Gary Smith: We decided to do a television special with Burt in conjunction with the opening of Lost Horizon and I convinced Ross Hunter to let us shoot on the set. Chris Evert had just turned eighteen and Burt was a big tennis player so I booked her and built a big tennis court on the back lot at Warner Bros., where we did this wonderful spot with the two of them. Chrissie was adorable and they played tennis with one another for about three or four minutes.
I had been doing television specials with Dwight Hemion and Gary Smith in England, but now they wanted us to do one that would be a tie-in to Lost Horizon. In one segment I was going to play tennis with Chrissie Evert. I thought it would be a good idea to get to know her so I went over to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet her. She said, “You want to play a set or two?” We got on the court and I thought I was a pretty good tennis player but I never got a single point off her. You would have thought maybe she’d miss a shot and give me a point but it was six–love, six–love.
When we were shooting the scene, we were supposed to play this match in what was sort of like a dream sequence. The idea was she would hit the ball into the net and say, “That’s it. You win, Burt!” and I would jump over the net. The next day they would have another set built with a tennis net and I would jump over it into a pond and then they would cut the two bits of film together for the show.
We were out there and they were having a little technical difficulty. Dwight Hemion was saying, “Come on, Burtie, we gotta get this in—we’re running out of daylight.” Chrissie said to me, “Get them to lower the net, Burt. It’s too high for you to jump over it.” I told them this and Dwight said, “Burt, don’t be a pain in the ass. Come on, we’re running out of light. Just hit the ball to her, she’ll hit the ball into the net, and then you jump over it.” I jumped and caught my foot in the net, and came down on my side and broke two ribs. That night I had to prerecord the music for the next scene so I went in the studio with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two broken ribs. It was agony to cough or laugh or sneeze and I just hated every fucking human being in the world.
Gary Smith: Ross Hunter found out what we had done and decided we had ruined his set by putting a tennis court on it and he went to court to get an injunction to keep our show off the air while we were editing it. We actually had to reshoot the concert segment in a jungle somewhere. When we finally did go to court, the judge threw out the injunction so the show aired on ABC the way we had shot it. It was called Burt Bacharach in Shangri-La. The movie itself was terrible.
Two months later, I went to the premiere of Lost Horizon in Westwood with Angie. I had already seen the review in the Los Angeles Times and the movie had gotten killed. After that, it seemed like every critic in America just started piling on. Roger Ebert wrote, “I don’t know how much Ross Hunter paid Burt Bacharach and Hal David to write the music for Lost Horizon, but whatever it was, it was too much.” Newsweek said, “The songs are so pitifully pedestrian it’s doubtful that they’d sound good even if the actors could sing, which they can’t.”
Columbia had made Lost Horizon their number-one release for 1973 and the studio had put so much money into promoting it that people in Hollywood started calling the picture Lost Investment. The day after it opened, I got in the car and drove down to Del Mar to escape because I thought nobody down there would know me. The movie was so personally embarrassing that it almost destroyed me. Once I got to Del Mar, I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to play piano, and even though Hal and I had signed a contract to write and produce an album for Dionne at Warner Bros. Records, her new label, I didn’t want to write with Hal anymore or even be around him.
My attorney in New York kept telling me I was going to be in major trouble because I had a commitment to Warner Bros. Records but I said, “I don’t give a shit.” When Dionne flew up to Lake Tahoe, where I was doing a show at Harrah’s, to tell me the record company was going to sue us if Hal and I did not honor our commitment, I told her there was no way Hal and I would be getting together to do anything anymore.
What happened next was that Dionne sued me and Hal, and then I sued Hal, and I didn’t talk to either of them for the next ten years. It was really stupid, foolish behavior on my part and I take all the blame for it. If it happened now I would cop to it and say, “Hey, it was all my fault.” But that wasn’t the way I saw it then.
Angie Dickinson: Burt started working on Lost Horizon in 1971 or 1972 and it became the greatest failure in his career. The fact that not all of the songs he had written with Hal had become hits came with the territory, so you can’t call them failures. All songwriters go through that. This was a monumental failure. It was a public humiliation and Burt retreated to Del Mar and Palm Springs. He was not impossible to deal with. He was just depressed and that affected everything in his life, including our marriage.
During all the time Burt and Hal had been working together, Burt had been getting almost all the accolades. Hal chose not to give Burt the half point because of his ego, but since Hal had been ignored for years, that was understandable. When they had only been known as songwriters, Hal got almost equal credit. But now it had gone past that.
As we get older we’re supposed to learn and grow, but that only happens if you do some work on yourself. Otherwise, the flaws just get worse. Not long ago, a very wise man I know asked me about the split with Hal and what had caused it. I said, “It would have made me feel better to get the extra half point because I had to be working with George Kennedy and Sally Kellerman and all these kid singers and that was what split us up.”
He said, “You know, it’s about your ego.” I said, “Yeah, maybe. I know I was wrong and I should have never done it because I was told I was going to get my ass sued but I did it anyway.” I’ve owned it since then because it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart. So I now know that on every level, it was a very bad mistake.
