Read Anyone Who Had a Heart Online
Authors: Burt Bacharach
Angie Dickinson:
The first time I read about Asperger’s was in
Newsweek
. My sister sent the article to me in July 2000 and said, “This sounds just like Nikki.” I circled the last paragraph, where it said that an institution is the last place these people should ever be sent. I finally went to UCLA, and after a doctor there examined Nikki, he said she might have Asperger’s. I said, “Doctor, she does have Asperger’s.” For Nikki, knowing what she had just didn’t help at all. She still couldn’t cope.
Nikki was thirty-four years old when we found out what was really wrong with her. Her inability to interact with other people, her total lack of empathy, and all the compulsive and obsessive behaviors Nikki had demonstrated ever since she was a kid were all symptoms of a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome.
Back when Nikki was born, no one knew nearly as much about this disease as they do now. I never heard any of the doctors who treated Nikki even mention the word “Asperger’s” or talk about autism. I know people who have problem kids but don’t want to find out what is really wrong with them and so never have them diagnosed. I did just the opposite with Nikki but it did us no good at all.
If only somebody had told me the truth, I could have dealt with that. Nikki spent ten years in that center and nobody ever said to me that this was an autistic child. You’d think someone would have seen it but no one ever did. And all the while, Nikki just kept getting worse.
After Jane and I had Oliver and Raleigh, Nikki would come to see us, but she had no patience at all for the kids. For her, they were an interruption, because she wanted to see this beautiful sunset and not be disturbed by them. The language she used was also hard for them to hear because she cursed all the time. By then I had really backed off trying have Nikki included in family gatherings, because for her my kids just got in the way and were a nuisance to her.
Angie Dickinson:
I moved into a new house in 1994 and the helicopters drove Nikki crazy. Helicopters, lawn mowers, motorcycles, leaf blowers, and weed whackers were like a drill in her ear. She couldn’t get the sounds out of her head and she was really suffering. I realized there was only one way to find real peace for Nikki and that was for me to stop doing all “the other things.” Don’t go to dinners or functions. Don’t play poker. Just pretty much give it all up. So I did and it helped. Nikki and I did everything together. We traveled together and saw movies and my whole life was Nikki. I was completely dedicated to her, and she was my soul mate.
Not one percent of it was out of a sense of guilt. She needed it. After she came out of the center, Nikki said the worst thing I ever heard. She said, “They stole my brain.” If she had been born now, they would have special classes and schools for her. They would also have a diagnosis, which they didn’t have back then.
Nikki talked a lot about suicide. She was very open about it, even to people she didn’t know well. She read
Final Exit
, a book about planning suicide, and found out that asphyxiation was the most peaceful way she could do it—like going under anesthesia at the dentist. What could I do? I had promised Nikki that she would never, ever go into another hospital and I meant it. I wanted to make everything right for her but I couldn’t. The obituaries in the
L.A. Times
were filled with people my age and Nikki just couldn’t bear the thought of my death. I was her lifeline.
In 2006, we went to church services together on Christmas Eve. Nikki had always wanted to sing but she didn’t, maybe because singing is so much about bringing out what’s inside you and she couldn’t cope with what was inside her. But that night Nikki just sang and sang. I’ll never forget how much gusto she put into those Christmas carols. She was free and at peace at that point because she knew where she was going.
Angie knew it was coming and one of her friends had given Nikki a book about how to commit suicide, but I never believed she would do it. At the end, Nikki’s sensitivity to sound was so acute that she kept saying she was going to kill herself because of it. And then it was “If my mother dies, I’m going to kill myself.” Always her mother but never her father.
I’d had surgery on my shoulder and I was in the hospital when Jane and I found out that our son, Oliver, who was on the Aspen snowboard team and competed nationally, had ruptured his spleen while snowboarding on the mountain. Jane flew off to Aspen to be with him and I was scheduled to be discharged from the hospital when Sue Main came to see me.
Sue Main:
I got to the hospital and Burt was sitting there with this physical therapist. I said, “Excuse me. I need to talk to Burt.” Burt looked at me and said, “What’s going on here, Sue? I’m supposed to be discharged and they’re telling me they’re holding up the papers. I don’t understand.” I said, “I have something I need to tell you and it’s really very sad. I’m so sorry I have to tell you this.” And he said, “What? What is it?” And I said, “It’s Nikki. She died. She committed suicide.” Burt was completely stunned. He was on pain medication and a little bit out of it and he was looking at me like he couldn’t believe it and I think he said, “How?”
It seemed like every time I would go up to Angie’s house to bring her and Nikki lunch from the deli, I’d hear Nikki going on about the helicopters. “I’m going to kill myself!” Or if it wasn’t the helicopters, it was the gardeners below with leaf blowers. “If they don’t stop, I’m going to kill myself!” I never believed Nikki would do that, because there were too many things she liked and too many places she wanted to go and too much pleasure she wanted to have. So it was sort of like the boy who cried wolf. I always thought she would never actually do it, but then suddenly she did.
