The Manilow Rules

A Florida Afternoon with Barry Manilow, 1989

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Substack’s multiskilled Chris Dalla Riva, about how I operated as a critic, especially in my younger days. From the undisciplined anything-goes of my Creem years (1971-1975), to the disciplined anything-goes of the Village Voice over roughly the same time, I found myself with an excellent chance of the equivalent of a tenured professorship: A union job as the pop music critic for Newsday, my hometown Long Island (and then New York City) newspaper, the best and biggest suburban newspaper in the country. Because of home delivery and saturation of Nassau and Suffolk County, L.I., that meant more than a million readers a day. (Weekly circulation 550,000; Sunday, about 650,000).

But my editors had to make sure that I understood just how wide and deep my beat was. After I had been hired, Newsday ran house ads with photos of and a few paragraphs written by “The Critics.” My description of the territory I covered was “From Sinatra to the Sex Pistols and beyond.”

One of the “beyonds,” perhaps, was Barry Manilow. New York was his home and the core of his passionate fan base. He played every year or so, so I had to see him a lot. My editor, I told Dalla Riva, was,

An experienced newspaper man named Joseph C. Koenenn. He told me something like, “You are not just the rock critic. You’re the pop music writer. You’re going to have to see a lot of shows that might not be by your favorite artist. But you can’t go to a Barry Manilow show and decide you don’t like him because you would rather be seeing the Ramones that night. You have to go to a Manilow show and tell the reader if he is being the best Barry Manilow he can be that night.”

That became what I call the “Manilow Rule.” I had to take each show and measure it by the standards set by the artist, within their genre or style. I had to figure out when an artist was connecting, whether they were challenging themselves, sticking to the script or reaching for adventure, alive and kicking or just going through the motions and phoning it in. One learned to read the audience: were they cheering with enthusiasm, standing ovations every few songs, or were they politely clapping, or sitting on their hands. Manilow was a dynamic stage performer, a throwback “song and dance” man. His fans knew that, too: His only Billbard pop No. 1 album (though he had many multimillion sellers) was Barry Manilow Live in 1977.

Manilow had a dozen top ten hits, according to Billboard, between 1974 and 1980, including “Copacabana (At the Copa”),” “Can’t Smile Without You,” “Looks Like We Made It,” “Weekend in New England” and “I Write the Songs,” which famously, he didn’t write. (It made a lot of money for its composer, Bruce Johnston, a member of the Beach Boys.) Manilow cooled off in the 1980s, as the radio format for which his was king, Adult Contemporary, went into eclipse. With an extended Broadway run coming up in 1989, Manilow’s publicists invited me to hang out with him for a few hours in Naples, FL, where he was doing a private corporate gig: Big money, little work.

It was not unusual for Manilow to want to promote his upcoming Broadway run at the Gershwin Theater. He also had a new album to promote, with the generic title Barry Manilow. Interviews almost never happen unless the artist, author, actor, has something to sell. There was something else he was selling, regarding his private life, and I was part of it. Here are excerpts from the story, which originally appeared in Newsday April 16, 1989, with a little detour to discuss what my responsibilities were to Manilow, to the reader, and to journalistic credibility.

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Naples, FL--HE’S GOT an inner fire fueled by adversity. He’s got maturity tempered by experience. He’s got a resilience that stems from growing up confident in one of Brooklyn’s toughest neighborhoods with some of the borough’s most demanding mothers: His own. He sings now with a been-around-the-block-a-few-times resonance. He works out; he pumps iron. He’s... he’s...

Barry Manilow?

Love him or hate him — and it’s hard to find middle ground — Ballad Brother No. 1 comes back to New York Tuesday for a month-long run at Broadway’s Gershwin Theater. The performances come at a time when Manilow is trying to reclaim his position as the king of romantic pop with a new album, Barry Manilow, due in the stores May 2.

More than the songs are new. Manilow himself, once a bundle of nervous energy possessed with more than a dollop of anxious defensiveness, has changed. Still proud of his strengths, he’s more accepting of his flaws. It’s a healthy reaction to what, for Manilow, has been a fairly recent development: rejection not just by critics, many of whom loathed him as a child loathes liver, but by radio programers and record buyers.

