They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  Being present in my own life is something that I had not been for far too long. This new me was going to take some getting used to, and I knew I needed to imagine it as a long-distance run and not a sprint.

  So the gauntlet had been thrown down. Not by Bob, but by me, because I could have just said, “You know what? I can’t do this. It’s too high-functioning for me,” and found another barely present guy to distract me from examining my own behavior. But instead I stayed, and I welcomed the opportunity. It was already way past the time to have a different life, which is to say, to be fully alive.

  NIKKI BACHARACH HAD BEEN living with Angie again since she’d gotten out of the Wilson Center. Bob and I would have her over periodically for dinner, and Cristopher loved discovering a new sister. Though she was eighteen years older than he was, he seemed to understand that she needed to be treated gently. I was happy when Burt started taking her and Cristopher out to dinner to spend more time together.

  She’d been officially diagnosed as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome once the medical community became aware of it in 1992. In light of this news, the Wilson Center recognized that they could not help her in any meaningful way and released her. I apologized to Nikki for my part in her having been at the center.

  Nikki was obsessed with earthquakes for as long as I’d known her—all she wanted was to feel one—and at one particular dinner she spoke incessantly about her misfortune of having been in Tahiti when the Northridge quake hit LA. She mourned the fact that she missed it; it pained her that she didn’t get to experience the shaking.

  “But, Nikki,” I said, “people died in that earthquake.”

  “I know,” she said, “but that doesn’t change my pain at having missed it.”

  She was also phobic about noise. The sound of a helicopter overhead or a leaf blower from a neighboring garden would drive her to despair.

  But what consumed her the most as the years passed was the crippling fear of her mother eventually dying and leaving her on the earth alone. This was unbearable to her. She would say, “If Angie dies, I’ll kill myself.”

  I felt tremendous compassion for Angie, who seemed to have given up any chance for a life of her own to care for her daughter. It had gotten to the point where she had to discontinue her weekly card game at her home, because even that much noise would make Nikki crazy.

  Angie got Nikki an apartment in Thousand Oaks and enrolled her in a college nearby where she could take one geology course each semester and study the earthquakes she loved. On the weekends she went home to Angie.

  Sadly, as Angie got older, Nikki’s fear of being left alone became more intense, and in January 2007, at forty, she committed suicide.

  It was all a tragedy, her death and her life. Cris felt the pain in his own way. It took two years for him to show me he had tattooed a heart on his wrist with Nikki’s name below it. When I asked him why, he said, “Because she was my sister.”

  I called Burt to tell him how sorry I was, and he told me she left him a note. I asked what it said, and he said he didn’t read it.

  “You didn’t read a suicide note from your daughter?” I asked incredulously.

  “I let Jane read it and decide if I should read it, and she said I shouldn’t. It was just rehashing all the things I already knew: her anger at me for putting her in Wilson and leaving her there for nine years.”

  Today there is so much more understanding, support, and coping strategies for someone like Nikki with severe Asperger’s. I certainly would have been more accepting and compassionate, and would have clearly seen the futility of sending her away from home for help.

  I felt guilty that instead of helping her I added to her burden. I never could have changed her situation, but sometimes out of the blue I’ll think about Nikki and feel anguished that I just didn’t do enough to try and save her.

  Forty

  ALTHOUGH I NEVER DOUBTED my unconditional love for Cristopher, through my close girlfriend Stacey I did come to see the big difference between me, who was always a working mother, and Stacey, who was a full-time mom. I was almost never with Stacey for any length of time before one of her three children needed to speak to her.

  Sometimes I wished I had that relationship with Cristopher. When I would call Stacey at night, her son Max would often pick up the phone. Until he was well past sixteen, he would almost always say, “Could she call you back later, Carole? Mom and I are spending some quality time together.” I wanted Cristopher to want to share his feelings with me, and want to watch television with me, and basically spend more time with me, but maybe I hadn’t put in enough time with him. In any event, Cristopher once very wisely said, “Mom, I’m not Max. Stop comparing me to him.”

