Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music

by Burt Bacharach

  I don’t think it’s ever good to beat up an audience or get angry with them, but when people act this way, they’re being disrespectful to the music itself. Although I really haven’t had that many bad experiences performing in public, I still remember these two shows a lot more clearly than the good ones. However, thanks to Mike Myers, at least my movie career was going great.

  Mike Myers: In terms of putting him in the second Austin Powers movie, it was “More of the same, please. Can I have another helping?”

  In the second Austin Powers movie, Elvis Costello and I are doing “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” in an outdoor market that was supposed to be in London, even though they shot it on a back lot in Los Angeles. Elvis is singing and I’m playing piano and I’ve got a little band behind me and Austin Powers walks through the shot.

  Mike Myers: Burt and Elvis Costello were supposed to be the world’s most talented buskers, and it was by design that Elvis looks so funky. Was Burt not in the third one as well? There was an incarnation of it when he was but I watched the movie so many times that I don’t remember what I cut because things fly in and out a million times. I do remember we used “What’s It All About, Austin” over the end credits and Susanna Hoffs really sang the crap out of it.

  How people feel about what I write is not something I can control. Before I met Carole, no one was playing my stuff, and then after we split up, I went through another long cold period where nothing I was doing or had ever done seemed to matter to anyone anymore. It’s not like you stop working when that happens, because you don’t. You just keep writing and hope things will change. For reasons I still don’t understand, things started turning around for me after I did the first Austin Powers movie and began working with Elvis.

  All of a sudden. Julia Roberts was telling a reporter how the sing-along version of “I Say a Little Prayer for You” had changed the whole tone of My Best Friend’s Wedding. The Atlantic ran a really serious six-page article about my music and the New York Times sent someone to interview me. I hadn’t changed but a lot of people who had never heard my music before now thought it was cool.

  Chapter

  24

  Overture 2000

  Dick and Lili Zanuck were doing the Academy Awards show and they came to see me perform in Vegas. Then we all went out and had a drink together. They loved the show and asked me how I felt about putting together a medley of Academy Award–winning songs as well as some that had been nominated. They also asked me to serve as the music director for the entire show with Don Was.

  For the next three months, all I did was work on a very cohesive fourteen-minute medley of songs with a group of killer singers like Ray Charles, Garth Brooks, Queen Latifah, Isaac Hayes, and Dionne. I wanted the medley to be so seamless that it never felt like we were changing keys at any time. I sketched it out and wrote the arrangement and we were going to have the band onstage to perform it live.

  We were looking for a diva and Whitney Houston’s name came up. I had known Whitney since she was a little girl and I loved her voice, but Dick and Lili’s concern was “How straight is she?” Whitney was going to sing at Clive Davis’s Grammy party so I went to see her and she knocked me out. What I didn’t know then about an addict was that you can give them the songs they sing year in and year out like their early hits and they will be perfect. But give them a song like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and they can’t sing it.

  I didn’t understand this until Whitney came to my house four nights before the Academy Awards show with Bobby Brown in a caravan of cars. She walked in wearing dark glasses and a baseball hat and Bobby scared the shit out of my kids because he was making these weird gestures like coke addicts do. I started working with Whitney at the piano, and although the key I was playing in was right, she thought it was too high for her to sing.

  Whitney was supposed to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “The Way We Were” and then at the end, she and Dionne were going to do “Alfie” together with a great harmonica player and I was going to sing four bars with her as well. When Whitney said the key was too high for her, I had to lower it, which upset the seamless transitions I had written. I had no choice. I lowered the key.

  About three weeks before the show, I got a call from my agent, who said, “Don’t quote me on this but there’s a rumor Ray Charles has taken a date to play on the Saturday night before the Oscars.” I said, “That’s our dress rehearsal,” and he said, “Maybe you should talk to Ray.”

  I had shown Ray the layout of what he was going to do a couple of months before and he had been amazing because when I played the song for him, he said, “Man, that chord is not the right one.” I said, “I know. I’m just trying a different version to lead into the next song.” But he didn’t really like it that way so I changed it back for him. Even though Ray wanted more than they were willing to pay and was only doing it for the money, he agreed to do the show.

  I called him after my agent had talked to me, and I said, “Ray, I heard this rumor you’re taking a date on Saturday night before the show. That’s our dress rehearsal. First of all, is that true?” He said, “Yeah, it’s true.” I said, “Where’s the date?” When he said Germany, I said, “Ray, what if you’re delayed coming back?” That alone was enough to make me a nervous wreck.

  The Academy Awards were on Sunday, and on Friday night we had a rehearsal in the Shrine Auditorium. There were about three hundred people in the audience. Whitney came in wearing the baseball cap and sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and it was unrecognizable. There were only twelve bars of it before the next song began but I stopped the band and went over to talk to her.

  I said, “Whitney, everybody knows and loves this song, so you’ve got to sing the melody. You’ve got to sing at least most of the melody.” She said, “Okay.” Her next song was the title song from The Way We Were, and she wrecked that, too. Then we got to “Alfie,” which should have been a real moment for Dionne and Whitney. Dionne wanted them to sing it in harmony but Whitney rode right over Dionne. I know Dionne really well and I could see how angry and frustrated she was, but Whitney was her niece, so it wasn’t like Dionne could say, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” So that was also a disaster.

