Here Comes the Night (48 page)

Berns needed hits and his two main acts were not giving him what he wanted. Van Morrison didn’t have another “Brown Eyed Girl” in his hip pocket, anymore than Neil Diamond had another “Cherry, Cherry.” Morrison spent endless hours at his mother’s house in Belfast sitting in front of his tape recorder, noodling, jamming, just inventing, trying to find pieces of songs, images that stuck. He was pursuing a vision, dimly lit, elusive, and faint. These brittle, half-finished tapes featured Dylanesque ramblings, underscored by Morrison’s rumbling, jangling guitar and punctuated by the occasional thump and rattle of a tambourine. Morrison played the tapes for Berns at his office as if he were unveiling precious cargo. Morrison muttered something about preserving the spontaneity of the performances. Berns joked about just releasing the raw, sketchy demo—“That’s what we should do,” he said. For a minute, Morrison thought he meant it.

In November, when Berns reassembled the sessions at Incredible Sounds, Morrison found a full ensemble of New York studio professionals waiting for him at the studio to start his new album. Morrison was daunted and couldn’t express himself. He was certain Berns wasn’t going to listen to him or that, even if he seemed to be listening, Berns would go ahead and do what he wanted anyway. He threw his guitar against the studio wall and yelled at the musicians. “You can’t understand me,” he said.

Morrison had been living in tiny hotel rooms for months, spending far too much time isolated. The warm camaraderie of the Circle Line boat cruise had been replaced by a wary, tense relationship. Morrison felt ignored by Berns, as if he was just another artist on the label. He didn’t have other options, but he was growing increasingly resentful, drinking himself into dark, depressive moods.

The sessions with Van Morrison frustrated Berns, trying to make sense out of his new material. Obviously brilliant but not brilliantly obvious, the new Morrison songs vexed Berns. He dumped all sorts of loud party noise on “Madame George,” trying to give the obtuse, poetic song some context, forcing the material into shape through production.
Morrison was right—Berns didn’t understand these songs, but this time, he wasn’t kindly and encouraging. Berns, exasperated, lost his temper with Morrison. He told him that, of the two of them, Berns was the one who knew what he was doing and that Morrison would be well advised to pay attention. Morrison was proving to be quite the headache and the new songs didn’t sound like hits.

Berns conducted brief sessions with Freddie Scott and took Erma Franklin back in the studio at Incredible and cut a fine Berns-Ragovoy number, “Open Up Your Soul,” while Ragovoy looked on, and a Goffin and King teardrops song, “The Right to Cry.” After “Piece of My Heart” made the Top Ten R&B in November, Franklin decided to quit her job and signed with Queen Booking, the agency run by Ruth Bowen that also handled her sister. Berns restored her confidence. They were making an album. She was going back into the music business.

Berns decided to move his family back in the city while Ilene was pregnant. He wanted her to have ready access to her obstetrician. They rented a suite at the Oliver Cromwell Hotel on Seventy-Second Street, next door to the Dakota, across the street from Central Park. Construction of their dream house with the guitar-shaped swimming pool across the river in Tenafly, New Jersey, near where they had been living, was nearly finished. Mark Ben-Ari Berns was born December 12. His godfather Jeff Barry officiated at the bris. He held up the baby and remarked that it looked exactly like his father if somebody put a pin in Bert and let all the air out.

About the same time, session musician Al Gorgoni and songwriter Chip Taylor, who had been working as a production team, booked a date at Brooks Arthur’s new studio, Century Sound, and showed up with Neil Diamond. Arthur was shocked there was no Bert Berns or Jeff and Ellie, but he didn’t say anything. Arthur, Brooklyn boy that he was, cried as he recorded the song “Brooklyn Roads.” Berns was on the phone a couple of days later, trying to sound cheerful. “I hear you cut Neil,” he said. “Well, now it’s out—we’re not on terms.”

