Barbara McNair
Encyclopedia
Barbara McNair was an African American
singer and actress.
Born Barbara Jean McNair in Chicago
, Illinois
and raised in Racine, Wisconsin
, McNair studied music at the American Conservatory of Music
in Chicago. Her big break came with a win on Arthur Godfrey
's TV show Talent Scouts
, which led to bookings at The Purple Onion
and the Cocoanut Grove.
She soon became one of the country's most popular headliners and a guest on such television
variety shows as The Steve Allen Show
, Hullabaloo
, The Bell Telephone Hour
, and The Hollywood Palace
, while recording for the Coral
, Signature
, Motown
, and TEC Recording Studios labels. Among her hits were "You're Gonna Love My Baby" and "Bobby". In the early 1960s, McNair made several musical shorts for Scopitone
, a franchise of coin-operated machines that showed what were the forerunners of today's music videos.
McNair's acting career began on television, guesting on series such as Dr. Kildare
, The Eleventh Hour
, I Spy, Mission: Impossible
, Hogan's Heroes
and McMillan and Wife
. McNair posed nude for Playboy
in the October 1968 issue. She caught the attention of the movie-going public with her much-publicized nude sequences in the gritty crime drama If He Hollers Let Him Go
(1968) opposite Raymond St. Jacques
, then donned a nun
's habit alongside Mary Tyler Moore
for Change of Habit
(1969), Elvis Presley
's last feature film. She portrayed Sidney Poitier
's wife in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!
(1970) and its sequel, The Organization
(1971).
McNair's Broadway
credits include The Body Beautiful
(1958), No Strings
(1962), and a revival of The Pajama Game
(1973).
McNair starred in her own 1969 television variety series The Barbara McNair Show, one of the first black women to host her own musical variety show. The show lasted three seasons till 1972, at the time she married Frederick Andrew Manzie (Rick Manzie), Mr. Manzie managed Barbara McNair and produced the show with Burt Rosen, they formed ABR Entertainment and the rights to the show are owned by the Manzie Family. The show starred A-list guests like Tony Bennett
and Sonny and Cher, The Righteous Brothers, Johnny Mathis, Fredia Payne, and many more entertainers that became superstars.
On December 15, 1976, her husband, Rick Manzie, was murdered, in their Las Vegas Bruce Street Mansion and Mafia
boss-turned-FBI-informant
Jimmy Fratianno
later claimed in his book The Last Mafioso that Manzie had been a Mafia associate who tried to put a contract on the life of a mob-associated tax attorney with whom he had a legal dispute. The ensuing publicity did little to help McNair's career. This was not the cause of Manzie's murder.
Her recordings include Livin' End, "The Real Barbara McNair", More Today Than Yesterday", Broadway Show Stoppers", "A Movie Soundtrack If He Hollars, Let Him Go", I Enjoy Being a Girl, and The Ultimate Motown Collection, a two-CD set with 48 tracks that include her two albums for the label plus a non-album single and B-side and an entire LP that never was released.
Into her seventies, McNair resided in the Los Angeles
area, playing tennis and skiing to keep in shape on a regular basis and touring on occasion. She died on February 4, 2007, of throat cancer, survived by her husband Charles Blecka, sister Jaquline Gaither, niece Angela Rosenow, and the nephew of her late husband Frederick Manzie, John Thomas and his family.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
singer and actress.
Born Barbara Jean McNair in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
and raised in Racine, Wisconsin
Racine, Wisconsin
Racine is a city in and the county seat of Racine County, Wisconsin, United States. According to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the city had a population of 82,196...
, McNair studied music at the American Conservatory of Music
American Conservatory of Music
The American Conservatory of Music was a major American school of music founded in 1886 by John James Hattstaedt . The conservatory was incorporated as an Illinois non-profit corporation. It was located in Chicago until 1991 when its Board of Trustees — chaired by Frederic Wilbur Hickman...
in Chicago. Her big break came with a win on Arthur Godfrey
Arthur Godfrey
Arthur Morton Godfrey was an American radio and television broadcaster and entertainer who was sometimes introduced by his nickname, The Old Redhead...
's TV show Talent Scouts
Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts
Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts is an American radio and television variety show which ran on CBS from 1946 until 1958...
, which led to bookings at The Purple Onion
The Purple Onion
The Purple Onion is a celebrated cellar club in the North Beach area of San Francisco, California located at 140 Columbus Avenue...
and the Cocoanut Grove.
She soon became one of the country's most popular headliners and a guest on such television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
variety shows as The Steve Allen Show
Steve Allen (comedian)
Stephen Valentine Patrick William "Steve" Allen was an American television personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, and writer. Though he got his start in radio, Allen is best known for his television career. He first gained national attention as a guest host on Arthur Godfrey's Talent...
