Read Anyone Who Had a Heart Online
Authors: Burt Bacharach
Anyone Who Had a Heart
Contents
I
had only been married to Angie Dickinson for about nine months when I started thinking about getting a divorce. Our problems had nothing to do with the fact that she was a much bigger star than me. We just weren’t really communicating with one another and part of that was my fault because I was still pretty immature at the time and so totally into my music that I could not have kept a real relationship going with anyone for an extended period of time.
When Angie told me she was pregnant, I was so surprised and overjoyed at the prospect of having a child that I completely forgot about all that and began doing everything I could to keep our marriage going. Angie had a difficult pregnancy, and while we were in New York together, she started having what looked like a miscarriage, so she went to see a doctor, who gave her some medication that was partly experimental.
Angie was just starting her sixth month when we went to a Dodgers game in Los Angeles. I had already written “Alfie” and recorded it with Cilla Black at the Abbey Road Studios in London, but the director of the movie decided he wanted Cher to cut the song so the picture could be distributed in America. I knew I wasn’t going to have any input at the session but on our way home after the game that night, Angie and I dropped in at Gold Star Studios, the magical room where Phil Spector had done all his incredible Wall of Sound records with the Ronettes, Darlene Love, and the Righteous Brothers.
Sonny Bono was producing the session. He had been heavily influenced by Spector so he had the same kind of setup, three percussion players and three guitars, and it was not at all the way I heard the song. By then I was used to controlling what was going on in the studio, but Sonny never once asked me, “Do you like the way it sounds?” It was not the way Cher was singing but what Sonny was doing to “Alfie” that I found so distressing.
I know it was just a coincidence, but as I remember it, Angie’s water broke while we were in the studio that night, so we both got out of there as fast as we could and went right to the old Cedars-Sinai Hospital, on Beverly Boulevard in Silver Lake. Angie managed to hold on to the baby so they let her go home.
About a week later, an infection started. Her doctor told us she was losing the baby, so Angie went back into the hospital, where she was in labor for the next twenty-six hours. It was a Tuesday and there was no radio or TV in her room. The All-Star Game was being played in St. Louis so Angie kept asking everyone, “Who’s ahead? Is the National League ahead?”
On July 12, 1966, our daughter was born, three months and twenty days prematurely. She weighed one pound, ten ounces and the doctors didn’t think she would live through the night, but somehow she did. Because no one had any idea how long this child might live, Angie and I were told not to give her a name.
When a baby was born prematurely back then, their chances of survival were not very good. Three years earlier, Jacqueline Kennedy had given birth five and a half weeks early to a baby boy who weighed four pounds, ten and a half ounces. The doctors put him into a hyperbaric chamber so he could be given oxygen under high pressure to keep his lungs clear, but he still died, thirty-nine hours after being born. If medical science could not keep the son of the President of United States alive, a baby who weighed four times as much as our daughter, how could Angie and I possibly think we would have any better luck?
Angie was in the hospital for five days before the doctors ever let her see our daughter. They didn’t want her to have that memory of her if the baby died. Like clockwork, I would go to the hospital every day to see her by myself.
Even after Angie had come out of the hospital and could drive, I would still go there on my own because I thought that if I changed anything I was doing, something bad might happen to our daughter. It had to be my own private thing so I could commune with her through the window of the preemie ward, where incredible nurses were doing everything they could to keep our baby alive.
Day after day, I would stand in front of the preemie ward, looking at my tiny little doll of a daughter in her incubator. Even though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I would start singing to her. You might think it would have been something I had written, but the song that got stuck in my head was “Hang On, Sloopy,” by the McCoys.
I stood there and sang that song to my daughter every day because I was afraid that if I didn’t, she wouldn’t be there when I came back to visit her the next day. I also got into doing all kinds of other things I thought might keep her alive. Right across the street from where Angie and I were living, on North Bundy Drive, our neighbors had a pool where they would always let me swim. Whenever I went there after Nikki was born, I would try to save all the bees and insects that fell into the water. I was hoping and praying this act would somehow also help save my baby girl. For me, it became another ritual.
One day about eight weeks after our daughter was born, I was standing in front of the preemie ward singing “Hang On, Sloopy” to her when two women who had been visiting someone in the maternity ward walked up. They began looking at all the preemies and one said to the other, “God, if I had one like that, I’d just throw it away.” Completely losing it, I started to scream at them. Then I chased them all the way to the elevator.
