Patti looked at Burt and me and said, “Who’s the star here? I’m supposed to sit here in this studio and wait for him to do my vocals? Who does he think he is? I’ve had it with him. Burt, you and Carole can do my vocals.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Patti,” Burt said. “I don’t want to step on Richard’s feet.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” she said. “There is no more Richard. I’m not going to work with him again, so you can either do it with me or I’ll find someone else.” Ultimately, we produced the record.
Richard Perry was a great producer, but his weakness was his social life and his intense interest in fashion. He was the first person who introduced me to Maxfield, a West Hollywood clothing store that remains today a fixture of style, edge, and celebrity. Art Garfunkel once told me what he said to Richard after they completed a record together: “Richard, I would work with you again if just once while we were making the record I could have seen the smile you had on your face when you were trying on jackets at Maxfield’s.”
My biggest contribution to the production of “On My Own” was pressing Burt to make it into a duet because, for me, Patti’s voice alone, though beautiful, was very high and needed a male voice on the record to provide the bottom. I immediately thought of Michael McDonald. The moment I heard his voice alternating with hers, I fell completely in love with the record.
Richard was furious. He thought Burt had wooed Patti away from him. I reminded him of how often he played the star role while the real divas were left sitting and waiting. I think he knew what I said was true, and it didn’t hurt our friendship at all, I don’t think, though it was the last song of mine that he ever recorded. Hmmm.
BURT WAS OBSESSED WITH hygiene and health. Phil Ramone, a great recording engineer and producer, once remarked that Burt was the only person he knew who “washes his hands before he washes his hands.” He didn’t allow me to use the air conditioner. He was obsessive about the room temperature in any studio we recorded in. Having twice had pneumonia, he layered his clothing, even on a ninety-degree day, to cover a possible thirty-degree change in temperature. Scarf, jacket, cashmere sweater underneath, tee shirt underneath the sweater.
“But no air conditioning!” He unpeeled himself as the day’s temperature warmed. Over the years there would be many cashmere sweater birthdays and Christmases. He looked so great in those soft mid-blues.
“BURT,” I ASKED HIM when we were working late one afternoon, “what time do you want to eat dinner?”
He looked at me incredulously. “Hey,” he half-whispered—his voice sounding like red wine being poured over pebbles—“I can’t, uh, [count 2, 3, 4] tell you that . . . now.” How crazy of me to ask him this question at five in the afternoon. “I haven’t even worked out yet,” he went on, “and, you know, I’ve gotta shower . . . Really rough when you ask me that, Carole.”
What I was coming to realize was that Angie had the same Burt as me. Nothing really changes when he changes wives; his routine remains exactly the same. On my first trip to Del Mar, he asked if I’d like to take a walk with him after dinner. He’d show me the neighborhood. I gladly joined him, walking by all the houses that ran along the beach. It turns out he took this walk every night before he knew me, and he would take it after me. You could join him, or he’d do it without you.
The same with his workouts. “Hey, babe, you wanna come watch me work out?” You were welcome to tag along, but he was going to run up that hill with a jump rope, with or without you.
Twenty-Five
MY MOTHER—THREE THOUSAND MILES away for most of my adult life—punctuated many a day or night with her phone calls. Even with her having given up drinking, I could always pick up just from her “Hello” which mother I’d be speaking to—the warm and friendly one or the angry, needy one. This ability didn’t help me at all, because there was nothing I could do about it once on the phone, and I never quite mastered the art of “I’m on the other line, can I call you right back?” If Bad Mom was calling, a delay would only exasperate her.
She might begin with “I could be waiting till hell freezes for you to call me for a change.”
“Hi, Mom!” I’d say, trying to sound glad to hear from her.
“So? What’s going on out there?”
“Oh, not too much, Mom.”
“How’s Cristopher? How’s my grandson?”
“He’s good, Mom.”
“And how are you? Are you feeling well?”
