“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and I was also nominated for Best Score. I had already been through all this three times before and then gone home depressed when someone else won the Oscar, but when I walked in there with Angie for the ceremony that night, I was very excited. I was also scared because I thought we had such a great chance to win.
After I won the Oscar for Best Score, I thought, “Hey, it’s looking really good like we’re also going to win for Best Song.” Hearing them call my name when they announced that Hal and I had won the Academy Award for Best Song was an unbelievable, spine-tingling feeling, an incredible rush. The only problem was that once you get that feeling, you want it again. Right away, I started thinking, “Now that I’ve won this, what can I look forward to? Do I have a horse running in the fourth at Santa Anita in a few days? Maybe I can win that, too.”
Angie Dickinson: Winning the Academy Award puts you in the driver’s seat and Burt won two that night. When his name was announced, Burt slapped my knee as he jumped out of his seat to accept the awards but he didn’t reference or even acknowledge me in his speech, which was fine because I don’t think you should thank spouses unless they were so instrumental that “I could not have done it without you feeding me at three in the morning.”
When you’re in that state you don’t know what hit you but Burt did say, “Nikki, this will be on your breakfast table in the morning.” After Burt won those awards, he started performing, and all this adulation came like a wave that started slowly and built and rolled over on him.
The way I started performing was accidental because at that point, I could hardly even speak to an audience. It wasn’t stage fright. It was just something I had never learned to do. What happened was that the Reach Out album was making some noise and a woman in Los Angeles asked me if I would perform at a charity event. She said she would pay for all the expenses and get the band, so I agreed to do the show.
At that point, I didn’t even have endings for my songs so we did fade-out endings onstage like we were in a studio. That was how I started, and it felt okay. Then my agent came up with a date in San Diego. I didn’t think I could get enough people in the audience so I had the Carpenters open for me. In May their version of “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” a song Hal and I had written in 1964, went to number one on the charts and stayed there for a month.
I had originally cut the song with Richard Chamberlain, the actor who was playing Dr. Kildare on television and had also come up with a couple of songs that were hits. Nobody ever heard the record and nobody should have, because it was terrible. It was a terrible arrangement, which I wrote, and terribly produced, and I was the producer, and Chamberlain wasn’t a great singer. It was probably the worst record I ever did in my entire life, and had it not been for Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, no one would have ever heard “Close to You” again.
Herb Alpert: I was thinking of doing “Close to You” as a follow-up to “This Guy’s in Love with You.” I recorded it, and as I was listening to a playback in the studio, my engineer friend Larry Levine looked at me and said, “Man, you sound terrible singing this song.” I lost confidence in it and put the song away in my drawer. Then, in 1970, I gave it to Richard Carpenter.
The Carpenters recorded the song, and the first time I heard it, I wasn’t crazy about it, because Karen was playing drums and it was very light. I think they recorded it three times and the third time was the charm because they brought in the Wrecking Crew, with Hal Blaine on drums. Prior to that, the Carpenters had an album out that didn’t sell for a year. It was just kind of lying there but that song was the door opener for them.
Richard Carpenter: “Close to You” is one of the few exceptions where I believe Burt wasn’t exactly on his game as far as the arrangement being up to the potential of the song. Burt said, “I want you to do your own arrangement of this with the exception of one thing. At the end of the first bridge, there are two five-note groupings.” He thought that had a particular hook to it and he said, “If you just keep that in mind, you can do whatever else you want with it.” Which I did. I took it into the sound stage and came up with a slow shuffle and then we added the vibraphone and then Karen by herself. It was classic Bacharach.
Richard Carpenter didn’t change any of the notes but he got a completely different feeling out of the band and rhythm section with the shuffle. When Jerry Moss first played me the record over the phone, I thought, “Man, this is just great! I completely blew it with Richard Chamberlain but now someone else has come along and made a record so much better than mine.”
I still really wasn’t thinking seriously about going out on the road as a performer, but I did some shows at the Westbury Music Fair in New York that sold out. At one of them, I got to introduce my mother from the stage. Then I played Las Vegas for the first time.
Angie was pretty friendly with Sidney Korshak and his wife, Bea, and every once in a while, they would come over to have dinner with us. Sidney was a powerful guy who knew everybody in Hollywood and was also connected in Vegas. One night while the four of us were eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, Sidney said to me, “Listen, I want you to go in and play a week at the Versailles Room at the Riviera Hotel. I’ll give you thirty-five thousand dollars for the week.” I thought that was a lot of money, so I said yes, but when I told my agent about it, he said, “Oh, why didn’t you tell me? I could have gotten you a lot more.”
I flew to Vegas and got into a limo, and as I was coming up the Strip, I saw the marquee outside the Riviera. In huge letters, it said, “Burt Bacharach in Concert.” At the very bottom in really small letters, it said, “In the Casbah Lounge Nightly, Vic Damone.” Every night while he was onstage, Vic would mention my name and say, “I discovered this kid. I know talent when I see it.” After I went in and did the week, I started working pretty regularly at the Riviera and also doing shows with Dionne at Caesar’s Palace.
