Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music

by Burt Bacharach

  Chapter

  17

  Best That You Can Do

  I was playing tennis every day and taking the game quite seriously. In 1974, Pancho Segura and I were invited to play in the big celebrity tournament that Prince Rainier of Monaco held every year in June on the clay courts at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo. Bill Cosby and Fred Stolle were the team to beat because no matter where Cosby was working he would always have a pro with him so he could hit every day. The tournament always coincided with the big yearly Red Cross benefit on Saturday night, with guests like the Aga Khan and princes, princesses, barons, and counts from all over Europe.

  The star of the show that year was Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy flew into Nice but he got pissed off because nobody from the palace was there to meet him at the airport. He had a whole entourage with him and all these perks, including the use of the royal yacht. Because his feelings were hurt, Sammy said, “Fuck this.” Then he got on the yacht with his entire entourage and just sailed away.

  I had played tennis that afternoon with Segura. As I came back into the hotel I heard a voice in the lobby. It was Sam Spiegel, the legendary producer who had made Lawrence of Arabia. Sam was standing there saying, “Vee got a problem.” He told me what Sammy had done and how all these important people were here but we had no show. He said, “So, go up to your room and just get the operator and ask her to put you through to the princess.”

  I went up to my room and said, “Can I speak to the princess, please?” Princess Grace came on the phone and said, “We have this problem. Can you help us out? We have no show for tonight, so can you organize one?” I couldn’t say no to her so I said, “Well, I can play a little piano and do a couple of songs.” Desi Arnaz Jr. was there and I knew he could play the drums. Merv Griffin was there, too, and I figured he could also do something. I said, “We’ll get it together, sure. And we’ve got Bill Cosby, who’s brilliant. He’ll do his act.” She was very grateful.

  I played the piano but there were a lot of Germans in the audience and the atmosphere was very stiff. Desi Arnaz Jr. played his drum solo, but nothing was happening. Then Cosby came on. He was our star. The guy who was really going to do it for us. I was falling off my chair, but nobody else was laughing because they couldn’t understand him. Even when the Germans did understand what Cosby was saying, they didn’t get it. Cosby was hysterical but he bombed, too. When it came time for them to serve us all dinner, I sat with Prince Rainier, Princess Grace, Prince Michael of Greece, Princess Helen of France, Maria Callas, and David Niven and his wife.

  My tennis career peaked a couple of years later when I played in the Robert F. Kennedy Pro-Celebrity Tournament at Forest Hills. This was back when they still had the Nationals there. As a kid I would go to that stadium for all the early rounds of the tournament, and I got to see great players like Pancho Segura, Vic Seixas, Pancho Gonzales, Lew Hoad, and Ken Emerson. For this tournament, I was paired with Arthur Ashe, and we made it to the semifinals, where we played against Oleg Cassini and Jaime Fillol, a Chilean pro.

  There were thousands of people in the stands watching us and the pressure was horrible. Before the match began I said to Arthur, “I’ll take the backhand side.” In doubles, the backhand side is the most vulnerable and important side. His backhand was a lot better than mine but my backhand was better than my forehand so it was the right thing to do. But we still got beat. In a situation like that, you forget who you are. Being a composer was what had gotten me invited there in the first place.

  All throughout this period, I wrote songs with different people without having a hit. Then my agent came up with the idea of going out on tour with Anthony Newley. I had first met him back in 1966 when he was in the first flush of his success with Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. I had gone to a recording session at Bell Sound, where Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were cutting Tony doing “My Clair de Lune” with English lyrics.

  Tony Newley was a great guy with a great sense of humor who could be so funny onstage that I’d put him right up against Don Rickles any day of the week. Tony and Leslie Bricusse had written a lot of great musicals together but neither of them played an instrument. What they would do is sing a melody and then Ian Frasier, who was a brilliant conductor and their go-to music guy, would say, “You like this chord better here, or that one?” I don’t think Tony could even read music. He was just a self-taught genius who had a very different kind of voice and when you heard it, you knew immediately, “It’s Tony Newley.”

