I went to a couple of John Cage concerts, one of which featured twenty-four musicians huddled around twelve portable radios. As Cage began conducting, the musicians turned the dials of the radios so the audience heard bits and pieces of music and speech mixed in with lots of static. I also saw a piece performed that Lou Harrison had written for Martha Graham. It was sixteen minutes long and thirteen of those minutes were complete silence. I was listening to stuff that was pretty out there, but none of it helped me decide what I wanted to do as a musician.
It was then that I met Paula Stewart, a stage singer who also happened to be very good-looking. Paula was working as an understudy on Broadway when she ran into my dad at a press party. When she told him how hard it was to find an accompanist for her auditions, he said, “Boy, have I got a guy for you!” My parents invited Paula to a party at their apartment, and I was sitting at the piano playing background music when she came over and started talking to me.
Paula Stewart: I kind of sidled over to Burt but he was very cool to me and it was definitely not love at first sight. It was more like hate at first sight. I don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t like singers. But I’ve always been attracted to piano players. My father was a pianist and I dated Byron Janis for a while and Vladimir Horowitz was a great friend and then I met Burt. I told him I was looking for an accompanist and I asked how much he would charge to play at an audition for Richard Rodgers the following week. Burt said, “Five bucks,” and I said, “Good. Sold!”
Whenever you performed Richard Rodgers’s songs in a summer stock show back then, he insisted on hearing who would be singing them. Burt went with me to the audition for Richard Rodgers and he was a stickler. If you didn’t play his music exactly as it was written, he got furious. In the middle of my audition, Richard Rodgers said, “Miss Stewart, will you please send your orchestra home?” I thought it was funny but Burt was crushed.
From then on Burt played all my auditions, and after each one we would go to the Horn & Hardart on Fifty-Seventh Street and have a cup of coffee to discuss how we had done. Gradually he got to know me a little better and we started going together. He was still living with his parents, which I think made him insecure, but then he moved into my one-room apartment at 140 East Fortieth Street. Burt was a neat nut and he didn’t like the way I kept house, so the first thing he did was clean up my kitchen.
Burt was also a germ freak. If he went out in cold weather, he would never leave the apartment without a bottle of Cepacol in his pocket. He got that from his mother. He was also a little bit obsessive-compulsive and would get out of bed to check the front door like twenty times at night. He would also be up all night playing the Wurlitzer spinet piano Vladimir Horowitz had bought for me, and that would annoy the shit out of me.
Paula could sing but she was not my kind of singer. However, even after we started living together, I would still get five dollars whenever I played an audition for her. The attraction between us was physical, because she was really good-looking and had great tits, which back then could not be prefabricated.
I began living with her. While I can’t say it was wonderful, it was nice not to be living with my parents anymore. Paula and I were invited to a lot of fancy parties. I would walk in wearing black tie and we would be expected to perform. We were guests but we weren’t really guests, which I thought was odd, and then Paula would sing “You Are Love” or some other song from Show Boat for all these really rich folks and debutantes.
I remember going to a party one night and being fascinated by the woman on my left at the dinner table. The next day, the phone rang and I picked it up, and this woman said we had met at the party the night before. She told me she had written her phone number down on the cuff of my shirt and wanted to know if I still had it. I was going right along with it until I realized it was my mother, who now knew I was not really being so faithful to Paula. It was a mess.
Paula Stewart: Burt and I used to be constantly invited to parties to perform for the Whitneys and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. We would perform and then sit and have dinner with the duke and duchess. Burt would be talking to her and I’d be talking to the duke, who at this point was a doddering, falling-down drunk. Wallis was very much the one in control and Burt and I performed for them so many times that she gave me this beautiful art deco jade and sapphire bracelet as a gift.
