I went to London to make the album because it was a lot cheaper to record over there and I’d heard the English musicians were great. I was in coach on the flight over there and a beautiful black actress named Ena Hartman was in first class on her way to London to audition for the new James Bond film. I had a lot of work to do in London and I was busy writing arrangements in my little room in the Dorchester. Ena and I got together a little but she didn’t get the role and had to go back to Los Angeles.
I recorded the album as quickly as I could but I didn’t sing on it. Instead, I had three girls called the Breakaways—who later backed up Jimi Hendrix on “Hey Joe”—do all the vocals. I was just playing piano, and when somebody else was doing that, I was producing in the booth. I was working with some incredible musicians, like Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who later went on to form Led Zeppelin; Big Jim Sullivan; and about half of the Ted Heath band.
I guess because I’d had a string of hits in England, the word had gotten out that I was something special and the control room was always crowded. I remember being at the console trying to give signals to the bass player and the drummer to play louder or softer and this one guy kept taking pictures of me. He was really bothering me so I finally said, “Get the fuck out of the way.” The guy turned out to be Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was then married to Princess Margaret, and was also known as Lord Snowdon. I didn’t know any of this at the time but he was very understanding.
The album sold only five thousand copies in the States but it went into the top ten in England. The single “Trains and Boats and Planes” got to number four on the charts and did better over there than the cover version by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, which George Martin produced. Back then in England if you got a record on the BBC, everyone would hear it, so I actually got discovered over there long before that happened in the States, and that was the reason Granada Television decided to do a special on me.
When I went back to Los Angeles I brought the album with me and played it for Angie, who was ecstatic over every cut. She thought it was all very beautiful, and to get that kind of adulation from a woman like her was really something. There was an intense physical attraction between us but I was also really in love with Angie. At the time, I think I was too insecure to believe that this gorgeous movie star could fall in love with me.
Angie Dickinson: I did love The Hitmaker album and I often wonder if I was in love with Burt or his music. One of the titles I’m thinking about for my book is “I Think It Was the Freesias” because when we were together in London, Burt would always come back to our flat with a handful of freesias. Between the music and the freesias, I was a dead duck.
Chapter
9
What’s New Pussycat?
Angie and I flew to London together and she was with me when I started shooting a special called The Bacharach Sound for Granada Television. Angie knew all about camera angles and lighting and had been with Howard Hawks while she was making Rio Bravo, so she really had an eye for the camera and did everything she could to protect me in this completely new environment.
Angie and I were staying at the Dorchester Hotel, and that was where she ran into Charlie Feldman, who was producing a new movie, What’s New Pussycat?
Angie Dickinson: Charlie Feldman had been a great agent and then he became a producer. He was an enchanting guy and everybody who knew Charlie adored him, including me, and we dated for quite a long time. He was always trying to get me to marry him but I wasn’t in love with him. I just loved him. Charlie really knew how to live, and year-round, he always had the Audley Suite at the Dorchester. One day while Burt was out, I called Charlie and said, “Come down and see me.”
I had some of the stills Burt had given me that were used for the Hitmaker album, so I put one of them up and Charlie said, “Who’s that?” I said, “That’s the guy I came over with.” He said, “What does he do?” And I said, “He’s a songwriter.” Charlie said, “What has he written?” I said, “Oh, ‘Walk on By,’ and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart,’ and ‘Don’t Make Me Over.’ ” Charlie said, “He wrote those? Can he score a movie?” And I said, “Sure.”
Burt had never scored a movie but I was sure he was capable of it because he was already a genius in my mind. And the proof was in those songs I had just mentioned. Charlie told me he had a deadline to get the movie into the theaters and the guy who was going to do the music had dropped out. Charlie had someone waiting in L.A. to come over and start but the deadline was only about three weeks away. The guy who had dropped out was Dudley Moore, who was a great pianist, and the other composer he had waiting to come over was a young newcomer named John Williams, who had done the music for The Killers, a movie I had done just the year before.
Burt met with Charlie, who said, “I’d like you to look at the picture and see if you want to do it.” Burt asked me if I would go with him, and I said, “Sure.” It was a rough cut and I laughed my head off because it was hysterical. Burt had never seen a rough cut and he said, “Is it any good?” I said, “It’s great,” and Burt said, “I’ll do it if you’ll stay.” Because he knew he needed help.
Even after having seen What’s New Pussycat? I’m not sure I could really say what it was about. The script was written by Woody Allen, and the movie is set in Paris, where Peter O’Toole works for a fashion magazine. Every woman he meets, all of whom he calls “Pussycat,” immediately falls in love with him, so he goes to a psychoanalyst for help so he can marry the girl he loves.
Speaking in a heavy German accent while wearing a black Beatles wig and thick black-framed glasses, Peter Sellers plays the psychoanalyst. A lot crazier than O’Toole, he is desperately in love with one of his female patients, who also happens to be after O’Toole. The film is filled with beautiful women like Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss, and Ursula Andress, and a lot of it is just completely wacky, pure Marx Brothers slapstick.