  ONCE I WAS LIVING in Carolwood, I was in the process of becoming everything Daly: up early, no sleeping in, go go go all day, and at night, tear up the card. That was the Bob Daly way.

  Now, with me being an only child, you can imagine my surprise when I finally met all of the family. There was Linda, Bobby, and Brian. I felt like I instantly went from Mame to The Sound of Music. With the Dalys and their closely knit family, all of whom I liked, I expected Bob to blow the whistle and for me to get in line with the von Trapp children and break into a chorus of “Edelweiss,” the perfect Austrian song for a Jewish girl.

  Cristopher loved the concept of “more.” Thus, he loved being part of a big family.

  As I tucked him into his new bed in his new home, he started to count his family members much the way he counted his prized sneakers and hats.

  “I have Linda, who is a new sister, and Bobby is a new brother, and Brian is another new brother. That’s three more family.”

  “Well, you know, Bob and I are not married yet.”

  “Marry Bob,” he said. “I want more brothers and sisters.”

  “Okay, sounds good to me,” I said, rubbing his back. “Let me work on that.”

  It took another two years, and his daughter Linda’s marriage, before Bob asked me to marry him. There was something about his getting engaged before Linda that struck him as inappropriate, and Bob always listened to his gut.

  He gave me free rein to make the wedding of my dreams. As my first two weddings left so much to be desired—the first saw me going down the aisle in need of smelling salts, and my second had four people witnessing Burt saying “I’ll try”—I wanted this to be the real thing: beautiful, enchanted, and romantic. I felt that by planning all the many details of our wedding, and surrounding us with people we loved, our commitment to each other would be more meaningful and this time it would last.

  Of course it’s exceedingly dangerous to give me free rein, because I’m as impractical as I am creative. Even a set designer has a budget, but without one, this is how my first meeting with our team went:

  “I would like it to be tented down below”—they began to take notes—“but I want the tent to disappear,” I said.

  “Disappear?” the wedding planner asked with some concern.

  “Yes, I want it to look like you’ve walked into an enchanted forest, with wisteria and lilies hanging at various lengths from the branches above. I’d like a faux brick and wooden entrance so people have no idea what they’re stepping into or where they are. Oh, and I’d like not to have a pole in the middle because I don’t want anyone to even know they’re in a tent.”

  Bob’s longtime trusted aide, Marissa, asked, “Well, how is the tent supposed to stay up, Carole, if there’s no support in the middle?” The others, wanting to please me, because I was after all to be Mr. Daly’s wife, said they were sure they could figure out a way to make me happy.

  Bob wanted a “traditional” white cake with white icing. Well, you have no idea how many white cakes are not completely “white” or don’t “taste like traditional white cake,” whatever that taste is. He sampled nine different cakes before he found the one he loved. If I’d had to go through as thorough an investigation as those cakes did, I might not be Mrs. Daly today.

 
For days before the Saturday evening wedding (June 8, 1996), hordes of people were setting up the sound system, the lighting, and of course the construction of the pole-free tent. Late Friday afternoon, we did a final lighting check, and when I walked inside I was standing in this magical forest that was everything I’d imagined and more.

  Two hours later I was upstairs reveling in the fantasy setting we had all created when Bob burst into the bedroom. “Your tent with no center pole just collapsed,” he said. “It’s gone. It’s lying in a pile.”

  “You’re kidding, right? That’s not funny, Bob.”

  “You want to see not funny? Come downstairs and look.”

  With no center pole, the weight of the flowers and the twigs and the branches and the wires was too much for the structure to bear and down it came. The tables that had already been beautifully set were now covered with debris and piles of now-all-visible canvas.

  I started to cry. Marissa told me not to panic. They would fix it. I couldn’t imagine how, yet unbelievably, with a double crew from Warner Bros., they worked overnight like an army of elves and managed to put the tent back up with the all-too-essential center pole, now disguised—as it always should have been—to look like a magnificent tree reaching up toward the sky.