“Yes, I am. I feel good, Mom.” Even if I didn’t, she’d be the last person to confide my concern to. If my problem was big enough, she would wear it as her own and soon forget that it was me who had the problem. But the truth was she’d really rather you didn’t have a concern to pass on to her. She wasn’t calling for concerns. She didn’t handle them well. She was calling to be pumped up. She was calling for Entertainment Tonight.
“Any plans this weekend?”
“Yeah, we’re going to some Hollywood party.”
Now she paid attention. “Ohhhhh. Will there be any notables?”
“Notables, Mom? Stars are not ‘notables.’ The Dalai Lama is a notable. The president is a notable.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“I’ll let you know after we’ve gone. I’m sure there’ll be some.”
“And how about Liz? How’s Liz?”
To my mother, one of my greatest achievements in life was having become a close friend of Elizabeth Taylor. I mean, I understand that. It was pretty amazing to me, too. How did I become the friend that could waltz into her house, past security, ask her housekeeper, “Where’s Miss Taylor?” and, when she pointed upstairs, just go up the stairs, like I would do in my own home, and sit down on her bed. How did that happen?
I first met her in 1981 when Burt took me backstage to congratulate her on her performance in The Little Foxes. My heart started beating so fast I could barely say hello, as I looked into the world’s most famously beautiful eyes. I had only seen them before on a giant movie screen and here they were, equally spectacular in real life. Oh my God! This is Elizabeth Taylor, I thought to myself. Well, this is a highlight in my life.
Then we met again at Hollywood Park, where Marge Everett, then the majority shareholder of the racetrack and a dear friend of Burt’s, invited us often. Marge enjoyed hosting her “buddies,” Cary Grant, Bill Shoemaker, and John Forsythe among them, and she often brought her friends together for racing events. On the occasion of the Breeders’ Cup in the fall of 1985, I found myself sitting next to Elizabeth in Marge’s box. We started chatting and realized that Burt and I would be moving three doors from her home in Bel Air within the month. The day we moved in, she sent down a symbolic cup of sugar and, in her extravagant manner, a cake from the Beverly Hills Hotel and a giant box of Edelweiss chocolates, and it wasn’t long before we became close. I could not imagine how significant a friendship we would develop, and certainly not what a generous, loving, and special soul she would turn out to be.
Here was the wonderful surprise: Elizabeth knew how to be a real friend. She cared about the things you cared about, she was happy when you were happy and sad when you were having a hard time, and that’s pretty rare, particularly if you’re as colossal a star as she was. I have found that the majority of “stars” actually see themselves as the “gift,” but Elizabeth opened her house to her friends often. She saw no need to categorize them. She would easily sit Nancy Reagan next to her assistant’s boyfriend and think nothing of it. I loved that.
I don’t think Elizabeth was used to having girlfriends to hang out with in LA, because the two closest girlfriends she had were in London. She enjoyed spending time holding Cristopher, and as his godmother, she made sure he was heavily gifted. So was I. On my first birthday in our new home on Nimes Road, Elizabeth sent over a gift-wrapped box from Christian Dior Paris. Even the box looked extravagant. When I opened it, I saw the most unexpected breathtaking white ermine jacket. Burt’s eyes just rolled back into his head.
/>
“Jesus,” he said, “what am I supposed to give you if that’s what your girlfriend sends over?” he said innocently. “You know, baby, I’m not used to these stakes, I think they’re a little too rich for my blood.”
Burt was not free with his money. In fact, when we bought our house on Nimes Road, it cost much more than he was used to spending. Still, he agreed to pay for our basics—the food, the housekeeping, etc.—himself, and everything else was two-thirds Burt and one-third me. I would list how these were broken down, but I don’t even remember what I was paying a third for. I just wanted to live bigger than Burt had in his one-bedroom apartment at the Wilshire Comstock, and he was more than comfortable with my offer to chip in and pay a part of what it cost to live the life we were living.
Sometimes I would visit Elizabeth, and she would still be in bed and invite me upstairs. Her bed had the most beautiful sheets and pillowcases, with little lavender flowers from Porthault, the famous Parisian linen shop. Her pillows had beautiful organdy frills around them and a number of loved stuffed animals sat at the foot of her bed. On her night tables were photographs, many of her with Richard Burton, with her children, with Mike Todd, intimate snapshots taken by her dear friend Roddy McDowall of her dogs, especially Sugar, her Maltese, who was probably her very best girlfriend ever. Sugar even went to the hospital with her every time she was taken ill, which was far too many times.