Angie and I had wanted to name our daughter Lea, after Leon Krohn, the doctor who had delivered her. I really loved the nurses in the preemie ward, and since they had been calling the baby Nikki, we decided to name her that. Nikki’s situation was so touch-and-go that she spent the first three months of her life in an incubator.
Because she stopped breathing a couple of times, they would sometimes have her on this little device that was kind of like a seesaw, to help clear the fluid from her lungs. The doctors had also instructed the nurses to give Nikki high doses of oxygen, which can sometimes be toxic to the eyes of premature babies. I had so much passion in wanting this child to make it that I said, “If she’s blind, she’s blind. Just let her live.”
Having a child changed me in ways I didn’t even really understand at the time. Despite all the hits I had already written and all the success I’d had in the music business, none of that seemed all that important to me anymore. So what if one of my songs went to number three or four on the charts? It didn’t matter nearly as much as my daughter’s life.
W
hen I was a kid, everyone in my family called me Happy. When I was born, my dad wanted to name me after himself so there would be a Big Bert and a Little Bert, but my mother didn’t want to put me through the hassle of being called Bertram, as my dad had been when he was a boy, so they compromised on Burt. But even though our names were spelled differently, people would always ask my mother, “Oh, is your son Bert Junior?” and she would say, “No, he’s not.”
To lessen the confusion, my mother finally just said, “Let’s call him Happy.” I’m not sure where she came up with that name, because I don’t think I was very happy as a kid. In fact, I was lonely most of the time. Since my dad was working as a buyer of men’s clothing in Kansas City at the time, he probably never thought that either of our names would ever be known outside our neighborhood.
Neither set of my grandparents thought my parents were a very good match for each other, and I think my mom and dad moved to Kansas City to keep their marriage a secret. I was born in Kansas City on May 12, 1928, but my childhood memories don’t begin until we moved to Forest Hills, Queens, where I grew up in an apartment on the second floor of a three-story building at 150 Burns Street, just a couple of blocks from Queens Boulevard.
No one in my family ever went to synagogue or paid much attention to being Jewish. We also didn’t talk about being Jewish with other people, so I got the feeling this was something shameful that I needed to hide. I didn’t have a lot of friends in Forest Hills but the kids I knew were Catholic, and most of them went to church at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs. Whenever we played football against a team with Jewish players, our captain would say, “Let’s go and kick the shit out of these Jews,” and I would say, ‘Yeah, let’s kick the shit out of these Jews!’ ” Because I wanted to be with them, I thought I had to talk that way, too.
As a teenager I was very short. At Forest Hills High School there were three thousand students, but not a single one of them, not even any of the girls, was smaller than me. So I already had enough problems without having to also admit I was Jewish.
I didn’t read a lot as a kid, but one book I really loved and read over and over was
The Sun Also Rises
, by Ernest Hemingway. I really identified with the hero, Jake Barnes, who couldn’t perform sexually because he was impotent. That was definitely not a problem for me. I was socially impotent because I was carrying around all this baggage, and I never felt like I fit in anywhere, not in school or in my neighborhood.
As a kid growing up in Forest Hills, I was Jewish but I didn’t want anybody to know about it. I was too small for any girl to even notice I was alive. I was reading
The Sun Also Rises
and I was walking around with a name like Happy. And while I might have been able to find myself by really learning how to play the piano, there was nothing in the world I hated doing more than that.
I started taking piano lessons when I was eight years old. Every day when I came home from school in the afternoon, my mother would make me sit down at the upright piano in our living room and practice for half an hour. In my house, the push about music always came from her. What I really wanted to do was be out in the street playing ball like everyone else I knew. Whenever my mother said I had to practice, there was always a fight and I would only do it because she didn’t give me any other choice.
My mother played piano by ear, which I thought was remarkable, and I wondered, “Why can’t she teach me to do this? It would be so much easier than sitting here doing scales over and over again.” But whenever I argued this point with her, she’d say, “You have to learn to play properly.” When she was young, my mother had wanted to be a singer. I don’t know what happened to those dreams, but after the career in music didn’t work out for her, she really leaned on me a lot.