After selling 50 million albums and two-dozen hit singles, Manilow got a first-hand feel for the fickleness of pop when his 1985 album Manilow fizzled. Though his recording career had cooled in the 1980s, the first (and last) recording Manilow made for RCA Records after a golden decade with Clive Davis’ Arista Records, was a precipitous drop. (Manilow has since returned to Arista.)

“During the Manilow album, it was the first time I was totally rejected by the world of music,” Manilow said last week on the terrace of a hotel room in Naples, Fla., where he and his band were resting and tuning up for their Broadway run. “It was rough. I had never thought I had equated my own self-worth with how high the albums went up on the charts. But when this thing was not accepted — the radio stations said, ‘Barry Manilow [he gives himself a dismissive razz), in the dumper’ — yeah, I went down.”

Falling from the top of the pop charts to a level where his records aren’t played on top 40 radio anymore has Manilow alternating between understanding and anger. “I think it goes in cycles,” he says. “I blame myself. So I figured that it was my fault; either I was making lousy records, or I had been there too long, they were tired of me, or whatever.

“But if I could step back from it, and look at the music industry for the last five years, it’s not just that they’re not playing me. They’re not playing anybody that’s close to what I do. They’re not playing songs; they’re playing records. And there’s a difference between a good record and a great song. Now and again a Sting will fight his way through, or a George Michael...But I just think that if Harold Arlen came along today, he would just not have a shot. Or if Billie Holiday got up onstage at the Apollo, she’d be booed off of it because she does not do vocal acrobatics, the way everybody seems to want.”

The huge popular success of Manilow’s overblown, sentimental, cliche-filled ballads made the singer the butt of jokes that he didn’t get at the time. Now, he admits the criticism may have had some merit.

“They bugged me,” Manilow acknowledges. “They [critics] really weren’t on my side at all. But look, you can’t like everybody. I’m not angry at them. As a matter of fact, I attribute 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe, (1984) the highlight of my musical career, to them pushing me so hard to do something I was very proud of. So I thank them for that, though they didn’t have to be so cruel.”

He also stretched out with Swing Street (1987), a well-received jazz and pop album on which he was paired, with respectable results, with the likes of Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Diane Schuur, Sarah Vaughan, and Kid Creole.

“It was very gutsy of Barry to try and move in another area,” says Schuur, a Grammy-award winning jazz singer who sang a duet of ‘Summertime’ with Manilow. “He has a lot of drive that propels him forward musically.”

Manilow’s first musical love was the jazz he heard listening to Symphony Sid’s legendary New York radio show in the 1950s. In fact, during his string of pop hits, which began with ‘Mandy’ in 1974 and included ‘Could It Be Magic’, ‘I Write the Songs’ (which he didn’t, in this case), and ‘Weekend in New England’, Manilow sometimes didn’t necessarily “respect” all of the songs.

“When I heard ‘Can’t Smile Without You’ for the first time on the demo, I said, I can’t sing a song like this, it’s just too simple.” To make it palatable to himself, Manilow focused on honing the arrangements and production to a professional sheen. (Manilow and Ron Dante produced all of his 1970s hit records, through 1980.)

Manilow also wrote a book: Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise, which, surprisingly, was not a ghost-written paper waste of celebrity clichés. Though a short, breezy read, Manilow wrote about his mother’s two failed marriages, and his own erratic relationships. (He was married briefly to his high school sweetheart; he has lived for the last nine years with his girlfriend, Linda Allen, a movie set designer.) Though it hardly contained sensational revelations, the book helped debunk the notions that Manilow was gay.

This was at least misleading. As part of my preparation, I had read the book. Manilow, before and even after stardom, was well known as a session pianist (he started as the divine Bette Midler’s musical director at her career-making 1972 residency at the Continental Baths, a safe space in the nascent gay rights movement-ed.] He also wrote commercial jingles, including “Like a good neighbor,” for State Farm Insurance, and “You Deserve a Break Today,” the McDonald’s theme. He knew the whole New York music industry, and most thought they knew he was gay.

