“Hey, Burt,” I called.
He came out of the bedroom.
“What’s up with these?” I asked. “Is there something I should know?”
“Oh,” he laughed. “No. I, uh, get these all the time, from crazy fans.”
“But look,” I said, “this one left her phone number.”
“Yeah,” he answered, “but I would never call her.”
Marvin never got anything like this, I thought, or if he did he had the good sense to put it away.
Back in the car, the whole thing started to replay in my mind. I could understand him getting sexy fan mail, and I could understand women wanting him, because I wanted him, too. But why hadn’t these things been thrown in the trash? Why did he keep them? I started to worry and I asked the question I didn’t want the answer to. “So, Burt, do you have a thing for big-breasted women?”
“What guy wouldn’t?” he said enthusiastically.
“Well, I saw those photos and I was thinking . . . I’m not that. You know . . . chesty.”
“Funny you should say that. When I took Nikki home last week I was talking to Angie and she was saying how beautiful she thought you were, and I told her, ‘I must really be in love with her because she doesn’t even have big breasts.’ ”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, or how that might have sounded to his ex-wife, but I chose to focus on the “I must really be in love with her” part.
He loved me. He even told Angie. And he moved in with me.
Twenty-One
MICHAEL MASSER, ONCE AN attorney and now a hit songwriter (“The Greatest Love of All” for Whitney Houston, among dozens of others), tracked me down to write a lyric to his prewritten melody for the movie It’s My Turn. Next to the still-new excitement of Burt, it seemed more like work I didn’t feel like doing. Michael tried on more than one occasion to drop by and play it for me, but my head was just not there. I told him I was going to be in Del Mar for the week, and if he really wanted to, he could drive down and we could see what happened.
Within days he was standing in the living room of Burt’s small home. After Burt said hello to him, and Michael sang his praises for the appropriate amount of time, Burt excused himself and told me he’d be out on the beach. Michael immediately situated himself on Burt’s piano bench.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked.
“Yes, please. I’d love an iced tea.”
I looked at him. He was sort of cute, in an unorthodox kind of way. He had beautiful blue eyes and very blond hair that looked sun-bleached to me, and it fell on his face in a Little Lord Fauntleroy fashion, sort of like someone put a bowl over his head and cut around it. He wore a blue and green horizontally striped tee shirt and a pair of jeans. Eyeballing him, I guessed he was about twelve pounds overweight, and vertical lines might have been a better wardrobe choice.
“And could I also get a glass of water with that? . . . And, if you really wouldn’t mind, a cup of coffee.”
Okay, I thought. This one’s a crazy one. I set off to bring him his three drinks.
Back at the piano he began to play the melody for me. I listened. “Michael,” I interrupted, “is there any way you could play it a little less loud for me? It’s kind of hurting my ear.”
“Oh, sure. Let me start again.”
He played it exactly the same, though I did make out what I thought to be a very pretty melody inside the piano that was being hammered so hard I wondered if a metal string inside could pop off like it might on a guitar.
“That’s pretty,” I said, meaning it.
“So are you,” he said, smiling an almost too-big smile. “I know this is a hit. I even hear where the title goes.” He began to play, and when he got to the chorus, he began to sing, if you want to call it that: “It’s my turn, da-da da-da da-da,” and he kept da-da-ing until he got to sing the title line again: “It’s my turn, it’s my turn.” He was now singing so loud he almost drowned out his already deafening piano playing. However, I couldn’t deny his talent. This ex-lawyer churned out hit after hit for Diana Ross, including “Touch Me in the Morning” and “Theme from Mahogany,” and this could wind up being a single for her as well.
“Let me hear it from the beginning, Michael. Maybe I can start to write it.” I quickly wrote words that were actually meaningful to me, and to my life as I felt it at that time:
It’s my turn
To see what I can see
I hope you’ll understand
This time’s just for me
Because it’s my turn
With no apologies
I’ve given up the truth
To those I’ve tried to please
They were simple but they fit his melody perfectly and as soon as I began to sing it, even with my limited voice, I really started to like it. Michael was so thrilled that he was finally getting a lyric on this melody that he’d already labeled a masterpiece that he was drinking his coffee and tea almost simultaneously and washing it down with his water.
“This is going to be a big hit,” he said, smiling at me. What I admired was the confidence that poured out of him. How was he so sure? I’d not yet worked with anyone who was so certain of a song that was still unfinished.
“Okay, let’s keep going,” I said. And maybe because I did like it, or maybe because I just wanted to get back to Burt, I finished the lyric that afternoon. When Michael left, he gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “I’m going to play this for Diana. You’ll see. You’ll be glad I came down here. We just wrote a hit.” And indeed we had.
BURT’S PUBLICIST TOLD HIM that Michael Jackson wanted to have dinner with us.
I had met Michael in 1979 when he was not yet twenty-one years old. He was a few years away from becoming the King of Pop, but he was already a genius. Off the Wall, the first album of the brilliant trilogy produced by music legend Quincy Jones, spawned four huge hits. I was thrilled to have a song on that record. Quincy had heard “It’s the Falling in Love,” which I wrote with David Foster on my second album, and suggested that Michael record it.
