Introduction:
For decades, Barry Manilow was treated like the artist serious music critics were supposed to dismiss. Too sentimental. Too polished. Too soft. Yet while the tastemakers rolled their eyes, millions of listeners kept buying his records, filling his concerts and turning songs like “Mandy,” “Copacabana” and “Can’t Smile Without You” into permanent pieces of American pop culture.
Then came the achievement almost no one could have imagined.
In 2023, Manilow performed his 637th show at the International Theater at the Westgate Las Vegas, surpassing the legendary residency record once held by Elvis Presley. The Brooklyn boy critics had spent decades underestimating had outlasted nearly everyone.
But his greatest battle was still ahead.
Born Barry Alan Pincus in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Manilow grew up poor and painfully shy. His father disappeared before he was two, leaving him to be raised by his mother and grandparents. Music became his escape. Accordion lessons led to piano, formal musical training and eventually years working anonymously behind other people’s success.
Before America knew his name, it already knew his melodies. Manilow wrote and arranged advertising jingles, worked alongside Bette Midler and spent years learning how to make an audience feel something before finally reaching No. 1 with “Mandy” in 1975.
What followed was extraordinary: more than 85 million records sold worldwide, dozens of chart hits and a career stretching across six decades.
Yet fame came with another hidden story.
For nearly four decades, Manilow kept his relationship with longtime partner Garry Kief private, fearing that revealing he was gay might disappoint the predominantly female audience that had supported him. They eventually married in 2014, and when Manilow publicly discussed his sexuality years later, the response he had feared never came. Fans overwhelmingly embraced him.
Then his body began testing the resilience that had defined his career.
After overcoming a serious illness affecting his voice earlier in the decade, Manilow faced another frightening medical chapter when doctors discovered a cancerous spot on his left lung. Surgery followed, forcing an artist famous for relentless work to do something he hated: stop.
From his hospital bed, he offered fans just two words: “Better today.”
Recovery became another performance of endurance. Manilow returned to the treadmill, practiced his breathing and counted how many songs he could sing before exhaustion arrived.
One song became three. Three became more.
At 82, he was not talking about retirement. He was talking about returning to Las Vegas, recording new music and stepping beneath the lights again.
Perhaps that is Barry Manilow’s real legacy. Not simply the records sold, the awards collected or even the Elvis record he surpassed.
It is that after poverty, rejection, secrecy, illness and half a century of criticism, he is still reaching for the microphone.
And somehow, Barry Manilow is still writing the next song.