They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  When love comes knocking at your door

  Just open up and let it in

  It’s gonna be a magic carpet ride

  So, little girl, now don’t you run and hide

  Donnie put it on their second album, More of the Monkees, which spent eighteen weeks at Number One on the Billboard album chart. It was the first of three of my songs that the group recorded, all with Davy Jones singing lead vocals, which made me happy because he was the Monkee I had a crush on. I’d met them when they came to New York on a publicity tour and Davy asked me if I wanted to hang out with him. I was hardly the only girl who liked Davy. He was the Paul of the group, with that floppy-haired adorability and his wonderful Manchester accent.

  I knew I wasn’t “girlfriend material” for a star like Davy Jones. I knew he thought of me more as what we now call a “friend with benefits.”

  One day we walked hand in hand from his hotel to Screen Gems, with young girls lining the streets of Fifth Avenue five deep screaming “Da-a-a-v-e-e-e!” He was the first star I was ever involved with (not counting the Paul Simon date), and I felt the rush of being the one he was with, envied by hordes of screaming girls behind barricades.

  After he returned to LA, I saw in a magazine that he was dating a really pretty actress out there. I felt a little sad, but he’d never said anything to make me expect more.

  I was used to being the girl with the “pretty face,” code for don’t look past the neck. I hid in shapeless clothing as much as I could, all the while knowing I wasn’t hiding a thing.

  I CAME HOME FROM Mabel Dean Bacon one day to find a check in the mail for $34,000. Thirty-four thousand dollars! It was my share of the royalties for “A Groovy Kind of Love.”

  That I could do something I would have paid to do, something that felt effortless, and receive a check that size for it was unfathomable. I was teaching school five days a week for $5,100 a year. It was crazy. I completely saw the inequity. I knew how hard it was to reach and teach those girls. I saw that musical talent got rewarded in a hugely disproportionate way. As unjust as that seemed to me, I decided I had to pursue what I loved doing, and for the first time I could afford to focus full-time on my passion. With the money coming in, I was able to rent a studio apartment on Fifty-Ninth Street, diagonally across from where I grew up. I moved out of my lifelong home, to the extent you can call relocating a block away “moving.” I had never lived alone, and I quickly found that I didn’t like it at bedtime, even with the love of Benjamin, my first little Yorkshire terrier. I didn’t like sleeping in the apartment alone any more than I did in my bedroom as a kid.

  I started seeing a psychologist, Marci Lakos, twice a week. Marci suggested that I begin going to her group therapy as well, and I did. My first evening there, I was told by someone in the group that I reminded him of a former group member, Toni Bayard, and a number of the group agreed. Toni had recently passed away. “Oh, how sad,” I said. “What did she die of?”

  “Multiple sclerosis,” someone answered solemnly.

  I don’t know if it was an hour, an evening, or the next day, but there it was, the irrational leap: “Bayard? [beat] That sounds very close to Bayer.” Immediately I was in such fear that I instantaneously found myself beginning to twitch in different parts of my body. I had found a new disease to terrorize myself with. This one had such a garbage pail collection of symptoms that it would remain with me for quite some time.

  “You’re not afraid of dying,” Marci told me. “You’re afraid of living.” I knew instantly it was true, and yet it changed nothing. I just wasn’t able to act on it.

  I reacquainted myself with our family physician, Dr. King—yes, this was a time when middle-class people could afford a family doctor who would even sometimes come to your house. I told him my eye was twitching. He opened a thick doctor’s manual and told me eye twitching was benign. In the ensuing years, I’d call with more frequency, reporting each new symptom and invariably being told I did not have multiple sclerosis. In time, he learned to dodge my phone calls whenever he could.

  This non-disease, which was nonetheless completely real to me, led me to my long-standing relationship with sleeping pills. I knew if I could identify the nature of my true fears I might be able to confront them and be free of them, but they lay buried beneath a pile of unreal fears, which kept them hidden deep within me.