  The two of us started working together. Tony would come out and do about forty minutes with an orchestra and then I would come out and do forty. Tony would come back and sing “Make It Easy on Yourself” and then I would conduct “Who Can I Turn To?” for him. We would end the show with “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

  During the summer, we played places like the Westbury Music Fair and Valley Forge in Devon, Pennsylvania. Right before we did “Who Can I Turn To?” near the end of the show, I would give Tony some straight lines or ask him a question. He would then go off and just be hysterically funny, sometimes for a good twenty minutes.

  The third year we were working together, the two of us played the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. It was a Saturday night and the place was packed with about two thousand Jews. Irv and Marge Cowan, who owned the Diplomat and were friends of mine, had off-duty policemen wearing tuxedos lined up on both sides of the stage to do security. Tony came out at the end of the show to sing “Who Can I Turn To?”—or, as he sometimes called it, “Who Can I Turn On?”

  Before he started I said, “How’s your mother, Grace?” And Tony said, “She’s fine. Thanks, Burt.” She was living in Florida at the time. Then I said, “Does she still roll those really great joints?” With that, some guy in the audience threw a joint onto the stage.

  Tony and I looked at the joint. Then we broke it in half and lit it up onstage. Tony took a couple of hits and I took a couple of hits and then we passed it to the orchestra. I passed my half to the string section and Tony passed his to the saxes and the brass. We were both getting absolutely stoned, not because we had smoked that much, but because we knew we were doing something very crazy.

  Then Tony said, “Whoever you are, thank you very much. What else have you got?” And the guy threw some coke up on the stage in a Baggie. Now Tony had himself a dealer. He picked up the coke, set it on the piano, and said, “Hey, you have any Quaaludes?” The audience didn’t know what to make of it and all these cops in tuxedos were watching us and it was wild. Then Tony said, “Hey, our next date is at Westbury. Can we count on you to show up?” People started screaming with laughter and Tony and I were falling apart onstage.

  After our shows were over, Tony and I would always hang out together. I really enjoyed the guy. I was separated at the time and the only trouble I ever had with him was that when I was with a woman I really liked, Tony would always want her, too. He would never get her but there was always this game going on between us and we had fun. The two of us were going to do a musical about Charlie Chaplin but we barely got started before Tony got sick. He died of renal cancer in 1999 at the age of sixty-seven. It was a big, big loss.

  Tony and I did write a piece together called “The Dancing Fool,” which I recorded live with the Houston Symphony Orchestra as part of an album called Woman, released on A&M in 1979. I cowrote a couple of the other tracks with Libby Titus and Carly Simon, who both sang on the album. We recorded it live onstage at Jones Hall in Houston during a single four-hour session. For two months after I cut that record, I had the same dream every night that I wasn’t going to get the music done and time was running out. I would wake up in a state of utter panic. The album itself turned out to be a very expensive failure.

  Paul Anka and I then did the soundtrack for a movie called Together Again, starring Jacqueline Bisset, which no one ever saw. I was going through a very cold period in my career and it had been so long since I’d had a hit
that radio stations pigeonholed me as part of the easy-listening school of music. Since nothing I was writing was getting any airplay, I decided to spend most of my time performing.

  Angie and I were still married but I was living by myself in an apartment in the Comstock on Wilshire Boulevard when Mike Douglas asked me to cohost his show for a week in Los Angeles. One of the guests was Carole Bayer Sager. She looked great and sang great and after the show was over, I asked her out for dinner.

  Angie Dickinson: I was on The Mike Douglas Show when Carole performed. I came on toward the end as a surprise guest. Someone was talking about divorce, and Burt looked at me and said, “Maybe I should ask you for a divorce now.” On the air. It wasn’t so much that he mentioned divorce because by now our marriage was long over, but I was so humiliated that I just laughed and said, “See what I mean? What a sense of humor!”