It wasn’t really in my genes to drink but I always liked drinking Jack Daniel’s when I worked in Vegas, maybe because it gave me a little self-confidence before I went onstage. Those were the days when you did two shows a night, so I would have two Jack Daniel’s before I went onstage at eight-fifteen and then two more before I went on at midnight. I couldn’t ever go to bed right after the second show, so I would go hang out somewhere. It got to the point where I began playing games with myself that I had to be in bed twice a week before 5 a.m. Most nights, I broke that rule.
In those days, I thought I could do it all, and I had a regular routine. I would do two shows a night and drink and then get up and play tennis every day. I really loved the game and was pretty good at it. I would play doubles with Pancho Segura and Bobby Riggs, who would never play unless there was money down. To balance out the match, Bobby would come up with crazy stuff like him not being able to use the left alley on our side of the court. We would be playing really intense tennis in the blazing hot sun and people would come out to watch us.
In Vegas, I would always work with the house band, but some of those guys were really tough and would eat you alive if you let them. About the third or fourth time I played the MGM Grand, I gathered the horn section around my piano during rehearsal so I could show the lead trumpeter how I wanted the phrasing to sound on a certain passage. First trumpet players in house bands are notorious because they rule all the other musicians. When the passage still didn’t sound right, I made them go over it again and again. Eventually, the lead trumpet player got really pissed off at me because he thought I was doing this just to embarrass him and the horns.
When we played the show that night, he paid me back by playing all the notes marked soft very loudly, and vice versa. He also proceeded to blow the ending of every song by playing an extra note after we had hit the final chord. I got really livid at his total lack of respect. I wanted to take him in front of the union and get his ass fired but then I decided against it.
>
I also met Frank Sinatra for the first time in Vegas. Angie and I went to his show one night and Frank introduced me from the stage by saying, “There’s a man in the audience who’s a good composer. He writes in hat sizes. Seven and three-fourths.” It was a very hip line and I don’t know how many other people got the joke, but I thought it was funny.
While I was in rehearsals for Promises, Promises in New York, I had gotten a call from one of Frank’s underlings. It was kind of like dealing with the Mafia because this guy said to me, “Are you going to be at this number tomorrow? I can’t tell you what time. It could be late afternoon or early evening.” I said I would and the next day I got a call from Frank’s pal Jilly Rizzo, who said, “Where are you going to be tonight at eight or eight-fifteen?” I told him where he could reach me and then at six-thirty I got a follow-up call that Frank was going to call me.
The call came in and Sinatra said, “This is Frank. I’d like to make an album with you. You write all the songs and all the arrangements, pick the studio, tell me where and when, and I’ll be there.” I said, “Gee, this is great, I’d love to.” Frank said, “Okay, when can we do it?” I said, “Right now I’m in rehearsal with Promises, Promises and then we’re going on the road with the show—” I didn’t even get to finish the sentence before Frank said, “Forget it, man. Just forget it.”
It would have been difficult for us to work together, because sometimes I write complicated songs and Frank would have had to know them and be willing to do more than one or two takes. Still, I was very flattered he wanted to do it because I would have really loved to record Sinatra.
What with all the awards and hit songs and sold-out shows, I had been having a terrific year. The icing on the cake came when Newsweek magazine put my picture on the cover and ran a long profile about me called “The Music Man 1970.” The guy who wrote the piece basically lived with me for almost three weeks, first in New York, where I was playing the Westbury Music Fair, then in California, and then back in New York again. It was a lot like going through analysis because he asked me question after question. I thought we were done but then the guy said he still needed to talk to me for three or four more days, and he would come to see me in my apartment in New York at five o’clock every afternoon.
I was in the elevator one day with an actress who lived down the hall. She asked me what I was doing so I told her about the guy from Newsweek and what a drag it was to have to talk to him for two hours every day. I said good-bye to her and the guy arrived and we were talking and he had his tape machine on. After about forty-five minutes, the doorbell rang and the actress from down the hall was standing there totally naked, holding an empty coffee cup. She walked in and said, “I’ve come to get some sugar.” Then she put her lower body right up against the guy, went into the kitchen, got the sugar, and left.
I was married to Angie at the time and I knew I was screwed. What he had just seen was going to make his story a lot more interesting to read. I told him, “You have to believe me. Nothing ever went on between us,” and he kept saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” After a couple of days of me pleading my case to him, the guy finally said, “I’ll tell you what. Just give me her number and I’ll let it go.” So I did and the story never appeared in print.
The piece itself covered my entire career and went into great detail about how I was now making so much money that I’d had to hire a business manager to look after it all for me. I already owned some racehorses but the business manager bought me two restaurants on Long Island, a car-washing service in New Jersey, five hundred head of cattle, and a lot of real estate in Georgia.