  Five

  I HAD BEGUN SPENDING more and more time with a guy named Andrew Sager. I’d known him socially since the early Sixties, but now we were kind of becoming a couple. He was handsome, with brown hair, hazel eyes, tan skin, and a great smile, and he dressed beautifully. Khaki pants or jeans with a form-fitting white shirt, and honey-brown loafers with matching socks. He wore clothes the way I would have liked to, with confidence and ease, and had a tall, lean body that allowed him to feel that way.

  Three years older than me, Andrew was soft-spoken with a certain class about him. He came from a very affluent New York family whose fortune was in real estate, but Andrew’s manners made it seem like the money had been in the family since they stubbed their toe on Plymouth Rock.

  We spent a lot of time in discotheques—Andrew loved to dance, though I wasn’t all that comfortable doing more than my dumbed-down version of whatever was in vogue. I didn’t feel sexy. I just tried my best to blend in. I looked like I was doing what everyone else was doing just enough that no one would notice that my hips were not moving in the same sensual way. For all my musicality, the music stayed in my head and never found my feet. I was, at best, a barely average dancer.

  On Saturday afternoons, Andrew and I would have lunch and shop. Sixtieth Street between First and Third Avenues was a hot fashion street. The style was to wear the tightest jeans possible, and no, Lycra did not yet exist to make this less of a torture. I would have to lie on the floor of the store to zip them up. Andrew had a great sense of fashion, and he was helping me find my own style. I might not have felt completely comfortable in my body—or in some of those clothes—but I was learning how to look like I did.

  At one point with Andrew I was weighing in at 105 pounds, my lowest adult weight ever, and looking great in tight jeans, cotton or silk man-tailored shirts tucked in with a belt and sometimes worn with little hand-knit vests. I dared to wear miniskirts and boots, even with the wide knee issue, and actually liked the way I looked.

  And, with Andrew, I had finally found a replacement for sleeping at my mother’s.

  ONE DAY WHILE WALKING along Central Park South, I bumped into Phil Spector, who I’d known when Sherry and I were first starting to write, and told him I’d had a big hit with “A Groovy Kind of Love.”

  “When you’ve had as many hits as Goffin and King, or Mann and Weil, I’ll congratulate you,” he said. “One hit does not make you a songwriter.”

  How right he was.

  A year after my Number One record, it was still easy to proudly boast that I wrote “A Groovy Kind of Love,” but my pride steadily faded as more and more time passed without another hit. I was fearful that I could turn out to be one of those one-hit wonders who ten years from now would be muttering my by-then-passé single credit under my breath to whoever still asked.

  Being on three of the Monkees’ albums, plus a few others like the soundtrack to To Sir, with Love, I felt I was still in the game. I was still writing with Toni Wine and had also started working with George Fischoff, a songwriter who looked oddly old-fashioned to me and, with his bald head and high brown trousers, older than his thirty years. George had come to Screen Gems with only one dream: he wanted to write a Broadway musical. Just to remind them he was there, he wrote two pop hits during that time: Spanky and Our Gang’s “Lazy Day” and Keith’s “98.6.”

  One afternoon we were standing in the hallway when he asked me out of the blue if I’d like to write a musical with him based on the movie Georgy Girl.

  “Sure,” I answered. One word, with little to no thought, launched me on a two-year misadventure in the world of musical theater.<
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  I loved Broadway musicals. For my birthday as a child my parents would take me to see the latest hit show. The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and My Fair Lady transported me to a magical place. When the cast would take their curtain calls, I got goose flesh all over. The excitement of a live performance thrilled me—the big emotions conveyed in song, the way each one told a story that all added up to a much bigger story—and now I was going to be writing one.

  The film Georgy Girl had been a surprise hit, with its catchy title tune by the Seekers and its bittersweet love story of an awkward, overweight music teacher played by then-unknown Lynn Redgrave. I couldn’t help but feel a connection to her.

  But a musical is very different from a film, and making a musical from what many considered a “perfect” small film was even more challenging. In a musical you need to find the scenes where the character has a feeling so big that it deserves to be sung, or you need to replace what would be dialogue with song instead.