Looking back, this is where I wrestled with the function of the celebrity interview and the responsibility of the journalist. The Society of Professional Journalists has a lengthy Code of Ethics that most of us try to live by. I taught a course called the Craft of Interviewing at St. John’s University every year from 2013-2024, and we used that Code of Ethics, which, like many codes, can be contradictory. Was it “accurate, fair, and thorough” to say Manilow wasn’t gay? Maybe not. But there is a section called “Minimize Harm.” That calls for balancing “the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.”

Manilow came out in People magazine in April 5 2017, age 73, when he did acknowledge his long, private gay life, what was then a 39-year relationship ,with to Garry Kief, his manager, who he met in 1978, and married in 2014. People profiled Kief in December, 2024, so that means they have been together 47 years.

Until then, he feared that from the beginning, being known as gay would damage or destroy his career. My conclusion was that it would only be legitimate to question Manilow’s assertions about his sexuality if he had been hypocritical about it: An antigay crusader, or one whose stage routine might include mockery or stereotypes about gay life. He was, and did, neither.

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Musically, Manilow often defers to Clive Davis’ judgment on songs. Davis calls the forthcoming Barry Manilow record “an album of songs for the 90s,” featuring songs by Jimmy Webb, Richard Kerr, who co-wrote some classic Manilow hits, and Simon Climie, the hot English writer who has written hits for George Michael, Robert Flack and Aretha Franklin, and other mainstream pop writers.

More important, Manilow sings with a precise, lower register edge that he’s never displayed before. Rather than a nervous kid from Brooklyn, he sings with unprecedented expressiveness and maturity.

“I’VE NEVER been a fan of my own singing,” Manilow said. “Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I had to lower the keys, and I’m not squealing, stretching so much. I just think it’s a matter of experience, and growing up, and learning my craft, finally.”

Manilow is growing up — and out — in other ways. He had been working out with a personal trainer, and now pumps iron on his own. “Don’t you think I look a little bigger?” he asks as he folds his arms in front of his chest, which he puffs out in a mock-Schwarzenegger pose. (It’s hard to tell; he’s wearing a long sleeve shirt). “I never was a sports-minded fellow,” Manilow acknowledges. “Not that I am right now, but I’m into giving myself a little mini-body. I had it with being a skinny-malink.”

When he’s home in posh Bel-Air, Manilow also sees a psychiatrist. “It doesn’t get inside as much as I thought it would,” he said. “Cerebrally, I thought it was, and still do, think therapy is very helpful. It helps me understand things and logically figure things out. The inside stuff is really where it matters. That’s the stuff that keeps me going, and that’s the stuff I work on continually, by myself.”

ONE ASPECT for Manilow to focus on is emotional commitment. Reading his autobiography, one could easily see the toll taken by the persistent meddling by others in his personal life. His adored mother, who attempted suicide twice, once moved with her second husband to an apartment directly above Manilow’s, just when he was trying to assert his independence. And squabbling among multiple sets of parents and grandparents doomed his brief marriage to his high school sweetheart, Susan.

“I just wasn’t strong enough to say, get outta-here, get outta-here,” Manilow said, emphasizing the Brooklyn accent. “I had to become strong enough. I had a very” — he wraps his arms around his chest as he searches for the right word — “enclosed childhood. I was taken care of by my grandma and grandpa and family and neighborhood, so when I was thrown out into the real world, I wasn’t prepared for it.”

And yet Manilow finds the “unconditional love” he was given at the time to be the source of his resilience and strength. Nevertheless, though he has been living with Linda Allen for so long, he’s not ready to take the commitment any farther.

“I don’t know exactly what it is,” he said. “I’m still not there yet. But marriage is just... I don’t know anybody that’s happy married. Everybody I know is either divorced, or getting divorced, or cheating. My mother was married and divorced twice, my grandparents never really loved each other — they stayed with each other because in those days, I guess you did.” So Manilow has let go of the early goal imprinted on him by his middle-class Brooklyn upbringing: steady job, wife, kids, house on Long Island with white picket fence.

“No, that’s gone,” he said of that once-persistent fantasy. “I’ve got a great house on top of a mountain, overlooking a canyon. I’m very happy. The other thing I wanted because I was supposed to. That’s where I was heading, because that’s what I was taught. So I blindly went ahead with what I was supposed to, but it never felt right. I was always a little off-center, musically and every way. I was always a little cockeyed.”

(c) Wayne Robins, 1989, 2001, 2025

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