They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  Eighteen

  I CONTINUED TO WRITE pop songs, and Marvin began working with Neil Simon to turn one of his plays, The Gingerbread Lady, into a musical.

  While they were collaborating, Marvin would talk to Neil about what it was like living and working with the same person: how we once dashed off a song in our evening clothes, how we were always comparing our BMI and ASCAP statements to figure out which organization gave you more money, or how he never heard of tofu until he met me.

  One day Marvin told me Neil had something he wanted to talk to me about, and that he was going to call me to take me to lunch. In the course of three hours at the Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills, Neil told me that he found himself more intrigued by the idea of a musical about two songwriters living and working together than by reworking The Gingerbread Lady. He wondered if I would mind if he took a pass at writing a book for a musical loosely based on Marvin and me!

  Neil Simon had written some of America’s funniest and most romantic Broadway shows (among them The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park) and the musicals Sweet Charity and Promises, Promises. He was America’s premier comedy playwright, revered by theatergoers everywhere, and he found my life with Marvin interesting enough to base a play on. Was I going to say no to Neil Simon?

  Marvin and I decided to put our major seemingly unsolvable issue—that we were not in love but merely in like—on hold and to view writing the show as an opportunity to do some really good work together. The irony was that our relationship was waning just as we were starting to write songs about it. But we’d begun as friends, so I thought we could be that again.

  Neil finished the first act as quickly as Marvin and I might have finished a few songs. We read it and liked it and act two soon followed. Now we were writing a musical.

  The three of us were creating at warp speed. It felt almost bulletproof, having Neil Simon and Marvin Hamlisch as my collaborators. Our meetings were always quick and to the point, whether we were playing Neil a new song we’d just written or figuring out where the book needed a song.

  “We need a song in the discotheque,” Neil said. “They’re out on their first date, what would they dance to?”

  “Well, I’m not much of a dancer,” I said apologetically. “I mean, I wish I were, but . . . maybe a slow song, I could dance to that.”

  “It’s a discotheque, Carole,” Marvin said to me. “Pay attention.”

  “Well, you’re not a dancer either,” I said defensively. “What would you dance to?”

  “Carole, we’re not Vernon and Sonia,” he said. “This is fiction based on us. It’s not our biography.”

  Neil laughed. “You’re both so crazy,” he said. “They’re going to have to dance in this scene, so figure out what kind of song you’d dance to.”

  Marvin said, “Well, the only thing that would get me on a dance floor would be if they started to play one of my songs.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, almost stepping on his line. “Me too. I’d get up if they were playing my song. I’d feel excited.”

  At which point Marvin leapt up and raced to the piano. “That’s it!” he said. “Listen! Can’t you hear what they’re playing?” He launched into the first two lines of the music and lyrics of “Oh-ho, they’re playing my song, oh yeah, they’re playing my song.” I excitedly added, “And when they’re playing my song . . .”

  Neil was smiling from ear to ear. “This is so perfect,” he said. “In fact, I think it’s the title of our show. They’re Playing Our Song.”

  In two more minutes, if even, we completed the chorus of “They’re Playing Our Song.” And that’s how easy the whole experience of writing a musical with Neil and Marvin was. Not that there weren’t rewrites. We would all rewrite. One night in previews a joke wasn’t working. Neil went home, gave it some thought, and the next night he put in another joke. This one got huge applause. “He goes home and writes the equivalent of a Number One song,” I said to Marvin, “but it’s a joke. What an amazing talent.”

  They’re Playing Our Song opened at the Ahmanson Theatre for its out-of-town tryouts—you’ve got to have a lot of confidence to open your show in LA—in December 1978. Given my theater track record, I was nervous but by the time we went to New York, it had already made its investment back. (It was a two-character show with three backup singers for each character, so expenses were minimal.) It opened on Broadway at the Imperial in February 1979—less than a year after Neil dashed off that first act—where it would run for 1,087 performances over three years.

  Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz were simply amazing as “us.” Robert, who by profession was a stand-up comic, had the ability to slip into the character of Vernon Gersch with ease, and Lucie brought a wonderful voice and great comedic timing to the role of Sonia Walsk. The show was nominated for four Tonys, and critics called our score “lively,” “hummable,” and “exhilarating.”

  Marvin often said that his favorite of all the hundreds of songs he’d written was “If He Really Knew Me.” I think the lyric was very real for him personally. I felt the same way.

  If there were no music

  If my melodies stopped playing

  Would I be the kind of man

  You’d want to see tonight . . .

  Does the man make the music?

  Or does the music make this man?

  And am I everything I thought I’d be?

  Marvin went on to sing it in all of his concerts.

  I loved the charm and humor of the title song, and the other song that I liked was “Fallin’,” the opening song of the show, which is the first time Vernon Gersch (who was based on Marvin Hamlisch) sings alone at the piano.

  I’m afraid to fly

  And I don’t know why

  I’m jealous of the people who

  Are not afraid to die

  It’s just that I recall

  Back when I was small

  Someone promised that they’d catch me

  And then they let me fall

  That lyric was pretty true to my life. I think the image of falling might have come from much earlier, with my mom and the bath all those years ago. It worked much better as the opener than a big showstopper would have done.

  MARVIN HAD BOUGHT A beautiful apartment in New York, because that’s where his heart told him he really wanted to be, and he wanted me to try living there with him. He asked Angelo Donghia, a famed interior designer at the time, to decorate it, and to design a study for me. It was feminine, which I liked. The walls were a pale gray silk and the furniture was done in shades of pale pinks and grays. It was sweet of him, but truthfully, I never felt at home in it. I still favored Los Angeles, not just because there were more songwriting opportunities there, but because it gave me the space to have my own life and create a new me. New York was too close to Anita. Though she had stopped drinking, for which I was grateful, when I would enter apartment 10-A, where her cigarette smoke stained the walls of the rooms I’d grown up in, I would lose my adult self and revert back to little Carol Bayer.

  Marvin came out to LA one more time and tried to live with me, but I knew that wasn’t working when I overheard him whispering sweet nothings into our bathroom phone, where he was clearly flirting with a young actress named Emma Samms. The worst part about it was it didn’t hurt me and it didn’t make me cry. In truth, it was a kind of relief because were it not for Neil, we would have parted company much earlier.

  With the show a hit, many people wanted to interview Marvin and me about how close our characters in the play came to who we were in real life. My standard answer was, “If our lives were really the way Neil portrayed them on stage, we would still be together. These were our lives filtered through Neil Simon’s brilliant wit.” There was not a lot of me in my character, Sonia Walsk. She was the way Neil imagined me to be. I was not all that sunny and quirky. Well, maybe a little quirky, but I did not dress in costumes from different Broadway plays and Neil never touched on my often crippling anxieties. If Edward Albee ha
d written it, it might have been a bit closer to the truth.

  Nineteen

  WHAT THEY’RE PLAYING OUR SONG gave me, other than a bit of fame for being that girl who wrote the lyrics for the musical about her life with Marvin Hamlisch, was a steady influx of cash for the next three years. Never one to let the money accrue, I decided the time was right to buy my first home.

  I found my dream house on Donhill Drive in Beverly Hills, and Waldo Fernandez, a relatively new interior designer and friend at the time, created the most wonderful space for me. It was very open, modern, and had light coming in from all directions.

  Single again, I began to date and spend more time with friends. I felt like I had gotten the Get Out of Jail Free card in Monopoly. Marvin had wanted me to conform to a life I didn’t belong in. We were always mismatched, which is why Neil Simon saw the comedy of us as a couple.

  Soon after Marvin moved back to New York, I attended a party in honor of Burt Bacharach. He was one of the most famous songwriters in the world, but this was the first time I had ever met him.

  Burt was holding court in the back room and talking about his past accomplishments, and as staggering as they were, I saw him as a songwriter looking back, not forward. But then he asked me if he could drop a cassette off for me to listen to, and maybe write some lyrics to. I said sure, I’d be happy to listen.

