They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  A wonderful photorealist, Jack Mendenhall, painted a portrait of us a few years after the wedding in which I’m looking straight ahead and Burt is positioned with one foot out the door to our veranda, looking away. Prophetic, no? After our divorce I immediately donated the painting to the Songwriters Hall of Fame while Hal David was still president. Why was I not surprised years later to hear that no one at the SHOF could even find it? Hal probably trashed it. He hardly got enough recognition for all of his great lyrics with Burt, so why would he want a big painting of his ex and me staring him in the face?

  When our album Sometimes Late at Night was finally released, a few of my friends teased me because they said it sounded like Michael Jackson was trying to sound like me on our duet, “Just Friends.” Just what I wanted: Michael sounding like me. From that day on, as Michael’s popularity continued to grow until he was the biggest artist of his time, whenever I saw him, I would say, “You’d better be very nice to me, Michael, or I might just put our duet out as my next single,” and he’d always laugh.

  Neil Bogart wanted Burt and me to go around the country on what he called “The Living Room Tour.” He wanted us to re-create for an audience the intimacy he felt when we first sang for him in his living room, and he didn’t seem to care about the expense. He had his vision. So we flew from city to city with three background singers and a first-rate LA band, losing money in small clubs while touring as though we were playing large theaters. But then, the record we were promoting hardly sounded intimate. On most of it, I am drowning in Burt Bacharach orchestrations that were suitable for Dionne Warwick, not for me and my small voice.

  You haven’t truly traveled until you’ve traveled with a narcissist. Enjoy the thrill of catching planes one minute before takeoff—he liked the rush of it, and being a star, he hoped they might hold the flight for him. I just wanted to know I had my makeup and enough sleeping meds for the trip.

  Pretty soon I no longer had any me time, there was just Burt time. And I, like he, was now late for everything.

  MANY NIGHTS BURT AND I would talk about Nikki and what we might be doing to help her more. I so wanted to have a loving relationship with her, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be.

  After months of therapy that seemed to be accomplishing nothing, we tried a clinic in the city of Brea. I knew in a matter of weeks that it was the wrong place for her. The children there were out of control with behavioral issues that bore no resemblance to Nikki’s. A doctor in Los Angeles told us about the Wilson Center in Minnesota. They were fully accredited and had psychiatrists on staff to work with the emotional problems of adolescents.

  Nikki was now sixteen. Burt and I were hopeful that these professionals would help her to grow out of some of the obsessions and phobias that dogged her and made it so difficult for her to have friends or an abiding relationship with anyone but her mother. It must have been so challenging for Angie to have her at home all the time, but she was against sending her to the Wilson Center. I think she intuitively—and, as it turned out, correctly—felt that Nikki belonged with her and there was no “curing” her.

  Reluctantly, though, she acquiesced to Burt’s plan after he threatened to have Nikki’s therapists testify that she needed more intensive treatment than she could receive at home. Angie thought Burt didn’t love Nikki because she wasn’t perfect. I think Burt loved Nikki as much as he was capable of loving anyone.

  Though the doctors in Minnesota sent us reports that she was doing better, when we would visit her, it seemed like nothing was changing at all. The only thing that was growing was her anger at us for keeping her away from her mom. The directors promised us that Nikki was beginning to make positive changes, and that we would be the last ones to see them because parents always are, and in any event it would take more time.

  Nobody there ever said to us, “Hey, here’s the truth. We can do therapy with her every day of the year, twice a day, and she’s not going to get any better.” They were earnestly trying to make Nikki capable of taking care of herself so, despite her pleading to get out of there, we agreed to give them more time with her.

  ONE EVENING I WENT to a screening of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. That strange creature, so alone, so ugly, transforms as the story progresses into a wise, big-hearted little being that everyone—in the movie itself as well as in the audience—falls in love with. When I returned home that night, I couldn’t stop talking about E.T. I told Burt I would love to write a song called “Heartlight.” Though the script never used that word to describe the little red heart beating in E.T.’s chest, I thought it would be a great title for a song about him.

