Anyone Who Had a Heart (15 page)

By the time we got to New York, Neil had made the show half an hour shorter than it had been in Boston, and Hal and I had replaced five of the original songs in the score. The show opened on Broadway on December 1, 1968, and by then we had already racked up a million and a half dollars in advance ticket sales. Angie had flown in from Los Angeles and my parents were there and the theater was filled with people like Merle Oberon, Sidney Lumet, Ethel Merman, Tammy Grimes, Carol Channing, Milton Berle, Cab Calloway, Herb Alpert, Ben Gazzara, and George Segal. Just as I had done on the road, I watched the show from the back of the house with Neil, Hal, Merrick, and Robert Moore.

Neil, who had been through far more opening nights than me, was nervous because he thought the audience was not responding as it should. When the curtain came down at around nine-thirty, all the critics rushed out of the theater to write their reviews. I went with Angie and my parents to El Morocco, the nightclub on East Fifty-Fourth Street where Merrick was throwing a party for about 250 invited guests.

Angie and I got there at around eleven and went to a little office upstairs so we could watch the first reviews on television. The reviews were good but not raves. At about two in the morning, someone walked into the party with a copy of the
New York Times
. Clive Barnes had given us a great review, so everyone knew the show was going to be a hit.

Freddy Robbins was at El Morocco that night interviewing people for a promotional record that was then sent out to radio stations to help plug the show. Although Freddy spoke to every celebrity he could find there that night, Hal was not one of them. While Freddy was talking to my mother, Merrick walked by and said, “Thank you for giving me Burt.” Merrick also told Freddy he thought I would be writing many other shows because I was stage-struck and that I was the first new original American composer since George Gershwin.

After the show opened, I actually got to spend time with Ira Gershwin in L.A., because Angie was friendly with him and his wife, Lee. On Saturday nights, Angie would often go to their house to play poker. I didn’t play but I would turn up about a half hour before the game broke up because they always had great corn rye bread. I got to know Ira a little and he was kind enough to give me a copy of the sheet music for “Strike Up the Band.” On it he wrote, “For Burt—The Fifth B—(in no particular order)—Beethoven, Brahms, Berlin, Bach & Bacharach—with admiration, Ira Gershwin.”

It was a gift I treasured but I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man’s music case. If George Gershwin hadn’t died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written.

Even though I knew
Promises, Promises
was a hit and I should have been really happy about it, all I could say to Freddy Robbins when he interviewed me that night was how much I was looking forward to getting away to Palm Springs for a couple of weeks with Angie and Nikki. More than anything, I was worn out.
Promises, Promises
was the hardest thing I had ever done. I had seen Angie six times in four months, taken too many sleeping pills, and still hadn’t gotten enough sleep because music kept running through my head like a jukebox playing all night long.

None of it had been really joyful or exciting for me and I already knew I would never write another Broadway musical. In the theater, with a live orchestra in the pit, the tempos change nightly, and all that was out of my hands. In a recording studio, I could get it right on tape and it would be there forever.

I spent another couple of days in New York and went into the studio to record the cast album. Then I got on a plane and flew to California, where Angie had rented a house in the desert. All I wanted to do was get away from music, hang out in the sun, play tennis, and start feeling better. About a week and half later, I got a call from Merrick, who said, “I just wanted you to know that Richard Rodgers was in to see the Sunday matinee.” I thought that was great but then Merrick told me there had been a substitute drummer and five other key subs in the orchestra for the performance. I said, “That’s just terrible! That’s the way Richard Rodgers got to hear my show?” It just killed me to know that, but the only way I could have controlled that was to be in the pit myself every night conducting the orchestra, which was something I was not willing to do.

Promises, Promises
ran on Broadway for four years. The show opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London a year later and ran there for 560 performances. The cast album wound up winning a Grammy Award and Dionne had hits with both “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “Promises, Promises.”

Shortly after the show opened I got a call from the American Symphony Orchestra saying Leopold Stokowski wanted me to write a serious work for them to perform. When I told my mother about it she broke down and started crying. After I learned that it would be at least two years before the orchestra could perform whatever I had written, because of the way symphony orchestras scheduled their programs, I turned the offer down. My mother was really disappointed but I was used to the immediacy of the record business, where you write a song, play it for the artist, go into the studio, make the record, and then track it on the radio for the next six weeks.

