Basically, I was doing anything I could to make ends meet, but when it came to writing songs, I had no idea how hard it was going to be, and the ones I wrote were so bad that I went close to a year and a half without getting one sold. In 1955, Patti Page recorded “Keep Me in Mind.” I had composed the melody and a family friend named Jack Wolf wrote the lyrics, but it wasn’t a hit. Things were so bad that I had to borrow five thousand dollars from my dad. That was a lot of money back then and it would be like thirty-five thousand dollars today. It kept me going for a while, but what I really needed was to write a hit. No matter how hard I tried, it was something I couldn’t seem to do.
Chapter
4
Warm and Tender
Even before I was signed by Famous Music, I had already started working out of a little office in the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway. Everybody you needed to know in the music business was there but the offices were so small that there was just enough room for a desk, an old upright piano, and an air conditioner that didn’t work in a window you could never open.
Downstairs was the Turf Restaurant, where a lot of songwriters who weren’t broke went for lunch, and Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant and Bar, where only people who really had money could afford to eat. Agents and performers looking for work would sit in the phone booths in the lobby making calls with dimes stacked in front of them. In the elevator going up to my office on the fifth floor, I would sometimes see Phil Spector, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Jerry Moss, who later founded A&M Records with Herb Alpert.
Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich were all right across the street at 1650 Broadway working for Donnie Kirshner, who had kind of an empire going at Aldon Music, with lots of office space and pianos and work rooms. Unlike them, I never got into writing the kind of songs you would call teen pop.
I don’t know if it was my classical training or because I had fallen in love with jazz as a kid but the kind of music Bill Haley and His Comets were making also never did much for me. A lot of those songs consisted of just three chords, C to F to G. If they had thrown in a C major seventh that would have been a lot more interesting, but the plain C major chord just seemed so vanilla to me.
The way it worked in the Brill Building for a songwriter was that when you finished a song, you would take it to a publisher and play it. If the publisher liked it, he would say, “Go make a demo.” The publisher would pay for the demo and then it would be up to him to peddle the song to an artist who would record it. Some publishers knew a good song when they heard one, and some had no idea.
My first year and a half in the Brill Building was very hard and I got a lot of rejections. After I had come up with a few songs that were recorded, someone arranged for me to see Connie Francis. She’d already had a huge hit with “Who’s Sorry Now?” and was a big star, but when I went in to play a song for her, she took the needle off the demo after eight bars.
Pretty much the same thing happened when I went to see Carolyn Leigh, a well-known lyricist who wrote hits like “Witchcraft” and “The Best Is Yet to Come” with Cy Coleman. I played her some of my music and asked if she would be interested in writing with me but she turned me down flat. So it was not as though people were knocked out by what I was doing.
While both Connie Francis and Carolyn Leigh might have been right about the songs I played for them, I’ve always thought that if a lot of the people who were trying to write hits back then had been able to stick it out and have the stomach to be repeatedly rejected, they might have eventually become very successful.
After I had written some songs with Jack Wolf, Eddie Wolpin hired me to write for Famous Music, a division of Paramount Pictures. A classy guy in his fifties who always dressed very sharply and was related in some way to the Gershwin family, Eddie had better taste in music than most of the publishers in the Brill Building. The two of us would sometimes go out to the racetrack at Jamaica and Belmont, and Eddie kind of liked having me around, which made it easier for me to get an office at Famous Music. I got paid fifty dollars a week for working there but since my salary was charged as an advance against future earnings, this meant that every week I went without writing a hit just put me in a deeper hole in terms of what I owed the company.
Eddie Wolpin thought it would be a good idea for me to write with Hal David, but we were both also working with other people at the same time. Hal might write three days a week with Mort Garson in the morning and then with me in the afternoon, and I also wrote with Bob Hilliard and Hal’s older brother Mack.