One day she asked me, “Would you like to see my jewelry collection?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I answered. All of her jewelry was taken out of her safe and put on her bed for me to behold. It was a sight I won’t forget. Imagine Elizabeth Taylor showing you, and only you, all of her favorite pieces, and telling you who gave them to her, on what occasion, and why she loved them. It’s what girlfriends did, except she happened to have the most expensive jewelry collection in America, and she knew it. When her business manager would tell her she couldn’t afford to buy a certain piece of jewelry she’d fallen in love with, she would say to me, “They’re just being so stupid. I’ve been told that my collection is second only to Queen Elizabeth’s. Don’t they realize that because it belongs to me, it’s only going to increase in value when the whole collection is sold after I’m gone?” How right she was. At the Christie’s auction in 2011, the collection brought in $137 million. As an example of the frenzy her jewelry created, a single pearl necklace that Richard Burton bought her for $37,000 in 1969 sold for $11.8 million.
Other days, when she was up and going somewhere, I would get the chance—and this is no small deal—to sit in her bathroom/vanity room and watch her do her makeup. Even the greatest makeup artist in the world did not do Elizabeth’s makeup. She did it. Occasionally she would let them assist her, but it was her face, and she did her own makeup even for all of her films, including Cleopatra. And I got to watch and to learn, though I could never do it for the length of time she did. It must have been some sort of meditation for her, because when I was going out one night, I took practically the same cosmetics out, placing them on top of my vanity, and said to myself, I’m going to do my makeup like Elizabeth tonight. Twenty minutes later, at most, I was finished. She would just be beginning. Our mutual friend and hairdresser José Eber would laugh at me and say in his French accent, “Dahling, you will never be able to do what Elizabeth does. I have watched her for years, and she does it as an artist, painting slowly and perfectly.” Elizabeth was the most extraordinarily beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, even when she was completely makeup-free.
She had two nicknames for me: Little One and Mighty Mouse, because she always knew the strength I possessed underneath the smallness I projected. During the summers, when I would wear my basic uniform of white linen pants, white short-sleeved tee shirt, with a printed see-through blouse tied around me where I would have liked my waist to have been, she would say, “Little One, take that thing off. You don’t need it. What are you hiding?”
“I like it, Elizabeth. I like the way it looks.”
“Well, it looks to me like you’re trying to hide, and I don’t want you hiding anything. You’re beautiful just the way you are.” Now that’s a good friend, even though I continue to this day to tie that same shirt around my linen pants. Now it reminds me of her sweetness.
When Elizabeth wasn’t on a diet, she ate with complete gusto and abandon. One of the great treats was watching her prepare a hot dog before she was ready to consume it. She put everything on it: the mustard, the sauerkraut, the relish, and when she took a bite of it, she really bit in. One night I had fixed her up with Neil Simon in between his marriages, and the four of us went out to dinner. We went to a restaurant we had heard of somewhere in Venice. The menu had many a delicious choice on it. Elizabeth was getting excited by all of the possibilities and was having difficulty deciding what she wanted to eat. Burt didn’t notice how long it was taking, because he was happy drinking his scotch on the rocks. But Neil finally signaled for the waiter to come over.
“You go first,” Elizabeth said. “I’m still deciding.”
I ordered. (“Can I get that grilled without butter?”) Burt stuttered through his order, making a few adjustments and speaking slowly enough for Elizabeth to reread the menu. When it was Neil’s turn, he took the liberty of saying, “Miss Taylor will have the entire right side of the menu, please.” We all laughed, but boy, could she eat. And she made eating look like fun. By dessert time I indulged with her, because it was just too much fun not to. And besides, she would tease me mercilessly if I kept up my dieting lunacy too long. I just accepted that the following day would be a starvation day, but I could give her a run for her money on desserts. The next day I asked Neil if he liked her.
