Read Anyone Who Had a Heart Online
Authors: Burt Bacharach
One of the strangest experiences I ever had playing overseas happened a couple of years earlier, when I went to the Philippines to do some solo concerts with a pickup orchestra and a couple of key musicians I had brought with me. Imelda Marcos, the wife of the Philippine president, came to one of the shows and sat right down in front. The next night I got a message asking me if I could come to the presidential palace to join her and Ferdinand Marcos. It wasn’t like I could turn the invitation down, so I went. It was kind of risky because the regime looked like it was going to explode at any moment and there were tanks with mounted machine guns outside the palace.
Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were sitting at a table in this disco room they had built downstairs and they asked me if I would play. I couldn’t refuse so they moved the piano and I was right in the middle of a group of about thirty people. During one of my songs, the president got up and went to bed. I’d had some wine and somebody had given me a joint to help me get through it, so I was just taking everything in, but it was still really bizarre.
At about four in the morning, Imelda came up to me and started making a speech. “Burt Bacharach, I want to you to know what your music has meant to my country and all my citizens and how much respect we all have for you. . . .” Meanwhile, I could hear the house piano player in the background going from one key to another. When he got down to a G-seventh chord, she leaned right into my face, just inches away, and started singing, “I’ll be seeing you / In all the old familiar places,” a standard that Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal had written before World War II, and she did the whole fucking song.
She couldn’t sing well enough to pull it off and I was breaking up, and I had to keep looking down at my shoes so she wouldn’t see me laughing. It was surreal. Then she sang Noël Coward’s “I’ll See You Again.” Not long afterward, the regime was deposed and both Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had to flee for their lives.
A couple of months after “That’s What Friends Are For” went to the top of the charts, Carole and I wrote and produced “On My Own,” a number-one hit for Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald. Michael has one of the great white soul voices of all time and he can also really play great piano. The mix was very hard to get because we were trying to balance the vocal between Patti and Michael and we weren’t getting it right. Then Carole rode the faders on the mixing board, and it was perfect.
Professionally, Carole and I were really doing well together but life with her was a little too social for me. When Carole threw Elizabeth Taylor a birthday party, we had 160 people at our house. I said to Carole afterward, “I want to be remembered for the music I wrote, not the parties I gave.”
Carole Bayer Sager:
We gave Elizabeth her fifty-fifth birthday party and it was her guest list and ours so it was pretty awesome. Burt did say he wanted to be known for the music he wrote and not the parties he gave, but I don’t know if he said it at the end of that party because he had the most spectacular time. At the end of the night, he was jamming with Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, and Bob Dylan and he was in heaven.
On August 17, 1987, Carole and I were under extreme pressure to finish a song called “Ever Changing Times” for the movie
Baby Boom
, starring Diane Keaton. I got a phone call from the hospital in New York that my mother had died. It was not unexpected, since she was eighty-five years old and had been in and out of hospitals for a while and just gradually breaking down.
I was very undecided about what to do. Should I get on a plane to New York right away or should I finish the song with Carole? I had no family in New York other than my aunt. I told myself that if I stopped working to fly back east, all I could really do was talk to some doctor, but I could do that on the phone. So I stayed and finished the song and flew in a few days later. Did I feel good about it? No. Do I feel all right about it now? No.
I didn’t have to face this kind of decision when my dad died on September 15, 1983, after suffering from a long illness related to a heart ailment. Carole and I had been in New York and we had gone to see him in the hospital every day. My dad was kind of out of it at the end but I think he was very much at peace with himself because he’d had such a great life. Carole and I were actually making a phone call down at the end of the hall in the hospital when they told us he was gone. As soon as we got the news I called my mother, who had also been expecting this to happen at any time. Then we all took his ashes out on a boat and scattered them in the East River.
The bottom line was that both my father and mother got to witness what I was doing with my life. They came to see me perform at my concerts and they saw me win Academy Awards and they were there on the night
Promises, Promises
opened on Broadway, so I knew they were both really proud of what I had accomplished.