When I first met Hal, I was twenty-seven, single, and living with my dog Stewba in a nice little apartment with a tiny terrace overlooking Bloomingdale’s at 166 East Sixty-First Street. Hal was thirty-five, married, and living in Roslyn, Long Island. Along with his two older brothers and his sister, Hal had grown up in Brooklyn in an apartment over a delicatessen run by their parents. During World War II, Hal had served in a Special Services unit in the Pacific, where he had written songs and sketches for people like Carl Reiner and Howard Morris.
After the war, Hal followed his brother Mack into the songwriting business and went to work at the Brill Building. By the time I met him, Hal had already written the lyrics to “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” a hit for Guy Lombardo that Vic Damone also recorded. Hal had also worked with Frank Sinatra and Teresa Brewer.
The best way I can describe Hal is to say that he was a regular guy. Sammy Cahn once said I was the only songwriter who didn’t look like a dentist, and if you had met Hal at a party back then, that was exactly what you would have said he did for a living. Like me, Hal was a perfectionist but he didn’t have a lot of personal eccentricities and he didn’t dress like a guy in the music business. When it came to writing a song, he always had the ability to unleash some extraordinary lyrics. I really believe that what you write is what you are, and the deeper core of Hal’s being always came through in his craft.
Hal was also pretty structured. I remember him telling me, “I work between ten and five and then I get on the train and go home.” Hal and I were never able to write a song together in a minute and a half, and we couldn’t be in the Brill Building after six at night because they would lock the front door and neither of us had a key. So there was no such thing as an all-night session.
Unlike a lot of the other guys I wrote with, Hal was flexible. Sometimes he would bring me a song title or some lyrics he had written, sometimes I would play him the opening strains of a phrase or a chorus I had come up with, and sometimes we would actually sit in the office at Famous Music and write together. At the end of the day, Hal would go home to do his work and I would go home to do mine. The next day we’d come back to the office and work together on whatever we had come up with overnight.
Our office was so narrow that Hal had to squeeze by me to get to his desk, where he would chain-smoke one Chesterfield cigarette after another as I sat at the piano. The room was always filled with smoke, and although I hated the smell, I never asked him to stop or told him how much it bothered me. At some point, thank God, he finally broke the habit.
Hal and I wrote some really bad songs together, like “Peggy’s in the Pantry” and “Underneath the Overpass.” Then Syd Shaw and I came up with “Warm and Tender” in 1956, which became the B-side of Johnny Mathis’s first big hit, “It’s Not for Me to Say.” At the time, Johnny was not a well-known artist. He had done a jazz album at Columbia and then Mitch Miller decided to record him and change Johnny’s image by having him do romantic ballads, with Ray Conniff conducting the orchestra.
Since Syd and I got paid as much for writing the B-side as whoever had come up with the hit, “Warm and Tender” was really important for me. The money I earned from it pulled me out of the financial hole I was in with Famous Music. “It’s Not for Me to Say” went to number one on the pop chart and Johnny became a big star. Both songs were used in the movie Lizzie,
the story about a girl with three personalities, starring Eleanor Parker and Richard Boone, and then ended up on Johnny’s Greatest Hits album.
Syd Shaw was a very funny gay guy, and every time we wrote a song that Johnny Mathis recorded, Syd wanted to celebrate by giving me head. Quoting the A-side of “Warm and Tender,” I would tell him, “It’s not for me to say but thank you very much, I don’t want that.”
A year later, Hal and I came up with “Magic Moments” and “The Story of My Life” at about the same time. After Perry Como recorded “Magic Moments” and sang it on his television show, the song became a hit and I made enough money from it to pay my father back the five thousand dollars he had loaned me. Perry Como would never have recorded most of the pop material that was coming out of 1650 Broadway, but “Magic Moments” was a lot more adult and mainstream than what I started writing later on.
