Before we recorded it, I spent a week working with Dionne and the background singers. We rehearsed every day so everyone would be prepared. For me that was essential because I wanted to leave as little as possible to chance once we actually got into the studio. At night I would go back to my apartment and play mind games with myself by pretending the copyist was coming in the morning so I had to get the arrangement done right away.
In those days if you were sick, there was a forty-eight-hour window during which you could cancel a session without having to pay for the studio time. I had a bad cold but I still wanted to keep the date. Even as we were cutting “Anyone Who Had a Heart” at Bell Sound in the fall of 1963, Hal was still driving himself crazy about the way the accent fell on a word in one of the lines.
Hal David: I had it almost the way I wanted it and until we went into the recording studio that night, I was trying to change it. The song starts, “Anyone who had a heart could look at me and know that I love you / Anyone who ever dreamed could look at me and know I dream of you.” The accent should not be “dream of you.” The accent should be “dream of you.” But I had to have the accent on “of” because that’s where the melody was. I tried to find a way to make the “of” do something but I never could. And maybe it just couldn’t be done. But I worked on that until it was recorded. Then I had to let it go.
Along with Cissy Houston, Dee Dee Warwick, and Myrna Smith, I brought in three white girl singers who were making a lot more money at the time doing jingles than any of us were ever going to see from a record. One of them was Linda November, who could sing all the way up into the stratosphere. She and the other two white girls would walk into the studio, hang up their mink coats, and be ready to go to work. On “Don’t Make Me Over,” I had Cissy, Dee Dee, and Myrna singing in the lower register, with the white girls singing on top of them. If you listen to the record, you can hear the soul on the bottom and the altitude coming from the white girls.
Hal and I cut Dionne doing “Walk on By” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” at the same session, and then argued about which song we should release first. We decided to go with “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” which went to number eight on the pop chart.
A couple of months later, I went to see Dionne perform at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. When she did “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” I could tell the band was struggling. When I went backstage to say hello to her after the show, the band surrounded me and they were all kind of hostile. One of the horn players said, “Why do you make it so difficult for us, man? Why do you have a seven/eight bar in this song?” I said, “Listen, there must be people who understand this music the way it is. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a hit. They get it. So instead of counting, just try to feel it. Sing the lyric on your horn.”
Although I had no idea how it happened at the time, Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles, bought a copy of Dionne’s record of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” while he was in New York and took it back with him to London. He gave it to George Martin, who thought the song would be perfect for Shirley Bassey. Instead, he wound up cutting it at Abbey Road Studios with Cilla Black. The song became a hit in England, and Dionne got really bent out of shape about that.
Dionne Warwick: I say frequently if the organ player had made a mistake or if I had coughed during the middle of the song, Cilla would have coughed and the organ player would have played a wrong note. That was how verbatim they copied exactly what we had recorded.
Although I knew how Dionne felt about what Cilla had done, neither Hal nor I had any control over who covered what we wrote so there was really nothing either of us could have done about it.
Elvis Costello: The way music was set up in England back then meant that there were two things that conditioned hearing it differently than in America. One was the needle time restriction, which put a strict limit on the amount of recorded music that could be played per week on the BBC, which was the main source of music other than Radio Luxembourg. This meant that a lot of what was played on the air in England was heard transposed or filtered through dance bands and ensembles that played live on the BBC, including the one my dad sang with.
The second factor was that there were no global releases in those days, so there was a delay of up to six weeks between the release of the record in America and its release in England. A record had time to be a hit in America and then it would be picked up by people in the U.K. who had their ears tuned to the American charts.
I’ve heard Dionne on this subject a lot, and it is true that English artists back then did very consciously go in and copy American recordings note for note. But of course the timbres of the players and in some cases the rhythm sections weren’t quite as groovy. The English brass tone is also very distinctly different, and of course the recording studios were different as well.
I definitely heard “Anyone Who Had a Heart” by Cilla first, and it became a number-one hit in England before Dionne’s version was ever heard there and then I think both versions were in the charts. And then I heard Dusty Springfield’s version after that. In England back then, Burt sometimes had two and even three versions of the same song in the charts at the same time.
They weren’t really like what we would later call soul records, although the original versions were sung by African-American singers. The covers in England were sung predominantly by white singers. But people like Dusty and Cilla were great on those early records. I still really love Cilla’s version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” because she sounds so desperate in a great way and that’s a very profound song.
At that same session, Dionne also cut “Land of Make Believe,” and her version of it was released early in 1964. Within weeks, the Drifters put it out as the flip side of a single but the song never became a hit for either of them. In April, Hal and I finally got Scepter to put out “Walk on By.” Hal and I were always trying to come up with material for Dionne to record. Like tailors in the apparel business, we were making goods for her to sing.
While I was writing “Walk on By,” I was hearing the whole arrangement. I love flugelhorns and they’re on there and I heard the piano figure being played by two different pianos. We cut “Walk on By” first that night and I had Paul Griffin and Artie Butler playing the same figure on two pianos at the same time. Because they were never exactly in synch with one another, that gave the song a very different, jagged kind of feeling. I let the rhythm section have a certain kind of freedom and they got it really quick because they all knew me and they could read where I was going.