While I was in Palm Springs I didn’t touch a piano and I stopped writing. Instead I played tennis every day. I called my agent, Freddy Fields, and told him to get me out of scoring a new motion picture comedy called
The April Fools
, starring Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve. I told Freddy I was too burned out to do the job but I agreed to write the title song and they brought in Marvin Hamlisch to come up with the score.

Two weeks in Palm Springs became four weeks, and then six, and I still didn’t miss having to sit down at the piano every day and write. After two months, I was tan, my backhand had improved, and for the first time in a very long while I wasn’t even thinking about music. Larry Gelbart, who created
M*A*S*H
for television and wrote
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, had a great line: “If Hitler is alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.” At the time, that was exactly how I felt as well.

The pneumonia had really taken a lot out of me and it was hard to recover. What I learned was that the longer you stay away from your craft, the harder it is to reenter. What I would say to people who write music is that if you stop for a while and think you can pick it up again anytime you like, it’s really not that easy. There is something to be said for going to your piano or guitar every day, even if you don’t write anything, just so you can keep in touch with your music. If you do that, there will be days when something magical happens, but you have to do it on a daily basis.

Chapter

14

Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head

A
t a time when no one under the age of twenty-five wanted to listen to the music their parents liked, the songs Hal and I were writing seemed to appeal to both generations. I guess the best way to explain what started to happen for me during the next two years is that
The Hitmaker
, the first album I had done on my own, sold a grand total of 3,500 copies in America. My second album,
Reach Out
, which Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss put out on A&M in 1967, sold 135,000 copies in nine months.

Herb and Jerry were great guys and I loved them both. While I was making
Reach Out
, I saw Herb on the A&M lot one day and he asked me, “How did it go in the studio last night?” I said, “You know, it was good but on ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love,’ I didn’t get what I was looking for.” These were the days when I would try to cut three songs in a three-hour call. Certainly two, but since I was working with a huge orchestra, I never wanted to run over because that would cost the record company money. So I was stunned when Herb said, “You didn’t get it? Go back in and do it again.” I said, “Just that one song?” And he said, “Yeah.” I had never heard that from a record company before but that was just how good A&M Records was.

A few months later I got a call from the brilliant film director George Roy Hill at Twentieth Century Fox, who said he wanted to meet with me. Since I had still done only two films at that time, it was really more like an audition. When I walked into George Roy Hill’s office, he was sitting at the piano playing Bach, and doing it really well, too, and I thought, “This is just amazing. A good director who also knows music.” In terms of my working on the score, that could have been both a plus and a minus. After I got to know George a little better, I learned he had studied music at Yale with Paul Hindemith, who had also taught Helmut Blume, my piano teacher at McGill.

George knew exactly where he wanted music in this picture he had just shot and where he didn’t want it. When the music was there, he wanted it to be important. After he showed me a rough cut of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, I agreed to score the picture for him.

There were certain scenes in the film that had been shot as musical interludes. During one of them Paul Newman is riding around on a bicycle with Katharine Ross sitting on the handlebars. George had cut the sequence to “The Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” by Simon and Garfunkel. Even after I started working on the movie, I had no idea if George wanted to hear someone sing during that sequence.

After running the scene over and over on a Moviola, I heard this melody I thought could be a song. When I hear a melody, the orchestration comes out of the same cloth. I knew this song was going to start with a ukulele, and that there would be a tack piano on it to get a honky-tonk kind of feeling. What I would do back then was come up with words that had no meaning but just sounded good to me on the notes I was writing. I think Paul Simon also does this to help guide him to where he is going on a song. I wrote the entire melody, and the only words that kept running through my mind from top to bottom were “Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head.”

I got together with Hal and gave him the melody. He tried very hard to come up with another title, because if you watch the scene in the movie, the sun is shining pretty brightly as Newman and Ross ride around on that bicycle. My title might not have made any literal sense but those were the words that sounded good to me on the notes I had written and they did contour the melody.

Hal came up with lyrics in a couple of days. Then he wrote another set of lyrics and took what he liked best from each and glued them together. George Roy Hill had to sign off on the song, so he came to my house. Hal was there and when I played George our song, he liked it right away.

