Anyone Who Had a Heart (16 page)

In those days, I thought I could do it all, and I had a regular routine. I would do two shows a night and drink and then get up and play tennis every day. I really loved the game and was pretty good at it. I would play doubles with Pancho Segura and Bobby Riggs, who would never play unless there was money down. To balance out the match, Bobby would come up with crazy stuff like him not being able to use the left alley on our side of the court. We would be playing really intense tennis in the blazing hot sun and people would come out to watch us.

In Vegas, I would always work with the house band, but some of those guys were really tough and would eat you alive if you let them. About the third or fourth time I played the MGM Grand, I gathered the horn section around my piano during rehearsal so I could show the lead trumpeter how I wanted the phrasing to sound on a certain passage. First trumpet players in house bands are notorious because they rule all the other musicians. When the passage still didn’t sound right, I made them go over it again and again. Eventually, the lead trumpet player got really pissed off at me because he thought I was doing this just to embarrass him and the horns.

When we played the show that night, he paid me back by playing all the notes marked soft very loudly, and vice versa. He also proceeded to blow the ending of every song by playing an extra note after we had hit the final chord. I got really livid at his total lack of respect. I wanted to take him in front of the union and get his ass fired but then I decided against it.

I also met Frank Sinatra for the first time in Vegas. Angie and I went to his show one night and Frank introduced me from the stage by saying, “There’s a man in the audience who’s a good composer. He writes in hat sizes. Seven and three-fourths.” It was a very hip line and I don’t know how many other people got the joke, but I thought it was funny.

While I was in rehearsals for
Promises, Promises
in New York, I had gotten a call from one of Frank’s underlings. It was kind of like dealing with the Mafia because this guy said to me, “Are you going to be at this number tomorrow? I can’t tell you what time. It could be late afternoon or early evening.” I said I would and the next day I got a call from Frank’s pal Jilly Rizzo, who said, “Where are you going to be tonight at eight or eight-fifteen?” I told him where he could reach me and then at six-thirty I got a follow-up call that Frank was going to call me.

The call came in and Sinatra said, “This is Frank. I’d like to make an album with you. You write all the songs and all the arrangements, pick the studio, tell me where and when, and I’ll be there.” I said, “Gee, this is great, I’d love to.” Frank said, “Okay, when can we do it?” I said, “Right now I’m in rehearsal with
Promises, Promises
and then we’re going on the road with the show—” I didn’t even get to finish the sentence before Frank said, “Forget it, man. Just forget it.”

It would have been difficult for us to work together, because sometimes I write complicated songs and Frank would have had to know them and be willing to do more than one or two takes. Still, I was very flattered he wanted to do it because I would have really loved to record Sinatra.

What with all the awards and hit songs and sold-out shows, I had been having a terrific year. The icing on the cake came when
Newsweek
magazine put my picture on the cover and ran a long profile about me called “The Music Man 1970.” The guy who wrote the piece basically lived with me for almost three weeks, first in New York, where I was playing the Westbury Music Fair, then in California, and then back in New York again. It was a lot like going through analysis because he asked me question after question. I thought we were done but then the guy said he still needed to talk to me for three or four more days, and he would come to see me in my apartment in New York at five o’clock every afternoon.

I was in the elevator one day with an actress who lived down the hall. She asked me what I was doing so I told her about the guy from
Newsweek
and what a drag it was to have to talk to him for two hours every day. I said good-bye to her and the guy arrived and we were talking and he had his tape machine on. After about forty-five minutes, the doorbell rang and the actress from down the hall was standing there totally naked, holding an empty coffee cup. She walked in and said, “I’ve come to get some sugar.” Then she put her lower body right up against the guy, went into the kitchen, got the sugar, and left.

I was married to Angie at the time and I knew I was screwed. What he had just seen was going to make his story a lot more interesting to read. I told him, “You have to believe me. Nothing ever went on between us,” and he kept saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” After a couple of days of me pleading my case to him, the guy finally said, “I’ll tell you what. Just give me her number and I’ll let it go.” So I did and the story never appeared in print.

The piece itself covered my entire career and went into great detail about how I was now making so much money that I’d had to hire a business manager to look after it all for me. I already owned some racehorses but the business manager bought me two restaurants on Long Island, a car-washing service in New Jersey, five hundred head of cattle, and a lot of real estate in Georgia.

From the outside, it must have looked as though everything I touched turned to gold. I had a beautiful, famous wife, I loved my daughter, I had a lot of money, and my career was going great guns. The truth turned out to be a lot closer to something I said right near the end of the
Newsweek
article. “Happiness is a question of percentages. You’re lucky to get a 50–50 split.”

Chapter

15

Lost Horizon

A
ngie and I had bought a beach house down in Del Mar, not far from San Diego, so I could be near the racetrack there during the racing season. That was where I was spending most of my time when the producer Ross Hunter told me he was going to remake
Lost Horizon
, a film Frank Capra had done in 1937. Hunter had a script by Larry Kramer, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for writing
Women in Love
, and a $12 million budget. Because Hunter was going to remake
Lost Horizon
as a musical, he asked Hal and me if we would come up with the songs for it and we said yes.