Sue Main:
Nikki had gotten a DVD about how to commit suicide and it was in the video machine when she died. There was a bag over her head with a tube that fed nitrous oxide into it, and that was how they found her. She basically fell unconscious and died. She suffocated after knocking herself out with the nitrous.
Burt kind of pulled himself together and said, “How’s Angie?” I said, “How could she be? What do you want to do, Burt?” And he said, “I think we should go to Angie’s house.” We still had to go through the discharge process and it took hours. His arm was in a sling and he was in pain but I got him in the car and we drove up to Angie’s. We spent a couple of hours there because there were things that needed to be discussed, like donations in Nikki’s name and an announcement for the newspapers.
The entire conversation was about Nikki and it was kind of like a wake. Burt was trying to understand what had happened. His son Oliver had just had his spleen removed in Aspen and Burt was worried about that, and he had just come out of the hospital and was in no shape to go anywhere. It was an extraordinarily tough time.
Nikki died on Thursday, January 4, 2007. She was cremated and there was no service, but Angie made a memorial booklet for her with photographs and a long poem that began, “Nikki loved yellow and pink, and bright blue skies with white puffy clouds. She loved scuba diving, and pushing the limits. She loved glacial calving and the powerful sensation to her body of the earth shaking under and around her in an earthquake. She loved Steve Perry, and her father’s music, and the sound of the kitties mewing and Pink Floyd.” The last lines were “Nikki put on quite a show when she was here, on
this
earth. She was not understood by most, but loved and appreciated by a precious few. And now, she’s finally happy. Her Mom.”
Angie Dickinson:
Nikki not only had Asperger’s but she also had terrible vision from having been born three months prematurely. She also had water on the brain, which I did not know until I saw the coroner’s report. That probably came from the prematurity as well. But she was great and it was a miracle she made it as long as she did, and I know that and I cherish it. I just wish I had done a million times more for her. In my view, I could have done so much more but it took me a long time to understand that for Nikki, there were no earthly solutions. Most people can fix what problems they have, but Nikki did not have that gift.
No matter how many times I would say to Nikki, “Please forgive me and Carole. We didn’t know you had Asperger’s. No one ever told us the truth so I ask your forgiveness,” she just could not let that go. For her it was just one more thing to hold on to. She was stuck on a wheel of three or four obsessions and she never did forgive me.
Before Nikki killed herself, she left me a note in a sealed envelope. I have never read the note because I can just imagine what she said in it. A couple of years later, before I was going out to dinner with Angie, she called me and said, “Do you still have the note Nikki left for you?” And I said, “Yeah, Angie, but I just don’t know where it is. It’s hidden somewhere.” She said, “Do you think you could get your hands on it and bring it when we have dinner tonight? I’d like to read it.” And I said, “Angie, I don’t know where it is. Besides, it was made out to me.”
Sue Main:
I went to the mortuary to pick up Nikki’s belongings for Angie because she didn’t want to do that and they had already opened the envelope, so I saw the note. It’s a couple of pages long and a very hateful thing. I was really surprised because in recent years, Burt had spent more time with Nikki. He would take her to dinner and go up and have lunch with her and Angie and sit with Nikki when she was in the pool. He was really making an effort to be in her life.
I mean, why would Angie want to read the note? Jane knew where the letter was but because she was being protective of me, she had stashed it somewhere. I already knew what the letter would say and I didn’t want to hear it or read it. If there was something in there I should see, Jane would have shown it to me. The truth was that no matter how much I had tried to give Nikki, I had still wound up hitting the wall.
Jane Hanson Bacharach:
I have read the note Nikki wrote and it’s nothing Burt hasn’t heard before. Nikki was who she was and couldn’t control some of the hurtful things she would say to Burt when they were together. He would take her to dinner or have her at our house, and at the very first opportunity, Nikki would lay into him and just get on that wheel. She wanted Burt’s attention so she could beat him up because he had put her in the clinic in Minnesota.
I originally wrote “Nikki” as an instrumental that was later used as the theme for the ABC
Movie of the Week
. Then Hal wrote these terrific lyrics for it that were very touching. The way the chorus goes is “Nikki, it’s you / Nikki, where can you be? / It’s you, no one but you, for me / I’ve been so lonely since you went away / I won’t spend a happy day / Till you’re back in my arms.”
M
y lifelong battle with insomnia began when I was a teenager growing up in Forest Hills and my mother gave me my first sleeping pills. I stopped taking them when I went into the Army and I don’t remember when I started again. But when I came off the road after having worked for Vic Damone and the Ames Brothers, my insomnia got really bad.
When I lived by myself in that apartment on East Sixty-First Street in New York, I had this kind of ritual so I could make sure I would get some rest. Before going to bed every night I would turn on a machine that made white noise, just like the one my mother had used in Forest Hills. Then I would close all the windows, get the air conditioner going with just the fan so it would be really loud, and put wax plugs in my ears to block out all the noise. I would also turn the clock around so I wouldn’t see the hands. Then I would lie there thinking I had to get some sleep. Since that thought was also keeping me awake, it was a wicked cycle.
