Burt and I got married in October 1993. We stayed at the Auberge du Soleil, up in Napa, and the ceremony took place on a Tuesday and was performed by somebody I found in the Yellow Pages. My friend Kristin and Burt’s former road manager, Charlie Herman, were our only guests. Getting married never really seemed all that important to Burt and me because I didn’t necessarily want to be wife number four and he had already been through it three times. So I think that’s why there were just four of us there on a Tuesday.
We had planned to get married a couple of other times and I don’t know, maybe I was getting my nails done, so we put it off. We got married mainly because we were thinking about another child, and three years later I gave birth to our daughter, Raleigh.
A lot of what has been imparted to our kids comes from Jane. She took some chances in her life and picked up and got out of a small town in Ohio and went to teach skiing in Switzerland, hitchhiked through Europe by herself, and crewed on sailing ships in the Caribbean. Jane has great common sense. If you ask her a question, the answer may not be what you want to hear but it will be honest. She is a very independent person and we give each other space. We can be together and also live parallel lives. This marriage is different because my relationship with Jane is just right. Not too close and not too far.
Chapter
21
Battle Royal
I had spent a long time writing with Hal and then a long time writing with Carole, and in a way I had been married to each of them. After Carole and I split up, I began writing with other people and it felt like I was dating a lot. I was going through another cold period and didn’t come up with another hit for a couple of years, but I did manage to get back together with Hal. Our public reconciliation came when we were both honored with ASCAP’s Founders Award in May 1993. By then we had both also buried the hatchet with Dionne, so the three of us were talking again.
Even when everything else in my career hasn’t been going well, I’ve always had my horses and it was during this period that two of them ran in the Kentucky Derby. My interest in horse racing started when I was fourteen or fifteen and one of my mother’s friends, Edith Friedman, took me to Jamaica Race Track in Queens. After that I started reading Ken Kling’s race selections in the Daily Mirror. I would always look at the paper the next day to see how right he had been, and who the hot jockeys were. So I started to know guys like Eddie Arcaro by name and I thought, “If I ever can afford it I’ll own a racehorse.”
Eventually I met up with Charlie Whittingham, one of the all-time great trainers. I don’t think he would have paid that much attention to me but he liked Angie, so for fifteen thousand dollars, which would be about forty-five thousand dollars now, Charlie bought me a horse named Battle Royal.
On the day before I had to fly to New York to start rehearsals for Promises, Promises, Angie and I went to Hollywood Park to watch Battle Royal run his first race under my colors, blue silks with two music notes on the back. It was a very close finish and they didn’t show replays like they do now so we had to wait for the stewards to look at the photo and then Battle Royal was posted as the winner. I went down to the winner’s circle with Angie and the feeling was incredible.
I fell in love with Battle Royal and the horse became the family pet. Nikki would go out and pat him and Angie always made a big fuss over him. We ran Battle Royal in Del Mar on the grass in a $15,000 claiming race, which meant that anyone could buy any of the horses who were running in that race for that much. Battle Royal finished a close second and someone claimed him. I didn’t really understand how all this worked back then, so I was really shocked to learn that I no longer owned this horse. He now had to go to another barn with another groom and another trainer. I felt really bad because Battle Royal was like a pet and he couldn’t even bring his own toothbrush with him, if horses had toothbrushes.
Six months later, when someone told me Battle Royal was running at Santa Anita in an $8,000 claiming race, I got in touch with Charlie Whittingham and said, “Charlie, I want to get the horse back.” He said, “Can you get the fuck off the phone and leave me alone? I have to get up at four a.m. tomorrow.”
By now Charlie had become a great friend. We had houses next to each other on the beach at Del Mar and we had gotten drunk and gone swimming together in the ocean at night and lived to tell the tale. If it had been anyone else but me, Charlie would have said, “Please just get out of my life. Fire me.” Instead, I got him to cave in and he said, “Bring your check for $8,000 and be here before the first race tomorrow.”
We got Battle Royal back and wound up running him down in Del Mar in a couple of races. He wasn’t doing well so we dropped him down into a $5,000 claiming race that he won. Angie and Nikki and I went down to the winner’s circle and sure enough, Battle Royal got claimed and Angie said, “I swear I saw a tear in Charlie’s eye.” I said, “If you did it was a tear of happiness, because he’s so glad to finally be rid of this horse!”
What I like about people in horse racing is that they tend to be understated. A jockey doesn’t get off a horse and say it’s the best horse he ever rode. Bill Shoemaker, who was a good friend of mine, rode a number of horses for me. He won a couple of stakes races with a horse I thought was pretty good and said, “Burt, he’s a nice horse. Just a nice horse. But don’t get your hopes up.”
After having been such a control freak in the studio for years, and trying to get a certain performance out of a singer, or a drummer to play differently, I would have a horse that was not very talented and ran slowly and there was nothing I could do about it. In the music business, it was always “The record’s a smash! It’s top five in Detroit! It’s got a bullet.” People in the racing business have been dealing with disappointment their entire careers. They spend years trying to get a horse to the Kentucky Derby, only to have the horse break down and never run again, so they really understand losing. Charlie Whittingham and I won our first race with Battle Royal. Then I bought some more horses and we ran forty-three times in a row without ever winning a race.