I don’t know how Hal and I did it, but “The Story of My Life” definitely sounded country, so it was sent to Nashville. Marty Robbins recorded the song and it went to number one on the country-and-western chart. I remember being in Las Vegas conducting for Marlene Dietrich around that time and there was a chorus line at the Sands called the Texas Copa Girls, all of whom were beauty contest winners. “The Story of My Life” was being played like crazy in Houston and none of the girls in the line at the Sands believed a New Yorker like me could have written it. I had a copy of the sheet music sent out so I could prove to them that I had.
I still wasn’t doing that well, but I wanted to get out of the city for the summer, so I took a house in Ocean Beach on Fire Island. I split the $3,000 rent for the season with four other people, one of whom was Merv Griffin, who back then had a game show on local television in New York. A friend of mine named Charlie Herman, whom I had met playing basketball at the YMCA in the city and who later became my road manager, was also out there for the summer.
Charlie was a Brandeis graduate who liked to hang out at the Bayview Club because it was so quiet. Even on a Saturday night, there would be no more than ten or twelve people there. Among his other talents, Charlie could drink eleven martinis and not fall off the bar stool, and he got to know Billy Kohler, who owned the place.
I was in there one night when Billy came over to me and said, “Charlie says you play piano. Are you any good?” I said, “Yeah, I am.” We made a deal for me to play on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights and Billy said, “You’ve got a choice. I can give you a percentage if we do well or I could just give you forty dollars a weekend and you can have all the food and drink you want.” I said, “I’ll take the forty and food and the drink, yeah.”
After I started playing there, a guy who wrote for Variety or the New York Post came in and had a couple of drinks and wrote a rave review about me. The next weekend, you couldn’t get into the fucking joint. The Bayview Club became the place to be on Fire Island on weekends, and there were so many people trying to get in that Charlie became the bouncer. In order to get into the club, you had to go through him. The place got so jammed that it wouldn’t have mattered if Charlie had been playing piano.
By the first week in July, so many girls had spilled their drinks on my piano while I was playing that they had to set up a white picket fence to keep them away from me. If I had taken the percentage I would have been making a fortune, but to make up for that I was eating as much lobster as I could and also drinking a lot.
I was playing there on a Sunday night when Tracy Fisher walked in. She was a great-looking California girl with beautiful hips, sun-streaked blond hair, a dark tan, and blue eyes. At the time, she was married to Marvin Fisher, who had written the lyrics to “When Sunny Gets Blue.” Tracy was older than me and after we left the club together, she said, “When I came in to have a drink tonight, I had a choice. I was either going to fuck you or the guy at the end of the bar, who’s a fisherman.”
I didn’t know if she was serious or making a joke, but I thought she was incredible. Tracy had been a showgirl and had great legs and I was just crazy about her, so we started an affair that lasted all summer long. When I went back to the city, she left Marvin and moved in with me in my fourth-floor walk-up on East Sixty-First Street, where we lived with Stewba and Tracy’s dog, a poodle named Killer.
If Tracy and I had stayed together, I would never have had a career. I would also probably be long since dead. Every night when I came home from the Brill Building, Tracy and I would start the evening by drinking martinis before dinner. After the fifth martini, we would go out and walk our dogs on Park Avenue. Then we’d come back home and go to bed and I would never get any writing done.
Our relationship started to come apart after a few months because I started wondering, “How much can you drink? And then not write?” We finally broke up when she gave me the crabs after sleeping over at a friend’s apartment. Tracy just kept right on living the same way and eventually wound up with some low-level hood, who killed her on a boat.
Despite “Magic Moments” and “The Story of My Life,” I still hadn’t found my own voice as a writer, and I wasn’t doing all that well with the assignments I got from Famous Music. Without being given credit for it, I wrote the instrumental theme for The Blob, a Paramount picture starring Steve McQueen. I got five hundred dollars for the song. Mack David put words to it and the song was recorded as “Beware of the Blob,” by the Five Blobs. Bernie Knee, a demo singer and musician at Associated Recording Studios in Times Square, where everyone cut their demos back then, sang all five parts on the song and it became a moderate hit.