This guy looked at me and said, “You should have called Hal up in Mexico and said, ‘I’m giving you five points. You can have them all.’ ” Instead, I broke up a partnership that had lasted for seventeen years and tried to forget about everything by playing tennis every day with Pancho Segura and hanging out on the beach in Del Mar.
At the time, Angie was still a much more public figure than I was. She was out there and I was hiding behind a sand dune. After Lost Horizon opened, I got into my car and went down to Del Mar and disappeared. I disappeared from Hal, I disappeared from Dionne, and I disappeared from my marriage.
Chapter
16
Only Love Can Break a Heart
The first time I realized something was wrong with Nikki was when Angie got up to speak at a big charity event where my dad and I were being honored by the March of Dimes as “Men of the Year.” It took place at the New York Hilton in November 1969. The guest list read like a Who’s Who of celebrities and the program was filled with congratulatory messages from people like Frank Sinatra and Richard Rodgers. That night, Angie was wearing this incredible white dress that left her stomach bare and she looked terrific.
I don’t know what set her off, but as Angie started talking about children, she suddenly lost it and began to cry. I thought, “Maybe there’s something going on with Nikki I don’t know about.” Nikki was three years old at the time, and until then, I thought my beautiful little blond daughter was doing fine.
Angie Dickinson: I was speaking about my daughter and I broke down because I had been concerned from the moment Nikki was born that she had some really heavy problems. I had also seen this movie on the plane coming into New York and it had just absolutely wiped me out so when I got up to speak and mentioned my daughter, it all just overtook me. I’m sure I’d had a few vodkas, which didn’t help, but the sadness and injustice of it all just hit me like a ton of bricks.
Before she was a year old, Nikki started having difficulties with her eyes. She
had strabismus, where the eye turns inward, and for the rest of her life she could only use one eye at a time. Nikki didn’t start speaking until she was three years old, but then Einstein didn’t, either, and the doctor used to say, “If she wants the ball, the reason she’s not talking is because you’re giving her the ball before she asks for it.” I think that was half true but she was obviously storing a lot of information, because one of her first words was “meditate.” That was the word I would use whenever I’d see her sitting in her infant seat on the bench looking out at the trees and the sky, so she probably got it from me.
That night at the March of Dimes charity event, I felt my child was in jeopardy and I might lose her. I’m amazed I could even talk at all. Someone else might have acknowledged the emotional burden I had to bear and asked everyone to give me a hand for all the love and devotion I had given our cherished baby, but I think Burt and his father were simply embarrassed by my breakdown.
When Nikki was a young child, I couldn’t really tell if there was something wrong with her even though I definitely felt something about her was off. She had to wear a patch over one eye and then switch it to strengthen the other one, and then she had surgery at UCLA to help correct the problem. By the time Nikki was four years old, her behavior was so strange at times that neither Angie or I could really understand it.
Angie Dickinson: When Nikki was four years old, she could play the piano like a prodigy and made up songs with fast rhythms and notes that went together. Burt’s father heard her play once and said, “I know this sounds silly but I haven’t heard any wrong notes.” She was that amazing. One of her songs was “I Can’t Cope with My Purple.” As a child, Nikki excelled at gymnastics, horseback, ballet, scuba diving, and swimming.
We had this little gym at our house, and the few friends Nikki had would be invited over to watch her do gymnastics. She would take forever to do it, and you couldn’t leave or go pee because you had been captured. I was playing a lot of concerts, so I would go out on the road, and when I’d come back, Nikki didn’t want me sleeping with Angie because that was what she had been doing. She didn’t really want me around the house because it took away from her time with her mother. Angie made herself very available to Nikki but she didn’t know what was wrong with her. Neither of us did.
Angie Dickinson: Early on, Nikki started cutting the hair off her dolls and the manes of her toy horses. When she was around four years old, Nikki began saving everything—broken toys, pieces of glass, old batteries, and dog poo—in a mound about a foot and a half high on top of a dresser in her closet. She also started coming up with names for herself like “Yellow Collar” or “Instead Blender,” and you had to call her by those names.
When Nikki was five, she decided she was Lorne Greene. Nikki never watched Bonanza that I knew of but she was Lorne Greene for months. When she had exploratory surgery on her eyes, she wouldn’t let them put on the wristband unless it said “Lorne Greene.” So they made two bands for her. One day we went to the doctor’s office, and who should be at the end of the hall but Lorne Greene, and so I introduced him to Nikki. I don’t know what I said Nikki’s name was, but after that, Lorne Greene was over for her.
By the time Nikki was eight years old, her relationship with Angie was so symbiotic that it was driving me crazy. Nikki would sit at the dinner table and Angie would feed her. Nikki should have been feeding herself and I knew all this aiding and abetting was no good for either of them, so I said, “Just let it go, Angie. Don’t feed her. When she’s hungry, she’ll eat.” But that didn’t work.
At this point, Nikki was really out of control. She would take the pet mice Angie would buy her, throw them against the wall, and kill them. Then Angie would go out and buy her some more.
