Looks Like He Made It: Barry Manilow at 80

Barry Manilow is standing poolside at his Palm Springs home, a spectacular, eight-bedroom hillside villa with far-reaching views of the Coachella Valley. He’s taller than one might expect — a little over 6 feet — and rail-thin, which makes him appear even taller. Manilow is relaxed this morning, tapping one spindly leg to a tune wafting through the speakers — not one of those easy-listening grooves that made him a music superstar, but a thumping slice of techno called “Love Regenerator,” by Calvin Harris. He has an entire Spotify library of that stuff. Manilow, it turns out, loves dance music.

At 80 — he reached the milestone last June — Manilow is coming off of one of the busiest stretches of a consistent, six-decade career. In September, he played his 637th show at Las Vegas’ Westgate Resort Hotel — beating Elvis’ record of 636 performances on that very stage (when it was the Las Vegas Hilton) back in 1976. (On and off since 2004, he’s played two weeks a month there, three nights a week.) Manilow sold out five nights at Radio City Music Hall in October and has another five planned for April. He also has a residency booked for June at the London Palladium — what he bills as “the last, last U.K. concerts.”

His musical, Harmony, about a real Jewish boy band that became famous as the Nazis rose to power in Berlin, debuted on Broadway in November after 25 years of workshops. (Bruce Sussman, Manilow’s longtime lyricist on songs like “Copacabana,” is his collaborator.) As if that weren’t enough, Manilow’s cover of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” currently sits at No. 15 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary Chart — three spots ahead of Dua Lipa’s “Houdini.” Add it to the pile: Manilow has had 11 hits in the top 10 on the Hot 100 (including three No. 1s — “Mandy,” “I Write the Songs” and “Looks Like We Made It”) and sold over 85 million records, making him one of the best-selling recording artists of all time. 

No one is more astonished by all this than Manilow himself. “My family, most of them lived until 74 — so when I hit 74, I thought, ‘This is the end,’ ” he says. “But it didn’t happen. It kept on going. I kept going on the road. I kept on making records. I mean, when does my body give in?” 

Ken Thomas, his tour manager for the past 15 years, sees no signs of him slowing down. “I think it’s an unspoken thing that he’s going to go until he physically can’t walk out on that stage,” Thomas says. “He’s said, ‘If I can’t do it right, I won’t do it at all.’ ” 

“I have a theory that your spirit is one age and your body is another age,” says Melanie Taylor, a backup singer for Manilow since the early 2000s. “Barry has a really young spirit and a childlike mind. He’s curious and very engaged in life and very consistent.” 

Thomas credits Manilow’s staying power to two things. “One, the road is his family,” Thomas says. (Manilow is backed by a loyal crew and a 24-piece band.) “We enjoy each other’s company and performing gives us a purpose to get out there every day. The other is Barry’s drive to always make things better. Up until 10 minutes before showtime, he’s always changing, tweaking, improving. There are days when that puts us nose-to-nose on things — but at the end of the day, he’s always right.”

For Manilow, that fine-tuning is the fun part. “Changing things around, working with the musicians and the lights and the video behind me, I love that,” he says. “But the performing part, that’s the job for me. That’s the hard part. It looks like I’m having a good time up there and there’s a part of me that is having a good time up there — but it’s the job.”

To help him stay fit, he has a personal trainer who works with him every morning (“I haven’t got a big, muscular body, but I like it”). Quitting smoking also helped. At his worst, he was up to three packs a day of filterless Pall Malls. These days he waves a white e-cigarette around as he speaks, like a magic wand. “I don’t eat and I don’t sleep. That’s also the trick,” he continues. “I often find myself trembling and think, ‘Oh — I should probably get some calories in me.’ ” Manilow nods off around midnight each night and is up by 4 a.m., at which point he’ll shuffle over to his desk and “make trouble for Garry,” he says, referring to his romantic partner, manager of 45 years and husband since 2014: Garry Kief.

