They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  BURT FLEW INTO NEW YORK without me on Saturday night. My fortieth birthday was the next day, and went by unnoticed by both of us. Whatever happened during this time is lost to all memory retrieval. It’s like a power outage that went on for days. Did flowers come? Did people call to say “Happy Birthday”? Your guess is as good as mine.

  When Burt came back with my gold embossed plaque, he took me down to Two Bunch Palms, a spa near Palm Springs. I don’t remember staying there, I just remember the two of us in a small near-empty Italian restaurant at a table for two. He was facing the door, and I was facing the wall. Recalling this detail is as odd to me as is my forgetting everything else. I remember him urging me, “Carole, please, just take a taste of the pasta. It just has a little butter on it. Can’t you try?”

  And I couldn’t. Can you imagine? I couldn’t eat. I looked at the food and it looked back at me. It was something I wanted no part of. Finally, to please Burt, I took a tiny taste.

  Everything else is more than blurry. It’s black. But I do remember on the ride home from the desert, I was feeling a little less awful. And within another week, I was pretty much over it, whatever it was. Believe me, I’ve thought about it long and hard. The closest I ever came to figuring it out was that long ago I made a Faustian bargain with the Devil: Give me a great life and much success and in return I promise not to enjoy it.

  I’d already gone too far by feeling real joy at the Grammys and at Elizabeth’s party, and I obviously had to pay for it. I guess whatever part of me was doling out the punishment was kind enough to believe that denying myself the Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony, which surely would have been one of the greatest nights of my life, was penance enough for the crime of having a good time.

  Twenty-Eight

  I WANTED TO THINK that living and working with Burt was going to be forever, but the truth is there are always signs if you choose to see them. During the next few years, our life together was not the same as it was at the beginning. We both were relying more on our son Cristopher to keep us together. It was good for Cris because we both spent a lot of time with him. Though I had a hard time admitting it, I was aware that our married life was predominantly about the music. That might have been okay, but I was not exactly happy in the music room.

  I always thought I could be doing something else with the endless amount of time Burt needed me there to be the muse in his creative struggle. It was so not fun, which is what songwriting used to be for me. I could be with Cristopher. I should be with Cristopher.

  We didn’t spend a lot of time going out on “dates,” or having romantic dinners, or making passionate love. Burt’s fondness for porno videos left me feeling he was more connected to the porn star he was watching than he was to me. And what at first was something that aroused me, too, was now making me feel I was not enough.

  I never said any of this to Burt because I was afraid to hear his answer. When we weren’t having our picture taken, or being interviewed on talk shows (where we always appeared camera-happy), I’m not sure we were having any real fun together, or even if there was any “we” at all. We spent an excessive amount of time together but only in our photographs, which I placed all over our home, were we truly happy. The intimacy wasn’t there.

  Burt felt like our life had gotten far too social for his taste. One night he said, “I don’t want to be known for the parties I give. I want to be known for the music I write.” I didn’t disagree, but I didn’t see them as mutually exclusive.

  ONE OF THE GREAT bonuses of being a songwriter is that once one of your songs has been recorded, someone else can decide to rerecord it at any time. This happened to me a few times, but none more dramatic than when, twenty-two years after “A Groovy Kind of Love” was first a hit, Phil Collins had an even bigger hit than the original when he recorded it again for his movie Buster. It went to Number One on both the US and the UK charts, and remains the only Phil Collins record to reach Number One in both countries. It was also named the Most Performed Song of the Year by Billboard.

  All this without either me or my publisher lifting a finger to make it happen.

  IBM WAS HAVING A ten-day convention in Maui, flying in three separate groups of their best salespeople, and we were the entertainment. They’d rented us this beautiful condominium right off the beach, staffed by the Kapalua Bay Hotel. I remember Burt running out onto the magnificent white sandy beach before he was even unpacked so he could take a swim in the warm ocean. It was four in the afternoon. I went running out after him fully dressed, with my Nikon, taking lots of pictures of him. Later we lay by the pool where, next to us, Carol Burnett was reading a magazine.

  As Burt applied sunscreen, Carol looked up and told me of the piece she was reading on teens and drug addiction. I listened and in my usual Zelig manner, nodded in agreement when she said marijuana acted as a gateway drug to substances far worse.

  We didn’t get off stage until one that night, and by the time we settled down, it was close to three when we went to bed. We slept in the next morning and it wasn’t until early afternoon that Burt was ready to exit the room.

  “Ready?” he finally asked me as he took an extra towel and threw it around his neck.

  “Sure!” I said, holding the door open for him, feeling like a contest winner who’d won him as a prize. I followed him onto the beach. I had tied a great big cotton scarf around my bathing suit, covering what I considered my most serious character defect, flabby thighs. I wore white wedges, which immediately sunk into the sand, reducing me to my actual five-foot-one status. If I cheated and put a little tiptoe in, I could get to five one and three-quarters. I trailed behind him.

  Burt set up our towels at the far end of the beach. This made me happy. It always made me feel happy when I had him all to myself. He removed the sunscreen from his canvas travel bag.

  “Hey, baby, would you do my back for me?” he asked in his sexy voice.