Being in racing has taught me to try to stay in the moment. When you’re getting your picture taken in the winner’s circle, enjoy it. Don’t be looking ahead to the next race, because you just don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Stay in the moment. I’ve tried to bring that attitude to my life as well. That’s the great lesson racing has taught me. I’ve also learned that racing is a very expensive business and that slow horses eat just as much as fast ones.
By the time I met Jane, I had no idea how many horses I had or how much money I was spending on them. Knowing how practical and sensible she is, I decided to bring her into it as well.
Jane Hanson Bacharach: Early in our relationship, before we even had any children, we were staying down at La Costa and Burt had to go on the road. He left me there for a few days on my own, which was fine. I was at the pool, I was in the gym, I was completely happy. Burt had a racing form delivered to the room every day and he told me, “Read that form and figure out how it works and then we’ll talk about it when I get back.” He taught me a whole lot early on and I’m still learning.
The first really great horse I had was Heartlight No. 1, who won the Eclipse Award for three-year-old filly of the year. To get the Eclipse Award, we had to beat the top horses on the east coast so I took Heartlight No. 1 to Belmont to run in the Ruffian Handicap in August 1983. Dinny Phipps was the head of the Jockey Club and a really powerful figure in horse racing in New York. I knew him a little from the club scene in the city. He said, “You can’t run with those colors here because you’re advertising yourself with the two music notes on the back of your silks.” I said, “Cut the shit, Dinny. Come on.” So he waived the rule for me and said, “After the Ruffian, you’re going to run in the Beldame Stakes in October.”
What he was saying was, “This one time, I’ll make an exception. But if you run again, you’re going to have to change the colors.” I fought with h
im about that as well so he let it go and we went out with Laffit Pincay Jr. as our jockey and two eighth notes on the back of the silks. We got beat right at the wire by Dinny’s horse but it was still a great experience.
For the six months that Heartlight No. 1 ran, it was like I was managing a rock star and I dropped my music career so I could be totally into this horse. I would call the trainer every morning to see if she had a good bowel movement and then I came up with the brilliant idea to play Neil Diamond’s “Turn On Your Heartlight” on a boom box right outside her stall all day long because I thought it would inspire the grooms, the trainer, and the horse. That idea lasted about half a day because someone stole the boom box.
By 1994, Dick Mandella was my trainer and we had a really good horse named Soul of the Matter, who almost beat Cigar in the first Word Cup in Dubai on March 27, 1996, a $4 million race. Soul of the Matter had run in the Kentucky Derby and finished fifth. Jane and I were in the paddock right before the race when we found out Dick had not been paid in months because my business office had dropped the ball. After that, I made sure that the bills came directly to Jane, who I knew would take care of them properly.
A year later, we had a horse named Afternoon Deelites, who also made it to the Kentucky Derby, and that was when I did “the walk.” Before the race begins at Churchill Downs, they bring out the horses from the stable area in the middle of the backstretch and walk them toward the stands. It’s about a half mile.
I was wearing a suit and tie and dress shoes and walking in the dirt on the track and loving it because there were more than 100,000 people watching. As I came around the turn with Dick Mandella, the groom, and Afternoon Deelites in front of me, the crowd started yelling out my name and singing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
Because of all the noise, Afternoon Deelites started getting a little fractious. Dick said, “Burt, could you walk about ten feet behind us?” I said, “Absolutely.” I didn’t want to do anything to make the horse a nervous wreck and jeopardize his chances. Afternoon Deelites finished eighth but it was another experience I will never forget.
The fact that I had two horses back-to-back in the Derby and that they were both home-bred taught me never to complain that my horses weren’t running well, because nobody could be that lucky. A home-bred horse means you own the mare and you breed her to a stallion. Most people buy their horses at a sale where they can cost as much as three or four hundred thousand dollars. The cost to have both Soul of the Matter and Afternoon Deelites bred back then was fifteen thousand dollars each and we were running against really well-bred horses who could have cost twenty times that much.
Jane Hanson Bacharach: Burt doesn’t ride because he’s afraid of horses. He will occasionally place a bet but gambling isn’t why he’s so into racing. What he really loves are the characters at the track and the sport itself.
I’ve been in racing a long time, and from Battle Royal on, there have been good times, better times, and bad times but I have a kind of mantra that I always go back to. Which is that I have no right to complain about the way my horses are running now, which is not very well, and hasn’t been for a while. Instead I just say, “Remember that you had three really terrific horses that were home-bred.”
I had a champion filly that won the Eclipse Award and two horses that ran in the Kentucky Derby in consecutive years and that was just amazing luck. Afternoon Deelites and Soul of the Matter both made more than a million dollars each and were sold as stallions to Brereton Jones in Kentucky for $4 million.
Although the horses I have now are running very poorly, that comes with the territory and is out of my control, because I can’t make them run faster. I now own thirty-two horses but the ones that race are outnumbered by Jane and Raleigh’s show jumpers. The season in Del Mar starts on the third Wednesday in July and goes for seven weeks. I’m always at that meeting and then our horses do the full Southern California circuit at the Pomona Fairgrounds, Hollywood Park, and Santa Anita.