Manilow and Kief have lived full-time in Palm Springs for 25 years. Two days before our meeting, Manilow wrapped “A Gift of Love VI” — a five-night stint at a Palm Springs theater for which he takes no paycheck and donates all proceeds to 25 charities in the area. I caught the final date of those shows and came away astonished at Manilow’s showmanship and how powerful his pipes remain after all these years — particularly when one of his bombastic and unabashedly emotional finales kicks in. (Yes, that’s him singing. “I’m a terrible lip-syncher,” Manilow says. “I don’t know how to do it.”) Resistance is futile. Your brain is telling you it’s schmaltz, but your ears are telling you it’s the most delicious schmaltz you’ve ever tasted. Before you know it, you find yourself levitating out of your seat and shouting, “Bravo, Barry, bravo!” 

Manilow has been eliciting that kind of euphoria since his earliest performances. “The second gig I ever did was in a place called The Bijou in Philadelphia,” he recalls. “Edna, my mother, came down to see it. Back then, performance-wise, I stunk. But they saw something in this skinny guy at the piano that they liked. The word was out: ‘This guy has got something.’ At one point, everybody stood up. Edna thought there was a fire. She started running to the exit. But they were applauding. Those audiences believed in me way before I did.”

Manilow is emphatic that he was never supposed to be the marquee draw. What he envisioned for himself growing up in the “slums of Williamsburg,” Brooklyn, from the moment he first touched a piano at age 13, was a career as an orchestrator and songwriter — one of those guys bent over the ivories behind the star. And that’s exactly what he was for the first decade of his career, making a living in the daytime writing commercial jingles (“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” is his — and he made only $500 from it), while at night providing accompaniment in smoky rooms to a long list of female belters, all of them hoping to be the next Barbra Streisand. None would — none, that is, until a tornado of wild energy and talent swept into his life in 1971 in the form of Bette Midler. 

“The owner of the Continental Baths was Steven Ostrow,” Midler, 78, tells me of the infamous gay New York bathhouse where she got her start. Located in the basement of the former Ansonia Hotel at Broadway and 74th, the Baths were envisioned by Ostrow, a former opera singer, as a cabaret-slash-sex club where anything went. Careers were launched from that stage — not just Midler’s, but those of Peter Allen and Melissa Manchester, too — while just a few feet away guys were getting off in an orgy room. There was a VD clinic on site. The audience typically stood around stark naked, unless a woman was performing, in which case they donned towels. 

Finding herself in desperate need of an accompanist, Midler was sent by Ostrow to meet Manilow at his apartment. “He sent me down to No Man’s Land — Lexington, somewhere in the 20s — and I went up to meet Barry,” she says. “I quickly discovered he could play anything. He could arrange anything. He could make anything funny — or sad. He had a tremendous amount of tools at his disposal. He had a great ear and just so much charm.” 

Manilow had a different first impression of Midler: “She was every Jewish boy’s nightmare come to life,” he wrote in his 1987 memoir, Sweet Life. “She was my mother, my grandmother, and all of my female relatives rolled into one.” 

It wasn’t until their debut performance together at the Baths — in which Midler launched into an ecstatic rendition of “Friends,” her signature song — that it fully dawned on Manilow what a monumental star this 5-foot-1 bundle of neurotic creativity really was. “I was in shock,” he says in Sweet Life. “She had given me no indication during our rehearsals that she had all that inside her. I felt as if I had stuck my hand into an electric socket.” They were each brilliant musical interpreters in their own right. But together, their combined talents produced something akin to a miracle — the birth of “the Divine Miss M,” as Midler’s stage persona was known. 

I ask Manilow — who came out officially in 2017 after decades of public speculation — if the Continental Baths hastened any kind of awakening in his own sexual development. 

“At that point I wasn’t sure about that,” he says. “There were a lot of us in the world that had yet to figure it out.”

“I mean, the show was literally in a gay bathhouse,” I say.

“What do you think, they were fucking in front of us?” he asks. “They were just an audience. A great audience, too.”

“Well, it’s just a very unusual venue,” I reply.

“It’s unusual, I agree. But for me, it was a job for 75 bucks.”

The crowds were indeed great and grew larger. Ostrow eventually roped off a section where spectators who weren’t also bathhouse clientele could watch the show fully clothed. “Then we got some offers to go on the road,” Midler recalls. “Barry put together a terrific band — the first Harlettes were jingle singers he knew — and we played a whole bunch of little nightclubs all over the country. That was a tour I will never forget.” They also played Upstairs at the Downstairs, a cabaret on 56th Street that featured singers and comedians like Joan Rivers and Madeline Kahn. 