  Carole Bayer Sager: I had actually met Burt some months before, at a party in honor of his new album. At the time Burt’s writing career was cold and he was trying to make a comeback. I went to the party with Marvin Hamlisch and Burt was kind of holding court in the back of the room with a glass of wine. A lot of stories about, “Oh, when Dionne sang this,” or “When I used to . . .”

  We said hello, and then he called me afterward and said, “I have a couple of songs and I need a really good lyricist. Will you listen to them and possibly put lyrics to them?” Then I got this tape from him. To be very honest, I listened to the tape once and I thought it was not in the world of what I was writing, so I didn’t do anything with it and I never thought about it again.

  The next time I saw Burt he was cohosting The Mike Douglas Show and I was a guest. I sang a song and Burt told me he thought I was very talented. He asked me out to dinner and suggested we should sit down and write a song together. Years later I’d tell people, “If I could ever remember which question he asked me first, I think I could figure out the nature of our relationship.”

  Carole was very sharp. I thought she was really cute and brilliant and gifted and I was really taken with her. I knew she had been with Marvin Hamlisch because the two of them had just done the score for They’re Playing Our Song, a hit show on Broadway that Neil Simon had written. At the time, I was still half keeping up the pretense that I was married to Angie. I didn’t want to embarrass Angie by being seen in public with Carole, so I took her to a restaurant where no one would know us.

  Carole Bayer Sager: He took me to a Chinese restaurant on Rodeo Drive up one flight of stairs. I had never been there, and I had never heard of it. When I got into his car I noticed he was driving this big green Lincoln that was not at all in style, so I immediately assumed, “Oh, his car must be in the shop and this must be a loaner.” I found out later it was a car that had actually been given to him and Angie after they had done a commercial together. So this was the beginning of my inventing who I thought Burt Bacharach really was.

  I remember the first time I ever saw where he was living. We stopped at his apartment so he could pick up some sheet music. It was a one-bedroom apartment in the Comstock on Wilshire that was practically empty, except for a bed, a chair, one little sofa in the living room area, a television, a piano, and sheet music thrown all around. I thought, “Oh, I guess because he’s getting divorced his new house isn’t ready yet.”

  From the first time we ever discussed it, I thought Burt was separated and getting a divorce or had just gotten a divorce. I was very surprised to find out well into our spending time together that he would sometimes go back and sleep at his old house off Coldwater Canyon because he wanted to be with Nikki. He was no longer with Angie, but it takes Burt a very long time from when he decides something to when he acts on it, because he processes things very slowly. Just like he writes a song. Very slowly.

  I had never really thought about me and Burt romantically. At least not at that point. I just thought he was a great writer who was kind of old and past it and probably wasn’t going to have any more hits. Before I dated Burt, I had been with Michael McDonald, riding around on his motorcycle, and then Burt came into my life. Once he did, I started to find him more and more attractive. Suddenly I saw him in a different way. But I had a girlfriend who said to me, “Are you out of your mind? You’re going to go out with Burt Bacharach instead of Michael McDonald? He’s the hottest thing going.” But what happened, happened.

  Carole and I became a couple kind of quickly but I wasn’t ready to move in with her. She was so different from Angie, very intense and funny but also serious. She didn’t miss a beat and she could talk to anybody. Carole had been in the music business ever since she had graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and she had written songs with people like Neil Sedaka, Peter Allen, and Melissa Manchester. When we first got together, I said to her, “You know, I had a great run as a songwriter but now I think it’s gone.” And she said, “Where did it go?”

  Carole Bayer Sager: Burt and I would go somewhere together and people would say, “Hey, Burt, don’t you write anymore?” Or, “What are you writing?” Or, “How come we don’t hear any songs of yours anymore?” To me, the absurdity of it was that here was this man whose contribution to music was phenomenal. Who if he never wrote another song after “Alfie” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and “What the World Needs Now Is Love” and “A House Is Not a Home” and “Message to Michael” had already done it.

