Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “Leslie was so remarkable, she had everyone on the set and the onlookers in the street in tears,” offered the pretty press agent, nervously signaling the star to vitamize the conversation.

  “Aaah,” groaned the reply. “I said hell before I did the scene and giggled right after. Dramatic scenes. I don’t enjoy them. Maybe I expect more than I can possibly give, so I become arrogant and contrary. When I see myself on the screen at first I usually catch the flu. When I come out of seeing a premiere of a film of mine I have sore throat, fever, headache and all the symptoms of a very serious illness. I go on with acting simply to prove to myself that I am alive. That’s why we all work, isn’t it? I refuse to be an image of something I’m not. I’ll never forget the day at MGM when they photographed me as a bunny. Yes, a French bunny! The caption was: Oooh, la la! and then there was a hoop I was jumping through. Quite funny actually. But when you have to go through it it’s simply awful. And so I put my foot down, and said no more bunnies for me. And I was considered very difficult, you know, and very few people liked me. And that to me is the whole of Hollywood, making people be bunnies when they’re not.”

  The telephone rang and the star rubbed her temples nervously, trying to keep her voice down. “I told you, Warren, I’m busy! I don’t know when. Go out and walk around the block a few times. No. No! Later. I mean it.” She hung up the receiver and made a face.

  “Now I suppose you’ll print that I’m having an affair with Warren and we’re holed up in the George V doing all sorts of tatty things. Just say we’re good friends. No, I have no plans for marriage. It’s deeply traumatically disturbing to withstand the kind of scandal the press builds up. I understand the side of the journalists and I understand the public’s interest, so I’m not angry or bitter or—you know, it doesn’t leave permanent scars on me at all, although I’ve had to live incognito, James Bond style, at times. But I guess that’s the price we have to pay. It’s for my children, I mean otherwise what does it matter to me. Do you want to ask me something? Ask! I don’t know what to say. I’m human and I don’t like scandal. Ever since I was sixteen in the ballet—long before Gene Kelly discovered me and signed me for An American in Paris—I’ve been in the press, so I don’t know anything else. But you’re all a bunch of bastards really, you know. Yes, you are.”

  Does she like anybody? She thought a moment, scratching at her Sassoon bangs. “Not many. I have few friends. How can I know others well if I don’t know myself? When I was doing Gigi everybody loved me suddenly because I was Gigi, they thought! But I was character acting as far as I’m concerned; I already had one baby and I was already 25. I always wanted to play sophisticated women when I couldn’t and I didn’t look it, and I didn’t have the maturity. So I wasn’t really Gigi or Lili or any of those girls. Most of the people I know are not actors. You can’t have deep friendships in this business. It’s like politics. Also, I don’t trust people. For instance, if I’m recognized in the street I am bound to think it’s a sex maniac, or somebody—I think why are they staring at me?”

  Mention the war. It’s like picking the lock on a cheetah cage. “You Americans. What do you know? You’ve never been bombed or occupied by an enemy or anything. During the war, I used to make shoes from my great-grandmother’s leather gloves. A pair of shoes was something you kept for 10 years. We lived on rations.”

  “We had rations in America, too,” volunteered the press agent.

  “Ha! What does that mean? You only got one chocolate bar instead of two? Hunger and unpleasantness and fear from the Nazis because my mother was American and my cousins were in the underground. It’s never worn off. I still save Kleenex. When I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was horrified. I had been raised in convents, knew nothing of the world. I had two pairs of panties and every American woman had 18 slips. My greatest luxury now is underwear. It is very hard to feel sorry for you Americans. If you want to, you can always work. I went to Cairo two years ago and it was dreadful. The rich people live in tombs, and they are the lucky ones. But in America you know nothing of this. You’ve had the best of everything and you know the least of anyone.”

  Recovering from this attack, there seemed only one thing left to question: the future. “I don’t expect anything from that. I think you have to be a moron to be really happy all the time. In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and great unhappiness—otherwise how would you know when you’re happy? Marriage is no solution. I’ve been married twice. It’s just a social habit that we have which makes our children have the name of a gentleman. But I don’t think it’s a perfect solution for human beings. I think the relationship has more chance to succeed without marriage. It’s very difficult to plan a life,” she said, ushering us to the door. “Very boring if you do, and more boring if you stick to it. Such questions, such odd ideas you must have of how a movie star lives. Americans. I don’t know how to talk to you.”