My mother was born and raised in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Her father, Abe Freeman, owned a very successful cut-rate liquor store, until Prohibition put him out of business. Then he ran a pharmacy on the boardwalk, where he made enough money to send his three daughters—my mother, Irma, and her sisters, Dottie and Julia—to private school.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, Abe lost everything. Although he was president of Beth Israel, the Reform synagogue in Atlantic City founded by one of my Bacharach cousins, Abe could no longer afford to pay his dues so he went to the board to offer his resignation. When they accepted it, he never returned. Whatever connection my mother might have had with being Jewish also ended right then and there, which helps explain the way I was raised.
To the day she died, my mother had great taste in clothes and art and music. One of my cousins who used to visit us in Forest Hills still remembers our apartment as the most beautifully designed and decorated residence he had ever seen. It had high ceilings, wooden floors, and big windows that let in lots of light. At a time when everyone else had white walls, ours were all different colors and decorated with framed original oil paintings, some of which my mother had painted herself.
By the time I was a teenager, my father had become a well-known newspaper columnist. He and my mother went out to dinner a lot, but they never had to pay for anything because my father might write an article about the restaurant. I never really felt comfortable with them in a restaurant, because even though we weren’t going to be paying, my mother would still always ask the waiter, “Do you have orange juice?” And when he said, “Yes,” she’d say, “Are you sure it’s fresh?”
My dad was really driven and worked all the time but when it came to me he was the most gentle, no-pressure guy in the world. More than anything, I wanted to be like him. On Sunday mornings while I was waiting for him to wake up, I would go through all of his old scrapbooks, because he was definitely a hero to me. Like my mother, he’d grown up in Atlantic City, where he had worked delivering newspapers and then as a lifeguard on the beach during the summer.
A big guy who stood six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds, my dad looked a lot like his father, Max Bacharach, whom everyone called “Backy.” Always immaculately dressed in a high-collar shirt and spats, my grandfather would get in his hand-cranked Model T Ford and drive through Pennsylvania to all the small towns where he sold men’s clothing. Although Max made a good living as a salesman, his cousin Harry, who was the mayor of Atlantic City and after whom the Bacharach Giants, the local team in the Negro League, were named, and his cousin Isaac, who served eleven terms as a United States congressman, were a lot more successful than my grandfather.
When my dad was eighteen years old, he went off to college at the Virginia Military Institute, where he lettered in four sports. My father played fullback on the football team and captained the All-Southern conference championship basketball team. During World War I, he left college for a year to enlist as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
After graduating from VMI, my father went to work as a buyer of men’s clothing for a department store in Baltimore where he earned twenty dollars a week. Since he had to pay twenty-five dollars a week for room and board, he began playing professional basketball and football as a sideline. Being a professional athlete back then was not nearly as lucrative as it is now, and to keep enough money coming in, my father once played on five different professional basketball teams at the same time. Whenever two of his teams played each other, he had to pick which one he wanted to be on.
After working for Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City, when that store first opened, and then as a buyer for Bamberger’s in Newark, New Jersey, my father got a job at the Woolf Brothers department store in Kansas City. Shortly after I was born, we moved to Kew Gardens in Queens. After being out of work for six months, my dad started a small trade paper for the men’s clothing business and then became an associate editor at
Collier’s
magazine.
My father left that job to go into public relations and then cohosted a radio quiz show on WJZ called
Suit Yourself
. He was also the host of the first sponsored television program in New York City. Eventually my dad began writing a column called “Stag Lines,” which was syndicated in eighty-four newspapers, as well as a column called “Now See Here,” which ran five times a week in the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
, the
San Francisco Examiner
, and the
Indianapolis Star
. For many years he also appeared in a segment called “For Men Only,” which was shown in newsreels in movie theaters all over the country. He also wrote three books about men’s fashion and grooming and household hints, and they sold pretty well.
Because my dad never had an unkind word to say about anyone in what he wrote, he was always working and doing okay, and so I didn’t feel the impact of the Depression while I was growing up in Forest Hills. On the other hand, I also never felt rich, because all the people my father knew in the clothing business had a lot more money than us.
I was thirteen years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and I remember the day very clearly. I had gone with my parents to the Polo Grounds to see the New York football Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers in the last regular-season game of the year. Tuffy Leemans, the star fullback for the Giants, was being honored that day.