“She’s got too many fingers for me,” he said.
“Huh?” I said.
“You know; all those fingers need jewelry.” It wasn’t his best joke but it was honest. Neil, like Burt, was not one of the big gifters.
Anyway, back to “How’s Liz?”
“Mom, she hates to be called ‘Liz.’ By anyone. Ever.”
“Oooohh, I see. Well, don’t tell her I called her Liz.”
We would have these conversations two or three times a week, and I would feel like she was inserting a soda straw into me, trying to suck the life from me and make it hers. It didn’t feel good, which is one reason I lived across the country in LA.
Twenty-Six
I’M SURE THE IDEA of me writing with Bob Dylan sounds as alien to you as it did to me when he called. The whole idea of collaborating with him seemed ridiculous. If anyone felt like a self-contained solo artist to me, it was Dylan.
He changed a generation. No, he wasn’t having hits when we wrote together, but he was still tirelessly releasing new records full of ambitious material and was always taken seriously because he was Bob Dylan.
I had met Bob a number of times. His girlfriend at the time was my friend Carole Childs (formerly my old friend Carole Pincus), and she suggested that Bob and I write together. Bob liked the idea, so one day in the spring of 1986 we found a day for me to drive out to his Malibu ranch and see what we might come up with.
I drove out to where Bob had lived for years now. It was farther than most homes I knew out there, but what surprised me (and yet did not surprise me the minute I put a Bob Dylan filter over it all) was the kind of rundown feeling the place had. The greenery was growing any way it wanted, and there were no gardeners shaping the plantings. It looked a lot like Bob looked to me—unkempt, frayed, and worn. His beard was growing in all directions, too.
He really was a man of few words. “Let’s go out to the barn,” he said. How I wished I had the self-acceptance to be in cowboy boots, but they didn’t have high enough heels. The ground on the walk from his main house to his barn was more uneven than his beard or his shrubbery. A divot here, a clump of soil there; I prayed that breaking an ankle would not be part of my “writing with Bob Dylan” story. His big, musty barn reminded me of a summer camp in the middle of winter.
&nb
sp; Two single beds faced each other, with random quilts and guitars lying around. He sat on one of the beds, and I sat myself down on the other, facing him. We were around five feet away from each other, which is unusual since I usually sit very close to where the composer is seated. He picked up one of the two guitars that were sitting against a cracked wall. An old wood upright piano was in a far-off corner waiting to be played. I had a feeling it had been waiting quite a long time.
I had to focus on why I was sitting facing Bob Dylan because there was a part of me blown away by what an unlikely pair we made—he completely disheveled from head to toe and I in full makeup, tight jeans, tee shirt, and studded leather jacket. I was wearing my faux rock ’n’ roll look and failing miserably, and he could have told me he had come in from just rolling around with some farm animals and I would not have disbelieved him. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks.
In all truth, though he was an icon, I was not a follower. I missed the Dylan Revolution somehow, with the exception of a few classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Lay Lady Lay.” So I knew the hits, but I was listening more to the polished sound of pop and R&B. I appreciated Bob’s thorny poetry as a lyricist, but I was always in search of a great melody. Friends whose taste in music I respect have played me some of their favorites and when I listened, though I appreciated how very good some of the lyrics were, they didn’t hit me in my solar plexus because there was no melody to speak of.
Still, I sat in his barn and was completely aware that This Is Fucking Bob Dylan!
I had my usual yellow lined legal pad and he gave me a pen when I couldn’t find mine in my overstuffed bag which included a wallet, a card case, a makeup bag in case I was sleeping over, Kleenex, Chapstick, a small collection of star crystals in a small silk pouch that I carried because I was afraid to stop carrying them in case they were protecting me, a croc case for my Lactaid and my Stevia, cards with people’s names on them I no longer knew, a mirror given me by Elizabeth with undistorted magnification, my eyeglasses, a rubber tip that a dental hygienist had dropped in one day, and scores of useless other things that just kind of piled up in there.
They're Playing Our Song Page 14
