Anyone Who Had a Heart (12 page)

At the end of every show on
Hullabaloo
, we would cut out the letters for the finale from the
Billboard
magazine charts and spell out something like “Motown” or “Lennon-McCartney” and all the guests would do their songs. One week when Dionne Warwick was on the show, it said “Bacharach” and all the guests performed Burt’s songs. The next morning, my assistant said, “There’s somebody here to see you. His name is Hal David.” And I went, “Oh God. I know what this is about.”

Hal walked in and he looked like an accountant or a guy who worked in a drugstore and he said, “Look, Gary, I’m not going to make a federal case about this but I will tell you this. I was sitting at home with my kids last night watching
Hullabaloo
and they said to me, ‘Daddy, why isn’t your name up there? Why doesn’t it say Bacharach and David?’ ”

I said, “Oh shit, Hal, I have to be honest with you. I don’t have an answer for that. Except to say that your partner in music has a cachet that is unbelievable. You know that. He’s a handsome guy and he could be hosting TV shows someday. I urge you to go out and get a PR person. Because you have to be more visible. It’s not that Burt’s doing it on his own. It’s just that everyone in the business always thinks of what the two of you have written as a Bacharach song. Nobody says Bacharach-David like they say Lennon-McCartney.” And he left the office, thanking me for the advice.

Hal David:
After I saw
Hullabaloo
, I called Lee Eastman, our attorney, and he had his son John give the
Hullabaloo
people an earful about what they had done and I think I did hire a publicist then.

During this period, Hal was the one who did most of the business stuff and he was the one who brought in Lee Eastman to help us set up our own publishing company. Hal would talk to Florence Greenberg at Scepter Records and send in our accountants to find the money whenever we were given a royalty statement that seemed wrong, and he would call
Cashbox
magazine to complain about the chart standings when our new record didn’t get a bullet. I never wanted to do any of that because I was still kind of shy at the time and always afraid of bad news.

Angie Dickinson:
Personality-wise, Hal was one hundred percent different from Burt, and you never would have thought they would jell at all. Hal was not show business. He was old-fashioned and Burt was forever young in the way he walked, the way he dressed, the way he talked, and the way he looked. Maybe the fact that Hal was old-fashioned let him write so many of those lyrics from what seems like a woman’s point of view. The old-fashioned way people loved and lived, they kissed, they fell in love, they got married, they had babies. It was pure romance. Unlike Burt, Hal had to create his own importance because the public made Burt important, and not Burt and Hal.

When Burt married me, no one outside the Brill Building knew who he was. They knew the songs but not the man. Most songwriters had the same problem. But Burt backed it up with his own thing. I was just the cover of his book and we became a very exciting team. Kind of like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are now because an appealing couple always attracts attention. We were equally exciting people in different fields and it’s just normal to look at pretty people.

Once things started happening for me, there was definitely resentment from Hal. I think I did kind of take him for granted because even though he was delivering brilliant lyrics, I wasn’t paying much attention to them. I just wanted Hal to give me great-sounding open words that would be easy to sing on the notes I was looking for so the music would shine through.

Now I understand that Hal was being neglected, but in all truthfulness, did I feel like that then? No. It was definitely a certain kind of ego thing. If people wanted to do these things for me that I hadn’t asked them to, great. You know what a very famous songwriter once told me? “Hey, nobody whistles lyrics, you know?” Cruel, huh?

Photographs 1