, Hullabaloo
Hullabaloo (TV series)
Hullabaloo is an American musical variety series that ran on NBC from January 12, 1965 through August 29, 1966. Similar to Shindig! it ran in prime time in contrast to ABC's American Bandstand.-Overview:...
, The Bell Telephone Hour
The Bell Telephone Hour
The Bell Telephone Hour is a long-run concert series which began April 29, 1940 on NBC Radio and was heard on NBC until June 30, 1958. Sponsored by Bell Telephone, it showcased the best in classical and Broadway music, reaching eight to nine million listeners each week. It continued on television...
, and The Hollywood Palace
The Hollywood Palace
The Hollywood Palace is an hour-long American television variety show that was broadcast weekly on ABC from January 4, 1964 to February 7, 1970. It began as a mid-season replacement for the short-lived Jerry Lewis Show, another variety show which had lasted only three months...
, while recording for the Coral
Coral Records
Coral Records was a Decca Records subsidiary formed in 1949. It recorded pop artists McGuire Sisters and Teresa Brewer, as well as rock and roller Buddy Holly....
, Signature
Signature Records
Signature Records was a mid-20th century United States based record label. Noted Signature recording artists included Anita O'Day, Coleman Hawkins, Eddie Lawrence, Ray Anthony, Barbara McNair, Monica Lewis, Dickie Thompson, Jane Harvey, Kay Thompson and Alan Dale. Bob Thiele produced records for...
, Motown
Motown Records
Motown is a record label originally founded by Berry Gordy, Jr. and incorporated as Motown Record Corporation in Detroit, Michigan, United States, on April 14, 1960. The name, a portmanteau of motor and town, is also a nickname for Detroit...
, and TEC Recording Studios labels. Among her hits were "You're Gonna Love My Baby" and "Bobby". In the early 1960s, McNair made several musical shorts for Scopitone
Scopitone
Scopitone is a type of jukebox featuring a 16 mm film component. Scopitone films were a forerunner of music videos. The Italian Cinebox/Colorama and Color-Sonics were competing, lesser-known technologies of the time....
, a franchise of coin-operated machines that showed what were the forerunners of today's music videos.
McNair's acting career began on television, guesting on series such as Dr. Kildare
Dr. Kildare
Dr. James Kildare is a fictional character, the primary character in a series of American theatrical films in the late 1930s and early 1940s, an early 1950s radio series, a 1960s television series of the same name and a comic book based on the TV show, and a short-lived 1970s television series...
, The Eleventh Hour
The Eleventh Hour (1962 TV series)
The Eleventh Hour is an American medical drama about psychiatry starring Wendell Corey, Jack Ging, and Ralph Bellamy, which aired sixty-two new episodes plus selected rebroadcasts on NBC from October 3, 1962, to September 9, 1964.-Series premise:...
, I Spy, Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible is an American television series which was created and initially produced by Bruce Geller. It chronicled the missions of a team of secret American government agents known as the Impossible Missions Force . The leader of the team was Jim Phelps, played by Peter Graves, except in...
, Hogan's Heroes
Hogan's Heroes
Hogan's Heroes is an American television sitcom that ran for 168 episodes from September 17, 1965, to March 28, 1971, on the CBS network. The show was set in a German prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. Bob Crane had the starring role as Colonel Robert E...
and McMillan and Wife
McMillan and Wife
McMillan & Wife is a lighthearted American crime drama series that aired on NBC from September 17, 1971 to April 24, 1977. Starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James in the title roles, the series premiered in 90-minute episodes as part of the wheel series NBC Mystery Movie, in rotation with...
. McNair posed nude for Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
in the October 1968 issue. She caught the attention of the movie-going public with her much-publicized nude sequences in the gritty crime drama If He Hollers Let Him Go
If He Hollers Let Him Go
If He Hollers Let Him Go is a novel by Chester Himes, published in 1945, about an African American shipyard worker in Los Angeles during World War II. A 1968 film adaptation with Raymond St. Jacques, Barbara McNair, Kevin McCarthy, and Arthur O'Connell bore little resemblance to the book.The story...
(1968) opposite Raymond St. Jacques
Raymond St. Jacques
Raymond St. Jacques was an American actor.-Career:St. Jacques was born James Arthur Johnson in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Vivienne Johnson, a medical technician...
, then donned a nun
Nun
A nun is a woman who has taken vows committing her to live a spiritual life. She may be an ascetic who voluntarily chooses to leave mainstream society and live her life in prayer and contemplation in a monastery or convent...
