Anyone Who Had a Heart (18 page)

The first song we wrote together that was recorded was “Where Did the Time Go.” The Pointer Sisters cut it with Richard Perry producing. I played piano and conducted the string section. Although the song wasn’t a hit, I felt like Carole and I were headed in the right direction. About a year later we did a concept album about a relationship, called
Sometimes Late at Night
, for Boardwalk Records, a label owned by Carole’s good friends Neil and Joyce Bogart.

Carole and I wrote most of the songs together. I produced the album with Brooks Arthur and we had great musicians like Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner, Leland Sklar, Lee Ritenour, and David Foster in the studio. The single “Stronger Than Before” went to number thirty on the charts.

There was a duet on the album called “Just Friends,” and Michael Jackson came in to sing it with Carole. I had written the arrangement and we had the strings and the rhythm section there when Michael said, “Can you just give me a few minutes so I can try something?” He took Paul Jackson Jr., who played guitar on the date, into the bathroom and came back out with a totally different flow and concept for the song that was five times better than what I had done. When you listen to Carole and Michael singing together on that cut, you wonder, “Which one’s Michael and which one is Carole?” Their voices went together that well.

After we made
Sometimes Late at Night
Carole and I went out on the road together. Although the album wasn’t really selling all that well, people thought it was because the single from it, “Stronger Than Before,” was making some noise on the charts. So when Carole and I played the Roxy on the Sunset Strip in L.A. for five nights, we sold out every show. What with the orchestra and all the background singers, we lost money on the gig but at least we sold out, right? During the show Carole would sing some of her songs and I would do some of mine, and then we would perform the songs from the album together.

While Carole was doing her set during one of the shows at the Roxy, I looked into the house and saw Dionne and some of her friends sitting at a table right down in front. Dionne was just glaring at Carole. I mean, if looks could kill, this was it. Dionne and I still weren’t talking to one another because of the lawsuit but there she was, giving Carole this totally wicked look.

Carole Bayer Sager:
Sometimes Late at Night
seems like it was about our relationship but I didn’t know that at the time. It was a concept album about love where every song moved into the next with a sense of continuity. Looking back, I think it foretold certain things I didn’t even know I was feeling.

Mike Medavoy was running Orion, the movie studio he had co-founded a couple of years before, and he asked me to do the music for a romantic comedy called
Arthur
, starring Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, and John Gielgud that Steve Gordon had written and directed. When I saw the rough cut, I wasn’t sure it was going to be a great movie but the picture just kept on getting better as Steve edited it, so I decided to take the job.

There were going to be a couple of songs in the movie and we needed to get the main title written quickly, so we were in a rush. By now Carole and I were living together, so Christopher Cross came over to the house one night to work with us. He’d had a number-one hit with “Sailing” and won four Grammys that year, and he had been very hot for a while but had done nothing since.

I had maybe a fraction of where I thought the song should be going but once we started working together, it all evolved very quickly. Having three people in the room was a great way to write, and by the end of the night, we had basically finished “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).” I taped what we had done and listened to it the next morning and nudged it a little here and there to make sure it was right and complete.

A couple of days later, I said something to Carole about what a great line “When you get caught between the moon and New York City” was, and she told me it came from a song she had written with Peter Allen that had never gone anywhere. Because they had written the lyrics together, she didn’t know whose line it was. It fit so well in the song that Carole said she would talk to Peter about it. When she called him, Carole said, “Listen, Peter, I used this one line. Are you okay with it?” He said, “No. I want to be a writer on the song.” And that’s why all four of us are credited on it.

Christopher Cross recorded the song and it sounded like a hit to everybody at Warner Bros., so the label decided to release it as a single to coincide with the opening of the movie. The only problem was that Christopher Cross had a clause in his contract that allowed him to hold up the release of the single for radio play until he saw how much money the film had grossed on the opening weekend. Once he knew the film was going to be a hit, he let the record come out, and “Arthur’s Theme” went to number one on the charts. Then it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. I thought we had a great shot at winning the award because the movie was so huge.

Carole Bayer Sager:
Burt and I had been living together for a while and I certainly would have liked to have gotten married. We were nominated for an Academy Award and I don’t know how it came to be but Burt said, “I tell you what. If we win the Oscar, we’ll definitely get married right away.” And I thought, “Fine. Okay. Even more reason to want to win the Oscar.” We won the Oscar, and got married very shortly after.

Carole and I won the Oscar on a Monday night. We were both really riding high so we decided that if we were ever going to get married, this was the time to do it. Neil Bogart, who died of lymphoma a few months later, offered to let us have the ceremony at his house the following weekend. Carole’s mother, Anita Bayer, had come out for the Academy Awards and was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was a great character, a Jewish Auntie Mame who could be so outrageous and difficult that I sometimes thought it was a miracle Carole could even function in this world.

Even though she approved of me, Anita could also be like a truck or a steamroller running right over you. She was like nobody I had ever known, a really exasperating woman who kept right on smoking cigarettes like crazy even after she learned she had lung cancer. She also had a very caring side, but I decided I did not want her at our wedding, which was not very cool of me. Instead, I told Carole that after the ceremony was over we would go see Anita at the Beverly Hills, have a drink with her in the Polo Lounge, and tell her we had gotten married. It was not a nice thing to do for someone who is basically a nice guy. But it was like, “If I’m marrying you, I don’t have to have your mother there, do I?”

Carole Bayer Sager:
I had mixed feelings when Burt said my mother couldn’t come to the wedding, because I had mixed feelings about my mom at that point, but it was really a horrible thing to do and I didn’t even really realize how inappropriate it was at the time.

I don’t think Burt had ever dealt with his own feelings about his own mother, because he was very obedient with her to the point of being dutiful. When Burt told his mother for the first time that he loved me and we were thinking about getting married, she said, “But she’s Jewish.” Which I think says everything.

There were only six people at the wedding—me and Carole; Neil Diamond and his wife, Marcia; and Neil and Joyce Bogart. We all had an ample amount to drink and I smoked some dope. Then this guy who I guess was a judge in Santa Monica said, “Do you, Burt Bacharach, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?” I said, “I’ll try,” and Neil Diamond said, “Holy shit!”

Carole Bayer Sager:
Burt loves to tell that story. Neil Diamond actually said Burt became his hero when he said that because Neil had never quite heard anything like it in his life.

After the ceremony, we got in the car and went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we brought Anita down to the Polo Lounge and told her. From then on, whenever Carole’s mother would get on an airplane to come out to Los Angeles, she would say, “Can you move me up to first class? Burt Bacharach is my son-in-law. Here are a couple of his records.” And the funny thing was, they would do it for her.

Photographs 2