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UK newspaper article
The November 24 Daily Telegraph has the following article, along with a
photo of Neil.
Enjoy!
--
.../Paul Maclauchlan
Moore Corporation Limited, Toronto, Ontario (416) 360-4761
paul@moore.com http://www.vex.net/~paulmac
"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you."/PS'67
"I'm not sure I've made a life for myself"
Singer-songwriter Neil Diamond's huge success has cost him two wives,
four children and lots of friends. He talks to David Thomas
'THE thought of getting married scares me," says Neil Diamond, in his
grizzly-bear growl of a voice. "It absolutely scares me to death."
He sounds convincingly serious about this, as well he might. In 1996,
Diamond was reported to have given his ex-wife Marcia the most expensive
divorce settlement in the history of showbusiness - a sum rumoured to be
more than 75 million pounds. For good measure, he threw in two houses,
in Beverly Hills and Aspen, Colorado.
This gargantuan settlement provided acres of material for gossip
writers; but it wasn't only the sum of money involved that excited
interest. Just as intriguing was the manner in which it was given; there
was no bitterly contested lawsuit, no haggling, no public bile. Diamond
simply stumped up the cash.
The reason for their split, he said, was work: "Twenty-five years on the
road, working in studios all night - I think a woman needs more
attention than I was able to give. I blame myself absolutely."
Two years later, the king of easy listening is working harder than ever.
In a career that has thrived for more than 30 years, Diamond has sold
more than 100 million records, but he is not one to rest on his laurels:
he is currently in the middle of a tour of the basketball stadiums of
America and, next February, he begins a trek round Britain's biggest
indoor venues.
He has a reputation as a balladeer in the Kenny Rogers or Barry Manilow
mould, a man capable of stirring up romantic fantasies in a million
housewives' hearts. But when we meet in Los Angeles, he looks more like
the husband of one of his fans than their idol. There is no sign of the
sequinned shirt he wears on stage; today, he is in jeans - bulging just
a little round the waistband - and trainers, and his only concession to
affluence is a fat cigar.
He is also wearing sunglasses, which, since we are sitting in the
Stygian gloom of his private recording studio, seem somewhat
superfluous. Quite why he wishes to hide so much of his face is never
made clear - he describes himself as "virtually teetotal", so he can't
be recovering from the after-effects of a heavy night out - but the
effect is to make him oddly impervious, as if armour-plated against
journalistic assault.
Critical bullets, of course, have always appeared to bounce off him, but
he would have us believe that he has paid a heavy price for all the
adulation.
"Having such a passion for my career certainly hasn't helped my personal
life," he says. "It makes for a difficult kind of a life when you're
trying to establish yourself in any area, but particularly this one,
because there's so much travelling involved. It makes bringing up your
kids and maintaining a relationship with your wife more difficult."
Diamond's first marriage, to his high-school sweetheart, Jaye, the
mother of his two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn, also collapsed as a
result of his work - they were divorced in 1969, three years after he
hit the big time. So does he feel the trade-off between hard graft and
his private life has been worthwhile?
"I don't know. I'm still asking myself that question. It cost me two
marriages, four kids and lots of friends. But, on the other hand, I
don't think I had much of a choice, because at the heart of it, I'm
still that youngster trying to get himself out of the ghetto and
establish a name for himself, or at least make a life for himself.
"I'm not sure I succeeded in making a life for myself, but everything
else has been a huge success."
He sighs. Then he gives me a taste of his personal philosophy, which
begins in pure Hollywood-ese: "Life is a single, short sentence, but I
want my life to read like a beautiful sentence, one that nobody wants to
end, and one that leaves some kind of - I hate to use this word -
vibration of love and compassion. That's really what I want my life to
add up to."
The way Diamond tells it, his life has been devoted to that classic
American journey from tiny ghetto apartment to the mansion on the hill -
but now that he has arrived, he can't decide if the effort was really
worth it.
"You can have all of what people today generally think is going to make
a person happy, but you learn very quickly that it's a con-job - you
haven't for one moment dealt with that part of yourself which is most in
need of attention."
Diamond, the son of a shop-keeper, was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New
York, where his Jewish contemporaries included Paul Simon, Art
Garfunkel, Carole King and Barbra Streisand. Diamond and Streisand sang
in the same high-school choir, although, he says, they hardly knew one
another: "She was in the alto section; I was a second baritone."