  When we started writing together, Carole said she wanted to get me to simplify my music a little bit so it would find its way back on to the radio. Carole had a very alert nose for the business and she knew all kinds of people I had never met. She was very helpful in turning me around, because at the time I was really out in left field and writing music that wasn’t accessible anymore.

  The first song we wrote together that was recorded was “Where Did the Time Go.” The Pointer Sisters cut it with Richard Perry producing. I played piano and conducted the string section. Although the song wasn’t a hit, I felt like Carole and I were headed in the right direction. About a year later we did a concept album about a relationship, called Sometimes Late at Night, for Boardwalk Records, a label owned by Carole’s good friends Neil and Joyce Bogart.

  Carole and I wrote most of the songs together. I produced the album with Brooks Arthur and we had great musicians like Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner, Leland Sklar, Lee Ritenour, and David Foster in the studio. The single “Stronger Than Before” went to number thirty on the charts.

  There was a duet on the album called “Just Friends,” and Michael Jackson came in to sing it with Carole. I had written the arrangement and we had the strings and the rhythm section there when Michael said, “Can you just give me a few minutes so I can try something?” He took Paul Jackson Jr., who played guitar on the date, into the bathroom and came back out with a totally different flow and concept for the song that was five times better than what I had done. When you listen to Carole and Michael singing together on that cut, you wonder, “Which one’s Michael and which one is Carole?” Their voices went together that well.

  After we made Sometimes Late at Night Carole and I went out on the road together. Although the album wasn’t really selling all that well, people thought it was because the single from it, “Stronger Than Before,” was making some noise on the charts. So when Carole and I played the Roxy on the Sunset Strip in L.A. for five nights, we sold out every show. What with the orchestra and all the background singers, we lost money on the gig but at least we sold out, right? During the show Carole would sing some of her songs and I would do some of mine, and then we would perform the songs from the album together.

  While Carole was doing her set during one of the shows at the Roxy, I looked into the house and saw Dionne and some of her friends sitting at a table right down in front. Dionne was just glaring at Carole. I mean, if looks could kill, this was it. Dionne and I still weren’t talking to one another because of the lawsuit but there she was, giving Carole this t
otally wicked look.

  Carole Bayer Sager: Sometimes Late at Night seems like it was about our relationship but I didn’t know that at the time. It was a concept album about love where every song moved into the next with a sense of continuity. Looking back, I think it foretold certain things I didn’t even know I was feeling.

  Mike Medavoy was running Orion, the movie studio he had co-founded a couple of years before, and he asked me to do the music for a romantic comedy called Arthur, starring Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, and John Gielgud that Steve Gordon had written and directed. When I saw the rough cut, I wasn’t sure it was going to be a great movie but the picture just kept on getting better as Steve edited it, so I decided to take the job.

  There were going to be a couple of songs in the movie and we needed to get the main title written quickly, so we were in a rush. By now Carole and I were living together, so Christopher Cross came over to the house one night to work with us. He’d had a number-one hit with “Sailing” and won four Grammys that year, and he had been very hot for a while but had done nothing since.

  I had maybe a fraction of where I thought the song should be going but once we started working together, it all evolved very quickly. Having three people in the room was a great way to write, and by the end of the night, we had basically finished “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).” I taped what we had done and listened to it the next morning and nudged it a little here and there to make sure it was right and complete.

  A couple of days later, I said something to Carole about what a great line “When you get caught between the moon and New York City” was, and she told me it came from a song she had written with Peter Allen that had never gone anywhere. Because they had written the lyrics together, she didn’t know whose line it was. It fit so well in the song that Carole said she would talk to Peter about it. When she called him, Carole said, “Listen, Peter, I used this one line. Are you okay with it?” He said, “No. I want to be a writer on the song.” And that’s why all four of us are credited on it.