The four of us went to Dominick’s, an industry steak house.
Michael spoke in a high breathy voice, soft and gentle and melodic. There was something very childlike about him, but he had, even at his age, an encyclopedic knowledge about the songs, writers, and artists that had come before him, including all of Burt’s.
“What are you up to these days?” he asked me. “Are you writing?”
“I’m making a record with Burt. He’s producing, I’m singing, and he’s doing all the orchestrations,” I answered proudly.
“That sounds so nice,” he said, smiling. His voice always went up at the end of sentences. “I would love to come by and hear what you guys are doing.”
“You’re welcome anytime, Michael,” I said. “We’re in the studio every afternoon. The Record Plant.”
When he came by, I was recording a song called “Just Friends.” He listened for a while, then asked, “Do you mind if I play around with something?” We didn’t mind at all—Burt admired him as much as I did, which was saying something. Michael took Paul Jackson, a wonderful guitarist who was playing guitar on the session, into the bathroom with him to work on another concept of the track and came back with a totally different arrangement with a whole new feel that even Burt said was better than what he had done. Somehow I got up the courage to ask him if he would sing with me on the record.
“Sure,” he said, “let’s do it. Let’s work it out. Let me hear you sing it.” We started to trade lines, and he built some background parts where he was doubling his own voice to give it more thickness and texture in the musical track. I was thrilled. Michael Jackson and I were singing together. It was mind-blowing to me.
WE’D BEEN DATING FOR four months when Burt gave me his first gift, and I use the word gift very loosely: a pair of framed photographs for my thirty-fifth birthday. One was a photo of a racehorse. He admired their beauty and owned a numb
er of thoroughbreds that he would race from time to time.
“Look at those legs, baby,” he almost whispered to me as I looked, puzzled, at the photo. “Beautiful, huh? Look at those fragile legs holding up the weight of this big fuckin’ horse.”
The second photo was of a sexy woman’s legs crossed in a provocative manner.
All I saw was his worship of the long-legged beauties that, at five foot one, I could never be. He didn’t mean to be hurtful. He was just oblivious to the effect of his actions.
One night we were going out to dinner and I came downstairs in a little skirt and a pretty white shirt. Burt kind of stared at me and said, “Hey, you know, I think, uh . . . I think . . . you look better in pants.” I stood there semi-stunned, my fragile-at-best self-image melting as he went on, “You know, longer. More . . . lengthy. Taller.”
That was it. It only took one remark, from someone I wanted to love me, for me to cover a body part for the rest of my life. I went back up and changed into my jeans, and every skirt and every dress I ever owned hung in my closet, some with price tags still on them, from that night on.
He did like my eyes. He would often tell me how striking they were, especially when the sunlight was shining in them. When I would go on a talk show of any kind with him, he would tell the cameraman to make sure the light caught my eyes.
I was learning something here. It should have been to get the hell out of this relationship as fast as my short little legs could possibly carry me, but instead my lesson was to accentuate the positive and change whatever else I could.
First on my list: height.
My friend Dolly Parton, also vertically challenged, told me about a man named Pasquale Di Fabrizio, “shoemaker to the stars,” whose shop made custom shoes for celebrities.
Inside his foot palace, shoeboxes were piled high against three walls, with famous names on every box: Sylvester Stallone, Judy Garland, Richard Gere, Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds, etc. Mr. Di Fabrizio gave stars a lift—literally. He once bragged to me in his Italian accent, “I am-a Burt Reynolds! I gave him two extra inches plus a third secretly built inside the shoe. You see nothing. He is a sex symbol, and it is all me. I even put the lifts in his bedroom slippers.”
I was happy to have Pasquale solve my height challenge, though I realized that any of his future clients might be told how short I actually was. He measured my feet on tracing paper, made a mold, and then made the shoe. He gave me four and a half inches, and I happily joined his wall of stars with my name on a shoebox next to Debbie Reynolds.
Next: curves, in the form of breast implants. I never minded that I was basically flat-chested. I thought it had a kind of androgynous sexiness to it, but Burt was a breast man. Dr. Harry Glassman made them perfectly for me, small but very attractive. Suddenly my tee shirts were looking perky and alluring.
Finally, my eyes. He liked them? Well, let him like them even more. Let’s get rid of those puffy bags underneath them. My second surgery was as effective as the first.
Burt never disagreed with anything I ever considered doing. He never said, “Why would you do a thing like that? You’re beautiful as you are!” but rather “Hey, baby, that might be great.” It was always only a little “fix,” but that’s what I was discovering it was all about. Little fixes. Nothing big, nothing obvious, just a tiny baby tweak to alter just a bit of the way I was born—a shot of collagen here, a bit of Botox there.
I never had to own that it was also about my own vanity. I was just trying to look like I belonged with Burt. He was my Hubbell, my Robert Redford in The Way We Were.
Twenty-Two
SO, WE WERE WRITING together, and now we were living together. My friend Arnold Stiefel, who was then at ICM (and has managed Rod Stewart since the mid-Eighties), thought that getting Burt a movie to score would be the best way to kick-start his comeback, and he hit a home run in his first at bat. He came up with Arthur, starring Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli (Peter Allen’s ex), and John Gielgud.
