Anyone Who Had a Heart (21 page)

Chapter

20

This Guy’s in Love with You

C
arole and I wanted to have a child together but we were having difficulties so we decided to adopt a baby. I was little reluctant to do this at first because I wasn’t sure how Nikki would react to it, but I also felt it was unfair for Carole and me not to be able to have a child together.

Our son was four days old when we got him, and although the birth mother was not supposed to name the child, she had decided to call him Nicky. Carole and I renamed him Cristopher Elton Bacharach. Elizabeth Taylor was his godmother, and his godfather was Elton John. I wasn’t sure I could handle having a child but when Carole brought him into the house, he was just so perfect and seemed to have so much potential that I broke down and started crying.

Carole Bayer Sager:
I was just so glad that it was a boy. Because Burt wasn’t certain how this was going to work and was doing it more for me, I really wanted him to develop a relationship with Cristopher. I would move out of the way so that every day Burt would take him for a walk through the streets of Bel Air in that baby holder you can wear around your shoulders. They had a wonderful relationship, which was what I had prayed for because I wanted us to be a family. It was joyous for Burt. All I can say is that Burt wasn’t the greatest husband in the world but he was a great father. Until Cristopher was eighteen, there wasn’t a single night when, wherever Burt was, he didn’t call him to say good night.

I was always astonished by couples like Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who wrote “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “The Way We Were,” because they would work together all week in L.A. and then go up to their place in Santa Barbara on the weekend and work there as well and somehow still stay married.

The way it worked with Carole and me was that we would get up in the morning and have breakfast together and sit by the pool and then go to the music room or the studio and work all day long. Then we would have dinner and go to bed. We’d get up the next day and do the same thing all over again. It was not as though we were arguing with one another, but I liked a little more distance in a relationship. I wanted to be not too close with someone but also not too far away, and Carole and I were very close.

We were literally together all the time and I’d always had trouble being with someone who was needy. It was in my DNA that this wouldn’t work. Carole was very sensitive and I couldn’t be with a woman who was that touchy-feely. Here I was on my third marriage and I was starting to think, “I’m still not ready to be married. I haven’t earned it and I don’t get it and I don’t even know what it is.” More than anything else I just wanted to be by myself and have more space.

Carole Bayer Sager:
Burt once said to me, “What do you want from me? I’m a selfish guy.” I was so enamored of him and I so bought into the look of him and me together. Superficially, it was just perfect. She’s pretty, he’s great-looking. She writes the words, he writes the music. They write the love songs and look at them.

It was very hard to feel a hundred percent confident with Burt, because he enjoyed adulation. He enjoyed women liking him and he had this reputation of being a sexy, handsome, talented man who could pretty much have an active and interesting sex life at any given time.

When you’re with a man who enjoys all that, even though he is committed to you, there is always that feeling, “Is he looking at her like he would like to go out with her? Nah. That couldn’t be. Maybe she’s flirting with him.” It was exhausting. He should have been worried about me but he wasn’t like that. I used to feel like this was my
The Way We Were
. He was Robert Redford and I was Barbra Streisand. He was Hubbell.

I used to take photographs of him. I had my camera and he was like fifty-three years old and I said to him, “You are so handsome.” He said, “Hey, baby, you should have seen me ten years ago.” I thought, “Whoa.” But it didn’t matter. I just kept taking pictures of him. Even while he was eating breakfast.

All those pictures I took were going into frames and I was deluding myself that this was our life. I was making up my own story. I’d done this with Burt right from the very beginning, when I thought his car was in the shop and he was living in that apartment until he could move into his new house.

When Cristopher was three years old, Carole and I went to spend Christmas with him at the Little Nell Hotel in Aspen, Colorado. They were both sick one day so I went up on the lift by myself. The woman who had been my instructor wasn’t there, so they paired me up with someone else. The name on her ski instructor tag was Janie Hanson.

