Manilow: From Mailroom To Marquee

What Valentine's gift is beyond the most romantic fantasy of any Barry Manilow fan?

How about Barry serenading the fan with "I Made It through the Rain"?

Thirty years later, the song is as beautiful as ever.

Or how about "I Write the Songs"?

Talk about longevity.

Rita Braver caught up with Barry and asked him if he ever thought his life would be this good?

"No," he answered emphatically. "I never wanted to be a performer ever. Ever"

Really?

"I wanted to be in the background doing arrangements, doing production, doing maybe even songwriting if I were lucky. The performing was for those crazy people who needed the applause. And I never cared for that."

Barry Manilow may not care but music lovers sure do. He's one of the most popular singers ever! Starting with "Mandy" in 1974, he had 12 number one songs in nine years, a whopping 25 consecutive top 40 hits in 10. He's sold over 70 million albums worldwide. At one point, he had five albums on the charts simultaneously, a record broken only by Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis. His live concerts have set records.

Braver made a list of some of his songs. "Mandy," "Whistle in the Wind," "Somewhere in the Night," "Looks Like We Made It." The list just goes on and on. Did he realize what he was doing?

"I honestly don't know how to make a hit record," he said. "I don't know what to do. I just know what feels good to me. And that's all I can do."

He began not by singing but arranging songs, and accompanying an aspiring singer named Bette Midler. The year was 1973. The act broke boundaries, beginning at a gay club called Continental Baths.

"It certainly was one of the big moments of my life," he said. "Bette and I got together because at that point I was playing piano for all of the singers of New York, because I'm a really good accompanist. And I played for her there and she floated. And I knew that she was the most talented woman I had ever seen in my life. I was six feet away from this unbelievable talent.

"And she didn't have any money. I didn't have any money. I didn't care. I knew she needed me. And I had to stay with her."

He stayed, writing songs and then singing himself. And he was discovered by legendary record producer Clive Davis.

"He viewed himself as Irving Berlin, as the writer, and of course, he's a very talented writer," recalled Davis. "I saw him as a great performer in the Sinatra tradition, who could interpret other people's songs."

The first song Davis found for Barry had been lying around without much success. He asked Barry to rewrite it. It was "Brandy."

"The guy who wrote it had a really gruff voice, and I said to Clive, 'You want me to do that?' I mean Clive Davis. So I did that. And I said, 'Well, let me give you another rendition of 'Mandy.' And I played it slowly. I played it like a romantic ballad. And he said, 'That's it. That's what I mean."

"Our first record of 'Mandy' went straight to number one," said Davis. "A great way to usher in a relationship. And over the years we've had about 13 number ones."

"It happened so quickly that it made my head spin," said Barry. "It was explosive. And I tell you something, it can knock you off your feet. It can really knock you off your feet."

And his hits kept on coming. And Of course, who can forget "Copacabana"?

"You know none of us believed in it," said Barry. "And even Clive didn't think of it as a hit record. And he just passed it by. Everybody passed it by. Except for you the public."

Barry credits his co-writers for "Copa's" success. "We discussed writing a song called 'Copacabana.' And they read it to me. Her name was Lola, ugh. She was a show girl, ugh. I said, 'Well, you got to be a moron to be able to write a melody.'

"I couldn't write any melody to that. It was their brilliance that put that one on the map."

On Barry's journey to success he was accompanied by brutal barbs from music critics. He was deemed "uncool" in the era of rock and roll, his music was called "processed cheese," his manner was "barely man-enough".

But to his fans--he calls them his family—-he's a cult hero. Women about his age around the world proclaim their devotion as "Man' iacs" and "Manaloonies". Even for men, Barry can be a guilty pleasure.

But too much adoration early on was nearly Barry's ruin.

"I became a jerk, arrogant, unpleasant, ungrateful, totally terrified of the world I had found myself in. I just didn't know how to behave. There's no school to go to become a famous singer. Sometimes I think it's easier to handle failure than it is to handle success."

He said he helped change his ways by remembering his roots. Born Barry Alan Pincus in Brooklyn in the forties, he grew up poor, skinny, and lonesome. His old apartment is both part of his act and his sorrow, as Braver learned when she asked him to revisit his neighborhood.

"I know that you want to go back to Brooklyn. I don't want to go back to Brooklyn. I really do not. There's nothing that I like about going back to my old neighborhood. I didn't have one happy moment there."

Not one? "All I remember are my drunken parents and he people beating me up and…I don't want to go back there."

Where he did want to go back to was a place where he started working days at the time he was going to music school at night.

Now get this. It's not only where he worked for three years, it's the world headquarters of CBS News in New York. He was in his twenties and he started in the mailroom.

"It's funny because I got a job at CBS because my stepfather had a friend and they told me, 'Don't say anything about you wanting to go into music at all because they won't hire you.'"

They wanted him to be a career mail boy?

"Right. Because at CBS they promote from within. So I said, 'I just wanted to be an executive. And they hired me. And when I got to the mail room, everybody there wanted to be an actress or people were singing."

And wouldn't you know it, he was promoted upstairs. His job was logging commercials. But while he was working there he was constantly thinking about how he was going to leave.

"The music was coming out of my ears," he recalled. "It wasn't that I wasn't happy at CBS. It's just that it didn't have anything to do with music."

He found he could do music by sneaking away to the CBS basement, where he found a baby grand piano. That piano became the instrument on which he wrote many commercial jingles.

"I had dozens and dozens of them. The audience loves it. Sometimes I throw them in."

Barry has no regrets about his commercials, no remorse about his career, and no plans to retire. He's performing full time at the Las Vegas Hilton, and last week released his latest album, "The Greatest Songs of the Fifties"

So for Valentine's Day does he like the idea that maybe a lot of people are listening to his music?

"I do. And I think it works."