They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  “I have to go out to California for a week,” I said. “Do you want to come with me and see Richard again?” Carole was hoping to get a job with Richard Perry, who I had introduced her to in New York. We even spent a few evenings at Studio 54 together.

  “Leave my job? Well, I guess I could take a little time off.”

  “Good. We’re going to take the train.”

  “The train?” she said, laughing. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I think it’ll be really relaxing. And I don’t have to have any fear, and—”

  “Caaa, that’s a week of just travel. I can’t be away that long. My boss’ll kill me.”

  “Oh, Carole, you know you want to come to California.”

  “Okay, I’ll go.”

  It was quite a ride. (I didn’t tell her until we left Grand Central Station about the six hours in Chicago.) The accommodations were not deluxe: two seats by day, bunk beds by night, a toilet wedged in next to a tiny shower that drizzled on you, though not strongly enough to be sure that your hair was soap-free.

  I looked forward to the starch-filled meals and sugary desserts in the dining car. I’d like to say I enjoyed the ever-changing scenery, but for the most part railroad tracks are rarely placed in the most beautiful areas of town. But Carole was fun and certainly made the trip go faster, though not fast enough, but you can’t have everything.

  When it came to travel, I was a mess. And yet, at the end of the ride, my songwriting was alive and well and waiting for me in California.

  Twelve

  NOW THAT I WAS starting to have more hits, I too wanted to join the growing list of singer-songwriter artists. One of my first meetings in LA was with Joe Smith, who was the chairman of Elektra/Asylum Records. This was my favorite record label, primarily because David Geffen had built Asylum Records by signing the most talented singer-songwriters on the West Coast. It had become a “Tiffany” label with only the finest artists on its roster. But by 1976 David had left to become a vice president of Warner Bros. Pictures, and Asylum was now part of the larger Warner/Elektra/Atlantic family.

  I walked into Joe Smith’s very large office and was duly impressed with the number of gold records he had, clustered as close as bathroom tiles on his walls. He was a pleasant-looking man, not tall, maybe in his late forties, and I felt very comfortable with him. After some music business chat, he asked, “What can I do for you, Carole?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve been writing a lot with Melissa Manchester and Peter Allen, but I feel I’d like to record my own songs as well.”

  I was waiting for him to ask me to make some demos for him to evaluate the way I sang, but instead he said, “Have your lawyer call me and we’ve got a deal. Go make a great album for us.”

  I was shocked and exhilarated. I couldn’t believe it. He never asked to hear me sing. Just like that I was given the green light to go make a record. It’s amazing, I thought, what a few hits can do. Soon my excitement gave way to panic. What if he hated the way I sang? I had a funny kind of voice. It was not the voice of a real singer. I didn’t have great range or power to hold long notes. My voice would never have been a vehicle to sing someone else’s songs, but when I sang my own, though it was breathy and occasionally gravelly, it had a vulnerability that was in keeping with the lyrics and a soulfulness that came from somewhere within me that was true. Which is sort of a dichotomy because where was that frailty when I walked in cold to Joe’s office and announced I wanted to make an album?

  Once again I was willing to put myself out there. Along with my fears, there was this fierce ambition to be heard and seen and to interpret my songs, my own way.

  Brooks Arthur had produced Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen,” a classic song about teen angst and not fitting in. I liked him very much and thought he would be the perfect producer for me.

  BETTE MIDLER AND HER boyfriend-manager Aaron Russo were renting a house in Bel Air in the summer of 1976. Aaron, a future failed candidate for the Republican nomination for governor of Nevada, was at the time focused on finding the right movie for Bette to make her debut in.

  My good friend and sometimes collaborator Bruce Roberts was in Los Angeles staying in their guest room. Bruce was younger than me by about ten years. We’d met in New York City and had written some songs together. Always upbeat, he was on the short side, about twenty pounds overweight, and openly gay (after Peter Allen gave him permission by example to be himself). He was warm, funny, and impossible not to like. He was also wonderfully musical, had something magical in his voice, and would go on to record his own songs in the late Seventies and write “No More Tears/Enough Is Enough” for Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer.

  I’ve always liked to share my friends so I introduced Bruce to Bette Midler in the early Seventies. My friendship with Bette evolved out of our sharing the same group of friends, mainly Melissa, Peter, and Barry Manilow. She and I have always kept in touch no matter who was living on which coast. For me that Bicentennial summer was our most enjoyable—and certainly craziest—time together.

  At Bette’s request, Bruce and I decided to take a stab at writing some songs with her while we were all in LA. Bette was like no one I’ve ever written with, before or since. Her brain rarely stopped, and when it did, you were never sure where it would be rushing off to next.

  “Why do you always use the same words when you write your songs?” she asked me as we began. “I mean, why don’t you ever bother to find new words? You’re lazy.”

  At that moment, I’d enjoyed a number of hit songs as a writer. As a writer, she’d had none. And yet that accusative, brash, know-it-all manner made me feel ever so slightly intimidated, though not enough to keep me from laughing at how inadvertently funny she was. Like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, she pointed her finger and said, “You’d have even more hits if you used more unusual words.”

