How Manilow fooled his fans for 40 years
Shocked by the news that Barry Manilow’s married a man? MICHAEL THORNTON wasn’t —and here’s why
THE news that Barry Manilow, the world’s richest and most successful popular singer, has married his male manager, Garry Kief, at a secret wedding, may have stunned the legions of women who worship the 71-year-old icon’s every move, but it is not likely to stop the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard.
For while many fans reacted on social media with broken-hearted shock — with one post reporting: ‘my Mum can’t stop crying about Barry’ — there were many who had long suspected that, despite the star’s decades of protestations to the contrary, the perma-tanned, disco- dancing smoothie was gay.
Many believe he had consistently declined to ‘out’ himself through fear of offending his middle-America, family-orientated fan base, who had financed his 40-year career — he now has around 100 million record sales to his credit.
He may well have been in denial himself: he has been linked to a series of high-profile ladies over the years, and was even married to a woman for a while (the marriage, in 1964, to his high school sweetheart Susan Deixler, was a fiasco that lasted just 18 months).
Yet to those in show business, Barry’s sexual orientation has been an open secret since the Seventies.
Manilow and the handsome Mr Kief, 66, have been together for more than 30 years, since Kief saved the singer from financial ruin in the early Eighties, after discovering that he had only $11,000 remaining in liquid assets, and that the rest of his multimillion earnings was tied up in unprofitable investments.
‘Barry!’ Kief is said to have shouted. ‘You’re broke!’
Kief took over the management of Manilow’s business affairs with such success that the singer came to rely upon him and to trust him implicitly.
Their secret wedding at the singer’s Palm Springs mansion in California, kept under wraps since last year, has now created headlines around the world.
As Manilow’s principal publicist, Carol Marshall, said, with a typical swerve around the central issue: ‘It seems like anything about Barry generates a lot of buzz.’
Certainly, throughout the four decades that Manilow has remained a star, rumours and counter-rumours have swirled around him.
Firmly entrenched in middle-of-theroad music, his style has been derided by critics but adored by his fans. In 2008, it was revealed that an American judge had been sentencing young noise polluters to a ‘horrible punishment’ — an hour of listening to Barry Manilow.
There has been constant speculation about the singer’s health, his gaunt and sometimes skeletal appearance sparking scare stories that he was seriously ill. Such claims have always been denied.
Born in Brooklyn on June 17, 1943, and named Barry Alan Pincus, he is of Russian, Jewish and Irish ancestry. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather, both of whom had a chronic drink problem.
‘I got through because of the music,’ he said recently, ‘but it wasn’t a fun time and I really feel for young kids raised by alcoholics. I made a decision not to go that way myself.’
HIS mother later revealed that Barry wore makeup from an early age to cover a childhood scar, caused by being pushed over by a girl called Elizabeth.
But the most persistent rumour that has pursued him down the years has been the allegation that he is homosexual.
To a Canadian interviewer who once stammered: ‘I was wondering if . . . you are gay?’ Manilow’s reply was emphatic. ‘Well, I’m not. No, no, I’m not.’ Then, as if to offer positive proof, he added: ‘I’ve been married.’
What he didn’t remind the interviewer of, however, was that when the marriage broke down, Susan filed for annulment on the grounds that the union had never been consummated.
Manilow’s first singing partner, the actress Jeanne Lucas, was attracted to him, but puzzled that she received no response.
An English woman who knew them both told her: ‘Darling, don’t you understand? Don’t you know?’
Lucas said: ‘ What? Know what?’ And then, Lucas recalled: ‘She sat me down and said: “He’s not for girls.” ’
The same was true of his long relationship with a TV production assistant, Linda Allen. It was a close friendship, but platonic in character.
In 1972, Manilow became the pianist for the outrageous Queen of New York camp, Bette Midler, and together they performed at the Continental Baths on New York’s 44th Street. The bathhouse — which featured saunas, a disco dance floor and small rooms for assignations — was a notorious haunt for promiscuous homosexuals .
Manilow later wrote: ‘It was decadent, sexual and shocking — all the things I wasn’t.’
He arranged Midler’s first two albums, but his relationship with her was always stormy and volatile, and in 1974 they parted company and he went solo.
RECORD company executives believed that Manilow’s strong, pleasant tenor, ingratiating manner, and expert arrangements and orchestrations gave him the chance of stardom.
In 1975, they were proved right when his recording of Mandy went to number one in America, and into the UK charts also.
Soon after his first number one, Manilow pulled in more than £500,000 for a single show. His real father, Harold Kelliher, whom he had not seen in years, came backstage at one performance.
