Barry Manilow
...and his beagle "Bagel"
Art Dogs is a monthly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, turtles, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these posts in your email inbox.
“Although not a favorite artist of music critics” (ouch), Barry Manilow had 51 top 40 singles, including 13 that hit number one across his career.
Barry’s career began to take off when Bette Midler saw his act in 1971. She chose him as her pianist, accompanying her at performances in a gay bathhouse in New York City.1
Despite being immersed in LGBTQ+ culture, performing at the bathhouse and touring didn’t lead Barry to discovering his sexuality. “At that point I wasn’t sure about that,” the singer later said. “There were a lot of us in the world that had yet to figure it out.”
Instead of chasing love in his youth, Barry buried himself into his music. By the early 1970s, Frank Sinatra predicted of Barry: "He's next." He skyrocketed to fame with “Mandy” in 1974, followed by “Looks Like We Made It,” “Copacabana (At the Copa)” and “Can’t Smile Without You.”
HAPPY PRIDE!! Enjoy this remixed version of Copacabana!
Later, Barry recalled of this time: “I was pretty lonely.”
To ease the emptiness, he brought a beagle named “Bagel,” into his life. There are a fantastic number of photos of Barry with Bagel out there, and I even found a Barry Manilow fan club named after the dog.
In 1978, at the age of 35, Barry met Garry Kief, who would turn out to be the love of his life.
Throughout his career, he says he “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.”
The two married in 2014, after same-sex marriage became legal in California. Three years later, Barry came out as gay after spending nearly 40 years in the closet, worried that he’d disappoint his fans. The couple has been together for 45 years, spending time between Bel Air and Palm Springs, where they once owned the Kaufmann residence by Richard Neutra, a midcentury modern masterpiece immortalized in the Slim Aarons photograph “Poolside Gossip.”
Today, he’s 80 years old and still performing in Vegas. And yes, he still has dogs.
Barry onstage in Vegas at 80 years old!
Barry Manilow facts
He was born Barry Alan Pincus and was raised by his single mother, Edna, in “the slums of Williamsburg,” Brooklyn.
His grandfather changed the family name to obscure their Jewish heritage just before Barry’s bar mitzvah.
After graduating from high school in 1961, Barry went on to study musical theater at Juilliard Performing Arts School.
He got his start writing scores for Off-Broadway plays, and composing and singing commercial jingles, including State Farm Insurance ("Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there"), Band-Aid ("I am stuck on Band-Aid, 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me!"), Pepsi ("all across the nation, it's the Pepsi Generation"), and McDonald's ("you deserve a break today"). When receiving an award for his commercial work, he stated that he learned the most about making pop music by working for three or four years as a writer in the jingle industry.
While in high school, he met Susan Deixler, and they later married for a short time. Barry stated in 2017 that though he later came out as gay, he had been in love with Susan and the failure of the marriage was not related to issues of sexual orientation. And… he credits a response he received from Playboy in 1965 for the courage to leave his marriage and everything behind to focus on his career in music: “I asked a lot of people what I should do, and they all said different things. Finally, I was so desperate, I wrote to the Playboy Advisor.”
Art Dogs is a monthly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, turtles, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these posts in your email inbox.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240108212130/https://people.com/barry-manilow-recalls-performing-at-gay-bathhouse-bette-midler-8422936
I have loved Barry Manilow since high school. I loved seeing his pups. <3
I remember reading about Bagel in the pages of 16 Magazine! I was a big Manilow fan, and he was a perfect teenage crush; he seemed friendly, warm, and those songs... I was just thinking about him and humming "Can't Smile Without You" this morning, likely due to the documentary on Clive Davis we watched the other night. In it, Manilow--after a string of hit songs chosen by Davis--says, "You turned me into Andy Williams." LOL!! I still love Barry, and yay Bagel and Biscuit!