After I had finished scoring the movie, I ran into Dick Zanuck, the president of Twentieth Century Fox, in a restaurant. He told me he had to fight the board at the studio to keep the song in the picture because they thought it was too risky and unconventional. All I knew was that the song seemed right to me for the time period of the picture. Although it wasn’t particularly pop and not a western song by any means, it did fit what the actors were doing in the scene. If I had known that Dick Zanuck was fighting the people at the studio to keep the song in the picture, I’m sure I would have freaked out.

Ray Stevens was a very hot singer at the time, so the studio brought him out to watch the movie and hear the song to see if he wanted to record it. Ray Stevens hated the movie and he hated the song. Time was running out so we took it to B. J. Thomas, who was on Scepter Records, which made things comfortable for us. He had sort of a country pop voice and even though B. J. had laryngitis when we cut the song in the studio together, he knew exactly how I wanted him to phrase it. We did five takes and I thought it was great.

On the day after Sharon Tate was murdered in Los Angeles, I flew up to San Francisco to watch a preview of the movie. Paul Newman was there but he was drinking beer in his trailer and so we never talked to one another. Because the composer always comes in last on a picture, the only person who worked on
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
that I ever met was George Roy Hill. I had a lot of respect for him, and since he was on my side, I thought, “Well, if he’s not worried about this song being in the picture, it must be all right.” When the bicycle scene was over, the audience erupted and I thought, “This is great.”

Two weeks later I cut the version of the song that was released as a single with B. J. Thomas at A&R Studios in New York. I was torn between two takes, one that sounded comfortable and one that had a lot more energy. I wound up making a splice right in the middle of the song so that it moved from the slower version to the faster one and that was the single they released.

George Roy Hill also had me write a piece of music called “South American Getaway” to accompany the sequence when Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross go to Bolivia. That’s the piece I’m most proud of in the picture. George always liked the Swingle Singers and what we did on it was use vocalists like instruments. The love theme I wrote for the picture didn’t have any lyrics, but after the movie came out and we were making the soundtrack album, Hal offered to write words for it.

He came up with a lyric I hated for “Come Touch the Sun”—“Where there is a heartache, there must be a heart”—but when you’re writing with somebody and rolling along together very successfully, you have to pick your battles carefully. It wasn’t like I could go to Hal and say, “Could I take my melody back and have somebody else write the words?” I just had to let it go, and what I did from then on was to call the song an instrumental.

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was released in October 1969 to coincide with the opening of the movie. The song went to number one on the charts in January 1970 and stayed there for a month. On March 11, I won a Grammy for the cast album from
Promises, Promises
and another Grammy for Best Motion Picture Score for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. Three days later, Dwight Hemion, who had directed a Kraft Music Hall special I had done on NBC, and Peter Matz, who had conducted the orchestra, were given Emmy Awards for the show.

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and I was also nominated for Best Score. I had already been through all this three times before and then gone home depressed when someone else won the Oscar, but when I walked in there with Angie for the ceremony that night, I was very excited. I was also scared because I thought we had such a great chance to win.

After I won the Oscar for Best Score, I thought, “Hey, it’s looking really good like we’re also going to win for Best Song.” Hearing them call my name when they announced that Hal and I had won the Academy Award for Best Song was an unbelievable, spine-tingling feeling, an incredible rush. The only problem was that once you get that feeling, you want it again. Right away, I started thinking, “Now that I’ve won this, what can I look forward to? Do I have a horse running in the fourth at Santa Anita in a few days? Maybe I can win that, too.”

Angie Dickinson:
Winning the Academy Award puts you in the driver’s seat and Burt won two that night. When his name was announced, Burt slapped my knee as he jumped out of his seat to accept the awards but he didn’t reference or even acknowledge me in his speech, which was fine because I don’t think you should thank spouses unless they were so instrumental that “I could not have done it without you feeding me at three in the morning.”

When you’re in that state you don’t know what hit you but Burt did say, “Nikki, this will be on your breakfast table in the morning.” After Burt won those awards, he started performing, and all this adulation came like a wave that started slowly and built and rolled over on him.