  “Well, that’s your feeling. I have spent years and years trying to condense the words in my songs to be honest, almost conversational, and deceptively simple. I believe that lyrics should make a direct connection in the shortest amount of time to the listener’s heart. So you’re basically asking me to go against my nature and my entire philosophy of songwriting.”

  “I still think the same words get boring,” she said, getting in the last word.

  One afternoon Bruce sat down at the keyboard. I took my place in a cushioned chair, yellow pad and pencil in hand as always. Bette, instead of sitting, began to pace the room, pulling books off the shelves that lined her living room wall.

  “Look at these words,” she said, randomly opening a book. “ ‘Curious’! You’ve never used the word ‘curious’ in a song. That’s a good word.” She opened another book. “ ‘Iconic.’ ‘Misfit.’ ‘Drunk.’ Where are these words in your songs? Everything’s ‘home,’ and ‘rain,’ and ‘light.’ ” She was impassioned now, glasses on the tip of her nose, shouting random words at me while throwing down one book and picking up another. “ ‘Dangling’! ‘Branches’! ‘Forbidden’! Those are good words! Have you ever used any of them?”

  “Come on, Bette,” I said, “let’s write a song. You asked me to come here and write songs.”

  “Yes, but we’re here to write better songs. Fresher songs.”

  Bruce started to play something so she’d be intrigued enough to move toward the piano.

  “Let’s write a song about someone who’s breaking up with her boyfriend,” I said.

  “No-o-o-o!” Bette said, making sure the Os resonated in the room. “You didn’t hear anything I said. We’re not here to write some sad breakup song like you always write. Let’s throw the moron out of the house.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, something I often say instead of actually laughing. I threw out two lines:

  I stayed out late one night and you moved in

  I didn’t mind ’cause of the state you were in

  Bruce was already playing a riff that had this great sense of fun to it, like a metronome in a heavy fo
ur feel. Bette came up with the next line:

  May I remind you that it’s been a year since then

  This set the tone for the insanity of the rest of the song. We decided to laundry-list what the guy had accumulated while he was mooching off of her. The whole song that followed reeked of Bette’s sensibility. She was pulling out rhymes, taking enormous pleasure in herself when she came up with something that amused her, like “your mangy cat away,” and when I said, “your baby fat away,” she cackled her approval. Without Bette, there’s no way Bruce and I would ever have thought to write this song.

  So pack your toys away

  Your pretty boys away

  Your 45s away

  Your alibis away

  Your Spanish flies away

  Your one-more-tries away

  Your old tie-dyes away

  You’re moving out today

  Now Bette, on a high from having finished a song, was up for immediately starting another. Bruce started to play some chords, a little on the melancholy side, and we started a ballad called “Amelia,” which I believe began, though surely didn’t end, as an homage to the aviatrix. Bette and I were both contributing lyrics, and I think, certainly in looking back, that neither of us had any idea what the other was writing about.

  Amelia,

  A thousand miles from home

  Bound for Corsica

  She left the radio playing

  Amelia knew all the saints by heart

  At this point I felt the song making a sharp turn toward some other Amelia.

  The neighbors quietly agreed

  She’d go a long, long way

  Now came our chorus: “And ohhhhhhhh,” Bette sang so seriously,

  I will remember you

  Light up a candle

  And I will say a prayer or two

  “A prayer or two”? How could that line have gotten past me? How did I not change it to “a prayer for you”? But the next two lines confirmed the futility of trying to edit the song.

  The doctor came today

  but she’d already gone

  What doctor? Who was this woman and where did she go? This could maybe, just maybe, have worked if it were a Sgt. Pepper song and we were the Beatles. And they’d know who the doctor was.

  Amelia

  Hair of gold

  Eyes of blue

  Carry on

  There was more.

  Monday, the day they brought her home

  I wore my Sunday best

  and heard the radio playing

  Amelia

  Your secret’s safe with me

  It doesn’t matter now

  that they would never leave us both alone . . .

  In a ten-day They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?–like marathon, we wrote five or six songs. One of them became a Top Twenty R&B hit by the Moments called “Oh I Could Have Loved You.” Which, by the way, was exactly the kind of song Bette announced to us that she did not want to write.

  Occasionally, Bruce and I would be witness to one of Aaron and Bette’s brutal rows. They always started the same way. Aaron, overweight with long black hair, would enter the living room and announce, “Bette, my love, I have found you the perfect script. The perfect movie to make you the star you are.”

  “Let me see!” she’d say suspiciously, ripping the script out of his hand. A few beats and then a very loud “Whaaaat? This is a fuckin’ part for Julie Christie. You don’t even know who I am! I can’t play that part. You gotta find a part for me.”

  Aaron screamed back, “Believe me, I know you’re not Julie Christie.”

  Then she’d shut him down with “Get the hell out of here. Can’t you see we’re writing?”

  Out of all the songs we wrote, the only one Bette recorded was “You’re Moving Out Today.” She liked it so much that she added it as the only studio track on the live album she was about to release. Bruce played keyboard on it and did all the wacky voices meant to evoke the evictee.

