They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  He nodded yes.

  “But who should Mommy marry?” I was hoping maybe he had a good idea. He was really much smarter than his years.

  “The Raiders,” he answered confidently.

  “All of them?” I laughed. “The whole team?”

  “Yeah. The Raiders, or maybe the Rams. I have a Rams helmet,” he said.

  “Well, I like Joe Montana.” I was negotiating.

  “But that’s San Francisco!” He gave up, put his thumb in his mouth, and closed his eyes, holding on tight to his dependable frayed blue blankee.

  “Don’t stop,” he said. “Keep rubbing my back.”

  He didn’t need a pill to help him sleep. He had his mommy and he had his trusted blue blankee. Burt had been my blankee, and he’d kept cutting it down, giving me less and less. In the end, I was clinging to a shred and I still couldn’t let go.

  Thirty-Two

  THE LOSS OF BURT was a double whammy. Not only did I lose my life partner, my supposed soul mate, but I also lost the major collaborator in my life for the past decade. I was filled with insecurity as to how I’d start writing again. I decided to call up someone I knew, who’d be less likely to reject me.

  I called my friend James Ingram, whose voice I loved, and who’d written a number of good songs. He came over and we wrote a song that day. It wasn’t an important song, but what was important was the knowledge that I could write without Burt, which made it easier for me to move forward. Once I felt the music part was under control, I needed to find someone who could be the new man in my life.

  The first real date I had after I filed for divorce was with Richard Cohen. Richard was a retired real estate guy who was best known in LA for marrying Tina Sinatra and dating Linda Evans of Dynasty fame.

  Marvin and Barbara Davis—he was once the owner of 20th Century Fox—friends of mine, had taken me to Matteo’s, an Italian restaurant in Westwood. It was a show business restaurant, especially on Sunday nights.

  Richard appeared to be approaching our table but I wasn’t sure if Marvin Davis had signaled him to come over. He was very attractive: blue eyed, well dressed, trim, blond (a first for me), and muscular. Barbara introduced me. “Carole, do you know Richard?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I do know Richard. I mean, we’ve met a few times at various parties, I think.”

  I didn’t think. I knew. Why did I qualify everything I said? Was there nothing I was sure of? I had not only met Richard, I’d sat next to him at a large dinner party and did not have a particularly stimulating evening. As was the custom, Burt and I were seated at different tables. What was the assumption behind separating the husband and the wife? Was it that the married are tired of talking to each other? That particular evening, I remembered only wanting to be seated next to Burt, who only wanted to be somewhere other than at that dinner party, so it would be unfair to hold Richard responsible for my bad time.

  “Well, it’s good to see you again. You look beautiful tonight,” Richard said matter-of-factly. “Good-looking friend you’ve got here,” he said to Marvin. Bull’s-eye! Score two for Richard. What better thing to say to a woman who had just been dumped by her husband?

  “Thank you,” I answered shyly. I wasn’t very good at any of this. I squeezed Barbara Davis’s hand. I felt like I could have been at my own sweet sixteen party. I looked at Richard. Now he’d passed beyond attractive to actually handsome.

  Barbara, who was anything but shy, kept the dialogue rolling.

  “I think the two of you make such a lovely couple. I think all of us should go out. Soon!”

  “I was thinking the same thing, Barbara, you might have let me say it,” Richard quickly offered.

  “How’s your golf game, Richard? How are you hitting the ball?” Marvin wasn’t really looking for an answer. His eyes were already darting around the room, looking to spot someone else he knew, someone more famous, more interesting.

  “Oh, I’m playing about the same. Hurt my shoulder last week. I have to be careful. Go a little easy on it. I played with your friend Margie Perenchio last week.” He was addressing me. “She’s some good player, Margie. You know she only plays with the guys.” Margie was my close friend; I knew more about her than he would ever know, but of course I didn’t say anything.

  Marvin wasn’t interested in golf. He wasn’t interested in Richard, either. He didn’t even bother to answer.