Paula and I were living together when one day she said, “Either we do it or we don’t. Either we get married, or you have to move out.” So I moved out. And I was miserable the first night. And miserable the second night. On the third day I woke up and told her, “I can’t do this. Okay, Paula, we’ll get married.” I’ve since learned there really is a three-day cure, and I would recommend it to anyone. If you can get past the third day, you’ll be over it and it will be finished just like a cold. By the fourth day you’ll say, “What was I thinking?” But Paula wanted me to commit, so I did.
Paula Stewart: We had been living together for six months and my father was constantly pushing me to get married. Burt’s mother, Irma, a teeny little lady who was very artistic, didn’t like most of his girlfriends but she really loved me, and when she found out we were getting married, she told me, “You know, honey, he’s really not marriage material.” She tried to warn me but I still went right out and bought our engagement rings.
Then Burt began working for Vic Damone. Vic was not terribly well educated but he was good-looking and well endowed and the girls liked him. He would ask Burt all the time, “Tell me some big words. I want to impress this girl.” So Burt would give him a couple of big words and I think Vic felt a little intimidated by that.
A well-known music publisher named Ivan Mogull, who lived in the same apartment building as my parents, suggested I go to work conducting and playing piano for his good friend Vic Damone. I was very inexperienced as a conductor and didn’t quite know what I was doing, but I auditioned for Vic and he hired me to go on the road with him. Vic had all the tools to be a great, great singer and could have become a huge star, but he was his own worst enemy.
Like me, Vic had also just gotten out of the Army, so we hit it off at first. I went to Palm Springs, California, where I lived with him and his managers, Marvin Cain and Nick Sevano, in a house Vic had rented in the desert so we could rehearse. But instead of working with him at the piano, I spent most of my time driving around with Vic in his car and watching him hit golf balls at the driving range.
One day as we were coming back from the range, Vic turned to me and said, “Burt, who’s the best driver you’ve ever been with in a car?” I thought this was a really dumb question, so I said, “Uh, Marvin?” When we got back to the house, Marvin took me in the other room and said, “Listen, schmuck, you want to get ahead in this business? When Vic asks you who the best driver is, you say, ‘You, Vic!’ ”
I was supposed to be getting paid fifty bucks a week for learning the act with Vic, but he didn’t want to sign my check. So one day Marvin stood him up against the wall, took out a pen, wrote out the check beside Vic’s ear, and made him sign it for me. I should have known right then and there that this was not going to last, but I was so happy to be working that I just went along with it.
Before we played at the Mocambo on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, Sammy Cahn wrote special lyrics to “The Lady Is a Tramp” for Vic to sing on opening night. Because Vic was too busy hitting golf balls and chasing girls to learn the words, he had to perform the song with a lyric sheet in his hand. Everybody in Hollywood was in the club that night so they all got to see Vic shooting himself in the foot.
Vic definitely had the singer’s ego, and I soon learned that whenever I saw him coming toward me with a girl on his arm, I had to cross the street and walk on the other side. After we finished up at the Mocambo, we went to Las Vegas, where I met Slim Brandy, a beautiful girl from New York’s Copacabana Club who had come to Vegas to dance at the opening of the Sands Hotel’s Copa Room.
Slim Brandy: I had a lot of buddies in Las Vegas and one of them was Danny Stradella, who owned Danny’s Hideaway in New York. Vic Damone was singing at the Thunderbird and Danny asked me what I thought of him. I said, “Well, he’s terrific. Why?” And Danny said, “He needs someone to burst his balloon. He’s screwed just about everyone in this town and you just got here so I’m going to make a reservation and we’re going to sit ringside. Do you think you can flirt with him during the show and then brush him off when we go backstage afterwards?”
Vic had just absolutely destroyed one of my best girlfriends, who was a cocktail waitress there and had actually tried to commit suicide over him. So I was hot to trot. I got myself all dressed up and we went to this ringside table and for just about two minutes, my heart dropped because I thought, “Oh, he’s so adorable! I’m never going to be able to do this.” Then I got an elbow in the ribs from Danny, who said, “Hey, what’s going on? You’re not supposed to fall for the guy.” As I was listening to Vic sing, I was going, “What is that countermelody? What am I hearing? I know the song, but I’ve never heard it sound like this before.”