  “Sure,” I said, squeezing the remainder of the tube into my hands and gladly massaging it into his skin.

  “Be sure you get it all over. Don’t forget my shoulders,” he reminded me.

  “Oh, no, I won’t.”

  I might have asked him to do mine, but there was none left.

  He had such a comfortable relationship with his body. He thought nothing of walking around with just a towel around his waist. He liked his muscular well-defined legs, though he told me they used to be even better when he played in the RFK Tennis Tournament. All his life he had worked out. He knew exactly how he looked.

  We lay there for a minute or two, partially shaded from the sun by a big beach umbrella. Then he got up and said, “Come on, let’s go in the water. It’s good for us.”

  Water? We’d just lain down. I decided to swim with him. He knew what I looked like. He hadn’t married me for my body. I swiftly followed him to the ocean, dragging a big beach towel and placing it as close to the water as possible in preparation for what would be my exit. The ocean felt wonderful, warm, and sensual. I stood, safely up to my waist in water. I wet my whole head in the ocean and tossed it back. I knew this was a good look for me: tan, white bathing suit, wet from the waist up. I let the sun play in my eyes because I knew he liked that. He looked at me.

  “You know, you’re very pretty,” he said. “Come here.” He put his arm around my waist and pulled me toward him. Was he going to make love to me right now, right here in the water? I felt so excited.

  “Now, look,” he said. “I’m going to show you a great exercise for your thighs. Watch what I do.”

  He began to run back and forth in the ocean like an old warhorse, thigh high in water.

  “Follow me,” he called. “Do you feel the current fighting against your thighs? Great! Great for you! Come on! Start running!”

  Dutifully I began running, back and forth, back and forth. While other honeymooners were sipping piña coladas by the pool, I was doing laps as though I was in training for the Summer Olympics. He might have stayed in the water longer w
ere it not for the two effortlessly beautiful young women in string bikinis waving vigorously and calling him from the water’s edge.

  “Burt, Burt! Hi! It’s Cindy and Rachel.”

  Burt waved back. “Who are they?” I asked.

  “They’re two models I know,” he said. “Come on, let’s say hello. We’ll do some more of this tomorrow.”

  “Oh, you go ahead,” I answered sweetly. “This exercise you showed me is just so great. I’ll stay here and do a few more laps. It just feels too good to get out now.”

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” he said, proving definitively that he had absolutely no idea who he was married to. “We’ll wait for you.”

  I continued back and forth, back and forth. I was exhausted and praying they would leave, but Burt looked very happy and animated standing and talking to them. They weren’t going away, so I had no choice but to get out of the water. With shriveled little hands I paddled my way back to shore, ran out quickly, and grabbed my now tide-dampened towel, wrapping it—and the accompanying mud it had accumulated—around me.

  “Hi, Carole,” the nearly six-foot Rachel called to me. I walked over. Standing between her and the equally tall blonde Cindy, I felt like one of those baby frankfurters or a woman sawed in half by David Copperfield. I forced a smile.

  “Why don’t we all have dinner tonight?” Rachel suggested.

  “Great!” Burt replied immediately. “We don’t have any plans tonight. We’ll go into town. There’s a good fish restaurant.”

  “Oh, good,” I lied again.

  After what for me, though certainly not for Burt, was a long and boring dinner, he and I left the restaurant and were walking down a dimly lit Maui street.

  “Hey, baby, light up a little joint for me, will you?”

  Obediently I reached into my wallet and found half of a joint. I pulled it out and tried to light it, but the wind kept blowing out the match so I walked closer to the buildings and moved into a doorway to try again. Suddenly, out of nowhere, three huge Hawaiian men grabbed me and pulled me roughly to an unmarked car. I was under arrest, they said. For smoking marijuana.

  In Maui?

  “It’s not mine,” I said loudly, looking to Burt to share some of the responsibility. When he said nothing, I pointed my finger at him and said, “He asked me to light it.” They were not listening to me. Burt stepped forward, hoping they would recognize him and ask for an autographed copy of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” Instead, they wouldn’t even allow him in their unmarked police car. They pushed me into the backseat and told him he had to follow behind.

  In retrospect, I should have been thinking My husband never came to my defense! “Hey, baby, light up a little joint for me, will you?” God! He should have pulled me out of that police car and put himself in. But all I could think of as I cried and cried was how horrible this was all going to be when Carol Burnett read of my arrest for possession of the gateway drug in the Maui News the next morning.

  They fingerprinted me and took a mug shot. It was probably the first photo of my life I hoped I looked bad enough in that it bore no resemblance to me. I stated my name as Carole Bacharach, hoping no one would know who that was.

  What would the IBM executives do when they heard the news? They were so strict they’d gone through all our songs before we performed, making me eliminate the line “your funny cigarettes” from my song “You’re Moving Out Today.”

  Through my tears, I told Burt to call my manager, Shep Gordon. He had a house in Maui and was well wired in with the locals. Thanks to Shep, there was no publicity. I was put on one year’s probation and one year later to the day my prints and mug shot were returned to me in the mail to destroy. Which, believe me, I did.