Then we cut “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” The song was challenging but they got it, too, and it was kind of like, “Wow! What have we got here?” Florence Greenberg, who by now really had a track record when it came to not knowing when Hal and I had written a hit, put out “Walk on By” as the B-side of a song called “Any Old Time of Day.” Murray the K played both sides on his radio show in New York and then asked his listeners to vote on which one they liked better. They picked “Walk on By,” which went to number six on the pop chart.
Isaac Hayes did an incredible twelve-minute version of the song that I loved, and many years later I got to tell him so when he performed it on one of my television specials. On YouTube you can see President Obama doing about eight seconds of “Walk on By” as a tribute to Dionne during a campaign appearance he made with her in New Jersey. The great thing about it is that he can really sing.
A few months after Hal and I wrote “Walk on By,” Famous Music offered us five thousand dollars to come up with the theme song for the movie A House Is Not a Home, starring Shelley Winters. It was based on the life of Polly Adler, who had been a famous madam in New York City during the 1920s. Hal came up with a brilliant lyric that never let you know the song was about a brothel.
I wrote the music for the song in my apartment on East Sixty-First Street and I was so excited about it that I called Hal and played it for him over the phone. Paramount Pictures wanted Brook Benton,
who’d already had several number-one hits, to record the song, so I sat down with him in our office to teach it to him. Benton was really difficult to work with because he kept singing the wrong notes in the ascending melody line that goes up chromatically in thirds with the lyric “A chair is just a chair / Even when there’s no one sittin’ there.” There is also a bar change from four/four to three/four in the bridge, so it’s not the easiest song to sing.
Dionne just happened to drop by while I was working with him and watched the whole thing going down. Benton was being a real pain in the ass and at one point he uttered this great line: “I could read music but I don’t want to spoil my soul.” Because the people at Mercury Records knew there had already been a good deal of friction between the two of us, they kept me out of the studio when he cut the song. Alan Lorber, who did the arrangement, wound up producing the session. I thought it was a good record but Benton was still singing the wrong notes.
In self-defense, I took Dionne into the studio and cut “A House Is Not a Home” with her. Two weeks after the Benton version was released, her version came out as the B-side of “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart).” The two versions compromised one another so neither one went very high on the charts.
“A House Is Not a Home” is still one of my favorite songs, and when Dusty Springfield performed it on one of my television specials, she was great. Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder have also cut it, but the person who really made it a standard was Luther Vandross, who I think did the best version ever.
A month after “A House Is Not a Home” came out, an independent record company called Big Hill released a song Hal and I had written called “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” sung by Lou Johnson. I was really impressed with Lou’s talent and I thought I had made a great record with him, but it just hung around on the charts in America. Then Sandie Shaw wound up having a number-one hit with it in England.
Another song I cut with Lou Johnson in 1964 that never became a hit for him was “Kentucky Bluebird.” The original title of the song, for which Hal wrote some incredible lyrics, was “Message to Martha.” I recorded it first with Marlene Dietrich on a four-song EP we did for the German market in 1962 as “Kleine Treue Nachtigall,” which means “Faithful Little Nightingale.”
Four years later, Dionne decided she wanted to record “Message to Martha,” but Hal and I tried to discourage her from doing so because we felt it was a man’s song. At some point, Hal told her the only name that would work as a substitute for “Martha” was “Michael.” Even though Hal also told her he didn’t really like that name, she went ahead and cut it as “Message to Michael” and it became a top-ten hit for her on both the pop and R&B charts.
Slim Brandy: The only contact I had with Burt during this period was when he called me in Rome. I had started to do some acting and I was there with Frank Sinatra while he was making Von Ryan’s Express and I had a brief affair with him. It was a funny scene because Burt called me while I was at dinner with Frank and Glenn Ford and Prince Romanoff and Sammy Davis Jr. and Madame Butterfly was playing over the hills of Rome. Frank was drunk and he was talking to Ava Gardner and I was drunk and talking to Burt and I knew we were not getting back together.
It was just the leg that was kicking was still there. Frank was pissed off at me and he said, “Who are you on the phone with all this time?” And I said, “My ex-boyfriend, Burt Bacharach.” And Frank said, “Ah, he’s a lousy writer.” And I looked at him and said, “Yeah? Well, why don’t you try to hum a few bars for me?” We were fighting and I said, “You couldn’t hum any of his music, never mind sing it. It’s so complicated.” While he and I were together in Rome, somebody took a picture of us and Frank broke the guy’s arm. I heard the crack.
What I also remember about that session when we cut “Walk on By” was that I was seeing Lee Grant at the time and she wanted to come to the record date, so I put her in the booth. I was always intrigued by Lee because she had been blacklisted for twelve years for refusing to testify against her husband, the playwright Arnold Manoff, before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lee was a brilliant actress who won an Academy Award and then became a really good director, but she suffered for her political beliefs for a long time, because that was such a terrible period in the history of our country.