It was at one of those shows that Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun caught their act. “People were standing on the tables,” Midler recalls. “And he decided, ‘I don’t know what this is — but I need to have it.’ So he signed me.”

Almost immediately, problems arose. Midler chose Joel Dorn, producer of Roberta Flack’s album Killing Me Softly, to produce her debut. Dorn sidelined Manilow, who had obsessed over arrangements on songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Do You Want to Dance?” Says Midler: “Barry and Joel didn’t get along, and it was very tense, and kind of stressful. I kind of took a back seat.”

In the end, Ertegun was underwhelmed by the airless and highly technical album Dorn had produced. So was Manilow, who stormed into Ertegun’s office clutching a recording of Midler performing with him live at Carnegie Hall. On the strength of that tape, Ertegun agreed to let Manilow produce an entirely new album that captured Midler in her loose, live element. The result was 1972’s The Divine Miss M. “Pretty soon I was on the cover of Rolling Stone and I never looked back,” Midler says.

The success of Divine Miss M, which went double-platinum and earned Midler the Grammy for best new artist, calmed the discord in the air — but not for long. Soon, Manilow was offered his own record contract with Bell Records, home to 1970s pop stars like David Cassidy and Tony Orlando & Dawn. The news did not go over well with Midler. “When I told her, ‘I think I got a record deal,’ she said, ‘Doing what?’ ” Manilow recalls. “I said, ‘Singing!’ She said, ‘You can’t sing!’ ” 

Midler admits to being terrified of losing him. “I felt it in my bones that I was going to be left high and dry because he really was so accomplished and was capable of so many things. I didn’t know where I was going to find another MD” — industry shorthand for musical director — “and I really couldn’t have made it without him. He had a sense of how to present me and how to present what it was that I was trying to express in those songs.”

They struck up a deal. Manilow agreed to back Midler on her first arena tour — the big leagues — and, in exchange, she agreed to let him perform three original songs from his 1973 debut album, Barry Manilow, before the start of her second act. “People started coming to see him,” Midler recalls. “Of course, there was a certain amount of jealousy on my part because I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.” The tour allowed Manilow to find his stage legs. But the album — its biggest hit was the seven-minute soft-rock suite “Could It Be Magic” — did not sell.

Enter Clive Davis. The smooth lawyer turned industry wunderkind had been fired from Columbia Records in 1974, with Columbia owner CBS citing “$94,000 in expense report violations” — an accusation Davis has repeatedly denied. But Davis soon landed on his feet: Columbia Pictures invested in the founding of Arista, his own label. Columbia also told Davis he could take any artist from Bell Records, which it also owned and was about to shutter. On June 24, 1974, Davis caught Manilow opening for Dionne Warwick at Wollman Rink in New York’s Central Park. 

“I didn’t know from songwriting or not songwriting,” says Davis, now 91. “I was just very impressed with his showmanship — or the combination of his voice and his showmanship.” Says Manilow: “He came backstage and he shook my hand and said, ‘Welcome to Arista Records.’ ”

It was while pulling together material for Manilow’s second album, Barry Manilow II, that Davis broached the idea of covering other songwriters’ material. “I thought he was a real good songwriter,” Davis says. “But what I said to him was, ‘I don’t think you have a first single here.’ ” Manilow was initially taken aback by the suggestion. He had envisioned himself as a singer-songwriter. “Would Paul Simon agree to cover someone else’s song?” he asked himself. Definitely not. So why should he? 

Undeterred, Davis brought Manilow a song by a U.K. artist named Scott English called “Brandy” that had seen some success on the British charts in 1971. He told him to take a stab at covering it, but to change the girl’s name to “Mandy,” because Looking Glass’ “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” was a hit at the time. Still resistant but eager to humor his new boss, Manilow spent the day trying to capture the song’s folk-rock grit. Davis hated it. “Then I played him a slow version with the new chord changes and the modulation,” Manilow says. “And he said, ‘Just do that.’ ” The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on Jan. 18, 1975, turning Manilow into a superstar. 

