They're Playing Our Song

by Carole Bayer Sager

  “What a wonderful doctor!” She looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “You should give him Benny.”

  Benny is my four-pound Yorkshire terrier whom I love as though he were my other child.

  “Benny?” I exclaimed, startled. There was an awkward pause.

  “Give him Benny,” she said again. “They have little children, and they would enjoy playing with him, and he would have a lovely home.”

  Dr. Natterson seemed embarrassed by her outrageous suggestion. Bob, forever the realist, said, “Anita, are you crazy? We’re not giving Benny away, so just stop it. Benny is Carole’s dog.”

  It was classic Anita. She loved making a grand gesture, but her resources were sketchy, and she never did grasp—and never would—the difference between what was hers and what was mine. Benny stayed.

  She would buzz me on the intercom. “Do you wanna play gin?”

  “Yeah, I’ll come in.”

  “No, no, on the computer. Let’s play on the computer.”

  Sometimes we did this when she was in New York, which at least made sense. But two rooms apart? But we would start playing. My mom was a pretty good gin player, and I guess so was I. We’d be halfway through the game and she’d say, “What do you need?”

  “What do you mean?” I’d ask.

  “Do you need a jack? I’ll give you one.”

  “Mom, I want to play an honest game. Just keep playing.”

  “Do you need a king?”

  “Mom.”

  “But I want to give you something. Let me give you something to help you win.”

  IN THE LAST SEVEN months of her life, I never once heard my mother ask “Why me?” In fact, she used to say “Why not me?” She never felt sorry for herself, and she would tell me over and over how happy she was to be in our home and how wonderful her son-in-law and grandson were to her. It makes me sad to relive this, but it pleases me to know she was mostly happy at the end. She would tell me, “Who needs heaven? It’s right here with you.” She rarely lost her humor, unless she tapped into her old anger, exaggerated by the steroids she needed for the pain.

  She didn’t go out much after December, but she still played her gin games. It was when she stopped trying to get up and play online that I knew she was losing her fight to stay alive.

  I now see that my mother didn’t know how to leave me. On the day before she died, she seemed cheerful. I was lying on her bed while she was eating frozen yogurt, and out of the blue she asked me probably the most amazing question I had ever heard. “Do you want to come with me?”

  Come with her? It was shocking, but I knew exactly what she meant. “No, Mom,” I said quietly. “I can’t. Not now.”

  “I know you have Bob and Cristopher to care for,” she replied, then waited a few beats and said, more to herself than to me, “But how will we ever separate?”

  Today, I am so grateful for that time. I learned what my mother wanted. There was hardly a day that I did not tell her I loved her and she didn’t tell me the same. It wasn’t as if all those years ago didn’t happen, but they were part of the past, and our last days together became the memories I now cherish.

  She e-mailed this to me from two rooms away, shortly before she died:

  I love you for all your depth. It is a deep, deep love I have for you. We are being given this extraordinary extra time. Most can never realize this time together. It is truly a gift from our Higher Power. Save this note and maybe when reading it back, you can feel I am near and saying these things to you. OK?

  My mom, Anita Bayer, died on March 3, 2008. She was eighty-six—certainly a more than reasonable number of years for a person to live. But she was my mother, so there is no such thing as enough time.

  My mother was a true original. No one who met her ever forgot her, usually because she had said something so outrageous or inappropriate it was seared into their memory for life. She was funny and bright, and she had little patience for people who didn’t grasp things quickly, which often resulted in behavior she regretted. And she was a champion, always, for family and friends in need.

  If I could send her an e-mail today, it would read:

  My heart is opening now. It needed to shut down after you died because I was afraid of being flooded with too many feelings. You occupied so much space inside of me. To me, you were always bigger than life. I still hear your voice—I know what you would say to me and how you would say it. You are still here, yet now the critical voice has softened, and your courage and your big heart and, most of all, your authenticity, have moved to center stage. Thank you for allowing me to love you during those eight months, and thank you for allowing me to discover the lovability beneath your booming voice. You will live forever inside my heart.

  Fifty

  I WAS TIPPED BACK in the chair at my dentist’s office, which happened to have a television playing in the room, when they interrupted whatever I was paying no attention to with breaking news: Michael Jackson was dead. It was not shocking, just terribly sad. This tortured genius child-man was gone.

  I immediately called Elizabeth, who was inconsolable. She adored Michael. She mothered him and flew across the world when he was in crisis to be by his side. He was the last “man” in her life—the last one who truly loved her, who showered her with the extravagant jewelry she’d come to equate with great love. Theirs was a special relationship. Two of the world’s greatest superstars, with lives that were lived on stages or on movie screens since they’d been children. How could either of them find anyone else who could understand their lives?

  I’ve thought a lot about Michael’s life, while he was alive and since his death. So many people have asked me how he could be so brilliant and so crazy at the same time. I see it now like this.

  Imagine surfing the channels on your television. One channel is so clear, colorful, and vivid you can’t take your eyes off of it. This was Michael and his extraordinary talent. No one else performing in his time came close to challenging the totality of him as a singer, songwriter, dancer, and entertainer. No one. There were artists who could challenge maybe one aspect of his talent, maybe even two, but none could challenge them all.