  We decided to run the whole medley all over again right from the top, and when it came time for Whitney to sing, she didn’t know where she was. She came in on the wrong song and it was obvious to everyone she couldn’t do this. Lili Zanuck came up onstage, and I broke the band and went into a trailer with her and Dick. It was their show, so instead of asking me, “What do you think we should do?” they said, “Fire her ass! Get her out of here! Because if we do this with Whitney, nobody will remember who won for Best Picture. They’ll just remember the train wreck.”

  It wasn’t a closed rehearsal and there were some news people there, so they could see how bad this really was. Lili got on the phone at about eleven o’clock that night and called Faith Hill, who was a friend of hers, and said, “If I send a plane for you, can you get here tomorrow?” Faith Hill said yes. She got to L.A. on Saturday afternoon and came over to my house. I gave her the demo of the medley I had cut with my band and my singers, and I played the songs for her on the piano.

  She took the demo with her, came into rehearsal the next day, and did the songs perfectly. They got her a dress to wear for the show and she looked gorgeous. But now we had a problem with Garth Brooks, who said, “What do you mean Whitney’s not going on? I want to talk to her before I’m willing to go on to make sure she’s okay and find out why she can’t do the show.” What was really bothering Garth Brooks was that we had replaced Whitney with Faith Hill. If we were going to bring in a country artist, he wanted it to be Trisha Yearwood, who he was crazy about and later married.

  They told him he could talk to Whitney but I’m not sure if he ever did, because Whitney herself wasn’t around when she was fired. Instead we told her representative, “You wan
t to do something for Whitney? Get her into a treatment center. You’re not helping her by saying, ‘She’s just marking the song and tomorrow she’ll be fine.’ ”

  It was all really harrowing. Ray Charles got back from the date in Germany just in time, so they had to send a police escort for him, but he came through onstage just like he always does. Garth Brooks also sang really great that night, but he only did the show because Dick and Lili had said that if he wanted out, they would replace him with Faith Hill’s husband, Tim McGraw.

  Even with everything that had gone on, it was a good medley, so I thought, “This will bring the house down and I’ll get a standing ovation.” When it was over, my son Cristopher stood up with Jane and then some other people also got up because the two of them were standing, but they had already given out so many awards by that point that no one really cared about the music. I had spent three months working on this and it stressed me out so much that I don’t think I did a very good job. We had a small band onstage, with Don Was in the pit conducting a nine- or an eleven-piece band when what we really needed was a big string section and a full orchestra.

  What happened with Whitney became a big story. Although it wasn’t true, Whitney’s people told everyone that the reason she didn’t sing that night was that she had a sore throat. I never heard from Whitney again but I found the whole incident really sad. I was also disappointed in myself for not realizing she would have so much difficulty with new material.

  Right after the awards show, I went out on the road to tour. I was so stressed out that I was going too fast and doing too much. When I played in Columbus, Ohio, with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Jane’s family was there. Afterward I got on the tour bus and was having trouble calming down. I kept thinking, “I’ve got to back off and slow down and get off this train.”

  Two days later, I got to Indianapolis to play the Indiana Roof Ballroom. I was walking through the venue that afternoon with my son Cristopher and my assistant and road manager, Sue Main, to do the sound check. There was a step down to the dance floor but the place was totally unlit so I couldn’t see it. I went down hard on my left shoulder and heard something crack. I knew right away I had broken it.

  Sue Main: We called the paramedics immediately and put something under Burt’s head and were careful not to move him. The paramedics came and Burt was pissed off because he was wearing one of his favorite T-shirts and they cut it off him. We ended up going to the hospital in the promoter’s car because Burt didn’t want to go in the ambulance.

  We had never had to cancel a show before, but we only had a few more hours until this one was scheduled to start at eight o’clock. I spent a lot of time on the phone with our agent while Burt was in the examination room. I was seriously considering canceling the show but Burt kept saying, “No. Don’t do anything yet. Just wait. Let’s just wait.”

  They did X-rays but it still wasn’t clear what had happened. Burt was asking the doctor if he could do any more damage to his shoulder by performing that night. He said, “It’s my left shoulder so I can’t conduct, but I can play with my right arm.” He somehow convinced the doctor that he was fine to do the show and the doctor gave him a shot for the pain and some additional pain pills and told Burt, “If it gets really bad, take these. But if you don’t need them, don’t take them.”

  We had been at the hospital for so long that we had to go straight back to the venue. We got Burt backstage, where he put on suit pants and a sweatshirt and off he went. No sound check. No rehearsal. Burt walked out and apologized to the audience for coming on almost an hour late and explained he’d had a little fall and had his arm in a sling. Everybody was very appreciative and he went on to do the show in what seemed like a state of euphoria.

  Burt was having a great time. He was very funny, laughing and telling jokes. When I got him back to the hotel I said, “Wow. You were amazing. You didn’t seem to be in any pain at all. You were so funny and just . . . so loose.” And he said, “Well, it was that pain pill I took.” It was just Burt being Burt and doing whatever it took to keep from canceling the show.

