“Okay,” I said, barely there. “That sounds good.”
So I sat there waiting to be led to the greatest moment of my life as Michael Caine and Maggie Smith came out to present the Best Song award. My heart started to pound in my chest, with its occasional skipped beats—something I’d already consulted my doctor about, and had been as reassured as someone like me could be that these were simply “benign extra systoles” usually triggered by stress. It also occurred to me that I might be having a heart attack, and that would be a great way out of here. I could imagine someone in the audience saying, “They took her out on a stretcher. I don’t know who she was.”
As the nominees were announced, I felt like I was outside of my body, watching myself judging myself mercilessly, with only a small part of me wanting to win. When I heard, “And the winner is . . . ‘You Light Up My Life,’ ” my disappointment was overshadowed by my relief at not having to walk on stage and make a speech in front of the whole world. I just wasn’t ready yet.
“Agghh!” I heard from the familiar voice on my left. “I never liked that song. Or that girl. Or her father. Carole, don’t you ever write anything for Debby Boone. You were robbed. Marvin, sweetheart, you were robbed. Lilly, my friend, don’t you think they were both robbed?”
Lilly, who after the tissue incident had tuned my mother out, did not answer. If she was thinking anything at that moment, it was most likely how she might get away from Anita, and probably me, too, if she could. She would have been happiest just to have gone home with her Marvin, who looked downtrodden.
Twenty-six years later, the American Film Institute honored “Nobody Does It Better” as number 67 of the 100 greatest movie songs ever, and some online list named it the number 2 best Bond song, behind “Goldfinger.” And Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, performed it in concert and called it “the sexiest song ever written.” Sometimes losing is winning.
BEFORE OUR NOMINATION FOR “Nobody Does It Better” was announced, Marvin had been hired to score the motion picture Ice Castles, and he asked me to write the title song with him (which Melissa Manchester wound up singing). The film was about a young figure skater who loses her sight in an accident but begs her coach not to reveal she is blind so she can enter a big ice-skating competition. Thus my title, “Looking Through the Eyes of Love.”
When we sat down to write it, he played a series of chords until I said, “Wait, I like that.”
“This?” he said, playing it again.
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s so pretty. What if we start, ‘Please don’t let this feeling end,’ as though she is in the middle of skating.”
Marvin sang those words to his melody and went on to play the rest of the phrase. I offered up: “It’s everything I am, everything I want to be.”
He sang my new words, writing the whole melody so quickly that I was suddenly playing catch-up with my lyrics.
“Listen, I can hear the string line coming in here, and listen to this figure that would be great to start the record off with.” He was talking very quickly.
“Hold on! I’ve only written the first line of the lyric. You’re already arranging the finished record!”
“Just listen to this line for the intro,” he said, as excited as if he’d just found the cure for any of those diseases I lived in dread of.
“Can you just play the beginning of the melody one more time, please? I think I have another line there.”
We were practically talking over each other. Creating with Marvin was like being on three cups of espresso. We kept building on each other. Everything came together so quickly it was like a whirlwind—like if you blinked you could miss the whole collaboration. Before I knew it, we were done.
The song had a very positive lyric. Most of my “positive” love songs, it seems, have been written for motion pictures. As the lyricist writing for a film, your responsibility is to serve the film first—the lyric has to reflect what we are seeing in the movie. I liked this new discipline. I didn’t have to write entirely out of my imagination. It gave me a map to help craft my lyric.
I can see what’s mine now
Finding out what’s true,
Since I’ve found you
Looking through the eyes of love.
The song earned me my second Oscar nomination in as many years. I felt somewhat more ready to get up on stage and accept an award this time, but we lost to the song from Norma Rae, “It Goes Like It Goes.” That song is virtually unknown today, while the “Theme from Ice Castles,” a very pretty song that was easy to sing, went on to be a favorite among Miss America contestants—a dubious achievement, I understand—and found an instant place in elevator music all over the country.
WE WERE ON A nice roll. Next we wrote “Break It to Me Gently” for Aretha Franklin. Marvin played me a melody one day and said he could hear Aretha singing it. I was less sure, but I trusted his feeling.
Marvin’s melody in the chorus was so beautiful that we wrote that first, which is unusual. I came up with
Break it to me gently
Be careful what you say
And save it, save it till tomorrow
Maybe then you’ll stay, one more day
Then he wrote a melody that was his idea of how an R&B verse would sound. I thought it was a little over the top. “It’s so rhythmic,” I said. “It doesn’t match the smooth chorus and it doesn’t sound black.”
“Trust me!” he said. “It’s perfect. Give me some words and you’ll see how good it is.” I still thought it was a little cheesy, but I wrote it anyway. We put it down on tape. He played it back. I said, “Maybe it’s better than I thought.”
Marvin loved when I admitted he was right. He played it back again, singing the verse and dancing, pretending he was one of Aretha’s background singers, doing some kind of choreographed dance moves with his hands and feet as he sang. He was hilarious.
Aretha was living in Encino at the time, so when the song was finished, he thought nothing of driving us out to play it for her in person. Marvin didn’t make demos like the rest of us. He would just call an artist and ask if he could come and play him or her a song, and because he was Marvin Hamlisch they’d say, “Are you kidding? Of course.” I don’t think he realized this wasn’t the way it worked for the rest of us.