The first week of December, Berns released another new Neil Diamond single, as if to let the entire industry know that he was still in the Neil Diamond business, the old Gary “U.S.” Bonds song “New Orleans,” one of the covers that filled out his first Bang album. A week later, Berns sent telegrams to every record company he thought might be talking to Neil Diamond:

PLEASE BE ADVISED WEB IV MUSIC INC HAS EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS RECORDINGS OF NEIL DIAMOND FOR PHONOGRAPHIC RECORD PURPOSES AND OTHER RIGHTS ANY INTERFERENCE AND ADVANTAGEOUS RELATIONS IMMEDIATELY AND SUBSTANTIALLY DAMAGING

Berns went on the warpath. Not only was Diamond his label’s top-selling artist, but also Berns felt protective of Barry and Greenwich, who were the real innocent victims of Diamond’s fight with Bang and a stepping stone for his ambitions. They found Diamond when he was nothing, went into their own pockets to pay his salary, and gave him an unheard-of fair shake. Diamond used the equitable percentage they gave him to abandon their partnership and vacate the deal. He would have never been offered a deal like that from Leiber and Stoller or, for that matter, anyone else on Broadway. Berns did not want to see him get away with it.

When somebody tossed a stink bomb into the Bitter End during one of his engagements, Diamond knew Berns had it done. Ironically, Berns’s old pal Paul Colby, who recently took over running the club for Diamond manager Fred Weintraub, cleaned up the mess. Then Weintraub was “mugged,” beaten up pretty bad. Things were getting scary. Diamond borrowed a .38-caliber pistol from a friend and moved his wife and kid out of their new Manhattan apartment to stay in Long Island.

The week after Christmas, Berns ate dinner with Incredible engineer Chris Huston at Mamma Leone’s. Berns had lots of plans for the future of the studio and was talking to Huston about working together.
Out of nowhere, his mood shifted, his voice dropped. “Have you ever had the premonition you were going to die?” he asked the twenty-three-year-old engineer, who sat there speechless, not knowing what to say.

On Friday, December 29, Stephen Prince, working as an assistant to Fred Weintraub, wheeled his boss’s Cadillac Fleetwood uptown and waited while his passengers, Weintraub and Neil Diamond, went to have a meeting with Berns at his office. They returned shaken and upset. Berns scared them badly. They planned to call the district attorney and hire protection on Monday. “We’ll get bodyguards,” Weintraub said.

After the nasty confrontation with Diamond, Berns met Billy Fields that afternoon for a cup of coffee at the B&G Diner on Seventh Avenue. Fields, who knew Berns all the way back to the Trocadero Ballroom in the Bronx during the forties, worked at Weintraub’s management office. He found a dispirited Berns, resigned to losing Diamond. But the working year wasn’t over until Berns and Morrison held a shouting match on the telephone later that escalated to the point where Morrison hung up on him.

The long holiday weekend stretched out ahead. Soon it would be a new year, 1968. Bert and Ilene were going to a New Year’s Eve party Sunday night at Artie Resnick’s place.

On Saturday morning, Berns took out the new Cadillac convertible he bought Ilene and packed his wife and Brett off to inspect the new house. They drove across the bridge on the cold, gray day into the cul-de-sac in Tenafly. “Honey,” he said, “I bet you never thought you’d fill up all these bedrooms.”

They walked around back and looked at the guitar-shaped pool. Berns needed to check the shape of the hole before they poured the cement. He called Tommy Dowd, who lived in nearby Westwood, and dropped by to visit with him and his wife, Jackie. Bert and Ilene got in the car to drive home. “I don’t feel so good,” he said. “I feel a little tired. I think I’ll go home and take a nap.”

When they got back to the Oliver Cromwell, Ilene went out to Bloomingdale’s. She had been in maternity clothes for eighteen months. She wanted to buy a new outfit for the party the next night. She left Berns with the baby’s nurse and the Jamaican maid. The football game was on. When she called to check in, he asked her to come back. “I’m not feeling too good,” he said.

She came home and went in the bedroom. “I’m not going to watch the game,” he told her. “I’m going to take a nap.” She turned off the television and shut the door behind her. The phone rang. It was Jerry Wexler. She shouted at her husband. Berns always wanted to talk with Wexler, even now, after all they’d gone through. “Tell him I’ll call him back,” Berns said from the bedroom.

The maid returned from downstairs with a pile of folded laundry and Ilene took a stack of socks and underwear in the bedroom. She opened the door and screamed. Berns was lying half off the bed, his eyes wildly dilated, wheezing, gurgling in his throat. Ilene grabbed him and threw him back on the bed. She scrambled looking for the nitroglycerin pills. She tried breathing in his mouth, but it was useless. The maid came in and started screaming and crying. “He’s gone, he’s dead.”