“When ‘Mandy’ went to number one, we came to an agreement,” Davis explains. “He would write and produce the bulk of his album — and he would give me two songs per album of other writers’ work.” Davis’ golden ears would continue to pay off, and Manilow would have further smashes with covers — “Weekend in New England,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” even “I Write the Songs” were written by somebody else. But he also composed many of his own hits, including “Could It Be Magic,” “Even Now” and “Copacabana,” the last of which won him his only Grammy, for best pop male vocal performance, in 1978. In 2002, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

• • •

In Manilow’s current stage show, “Mandy” begins with a projection of a performance of the song from that era. There young Barry is, in all his satin and sequined glory, his fluffy blond mane hanging down to his shoulders, his puppy-dog blue eyes selling every lyric. Then Manilow emerges onstage and observes for a few moments, before taking a seat at the piano and dueting with his younger self.

“What are you thinking about when you’re looking at that screen?” I ask.

“Well, he was a cutie,” he says. “I didn’t think so at the time. I wasn’t thinking about things like that. But when I look at him now, he must have had something. That guy is not dangerous. But he seems like a nice guy who is really into the song — and I was.”

Coming out was never an option for Manilow — until it was the only option. “I didn’t want my career to go away. I love it. I’m grateful for it. But it was a burden to keep it quiet,” he says. “I was always worried. Every interview: ‘They’re going to ask me whether I’m gay or not.’ Nobody ever did, by the way. They never asked me the $64 question.” 

He recalls a conversation with Davis in the 1980s. “He said, ‘You know — Elton John came out as bisexual. No artist should ever do that. It’ll hurt your career.’ And it did hurt Elton for quite a while.” Manilow took that to be an indirect way of advising him not to do the same. Davis, however, does not recall such an exchange. “I never had that conversation with Barry,” he says. “We never went there. Had it come up, to analyze what the impact would be, I would have said it’s a risky proposition to a career. But we never had the conversation about whether he should come out because he never said to me that he was gay.” (Davis himself came out as bisexual in a 2013 memoir.)

Manilow met his husband in 1978. He was in L.A. to work on a TV special tied to his latest hit — the irresistible dance-floor saga “Copacabana,” inspired by a trip to Rio — and was introduced to a young executive at ABC named Garry Kief. Manilow had just sunk millions into a huge condo in the San Remo building on Central Park. “But I met Garry, and that was it,” he says. “I never went back.” Kief had been married to a woman since 1971, and their daughter was a 1-year-old at the time. (Manilow had wedded his high school sweetheart, Susan Deixler, in 1964, but the marriage was annulled two years later.) “It was a real complicated couple of years there,” Manilow says. “But it was so real. I knew this was it for the rest of my life. This was going to be forever. Garry didn’t. But I did.”

They have been together ever since — 45 years, the first half of which was spent between Bel Air and Palm Springs, where they owned the Kaufmann residence by Richard Neutra, a midcentury modern masterpiece immortalized in the Slim Aarons photograph “Poolside Gossip.” Then they found their current home and decided to move to Palm Springs year-round. “My life is so noisy,” Manilow explains. “But it’s quiet here and it’s just beautiful. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

Manilow is popular around town. In April, he showed up in person to watch Modern Men, the Coachella Valley men’s chorus, perform Manilow! Songs That Make the Whole World Sing. He also stopped by the Tool Shed, a local gay bar, to play a musical version of Bingo called Singo, which turned into a Manilow sing-along. “They were so great to me, that crowd of guys,” he says. “I loved it.”

It’s a comfortable existence. But retirement is not yet an option — not so long as the muse beckons. Says Midler, “To be 80 and still playing Las Vegas and still putting butts in the seats. God knows, I wouldn’t want to do it. But, hey — Barry’s doing it. He’s still vital, he’s still energetic, and he’s still Barry. 

“We had so much fun,” she continues. “I wish I’d taken more pictures. It was a great, great time. So when he left me, I was bereaved. I was really pissed off — because I loved him. It turned out OK, but I nursed a grudge. I’m famous for that. I think we left on a note that wasn’t the greatest. But I’m so much older now, and so is he, and we’re not what we were. I want to make sure that he knows how much I love him.” Midler grows overcome with emotion. “And I’m so proud of him. I’m proud of the fact that he keeps going and that his generosity has never faltered.” 

This story first appeared in the Jan. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.