Lee Grant: Burt said, “I’m recording tonight. Would you like to come?” I remember literally feeling my blood drain right through the floor as I watched him, because Burt was producing and conducting and playing and his talent literally stunned me and so it was a real gift to be there.
Burt was not single and unattached, but we had a little thing and it was a really lovely summer. Then I remember him telling me, “You know, I met Angie Dickinson and there’s something about her I really, really dig and I’m going to go back and try it out,” and it was like that with us too. When I started to get some secret serious feelings about Burt, I called Norma Crane, who was a friend of mine, and asked her, “Can he be there for anybody?” She said, “No,” and I said, “Thank you.”
We were passersby in each other’s lives but I had a baby grand piano at my house and Burt would sit down and play. I love talent, and he was gorgeous. Gorgeous and electric and obsessed, and there is nothing as attractive as a person who is thankfully not obsessed with you but their own talent and work.
My mother and father already knew Angie Dickinson from a press junket, so when I went out to Los Angeles again in the fall of 1964 to try to learn how to score films, I met her in a coffee shop outside Paramount. We talked about baseball and she was very nice. The thing Marlene always used to say about Angie was “She’s terribly nice,” but the truth was that Angie was nice to the world. She always had a smile for everyone on the crew of any movie she was in and they all adored her. I used to think there had to be a flip side to that, but it was genuine and just who she was.
As I was leaving, Angie gave me her number and said, “The next time you’re out here, give me a call,” and I thought, “Wow! A real movie star!”
Angie Dickinson: I first met Burt’s parents on a press junket in New York when I was promoting Captain Newman, M.D., with Gregory Peck in 1963. I was standing on the corner of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth and a tall man said, “Excuse me, aren’t you Angie Dickinson?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I’m meeting you at three o’clock this afternoon for an interview. I’m Bert Bacharach.” And I said, “Oh, great. Well, I’ll look forward to that.”
We got along just great. I loved his wife and we saw each other for dinner whenever they came to L.A. and whenever I went to New York. This went on for about a year and a half before I even met Burt. Bert kept telling me about his great son and I said, “Sure, sure, sure, sure.”
I think they were pushing me on him as well, so I finally met Burt for a drink at Paramount in September 1964. We went to Nickodell’s, which was not a coffee shop but a bar. I absolutely did not know who he was beyond his parents and I had no sense of his music at all, except that his dad told me he had written “Wives and Lovers.” After that meeting at Nickodell’s, Burt said, “If you’re in New York, give me a call.” At that point, there were no tom-toms going.
In late February 1965, Burt called me and said, “I’m coming out to L.A. Can we have dinner?” I said, “I can make it Monday or Wednesday,” and he said, “How about Monday and Wednesday?” Charm all the way. I laughed and said, “So, Monday.” And on Monday, we went to Chianti, a great restaurant on Melrose in West Hollywood, for dinner. And then on Friday night, we went to Chez Jay, and that was the crucial night because he was leaving the next day.
Angie loved Chez Jay and she knew Jay Fiondella, the former actor who ran the place and was a good friend of Frank Sinatra. It was all kind of funny because Marlene had sent Sinatra “Warm and Tender” thinking he would love the song, but as it turned out, Frank didn’t love it. When I met Angie she was one of the few women in the Rat
Pack and had known Frank for years.
Angie Dickinson: On our first date, Burt came to pick me up and as usual, I wasn’t quite ready. I was standing in my bathroom and finishing my hair at the mirror with the door open and I had the radio on and Diana Ross and the Supremes were doing “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and I said, “Oh, God, did you write that?” And Burt said, “I wish I had.” I still didn’t know who he was and I didn’t even know he had written “Don’t Make Me Over,” which was one of my favorite songs.
After our first date, there were flowers the next day with a note that said, “It was a wonderful evening. From one penicillin sufferer to another,” because I can’t take it, either. Burt was a gentleman and he knew how to stroke the right spot. He oozed charm and he knew it, and it was a seduction. We went out three times that week and by Friday night, I was pretty hooked. I knew he had been living with Norma Crane but at the time I think he was in love with an actress named Ena Hartman. That was who he was talking about and since she was black, it was even more interesting.
After that visit, Burt went back to New York. Within the month, I was asked to do Password on television. I called him and said, “I’m coming to New York,” and he said, “So, good. Let’s see each other.” On our second date, Burt said, “I have to go to London. They’re doing this special on me and I’m opening Marlene Dietrich at the Savoy. Why don’t you come with me?”
I got someone to send me my passport and we went. Within six weeks, we had gone out in L.A. three times and gone out in New York three times and we were on our way. That was just that way it happened and it was one of the most romantic courtships ever.
An independent label named Kapp Records offered to put up the money for me to do an album of instrumental versions of songs like “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Walk on By,” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Wives and Lovers,” and “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa.” The album was going to be called The Hitmaker. Even though it had never been a hit I decided to also cut a song called “Trains and Boats and Planes,” which Hal and I had written for Gene Pitney but he hadn’t liked enough to record.
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 9