  Twenty-Nine

  TURNING SIXTY DEVASTATED BURT. So in 1988, in a last-ditch effort to battle Father Time, he entered therapy and suddenly discovered his anger at his deceased mother.

  We were in the kitchen. Burt was having his peanut butter snack when he said, “Jack says the sleeping pills I take deaden my creative energy.”

  “But you’ve been taking them your entire adult life. They didn’t seem to keep you off the cover of Time and Newsweek.” I guess I felt a little threatened because the fear of not sleeping was one of the biggest bonds we had, and if he was going to try and give up his sleeping pill, I would have to do the same.

  “He says with the breathing work he does and with me giving up my sleeping pills, he can reawaken my creativity.”

  “Well, I think that’s great,” I said not entirely truthfully.

  “Yes. I’m going to do it,” he said resolutely. “I’m going to stop. I’m going to reduce it two milligrams every week. I’m very clear about this. And I don’t want you asking me how I’m doing. I don’t want to report in, and if you decide to stop, too, I don’t want to compare notes.”

  All that he left out was “I hate you and I want no part of you!”

  Had the therapist promised him anything else—a deepening of his knowledge of himself, an acceptance of his age and stage of life—he would have lost him in a heartbeat; but he knew the magic words: “Restore Creative Energy.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’d like to try and stop, too.”

  “You do what you want,” he answered. “I just want to be separate from you on this.”

  On this? I thought. He’s been nothing but separate from me for the last year.

  He continued, “You know, I hate it when you make these pronouncements of what you’re going to do, go on a diet, work out every day, and then you blow it, and I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

  There was a pause.

  I said, “You know, the Davises want us to come for dinner Saturday night . . .”

  He let me wait.

  Finally, he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to feel on Saturday. I hate to commit so far in advance.”

  Today was Thursday. “How many times can I tell them we’re in the studio?”

  “I don’t like their dinner parties. I don’t have a good time. Tell them I’m working.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  My life was anything but fine. Just last week we had gone to a dinner party at our friends Wendy and Leonard Goldberg’s house for Art Garfunkel, when suddenly Burt got up and left the table, presumably to go to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later he still had not emerged, and I was getting nervous. When he finally came out, it was almost time to leave. He told me on the ride home that he hated being there. It was too social for him.

  The only thing Burt was able to commit to was Burt. Nothing mattered to him but this crisis he was going through—and his skiing. I read most men have their midlife crisis at forty. Burt was sixty, but he really didn’t see himself past forty.

  I kept hoping he would get it together and be there for me, but the only time he was there was when I was serving him. Now he needed to feel young and although I was nineteen years younger, being with me was making him feel old.

  WHILE I WAS WRITING songs with Burt, I also wrote two screenplays with my friend Alana Stewart, the second one being optioned by producer Joel Silver at Warner Bros. She had been married to Rod Stewart, and as we became friends, we found many similarities between Rod and Burt.

  I liked working in a room near Cristopher’s. I just felt relief being, even if for a short time, in a room other than Burt’s music room. What had once been enjoyable had become an obligation.

  I WAS ALWAYS LOOKING for an external solution to an internal problem. I took the lead and convinced Burt that we should buy a beach house for the weekends. He’d sold his house in Del Mar, and I was glad because I felt very alone when I was down there. Still, he always liked the beach, so it made sense to have one closer to home. It sat on a cliff in Malibu above the water but there was an easy path down to the sand. It was lovely, homey and cozy, and surrounded by a big porch that made it feel like we were on the East Coast somewhere in New England. I couldn’t wait to spend time there with him. We’d been t
ogether nine years and we were growing further and further apart. From the first weekend we spent in it, he seemed not to want to be there.

  We worked together that weekend, checking different mixes of Aretha Franklin’s recording of a song we wrote for her new album entitled “Someone Else’s Eyes.” The lyric was as autobiographical as any I’d ever written:

  This is my song

  And for too long I sang to someone else’s melody

  It wasn’t really me

  Somehow I took myself for granted

  In someone else’s eyes

  I saw reflections of the girl I was who caught me by surprise

  Seeing a woman who’s defined by you, I never realized

  I can’t love you, I can’t love me

  Through someone else’s eyes

  You were the sun; I was the one who just

  Revolved around you day and night

  You were my only light but if I were free

  Baby, I’d take control of everything inside of me

  Find who I’d want to be

  Well you, no you’re not the one to blame

  I got lost inside your name

  And I’ll never be the same

  Till I find a way back home again

  We must have listened to it at least a hundred times over that weekend and never did Burt say to me, “Is this the way you feel about us?” But then again, neither did I say, “Burt, listen to the lyric. This is how I feel.” It all came back to me: one of the reasons I wrote lyrics for so much of my life was for them to say what I couldn’t say in the moment.

  Burt only heard music, not feelings. He counted on my lyrics, but he only listened to the way they sounded, not to what they were saying.

  THAT SUNDAY, BACK IN town, we were getting ready for bed. At least we would soon be sleeping in the same king-size bed and something about that made me feel connected. It also held the promise of intimacy. Burt was in his bathroom and I was in mine on the other side of the bedroom.