After I told Charlie Feldman I would score the movie, Angie and I found a flat on Wilton Row, off Belgrave Square right across from a great pub called the Grenadier, about two blocks from Hyde Park. Even though I had never scored a film before, my instinct was to not work from the sheets of music cues written out by the music editor. The cues themselves had been selected by the director, who would say, “I want the music to start here and I want it to come out here.”
I decided the only way I could really learn how to time the music cues was by watching the film over and over until I knew it by heart. I had no idea how to run a Moviola so Angie learned how to do it. I’d be working when Angie went to bed and she would say, “Okay, wake me up when you need the reels changed,” or “Are you hungry? I’ll make you some supper, or we can make love. . . .” Whenever the film broke in the middle of the night, she would splice it for me.
I was under tremendous pressure to write the score and I had no idea how to deal with a rough cut that was full of dead sound. Angie would say, “Well, they’ll redo the voices in the places where you can’t hear them now.” I didn’t understand the medium at all so I needed a translator, and Angie was the one who explained it all to me.
At one point she had to go back to Los Angeles to do the Academy Awards show with Bob Hope. Then she spent twelve hours on the red-eye so she could be with me in London. I still had not written a single note and what I would do is walk in Hyde Park and try to hear something, but I just could not get started. Paralysis was setting in.
Angie was gone for three days, and when she came back, I finally broke through and came up with the melody for “What’s New Pussycat?” by watching how bizarre and brilliantly weird Peter Sellers’s character was in the movie. The music was a direct transfer of what I saw him doing on the screen. I went to the piano and played these kind of Kurt Weill–ish, angular off-center chords that just felt so right for what I was seeing.
By then, Hal had come over to London so he could write lyrics for the music I had started coming up with. H
al was staying at the Dorchester but he would come to our flat so we could work together. Whenever there was a pickup for the mailman, he would ring the bell. One day Angie, who was paying most of the bills, handed Hal some envelopes and said, “Do you mind taking these with you? It’s one less bell to answer.” The phrase must have stuck in his head because a couple of years later, Hal used it as the title for a song we wrote that later became a big hit for the Fifth Dimension.
Angie Dickinson: “What’s New Pussycat?” was not the first song Burt wrote for the film. “My Little Red Book,” “Here I Am,” and some Russian thing came first. He didn’t write “What’s New Pussycat” until Easter Sunday because we went out that night and celebrated at Trader Vic’s. Burt said to me, “The waiters don’t know they just watched a proposal.” It was a hint I don’t remember that well because I was trying not to get hooked on Burt and I did not have marriage in my plans at all.
When Burt finished scoring the movie, they gave me a very nice jewelry travel bag to thank me for my help. As the editor handed it to me, he said, “This is for you. None of us are safe.” They didn’t need to use their editor to splice the film and feed the Moviola because I did all that for Burt. That was a murderous three weeks, I can tell you. And for Burt, it had to be crippling.
Tom Jones had covered a song Hal and I had written called “To Wait for Love,” as the flip side of his first hit single, “It’s Not Unusual.” Tom and his manager, Gordon Mills, came to the flat where Angie and I were staying to hear “What’s New Pussycat?” They were both looking for another really hard-core R&B song as a follow-up to “It’s Not Unusual,” so when I played them this waltz, Tom was reluctant to record it. I had so much more music to write for the film that I couldn’t wait for them to leave so I could get back to work.
I thought Tom wasn’t going to record the song, but Gordon Mills told him the movie was going to be a hit so Tom agreed to do it. When we did the record date, I ran the session and did something I had never done before. I put five pianos in the room, all uprights, and two of them were tack pianos, which have tacks or nails on the hammers so they make a honky-tonk sound when they hit the strings.
When Tom walked into the studio and saw five pianos, he thought I was crazy, but by having them all play the same thing at the same time it was a little out of synch, and that was the sound I wanted. Tom said I got him to sing better than he ever had before and “What’s New Pussycat?” became an even bigger hit for him than “It’s Not Unusual.”
The first time I played “What’s New Pussycat?” for the movie people, one of them said, “This is in three/four. It’s a waltz. How is somebody in a disco in Paris going to dance to it?” I said, “It feels right the way it is, so they’ll find a way to move to it.” I never bothered counting bars or seeing whether or not there were eight bars in the first section. Sometimes there’d be nine bars and sometimes twelve but I never paid any attention to a changed time signature.
The song I had actually written for the sequence where Peter O’Toole starts taking off his clothes as he dances with Paula Prentiss in a Paris disco was “My Little Red Book.” It’s an odd song that doesn’t sound like anything I had ever done before, and I recorded two versions of it with Manfred Mann and his group. Paul Jones, who later became an actor in movies and on British television, sang the lead vocal on both of them.
Paul Jones: For that scene, I was told they had originally intended to use an existing record. A Motown record at that, because lots of things at the time had that very insistent four/four beat. And somewhere along the line, either because the existing song’s publishers wanted x million dollars for it or because Burt said, “If I’m doing the music for this movie, I’m doing all the music for this movie,” they had to scrap it. Since the scene had already been shot, Burt was subbing for whatever Peter O’Toole had danced to when they had filmed it.