The director wanted a song to play over the opening scene, which is a songwriter’s dream, because when it plays over the end credits, half the audience is already walking out. Burt and I watched the scene over and over on a small monitor in our living room. He was trying out lots of melody ideas as I was trying to think of words that felt right for the scene. In my mind I kept hearing the words to a not very good song that I had written years earlier with Peter Allen called “The Moon and New York City.”
The title came from one night when Peter was flying to New York from LA, and his plane got stuck in a holding pattern, circling around and around. He pulled out his notebook and wrote, “When you get caught between the moon and New York City, you might as well fall in love.” We wrote the song and, not long after, filed it under “things that will never get recorded because they really weren’t good enough.” The lyric was better than the melody, which had no hook at all, and we never put in the time to rework the song.
I said to Burt, “There’s an unpublished song I wrote with Peter Allen that I keep hearing a part of whenever I watch Arthur drive around the city in his limousine.” I told him the line, and it inspired him to write a melody for it. “When you get caught between the moon and New York City . . .” I added another line from the original—“I know it’s crazy but it’s true”—which led Burt to another musical line, and very soon—for him, certainly—he had the whole chorus melody finished. All I did was add “The best that you can do, the best that you can do, is fall in love.”
“You know, Burt,” I said, “I’m going to have to call Peter and ask him if it’s okay with him to use this lyric.”
“Why?” he asked. “It was from an unpublished song, and it’s your lyric.”
I explained that it was actually Peter’s line and related the story.
“Well, call him,” he said, “but, uh, I’m sure he’s going to say just use it. He’s not going to want credit for one line.”
“Of course I want credit,” Peter said when I called him. “For a song that could win an Oscar?” His position seemed fair to me. I mean, it was going to be the beginning of the chorus, heard more than any other line in the song. I’d have wanted credit, too. I suggested he come and help write the rest of the song with us. He agreed but said he couldn’t come for another week. Within two days, Burt had found his way to the verse melody, and I’d written the first verse. All I needed to do was find an original way to serve the film—without, in this case, ever getting ahead of the story, since the song would play over the opening credits.
Meanwhile, Christopher Cross had just won five Grammy awards for his debut album and Warner Bros. wanted him to sing our song. He came over and we played it for him. He loved it but wanted to hear the second verse. Since we didn’t have those lyrics yet, he and I wrote them in what seemed like a minute, and the whole song was finished in that same afternoon.
Well, of course, he deserved a writing credit, too. Burt could understand Christopher’s claim, but he was still resentful of Peter, who never had a chance to come up and collaborate. I pointed out that his was far more than an incidental line. Even though we called the song “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” I told Burt, “To many, it will be known as ‘The Moon and New York City.’ ”
So when Bette Midler, reading off the nominees at the 1982 Academy Awards, got to our song, she announced, “ ‘Arthur’s Theme,’ also known as ‘The Best That You Can Do,’ or that song about the Moon and New York City, or, as I call it, ‘four on a song.’ ” It was unusual to have four writers collaborating on one song. Moments later, she opened the envelope, read off our four names, and we all stormed the stage.
Of course I would have preferred it if Burt and I were up there alone, but it was still a thrilling night. The unfortunate outcome was that Burt’s resentment put a temporary wedge in my relationship with Peter.
WHEN I ASKED BURT if we were ever going to get married he said, “If we win the Oscar, we’ll get married.”
This was
not exactly getting down on one knee with a ring! What was I pretending not to know here? The question of whether Burt was with me because he was wildly in love with me or because I was his muse was answered that night. But I was not looking to hear or know that then.
Burt told his mother that he was thinking of marrying me, and her response was “But she’s Jewish.” An odd thing for a Jewish lady to say, but then her son was surprised himself that he was with me. Burt didn’t identify as Jewish.
We had finished our record for Neil Bogart, but before it was released he was diagnosed with cancer. He was not going to recover. Frail as he was, he and his wife, Joyce, still wanted to give us the wedding in their home. Burt didn’t want a big wedding, and I was just so happy we were getting married after being together for more than a year that I didn’t mind. Nor did I object, I’m ashamed to say, when he excluded my mother from the ceremony even though she was in town for the Oscars.
“Let’s just keep it very small,” he said, meaning just us, the Bogarts, and Neil and Marcia Diamond. I was so determined to not have anything spoil this night or our chances together that I agreed to keep my mother off the intimate guest list. “We can go by her hotel afterward,” he said, “and have a drink with her in the Polo Lounge.” Burt even acknowledges in his memoir that “It was not a nice thing to do for someone who is basically a nice guy. But it was like, if I’m marrying you, I don’t have to have your mother there, do I?”
The judge who was marrying us asked Burt, “Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?”
Burt said, “I’ll try.”
Neil Diamond, in complete shock, blurted out, “Holy shit!” He often said that Burt became his hero at that moment. Me, I never even heard it. I just knew we were getting married, so I didn’t react at all to his curious way of saying “I do.” True to form, Burt was keeping that one foot out, even when he was in.
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