Jane Hanson Bacharach:
I met Burt on December 29, 1989. I was an instructor for the Aspen Ski Company and it was my rookie year. The woman Burt had previously been skiing with was pregnant and couldn’t come to work that day because she was suffering from morning sickness. So by default I got plugged into the role of Burt’s instructor. I knew who he was but he kept talking about Carole and I didn’t know who she was. At the time I thought he was still with Angie Dickinson.

I had already instructed Iman, the Hilton girls when they were little, and the Trump kids, so I’d had a little exposure to celebrities. We were going up on the ski lift for the first time and Burt was telling me to put on sunscreen and to meditate. I thought, “What the fuck?” I understood the sunscreen, but meditate?

I think I got hooked on to Jane really quickly because she wasn’t in the business. She didn’t sing, she didn’t want to write songs, and she didn’t want to be an actress. She was a civilian and an athlete and she had this great vitality. She was also really bright and grounded and very sensible. She knew who I was because she had taken piano lessons when she was fourteen years old and played from my songbook, and her mother had seen the original production of
Promises, Promises
on Broadway. So it was a funny kind of circular thing.

Jane Hanson Bacharach:
I thought Burt was coming on to me but he was so different from the bartenders I normally hung out with that I wasn’t really sure if this was just Hollywood schmooze or if he was really interested. I never did see Carole because Burt was always alone on the slope. When Burt left, he told me he was going to come back to Aspen to ski again, and he did within two or three weeks.

Burt says he got on the ski lift and fell in love with me. I also think at that point in his life he was looking for simplicity. And I was as simple as it got. I was just a hardworking girl trying to pay a mortgage and the money I owed my ex-husband. I was working my ass off, going from one job to the next. So it took me a while to realize that Burt was indeed married, but to Carole, not Angie.

Initially, I was definitely more into Jane than she was into me. I think she thought I was a little bit weird because I was trying to teach her how to meditate on the chairlift and telling her to use a higher sunscreen because she was fair and had blue eyes. The fact that I was sixty-one at the time and Jane was twenty-nine also caused some problems. Because I thought Rachmaninoff’s third and fourth piano concertos were so romantic, I sent them to Jane when I got back to L.A. I thought she would love them, but she didn’t. Instead, she asked me if I had any Jimmy Buffett albums.

Carole Bayer Sager:
I used to get what I called weather reports from Burt. “Today I feel like I’m fifty-five percent into the marriage and if I could go away for a few weeks . . .” I didn’t get it. I thought he was having a late midlife crisis. I never dreamed there was another person. And when he finally told me about Jane, because he had to, he said, “You know, she’s very young.” I always thought I was very young compared to Burt.

For Burt, our life together was too social. Of course, he never even once said to me that he would rather not go out or that he’d rather not do this or that. So it came as a total surprise to me when he finally blurted out how much he hated these parties we had been attending.

One night we were at a party at Wendy and Leonard Goldberg’s house and Burt went to the bathroom and stayed there for over twenty minutes. I didn’t know if he had gone home or if he had drowned. When he finally emerged, Burt said, “I thought I was going to go crazy if I had to sit at that table for one more minute.” This was before I knew about Jane. I only knew that he was in this weird mode of behavior where all he wanted to do was go skiing and talk about skiing. “I love skiing.” “That’s so wonderful, Burt.”

When it looked like our marriage wasn’t going to make it, we went to couples therapy and the therapist said to us right at the beginning, “The only chance this has of working is if the two of you make a commitment that neither one of you is going to see anyone outside of the marriage while we’re working in therapy.” Burt had already met Jane so the whole thing was useless. We were also supposed to listen to these tapes. I listened. Burt threw his in the back of the car.

I was writing songs with him that were cries for help but he never really listened to them or ever once said to me, “Gee, is that how you feel?” There is a verse in “Someone Else’s Eyes” that goes, “This is my song / And for too long I sang to someone else’s melody / It wasn’t really me / In someone else’s eyes / I saw reflections of the girl I was / It caught me by surprise / Being a woman who’s defined by you / I can’t love you / I can’t love me / Through someone else’s eyes.” When Aretha Franklin recorded the song, we must have listened to it a million times while we were checking the mix. I thought it was so poignant. Burt would say, “Do you think the bass is high enough?” I don’t think he ever really heard the lyrics. All Burt cared about was whether the right-sounding syllables were on his notes.