If you look at the photographs on the walls of my house, I’m always smiling in the pictures taken after one of my horses has won a race. For me, this is still one of the greatest thrills in life.
Chapter
22
God Give Me Strength
I got a call from the music supervisor on a picture called Grace of My Heart, who said they needed a song and asked if I would consider getting together with Elvis Costello to write it. I said yes. I had met Elvis once at Ocean Way studios in Los Angeles, but until we started writing together, I didn’t really know him at all.
Elvis Costello: By sheer chance in 1988 or 1989, I was working at Ocean Way with T-Bone Burnett on the record Spike. We were doing this song that in my mind was kind of a Burt-influenced piece. I’d already written a few songs that were me trying to write a Burt Bacharach song. One was called “Accidents Will Happen” and another much less well known one was called “Just a Memory,” which Dusty Springfield recorded. That song was very much influenced by Burt, although when I actually sat with him and saw what he was doing, I realized I was miles off the model.
“Satellite,” the song I was doing on Spike, was not at all like Burt melodically but I was using marimbas and these little suspensions that reminded me of him. I don’t know what record Burt was working on but suddenly someone said, “Burt Bacharach’s down the hallway!” I went and introduced myself and asked him if he would come listen to the track.
Because I was deep within the recording, I imagined Burt would instantly hear the homage and the instrumentation. He listened as he listened to everything and said, “That’s interesting, thank you,” and then he left! He was complimentary but it wasn’t like, “A-ha! I get it now!” But he was great and it was really thrilling to meet him.
Elvis was in London and I was in Los Angeles, but they needed the song quickly so we started working together by phone and fax and pretty much put it all together in less than a week. The lead character in Grace of My Heart was loosely based on Carole King and a lot of the movie took place in the Brill Building, so I started writing in the six/eight, twelve/eight thing, which I hadn’t done in years.
I couldn’t go back and write something like “Don’t Make Me Over” again because I just don’t think that way anymore, but since this was for a movie about the Brill Building, I thought, “Okay. Great. I can do it.” Elvis wrote the lyrics and the music for the verse and I suggested a couple of new chords and changes, wrote the bridge, and did the orchestration.
Elvis Costello: When the music supervisor said, “Would you write with Burt?” I went “What?” It took me all of ten seconds to answer because I couldn’t even believe it. In our first conversation over the phone, I asked Burt if we could work together on the music and he agreed to that. I don’t know what possessed me to say that but I’m sort of glad I did, because I actually got out of the gate first and wrote everything from the opening line of the vocal to the hook line and sent it to him.
Burt responded immediately and stretched a couple of the lines and revoiced some of the changes, but it was essentially the same melody. Then he added the intro figure. The fantastic thing was where he went on the choice of the bass note by saying, “Let’s make that a minor sixth,” or something. There were no uneven bars in the first body part of the song but I was rushing some of the phrasing on the back end. He stretched the melody in some sections over twice as much music so it sort of went half time in just one phrase.
And then I told him, “Oh, by the way, I’ve written a bridge.” There was no e-mail back then so we were doing all this by fax and these faxes were going back and forth with sheet music on them. I wrote a top line and then I recorded the song and played it into his answering machine. He transcribed it and a fax came back with the question, “Is this it?”
Then Burt sent me his bridge and this kind of huge symphonic thing happened in the middle of the song. I had to write lyrics to it and that gave me t
he way to write a third verse, and then we had the reprise and the tag and suddenly we had this epic song. That was the composition of that one. If I had said, “Okay, I’ll be the lyricist,” and waited until he had sent me something, it might have been totally different. I don’t really recall where the title “God Give Me Strength” came from. Out of thin air, I think.
I was down in Palm Beach, Florida, and I wrote the arrangement there for the strings. Then I went to New York and met Elvis so I could explain what I had written on the intro and the ending. The next day we went into the studio with a rhythm section and it wasn’t happening, so Elvis said, “Maybe you should move the synth player and you play piano.” I didn’t know this band and I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings but I said, “Okay,” and I wound up playing piano like I always used to do in the old days.
We did it that way and it came out good, and the next day we put the strings and the horns on it. Allison Anders, who directed Grace of My Heart, was there when we did it, and she was ecstatic. Elvis and I were saying, “This is good. Maybe we should do an album together sometime.”
Elvis Costello: We sent off what we had written and they asked us if we would voice it for the end titles. We were at the Power Station in New York and this was the first time Burt and I had been in the same room together. We had just borrowed the studio to rehearse, so Burt and I were in there learning the song as we performed it and he was telling me how he was going to orchestrate it.
Then we went in and cut it with Allison Anders and Illeana Douglas, who played the lead role in the movie, in the studio. It was a great band, with Will Lee on bass and David Spinoza on guitar, and at the end of it, we were filmed fake-performing it with a cross fade and they made a little video. And it was like “Hold on. This is sort of a partnership here.” We had barely met and now we were doing publicity photographs together and suddenly we had gone from a standing start to making the record.
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 21