During the next four years I wrote eighty songs with Hal, Wilson Stone, Syd Shaw, and Bob Hilliard, including one called “Happy and His One Man Band.” None of them were hits, and most were never even recorded. Even though it bothered me a lot that my songwriting career was going nowhere, I kept myself busy by touring the world with Marlene Dietrich.
Chapter
5
The Blue Angel
I was about to go to Los Angeles to learn something about scoring films at Paramount Pictures and see this actress named Norma Crane, whom I had met in New York, when I heard myself being paged at the airport. I went to the front desk of the TWA terminal to take the call, and it was Peter Matz, a brilliant conductor, arranger, and classically trained pianist who had worked with Harold Arlen on Broadway. After Arlen had recommended Peter to Marlene Dietrich, he had started working as her accompanist before she loaned him to Noël Coward for an engagement in Las Vegas.
I always liked Peter because we had so much in common, and when I picked up the phone, he said, “Look, I’m in a real jam here. Dietrich is playing in Vegas at the same time as Noël Coward and he wants me to work with him, so do you think you could fill in for me and do the date with her?” Although I was definitely interested, the idea of meeting Marlene Dietrich seemed really intimidating to me. I had no idea if I could even pass the audition, but Peter said he would let Dietrich know I would be calling her at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
After I had put my stuff away in Norma Crane’s apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood, I called Marlene Dietrich and went over to see her in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Marlene was fifty-six years old at the time but she was still beautiful and as famous as ever. We talked a little and she was very nice and got me something to eat, but I was still really nervous because she was a very powerful presence and had the aura of a huge star.
When we started to work together at the piano, she said, “Do you write?” I said, “Yeah, I’m trying to be a songwriter.” She asked to hear something I had written so I played her “Warm and Tender.” Marlene had never heard the song before but when I finished, she told me how much she loved it. Marlene wasn’t going to sing the song herself but she wanted Frank Sinatra to hear it. I gave her the demo I had brought with me and she got it to Frank. When he turned the song down, Marlene got really angry with him and told him he was making a big mistake because I was going to become a r
eally well-known songwriter. “One day you’ll see!” she told him. “You’ll see!”
I asked her what song she wanted to open her show with and Marlene handed me the sheet music for a song Mitch Miller had written for her, called “Look Me Over Closely.” I looked at it and said, “You don’t want to open with this kind of arrangement, do you?” When she asked me how I pictured the song, I began playing it at a different tempo. I got her to try it that way and told her to let herself get carried away by the feeling. I also convinced her to open with “My Blue Heaven.” Then she had me play one song after another.
I began coaching her a little bit because Marlene had a tendency to rush and get ahead of the beat. “Sit back,” I told her. “Just sit back.” I was still a little tentative because Marlene could have just told me to get the fuck out of there, but she soon became very comfortable with me and began getting a strong hold on how to sing these songs. When I was done writing corrections on the lead sheets and orchestrations, we agreed I would come back to see her at ten the next morning. and we spent the next two weeks rehearsing together in Los Angeles.
As a singer, Marlene had a vocal range of not much more than an octave and a note or two. Since I knew we were going to be working with a pretty large orchestra, with what I hoped would be a tight rhythm section, bass, drums, and guitar, with me playing piano, I thought I could get her to swing a little. I kept some songs she had been doing forever, like “Lola,” “Lili Marlene,” and “The Boys in the Back Room,” but added standards like “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” “My Blue Heaven,” “One for My Baby,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” and of course, “Falling in Love Again,” which Marlene had first sung in Josef von Sternberg’s classic film The Blue Angel in 1930.
We opened in Las Vegas at the Sahara Hotel and the show went really well. Marlene was a smash. It was a wonderful time for me because Marlene always insisted that I go out with her after the show. One night we would have dinner with Judy Garland and the next it would be Maureen Stapleton. I didn’t really like the music I was playing for Marlene all that much but it seemed like a terrific life to me, because I was conducting, getting paid, and meeting all these really famous stars.
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 5