  Downstairs, on the curb, Warren Beatty was pacing nervously. “I’ve never seen her like that before,” said the pretty press agent as Beatty bounded past us and leaped toward the elevators.

  “Movie stars! Bah!” I mumbled, as the limousine swept us into the sane, welcome reality of the 5:00 traffic jam in the Place de la Concorde.

  Burt Bacharach

  The room smells like burning toast. It is burning. Burt Bacharach has a cold and he’s hungry, but this photographer is keeping him out of the kitchen by closing in on him with a camera that looks like a weapon and saying things to make him smile like “Give me your Michel Legrand smile” and Burt keeps saying, “When you take his picture, are you going to ask for his Burt Bacharach smile?” Mrs. Bacharach (better known to cab drivers as “a real tomato” and to autograph hounds as Angie Dickinson) went back to California after the opening night raves for Promises, Promises got tabulated, leaving Burt to nurse his own cold, get his own picture taken, burn his own toast, make his own bed and reject his own Burt Bacharach records on the record player.

  The bachelor pad on East 61st Street has a grey December afternoon college weekend frat house look. He lived there long before he wrote “Alfie” or married a movie star, and now the rent keeps going up every three years, but he keeps it anyway. When his wife and two-year-old daughter Lea are in town, they live in a hotel. But Burt’s mother keeps the refrigerator stocked with lemons and eggs and Pepperidge Farm bread and he hides out there when he wants to get away from the screaming fans and the hit records. Gold-framed Avedons of Marlene Dietrich signed with worshipful phrases of adoration line the walls. A baby Steinway sits in a lonely dining alcove covered with a massive clutter of bills, mail tied together with rubber bands, and blank score pads for future Burt Bacharach song hits to be penciled in. “I don’t take care of my piano,” he says. “I don’t even tune it. I can write songs anywhere. If Angie is making a picture in Arizona, I can write in the hotel room. But I can’t write anything at the piano. I write everything in my head and then put it down on paper. Poor piano.”

  The rest of the apartment is an agreeable explosion of coffee cups filled with day-old instant Yuban, dirty dishes in the sink, sleeveless phonograph records scattered like black vinyl seeds behind the sofa, under tennis racquets, and across the carpet toward the terrace, which is littered with last summer’s beach towels and old squeezed Bain de Soleil tubes, and which overlooks the roof of Alexander’s. Everyone hums as the phonograph plays a fresh stack of Burt Bacharach records. Stan Getz Plays Burt Bacharach. Cal Tjader Plays Burt Bacharach. Connie Francis Sings Burt Bacharach. (Badly.) The photographer leaves, still humming “The Look of Love,” and Burt leaps into the kitchen to make fresh toast. The Colts and Packers are playing and he’d much rather watch that, but he tries to keep his mind on the interview. He’s the man of the hour in pop music, but you’d never guess it. For a songwriter, he neither looks like a John Lennon nor lives like a Cole Porter. He’s rich, but he still drives a 1966 Chevy, prefers quiet evenings in Mexican restaurants to all the hoopla at The Factory,
and doesn’t even know where all of his money is. “You have to hire people to take care of it and then you just have to trust them, I guess. I bought a racehorse and a restaurant on Long Island, but the horse is still in England and I don’t know how the restaurant is doing. I guess I ought to go see if the food’s still good.”

  Except for a few patches of white hair, he looks, at 38, like Joe College in a Burlington sock ad. Plaid pants, baggy green crew-neck sweater, white socks, and white U.S. Keds. Mucking up the joint, throwing raw eggs and coffee ice cream into a blender, and talking about his new show. “Somehow I lived through it and I’m still alive. I didn’t damage my health too much, although I had pneumonia in Boston and spent a week in a hospital. But this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The work seemed endless. Since August, my partner Hal David and I have written songs, dropped songs, I’ve seen my wife six times in four months, I take too many pills, I don’t sleep any more, I close my eyes and music goes through my head all night—I’m wiped out by this show, man. Tomorrow we do the cast album and then it’s all over and I’ll be in Palm Springs by Wednesday. I have no desire to ever do another Broadway musical, no matter how successful Promises, Promises is.”