  “What’s happening in business, Richard? Oh, I forgot,” he said fake laughing, “you’re the one who’s retired. We all want your life. Lots of money and no responsibilities.”

  I laughed, noting he didn’t work. He seemed so young to not be working. I was trying on Richard’s life in my mind, just like when I was fifteen and met a boy I was interested in. I would write my first name with his last name and see how it looked and sounded. If I were crazy about him I’d write it hundreds of times, as if writing it would make it so.

  Richard bent down to whisper in my ear. “What’s your phone number?”

  Good. He liked me. Winning was important. This is why they called it the dating game.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked him.

  “I don’t need one. It’s all in here.” He pointed to his head. I whispered back my phone number. “I’ll call you,” he told me. “I’d love to stay, but I have to show up at this charity event later tonight. I’m on the board. I just stopped by because I knew you were going to be here.” He grinned.

  Wasn’t he there because he was eating at the next table with friends? I was so bad at all of this. If I didn’t know for a year that Burt was having an affair, how would I know if Richard was telling the truth?

  “Oh, he likes you a lot,” Barbara said later. “I can tell.”

  Why was everyone so anxious for me to couple so immediately? None of them looked really happy in their marriages. Two by two they enter the ark, I thought to myself.

  When I got home that night there was a message from Richard on my answering machine. “Hi. It’s Richard. I told you I’d remember your number. I’ll call you later.” It made me feel good—until I heard the next message. It was Burt. There was nothing particularly brilliant in it, nothing particularly anything. It was just the voice, the voice that soothed me.

  “Um . . . uh . . . I just needed to ask you something about Cristopher’s soccer game tomorrow.” Long pause. “I hope you’re feeling okay and I’m sorry to bother you but . . . uh . . . well, I’ll call back tomorrow.”

  Of course, he didn’t, but Richard did.

  The first date we had was dinner at Matsuhisa, a small “in” Japanese restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard in Hollywood.

  The waiter served a vegetable dumpling in a creamy brown sauce.

  “Any peanuts in there?” Richard asked cautiously. Then confiding in me he said, “I’m deathly allergic to peanuts. If I eat anything with as much as a hint of a peanut I go into anaphylactic shock and I can die.”

  I listened compassionately.

  “In fact,” he added as he pulled a small kit out of his wallet, “I should really show you how to administer this just in case you ever see me blowing up in front of you.” He then showed me in great detail the way you handle an EpiPen and how I was to inject him were he to find himself blowing up and unable to breathe.

  Then he gave me the pen. “Keep it,” he said. “I plan on seeing a lot more of you so you should have it.” I didn’t know what to say. I put the pen in my purse and hoped I could find it quicker than I find most anything in my overstuffed bag should I need to save his life.

  We talked about our lives. He talked a lot about how he made his money and about his former marriage to Tina. He said he knew from the start the marriage wasn’t going to work out. I didn’t know Tina well but I liked her. I wondered why, if he was so sure the marriage wouldn’t work, did he bother to get married?

  When we kissed good night, after our second date, it totally surprised me. I hadn’t expected to feel so turned on.

  On our third date we went
to a movie. We played with each other’s hands and fingers, which was better than the movie. There was nothing like the excitement of somebody new and unknown who can be a fantasy.

  When I told David Geffen I was dating Richard, he reacted in his usual honest way: “You’re wasting your time. He is completely uninteresting and he’s not nearly smart enough for you.”

  Forewarned but completely disregarding his advice, I soldiered on.

  For our fourth date, Richard invited me to dinner at his home. I was impressed, which he wanted me to be, when I saw how beautifully he lived. So different from Burt, who when we met was living in what looked like a one-bedroom suite in a Holiday Inn. Richard’s taste, if it was his, was impeccable. He had acquired through the years a very impressive art collection. Guided in his art buying by his friend Billy Wilder, whose name he enjoyed dropping every couple of hours, Richard relished showing it all off to me. He spent hours rearranging the placement of his possessions—his Picassos, his Rodins, and his Galle lamps.