's habit alongside Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show , in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as...
for Change of Habit
Change of Habit
Change of Habit is a 1969 musical drama film starring Elvis Presley and Mary Tyler Moore. It was Presley's 31st and final film acting role; his remaining two film appearances were concert documentaries. It was also Moore's fourth and final film under her brief Universal Pictures contract; she...
(1969), Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
's last feature film. She portrayed Sidney Poitier
Sidney Poitier
Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field...
's wife in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!
They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!
They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! is a 1970 film; a sequel to In the Heat of the Night . Sidney Poitier reprised his role of police detective Virgil Tibbs, though in this sequel, Tibbs is working for the San Francisco Police rather than the Philadelphia Police or the Pasadena Police .-Plot:The plot...
(1970) and its sequel, The Organization
The Organization (film)
The Organization is a 1971 film starring Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs. It was the last of the trilogy featuring the police detective Tibbs that had begun with In the Heat of the Night . In it Tibbs is called in to hunt down a gang of urban revolutionaries, suspected of a series of crimes...
(1971).
McNair's Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
credits include The Body Beautiful
The Body Beautiful
The Body Beautiful is a musical with a book by Joseph Stein and Will Glickman, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Jerry Bock.The first collaboration by Harnick and Bock, and the only one to have a contemporary setting, its plot focuses on a wealthy Dartmouth College graduate who aspires to be...
(1958), No Strings
No Strings
No Strings is a musical drama with a book by Samuel A. Taylor and words and music by Richard Rodgers, his only Broadway score written without a collaborator. The musical opened on Broadway in 1962 and ran for 580 performances...
(1962), and a revival of The Pajama Game
The Pajama Game
The Pajama Game is a musical based on the novel 7½ Cents by Richard Bissell. It features a score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. The story deals with labor troubles in a pajama factory, where worker demands for a seven-and-a-half cents raise are going unheeded...
(1973).
McNair starred in her own 1969 television variety series The Barbara McNair Show, one of the first black women to host her own musical variety show. The show lasted three seasons till 1972, at the time she married Frederick Andrew Manzie (Rick Manzie), Mr. Manzie managed Barbara McNair and produced the show with Burt Rosen, they formed ABR Entertainment and the rights to the show are owned by the Manzie Family. The show starred A-list guests like Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett is an American singer of popular music, standards, show tunes, and jazz....
and Sonny and Cher, The Righteous Brothers, Johnny Mathis, Fredia Payne, and many more entertainers that became superstars.
On December 15, 1976, her husband, Rick Manzie, was murdered, in their Las Vegas Bruce Street Mansion and Mafia
Mafia
The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose common enterprise is protection racketeering...
boss-turned-FBI-informant
Informant
An informant is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law enforcement world, where they are officially known as confidential or criminal informants , and can often refer pejoratively to the supply of information...
Jimmy Fratianno
Jimmy Fratianno
Aladena "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno was a Cleveland, Ohio, mobster and later acting head of the Los Angeles crime family before becoming a government witness...
later claimed in his book The Last Mafioso that Manzie had been a Mafia associate who tried to put a contract on the life of a mob-associated tax attorney with whom he had a legal dispute. The ensuing publicity did little to help McNair's career. This was not the cause of Manzie's murder.
Her recordings include Livin' End, "The Real Barbara McNair", More Today Than Yesterday", Broadway Show Stoppers", "A Movie Soundtrack If He Hollars, Let Him Go", I Enjoy Being a Girl, and The Ultimate Motown Collection, a two-CD set with 48 tracks that include her two albums for the label plus a non-album single and B-side and an entire LP that never was released.
Into her seventies, McNair resided in the Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
area, playing tennis and skiing to keep in shape on a regular basis and touring on occasion. She died on February 4, 2007, of throat cancer, survived by her husband Charles Blecka, sister Jaquline Gaither, niece Angela Rosenow, and the nephew of her late husband Frederick Manzie, John Thomas and his family.
Selected filmography
- StilettoStiletto (1969 film)Stiletto is a 1969 American crime film directed by Bernard L. Kowalski and starring Alex Cord, Britt Ekland and Patrick O'Neal. A playboy works as a hitman for an international crime syndicate, but wishes to retire after one final job.-Cast:...
(1969) - Venus in FursVenus in Furs (1969 film)Venus in Furs is a 1969 Italian supernatural erotic thriller film directed by Jesús Franco and starring James Darren.The film bears only a superficial resemblance to the 1870 Venus in Furs novel by Leopold von Sacher Masoch...
(1969)
External links
- http://www.barbaramcnair.com The Official Barbara McNair Web Site created by her Nephew John Thomas.
- Barbara McNair singing "Nothing Can Stop Me Now"