Before she died, my mother had told me she wanted her ashes buried on the grounds of the house on Nimes Road where Carole and I were living. Because things between the two of us weren’t going so great at the time, I had to explain to my mother that I didn’t know if I would be living there that long. Two days after my mother passed away, I flew back to New York and had my mother’s remains sent to Los Angeles, where I put them in a cemetery.
The last time I ever spoke to my mother, I knew she wasn’t well, but I didn’t want to deal with that. Instead, I thought that if I just kept on going, then she wouldn’t die. Someone who knows me very well once said I don’t like funerals or weddings. Although I do feel guilty about being this way, I think it’s true.
I
had never been in therapy but Carole had and she understood psychiatry a lot better than me. The two of us had a silent agreement that we would work together to get Nikki the help she needed. When Nikki was fourteen she decided to become a Sikh. Angie would get up with her at four in the morning so Nikki could go to the ashram. My daughter was getting weirder and weirder but I didn’t know what to do about it.
While Nikki was in her Sikh period, which lasted for two or three years, I thought maybe she was thinking, “My dad’s good-looking and my mother’s a beautiful movie star and I can’t compete with that so I’ll cut off all my hair and I won’t bathe or shower and I’ll let the hair grow under my arms.”
Angie Dickinson:
The Sikhs were loving and gentle—which Nikki had to have. Perhaps the uniformity of the dress and the rituals made her feel like one of them, as opposed to an outsider who was always being looked at and stared at. I never asked why. She loved it, and that was all I needed. They gave her the name Sat Kartar, which I later found out means something like “Walker of Truth.”
We would get up at 3:30 a.m. and I would drive her down there for
sadhana
, the devotionals before sunrise. I’ve got one picture of Nikki in her white turban with a rat sitting on it while she’s holding another rat. Nikki loved rats. We had thirteen at one time. That’s a lot of rat shit.
When I was playing Vegas in the middle of the summer, it would be 110 degrees. We would be by the pool and Nikki would be jumping off the high diving board in a full wet suit. Somebody would say, “Oh, that’s your daughter?” and I would feel a little embarrassed. That was tough to deal with, but when I found out Nikki had been smoking dope with one of the workmen who was doing repairs on Angie’s house, I finally said, “I’ve got to get her into a treatment program.”
Angie Dickinson:
There were a lot of workmen in the house and one of them took a liking to Nikki. Although I was not aware of it, I believe she must have begun smoking marijuana with him. It was 1982 and she was sixteen. Later on I realized that this gave her peace.
The fact that Burt thought I would permit this was a problem. The workman was forty-two or something, but I don’t think there was anything sexual going on between them because Nikki didn’t care about that. She just wanted to be loved and to have someone put their arm around her. But Burt was not wrong to lay down some laws.
Being a New Yorker, Burt was very pro-psychiatry. In his world, you did that sort of thing—go to psychiatrists. I’m from North Dakota, and there we didn’t. We went barefoot. Nikki began getting psychiatric treatment when she was about eight, but the psychiatrists had no answers. There was one I would kill if I could get away with it. He’d tell me that when she’d act out or keep talking or repeating herself, I should just say something like “doorknobs” or “spaghetti.” Something to make her go “Hmmm?” That hardly explained why she could not cope. He didn’t get to the heart of what she needed at all.
Carole found out about this place in Brea where they didn’t keep kids for long but they did put them in deep therapy. Carole had never had any children, but she was a very bright woman and now her mission was to help Nikki. Together we were going to get Nikki better.
Carole Bayer Sager:
Burt looked to me to help him with Nikki. Late at night when he’d had some wine, Burt would say, “What should I do? How can I help Nikki?” Burt would get very sad when he talked about Nikki and he cared very much about her, but he felt he was just hitting a wall because nothing ever got better. I think it was the most heartbreaking part of his life and I also think he was misunderstood by Angie, who felt Burt didn’t give Nikki enough time and support and love because she didn’t turn out perfectly.
