They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  I knew Whitney through her aunt, Dionne Warwick, who had collaborated so closely with Burt. Whitney was still a young girl when I first met her, and she was in awe of her famous aunt. Whitney’s mother, Cissy Houston, was one of Dionne’s backup singers for many years.

  With over 170 million sales of albums, singles, and videos combined, Whitney’s success had eclipsed every other female artist ever. But that was all then. The last ten years had been all downhill and her life was chronicled weekly in the tabloids.

  With this as background, Kenny Edmonds called me about writing a song for Whitney. What was her voice like now, and what was she like physically? I asked. He said she was clean and really sounding very good.

  Two years prior, she’d shown up late and disoriented at the Academy Awards rehearsal. She was to sing “Over the Rainbow” and didn’t know the words. Burt, who was the musical director that year, met with Lili and Dick Zanuck, who were producing the show. They told him to fire Whitney. “No one will remember who won Best Picture,” they said. “They will only remember that Whitney was a train wreck.” They replaced her with Faith Hill with only twenty-four hours before the show went on the air.

  That was the last I’d heard about Whitney until Kenny’s call.

  I loved her voice. To me, she was one of the greatest singers of our time. Like millions of other viewers, I was heartbroken watching her disastrous exchange earlier in the year when Diane Sawyer interviewed an anorexic-looking, clearly stoned-out Whitney who denied using any drugs at the time—yet another tragic moment in a career that was spiraling out of control.

  Believing, or wanting to believe, that she was better, Kenny and I began working on a song for Whitney. She was separated from her husband, Bobby Brown, at the time, and her family was helping her stay sober and clean. I thought a lot about what Whitney might want to say if she was writing her own song. I gave Kenny my title, “Try It on My Own.” I wanted to write a lyric that would empower her. He liked it. I wrote the following to his melody.

  And I am not afraid to try it on my own

  I don’t care if I’m right or wrong

  I’ll live my life the way I feel

  No matter what I’ll keep it real, you know

  It’s time for me to do it on my own

  Kenny produced the record, and Whitney did sound great. I also loved the video, which parodied her being fired from the Oscars, spoofed American Idol, and had her pushing Bobby Brown away, and then singing the song her way with a large gospel choir in front of a live audience at the Lyric Theatre, one of the oldest black-owned theaters in Miami. I don’t know if the video was Whitney’s idea or the director’s, but she owned it. The album sold more than three million copies. Good, but as with Michael’s Invincible, not outstanding, and nowhere near what she did at her height.

  The problem was that Whitney had not truly recovered, and every time she sang live, her performances got worse. Her pitch was off. She struggled for notes that were once easy for her. She was still lost in her addiction, and her rail-thin appearance was difficult for audiences, including me, to see. This might have been what prevented the song from being a much bigger hit on the scale of some of her others. But for me, as her fan, the sight of her unraveling was the worst part.

  I HAD ALWAYS WANTED to write with Carly Simon and I finally got that opportunity in 2002 when Freddy DeMann (co-owner of Maverick Records with Madonna) asked me if I’d consider writing a song for a Broadway play he was producing called Take Me Out. It all took place in a sports locker room, with five teammates exploring the underbelly of baseball as a metaphor for life.

  Carly and I had met before in 1978, when she recorded my song with Marvin Hamlisch, “Nobody Does It Better.” It was a great success for all of us, but like so many people you have the opportunity to work with, you don’t necessarily stay in touch after the project is complete.

  Twenty-four years later, before Bob and I went to New York, I called Carly and asked her if she would like to try and write the song for the play with me. She was still living on Martha’s Vineyard, and said she’d come into Manhattan and stay overnight in the city.

  So here was my Carole King experience happening all over again. I was excited to see what we might come up with. I loved everything Carly—her albums, her songs, and her voice—and in that way that I can do, we bonded instantly. She looked like an exotic bird, tall and graceful with the most charismatic smile and piercing blue eyes that made her instantly beautiful.

