Anyone Who Had a Heart (14 page)

I walked out onstage that night at Royal Festival Hall and got a standing ovation and part of me was thinking, “You’re not dead. You don’t have some incurable disease—or do you? Does the audience know something about me that I don’t know?”

Noel Gallagher had gone on record saying “This Guy’s in Love with You” was one of the best songs ever. We got together before the show in my hotel suite to rehearse it so he could perform it onstage with me and the BBC Concert Orchestra. He was really nervous but I said, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be great.” His appearance was supposed to be a big secret but word got out somehow and there were all these photographers down front who were definitely not there to see me.

When Noel walked onstage, he saw a sixty-four-piece orchestra with a complete string section and it must have scared the shit out of him. But he did well and was very happy about his performance. After the show, Noel got really smashed with his whole entourage. We had another show to do the next night so after Noel left, I asked my band, “What do you think? Will he make it, or not?” Noel never showed up, so I had John Pagano, one of my background singers, perform it the next night.

Chapter

13

I’ll Never Fall in Love Again

I
was scoring
Casino Royale
in London when David Merrick came up and introduced himself to me at a party. By then he had already won a slew of Tony Awards and was generally recognized as the most successful producer on Broadway. We talked for a little while, but I didn’t think much more about it at the time. Two years later, he got in touch to ask if Hal and I would be interested in doing the score for a musical Neil Simon was going to write.

The way I heard the story from Neil, Merrick had taken him to lunch that day to ask if he had any ideas for a musical. When Neil told him he only had ideas for plays, Merrick said, “If you
did
have any ideas, are there any composers you would like to work with?” Neil said the music Hal and I were writing would be a breath of fresh air on Broadway. Then Merrick asked Neil if there was a book or a film he wanted to adapt and Neil started talking about
The Apartment
, the Billy Wilder film starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine that had won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1960.

Writing for the Broadway stage had never been a particular dream of mine and if I had known what I was getting into, I might never have done it. But Merrick was very astute and he sold me on the idea by saying it was time for theater to change by opening itself up to people so they could do their own thing. I decided to say yes because Neil Simon was doing the book and the property itself was so great.

Some musicals are absurd, but when I read what Neil had written, I knew the show was funny and had a lot of heart. Aside from the fact that the lead character talks directly to the audience throughout the play, Neil’s book was pretty faithful to the movie. Chuck Baxter, a young guy who works at a big insurance company—and also just happens to have the same last name I used when I formed my first band at Forest Hills High School—tries to make his way up the corporate ladder by letting his bosses use his apartment for their extramarital affairs. Then Chuck falls in love with one of those girls.

Promises, Promises
, the title Neil came up with, refers to all the promises Chuck’s bosses make to give him a better job in return for this favor, which they never keep. The movie had been set in 1959. By the time we got around to doing the play, sexual attitudes had changed so much that the show already seemed out of date to a lot of people. My concern was the music, and so I thought Neil would fix any of the problems with the story before we opened in New York.

I knew all the songs had to come from what Neil had written and serve the characters he had created. For me this was a good thing because it was restrictive. Hal wrote all the lyrics first and I spent the summer working on the music. By the time I flew to New York in September, I had sixteen songs to play for the cast on the first day of rehearsal.

I wish I could say I was happy to be there, but I wasn’t, because I was going to have to spend the next three months rehearsing in New York and then go on the road to Boston and Washington for previews. Nikki was just two years old and so Angie and I decided it would be better for them both to stay in Los Angeles while I was working on the play. Angie did agree to fly in a couple of times so we could all be together.

We rehearsed for the first time on Labor Day on the sixth floor of the Riverside Plaza Hotel on West Seventy-Third Street. Hal was there along with Merrick, Neil Simon, choreographer Michael Bennett, and Robert Moore, who was going to direct the show. All the actors were there as well, including Jerry Orbach, who had been cast to play Chuck. After we rehearsed the show for about two weeks, Neil Simon went to Merrick and said, “I hate Jerry Orbach. I can’t stand him. Let’s get Tony Roberts to do the part instead.”