Aretha immediately loved the song, and it went to Number One on the Rhythm & Blues charts. So much for my doubts about Marvin’s aptitude for R&B.
Next came Alan Pakula’s film of Jim Brooks’s first movie script, Starting Over. Candice Bergen played a not-very-good singer-songwriter, so the challenge was to write her three very good not-very-good songs. The fun part of that was being in her apartment and teaching her the three songs. Candice herself was not a very good singer, so she sang them convincingly enough to earn a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.
Meanwhile, Elektra was happy enough with the response to my first album that they wanted more, so I started working on my second, . . . Too.
With more money and more choices, I moved into a house on Schuyler Road in Beverly Hills. Marvin was becoming more bicoastal, taking more films to score than he might have if he weren’t seeing me. When he was in LA we lived together in my new house.
My mother was still living in New York, and I was now covering her rent and helping to support her lifestyle. The truth is, it was worth it to have the physical distance from her required for me to have my own life. She was happy to stay where her life essentially was, and happy to dine out on the fact that I was dating Marvin Hamlisch.
If you look at the three years Marvin and I were together, you would see how heavily weighted the working and creating were. We wrote dozens of songs, many of them successful. Marvin and I were pouring out music constantly, and it felt pretty effortless. People were calling us to write for films, and Marvin loved having some hits in my world of pop that he had felt so distant from.
Everything was about music, and we spent very little time being social. We were both driven, we
both wanted more hits, and I don’t remember us ever turning down an opportunity because we wanted to spend time alone with each other. The truth was, I had more passion for the music and creating it than I did for us as lovers.
Seventeen
FOR THE FIRST TIME in my life I was living with the man I was writing with. But there was a price to pay for his kind of staggering creativity and output. Marvin suffered from horrible migraines. They were so bad he sometimes needed to lie in a darkened room for days, leaving him depressed and me feeling helpless.
Once, my friend Sandy Gallin (the manager of, among others, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, and Neil Diamond) was hanging out with me in the living room while Marvin was upstairs, presumably sleeping. Sandy said something funny that made us both laugh aloud. Marvin got out of bed and came downstairs, furious that I could find anything funny when he was feeling so horrible.
When Marvin got his headaches, he felt that the only person who truly knew how to take care of him was his mother. She had recognized his talent when he was practically a baby and nurtured it, and him, with complete devotion. He loved her deeply. Whenever we were in the same city, Lilly seemed to make his tea with warm milk better than I could, so I’d move aside and let her take care of him, though I wasn’t clear on how I could fuck up a cup of Lipton’s. It made me feel sad that he didn’t think I could take care of him.
I suspected that Marvin might be bipolar, because his highs were off the charts and his lows were so devastatingly low and lasted longer than any headache I’d ever known anyone to have.
There were a few other red flags popping up.
When he was with me, Marvin, who was so brilliant, thought he was just an “old-fashioned composer” and I was some pop princess with the same kind of fame as Linda Ronstadt or Carly Simon. I was so not in their league. They sold millions of records; I sold a hundred thousand. Still, when I had success with a song that I didn’t write with him, he was either jealous if he thought it was good or angry when it was a hit that he thought was undeserving.
But the biggest flag was about my performing.
It should never have been an issue, because I never loved performing, but Marvin feared my little four-city tour to support my record would widen to bigger venues and bigger audiences.
“I would definitely think about our getting married,” he once told me, “if I knew you would never perform for more than, tops, about five hundred people.” I found his comment to be weirdly specific, and though I was never pushing for marriage, I would tell him over and over again I had no intention of ever playing big venues. But I did have difficulty with someone telling me they loved me and then putting a limitation on what I could do or be. Love shouldn’t diminish you; it should enhance you. Lord knows where I got this idea when my mother, who adored me, was also so relentlessly critical. But I believed it, despite the absence of proof, and I still do.
We also had two very different sets of friends, and neither of us was excited about the other’s choices. His friends seemed to me too straight, too old-fashioned, too professional (as in doctors and lawyers) and mine seemed to him too “out there,” too showbizzy, and too druggy. Though we were the same age, Marvin gravitated to older friends, and I guess I spent time with what he saw as a “faster” crowd: Sandy Gallin, David Geffen, Bruce Roberts, and Bette Midler.
I have been close to Sandy Gallin and David Geffen, the wunderkinds of the music business, for almost four decades. Sandy and I were fixed up on a blind date while I was still living in my parents’ apartment in the early Sixties, when he was still bothering to go on dates with women. Obviously, that didn’t work out. But when we re-met in the Seventies he quickly became my sorely needed closest friend in LA. Around the same time, I met David Geffen and learned that Sandy and David were best friends from their early days as agents, Sandy at GAC and David at the William Morris Agency.