I thought I only had Nikki’s best interests at heart, but after it was all said and done I had to question that because I really wasn’t helpful to her. What Nikki really needed was as much connection as she could get with people who cared about her. And the acceptance that she was not capable of being anything but who she was.
Some of the things I was angry and sad and frustrated with Angie about, I now realize were just a mother’s gut feeling. Burt always felt Angie always knew something about Nikki that he didn’t. That maybe she had kept something a doctor had told her from him. But as a mother, she was just totally intuitive with her child and so attached to her.
The point is that Nikki wasn’t doing well at all here in L.A. Some people are likable in their neuroses and other people push you away. Nikki pushed people away because she would become so entirely absorbed by one thing. And whatever that thing was, she would hold you hostage with it. She would go on and on and on for so long after any human being could have any interest in the subject, whether it was Steve Perry’s voice or Christopher Cross’s version of “Sailing.” And worst of all was her obsession with having missed an earthquake that had killed people in Los Angeles.
Angie was against Nikki going into the treatment center at Brea, so I talked to my lawyer and we decided to take out a court order that would allow me to put her there. I was fighting for my daughter’s life and I thought, “I have got to get Nikki help, because this is spiraling totally out of control.” We were on our way downtown to file the order when I withdrew it.
Angie Dickinson:
Burt threatened to take out a court order if I didn’t help him put Nikki in the Brea clinic. I knew I couldn’t compete with his hatred or his money so I said, “Okay,” and I’ll never forget it. It was the worst day of my life because I never thought any of this would help her. Brea was Gestapo in the night. A pound on the door and you’re going in and they shoved her into a new world.
After Nikki went into the clinic in Brea I’d drive down to see her. She hated the place because she felt like she was in prison. I was expecting a very uptight therapist, but the man who ran the program was like a street guy who worked with kids all the time. Nikki stayed there for about five or six weeks and then she was released. In the meantime I’d been looking for a place outside of L.A. where she could get treatment. I went to see a therapist in Westwood with Nikki, and while I was sitting in the waiting room, I heard the doctor talking on the phone. He was saying, “Yeah, I’m with Burt Bacharach and he’s here with his daughter.” I thought, “This guy’s a real dick.”
I talked to some other people and Carole and I did some research to find the best place for Nikki. Then we met with some people from the Constance Bultman Wilson Center in Faribault, Minnesota. It was a beautiful campus with no gates, and a mansion that looked like it could have been in Brentwood for the adolescent residents.
Angie Dickinson:
Burt still thought Nikki was not doing well enough and that it would be good for her to get some distance from me because I was too permissive. And I thought, “Maybe he’s right. Perhaps I am too close.” And that was the reason I gave in. I kept telling Nikki that all kids go away to school to learn and grow on their own. I guess I convinced her and we flew to the Wilson Center in August 1983. Weeks after she arrived, Nikki called me and said, “It’s not a school, Angie. It’s a hospital.”
Nikki was really unhappy there but Carole and I would go see her twice a year. We would take her out to dinner and talk to the people at the center about how she was doing. After Nikki had been there for several months, her therapist said, “We’re having some difficulty treating her. Would it be possible for you and Carole to stop communicating with her for a while?” No calls, nothing. We all agreed to this, and then twenty minutes later Nikki was on the phone with Angie.
Angie Dickinson:
The bottom line was that Burt did it to get her away from me. He thought this would help Nikki but it destroyed her. She was there for ten years. I mean, Jesus Christ! Ten years. Ten years! Think about it. With no change because she didn’t have the mechanism. Poor soul. That poor darling. She was so heroic and still loved the sonofabitch because Burt can charm everybody.