  Attention was on us from the very beginning. At first this was fun. Time magazine wrote about how I raised the production money almost single-handedly by singing all the songs at the backers’ auditions. My mother was walking on air—her Carole was writing a Broadway show. To celebrate, I bought her a little dog like mine, a Yorkshire terrier, and named her Georgy.

  Fred Coe, whose credits included The Miracle Worker, Two for the Seesaw, and A Thousand Clowns, was the producer, and Peter Hunt, fresh off of 1776, was hired to direct. Tom Mankiewicz, son of Hollywood legend Joseph Mankiewicz, wrote the book. An unbeatable team! And then there was George and me. I wasn’t sure if George’s talent as a composer was equal to his passion to write for Broadway, and I was certainly no Alan Jay Lerner. I was young and naïve and had not learned to trust my instincts. But I didn’t like who my unbeatable team cast as the lead. I had wanted them to audition a pop singer named Melanie, who later had a big hit with “Brand New Key.” She was a little plump, with a sweet face. Instead they cast Dilys Watling, a British actress that no one in America had ever heard of. I don’t know if anything would have made a real difference in the end, but with a star at least we might have had reasonable advance ticket sales.

  When I saw a mock-up of the set, by the famed designer Jo Mielziner, my apprehension increased. “It looks so dark and unhappy,” I said. “Isn’t it supposed to be a children’s playground?”

  “Don’t worry,” Jo said. “Wait till you see it when it’s mounted.” Mounted, it looked exactly the same as the model, only now it was very big and very dark and very unlike any playground I ever played in.

  On the road, everything that could go wrong did. Another writer, Peter Stone, was brought in to rewrite Tom’s book, which was unrecognizable afterward. Somehow, our songs still fit, though I wish we’d had someone to help us think them through more carefully.

  Andrew Sager showed up in New Haven, where we had opened for tryouts, and asked me to marry him. It seemed to come out of the blue—yes, we were going together, but I had been so focused on Georgy that his proposal took me by surprise. I told him I couldn’t give him an answer in the middle of what was going on. “Let’s wait until after the show opens.”

  The block-long marquee of the Winter Garden Theatre was already announcing the February 1970 arrival of this wonderful new musical whose tryouts in New Haven were promising but somehow, in Boston, got worse instead of better. So much worse that Fred Coe—who, to me, was shrinking in stature with each successive city and now seemed weak and in way over his head—told us after two weeks in Boston that he was going to close the show before bringing it into New York.

  George immediately threatened to kill himself, convincingly enough that Fred, not wanting a suicide on his conscience, reluctantly agreed to bring it to Broadway. Still, he cautioned us that we’d be lucky if it ran five nights. At each evening’s tryout, as Fred paced the back of the theater, there was a small figure pacing alongside him—my mother. She was at every preview, oblivious to any impending doom, and already saw herself as the proud mother of the writer of a hit show.

  On opening night, my uncle Jack flew in from California to escort Mom and me to the theater. All dressed up, we walked out of our apartment and down the hallway. As we rang for the elevator, Uncle Jack looked at me wistfully and said in the Russian accent he never lost, “Oh, how I vish I vas here for your vedding. That vould make me so happy and proud.” I had a show opening at the Winter Garden Theatre, I was the youngest lyricist ever to write a Broadway musical, but in my uncle Jack’s eyes I was a failure. At twenty-five, I was already a spinster.

  I remember the opening night audience applauding wildly, but then there were so many invited guests. Everything would ride on the reviews, and we went to Sardi’s to wait for the late editions. It didn’t matter that the Daily News loved it, or that the New York Post didn’t. The only thing that mattered was Clive Barnes in the New York Times.

  The theme song from the movie Georgy Girl had been a huge hit: I have no idea why we didn’t use it in the show. This omission on our part allowed Barnes to end his unfavorable review with “I left the theater humming the title song. Unfortunately, it was from the movie and not the musical.” Words that to this day are seared in my memory.

  Fred Coe had overestimated the show’s potential. It ran for three nights. And while Georgy was DOA, the marquee with our names prominently displayed remained up for almost a year, a big, block-long reminder of our disaster.