  Being in a hotel room high above the city, hearing Carly’s sultry voice singing in my ear while strumming her guitar was nothing short of heaven. The song we wrote was called “In the Bigger Picture.”

  I’ve been feeling this weight on my shoulders

  Thinking it belonged to me

  I’ve been holding this perfect photograph

  Of how I am supposed to be

  But what if it is all a lie

  What if that’s not who I am

  Can’t I be a million things and still just be a man

  In the middle of our writing session, Carly mentioned she was feeling particularly nervous. Of course if she was feeling nervous, I soon noticed that I, too, was feeling the same. She excused herself and ran across the street to Zitomer’s (a large pharmacy that sells almost anything you can think of), to purchase some calming tea for both of us. When she returned, the water was boiled, and we began downing cup after cup of Koppla Tea, certain we were feeling its benefits within the first fifteen minutes.

  “Carole, I think this is really working. Don’t you?”

  “Yes! It’s almost like taking a Valium,” I answered. The label promised us “CALM-fidence—to calm mental or emotional anxiety, relieve physical tension and refocus our sluggish energy.” So impressed was I with this miracle tea that I ordered boxes and boxes of it online. Within a week the owner himself called me, asking if he could use my name on his website in return for some free tea. Let me say, long after Carly was home at the Vineyard, I had enough Koppola Tea to supply all of LA’s health food chains. Sipping it without Carly just wasn’t the same, and I quickly returned to my green tea and coffee.

  Back at the piano, I loved our lyric but I noticed our melody rambled a little. Carly was a really fine lyricist, so it was challenging to bring something to the lyrics she couldn’t do on her own. Like me she had a notebook where she jotted down potential lyrics or ideas when she thought of them. I wasn’t completely honest about how I felt about the chorus melody because I wanted to continue writing with her and besides, maybe it really was good; it takes me a while to decide.

  Carly was known for not liking to fly, something I easily related to, but after much coaxing, she agreed to fly back to LA with Bob and me and write together for six days. We invited her to stay in our guesthouse and she accepted.

  We started writing every day at about eleven. With or without music, Carly was fun to be with. We wrote a song I loved, “Leap of Faith”:

  That would take a leap of faith

  Bonds that I would have to break

  Chances I’ve been scared to take all my life

  I’d be absolutely safe

  With just a simple leap of faith

  No wonder I loved writing with her. We both carried deep scars from our childhoods; you always know when you’ve found a kindred spirit. I loved the cadence of her voice and the poetic phrases she would use in conversation. No doubt I had a “friend crush” on her.

  David Foster joined us one afternoon to write a beautiful song called “Heading Over Heels”:

  Make it like the first time

  As if there was no past

  Take me like the first time

  But this time make it last

  Love me like the first time

  Heading over heels

  Eventually Freddy decided the play did not need a song in it but I didn’t care. I was so happy to have had this time with Carly. She was charming, smart, literate, very seductive, and a little crazy in a poetic way. As Neil
Simon wrote in They’re Playing Our Song, “In this business aren’t we all a little rococo?”

  Carly seemed freer to me than I was with myself, her flowered long skirts ready at all times to dance in the wind. I enjoyed all of the stories of the dramas in her life, her complicated relationship with her then husband Jim Hart. It seemed that when she was deciding to come out to be with me, he was deciding to come out, period. We could talk for hours in our non-writing time.

  We haven’t seen each other in over ten years but I think if I were to see her tomorrow, it would feel like no time had passed. It’s odd that you can feel so connected to someone for a period of time and then disconnect. I don’t know if it’s a show business thing, or if it has more to do with creative people having busy lives, living on different coasts and eventually losing track of each other. I do know that when either of us picks up a phone to talk, we’re immediately connected without missing a beat.