  He’s happy the critics called the show a breakthrough, because “before this show the quality of sound in the theatre was really rotten. I tried to get the right musicians who could play my kind of pop music instead of the usual pit orchestra. I went for younger guys. I put in an electronic booth to control the voices I used with the music. I inserted “Fiberglas” panels to separate the sound from mike to mike and tried to achieve the same conditions you get in a recording session without the isolated sound of music coming through speakers. It’s a very complicated electronic system, with echo chambers and equalizers and technical equipment, and David Merrick was great. He spent all the money I asked for.”

  Although he has been called “too old for the pot generation and too young for jogging,” his speech is full of uptights, groovys, and cats words which, like his songs, span several generations. “But I don’t like to be called a ‘rock’ composer. I never wrote a rock ’n’ roll song in my life. I didn’t try to compose a score just to be commercial. I wrote just the way I always do. I didn’t compromise or change gears just because it was Broadway, but I tried to give the audience songs they could remember. I write very simply. If we knocked down a few doors with my rhythms, or the new sound in the show, great. Show music has to move on, but I don’t mean in the direction of Hair. I don’t respect the score from Hair at all. You get people waving flags all over the place over that show, but it doesn’t belong on the same stage with a score like No Strings. Same stage? It doesn’t even belong on the same record player.”

  He balances the coffee milkshake and a Dagwood sandwich of burned toast, cheese, chopped liver and butter, and sits under a painting of a woman who looks like Libby Holman. “My mother painted that years ago. She’ll be knocked out that somebody noticed it.” She gave up art to follow the party circuit with Burt’s father, columnist Bert Bacharach, after the family moved to New York from Kansas City. “She doesn’t regret it any more than that hokey stuff people ask me about ‘Just think—if you had stayed in classical music what you could have composed by now.’ I could have gone classical. I studied at Tanglewood and with Darius Milhaud in California, but I started seeing the dedication, the way serious composers had to teach school to live, waiting for grants to be able to eat, the poor money they made. I didn’t dig it.

  “I got into music in the first place to be popular. I wanted to be like my dad, who was an all-Southern Conference fullback, but I was too short. I ate jars of peanut butter to try and grow taller. I couldn’t find one boy shorter than I was, only girls. My folks kept my interest in music going when I hated it. It was very lonely practicing the piano while my friends were out playing touch football and I was inside playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘None But the Lonely Heart.’ Also, I was Jewish and all my friends were Catholics. They always got to do things together, like go to midnight mass, and I couldn’t go. Even in a football huddle, they’d say, ‘Let’s kick hell outta those Jews,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, let’s get ’em.’ Now I look back and can’t understand why it was so important to belong to those guys faking their I.D.’s to get rye and ginger ales at the bowling alley, but wow, it was then. So to be the life of the party I played piano in a Friday night dance band and suddenly I was with a real group of musicians, practicing together, meeting people. I used to keep time to the radio with a pair of drumsticks. Music made me belong.”

  Then came a hitch with Uncle Sam from 1950 to 1952 which has got to be one of the funniest enlistments in Army history. “Somehow they marked my file ‘concert pianist’ and I ended up playing piano in a tuxedo at the officer’s club on Governors Island and gave concerts at Fort Dix. It was the put-on of all time. I had nothing to play, man. It was all improvisation. I’d give ’em a medley from South Pacific and a little ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’ and then make up some wild thing off the top of my head and if anyone asked, I’d say ‘an unpublished work by Debussy.’” For two years he stayed out of Korea by winging it on unpublished works by Debussy. He lived off the base, drove his own car, and kept all the top-ranking officers happy by playing their favorite tunes. It couldn’t last forever (“How many choruses of “Home in Indiana” can you play before somebody gets wise?”) so they shipped him to Germany where he wrote arrangements for a German dance band and paid other soldiers to clean his M-l rifles. “I prayed a lot and it paid off. They never sent me to Korea. If they had, I wouldn’t have known how to do a thing.”