  Now switch the station. It’s his emotional channel. All you see and hear is static. No brilliant picture, no pristine sound. Occasionally a glimpse of him comes through but never past his adolescence. After that, just static.

  Some channels came in and went out. For example, when he bought the Beatles’ music publishing catalog, the picture was intensely clear. When he spent so much money that he had to sell half of that catalog to Sony to cover his debts, the picture got very blurry.

  He was, to me, a phenomenon. Singular in his stunning talent and stunted beyond measure in the rest of his life. And to the extent that he was capable of love, I believe he loved his children, his mother, and he loved Elizabeth.

  ELIZABETH DID NOT GO to Michael’s funeral. She didn’t want to be part of the spectacle, as she surely would have been, so I didn’t go either. I went instead to Elizabeth’s bedside and sat with her, holding her hand as she cried through the whole telecast. I can’t help but feel that losing Michael accelerated her decline.

  Elizabeth and I became friends soon after she’d come out of the Betty Ford Center, and being her friend in sobriety was a privilege and a treat. She was present and alive and fun, and as down to earth as anyone I’d ever known. Years later, when she became so ill with viral pneumonia that they had to perform a tracheotomy (for the second time in her life) and there was a chance she could die, I visited her every day in St. John’s Hospital. It was necessary for her to be on many medications during this time, some of them highly addictive.

  Surviving that crisis, and all the many others before, including a surgery to remove a benign brain tumor, had taken its toll on Elizabeth’s body. Her back was completely shot, and her heart was beginning to fail. She now had nurses around the clock, even on her good days. Often when we would speak or I would visit, I knew she was altered from her medicati
ons and that was painful for me to experience.

  ON FEBRUARY 9, 2011, Elizabeth was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA due to heart problems. She had had surgery for a leaky valve, but that did not help to turn around the heart failure that, along with a number of other conditions, all suggested her body was beginning to shut down at seventy-nine. I was told she was very ill, but probably because she had been ill so many other times and had always recovered, I kept hoping against hope she would survive this hospital stay as well.

  Bob and I canceled plans to travel to London because I refused to go anywhere with Elizabeth in the hospital. I visited her often. She was on oxygen, and I saw no sign of her getting better. She looked tinier and tinier with each of my visits, but week after week she was still there trying to will herself well.

  On one occasion I just held her hand. I told her how I knew she could get better, and she squeezed my hand. She barely talked, and when she did it was in a whisper. She was losing the fight.

  On March 22, I went to the hospital in the early evening. Her two daughters, Liza and Maria, were sitting in the room, and I wasn’t sure if I was intruding. They signaled for me to come in and sit down. Elizabeth no longer looked like herself. The life force, which was so much a part of her essence, was fading away. I felt overwhelmingly sad and began to cry. After sitting there for a while, I went over to my sweet friend and kissed her on her cheek. I knew I was saying good-bye for the last time.

  This woman who loved me unconditionally and took me under her wing, as she did with all those she loved, was so much more to me than what people saw on the big screen. She was nurturing and loving and fierce in her loyalty. When I was devastated over Burt, she comforted me, and when I found Bob, she rejoiced that here was a man who was going to take good care of her little friend.

  In the morning, I switched on the news and heard that she had died. To this day when I think of Elizabeth, I can only remember the largeness of her spirit and the generosity of her heart. And, of course, her breathtaking beauty.

  What made Elizabeth great? As huge a star as she was, throughout her life people felt her humanity. They felt her passion, whether in her greatest roles on the screen (never better than in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) or in her role in real life as the first star to use her power as a celebrity to shine a light on the horror of AIDS.

  THE STRING OF LOSSES started with my mother. Then Elizabeth. And one ordinary day, while I was talking on the phone to my friend Stacey, Bob wasn’t even fully through the doorway of my room before the words were out of his mouth. “Carole, Marvin Hamlisch died. I just heard it on the news. Marvin’s dead.”

  I might have told Stacey that I had to go, or I might have just hung up the phone. I don’t remember; I was in shock. “What? How?” Bob didn’t know. I looked at the date on my computer. August 6, 2012. I started a Google search with shaking fingers. Hamlisch dead. Collapsed after a brief illness. Illness? What illness? It was impossible, nobody was more alive than Marvin. Tears were already welling up. There’s no way to prepare for news this shockingly sad.

  I saw his face in my mind’s eye. He was smiling at me from the piano, his easy confidence making me feel safe on the stage at Feinstein’s.

  I called Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the two great lyricists who wrote “The Way We Were” with him and remained good friends. They’d know what had happened.

  “Marilyn, it’s Carole.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said, her voice quivering, and then she started to sob. “I’m devastated.”

  I cried with her.

  “Do you know what happened?” I learned that Marvin had undergone a kidney transplant earlier in the year, had been frail, and was looking seriously ill. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t called me, but I guessed he didn’t want me to see him weakened. Just months before, he’d been named director of the Pasadena Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, and I’d been looking forward to seeing him in California more.

  He was just sixty-eight years old. He was always so animated; my brain was trying to comprehend his absence.