Just like the original, the remake was the story of a group of travelers whose plane crash-lands in a paradise known as Shangri-La, where no one ever gets old. It took Hal and me a long time to write the songs and then Ross Hunter decided to invite the press to a sound stage at Columbia Pictures so I could present the songs to them. He asked me to sit at the piano and sing. It was ludicrous because my voice is quite limited and I should have known I couldn’t sing all those songs, but somehow I managed to get through it.

I had to answer questions from the press, and when I was asked about the movie by a reporter from the
New York Times
, I said, “The idea of the picture is very close to me. Imagine. Somewhere in Tibet in the middle of those mountains is a place called Shangri-La. Where you can live forever—almost. And you can stay healthy! And there is love! And peace! It’s exactly what everybody wants today.”

As it turned out,
Lost Horizon
was a movie nobody wanted. Nobody wanted to see it or listen to the songs Hal and I had written for it, and the experience of working on that picture was so bad that it nearly ended my career. To begin with, the movie should never have been remade as a musical. The idea was absurd. Unlike what we had done with
Promises, Promises
, Hal and I couldn’t take what we had written to Boston or Washington to find out which songs worked and which didn’t. If a song didn’t work in a film, it would cost millions of dollars to rewrite and reshoot the scene.

I saw some of the rushes, and even though they were shooting the picture on the back lot at Warner Bros., some of it looked really beautiful. They used dummy singers while they were filming so I had to coach the actors when it came time for them to do their vocals. Sally Kellerman, Bobby Van, and George Kennedy could sing but we had to use other people’s voices for Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, and Olivia Hussey.

Not only was I writing the songs for
Lost Horizon
, I was also doing the background score, which was nonstop music. I just couldn’t write it all and I was hating the work so I farmed some of it out. I had two top orchestrators come in and they also did some composing. It was the only time in my life I ever farmed out my music.

Although I still think a lot of the music I did for
Lost Horizon
was good, there was one scene in the picture where Peter Finch, who played the leader of the travelers, has to make a big decision. He misses his life in London but if he stays in Shangri-La, he can be with the woman he loves forever, so he sings “If I Could Go Back.” The song had a lot of heart and I thought it was very powerful.

When I saw the song in the rushes, I thought it was good. But after I watched a rough cut of the entire film for the first time, I knew it was a disaster. It didn’t matter that Peter Finch was singing, “How do I know this is part of my real life? / If there’s no pain can I be sure I feel life? / And would I go back if I knew how to go back?” Because when you saw it in the movie, you didn’t give a fuck if he went back or not. What came before and after the song was so bad that you just didn’t care.

I knew
Lost Horizon
was a dog and that the songs in it were not going to fly, but I had signed a contract, so I had to keep working on it. But I started getting into jams. I was in the dubbing room trying to give credibility to this music but it wasn’t sounding the way we had recorded it and I would be bitching while they were dubbing.

When we were in postproduction I went to Peter Guber, who had taken over as the head of Columbia Pictures, and I said, “Listen, I hate the way the music is sounding. It really sounded so much better when we recorded it.” I enlisted his help because we were sort of friendly and he said, “Okay, listen, go back in the dubbing room.”

He got me back in the dubbing room, and I don’t know how long that lasted because I was really focused and going for what I wanted 100 percent. I must have been a real pain in the ass because during the last week of postproduction, the head of mixing at Todd-AO had me banned from the dubbing room because I kept saying, “This sounds like shit,” and fighting for what I wanted to hear. It was a lot like when I wasn’t allowed into the studio while Brook Benton was cutting “A House Is Not a Home.” But all I was trying to do was protect the integrity of the music.

I spent nearly two years working on
Lost Horizon
, killing myself coaching George Kennedy and Sally Kellerman on how to sing, and working with the kids who were in the picture. The best thing that happened to me in the entire process was when I got to drive Liv Ullmann back to the Beverly Hills Hotel from the set one day.

While I was doing all this, Hal was in Mexico playing tennis because his work was done. My work was far from done and our deal was that Hal and I would split five points on the movie for our songs. So I called him up in Mexico and said, “Hal, listen, I know we’re getting five points but we’re never going to see anything from this picture. From what I hear, it may even bankrupt Columbia. Still, it would really make me feel better if instead of splitting the five points, I had three and you had two.” Hal said, “I can’t do that.” And I said, “Fuck you and fuck the picture.”

Gary Smith:
We decided to do a television special with Burt in conjunction with the opening of
Lost Horizon
and I convinced Ross Hunter to let us shoot on the set. Chris Evert had just turned eighteen and Burt was a big tennis player so I booked her and built a big tennis court on the back lot at Warner Bros., where we did this wonderful spot with the two of them. Chrissie was adorable and they played tennis with one another for about three or four minutes.