One of Carole’s close friends was Marvin Davis, who owned Twentieth Century Fox, the Pebble Beach Corporation, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the Aspen Skiing Company. When Carole and I were talking about splitting up, Marvin said to me, “Are you going to stay with her or not?” And I said, “Well, what if I don’t, Marvin? Are you going to break my legs?”

What I wound up doing was making a decision to not make a decision. I moved out of the house on Nimes Road and moved into a house Carole and I had bought on Zumirez Drive in Malibu. I lived there by myself for most of the winter. It was lonely but there was something very gratifying about my being able to say, “I’m just staying put. I’m by myself. I’m not with Carole. And I’m not with Jane.” Every day, whether or not I had business in town, I would get in my car and drive in to see Cristopher, who was then five years old.

I tried to write some songs with Paul Williams but that didn’t work because he was still coming out of a period of being totally off the ground and wasn’t yet sober enough for us to work together. Then Bobby Russell, a Nashville songwriter who’d had big hits with “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” “Little Green Apples,” and “Honey,” gave me some lyrics that I set to music and we went in and recorded them with Glen Campbell.

Jimmy Bowen was the A&R guy and he and Glen liked one another because they were both country boys. We were running into overtime with a big orchestra so Jimmy got up on a chair and turned the clock in the control room back half an hour so we could get thirty minutes more from the musicians without being charged for it. When he got busted for doing that by the music contractor, it became a big hassle. The songs themselves were okay but none of them ever became hits.

Even though I was in love with Jane, I knew that if we got together I was going to have to move to Aspen or spend a lot more time there. And there was always Cristopher and my wanting to be there for him. This beautiful child who had come into my life after all the years of pain and difficulty trying to help Nikki.

Carole Bayer Sager:
When we were splitting up, Marvin Davis went up to Burt and said, “Are you out of your mind? You’re crazy if you do this.” And Burt said, “Marvin, I’m just a piano player. That’s what nobody understands. I’m just a piano player.” But I understood what he was saying. “I’m not this person Carole would like me to be or that you might think I am.”

What Marvin didn’t get and I tried to forget was that Burt was the person happily living in one little room with a piano in the Wilshire Comstock and driving a green Lincoln. That’s who Burt is. Burt’s a pretty simple guy. He wants to be at a piano, he wants to write his songs, he wants to perform, he likes going on the road and being in front of an audience, and being the star. He loves that life, just like he loves the racetrack.

And that is why I really think we were not very well suited for each other. We were both artists. We both craved an adult. Someone who would take care of us in ways we wouldn’t have to do as artists and I think once that was clear, our relationship was doomed.

I met Jane’s mother for the first time when I was playing with Dionne in Atlantic City. Jane introduced me to her mother by saying, “This is Burt. We just had a miscarriage,” and I said, “Nice to meet you.” Her mother was very sweet and nice, and I remember telling her I had never loved anybody as much as I loved Jane.

At the time, I was still married to Carole. Unlike my divorce from Angie, which had been very simple, this one was tough because Carole was very angry at me. Even though we had signed a prenuptial agreement, it still took us a long time to work out the terms of our divorce and it became a long, drawn-out process that wasn’t pleasant.

I wound up losing our house in Bel Air as well as the one in Malibu but I was okay with that. They were just houses. I also lost a substantial amount of money. I took a hit but fine, it was just money. But I was in a cold period in my career at the time so this didn’t help.

Jane Hanson Bacharach:
We became a couple late in 1990 and started living together at the Westwood Marquis. After five or six months, we moved down to the Sea Colony, a condominium complex on the beach in Santa Monica. In the summer of 1992, I got pregnant again. That summer, five months pregnant, I returned home to see my parents on our farm in Smithfield, Ohio. We lived right next door to the cemetery.