  Forty-Five

  IN 1998 BEN GANNON, a theater producer from Australia, came to Los Angeles to talk to me about a musical he produced that had opened to raves in Australia called The Boy from Oz, based on the life of my dear friend Peter Allen. Peter was a huge cultural hero in Australia, having written its unofficial theme song, “I Still Call Australia Home.”

  I was so happy to hear that there was a successful musical about Peter and was surprised when Ben told me he wanted to bring the musical to New York and coproduce it with Robert Fox.

  “Wow! New York,” I said, duly impressed but still dubious about the commercial Broadway prospects of the life of an Australian singer-songwriter who was never that famous in America. “What songs are you using?” I asked.

  “Well, you’ve written at least half of them with Peter.”

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling more interested. What I didn’t know is that it was going to take another four years before Ben would visit me again to tell me that indeed they were moving forward with The Boy from Oz in America. They were going to be workshopping it in New York. I almost died when they told me they’d signed Hugh Jackman to play Peter.

  The commercial prospects had just shot from ten to one hundred. Hugh Jackman was a big star.

  “I’d like to get your feeling on it,” Ben said. “The music. Maybe you could be helpful to Hugh.”

  “Yes, I’d love to come to the workshop, and I would love to help in any way I can.” I was thinking since I wrote so many songs with Peter and knew his style so intimately, I could protect them and make sure they would sound the way Peter would have wanted them to sound.

  Bob and I flew to New York for the workshop. One thing I knew immediately. Hugh Jackman was fantastic. We were in a small rehearsal room, and I was dumbfounded at how charismatically he brought Peter back to life. He had watched his videos, listened to his songs, and studied him carefully, and through his gifts as an actor he found all the little poses and nuances that made Peter Peter. In bringing him back to life, he became my friend instantly. When I watched Hugh I saw Peter. It’s almost like I didn’t have to miss him; he was with me again.

  Hugh is so easy to like—warm, friendly, open—and so gifted as an actor and singer. He transformed into Peter while I was watching him. After the run-through I was able to share with the keyboard player how, if he wanted the piano to sound more like Peter’s, he needed to create a steady 4/4 rhythm in his right hand while his left played chords at the beginning of each measure. I also told him not to rush the tempos, which many pianists, especially when performing in live theater, have a tendency to do.

  It was surprising to hear songs that Peter and I had long given up on ever being heard now being used to help illustrate Peter’s interesting and complex life story. They were now going to be heard nightly on Broadway, and on a cast album. I couldn’t have dreamed this one.

  Songs like “Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage,” which we wrote as a tribute to Judy Garland, and “Continental American,” about the nightclub scene in New York in the Seventies, and “She Loves to Hear the Music,” which we wrote about a friend of mine who was a music groupie, all found their way to the stage after going unnoticed between the better-known hits on Peter’s albums. I ended up having cowritten nine out of the eighteen songs in the show and was given the title of musical consultant as well.

  At the first preview of Oz on Broadway, Sandy Gallin was on my left and Bob on my right. We were all mesmerized at seeing Hugh play Peter. It was uncanny. I just knew the show was going to be a hit. After the applause died down and before we went backstage, Sandy turned to me and said, “You know, if Peter Allen looked like Hugh Jackman . . .” He paused, making me wait for more. “And if Peter Allen sang like Hugh Jackman . . .” Another pause. “Peter would have been a gigantic superstar.” I wasn’t sure I was hearing right. “In other words,” I said, “if Peter Allen had been Hugh Jackman, he would have been a bigger star!” I looked at Sandy in disbelief.

  “That’s all true,” I said, “as long as Hugh Jackman wrote songs like Peter Allen.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  Hugh easily won the Tony that year for Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical, and if he had wanted to stay in the show, it could have run forever. In one year, not missing a single performance, Hugh made all of the money back, with even a little profit for the investors. There were fans that called themselves OZalots who’d seen the musical four or five times.