  Atlantic Records released Bette’s version as a single in the United States in early 1977. It got up to number 42. Bruce, ever the diplomat, provided those very same services for me when I recorded it for my first album.

  Thirteen

  BACK IN NEW YORK and still unhappily with Andrew, I got a call from someone at A&M Records asking me if I would consider writing a lyric with Marvin Hamlisch for some long-forgotten TV pilot.

  Marvin Hamlisch had won three Oscars in one night: Best Original Score for The Way We Were, Best Adapted Score for The Sting, and Best Song, “The Way We Were.” He had won a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for A Chorus Line, one of the greatest musicals ever. Marvin Hamlisch was every Jewish mother’s wish for her unmarried daughter.

  “Sure,” I said coolly. “I’d like to meet him.”

  When he called, he was very matter of fact. We set a time to meet at his apartment, and he immediately got off the phone.

  A week later I rang the bell. He answered the door with a phone to his ear.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, motioning for me to sit down on the chair he had placed next to the piano. “Hold on a second, I’m just wrapping up this call.”

  “Listen, Suzanne,” he said into the phone, “I rewrote the string section for Liza and she pushed the session back and now it’s tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you come over and I’ll show you where to make those changes on your scores? Thanks.”

  He was off the phone as abruptly as he had ushered me in.

  “Hi, I’m Marvin. I didn’t think you’d be so cute.”

  He was tall and thin. He had dark curly hair, cut close to his head so you couldn’t really tell it was curly, but I could. (Having wavy hair myself, it was one of those things I paid attention to.) Behind his horn-rimmed glasses I could see dark, intense eyes. He had a prominent nose and a largish mouth. He was wearing a dark suit, with a vest and tie. I thought he’d either come from or was going somewhere important, though it turned out this was just his casual look. When he got really loose he’d lose the jacket and put on a wool patterned sweater vest with a pair of tan trousers.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d be so tall.”

  “Would you like me to be shorter? I can sit down.”

  “No, no. I’d just like to be taller.”

  “Well, I can’t help you there. I’m a composer, not a magician.” He walked into his kitchen. “Want something to drink? Water? Tea?”

  “Water would be good. No ice, please.”

  “No ice? Who drinks water without ice?”

  “It’s much better for you without ice,” I said. “Easier on your stomach. A nutritionist told me that.”

  “Oh, a nutritionist,” he teased. “Don’t tell me you’re one of them.”

  “Who’s ‘them’?”

  “You know, those airy-fairy vegetarians who haven’t had a good meal since they were breast-fed. I had a doctor once who told me to stop eating all the foods I love. Corned beef, pastrami, ice cream. I asked him, ‘Tell me, doctor, if I eat that way, will I live longer or will it just seem like that?’ ”

  I laughed. “No, I eat. Believe me, I can eat.”

  This whole conversation was taking place in double time. Marvin talked at the speed of light, and I easily matched his pace because, remember, I am a chameleon, and also a New Yorker. I thought he was funny.

  “All right, I’m getting distracted,” he said. “Let’s write the song they want, though I think the show is going to bomb.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little deflatedly. “I’d hate to think that the one song we write together is going to be a bomb before we even write it.”

  I don’t know if he heard me. He was playing his piano and suddenly I realized he was playing “Don’t Cry Out Loud.”

  “Great song,” he said. “I love a good pop song.” He stopped playing. “Well,” he said, “if we don’t get something today, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. I have to go to London.” He said he was going over to write the score for the next James
Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, and that he’d also be writing the theme song.

  “I just thought of a great title,” I said. “ ‘Nobody Does It Better.’ ”

  I don’t know how I came up with it. I just thought about James Bond and that’s what popped out of my mouth. Marvin instantly loved it and within seconds we’d both forgotten about the song we’d gotten together to write and he was playing the melody of the chorus of “Nobody Does It Better.” I remember marveling at how he changed keys in a second.

  We sang it and I added the words

  Makes me feel sad for the rest

  Nobody does it half as good as you

  Baby, you’re the best

  I knew, having taught English, that “half as good as you” was not proper grammar, but writing “Nobody does it half as well as you,” which is correct, sounded terrible to my ear. Many times in writing songs, I made grammatically incorrect choices because certain words just sang better and sounded better to me than others. And besides, Marvin loved it immediately.

  We were such an improbable pair, kooky little me in the tee shirt and jeans that I wore every day, and him looking like he was on his way to a business meeting. Total opposites, but right from the beginning when we created music we were absolutely in sync. He played it again and added most of the verse melody in what seemed like seconds.

  And I loved it.

  He wanted to sell it, and me, to Cubby Broccoli, who produced all the Bond movies. He needed to convince Mr. Broccoli that even though I wasn’t a seasoned film collaborator, I was absolutely the right lyricist for this job.

  I felt a spark between us. He was fun. And while he wasn’t handsome to my eyes, he was so attractive when he was connected to his music. Marvin and I met one more time in New York, when he put the melody to “Nobody Does It Better” on tape for me to work on while he was gone, and when we said good-bye, he kissed me. That was surprising. What was more surprising was I liked it.