Since it was Neil’s play, Merrick called Tony Roberts in Hong Kong and had him fly to New York. By the time Tony landed at the airport, Neil had suddenly fallen in love with Jerry Orbach’s performance and told Merrick he couldn’t imagine anyone else ever playing the part. Tony Roberts eventually wound up playing Chuck in London and he was very good.

We spent six weeks rehearsing in New York. Right from the start I was obsessed with getting the rhythm section in the orchestra to play what I had written the way I wanted to hear it. Even though no one in theater would have ever considered doing something like this, I was such a complete novice that I even offered to pay for extra rehearsals so the rhythm section would be steaming by the time we got to Boston.

To get as close to the kind of sound I was used to hearing in the recording studio, I brought Phil Ramone in to mix the sound, and the two of us came up with the idea of creating a different kind of orchestra pit for the show. Our initial idea was to have the pit partially enclosed with the background singers down there to reinforce the voices onstage. By the time we finally got to New York, the concept got even more complicated than that.

In those days, producers always took a show out of town before it opened on Broadway, so we went to Boston, where the opening night reviews were pretty good. Eliot Norton, the theater critic for the
Boston Globe
, said the songs Hal and I had written were “as freshly different from those of their contemporaries as were those of Rodgers and Hart in their first shows. . . . It is sophisticated music with its own quick pulse, a nervous beat that catches and reflects something of the tension of the times and suits perfectly the people and the plot of the show, which is sophisticated.”

Despite that, we all knew we still had work to do and Neil Simon had to revise certain scenes. It was something he was very good at doing, which was why they called him “Doc.” The weekend after we opened, I had the worst sore throat of my life. I thought it was just a cold but by the third or fourth day, it just kept getting worse. What I should have done was call my physician in L.A., but instead I called the hotel doctor and he put me into Massachusetts General Hospital, where they told me I had pneumonia.

I hadn’t been in a hospital since I’d had my tonsils out when I was four years old, but at least I was lucky enough to be in a great one. I also knew that as soon as I got out again, I had to write four new songs for the show. David Merrick may have been a great producer but he was not a very pleasant guy. I never knew if he really liked anything, because I never saw him smile.

While I was in the hospital, he started calling me to ask, “How long do you think you’re going to be in there? Because we have new music to write.” When I told him I didn’t know, Merrick said, “Can we get a piano in the hospital room? Because if you don’t get better soon, I’m going to have to bring in some other writers.” At that point I said to myself, “Screw this! This is my life and it’s more important than this show.”

The day I got out of the hospital, I still felt like shit. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a hotel room with Hal and try to write a new song for the show. Hal had already come up with the lyrics to “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and my hospital stay had inspired him to write, “What do you do when you kiss a girl? / You get enough germs to catch pneumonia / And after you do, she’ll never phone you.”

I sat down at the piano and set Hal’s lyric sheet up in front of me. Maybe because I was still not feeling all that well, I wrote the melody for “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” faster than I had ever written any song before in my life.

Phil Ramone:
Merrick was famous for being a dick. The show was damn good in Boston, with lots of laughs. Neil, Burt, Hal, myself, and Michael Bennett were all in the men’s room after the show when Merrick came in and said, “If you think this fucking show is going to work, you’re out of your minds.” Then he looked at Burt and Hal and said, “We’re missing a song in the middle of the second act and what we need is something the audience can whistle on their way out of the theater.” Michael Bennett went into a stall and just started sobbing and Burt and Hal went off to write “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

We came in with the song the next morning and it went into the show a couple of nights later. “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” became the outstanding hit from the score and pretty much stopped the show every night.

When we got to Washington, D.C., I still didn’t feel right. I was sure my pneumonia had returned but I had to stand in a cold sweat at the back of the theater every night and listen to Merrick tear into Michael Bennett by saying the dancing was not good enough. It was brutal to watch because I knew how brilliant Michael really was.

I was still coughing and the only person I knew well enough in Washington to call and ask about a doctor I could go see was Ethel Kennedy, who had come to a couple of my recording sessions in New York and was a fan of my music. Ethel sent me to a doctor who took some X-rays and told me my pneumonia had not returned. That made me feel better but I still had to stand at the back of the house every night and watch what was going on between Merrick and Bennett. Angie had come to see me in Boston, but by now she had gone back to Los Angeles, so I was alone in a not-so-great hotel and none of this seemed like fun to me.