The way I started performing was accidental because at that point, I could hardly even speak to an audience. It wasn’t stage fright. It was just something I had never learned to do. What happened was that the
Reach Out
album was making some noise and a woman in Los Angeles asked me if I would perform at a charity event. She said she would pay for all the expenses and get the band, so I agreed to do the show.

At that point, I didn’t even have endings for my songs so we did fade-out endings onstage like we were in a studio. That was how I started, and it felt okay. Then my agent came up with a date in San Diego. I didn’t think I could get enough people in the audience so I had the Carpenters open for me. In May their version of “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” a song Hal and I had written in 1964, went to number one on the charts and stayed there for a month.

I had originally cut the song with Richard Chamberlain, the actor who was playing Dr. Kildare on television and had also come up with a couple of songs that were hits. Nobody ever heard the record and nobody should have, because it was terrible. It was a terrible arrangement, which I wrote, and terribly produced, and I was the producer, and Chamberlain wasn’t a great singer. It was probably the worst record I ever did in my entire life, and had it not been for Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, no one would have ever heard “Close to You” again.

Herb Alpert:
I was thinking of doing “Close to You” as a follow-up to “This Guy’s in Love with You.” I recorded it, and as I was listening to a playback in the studio, my engineer friend Larry Levine looked at me and said, “Man, you sound terrible singing this song.” I lost confidence in it and put the song away in my drawer. Then, in 1970, I gave it to Richard Carpenter.

The Carpenters recorded the song, and the first time I heard it, I wasn’t crazy about it, because Karen was playing drums and it was very light. I think they recorded it three times and the third time was the charm because they brought in the Wrecking Crew, with Hal Blaine on drums. Prior to that, the Carpenters had an album out that didn’t sell for a year. It was just kind of lying there but that song was the door opener for them.

Richard Carpenter:
“Close to You” is one of the few exceptions where I believe Burt wasn’t exactly on his game as far as the arrangement being up to the potential of the song. Burt said, “I want you to do your own arrangement of this with the exception of one thing. At the end of the first bridge, there are two five-note groupings.” He thought that had a particular hook to it and he said, “If you just keep that in mind, you can do whatever else you want with it.” Which I did. I took it into the sound stage and came up with a slow shuffle and then we added the vibraphone and then Karen by herself. It was classic Bacharach.

Richard Carpenter didn’t change any of the notes but he got a completely different feeling out of the band and rhythm section with the shuffle. When Jerry Moss first played me the record over the phone, I thought, “Man, this is just great! I completely blew it with Richard Chamberlain but now someone else has come along and made a record so much better than mine.”

I still really wasn’t thinking seriously about going out on the road as a performer, but I did some shows at the Westbury Music Fair in New York that sold out. At one of them, I got to introduce my mother from the stage. Then I played Las Vegas for the first time.

Angie was pretty friendly with Sidney Korshak and his wife, Bea, and every once in a while, they would come over to have dinner with us. Sidney was a powerful guy who knew everybody in Hollywood and was also connected in Vegas. One night while the four of us were eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, Sidney said to me, “Listen, I want you to go in and play a week at the Versailles Room at the Riviera Hotel. I’ll give you thirty-five thousand dollars for the week.” I thought that was a lot of money, so I said yes, but when I told my agent about it, he said, “Oh, why didn’t you tell me? I could have gotten you a lot more.”

I flew to Vegas and got into a limo, and as I was coming up the Strip, I saw the marquee outside the Riviera. In huge letters, it said, “Burt Bacharach in Concert.” At the very bottom in really small letters, it said, “In the Casbah Lounge Nightly, Vic Damone.” Every night while he was onstage, Vic would mention my name and say, “I discovered this kid. I know talent when I see it.” After I went in and did the week, I started working pretty regularly at the Riviera and also doing shows with Dionne at Caesar’s Palace.

It wasn’t really in my genes to drink but I always liked drinking Jack Daniel’s when I worked in Vegas, maybe because it gave me a little self-confidence before I went onstage. Those were the days when you did two shows a night, so I would have two Jack Daniel’s before I went onstage at eight-fifteen and then two more before I went on at midnight. I couldn’t ever go to bed right after the second show, so I would go hang out somewhere. It got to the point where I began playing games with myself that I had to be in bed twice a week before 5 a.m. Most nights, I broke that rule.