My eyes went to the right of the stage and Burt was playing piano and looking straight in my eyes, and it was kind of love at first sight. Danny and I went backstage and I gave Vic the brush-off. Two minutes later Burt said, “Let’s get out of here.” We went back to the Sands Hotel and we swam and we talked and we kissed and we spent the next four or five days together. We did not go all the way because I was still a virgin.
I thought Slim was beautiful and after the show was over, I found a piano so I could play her favorite song, “I Married an Angel,” by Rodgers and Hart. “Have you heard? / I married an angel / I’m sure the change’ll be / Awf’lly good for me.” Slim and I went to bed together in Las Vegas but she kept her bathing suit on.
Slim Brandy: Burt was very straightforward in Las Vegas. He said, “I’ve got a girlfriend back in New York and we’re supposed to get married.” And that was Paula. I was just a kid and I thought to myself, “Oh, I don’t care about that. My mother would never allow me to bring a piano player home anyway.” And I told him that.
After I had been working with Vic for about three and a half weeks, we were appearing at the Chicago Theatre on State Street when his manager took me aside and told me I was being fired. The reason he gave me was that whenever Vic and I were onstage together, he thought I was smiling at all the girls in the audience behind his back. It might have started with Slim in Las Vegas, but Vic would have fired me in any event because as I later learned, he fired a lot of people, like forty-three different keyboard players and drummers.
Still, this was the first real job I’d ever had and what really hurt was that Vic didn’t even fire me himself. Instead, he had his manager do it, and I was totally crushed. The truth was I didn’t really know how to conduct and none of the guys in the band wanted a young kid telling them what to play. But when I got fired, all my self-esteem and my self-worth went right out the window. I had no job, and how was I supposed to explain that to anyone?
I went back to New York, where I knew someone who knew Bill Ficks, the manager of the Ames Brothers, and he hired me to play with them. Joe, Gene, Vic, and Ed Ames were really good guys who were always on the road working in places like Tuscaloosa and Tulsa. Sometimes we all played basketball together before a show and I liked that. It was not a bad life by any means, but I knew it was a definite step down from what I had been doing with Vic.
Paula Stewart: Burt got a job with the Ames Brothers and went on the road with them. Even then he was the most incredible accompanist, and when he played piano, it sounded like an orchestra. But when he tried to write some songs for the Ames Brothers, they said, “Get out of here, Burt. Ah, please. Go listen to the radio.” But they were very sweet guys and they were all at our wedding.
Burt and I got married on December 22, 1953, and I even bought my own wedding ring, for which I still have the receipt. We were married by a justice of the peace and I made my own wedding dress. My parents and Burt’s parents were there, and we had the reception between shows, at the Versailles, a supper club on East Fiftieth Street between Third and Lexington where I was appearing at the time.
After we were married, Burt’s father found us a one-bedroom apartment at 404 East Fifty-Fifth Street, not far from Sutton Place. The rent was maybe a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month and the apartment was just a block away from where Burt’s parents lived, which of course they liked, and it didn’t bother me because I loved them.
Hermione Gingold lived in the penthouse and Ben Gazzara and Janice Rule and Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones all lived in our building, and we would see Jack and Shirley a lot. Our other friends there were Steve McQueen and Neile Adams, who hadn’t gotten married yet. Steve and Burt liked to sit together and watch games on television. I hated that.
I did a lot of traveling with the Ames Brothers, and whenever material came in that people wanted them to record, I would either play the songs for them on the piano or listen to the demos. They were all terribly simple and an awful lot of them were like a big hit at the time that went “I’m in love with you / You, you, you.” That was when it occurred to me that I could go back to the Brill Building and write five of these a day. I also went back to New York to work on my marriage to Paula. For all the good that did me, I could have stayed out on the road for another six months.