It was also torture to be in the theater and listen to someone else conducting my music. And I just didn’t think the guy we had was right for the job. Merrick felt the same way and he kept nudging me and saying, “Why don’t we fire the bastard?”

One night I went backstage and said to the conductor, “What were you doing with the tempo of the second song in the second act?” When he said, “Was it too fast or too slow?” I knew we were fucked. If he had said, “Yeah, it was a little fast,” I could have dealt with it. But this was like my coming out of the control room in a recording studio to tell a trumpet player he was out of tune only to have him ask, “Am I sharp or am I flat?” Which was also something I’d gone through before.

I went to Merrick and said, “This guy isn’t making it. We have to get rid of him.” We decided to have Harold Wheeler, the dance music director who was playing piano in the pit and now does
Dancing with the Stars
on television, take over. Harold had never conducted a show before but I said, “It doesn’t make a difference. Get him. He understands my music.” Merrick liked the idea of having a black conductor so he hired him and Harold proved he could do it.

When we finally came into New York after seven weeks on the road, I walked into the Shubert Theatre only to discover that the place was acoustically dead. Phil Ramone came up with the idea of not only partitioning the pit but also putting four girl singers alongside the orchestra so that for the first time in Broadway history, the chorus would be in the pit rather than onstage.

Phil covered the walls and floors and ceiling of the pit with acoustic insulation and put in seventeen microphones and processed what the girls were singing through an echo chamber. He installed an eleven-channel mixing board at the back of the house so the sound could be mixed live during the show. Everything we did at the Shubert has since become standard practice for Broadway musicals.

Phil Ramone:
I wasn’t union, so I couldn’t run the board, but I would be standing over the sound guy at the back of the theater during the show so I could tell him what to do. Burt was so sensitive that he would say, “No, no, no. We lost that word.” He didn’t like the sound at the Shubert and although what we did there had never been done before on Broadway, it wasn’t like we invented it.

Merrick said to me, “You can’t do this show without wireless microphones. It’s impossible.” And I said, “Put your money where your mouth is.” Wireless microphones were still in their infancy back then, and during a show you were as likely to hear the taxicabs outside as the vocalist, so the set designer and I worked really hard to hide microphones all over the stage.

I put surround sound in the theater for the background effects and the girls and the strings. The girls were singing around two mikes and the pit was like a studio. It had some separation and was lined with acoustical material and we had speakers around the theater mainly for the special effects, but the music was still coming from the pit. In the Rodgers and Hammerstein era they had hardly ever miked the orchestra but we had more input so it became a well thought out process.

Even at the end, when things started to work really well, Merrick said to me, “You’ve got to cut back some of that pit. People think it’s a recording. They think you’re just playing a fucking tape.” That pit was horrible, very deep, so we could actually bury the band in it, but that wasn’t the idea. So we cut the pit back and at the end of the show, people used to come down the aisles to watch the band play the walk-out music. They could see and hear them and there would be two or three rows of people just looking into the pit while listening to Burt’s songs. At that point, I think we could have even sold records from the pit.

There were some challenging songs to sing in that show, and the toughest one had to be “Promises, Promises,” which had successive bars of five/four, three/four, four/four, six/four, three/four, four/four, six/four, three/eight, four/eight, and four/four. When I first wrote it out, I knew I was changing time signatures nearly every bar but the reason I did it that way was the urgency of what was happening onstage and it felt really natural to me. God bless him, Hal also wrote some really brilliant lyrics for that song.

If I had been an actor who had to sing that song every night, I would have been pretty angry at the composer, and that was exactly how Jerry Orbach felt about it. He once told me, “You’re breaking my back every night with that song. Why did you have to make it so difficult?” I said, “That’s because the song has to be faithful to the story line and I’m governed by what the character has to say onstage. Chuck is pissed off because he’s been lied to and betrayed by his bosses and he’s all through with promises, promises. So when he sings that song, he has to show his anger.” As it turned out, Jerry wound up winning a Tony Award for his performance in the show.