  We flew to New York to attend his memorial at the Juilliard School where, at the age of seven, Marvin was the youngest student ever accepted. All nine hundred seats were filled. Barbra Streisand sang “The Way We Were” and Marvin’s and my song, “Looking Through the Eyes of Love,” and Aretha Franklin sang “Nobody Does It Better,” adding, “Marvin, you’re the best.” Along with my grief came pride when it was announced that of all the songs that Marvin had written during his lifetime, his favorite was ours from They’re Playing Our Song, “If She Really Knew Me.”

  The whole memorial was a testament to the magnificence of Marvin and how much he was loved, not just by me, but by so many people. The New York Times called him “America’s Composer” and I will always miss him.

  Fifty-One

  PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “Are you still writing songs?” My answer is simple. I got spoiled. I wrote lyrics with some of the greatest musicians of my generation. So when my publishers would send me a new composer who had one hit and a fraction of the musicality that I’d become accustomed to, it became increasingly difficult to get excited. And the new artists that I loved—Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Adele—were either self-contained or had their own cadre of producers and writers. And I was no longer the hot writer in town. If I for a moment believe I can be young while writing, my good friend David Geffen will happily remind me, “Sweetheart, you’re old.”

  There’s a time—or, if you’re lucky, times—in every successful songwriter’s life when you’re in the zone. It all goes right. The hits, the opportunities, the requests all line up. I hit that zone twice—in the Seventies and in the Eighties, with some nice momentary highlights after that. But I got tired of writing a new song and not knowing where it was going, or if it was going anywhere, so I took myself out of the game. Or maybe the game just decided to go on without me.

  There’s a naïveté I once had, where I believed that if a writer or an artist was hot, they would stay that way forever. It’s simply not true. I’m sure there’s an exception somewhere, but I’m not it. The only time I miss writing songs is when I hear something so great on the radio that it makes me want to write again. But the feeling quickly passes.

  ABOUT SIX MONTHS AFTER my mother died, I started to paint. My girlfriend Margie convinced me it would be a great distraction for me in my sadness. She challenged me to paint a self-portrait and, never one to shrink from a challenge, I started taking lessons from a teacher of hers, Manny Constantino. I told him, “I want to paint a self-portrait.”

  “Okay,” he said, “but it’s not going to be easy.” And so began my crash course in drawing and painting. I saw Manny three times a week and painted seven days a week, and after two months I had my self-portrait. I looked very serious in the painting, but I did it. And during that time that click happened where I was completely in it. And, as I don’t know how to do things in half measures, I was completely absorbed in painting. I know myself. I have to do something creative almost every day. That is the key to me being an artist. The medium is almost irrelevant, as long as I can practice it fully.

  With that encouraging beginning, I continued to study, painting as I went. I completed a portrait of Michael Chow, the restaurateur, who paid me $15,000 in cash and $10,000 in credit at Mr. Chow’s restaurant. (Bob took many a business associate to lunch on my credit.) When I told David Geffen about it, he said, “Sweetheart, it’s a hobby. It keeps you busy. You should give the paintings away. Don’t charge people for them.”

  Needless to say, I gifted David the portrait I did of him. I believe it sits in the guesthouse of his palatial estate in Beverly Hills. Since I have rarely known him to have a guest there, I imagine it has been seen only by the staff that keeps the house free of dust. I hope they dust my painting every so often.

  I STARTED STUDYING WITH Vietnamese artist Tien Ly. After eight more portraits I found my way to my true obsession: food. They were still port
raits, but now they just happened to be of grilled cheese or peanuts or kernels of caramel corn that looked like the universe colliding. I would photograph the foods I wanted to paint and then crop them in a way that unhinged your perception, altering and abstracting them so that they looked realistic from a distance, and less so as you moved closer to the subject.

  Once I believed these paintings were good, I immediately wanted them to be shown in a gallery, and my expectations were suddenly higher. I don’t know if I’ve ever done something creative just for myself, something I didn’t need others to approve of to give it value. So I ended up with three art shows and good reviews. Gallery owner William Turner wrote of my grilled cheese painting “Torn,” “These micro and macro views dislocate us from familiar perspectives allowing apparently representational images to become surprisingly abstract.”

  It was by no means a cure-all for my food obsessions. If anything, it made it harder to spend the day painting galaxies of candies (“Galaxy”) and shredded candy wrappers (“Shredded”) and come upstairs to my dinner of flattened chicken, broccolini, and spinach. After four years of painting nothing but, I was done painting food. I’ve always believed that when there’s a void the universe will fill it. So I’m hoping when I go back to my studio, I’ll find what it is I want to paint.

  ALONG WITH EXPLORING NEW areas of creating, I believe that third acts are about giving back and there are many causes I care deeply about. Putting music and art back in the public schools is why I joined the board of DonorsChoose, an online charity where teachers ask for what their students need and you as a donor become an instant philanthropist at any level of giving you choose, which is the perfect way to use the Internet for good. I also joined the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) after Michael Govan shared his vision of the world-class museum it held the promise of being in Los Angeles. I created public service announcements (PSAs) for DonorsChoose and for LACMA. And until we end AIDS, I continue to be an ambassador for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.