I had been doing television specials with Dwight Hemion and Gary Smith in England, but now they wanted us to do one that would be a tie-in to
Lost Horizon
. In one segment I was going to play tennis with Chrissie Evert. I thought it would be a good idea to get to know her so I went over to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet her. She said, “You want to play a set or two?” We got on the court and I thought I was a pretty good tennis player but I never got a single point off her. You would have thought maybe she’d miss a shot and give me a point but it was six–love, six–love.

When we were shooting the scene, we were supposed to play this match in what was sort of like a dream sequence. The idea was she would hit the ball into the net and say, “That’s it. You win, Burt!” and I would jump over the net. The next day they would have another set built with a tennis net and I would jump over it into a pond and then they would cut the two bits of film together for the show.

We were out there and they were having a little technical difficulty. Dwight Hemion was saying, “Come on, Burtie, we gotta get this in—we’re running out of daylight.” Chrissie said to me, “Get them to lower the net, Burt. It’s too high for you to jump over it.” I told them this and Dwight said, “Burt, don’t be a pain in the ass. Come on, we’re running out of light. Just hit the ball to her, she’ll hit the ball into the net, and then you jump over it.” I jumped and caught my foot in the net, and came down on my side and broke two ribs. That night I had to prerecord the music for the next scene so I went in the studio with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two broken ribs. It was agony to cough or laugh or sneeze and I just hated every fucking human being in the world.

Gary Smith:
Ross Hunter found out what we had done and decided we had ruined his set by putting a tennis court on it and he went to court to get an injunction to keep our show off the air while we were editing it. We actually had to reshoot the concert segment in a jungle somewhere. When we finally did go to court, the judge threw out the injunction so the show aired on ABC the way we had shot it. It was called
Burt Bacharach in Shangri-La
. The movie itself was terrible.

Two months later, I went to the premiere of
Lost Horizon
in Westwood with Angie. I had already seen the review in the
Los Angeles Times
and the movie had gotten killed. After that, it seemed like every critic in America just started piling on. Roger Ebert wrote, “I don’t know how much Ross Hunter paid Burt Bacharach and Hal David to write the music for
Lost Horizon
, but whatever it was, it was too much.”
Newsweek
said, “The songs are so pitifully pedestrian it’s doubtful that they’d sound good even if the actors could sing, which they can’t.”

Columbia had made
Lost Horizon
their number-one release for 1973 and the studio had put so much money into promoting it that people in Hollywood started calling the picture
Lost Investment
. The day after it opened, I got in the car and drove down to Del Mar to escape because I thought nobody down there would know me. The movie was so personally embarrassing that it almost destroyed me. Once I got to Del Mar, I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to play piano, and even though Hal and I had signed a contract to write and produce an album for Dionne at Warner Bros. Records, her new label, I didn’t want to write with Hal anymore or even be around him.

My attorney in New York kept telling me I was going to be in major trouble because I had a commitment to Warner Bros. Records but I said, “I don’t give a shit.” When Dionne flew up to Lake Tahoe, where I was doing a show at Harrah’s, to tell me the record company was going to sue us if Hal and I did not honor our commitment, I told her there was no way Hal and I would be getting together to do anything anymore.

What happened next was that Dionne sued me and Hal, and then I sued Hal, and I didn’t talk to either of them for the next ten years. It was really stupid, foolish behavior on my part and I take all the blame for it. If it happened now I would cop to it and say, “Hey, it was all my fault.” But that wasn’t the way I saw it then.

Angie Dickinson:
Burt started working on
Lost Horizon
in 1971 or 1972 and it became the greatest failure in his career. The fact that not all of the songs he had written with Hal had become hits came with the territory, so you can’t call them failures. All songwriters go through that. This was a monumental failure. It was a public humiliation and Burt retreated to Del Mar and Palm Springs. He was not impossible to deal with. He was just depressed and that affected everything in his life, including our marriage.

During all the time Burt and Hal had been working together, Burt had been getting almost all the accolades. Hal chose not to give Burt the half point because of his ego, but since Hal had been ignored for years, that was understandable. When they had only been known as songwriters, Hal got almost equal credit. But now it had gone past that.

As we get older we’re supposed to learn and grow, but that only happens if you do some work on yourself. Otherwise, the flaws just get worse. Not long ago, a very wise man I know asked me about the split with Hal and what had caused it. I said, “It would have made me feel better to get the extra half point because I had to be working with George Kennedy and Sally Kellerman and all these kid singers and that was what split us up.”

He said, “You know, it’s about your ego.” I said, “Yeah, maybe. I know I was wrong and I should have never done it because I was told I was going to get my ass sued but I did it anyway.” I’ve owned it since then because it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart. So I now know that on every level, it was a very bad mistake.

This guy looked at me and said, “You should have called Hal up in Mexico and said, ‘I’m giving you five points. You can have them all.’ ” Instead, I broke up a partnership that had lasted for seventeen years and tried to forget about everything by playing tennis every day with Pancho Segura and hanging out on the beach in Del Mar.

At the time, Angie was still a much more public figure than I was. She was out there and I was hiding behind a sand dune. After
Lost Horizon
opened, I got into my car and went down to Del Mar and disappeared. I disappeared from Hal, I disappeared from Dionne, and I disappeared from my marriage.