  Burt never ever asked me to write only with him. He said he totally expected me to continue to write with Peter or Bruce or anyone I had been working with. But having been so shell-shocked by Marvin’s jealousy when I wrote with others while we were together, I assumed that Burt would respond the same way. Still, I would on occasion ask a third writer if he wanted to try a song with us, because Burt would tend to move along faster in the presence of a third person, and it was easier for me when someone else urged him to move on or even suggested a melodic change.

  I had written a few songs with Neil Diamond for two of his prior albums, so I invited him to work with us on this song. We wrote most of it in Burt’s New York apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street. Once Burt got the verse melody, Neil swiftly came up with the chorus melody, and I had no trouble writing the lyrics because I was so emotionally invested in this little creature that inspired our song. We spent July 4, 1982, celebrating the completion of our song on a boat Neil chartered on the Hudson River.

  “Heartlight” went to number 5 on the Hot 100, and stayed at Number One on the Adult Contemporary chart for weeks. It was Neil’s biggest hit in years.

  BURT WOULD SPEND HOURS searching for the perfect chord, trying it this way and that way, asking me which chord I liked better, until out of sheer self-defense or boredom I would say, “Okay, I like it that way.” But it didn’t really matter because he never truly cared what my opinion was. He just needed me there. I never understood why he had to have me in the room with him, but I think he just liked having a witness to his struggle as he created his melodies.

  I had found, several songs back, that these marathon writing sessions were better endured with the help of a little marijuana. So, eventually grass became sort of a third writing partner, a regular occurrence in our creative process. Not a lot, just a hit or two, but enough to keep me content to sit in my chair listening to Burt’s partial melodies over and over.

  I felt compassion for what he needed to put himself through to birth his compositions, but I increasingly resented having to suffer with him for hours before he was even ready for me to work on a lyric. And when I would write words to the melody he’d finally settle on, we would have differences about that, too.

  It wasn’t easy being together all day every day. I didn’t know another collaborator who was as territorial about his music as Burt: This is mine, and that’s yours, and don’t cross over. Maybe the truly great composers don’t want their melodies tampered with by lyricists. Or maybe Burt was just very strict and controlling.

  This was radically different from the way Marvin and I wrote. “That’s it, done!” he would say in the same tempo as he said everything, prestissimo (very, very fast). “If you think it needs something else, I’m back in town next week and we’ll look at it then.” Marvin was so quick, it made me seem like Burt.

  Nobody I ever worked with had a pace as slow as Burt’s, and somehow, for me, that pace placed his work beyond criticism.

  “What do you think of this?” he asked me one day, playing me something he’d been working on for several hours.

  “What else have you got?” I asked insensitively.

  He looked at me like I had just wounded him to his core. I would go on to hear about that moment more times than I’d like to remember.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I’m sorry. I should have
realized how long this took you. I should have. I’m sorry. But it still wasn’t that good, or I would have liked it and tried to write it.”

  “I probably would have had way less hits,” he shot back, “if I was writing with you back then instead of Hal.”

  Twenty-Three

  IN 1982, BURT AND I were chosen to write four songs for Night Shift, one of Ron Howard’s earliest films. One of them was “That’s What Friends Are For.”

  We began by working on the verse. Burt played, “Da, dah, da da da, da da da dah.” I sang to that line, “I never thought I’d feel this way,” and he said, “That’s not what I played. I played, ‘Da dah, da da da da da da dah.’ Not just ‘dah.’ ‘Da dah.’ Nine notes, not eight. They’re eighth notes, except for the triplet.”

  “Well, why can’t you just drop the pickup note?” I asked.

