Anyone Who Had a Heart (17 page)
Read Anyone Who Had a Heart Online
Authors: Burt Bacharach
T
he 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.
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.