Paula Stewart: One of my best friends was Wilson Stone, a well-known songwriter who was signed to Famous Music, where he was working for Eddie Wolpin. Burt couldn’t find someone to write lyrics with him so I talked Wilson into writing a couple of songs with Burt. Wilson liked Burt’s music and took him over to see Eddie Wolpin, who signed Burt to Famous Music, and that was how Burt got his first serious music contract.
Burt and I were separated a lot because he would be out on the road and I was working constantly in New York and doing summer stock. That was one of the reasons I kind of lost interest in the marriage. I started playing around a bit, which he didn’t know. When you’re in summer stock, some of those leading men can be pretty handsome.
The breakup happened in 1956 and I still have the letter Burt wrote me begging me to stay. It was really heartbreaking. He didn’t want to give up the life we had, but it wasn’t going anywhere. The divorce was simple. I said, “You’re going to Vegas. Pick up a divorce while you’re there.” We were still friendly and he agreed to keep playing at all my auditions. That was part of our agreement but I also had to give him half of the five-thousand-dollar dowry my father gave us when we had gotten married and custody of our dog, a beautiful boxer named Stewba, which stood for “Stewart-Bacharach.”
While we were together, Burt never wrote a song that became memorable and he never wrote a song for me, which really pissed me off. But I never doubted his talent. In fact, I think I married his talent. That was how impressed I was by it. The other thing was that I never knew him as Burt. His family called him Happy and so did I. When he informed me that from now on he was to be known as Burt, I had a little bit of a hard time with that. But I did it to appease him. Although to me he will always be Happy.
To supplement the income I was getting trying to write songs, which was nothing at all, I played piano at one-night stands in Union City, New Jersey, with Steve Lawrence, who claims I once took him to a burlesque show in the middle of the afternoon because I liked listening to the music they were playing there. I also performed with Joel Grey in the Catskills, where we would do two shows on the same night at different hotels.
Back then, every hotel in the mountains had its own five-piece band, so we would leave the city in Joel’s car in the morning and drive up to Kutsher’s, to rehearse with their band. Then we would drive to Brown’s Hotel and rehearse with their band. We’d go back to Kutsher’s to do the first show, go to Brown’s to do the second one, and then get in the car and drive all the way back home again. It was a pain in t
he ass and very hard work for not much money. Maybe I would make eighty dollars for the night, if that much.
I also worked with Georgia Gibbs, Imogene Coca, and Polly Bergen. I had a mad crush on Polly, and we were sort of together for about a minute and a half. She and I would do evening boat tours. We would drive down to Baltimore, get on the boat, leave the port, rehearse the band, do the show, and come back at one in the morning. I also did a date in Florida with both Polly and Joel Grey, and although Joel also liked Polly, I liked her more. All of it was for very little money but I was learning how to conduct an orchestra.
I also did a USO tour in Libya with the Harlem Globetrotters and Abe Saperstein, the guy who owned the team. I was playing a lot of basketball at the Grand Central YMCA in the city and I was crazy about the game. On the scary old cargo plane going over there, I asked Abe if he would let me play for the Washington Generals, the opposing team of white guys who always lost every game. I told him all I wanted to do was take one jump shot from the corner and Abe said, “Yeah, sure, maybe we’ll let you suit up some night,” but he never did let me get in a game.
My roommate on the tour was Barney Ross, the former welterweight champion of the world. During World War II, Barney had won a Silver Star for single-handedly killing nearly two dozen Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal and then carrying one of his fellow Marines to safety on his shoulders. While recovering from his injuries back in the States, he got strung out on morphine and became a full-blown heroin addict for a while.
One night when we were in Tripoli, the two of us went into a café and had a few drinks. Then Barney tried to pick a fight with a couple of Arabs. “Hey, you,” he said to them, “we’re Jews. You got a problem with that?” Somehow we both got out of there in one piece, rented two camels with drivers, and decided to have a race through the streets. I don’t remember who won but it didn’t matter because neither of us fell off.
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 4