  I thought I was totally responsible. It was as if there’d been no Fred Coe failing to notice that the set was awful, no Peter Hunt failing to realize our lead was completely miscast, and no George Fischoff, who was at least responsible for the music. All I did was write the lyrics. Still, I took it upon myself to feel that if they’d only been better the show might have been a smash.

  I went into a depression, thinking I’d had neither the good sense to avoid attaching myself to this colossal failure nor the talent to know how to save it. Andrew, though disappointed himself, was being very kind to me. Three nights after it closed we were walking to P.J. Clarke’s and I managed to walk straight into a glass door on East Fifty-Fourth Street. I was rushed to the hospital and stitched up in the emergency room. To this day I still wear bangs to cover the scar on my forehead, my secret mark of failure.

  My mother, too, was devastated. She took Georgy’s failure as her own, and she winged off to Puerto Rico to recover in the sun with a piña colada in hand. When she returned home she threatened to change the name of her Yorkie. “Why should I be the only one left with this bomb Georgy? Couldn’t you have named her Gypsy, or Fair Lady?”

  It would be a long time, eight years in fact, before I thought about Broadway again.

  Six

  SEVEN DAYS AFTER THE final performance of Georgy, my publishers at Screen Gems called me in for a meeting.

  By now, Donnie and the Monkees had come to an end. The boys, flush with success, wanted much more creative control, and when they got it, they managed to bury their show. Donnie, who had fought back, was unceremoniously let go as president of Screen Gems.

  “Is there anything we can do for you, Carole?” Irwin Robinson, the new head of the company, began. “We know how bad you must be feeling. We feel terrible, too.” Of course they did, I thought. After all, their parent company, Columbia Pictures, had lost close to seven hundred thousand dollars producing this flop, so I was grateful Irwin was being so kind to me.

  “You know,” Irwin continued, “we still think you are a wonderful talent.” I sat there hopefully, waiting to hear their new plans for me. “But the guys upstairs,” he went on, “well, they just don’t want to have any reminders of such a big mistake, and unfortunately, Carole, you are a reminder. So . . . it pains me to say this, but we’re going to have to let you go.”

  Wait a minute! First, they were asking how they could help me and now they were firing me. This was not going well at all.

  Within a week, my show had closed, I had stitches in my forehead, and I was u
nceremoniously thrown out of Screen Gems. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, Andrew’s eagerness to get married seemed to have waned with the absence of klieg lights in my face, just as my shrinking self-esteem was making a wedding look like my only salvation. Fearing that I might have just seen my last music-related job, I put my creativity to work convincing Andrew to marry me. Finally, he said yes.

  My mother booked a small room at the Regency Hotel and with about forty or so friends and family members around me, I was rescued from singledom in September 1970. My recollection of all of this is more than a little hazy because in times of great stress I tended to split off and be present in body only. I do remember asking my friend Carole Pincus if she had any smelling salts in case I fainted going down the aisle.

  I was not really in love with Andrew. I wanted to be, but there was always something off. I would sometimes see a kind of vacancy behind his eyes, and I knew he was longing for a different life from the one he was living, but I didn’t know what it was any more than he did.

  Andrew had a lot of talent as an illustrative artist. His freehand sketching was better than much of the work coming out of Parsons School of Design, and yet he cut himself off from what could have fulfilled him. Instead of following his passion, he went to work for his uncle, Walter Reade, who owned a chain of movie theaters. But he would often sit in our living room with a pad and pencil sketching women who looked like they stepped off the pages of Vogue. We were pleasing our families—he by trying to be a “businessman” and me by getting married—but neither of us was happy.

  After the wedding, when the full flush of desperation had faded, I took a good look at the man I’d married and realized I didn’t really know who Andrew was. I wondered where he went when he left our apartment and stayed out until all hours after we had a fight. Or why he took such a curatorial interest in how I dressed. I had an inkling that he might be gay. I asked him, “Andrew, are you bisexual?” He looked me in the eye, then looked away and said, “No, of course not.” Still, we certainly enjoyed sleeping together, and he had a more than healthy sex drive.