In his autobiography, Manilow sanitises this episode, but eyewitnesses maintain that the meeting lasted 60 seconds and that Barry was terse and dismissive.
His stepmother, Annie Kelliher, Harold’s widow, said that Manilow threw his father out.
Around this time, Manilow began to experiment with marijuana and started exhibiting extreme moodswings, ordering his staff to clear TV studios and restaurants before he would enter them.
on one occasion, he said to his friend and songwriting partner Bruce Sussman: ‘Tell them who I am.’ Sussman replied: ‘If you have to tell them who you are, Barry, you aren’t anybody.’
As the major hits began to wind down, Manilow encountered a long succession of health problems. In 1982, he was bedridden in a Paris hotel with bronchial pneumonia, and was ordered by doctors to cancel a nine-concert European tour.
Then, in 1986, he was rushed into hospital in agony. A tumour in the roof of his mouth had exploded and was believed to be cancerous. ‘I had to sign a statement saying that if they needed to remove half my mouth I would let them do it,’ he said later.
The tumour was removed, along with much of the bone surrounding it. ‘They told me I nearly died.’ he said. As a result of the surgery, Manilow has had to undergo constant dental treatment ever since, but amazingly, his singing voice survived.
In 1989, there was a further crisis when he was rushed to a New York hospital during the intermission of a concert at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre, forcing him to cancel the second half of the show. This time the cause was said to be ‘an adverse reaction to medication prescribed for a stomach ailment’.
In 1989, Manilow was alleged to be engaged to a female porn star, Robin Byrd. He denied this immediately, and Byrd was yet another woman —
like his wife Susan, and also Jeanne Lucas and Linda Allen — who maintained their relationship was strictly platonic.
The health calamities continued. In 1996, he underwent eye surgery, and was repeatedly hospitalised during the next ten years.
In May 2003, there was a strange episode when he injured his famously prominent nose after allegedly walking into a wall in a disorientated state, then passed out for four hours.
Two months later, Manilow underwent a complete upper and lower facelift, which involved the removal of drooping skin from his eyelids and the general tightening of facial skin.
He was photographed emerging from the plastic surgeon’s office in Beverly Hills, in dark glasses and with a Super Bowl cap on top of a long blonde hairpiece in an unsuccessful bid to escape media coverage.
In 2004, he was hospitalised again in Palm Springs for stress-related chest pains caused by an irregular heartbeat, and in 2006 he underwent surgery to repair damaged cartilage in both hips.
The critical hostility to Manilow and his work continued. In the mid-Nineties, he launched a $28 milliondollar lawsuit against a Los Angeles radio station over an ad which suggested that people only tuned in to the station because it did not play Manilow’s music. The station backed down and withdrew the ad.
In June 2006, there was a further insult when Australian officials began playing Manilow recordings at blast level to deter gangs of teenage delinquents from disturbing residents of Rockdale, near Sydney, with racing cars and loud music.
Manilow, stung by the suggestion that his records would keep the gang away, responded: ‘But have they thought that these hoodlums might like my music?’
In 2007, there was another media snub when the producers of ABC Television’s chat show The View abruptly cancelled an appearance by Manilow because he refused to appear with the ultra Right-wing conservative TV presenter Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who had been an opponent of the gay rights movement.
‘I strongly disagree with her views,’ he said. ‘I think she’s dangerous and offensive. I will not be on the same stage as her.’
But in recent years, Manilow has at last achieved the critical reevaluation that eluded him throughout his years of chart success.
Perhaps the best-remembered of all his hits, Can’t Smile Without You, enjoyed a new surge of popularity after featuring in the hit 2008 film, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. One critic wrote of the song’s ‘ hip retro charm’ while another enquired: ‘When did Barry Manilow become cool?’
There can be no doubt that Manilow still retains a vast international following. The 02 Arena in London is a large venue to fill, yet when he performed there in 2008 a third performance of his show, Ultimate Manilow: The Hits And Then Some, had to be added to the original two, ‘due to an overwhelming response’. Auction bids on frontrow seats were made at prices between £350 and £717.
Even at the age of 71, Manilow remains, for several generations in his audiences, the nostalgic personification of the Seventies, with all his razzle- dazzle, the silk shirts, the glittery gold braid, the red velvet waistcoats and the sequin-studded belts.
Millions of fans, particularly women, still feel that this enigmatic and sexually ambiguous man represents something unattainable in their lives, and that, in the words of the song he made famous, they ‘just can’t smile’ without Barry Manilow.
They are unlikely to change their view because he has finally had the courage to step out of the closet, admit the truth about himself, and marry the man he loves who saved him from financial ruin.