  “Because it’s not as good.” He was adamant. He played it again. “I want ‘Da dah.’ Can’t you hear this?” He was getting annoyed. “Again. I want ‘Da dah.’ ”

  So finally I said, with a little built-up anger on my end as well at how dogmatic he could be, “Okay. All right!” I felt beaten down, and I said, with a little attitude, “Just sing ‘And’ first. ‘And I.’ ”

  And he did. And he was happy. And the song now started, “And I never thought I’d feel this way.” And I was wrong. When I first heard it playing on the radio I thought, Shit! He was absolutely right. It is better with the pickup, that itty-bitty but crucial sixteenth note. And I believe it’s in those tiny details that his greatness lies.

  I loved writing this song. I thought it was a perfect marriage of Burt’s music and my lyrics, and in relation to whatever else we wrote, it took the least amount of time. I could never have foreseen that this song would one day become the anthem for a generation of young men, women, and children struck down by AIDS.

  Rod Stewart recorded it as the closing theme in the film, but Warner Bros. thought the record was too soft to pull it off the soundtrack as a single for Rod, so it lay dormant for the next few years.

  DIONNE WARWICK CAME BACK into Burt’s life in 1984 after Aaron Spelling asked if Burt and I would consider writing a song for a new television series he had coming on the air called Finder of Lost Love—not exactly a title that screams “Hit!” for either a song or a TV show. And yet we said yes.

  When we played it for Aaron, he loved it and asked Burt, “How do you feel about working with Dionne again? I think she’s the one to record it.” Burt said he needed to think about that because it had been years since they’d spoken to each other. They’d had a falling-out when Burt and Hal broke up their songwriting team after their highly publicized musical Lost Horizon failed miserably. Burt had begun to calculate how much time it took him to write and orchestrate each complicated piece of the score and decided this fifty-fifty thing with Hal was a crazy split. He was doing the lion’s share of the work. I will make the assumption that Hal balked at the seventy-five/twenty-five split that Burt offered to honor going forward.

  Dionne—their very own diva—said, “But you guys have a deal to produce my records. I don’t care that you can’t work together. You have to, for me.” When they failed to comply, Dionne sued Burt and Hal separately for their lack of services. The lawsuit was settled out of court. There was no way you could force two creative people to work together. That team was out of business.

  It was funny that I was the one who urged Burt to call Dionne. The only experience I ever had with her—aside from enjoying her music—was when Burt and I played the Roxy in 1981 to promote Sometimes Late at Night. I opened the show with some of my own songs. I was stunned to see Dionne placed at a small table directly in front of the stage, and every time I looked in her direction her eyes were throwing daggers of hate at me. I could feel her rage spewing forth without even looking at her. Yet I did keep looking at her, like I was going to change her mind about me and she would suddenly love me.

  Dionne didn’t like me because she believed she and Burt always belonged together. Not necessarily romantically, but she definitely wanted to be the only woman in Burt’s musical life. The fact that he had written an album with me for my less than perfect voice made her furious. Who was this interloper singing songs that should’ve been written for her?

  She disliked me before she ever said hello. Still I pushed him to call her, and ultimately she did sing the song.

  Finder of lost love, it’s never too late to find love

  Put the past behind you, keep your heart open

  In the studio, I treated Dionne with all the respect that someone of her talent deserved. But I didn’t really like her. She was haughty. There was an air of entitlement about her that said, “Back up, the only one I care about in this room is Burt.”

  And to add insult to injury, I had unintentionally pushed myself out of a job, setting up what would be years of their touring together after they “put the past behind them.” The agents who had been booking Burt and me much preferred the package of a reunited Burt and Dionne—now, there was something they could sell—so I inadvertently ended the short performing career of Carole and Burt.

  WITH PERFORMING BEHIND ME, I told Burt I would like us to have a baby. At thirty-eight years old I felt like if I missed this opportunity I would regret it when it would be too late, and I had this picture of us loving our baby together and becoming a family, something more than just the two of us.