  Richard had everything, I thought, as his chef served us dinner—everything except my attention. I wanted the stories he was telling me to be more interesting. He was an art collector, and I wanted him to paint with more colors.

  He, in turn, wanted me to wear more color.

  “Why do you only wear black and white?” he asked. He was wearing a red shirt, one of my least favorite colors.

  “I don’t really know,” I said honestly. “I think it’s just easier. It’s safer. Yellow is a high-risk color.”

  “And those high heels,” he continued. “Don’t you ever just wear sneakers?”

  “I like looking taller,” I answered, sounding more than a little defensive.

  “Well, I’d like to see you in a pair of sneakers. But you’re okay with me just the way you are.”

  Wasn’t that a contradiction?

  “I’ll bet you’d look terrific in a pair of sneakers and jeans instead of those . . . big shoes. You should give it a try.” Richard stayed on every subject just a few minutes more than necessary. Did everybody want to change everybody? I wondered.

  There was one of those awkward pauses between courses.

  “What are you thinking?” Richard asked me.

  He’d caught me thinking about Burt. No wonder I questioned his honesty as I heard myself lie.

  “Nothing. I wasn’t thinking anything.”

  Really? I had achieved the state that Zen masters can merely aspire to? If only I could think nothing, I thought.

  He reached over and took my hand.

  I felt instantly bonded. I liked it most when he held my hand and he was silent. He could be anyone I imagined. And of course, I was imagining Burt.

  “I like you. A lot,” he added.

  “Why?” I asked him, really curious.

  Clearly, he had thought about this. “You’re special. You’re smart and very pretty. You’re talented and you’re good at what you do, you’ve made a success of yourself. Oh, I don’t know why,” and then added, “if I could define it, I probably wouldn’t feel it.”

  I felt a flush of embarrassment. If I really felt like the person he described, I’d probably like me, too. It was true I had made a success of myself. But I felt more like I had created myself. I felt like I had taken a glob of clay and molded it, bit by bit, by imitating what I saw around me that I admired.

  After dinner, Richard led me into the bar. We sat on one of the large eighteenth-century sofas. The only light in the room was from the Tiffany lily lamp, appropriately dimmed, and the spots on the Pissarro, Léger, Hopper, and Hockney paintings.

  Richard gazed at the softly spot-lit Matisse in the corner of the room.

  “I love that painting,” he said. “I waited four years to get that. Bid on it, lost it, waited till it came up again. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I studied it with appreciation. “It really is,” I replied.

  “You’re beautiful, too,” Richard said, mellowed by the after-dinner brandy he was sipping.

  If only I could believe it. I sat there, my own creation, guarded, always waiting for the well-trained eye to spot the cracks and yell, “Fraud!”

  Richard reached over and pulled me to him. He kissed me deeply and it was unexpectedly hot. I let myself get lost in him. I even slipped off my shoes. Everything fit perfectly. His arms holding me were strong and muscular. My body wrapped in his felt deliciously small and female. This was what it felt like to have hot sex. He was kissing my breasts. I was responding to his every move. So far it was okay. I liked my breasts. He took my hand and put it on his pants zipper. I was secretly delighted that I still had some sex appeal left in me after the Burt bashings.

  His hand moved down my body and opened the button of my jeans. He had to push his hand in. He moved it down with expertise. He was exploring my body, touching my ass, my thigh. Suddenly I became his hand. I was out of my body and inside his head wondering if my ass felt flabby to him. The spell was broken. I desperately wanted back in the moment. But I was out.

  “I don’t think I . . . Richard, I don’t think we . . . should go to bed together yet. I don’t think I’m ready,” I said awkwardly.

  I was forty-six years old and I wasn’t ready. What was I waiting for? Menopause?

  “You feel so good,” Richard said heatedly. “You really get to me.”

  Thank you, Richard, thank you for that. Burt had done a pretty good job on my self-image through the years.