  After the army, he worked as an accompanist for Vic Damone, who fired him, later Polly Bergen, Imogene Coca and the Ames Brothers. Square jobs for a swinger like Burt, but the money was good and he “got to go to Las Vegas twice a year.” He also played rehearsal piano for singer Paula Stewart and married her. It lasted three years. While he was playing in Vegas, the record company sharks would fly out to audition songs for the Ames Brothers and Burt would hear them. “I thought they were horrible. Songwriting sounded simple. I knew I could write better than that, so I told myself I should quit, go back to New York, and write a hit. I did and for a solid year I couldn’t get arrested. What looks simple and clear and inventive is very misleading. I couldn’t get anything published. I was busted. I was working weekends playing for Joel Grey in the Catskills. Three shows a night. I was never home. My marriage was cooked by then. I finally got a song recorded by Patti Page. It was awful. I’d rather forget it.” He leaps to the piano, tilts his shaggy head toward imaginary calypso drums, pumps the pedals of the Steinway with his sneakers, and sings. He’s right. The song was awful. “Then I met Marlene.”

  His highly publicized friendship with Dietrich began in 1953 when he was asked to fill in for her regular conductor. “I went around to see her at the Beverly Hills Hotel and I had a cold and she said, ‘Iz dot a cold?’ in that great voice and then she gave me some vitamins and some medicine and wowed the hell outta me. She now says I started coaching and advising her right then and there, but it’s not true. I mean she was a legend and you don’t walk in and say to a legend, ‘Listen, baby, sit back on the second eight bars and take it easy.’ I was awe-stricken. She thinks I helped her constructively, but she had the vitamin C! I had written a song. She called Sinatra and told him he had to record it. Of course he never recorded it, but she said, ‘Ah, you will be sorry. He’ll be very famous one day and you’ll remember I told you so.’ It’s been like that the whole time I’ve known her. It’s a kind of friendship and love that is very rare and special. Other people get into trouble with her, but I never did. Now I’m too busy to conduct for her much, but she isn’t sad or afraid. She just wants everyone to know how happy she is that I turned out to be a success. She bought 35 copies of the reviews and mailed them to people all over the world telling them, ‘See I told you so.’”

  After Burt’s first hit song, “Magic Moments,” was recorded by Perry Com
o in 1958, nothing happened for four years while he preferred to travel with Dietrich. “People warned me that I wouldn’t write songs while I was traveling, but I say so what? She taught me a lot about never settling for less. I just watched her—what she went after, what she got. I still conduct for her now when I can. Like going to Warsaw. You land. The snow is blowing, the wind is howling, you’ve had no sleep because you can’t sleep, there’s Marlene at the foot of the ladder. Not in the terminal with all the other people, but at the foot of the plane, and in her arms she’s got two enormous sweaters because she’s afraid you won’t be warm enough, and the longest Dior scarf you’ve ever seen, and a sheepskin jacket and a bottle of Polish vodka which she pours, which you drink, in the snow and wind. Then she takes you to your hotel, only it’s not just any hotel, it’s the hotel where Paderewski stayed and she’s gone to all the trouble of getting you his room! Then you go to Israel, where no German is spoken or sung ever, and the authorities stop her at the airport and say, “You won’t sing even one song in German, will you?’ and she says, ‘No eleven!’ and people are hysterical and weeping and it’s so emotional you have to do all eleven songs all over again. Traveling with her is not a trip or a job, it’s an invasion! The time I’ve spent with her is worth ten hit songs.”

  The other singer in his life has been Dionne Warwick, for whom many of his hits are specially written. He met her six years ago when she showed up for a record date to sing background music for a vocal group called The Drifters. “She had pigtails and sneakers and great cheekbones and said, ‘Who we singin’ for on this record?’ and I said, ‘The Drifters,’ and she said, ‘Oops, I don’t wanna blow my cool!’ We’ve been friends ever since.” When she made her debut in Paris, Burt wrote to Dietrich and asked her to look in on the shy young Negro gospel-turned-pop singer. Dietrich not only looked in on her, she took her to Balmain, bought her a gown, took over her opening, introduced her to European society, and—voila!—another star is born, touched by the Bacharach magic. “I’m very proud of Dionne and the kind of lady she’s become,” he says. “Our careers kind of rose together.”