From the outside, it must have looked as though everything I touched turned to gold. I had a beautiful, famous wife, I loved my daughter, I had a lot of money, and my career was going great guns. The truth turned out to be a lot closer to something I said right near the end of the Newsweek article. “Happiness is a question of percentages. You’re lucky to get a 50–50 split.”
Chapter
15
Lost Horizon
Angie and I had bought a beach house down in Del Mar, not far from San Diego, so I could be near the racetrack there during the racing season. That was where I was spending most of my time when the producer Ross Hunter told me he was going to remake Lost Horizon, a film Frank Capra had done in 1937. Hunter had a script by Larry Kramer, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for writing Women in Love, and a $12 million budget. Because Hunter was going to remake Lost Horizon as a musical, he asked Hal and me if we would come up with the songs for it and we said yes.
Just like the original, the remake was the story of a group of travelers whose plane crash-lands in a paradise known as Shangri-La, where no one ever gets old. It took Hal and me a long time to write the songs and then Ross Hunter decided to invite the press to a sound stage at Columbia Pictures so I could present the songs to them. He asked me to sit at the piano and sing. It was ludicrous because my voice is quite limited and I should have known I couldn’t sing all those songs, but somehow I managed to get through it.
I had to answer questions from the press, and when I was asked about the movie by a reporter from the New York Times, I said, “The idea of the picture is very close to me. Imagine. Somewhere in Tibet in the middle of those mountains is a place called Shangri-La. Where you can live forever—almost. And you can stay healthy! And there is love! And peace! It’s exactly what everybody wants today.”
As it turned out, Lost Horizon was a movie nobody wanted. Nobody wanted to see it or listen to the songs Hal and I had written for it, and the experience of working on that picture was so bad that it nearly ended my career. To begin with, the movie should never have been remade as a musical. The idea was absurd. Unlike what we had done with Promises, Promises, Hal and I couldn’t take what we had written to Boston or Washington to find out which songs worked and which didn’t. If a song didn’t work in a film, it would cost millions of dollars to rewrite and reshoot the scene.
I saw some of the rushes, and even though they were shooting the picture on the back lot at Warner Bros., some of it looked really beautiful. They used dummy singers while they were filming so I had to coach the actors when it came time for them to do their vocals. Sally Kellerman, Bobby Van, and George Kennedy could sing but we had to use other people’s voices for Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, and Olivia Hussey.
Not only was I writing the songs for Lost Horizon, I was also doing the background score, which was nonstop music. I just couldn’t write it all and I was hating the work so I farmed some of it out. I had two top orchestrators come in and they also did some composing. It was the only time in my life I ever farmed out my music.
Although I still think a lot of the music I did for Lost Horizon was good, there was one scene in the picture where Peter Finch, who played the leader of the travelers, has to make a big decision. He misses his life in London but if he stays in Shangri-La, he can be with the woman he loves forever, so he sings “If I Could Go Back.” The song had a lot of heart and I thought it was very powerful.
When I saw the song in the rushes, I thought it was good. But after I watched a rough cut of the entire film for the first time, I knew it was a disaster. It didn’t matter that Peter Finch was singing, “How do I know this is part of my real life? / If there’s no pain can I be sure I feel life? / And would I go back if I knew how to go back?” Because when you saw it in the movie, you didn’t give a fuck if he went back or not. What came before and after the song was so bad that you just didn’t care.
I knew Lost Horizon was a dog and that the songs in it were not going to fly, but I had signed a contract, so I had to keep working on it. But I started getting into jams. I was in the dubbing room trying to give credibility to this music but it wasn’t sounding the way we had recorded it and I would be bitching while they were dubbing.
When we were in postproduction I went to Peter Guber, who had taken over as the head of Columbia P
ictures, and I said, “Listen, I hate the way the music is sounding. It really sounded so much better when we recorded it.” I enlisted his help because we were sort of friendly and he said, “Okay, listen, go back in the dubbing room.”
He got me back in the dubbing room, and I don’t know how long that lasted because I was really focused and going for what I wanted 100 percent. I must have been a real pain in the ass because during the last week of postproduction, the head of mixing at Todd-AO had me banned from the dubbing room because I kept saying, “This sounds like shit,” and fighting for what I wanted to hear. It was a lot like when I wasn’t allowed into the studio while Brook Benton was cutting “A House Is Not a Home.” But all I was trying to do was protect the integrity of the music.
I spent nearly two years working on Lost Horizon, killing myself coaching George Kennedy and Sally Kellerman on how to sing, and working with the kids who were in the picture. The best thing that happened to me in the entire process was when I got to drive Liv Ullmann back to the Beverly Hills Hotel from the set one day.
While I was doing all this, Hal was in Mexico playing tennis because his work was done. My work was far from done and our deal was that Hal and I would split five points on the movie for our songs. So I called him up in Mexico and said, “Hal, listen, I know we’re getting five points but we’re never going to see anything from this picture. From what I hear, it may even bankrupt Columbia. Still, it would really make me feel better if instead of splitting the five points, I had three and you had two.” Hal said, “I can’t do that.” And I said, “Fuck you and fuck the picture.”
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 15