Barry Manilow is an American singer and songwriter with a career that spans seven decades.

Barry Manilow Children

Barry became a stepfather to the daughter of his husband, Garry Kief, Kirsten and they both raised her together for many years.

Who is Barry Manilow?

Barry Manilow was born to an Irish-American father, Harold Pincus and a Jewish mother, Edna Manilow. His maternal grandparents were also Russian Jewish and his Irish root traces back to Limerick in Ireland. Manilow grew up in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district and graduated from the now-defunct Eastern District High School in 1961.

He first met Susan Deixler in high school, and they were temporarily married after that. Prior to enrolling in the New York College of Music, he temporarily studied at the City College of New York. In order to cover his costs when he was a student, he also worked at CBS. Later, he pursued a degree in musical theatre at the Juilliard School of Drama.

A CBS director named Bro Herrod had an encounter with Manilow to in 1964, and Herrod requested him to compose some music for a musical version of the melodrama The Drunkard. Manilow instead created a full original score. In the Off Off-Broadwayical, written by Herrod and performed for eight years at the 13th Street Theatre in New York, Manilow’s song was used. Then Manilow worked as a pianist, producer, and arranger to pay his bills. He started writing and singing commercial jingles at this time and kept doing so for the rest of the 1960s.

In addition to writing the music for many of the TV jingles he produced, he would also perform them, such as those for State Farm Insurance (“Like a nice neighbor, State Farm is there”) and Band-Aid (“I am stuck on Band-Aid, because Band-stuck Aid’s on me!”), for which he adopted a childlike voice (Donald B Wood wrote the lyrics). Commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi (“all throughout the nation, it’s the Pepsi generation”), McDonald’s (“you deserve a break today”), and Dr. Pepper are among his singing-only credits.

For his efforts as a jingle writer and vocalist in the 1960s, Manilow received an Honorary Clio at the 50th Anniversary Clio Awards in Las Vegas in 2009. He claimed that working as a writer for the jingle industry for three or four years was where he learned the most about creating pop music when accepting the award.

Callback, which debuted on January 27, 1968 on WCBS-TV, had Manilow as its musical director by 1967. Then, while writing, producing, and performing his radio and television jingles, he directed and orchestrated for Ed Sullivan’s production business, developing a new tune for The Late Show.

He and Jeanne Lucas did a two-season run of joint performances at Julius Monk’s Upstairs at the Downstairs club in New York at the same time. Tony Orlando, a recording artist and vice-president of Columbia/CBS Music, signed Manilow in 1969. Orlando later collaborated and produced Manilow and a group of studio musicians on the Bell Records label, which Columbia Pictures had just bought, under the moniker “Featherbed.”

Barry Manilow has a musical career that spans for about seven decades. Could It Be Magic, Mandy, I Write the Songs, Can’t Smile Without You, and Copacabana (At the Copa) are just a few of his top-charting songs. He has produced and put out 51 Top 40 singles on the Adult Contemporary Chart, including 13 number one singles, 28 top ten singles, and 36 top twenty singles. Manilow has put out six multi-platinum and 13 platinum albums. Manilow has received accolades from his contemporaries in the recording industry, including Frank Sinatra, who was reportedly quoted in the 1970s as saying, “He’s next,” despite not being a favorite musician of music reviewers. Manilow has written and performed songs for musicals, movies, and commercials since the 1960s, in addition to producing and arranging albums for himself and other artists.

These companies include McDonald’s, Pepsi-Cola, and Band-Aid. Between 1973 and 2015, he was nominated for fifteen Grammy Awards (winning one) as a producer, arranger, and performer (in each decade). Additionally, he has worked on Grammy-nominated recordings by Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Dionne Warwick, Bette Midler, and others. One of the best-selling artists in the world, Manilow has sold more than 85 million records as a solo artist.

In 1964, Barry Manilow wedded Susan Deixler, his high school sweetheart. Manilow later admitted that he was in love with his wife and that their relationship had been strained by his obsession with pursuing a music career as well as his immaturity.

After just one year of marriage, he divorced the lady he saw as “the perfect wife” in order to embark on a “wonderful musical journey.”

Barry Manilow attributes the bravery to drop everything and start a music career to the response he received from Playboy in December 1965. Manilow remarked, “I asked a number of people what I should do, and they all gave me different advice. Finally, I wrote to the Playboy Advisor because I was so desperate.

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