Like Barbra, though, he yearned to escape. "I remember being a little
kid, looking out of the window at all the big houses on the other side
of the tracks - literally, the other side of the trolley tracks. I'd be
looking out at the trees and the houses and the people living in them."
This, he says, is why the garden of his Los Angeles home brings him such
simple satisfaction - it represents the green, open space that he lacked
as a child.
"I like seeing the flowers that I've had planted in front of my house. I
know nothing about them, but they're gorgeous, especially for a kid from
Brooklyn, where you had to go to a museum to see a flower. To have
hundreds of them on my own property, in front of my own home - that's a
joy."
Unlike their son - still touring, still career-hungry at 57 - his
parents were very happy with their lot in life. "They were a great
couple. My father worked in his shop six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a
day, but once he'd closed the door, my parents were out partying and
dancing and having a good time.
"They had lots of friends and they had a good life. I feel like it's
almost not proper for me to have come out of such a peaceful and loving
home and be this raging, unfulfilled, ambitious, driven person."
They hoped that their son would make them proud by becoming a doctor
and, sure enough, Diamond won a scholarship to study medicine at New
York University. But it wasn't long before he dropped out.
His parents, however, remained supportive. "I am sure they shed a few
tears for my career in medicine, but music was so strong in me that they
knew it was not something that they should tamper with. They were wise
enough to let me try to find my own way."
He managed to get a job as a songwriter in the Brill Building, the
Manhattan offices that were home to virtually the entire East Coast
music industry. His employers were the legendary composing team of
Leiber and Stoller; Carole King worked just down the hall. How did the
boy from Brooklyn feel in such august company?
"Well, I never was accepted. That's why, ultimately, I had to record
material for myself. I'd tried to come up with material for other
artists, but I failed."
After failing to produce any hits, he was fired by Leiber and Stoller.
Then, in 1966, he was given a two-single recording contract by an
independent label, Bang Records. The first of the two singles, Solitary
Man, reached 55 in the US charts. The second, Cherry Cherry, made it all
the way to number six.
Along the way, Diamond got a call from a music-business entrepreneur,
Don Kirshner, who had created a pop group with their own television
show, and needed material for them to sing. The group were the Monkees,
and Diamond gave them two tracks: I'm a Believer and A Little Bit Me, A
Little Bit You.
He had made it. The sense of being an outsider, however, has never
entirely left him. Perhaps this is because, unlike Paul Simon, Diamond
has never been what you might call a sophisticate.
While Simon is the Woody Allen of pop - an irony-drenched highbrow,
ill-at-ease with showbusiness - Diamond is more a man of the people.
He has a reputation for being an electric performer and this, together
with his willingness to work up a sweat, has helped maintain his status
as a box-office attraction, long after the hit singles have dried up.
The critics, however, are still torn between an instinctive contempt for
anyone deemed to be too middle-of-the-road, and an admission that
Diamond's songs are naggingly easy to hum, insidious in the way they
lodge in the brain. Occasionally, however (and unlike Barry Manilow), he
receives a dose of credibility-by-association.
It was Diamond who wrote UB40's biggest hit, Red, Red Wine. Quentin
Tarantino used a remake of his song Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon for a
key scene in Pulp Fiction. And Uma Thurman, having co-starred in that
scene with John Travolta, then sang along to Diamond's Sweet Caroline in
a later film, Beautiful Girls.
His latest record, The Movie Album: As Time Goes By, is a collection of
work by other people, taken from his favourite films. The tracks are all
karaoke classics, from True Love to Moon River, Unchained Melody and
Puttin' on the Ritz.
They are, says Diamond, "blatantly, unreservedly, unapologetically
romantic. And if you can't be romantic with these songs, forget about
it."
Two divorces have clearly failed to dull his interest in romance.
Despite the fact that I have been warned on pain of death not to ask
about his private life, he admits, somewhat guardedly, to having "a
girlfriend that I like very much. We've been going steady for a year,
maybe two."
This, I say, is a charmingly old-fashioned turn of phrase for a man of
57.
"Well, it seems like I've been married since I was 17. That's when I met
my first wife, so I'm starting off at that point again. I'm 17, and I
have a girlfriend, and I like it very much."
But something tells me he won't be buying an engagement ring for a while
yet.