There was no progress but I kept thinking that maybe there was. When my medical insurance ran out, you would think somebody there might have told me that Nikki could have been in therapy every day and it still wouldn’t have helped her but no one ever did. If somebody had just leveled with me and said, “Hey, we can’t do anything about this,” I would have taken her out of there in a heartbeat. But they never did. Instead, they just kept right on taking the money.
Carole Bayer Sager:
There was something deeply wrong with Nikki, but they would send us these reports and I kept saying to Burt, “I don’t see a diagnosis. What is the problem? Any doctor should be able to articulate what is wrong with her. Why are they keeping her there?” And he kept saying he didn’t know.
When Nikki was about to turn eighteen, she wrote Carole and me a really loving letter. But then her negative feelings about me began to build and I became her enemy, as did Carole. Nikki thought I had locked her up and imprisoned her and she hated me for having done that to her.
Angie Dickinson:
I talked to Nikki on the phone a lot and I would go see her at least four or five times a year. They gave me permission to take her out on trips to places like the Canadian Rockies and the Tetons and the Yucatan. She made some friends at the Wilson Center and had a couple of jobs. When she could no longer see well enough to make out the notes, Nikki gave up the piano and began taking drumming lessons. She was a natural drummer and when Burt played a charity concert in Minneapolis, he let her sit in with the band on “Heartlight.”
When Nikki entered the Wilson Center, she had beautiful thick hair that ran down past her shoulders. At home, she had been used to taking showers for as long as twenty-five minutes, obsessively scrubbing and rescrubbing her arms and legs. At the center they wouldn’t let her stay in anywhere near that long, so she ended up not washing her hair much. After a few years of their bitching at her to get it clean, she said, “I’ll fix it for you,” and she buzzed it off and kept it that way. I’m pretty sure she did that out of spite, but when anyone asked her why, she said, “For convenience.”
They were trying to make her into somebody who could hold a job so they forced her to drive, which was insane. She totaled one car and wrecked another one pretty good. By some miracle, she wasn’t hurt in either instance. As I later learned, she just couldn’t see cars coming from that far away. The psychiatrist there told her, “Nikki, someday your mother is going to die and then you’re going to have to be responsible for yourself,” and that put her into a spiral she never got out of.
Nikki was twenty-six years old in the winter of 1982, when she was released from the Wilson Center. Angie threw a freedom party for her at the house in Trousdale Estates, where she was living. I went and it was very weird, and then Nikki decided she wanted to become a geologist. Angie enrolled her in California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks and found Nikki an apartment near campus. Her eyesight was so bad she could only take one class a semester, but Nikki also started studying karate and got a green belt.
I’d go up to where Angie lived about every other month and bring her and Nikki lunch and stay a couple of hours because that was about all I could take. As Nikki got older, all of her problems became bigger and more impossible to deal with. Whenever I visited, I could feel the venom she had toward me for imprisoning her. After leaving the house, I would have to pull my car over to the side of the road and just sit there and meditate for about twenty minutes so I could get myself together enough to drive back down the hill.
The way it was with Nikki was that she would bounce from one obsession to the other. For a while it would be “The loud noise. I can’t stand the loud noise. It’s driving me crazy. I’m going to kill myself.” She would get that one going and then she would start talking about earthquakes and how she wanted to be in L.A. for an earthquake so she could feel the shaking.
Angie Dickinson:
Earthquakes were what made Nikki want to study geology in the first place. She loved feeling the power of earthquakes and always wished they would happen more often but without all the devastation. Most people feel they’re leaving the ground during an earthquake but for Nikki it was one of the few times she felt grounded.
Nikki loved going to Hawaii and she was there when the big Northridge earthquake hit Southern California in 1994. I called Angie four or five days later and said, “How’s Nikki doing?” Angie said, “She’s grieving.” I said, “Really? Who died?” Angie said, “Nikki’s grieving because she missed the earthquake.” I thought they were both crazy and I just couldn’t deal with it anymore because nothing I had ever tried to do for Nikki had helped her. As far as I could tell, she just kept getting worse.