  It was the most magical night imaginable. Our families, our children, our close friends, all gathered to celebrate two people who had found each other later in their lives. It was a middle-aged fairy tale.

  Cristopher walked me down the aisle. He was now ten years old, and I couldn’t have loved him more. After we said our vows outside our living room, golf carts took the guests down to the enchanted forest. Once everyone was seated, Bob said, “Some of you may be wondering about what you are sitting in tonight. It was all Carole’s vision. She dreamed this and I wanted to give it to her because she makes every day of my life magical.”

  I had tears in my eyes.

  He said, “Carole is known to some as a woman who has many names, but tonight she has one name, and I would like to ask Mrs. Daly to have this dance with me.”

  If I were any other woman sitting there, I would wish I were me. Bob was the most romantic man in the room and he loved me.

  Bob’s turn to get teary came when his two sons, who were his best men, made their toasts.

  Brian thanked me for “bringing our Dad back to us in a way we never had him before, more open, more fun-loving, more available to his family.”

  And Bobby said, “I always knew I was going to be the best man for one of these guys, I just never dreamed it would be my father.”

  James Ingram, David Foster, and Melissa Manchester performed. “Oh, Carole and I go back a long way,” she said between songs. “Even back then, this girl knew what she wanted—big furniture.” Huh? I felt a little confused, but then I remembered how reluctant she was to leave my big-pillowed couch back in the Seventies. Then David began to play an intro and Melissa said sweetly, “Pretend like you’re singing this to each other,” and sang “Come In from the Rain” so beautifully I rushed to the stage to hug her and thank her.

  The greatest gift Bob has given me in our years together has been the gift of really being loved, which allowed me, for the first time in my life, to feel safe. And on our anniversary every year since, we have this tradition of eating the same meal and the same cake—thank God the bakery is still in business—and then watching the full-length video of our wedding. The last few years it became more depressing, as we’d lie in bed and sadly comment: “Dead, divorced, dead, dead, Alzheimer’s, divorced, dead” as we watch each couple enter the man-made forest. Finally, this year we couldn’t take it anymore. We went directly to the three-minute highlight montage, edited to “That’s What Friends Are For.”

  No marriage is perfect. One constant area of contention that plagues ours involves time, as in “What time do we have to leave for . . . ?” So used to being late with Burt, it was not easy to make the 180-degree switch to Bob’s need to be more than on time. I would accuse him of wanting to get to a party so early he could help the waiters set up. He liked being early better than being on time. I still beg him sometimes, “Drive around the block. I’m not going in yet. There’s not one car here.” We have the same little argument over and over.

  “God, we’re going to be too early.”

  “What’s the difference if we get there a little early?” he’ll answer. “We can sit and talk. You always say we don’t talk enough!”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t mean sitting and talking in an empty restaurant while the waiters are still setting up.”

  While I’m finishing dressing, Bob will walk in and say, “Ready?” I’ll say, “Not yet,” and he’ll say, “I’ll be downstairs.”

  “What does that mean, ‘I’ll be downstairs’?” I’ll argue. “You said we don’t have to leave for ten more minutes.”

  “That’s right. And I’ll be waiting downstairs.”

  This lets me imagine him waiting in the car, going crazy, causing me to move more slowly. Sometimes the phone will ring.

  “I’m in the car. Where are you?”

  “Where you called me. Here.”

  “Hurry up, there’s going to be traffic.”

  I enter the car trying to shake off the annoyance of knowing I’m going to be too early. And then, somewhere along Sunset a few extra cars will be stopped at a light and he’ll say, “Didn’t I tell you there was going to be traffic?” And it never changes. We repeat the same scenes, knowing exactly who’ll say what, and when. Why do we do that?

  Forty-One

  DAVID FOSTER HAS WOVEN in and out and around my life like the thread of a fine tapestry so effortlessly and for so long that I sometimes forget to notice his many contributions to it, both professionally and socially.