Instead of sitting with my parents, I was watching the game from the press box with Dick Fishell, who was doing the radio play-by-play for WHN. Dick was a good friend of my parents and I really looked up to him because he was good-looking and had all the girls. It just seemed to me like he had it all. When the news came in to him just before halftime, Dick looked at me and said, “Shit, they bombed Pearl Harbor.” I said, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?”
At halftime, I went down to see my parents, who were sitting about ten or twelve rows back from the field, and I asked, “Where’s Pearl Harbor? Because they just bombed it.” My father said, “Who bombed it?” and I said, “The Japanese.” So that’s how my dad found out about our involvement in World War II. This was long before CNN and twenty-four-hour news, of course, so no one else at the Polo Grounds knew a thing about it until the game was over.
My father was forty-three years old when the war started. Even though he was too old to serve in the armed forces, he worked as a civilian consultant for the Air Force at Wright Field in Ohio. He also sold $5 million in war bonds at special events and helped bring entertainment to servicemen in hospitals. For me as a kid, World War II was something I read about in the newspapers and heard other people talk about. It really didn’t affect me directly at all and until the war was over I knew nothing about the millions of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.
What I remember clearly from those years is coming home from watching the New York football Giants play the Chicago Bears at the Polo Grounds on November 14, 1943. When my dad and I walked into the house my mother was listening to the radio. Still really excited about the game, I started to tell her about it when she interrupted me. “I’m sorry you weren’t here because you missed something unbelievable. Bruno Walter was supposed to conduct the New York Philharmonic but he got sick, so this young, unknown conductor took over and did a great job. His name is Leonard Bernstein.” I went into my room and I thought, “Leonard Bernstein? Shit, I know this guy.” And I did.
At that time, I had already begun taking piano lessons from a woman named Rose Raymond, who had studied with Leopold Godowsky at the Vienna Conservatory. She lived on Riverside Drive and Eighty-Sixth Street, in Manhattan. Once a week, I would sit with her for an hourlong lesson, and it was always brutal because she would make me do all these finger exercises at the keyboard without ever letting me play a single note. At one of her recitals I was supposed to play “Clair de Lune” but I forgot the music and really screwed it up good.
Even though I thought I had no talent and still hated to practice, I would ride the subway once a week from Forest Hills into Manhattan, get off the train at Fifty-Third Street, and then take a double-decker bus to Rose Raymond’s apartment. No matter how cold it was, I would always ride on top because I really loved being up there. I was sitting on top of the bus one day with a couple of other brave people in the cold when this young guy who I thought was kind of weird came up the stairs and sat down next to me.
When I started whistling a tune, he said, “Is that ‘Two O’Clock Jump’?” I said, “Yeah, how do you know that? Are you a musician?” He said he was, so I asked him if he played in any of the local bars. He said, “No, actually I’m a conductor.” When I asked him what he conducted, he said, “The New York Philharmonic.” I said, “Come on. I know who conducts the Philharmonic. Bruno Walter.” And he said, “Well, I’m an assistant conductor.”
After we had introduced ourselves to one another, I was getting off the bus at Eighty-Sixth and Riverside and the last thing I said to him was, “Well, I’ll see ya on top someday, Lenny.” What I meant was that I would probably see him again someday on top of the bus. Now he had made this sensational debut by stepping in at the last minute for Bruno Walter on a nationwide radio broadcast. The next day, the
New York Times
ran a front-page story about it, so I wrote him a letter, but I never got a response.
When I told my mother how I’d met Leonard Bernstein, she thought it was marvelous. Although I think she secretly hoped I would be conducting or composing for the Philharmonic some day, she always made a point of telling me, “Music is not a career I want you to have. I just want you to be able to play for your own pleasure, the way I do.”
A couple of years later, I went to music camp at the Tanglewood Music Center in western Massachusetts. Before I left, Morton Gould, a well-known composer and conductor who was one of my parents’ friends, told me, “Don’t worry about the girls. Look out for the guys.” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but the first night I was there, this guy asked me to take off my shoes and socks so he could put his foot up against mine. I thought that was really weird so I refused. Even if I had taken off my shoe, I would have only gone as far as my sock.