Can I just put in a quick word here for Hal David? I mean, the lyric is so good. I got really excited about it because of that word “thumbed” in the second line. “I got out my little red book the minute you said goodbye / I thumbed right through my little red book.” A lesser writer would have written “I looked right through” or “I went right through” or “I searched right through,” but “thumbed.” I could actually see the slightly discolored corners of the pages where the thumb went. Hal is just so precise and concrete.
The version that appears in the movie was done after the Manfred Mann version. We were told, “If you guys know what’s good for you, you’ll come to the studio in Abbey Road and Burt and Angie and Hal will be there and you’ll record this song that Burt’s written.” And I went, “Yeah! Okay! I’ll be there early!”
Burt was producing and really working me quite hard. I’d literally sing a phrase and he’d say, “No, let’s go back over that.” I was singing whole takes and then going back and redoing this line or that line again. When we finally got to take nineteen I said, “Burt, I’m really sorry.” He said, “What are you sorry about?” I said, “Take nineteen. I’m so sorry I couldn’t nail it in one.” And he said, “Don’t worry about that. I’ve gone past thirty takes with Dionne Warwick.” I think nineteen was the end, but it may have been a couple more after that as well.
Manfred Mann could read music and he was a jazz piano player and a jazz fan and wrote a fortnightly column in Jazz News, but he still couldn’t play Burt’s stuff. The story about Burt having to move Manfred off the piano bench during the session is absolutely true. In fact, it was slightly more subtle than that. Burt said to Manfred, “Look, I tell you what. You play the left hand and I’ll do the right hand.” Then they switched and Manfred did the right hand and Burt did the left hand and eventually Burt was sitting at the piano alone. Manfred didn’t hold it against Burt for a moment, and has actually said he admired the tactful way he had been edged out.
It wasn’t that easy for the rest of us to get the music, either. Mike Vickers, who played both guitar and flute on it, couldn’t get one particular chord at all. Burt was at the piano and Mike was looking over and seeing what Burt’s fingers were doing and he said, “Well, right, okay. There’s an F, there’s also a G-sharp, there is a C, and there’s a B-flat or an A-sharp, and a D-sharp as well.” That’s really complicated and Mike was trying to get this chord string by string. Eventually, Mike, or Tom McGuinness the bass player, said, “I think I know how you do that chord. It’s just a straightforward bar right across the first fret.” It is in fact E-A-D-G-B-E up a semitone. It’s the pounding beat, up a semitone, and then back down again.
The Manfred Mann version did nothing in either the States or the U.K. and the song never became a hit until Arthur Lee and Love performed it. They may have played the wrong chords but that’s not difficult, is it? Bacharach and David haven’t written anything else that sounds like “My Little Red Book” but it was Burt’s version of what you would hear in a disco back then and that’s why it’s genius.
Over the years, I’ve had to learn to get used to people making radical changes on my songs and stand back so I can look objectively at what they’ve done to see if I like it. Arthur Lee came along and cut “My Little Red Book” with Love and although I didn’t like their version because they were playing the wrong chords, it was nice to have a hit that gave me some credibility in the world of rock and roll. Like, “Oh, man, he wrote ‘My Little Red Book’?”
I’ve always been very grateful to Charlie Feldman for letting me score What’s New Pussycat? but I felt the same way about what he did to my music before the movie came out. After I was through working, Charlie fell in love with the cue I had written while watching Peter Sellers. Charlie took many of the cues I had written and threw them out and took this one cue I had done with the musette, and maybe a violin and a clarinet, and copied it and dropped it in everywhere throughout the movie.
Angie couldn’t come with me to the premiere in New York because she had to go off to shoot The Chase with Marlon Brando,
so I went with my parents. After I heard what Charlie had done, I called Angie and said, “I want my name off this film! I don’t want to be connected with it in any way!” She said, “Don’t be crazy! Don’t be crazy!” The picture came out and it was a huge hit and “What’s New Pussycat?” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1965. So I really learned a lot from Angie.
Angie Dickinson: Burt saw the premiere and wanted to take his name off the credits because he just hated the movie. It was not my music so I could be more objective. On the film, Burt had his credit as “Burt F. Bacharach.” I said, “Why not Burt Bacharach? It’s so young and hip,” and he said, “I don’t want people to confuse me with my father.” Maybe he really meant it sounded more elegant but I said, “After this movie, nobody is going to confuse you with your father.”
Chapter
10
Love, Sweet Love
It was 1965 and the war in Vietnam was really starting to heat up, but I was not yet in touch with my own political feelings. Hal had written the chorus for “What the World Needs Now Is Love” but then spent two years trying to find the first line of the opening verse until he came up with “Lord, we don’t need another mountain.” I wrote the music and the song sounded really good to me even though I thought, “Is this preaching?”
We had been doing all these R&B songs for Dionne, so I wondered if this one would be soulful enough for her. When Hal and I finished the song, I played it for Dionne because she was our artist and our flagship and always our first choice to record our stuff. She said, “Okay, it’s not my favorite song that you guys have written,” which meant she didn’t want to do it. I valued her opinion so highly that I just put the song in a drawer and forgot about it for almost a year. I figured, “Well, if she doesn’t like this, it can’t be any good.”
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 10