  He was so brilliant in the part that when the producers tried to think who could replace him, the answer was absolutely no one. For me as a songwriter, the longer it ran on Broadway, the longer the checks kept coming in, so I had added incentive to find a way to keep the performances going, but in truth, I totally agreed. For any actor to even attempt the part would have been foolhardy. Hugh owned that role. Forever.

  I loved Hugh so much for giving me that extra year with Peter. I can almost hear Peter saying, “Who’d ever think the two of us would end up with our lives portrayed on Broadway? In two different musicals. Honey, we lucked out.”

  Forty-Six

  ONE DAY CLINT EASTWOOD called. I’d gone to dinner with him and his then girlfriend Frances Fisher when I was still married to Burt, but I got to know him even better once I was with Bob because Clint had made a fortune for Warner Bros., and Bob was very grateful to him.

  “Hey, Carole,” he said in his classic, slow-raspy voice. “How are you?”

  “I’m doing really good, Clint,” I said, thinking he was calling for Bob. “It’s so nice to hear from you.”

  “And how’s Bob doing?” he asked, still making small talk.

  “Bob’s great. Hold on, I’ll get him for you.”

  “No, no, I called to talk to you. I’m doing a movie now, True Crime, and I have this little melody that I hear for the theme of the film, and I was wondering if you want to hear it sometime.”

  That was one of the surprises of Clint. This rugged cowboy possessed a sensitive side that wrote beautifully melodic film themes. He wasn’t a trained musician. He played his melodies almost with his right hand alone. But he worked with a very fine orchestrator, Lennie Niehaus, who was able to fill in what Clint heard but could not play himself. “Of course I would,” I said. “I love your melodies.”

  “Great,” he said, “then we’ll do it.” I was at my desk and looked down at my calendar to see what might be a good day. There was a pause. “So, are you busy now?”

  “Now? No, I’m not.”

  “Well, what if I come by in about fifteen minutes or so?”

  Of course, that had been his plan all along. Ten minutes later, Clint was standing at our front door, his blue pickup truck parked outside. He and Bob spoke for a few minutes, and then we went downstairs to my music room.

  My music room was—and is—a wonderful sanctuary, hidden away in what feels like the woods but is really one side of our driveway. The main room opens into an alcove, where I have a little table for six to have lunch, and a separate smaller alcove, which houses a recording booth.r />
  The walls are lined with gold or platinum records, cassettes, and CDs and various awards, all of it reflecting my many years as a songwriter. Some records are propped against the walls because I ran out of space to hang them. Behind the piano, which centers the main room, is a recording console and multiple speakers and monitors. You could easily make a record here. Clint took it all in, admiringly I think.

  “So let me play you this,” he said, as he sat down at the black Yamaha grand, his long and lanky legs almost not fitting under the piano, and picked out the melody for me to hear. Even in its raw form it was beautiful. We talked about artists he liked and he told me how much he loved the jazz artist Diana Krall; I too was a fan. He wanted a bittersweet lyric that would be great for Diana to sing and that he felt would work well on the end credits of his movie. He wanted a “torch song.” And the wonderful thing about writing with the director is, if he likes it, that’s it. Ordinarily, you would have to go to the director for final approval, but here was the director sitting with me.

  I suggested to Clint that David Foster might be the perfect person to produce the record. Clint left a tape with me that was made by Lennie and was a professionally arranged version of the melody he had just played me.

  We agreed to meet later in the week, when I would play him the lyric. David drove in from Malibu with his then wife, Linda Thompson Foster, and listened to the song. I had more than half of it written. Knowing Linda was a lyricist, I asked her if she wanted to finish it with me because I was feeling a little stuck, and we did it in under an hour. “Why Should I Care” practically wrote itself, as she offered some very nice lines, and it was, I thought, very beautiful.

  And will someone else get more of you?

  Will she go to sleep more sure of you?

  Will she wake up knowing you’re still there?

  And why should I care?

  When Diana Krall put her sumptuous, hickory-smoked voice on it, it became magical. It not only went on the soundtrack of True Crime, Diana put it on her album as well.