  The next day the tape arrived in my mailbox, with a note from Burt that simply said “New Melodies.” I remembered Marvin having once made a dismissive remark about Burt’s melodies being nowhere near what they used to be, and after listening to his tape I had to agree. I felt that his new melodies were like stops and starts that didn’t land. Never having been good at saying, “Sorry, I don’t think it’s for me,” I put it in a stack of cassette tapes and forgot to get back to Burt. (I did the same thing once with three melodies Andrew Lloyd Webber sent me, and although I lost the tape, I was almost sure I heard a variation on one of the melodies years later when I saw the megahit Phantom of the Opera.)

  I next saw Burt a few months later when I was a guest on The Mike Douglas Show and he was the guest cohost for the week. I sang a song from my second album, . . . Too. Afterward, Burt asked me two questions: Did I want to have dinner? And would I like to write a song with him? I’ve often thought that if I remembered which he asked me first I would know a lot more about our relationship. The truth is I suspect I know very well. It’s funny, because in some ways I think my “heat” at that time in the world of pop music brought the same excitement to Burt that Marvin had found so appealing.

  Before Burt the men I’d been with had been life rafts. Now I was afloat without a man, which was pretty rare for me, but this wouldn’t last long. Burt needed a muse—someone who could bring him back to that part of himself that could still write hit songs.

  I got the job.

  ON OUR FIRST DATE, he picked me up in a 1976 green Lincoln. It looked like a tanker that had drifted from its moorings. That must be a loaner, I thought to myself. His real car must be in the shop.

  He took me to dinner at a little now-long-gone Chinese restaurant above the street on Rodeo Drive. (It only had about five people in it, so I’m not surprised it closed.) He was very attractive, and it was clear that he liked me a lot. Suddenly I began to see him in a different light. Isn’t that weird: that moment, that split second when the “switch” happens. No charge! Then, bam! Charge! How does that happen?

  There was something so boyish about him. He dressed like a kid. I remember exactly what he wore that night. Faded jeans, blue blazer, white shirt, crewneck sweater. His silver hair and blue eyes picked up the blue of the sweater. Suddenly he was no longer the Burt whose gaze was on the past. Now he was the brilliant songwriter who wasn’t so old, was so crazy handsome, and whose speaking voice was beyond sexy. He spoke in the rhythms that he wrote his songs in: with stops and starts. To me it sounded like “Hey! [count 1, 2, 3, 4] Do you wanna, uh, [count 1, 2] uh, come down to Del Mar sometime, and uh [count 2, 3, 4] it would be fun. You know, I’ve got a piano . . . and it’s uh, [count 2, 3] beautiful, just beautiful. Great tone. [count 1, 2] Great down there.” He said the words like triplets—three notes tied together. “Greatdownthere.” “The beach, [count 2, 3, 4] the ocean . . .” It took him a long time to finish a sentence, but he was so handsome, who cared?

  We went through all the beginning stuff. He’d been married twice, most recently to actress Angie Dickinson. I felt a moment of insecurity. She was famously beautiful, with legs so legendary they’d been insured for a million dollars.

  “So how long have you been divorced now?” I asked.

  “Well . . . um . . . I’m not really divorced.” [count 2, 3, 4] The rhythm of his speech, with its stops and starts and half-stops and stutters, all lulled me into not caring what he was saying, just liking the sound of his voice. I think he liked it, too, which is probably why he took as long as he did. “I’m . . . uh . . . separated.”

  “For the last three years?” I asked, surprised.

  “Well, uh, there’s never been any reason to . . . I mean . . . the marriage was over even before we separated, and I uh . . . just stayed that long because of Nikki . . . Nikki’s my daughter. She’s thirteen now and . . . she’s . . . she’s had a lot of problems. I wanted to be there to help her.”

  Knowing Burt as I do now, I’m sure he kept the tiniest little balloon of false hope hanging over Angie’s head in case he changed his mind and decided to go back to his family.