Sandy, always full of fun, was about friends, parties, and spectacle. He was the perfect manager because he loved celebrity and had a very keen eye for talent. I remember him dragging me down to some hole in the Village to see Whoopi Goldberg at a time when no one knew her name. Sandy knew she would be a star and knew how to court her, sign her, and eventually deliver that stardom. Through Sandy I widened my social circle in LA. Over the years Sandy has become family to me, the one who by example reminds me how important it is to laugh and take things lightly. His homes, so many of which he’s bought only to enhance and then sell, are places I feel instantly comfortable in. Sandy is like my brother.
David, meanwhile, was uncanny in his choice of artists, signing icons like Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt, and was brilliantly incisive, cutting right through the bullshit to the truth of any situation. When I was briefly dating Nicky Chinn, co-owner of Dreamland Records—a short-lived label with a roster of B-list talent—David said to him, “Ultimately, Nicky, your career is not only defined by which artists you sign, but also by who you don’t sign.” I’ve applied this bit of wisdom to all areas of my life, from things I’ve created to things I’ve acquired.
Between the energy of the two of them I couldn’t help but feel “covered.” There was alchemy in the combination of the three of us. I’m not sure quite how it worked, but I am clear that I loved them and still do. Although David can sometimes come down a little hard in sharing certain truths with me that I might prefer not to hear, they are almost always correct and I’m better for having heard them.
WHEN I RENTED THE house on Schuyler Road in Beverly Hills I hired a Sikh housekeeper, Dhanwant Kaur. The Sikh religion forbids cutting hair on any part of the body, so she wore a white turban over her long, voluminous, curly hair. Her unibrow (think Frida Kahlo) was in desperate need of trimming, but she wasn’t looking to me for beauty advice. Or fashion advice. She was happy in a full-length white leotard swathed in layer over layer of crisscrossing cloth. If you had to describe her quickly, you might say she most resembled a giant gauze bandage with a face peeking out ten inches below the top.
But I liked that she was spiritual, did yoga, meditated, and ate healthfully. Marvin hated the tasteless, mostly vegetarian food at the house. “If you love animals so much,” he used to tease me, “why are you eating all their food?” He longed for corned beef and pastrami and all the other treats that could not be found in our home.
Bruce Roberts, my songwriting friend from New York, was once again living with me, and the three of us sat at the piano one day to work on a song for Barbra Streisand’s next album, Wet. (Yes, every song had to have a water theme.) We were writing what I thought was a beautiful song, “Niagara.” Marvin was replaying the chorus when he stopped suddenly and started to wave his hand back and forth over his forehead, and then his ear.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Something’s not right,” he said, his face looking anything but okay.
“Oh. Now my heart is beating fast.” Now his hand was patting his heart, fast.
“Calm down, honey,” I said. “Maybe you’re having a panic attack.”
“I’m worried it’s a heart attack,” he said.
“Do you have any pain down your left arm?”
“No,” he said, moving to the sofa and sitting down. He hung his head as if he was sitting shiva for someone he loved. His nose looked very long to me.
“But my heart’s still beating fast.”
“Take deep breaths. I’ll get you some water, but take deep breaths.”
He drank the water. “Better?”
“Yeah, sort of. I just felt weird. I wonder if that brownie I ate was bad.”
“The brownie in the freezer?” I asked.
“Yeah. With milk. Of course there’s no real milk here, just that one percent kind.”
“Why would you eat a brownie that said, ‘Do Not Eat’? Richard Perry left that. For me.”
Bruce now started laughing hysterically. Marvin glared at him. “Come on, Marvin, it’s funny. You’re stoned.”
“The
re is nothing funny about this,” he declared. Then, “Carole, are there any real cookies in this house?”
I walked over to him and gave him a big hug. “Honey,” I said, “this is the first time you’ve ever gotten high.”
“Let’s just write this song,” he said, going back to the piano. His mind was so strong he could just decide not to be high anymore. And we finished the song, though he did send Dhanwant Kaur out for a run to Stan’s Donuts in Westwood.
The result was one of my favorite of our songs. Now all we had to do was get Barbra to want to sing it.
We drove out to her lavender home in Malibu to play it for her. Sue Mengers, the infamous Hollywood agent, always ample in size, was on the deck soaking in a bubbling hot tub, oblivious to the fact that three newcomers were now viewing her large breasts as they alternately bounced up and down to the rhythm of the water jets. It was a sight that made you want to turn away even as you continued to stare, transfixed. And it was a sight that Bruce, to this day, remembers vividly, as he does her response: “What’s the matter? You never saw a pair of tits before?”
“Not if I could help it,” he stage-whispered to me.
Finally, Barbra came out and asked to hear the song.
We went inside and Marvin sat down at the piano. “What’s it called?” she asked.
“ ‘Niagara,’ ” I said proudly.
She scrunched her face, thought to herself for several seconds, then turned and seriously asked, “Is that wet enough?” Blanching, I said, “It’s very wet, Barbra. It’s Niagara Falls. What’s wetter?”
“Oh, okay. Let me hear it.”
Marvin played and Bruce sang it beautifully, with just enough Barbraesque touches to turn her on but not offend her, as I tried to read her reaction. Marvin played it in her key in case she was humming along in her head. Slowly she responded, “I like it.” And she did, because she recorded it for the Wet album. It should have been the single, but I guess all songwriters say that about their songs.
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