  I can’t recall ever asking him for help when he hasn’t said yes, whether it’s putting talent together for my wedding or other major events, or performing with me for certain charitable organizations, or playing keyboards on various records I was involved with. Though we didn’t write together nearly as much as I did with others, he is one of my favorite collaborators. As with a few others I’ve mentioned, I had to be wary because he, too, could make anything we wrote sound like a sure hit.

  David is handsome, quick, funny, irreverent, and oozing with musical talent. Burt once said he thought David was possibly the most musical man of the baby boom generation. He is a brilliant composer, producer, and arranger, and his work with artists including Josh Groban, Chicago, Earth, Wind and Fire, Céline Dion, and Barbra Streisand earned him forty-seven Grammy nominations and sixteen wins, including Record of the Year and Album of the Year in 1992 for Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and the soundtrack to The Bodyguard.

  David is so inventive and so able to arrange records on the spot that there was a certain producer who was said to put the best session musicians in a studio, get Foster to play keyboards, and just sit back knowing David would produce the record and he’d take the credit.

  “Hey, Caaa.” That’s how David has said hello to me for as long as I can remember. And then, because he probably likes the cadence he’ll usually add in perfect rhythm, “Carole Bayer Sager Hamlisch [where I then interrupt and say “Not true, never married him”] Bacharach Daly.”

  I spoke to David a short while ago. He knew I was writing this book and asked me, with still a trace of his Canadian accent, “Did you put that story about us in this book?”

  “What story?”

  “You know, that time when we were both between spouses and I laid my head on your lap, and you looked down and asked me, ‘What are you doing?’ without a thought that I was looking to get something going between us.” I guess the reason I didn’t pick up on it is because David has a type, and I was so far away from that type—tall, blond, big breasts—it would never have occurred to me that he was being flirtatious.

  In fact, he was so completely without filter during most times that we worked together that he once held up a photo to a few stud
io guys of his soon-to-be (and now ex-) wife Linda Thompson. “Look at this picture. Does she not have a body that goes on for days?” When it was passed to me, I felt like I was just another guy in the recording studio. Anyway, his mentioning this to me thirty years later was flattering.

  David played keyboards on my first two records. We wrote a song for my second record, . . . Too, “It’s the Falling in Love,” which Michael Jackson later recorded on Off the Wall, the first of his brilliant trilogy with Quincy Jones, followed by Thriller and Bad.

  When Warner Bros. approached me to write the songs for what was to be their first animated musical, I said yes and immediately asked David if he had any interest in collaborating with me. He did, so we signed on together to try our hand at Quest for Camelot.

  Quest for Camelot? The title alone should have been a red flag. It sounded like something everybody had already seen on television as a kid and hated even then. The pitch meeting in which the story was described to us was not reassuring, leaving me wanting something more, something better. Much better. Still, the idea of being given this large canvas on which to write a half dozen songs clouded my initial instinct, which was flashing: “Not Good Enough, Not Good Enough.” You would think I’d have learned something about trusting my instincts from Georgy, but no. I completely ignored the signs and moved forward.

  It reminded me of Steve Martin’s movie The Man with Two Brains, where he is about to marry this horrifying gold-digging woman and he looks up at a painting of his dear dead wife hanging over the fireplace and says, “Becca, if there’s anything wrong with my marriage to Dolores just give me a sign.” The room spins, the painting falls off the wall behind him. Lights explode and the portrait of Becca spins and spins. Horror music plays, underscoring the scene. Beat. “Just any kind of sign—I’ll keep on the lookout for it. Meanwhile, I’ll just put you in the closet.”

  David and I began to work on the songs for the movie. The director was very young and, it turned out, singularly untalented. He’d grown up in Belgium, so I’m not sure how familiar he was with American music, but the whole process felt very disorganized. There seemed to be no one in charge who knew what they were doing. In fact, except for me, no one involved had ever worked on a musical of any sort.