  “I worry so about Nikki,” he said, looking very sad. I wished there was something I could do to make him feel better. He refilled our wineglasses. There was something so shy about him.

  We talked about his work.

  “I don’t think I have it anymore,” he said. “Not like I did.”

  “Of course you do,” I answered reassuringly. “Talent doesn’t go away. Where can it go? You just have to find new ways of accessing it. New inspiration.”

  “I don’t know . . . It’s really not all that important to me anymore.”

  His first lie.

  We talked a lot more about his work, and a little bit about mine; he was very complimentary about the hits I had been having and said he loved “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and “Nobody Does It Better.” He poured more wine. He started to tell me some story about his love of horses, and he got to the part about loving the backstretch, but it was a long and boring story, and I left my body somewhere when he began to explain that “a jockey’s athleticism was greater pound for pound than any other athlete.” All I noticed was how incredibly great the streaks of gray and white in his hair were. And he was pouring more wine, and I was lost in how handsome he was. Since reaching adulthood I hadn’t been this physically attracted to any man.

  “That’s really fascinating,” I said, thinking that maybe it was and I had just missed the fascinating part.

  My first lie.

  “You know, I’m not used to drinking,” I half-apologized. “I take Dalmane to help me sleep at night, and I don’t like to mix the two.”

  “That’s amazing,” he said. “I, uh, take Dalmane every night, too.”

  Amazing! I felt this warm glow in my heart. We were bonding.

  “Where do you work now?” I asked.

  “Well, I’ve got a piano at the apartment, and I still keep my little studio at my old house. When Angie is out of town, I stay there sometimes. You know, to be with Nikki.”

  “Oh,” I said, not understanding. “You mean, you and Angie are friendly?”

  “No, not exactly . . . in fact, uh . . . I don’t think she likes me very much. But I try to be there for Nikki. I just want to be able to help her.” He looked sad again. I already knew that I wanted to be able to help him help his daughter.

  “Why don’t we try to write a song this week?” I offered. “It would be a shame for you to waste all your great talent.”

  Burt modestly shrugged. “I don’t know. Hey,” he said softly, “do you know you’re really, uh, [1, 2, 3]
pretty?” Then, as I leaned in, he added, “Boy, am I tired. I’ve kept you up much too late. I better, I . . . I better, uh, let you get some sleep.” We left the restaurant and he drove me home. He walked me to my door.

  “I’ll call you this week,” he said, smiling. “We can have another dinner and maybe try to write that song.” He leaned forward and kissed me. I liked it fine. Not the greatest first kiss ever, a little stingy, but good . . . sort of.

  Closing the door behind me, I knew that on this night, with many options to choose from, against my better judgment, I had already selected Mr. Green Lincoln, with his little-boy tee shirts, his sad look, and his dependence on sleeping pills, to be the great fake love of my life.

  BURT CALLED THE NEXT day to see if I wanted to try and write a song.

  “Yeah, let’s try,” I said. “If you come around noon, Digby could make us lunch.” Digby was my everything guy. He took care of the house, kept it clean, and cooked. I had no way of knowing if he really was a very good cook. He was paid to go grocery shopping and buy unsalted almonds, low-calorie bread, all sorts of lettuce, a few fruits, a few cans of tuna fish, and an assortment of healthy grains like quinoa and brown rice, and an occasional sweet potato.

  Burt arrived about forty-five minutes late. He apologized. It didn’t matter. He was there.

  He looked around and, with two comfy overstuffed sofas on one side of him and an equally welcoming large dark brown leather banquette on the other, he sat right down on the baby grand piano bench.

  “Hey, babe,” he said as he was trying out the keyboard that, thank God, had been recently tuned. “Nice piano. Come sit over here,” he said in his breathy, gravelly voice. He tapped the piano bench and motioned for me to sit down. In the light of day his eyes were a deep sky blue. God, he was handsome.

  “Do you know who Marty Kroft is?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I know Marty and his brother, Sid. They do those children’s shows with those big wild-looking puppets.”