When I was out on the road with Marlene Dietrich, she always had a good supply of German suppositories I would take to go to sleep. Things really got out of control once I started going into the studio to make records. I would be fighting a deadline and I’d have this recurring dream of not getting the arrangement done while all the string players were sitting in the studio getting paid by the minute. I’d heard a famous story about Quincy Jones writing an arrangement in his hotel room while the orchestra waited for him in the studio. I don’t know if the story was true but that was my nightmare so I began bumping up the sleeping pills.
No matter what I did, I could still hear the music playing in my head at night. On some level that was a plus because it meant that I might be on to something really good. It was a costly trade-off but the fact that I kept hearing the music made me think the work had some significance. I was also playing the piano at night and writing music, and that energized me to the point where I felt like I could never get any rest.
When I was in London racing against the clock, trying to score
What’s New Pussycat?
, I got myself into a situation that was really out of control. I was taking sleeping pills at two in the afternoon and then drinking coffee at three in the morning in order to wake up and start writing again after three or four hours’ sleep. And then the same thing happened while I was working on
Casino Royale
.
When I was living with Carole, we discovered that we had two things in common—writing songs and not being able to sleep at night. We both had our own sleep machines and we would both take sleeping pills. In the morning, I’d say to her, “So, what’d you take last night? One of the yellow ones or one of the green ones?” It was a kind of competition between us to see who could get the most sleep. Six hours might win it all.
About sixteen years ago, I went to see a psychiatrist who put me on the antidepressant Paxil so I could taper off on the sleeping pills. The idea was to substitute one for the other, but it didn’t work for me. The Paxil really dried me out and screwed me up so bad sexually that I couldn’t even get an erection.
After I had been using Paxil for a couple of months, I was in a hotel outside Detroit getting ready to play a date with my band. I cut my lip while I was shaving and I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding. I was friendly with Dr. Arnold Klein, Michael Jackson’s dermatologist, so I called him in Los Angeles and said, “I just cut myself shaving, and I can’t stop the bleeding.” He said, “What kind of medication are you on?” When I told him I was on Paxil, he said, “You’ve got to stop taking that stuff right away and go to the emergency room to have stitches.”
I went to the hospital and invited the nurse who sewed me up to come to the concert that night, where I thanked her from the stage for putting those stitches in my lip. After that, I gave up on Paxil. Even though the sleeping pills still didn’t really work for me, I then went right back to taking them every single night. In the early days when Jane and I were together in Aspen, I was driving her crazy because she would have to teach skiing early in the morning and I would be up every fifteen minutes and walking around and then go back to bed and get up again. I was using both Restoril and Ambien, and some nights I would take three Restoril.
About seven or eight years ago, I played five dates in a row and then drove with Oliver and Raleigh to JFK so we could fly to Venice, where I had some shows to do. It was a long flight and I didn’t get any sleep at all on the plane. I was already out of my head because I had done five concerts in a row. I was planning to have dinner that night with Jane, who was already in Italy with a girlfriend, so I knew I had to get some sleep.
I asked our nanny to take the kids out in the afternoon and I took a couple of sleeping pills and slept for about three hours. At dinner that night, I drank a lot of wine. I was getting up from the table when suddenly I was on my knees, about to pass out. I snapped out of it in a minute but the incident got Jane very concerned. I knew she was right because I was seventy-five at the time and that was stupid stuff to do. I think I was lucky that I didn’t wind up dead.
Not long after this happened, my internist suggested I start going to a very high-end outpatient clinic in Santa Monica called the Moonview Sanctuary, which was run by Gerald Levin, the former head of AOL–Time Warner. I went there mainly because of my sleep problem but also because I wanted to work on issues like lateness. I was always late, which was very bothersome to Jane. I was never late for a record date, because that was money and the musicians would be sitting there and I needed every minute I could get. But I didn’t like hanging Jane up, because it upset her to always be waiting on me.
Although I was sure there were big stars walking in and out of Moonview with drug or alcohol problems, I never once saw another client while I was there. My internist worked out a program with a sleep specialist there and they decided to put me on an antidepressant called Remeron. I began taking one tablet at night as well as one milligram of Klonopin, an anticonvulsant and muscle relaxer. It took me a week to get used to them, because at first I wouldn’t know who I was the next day. I was living in cobwebs and the dreams I was having were unbelievable.
I’ve been taking Remeron and Klonopin for about eight years now and although I can still hear the music at night, I am able to sleep. I’ve also tried to condition myself not to work after dinner, because if I start playing piano at ten-thirty or eleven o’clock at night, I get too stimulated. When I’m not on the road, I try to go to bed around twelve-fifteen. Sometimes I sleep for eight and a half hours and wake up just once or twice.
What I want to do now is try to get off the Remeron and the Klonopin. Am I getting sleep? Yes, but there is a price. I don’t like the dreams because they are too vivid. Although I’m sleeping better than I have since I was a child, would I like to have a sweet dream? Yes. Would I like to have something really pleasant to dream about? Yes. It happens once in a while but not often. I guess the best way to describe what I am still going through in terms of coping with my insomnia is that it’s a work in progress.