FICTION: Barry Manilow, Welterweight

Barry Manilow, Welterweight

Tom Junod

Barry Manilow,
Towelboy, because it captured how he looked when he was 17, and could have been a towelboy at a Vegas hotel. "Dewy" someone called that version of himself, and yes, he remembered when he was dewy. He also loved
Barry Manilow,
Deep-Muscle Specialist, because that guy had some serious arms on him. Same with
Barry Manilow, Singing "Mandy" in the Barry Manilow Karaoke Booth at the Las Vegas Hilton. The last was pitiless—it recast him as a paunchy tourist from Ohio or someplace like that, his face contorted in seeming agony as he tried to hit the big note—but he got it, he got it, and he admired Vinca's audacity and ambition. Christ, to have ambition like that: That was why Vinca was Vinca, he guessed; that was why he was known by one name, like Madonna, or Prince. There was a time—oh, a long time ago—when he had attempted to go what his manager called "the single-moniker route." Manilow. But he hadn't pulled it off; people—complete strangers—knew him as his parents knew him, as "Barry." Baaaarrrry: He detested the harassing nasality of it, but he found out that he couldn't disabuse his fans of their presumed familiarity without disabusing them of their affection. Let's face it: The show was big, the show was ambitious, but it wasn't his ambition that his fans were coming to see. It was Baaarrrry, someone they thought they knew. Not Manilow. Not the artist. Barry. The nice boy, made good.

So it bothered him, when people said that he took Vinca to court because he lacked a sense of humor about himself. Listen, you don't get to be friends with Bette Midler without a sense of humor about yourself. Sure, he was uncomfortable when Vinca showed him the notebook with the sketches for
Barry Manilow, One of Celine Dion's Nannies, and even more uncomfortable when he realized that Vinca was planning to cast him as Celine herself, in
Barry Manilow, Singing "My Heart Will Go On" At Caesars Palace. Oh, once again, he had to admit that Vinca nailed it: the chest-thumping, the mouth pursed in that fraught little schoolgirl's O. Barry Manilow looked pretty good as a diva. But he got uncomfortable, because he knew that Celine would get uncomfortable. Well, more than uncomfortable: He knew Celine, he liked Celine, and God knows, he admired her talent. A big-time entertainer. But you don't live in a Vegas-hotel suite rendered as an exact replica of your home in Manitoba or wherever if your comfort level was that high to begin with. If Vinca had created, say,
Barry Manilow, Singing "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy" at the Desert Inn, Bette would have laughed, because as she never tires of saying, "It's all drag, anyway." But Celine? In a sense, he did Vinca a favor by suing him. Contrary to popular belief, Celine hasn't had her sense of humor surgically removed. But you better believe that each of her lawyers has gone under the knife, and they would have made sure Vinca was working for her for the rest of his life, like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.

Still, he wouldn't have sued Vinca, for fear of offending Celine. He was the one who stood to be offended, after all, and so he would have simply done exactly what he did, which was try to dissuade Vinca from selling the sculptures. He sued Vinca for one reason and one reason only: personal betrayal. All right? It's one thing to create life-sized marble sculptures of Barry Manilow assuming the role of every character people think of when they think of Vegas, including the fighter knocked on his ass in the corner, his mouthpiece sitting on the ring apron as a token of his surrender. It's quite another to sell those sculptures for millions of dollars to the fucking Arabs who are building that new 90-story "hipster" hotel, the Black Cat. The first is an artist's vision, and so it's protected by the First Amendment. The second is ... well, it's a betrayal, and that's all there is to it. Barry—as Barry, not as Manilow —called Vinca after he heard about the sale, after his own lawyers, not risible creatures themselves, informed him of it, cease-and-desist orders already in hand. "I thought we were friends," he said, "I thought we had an understanding." But that was Barry's problem: He thought everybody was his friend. He expected everybody to be as honorable as he was. But no: Vinca gave him a lot of jazz about how "edgy" the Black Cat wanted to be, and how he depended on "transgression" to fuel his art. "There's one thing my parents taught me not to transgress," Barry had replied, mustering the dignity that fueled his art, "and that's friendship." Was Vinca listening to the feeling behind the words of that particular song? Barry didn't know. He had never understood the "transgressive" thing anyway, which was why he was playing the Hilton instead of the Black Cat. Last year, that producer with the Jewish name—Rubin—had called him and asked him if he wanted to do "Mandy" and some of the other songs with just an acoustic guitar as backup. "It'll win you a whole new generation of fans," Rubin said, but Barry thought the idea was ridiculous, and Rubin picked Neil Diamond instead. Barry didn't even own an acoustic guitar anymore. And he was who he was. Let Neil run after the kids and the critics; eventually, he'll come back to Vegas, if Vegas will have him. Barry would keep singing "Mandy" with all the emotion his orchestra could arouse in him, and he would keep living by a few simple principles, one of which was outlined in his court brief: "It's one thing to have a sense of humor about oneself; it's another to be made into a figure of fun."

He sued Vinca for $100 million. It was not a randomly selected figure; no, it was what his lawyers called the "required calculus" for getting Vinca's attention. And it did: No sooner did the lawsuit become public, than Vinca sent him a notebook page, a sketch of Barry as Steve Wynn, at the prow of the mega-hotel that bore his name. All right: touché. And, of course, Barry took a beating in the press, as someone who was interfering with a struggling artist's right to express himself. Vinca, as poor artist: Now, that was a laugh, almost as much of a joke as the sculpture Barry disliked the most:
Barry Manilow, Old Woman Playing the Slots with Scotch and Cigarette. Vinca, compared to most artists, compared to Barry back in the days when he was playing piano for Bette and trying to make ends meet, might as well have been Croesus. Which was how the courts saw it, eventually: Barry won, as everyone knows. Well, came to an agreement, whose terms were not disclosed. But the agreement was this, as any cursory reading of court documents will show: Vinca said that he was wrong, and that he had wronged his good friend, Barry Manilow. And Barry bought all the sculptures, even the one of him at the slots, for precisely the $100 million he had sued for. He was too nice a guy to put anyone out of his business, and besides, he'd had the sculptures appraised, by Wynn's guy, and he said that in time that $100 million would be regarded as a down-payment. Vinca, his art now fueled by his notoriety, shipped Barry all the sculptures as the adornment to Barry's own poolside—oh, how Barry relished the irony having
Barry Manilow, Towelboy displayed in the very place where his own dewy towelboy plied his trade—but there was one thing that made Barry think that maybe he had given Vinca a little lesson in class. The sculpture of Barry as boxer was sent to him, along with everything else, but Vinca had changed its very nature: It had the same title,
Barry Manilow, At 147 Pounds (which, incidentally, was Barry's weight, on the nose), but instead of having Barry slumped in the corner, it had him in the center of the ring, raising his arms over his head. As the winner. By a knockout.

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