Angie Dickinson: The Catholic Church says you reach the age of reason at seven, so I decided not to work too much until Nikki was that old. I took the lead in Police Woman in 1974 because it was a television series that would keep me at home so I could be a mother and act and not have to leave L.A.
We enrolled Nikki in an experimental elementary school at UCLA for kids of all races and backgrounds, some of whom were disabled. Nikki didn’t consider herself an oddball but she knew people stared at her because of the way her eyes looked. She still managed to make friends with the kids who were more understanding and nicer to be with. She would sometimes talk obsessively and tear pages out of books or kick a wall in sheer frustration. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t deal with certain things, so I couldn’t help her tolerate them or change them. I just found her excessive.
Burt was much more into pushing Nikki to be on her own than I was. He’d tell me, “Let somebody else do that for her.” I remember him coming back from Barbra Streisand’s house one night and he said, “Oh, she’s so great. She drives her child to school every day.” And I said, “I drive my daughter to school and you criticize me and you come home and praise Barbra Streisand because she drives her kid to school?” I really laughed at that one.
For Burt and me, dinners had always been about candlelight and conversation. For Nikki, dinner was a time to talk endlessly about horses and gymnastics and imaginary friends. She had needs that had to be met constantly and in these kinds of situations the father usually can’t understand why the mother just can’t make everything right. Most fathers blame the mother. They lose the love and the interest and then they’re gone.
I don’t think we were very happy by the time we were living in Del Mar. It didn’t last very long, to tell you the truth. The marriage was already in trouble before Nikki was born. Very much so. I didn’t feel Burt really wanted to be there. I was working on a TV movie while I was pregnant but I was fine. Since she weighed less than two pounds, I barely showed but I was working late hours. Something unimportant happened and I said, “Well, you don’t love me anymore,” or some stupid thing like that and Burt said, “You have to understand. It’ll never be like it used to be.”
For me, that said it all. In my stupid young ingénue mind, that was the most crushing blow and I fell apart for a little while. That’s how I know it wasn’t the birth of Nikki that made it all more difficult.
It’s hard even now for me to explain how stifling it was to live like that, because at this point, Nikki was really quite nuts. As she got older, there was definitely a kind of deterioration, because if a child was born as prematurely as she was back then, there was no way she was going to come out with a full deck.
Angie was a smart woman, but when it came to Nikki, she was lost. One night when we were in Del Mar, I took Angie out onto the beach and told her I had a list of about twenty-six things that would have to change because I couldn’t live like this anymore. Angie just listened. It was almost like she knew I was right. She was so tied to Nikki and Nikki was so tied to her that I wound up leaving. I moved down to Del Mar and Angie stayed with Nikki in the big house off Coldwater Canyon Drive.
Angie Dickinson: I don’t remember Burt giving me an actual written list of things that had to change in the marriage. If he had, you’d think I would have saved it. I would have stuck pins in it and held it up to say, “See what a prick I married?” The definition of a narcissist isn’t that you look in the mirror and think you’re great-looking. It’s someone who thinks they always have to do the right thing, and cannot be held responsible for anything that did not go the way they hoped or planned or thought it should. And that is who Burt is.
Even after we were separated, Angie and Nikki would come down to Del Mar so we could spend Christmas and New Year’s together. I would always think, “This time will be different,” but it never was. On Christmas morning there would be forty gifts for Nikki, and because she didn’t want to tear the wrapping paper—she wanted to save it all for the next year—it would take her hours to open all her presents. It was sheer torture to sit there and watch her do it.
When Angie got the Police Woman television show she became a much bigger star than
she had ever been before. Whenever we would go to the racetrack together, no one would ask for my autograph anymore. Instead, they would ask Angie for hers. That made me smile because Angie was a great lady and a terrific actress, and I knew she deserved that kind of attention and fame and success.
Right around this time, the two of us were asked to do a television commercial for Martini & Rossi vermouth. In it, Angie walks through this living room in Malibu to where I’m sitting at the piano. Looking great, she leans over and asks me what I say to the glass of Martini & Rossi on the rocks she’s holding in her hand. Then I start singing and playing the advertising slogan, which was “Say yes to Martini & Rossi.”
The commercial turned out to be such a hit that the company decided to renew it. But they wanted an assurance that Angie and I would still be together for another year, so I said we would. Angie and I were not yet separated but we were having trouble. I didn’t stay with Angie just to keep the commercial on the air, but by then, I’d already had a couple of affairs.
My relationship with Slim Brandy had begun before I ever knew Angie, but there were also a few others. For a while, I was pretty crazy about a stunning violinist who was on the road with me but she was the only one who had an impact. There was another woman in New York, too, but that happened after Nikki was born, when I was having problems with the way Angie was raising her.
Would our marriage have lasted if not for Nikki? I doubt it. There should be a rule that no one is allowed to get married until they are thirty years old and maybe not even then, because what marriage is really all about is communication. And by that I don’t mean surface bullshit communication about the kids or the dog. Angie and I had great times together, but after Nikki was born, everything changed because the focus was always on her.
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 16