  “We don’t have to go to bed together. I can wait until you’re ready,” he said, continuing to kiss me and hold me.

  I was amazed that I could feel so much so quickly. Richard was magically turning into the man of my dreams right before my eyes. And, as he became more, I was becoming less. It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t ready to have sex with him. I just wasn’t prepared for the possibility of rejection and I still hadn’t figured out how to get from the bedroom to the bathroom without my four-inch heels and without him seeing me naked. As soon as I could figure it all out, I knew I would go to bed with him.

  After two more dates I found myself in Richard’s bedroom. It began the same way. A Roberta Flack record was playing in the background. Somewhere between the fondling of my breasts and the unbuttoning of my jeans, I decided not to stop him. What did I have to lose?

  The sex was better than I ever imagined. It wasn’t just that I had been deprived of a sexual partner for so long. It was that Richard was a really good lover, both times. And he was making love to me alone. No Marilyn Chambers tapes joining us from the VCR, it was just the two of us.

  “You are one sexy lady,” he said lying next to me in the dark.

  “You too. I mean, you are a very sexy man,” I said, my head nestled in his chest.

  But now, how was I going to get to the bathroom? I didn’t want to push my luck. I lay there trying to figure it out.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked me.

  “Uh . . . I was thinking . . . how good it felt. I mean, it was great being with you,” I answered. I actually had been thinking that, just not at the moment he asked.

  “You didn’t think I had it in me, did you? I mean twice,” he boasted. “You really take everything out of me, baby,” he said sexily.

  And the next moment, he was snoring. Loudly.

  God can be so kind, I thought, as I quietly got up, went to the bathroom, came back and got dressed. I woke Richard with a kiss, thanked him for the evening, and went home to Cristopher.

  I went to bed that night feeling honestly hopeful that I had really gotten lucky. A very handsome “younger” man (eleven years younger than Burt) was really turned on by me and, more important, I was turned on by him.

  Maybe the pain was over.

  WE SAW EACH OTHER every night for the rest of the week and we spoke a few times a day on the phone. I was just getting out of the shower one morning when Richard called from his mobile phone on the golf course. He also called from his car, and from his living room. Semi-retirement left so muc
h free time.

  “So, how many phone calls did you get today? What did the ‘ladies’ have to say about us?”

  These were two questions I was now hearing every day. Richard liked to network, and many of his friends were women. He liked to know what the word on the street was about “us.” I saw this as a minor character flaw but chose to overlook it because, well, let’s face it, I was desperate. Besides, I liked drama as much as the next person. In fact, the most exciting thing about our relationship was what people were saying about it. Yesterday we’d made the New York Post’s Page Six, and all I could think was I hope Burt sees this, all the while knowing he wouldn’t. I just wasn’t used to a man who liked to talk about the same things girls talked about.

  “Well,” he asked, “does Barbara Davis think we make a great couple?” Then, “What did Alana think when you told her we’re going away together next weekend?”

  Was I really having this conversation? Burt hated to talk on the phone for long. He hated idle chat and morning calls. Now I was dating someone who liked the same thing I did and I was starting to hate him for it.

  “Tita Cahn is finished as far as I’m concerned,” he said. This was the fifth time this week he was telling me how he had reduced legendary songwriter Sammy Cahn’s widow to the level of acquaintance because she bad-mouthed me.

  “All your friends don’t have to like me, Richard. I mean, we’re not kids.” I thought of David’s dismissal of him. “I’m sure both of us have some friends who won’t like the other.”

  “If she was really my friend, she wouldn’t say nasty things about you. She is not my friend. Sammy Cahn was my friend. Tita Cahn was my friend, but now she is an acquaintance. If we have a party with sixty people, she can come, but if we have sixteen people she’s out.”

  This was important information. Sixty people and she’s in, sixteen and she’s out. I suddenly realized I was talking to a fifty-year-old man who seemed more like fifteen. There was a world we lived in, a world with real problems and challenges, and this was what we were talking about? I was feeling uncomfortable and judgmental.