  I was trying to get pregnant but not succeeding, and so we also registered with an adoption agency in Beverly Hills. I know Burt was hesitant about having a baby, even though he wanted to, particularly for me, because I had yet to have one, but he was ambivalent because Nikki still had so many problems. He didn’t know how she would react to having a sister or brother.

  The months went by until one morning I got a call from our lady in Los Angeles who had completed her screening of us.

  “Carole, this is Mrs. Mintz. We have a beautiful baby boy for you if you and Burt still want him.”

  Did we want him? Of course we wanted him. He was three days old, and the next day, his fourth day on earth, I fearlessly flew to Nevada to bring him home. That night, when I returned home with our baby in my arms, Burt stood in the doorway crying. “Happy” was happy.

  Cristopher Elton Bacharach was born on December 2, 1985. He was a beautiful baby. He had these piercing blue eyes that looked so wise to me that I was sure he was an “old soul.”

  I was very deliberate in encouraging Burt to have his own bonding time with Cristopher so that he would feel toward him the way I already did. And it worked. Burt would take Cris for a walk each day wearing a baby halter, talking with him and enjoying his time with him. It was a wonderful time. We were a family. And I was learning how to be a mother. I was changing diapers and rocking Cristopher in my arms for hours, singing to him.

  He was so beautiful, so pure. The idea of being in a marijuana-induced altered state felt all wrong to me. I tossed out my grass and didn’t use it again for years. Holding my baby in my arms, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of love I had never known. His future was unwritten, and I could be the one to help write it by loving him unconditionally and giving to him what I never had.

  Burt and I kept working every day in our music room above the garage, and in addition to all the other joys that came with having Cristopher, I now had a legitimate reason to escape at regular intervals: To check in with my baby boy. To feed him his lunch, to rock him in his cradle, to just let him know I was there and I loved him.

  My life was finally perfect. I had a husband I loved, a baby who filled my heart with happiness, and the ability to be actively creative with the man I adored.

  Twenty-Four

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE records of all time is LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade.” When we heard that Richard Perry was planning to produce Patti LaBelle, we played him a song we’d written called “On My Own.” I give Burt the credit for pushing me to write that song, because he had a belief in it that I did not share.


  I didn’t hear it as a hit melody, but Burt really did, and about once a week he’d say, “Hey, uh . . . you know that song I played you? . . . I, uh, keep hearin’ it. I . . . I, uh, really think it’s a hit. Wish you’d take a shot at it.” Finally, just to appease him, I did. At least this time he already had the melody. He also had the title, “On My Own,” and it was unusual for him to hear actual words to his melodies.

  Every time he’d sing it for me, whatever he was playing on the keyboard made me think it was a Polynesian melody. I could imagine a group of female singers in native costumes, leis around their necks, swaying to Burt’s tune. It didn’t sound current, and it didn’t sound like a hit. But as I started to write the lyric, I began to like it. For one thing, Burt’s melody was, for once, spacious enough to give me room to say something.

  Now I know what loving you cost

  Now we’re up to talking divorce

  And we weren’t even married

  On my own, on my own now

  One more time, by myself

  Richard wanted to produce it with Patti, so we spent a number of days at Studio 55, the studio he built below his office on Melrose near Paramount. Richard wanted Burt to play keyboards and, like Burt, Richard did not move at record speed. He took many breaks, leaving Patti downstairs while he would attend to some other business upstairs.

  Late afternoon on the second day, Richard told me he had tickets that night to see Harry Nilsson at the Greek Theatre. He asked if I thought it would bother Patti, who was planning to work into the night. I told him I thought it would bother her quite a bit. Unfazed, he told Patti he wouldn’t be too long—he just needed to go upstairs and change and then drive to the Greek and hear Harry, and then he’d be right back. He didn’t seem to register how unhappy she looked and, patterned scarf carefully wrapped to look carelessly wrapped around his neck, he waved good-bye. “This shouldn’t take long at all,” he said, and was gone.