  They sent the X-rays to Los Angeles. My orthopedist read them and said I had a fractured shoulder. Although it never occurred to me at the time, I had gone on and done the show just like Marlene did after she had broken her shoulder in Germany. Unlike her, I’d had some chemical help to get through the pain. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was an accident just waiting to happen.

  I thought I could keep going and perform the next date, which was three concerts with the Milwaukee Symphony, but we had to cancel the rest of the tour. When I went for shoulder replacement surgery at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic, they inserted a titanium plate in the joint. I had never been injured like this before and the recovery took a lot longer than I thought it would. The pain was so bad I had to keep taking Vicodin, and then I had to work really hard to get off the stuff. I was seventy-one at the time and for the first time in my life I felt old.

  I eventually had to have the surgery redone because the muscle had fallen off the bone. It was a mess but they managed to fix it. In 2007, I was in Aspen around Christmastime when I slipped on some ice on the steps of my house and broke my other shoulder. I had to fly back to Los Angeles to have it replaced as well. I was in the hospital recovering from that surgery when I heard the news about Nikki.

  Chapter

  25

  Nikki, It’s You

  Angie Dickinson: The first time I read about Asperger’s was in Newsweek. My sister sent the article to me in July 2000 and said, “This sounds just like Nikki.” I circled the last paragraph, where it said that an institution is the last place these people should ever be sent. I finally went to UCLA, and after a doctor there examined Nikki, he said she might have Asperger’s. I said, “Doctor, she does have Asperger’s.” For Nikki, knowing what she had just didn’t help at all. She still couldn’t cope.

  Nikki was thirty-four years old when we found out what was really wrong with her. Her inability to interact with other people, her total lack of empathy, and all the compulsive and obsessive behaviors Nikki had demonstrated ever since she was a kid were all symptoms of a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome.

  Back when Nikki was born, no one knew nearly as much about this disease as they do now. I never heard any of the doctors who treated Nikki even mention the word “Asperger’s” or talk about autism. I know people who have problem kids but don’t want to find out what is really wrong with them and so never have them diagnosed. I did just the opposite with Nikki but it did us no good at all.

  If only somebody had told me the truth, I could have dealt with that. Nikki spent ten years in that center and nobody ever said to me that this was an autistic child. You’d think someone would have seen it but no one ever did. And all the while, Nikki just kept getting worse.

  After Jane and I had Oliver and Raleigh, Nikki would come to see us, but she had no patience at all for the kids. For her, they were an interruption, because she wanted to see this beautiful sunset and not be disturbed by them. The language she used was also hard for them to hear because she cursed all the time. By then I had really backed off trying have Nikki included in family gatherings, because for her my kids just got in the way and were a nuisance to her.

  Angie Dickinson: I moved into a new house in 1994 and the helicopters drove Nikki crazy. Helicopters, lawn mowers, motorcycles, leaf blowers, and weed whackers were like a drill in her ear. She couldn’t get the sounds out of her head and she was really suffering. I realized there was only one way to find real peace for Nikki and that was for me to stop doing all “the other things.” Don’t go to dinners or functions. Don’t play poker. Just pretty much give it all up. So I did and it helped. Nikki and I did everything together. We traveled together and saw movies and my whole life was Nikki. I was completely dedicated to her, and she was my soul mate.

  Not one percent of it was out of a sense of guilt
. She needed it. After she came out of the center, Nikki said the worst thing I ever heard. She said, “They stole my brain.” If she had been born now, they would have special classes and schools for her. They would also have a diagnosis, which they didn’t have back then.

  Nikki talked a lot about suicide. She was very open about it, even to people she didn’t know well. She read Final Exit, a book about planning suicide, and found out that asphyxiation was the most peaceful way she could do it—like going under anesthesia at the dentist. What could I do? I had promised Nikki that she would never, ever go into another hospital and I meant it. I wanted to make everything right for her but I couldn’t. The obituaries in the L.A. Times were filled with people my age and Nikki just couldn’t bear the thought of my death. I was her lifeline.

  In 2006, we went to church services together on Christmas Eve. Nikki had always wanted to sing but she didn’t, maybe because singing is so much about bringing out what’s inside you and she couldn’t cope with what was inside her. But that night Nikki just sang and sang. I’ll never forget how much gusto she put into those Christmas carols. She was free and at peace at that point because she knew where she was going.

  Angie knew it was coming and one of her friends had given Nikki a book about how to commit suicide, but I never believed she would do it. At the end, Nikki’s sensitivity to sound was so acute that she kept saying she was going to kill herself because of it. And then it was “If my mother dies, I’m going to kill myself.” Always her mother but never her father.

  I’d had surgery on my shoulder and I was in the hospital when Jane and I found out that our son, Oliver, who was on the Aspen snowboard team and competed nationally, had ruptured his spleen while snowboarding on the mountain. Jane flew off to Aspen to be with him and I was scheduled to be discharged from the hospital when Sue Main came to see me.