Ilene knew. She slowly backed out of the room, horrified, shutting the door behind her. Two-year-old Brett pounded on the door. “I want my daddy,” he cried. “I want my daddy.”

She called her parents—her father had to be paged at an airport—and they came to take the two older children. The baby was three weeks old. Outside it was snowing. She called Jeff Barry and he came right over. He found Ilene a wreck and Berns’s body lying on the bed. Tommy Eboli showed up in a cashmere overcoat. When Wassel got there, after running all the way from Sixty-Ninth Street and West End Avenue, tough guy Eboli was sunk into the couch, crying in his hands.

Barry knew about the cash in the safe at the office. Berns had showed it to him only recently. Barry thought Berns kept the safe combination in his right-hand desk drawer. Eboli left for Berns’s office
shortly thereafter. When he called back to say he couldn’t find the combination, Barry knew what he needed to do.

He went into the bedroom, extracted Berns’s wallet from the dead man’s pants, and found a folded slip of paper from Massler’s Safe Company. Eboli sent a car for Barry. By the time Barry arrived downtown, Patsy Pagano had joined the party at the office, and they stacked the $100 bills in a paper bag, almost all the $70,000 from the Atlantic settlement Pagano had brought to the hospital only nine months before. There were also three handguns in the safe and they brought those along. Back at the Oliver Cromwell, they gave Ilene the greens. The party at Artie Resnick’s the next night was subdued.

On January 1, 1968, they buried Bert Berns at the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Amsterdam Avenue at Seventy-Sixth Street. Tommy Eboli came to the mortuary the night before to pay his respects. He asked Ilene to view the body. For everyone else, it was a closed coffin, but Eboli took one last fond look at his friend. He didn’t feel comfortable going to the next day’s services at the chapel, but Patsy Pagano and his wife did. Ilene was pudding. She needed help to walk. She left the children home. Freddie Scott stood in the back, sobbing. Ellie Greenwich came with Paul Marshall but didn’t stay long because she was uncomfortable around Jeff Barry, who was there with his new girlfriend. Grown men were crying.

These people did not know death. Berns was their first take on the death of someone not old and infirm. He was their colleague and he was gone. Sudden, unexpected deaths always have a way of putting mortality in focus. Life for these princes and princesses of the music world had long been nothing but a frolic.

The curtain had rung down on more than Berns, truth be told, although they were all too stunned to take account. One of the great golden ages of American music had come to a close, although nobody may have noticed at the time. Atlantic Records was sold. Soul music would never grow greater than Aretha Franklin. Leiber and Stoller
were as good as retired. They wanted to write a Broadway musical and shake free forever of the dirt and grime of the rhythm and blues that put them at the top of the Brill Building. Phil Spector was living like some kind of crazed recluse. He closed his Philles Records, fatally discouraged by the failure of his Ike and Tina single, “River Deep—Mountain High,” and descended into a life lived on vampire hours behind around-the-clock security in a Beverly Hills mansion, where his jealousies and paranoias could run free. Doc Pomus, already long out of the music business, estranged from his family, divorced from his showgirl wife, was making a living running poker games in his room in the sleazebag Broadway hotel. Morty Shuman escaped to Paris, where he was writing songs for French rock and roll king Johnny Hallyday. Goffin and King split up and Carole King moved to California. Burt Bacharach had moved to Hollywood, where he was writing cheese for the movies, preparing a Broadway musical of his own with Hal David, and starting to develop his interest in racehorses. Donny Kirshner wasn’t even in music publishing anymore; all he had left of his Screen Gems deal was a lawsuit. Barry and Greenwich were no more. Ellie Greenwich would never marry or write another hit song again. George Goldner would never put out another record. Wexler didn’t come to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did. He went to ask the widow for his release. Van Morrison stayed away, too.

Brooks Arthur, Artie Butler, Gary Chester, and their wives stood around the cold sidewalk afterward and, without saying much, walked off together under the gray skies. They just wandered downtown, blocks after blocks, quiet for the most part, until they found themselves, without meaning to, in front of 1650 Broadway. An icy wind whipped down the empty streets. Some Broadway wiseacre, someone with nothing better to do than be downtown on this cold New Year’s Day, recognized them and braced them. He asked what they were doing there, and they told him.

“Bert Berns,” he said. “He coulda given Gershwin a run for the money.”