Anyone Who Had a Heart (19 page)

Chapter

18

That’s What Friends Are For

C
arole and I had been living together in her house on Donhill Drive, off Laurel Way in Beverly Hills, but after we got married, I told her I wanted my own bathroom and a gym, so we moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel while they were adding on to her house. Then we bought a house on Nimes Road in Bel Air. One of our neighbors was Elizabeth Taylor, and that was how Carole’s friendship with her began.

Carole Bayer Sager:
What I now realize is that nothing changes with Burt when he changes wives. The only thing that changes is the wife, but his routine remains the same. I had no idea how important his routine and working out was for him. It didn’t matter when dinner was. What mattered was that he had to work out. There was this very large hill that led up to our house and Burt would run up and down it with a jump rope and jump up the hill and down the hill and then all through the street. After dinner, he would say, “Hey, you want to take a little walk?” I thought, “What a nice idea,” and then I realized that walking after dinner every night was part of his routine. I was invited to come along but no matter what I said, he was going anyway.

The first big song Carole and I came up with after we were married was “Heartlight.” We wrote it with Neil Diamond, and then we cut it with him and the song went to number five on the charts. After we were quoted as saying the song had been inspired by the movie
E.T
., Universal Studios came after us and said they wanted part of the publishing for infringing on their copyright. We wound up paying them twenty-five thousand dollars but I didn’t think they were right at all.

Carole Bayer Sager:
I had gone to an advance screening of
E.T.
and fallen in love with it, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about this magical film. I told Burt, “You know, I’d really like to write a song about it,” because there was no song in the movie. I kept thinking about “Turn on your heart light.” I don’t know how I got Neil Diamond involved, but I did it because I still didn’t feel secure enough writing alone.

I think Burt wrote the music for the verses and Neil wrote the music for the chorus. It was easy, which was why I loved bringing another person in to write with us, because then we were going on the combined energy and it wouldn’t take as long. It was also a way to keep Burt on track with the hit melody. We finished most of it in Burt’s apartment in New York on the Fourth of July, and then Neil Diamond chartered a boat to take us around to see the fireworks.

As the song was climbing up the charts and definitely looking like a top-five record, the pressure was on for Neil to record a new album, so Carole and I started writing with him every day out in Los Angeles. Neil and I are both pretty intense guys and very serious about our work. Carole, on the other hand, was very quick when it came to writing lyrics. Most of the time, she was way ahead of us, and would get quite bored watching the two of us ponder over notes and chords. I got to be as friendly as you could be with Neil but he was a very private person.

After we finished working with Neil on the album, Carole and I went to see him in concert in Hartford, Connecticut. When this guy who was always very serious and didn’t smile much walked out onstage that night and said, “Hello, Hartford!” he suddenly became a completely different person. In the middle of the concert Carol said, “Who
is
this guy?”

When we came back to L.A., Carole and I had dinner with Neil Simon and we told him about having seen Neil Diamond in Hartford and how totally different he was onstage. Neil Simon said, “You should have a party in your house and invite two hundred people. Then ask Neil to come and you’ll see that guy again.”

Although Carole and I were really doing well at the time and pretty much having one hit after another, I can’t say I was ever comfortable writing with her. It’s tough enough to be married to somebody without the added strain of having to work with them. The two of you are in a recording studio all day and then you come home. Instead of talking about something personal, you’re saying, “No, the drums should be playing the backbeat with a snare and not the cross stick.” If two people are making love, you should not have to get out of bed to write down what you’re hearing and say, “The G will go to the A-flat, not the A-minor. Be right back, baby.”

Carole played a little piano but she wanted to compose. She wanted to have input into my music, and sometimes Carole would be right when she said, “The bridge isn’t good enough.” But Hal had never done that when we were working together and I didn’t like her interfering with where the melody was going. That was my private property. I wasn’t giving her words because that was her property. But she wanted to have something to say about the words and the music, and her musical instincts were quite different from mine. Maybe I would never have written a song like “Alfie” with Carole, because she had a real pop sensibility and always thought a lot more commercially than I did.

Carole Bayer Sager:
If we didn’t have something, I would always say let’s do it next week because I’m bored. Burt can spend and thinks he has to spend hours finding the right chord, trying it this way and that way. Out of sheer self-defense, I would say, “I like it that way.” But it didn’t matter, because he never really cared what my opinion was. He just needed me in the room as kind of a muse. Eventually I wrote the words to whatever melody he came up with, but then we would fight about that as well.

This was radically different from the way Marvin Hamlisch wrote. He was so quick that he made me seem like Burt. “Boom! That’s it. If you think it needs something else, I’m back in town next week.” Burt and Marvin were extreme opposites. Nobody I know writes at a pace like Burt, but that’s why when you hear his melodies, it’s hard to be dismissive because you know how hard he has labored over each one. So we had some stuff we had to work through about that.

In 1984, Aaron Spelling asked Carole and me to write the title song for a television show called
Finder of Lost Loves
. When I played it for him, he loved it and said, “How do you feel about getting Dionne to record it?” I said, “Aaron, I haven’t spoken to her for ten years.” Actually, I had taken her out to dinner once to try to reason with her and had said, “Listen, Dionne, I want to record you,” but Dionne didn’t want to hear about that because she still wanted to win the legal battle with Hal and me.

By the time I met with Aaron Spelling, Hal and I had already gotten our masters back from Scepter in return for all the royalties the label had never paid us. To settle the lawsuit with Dionne, we had given her back the songs she had done with us for Scepter and they had generated a lot of money for her. I still wasn’t excited about working with Dionne again but Carole urged me to do it. So I called Dionne up and said, “Hey, it’s Burt,” and she said, “Burt who?”

Dionne was living in Beverly Hills, so I went over to her house and said, “I’ve got this song. Are we talking?” She said, “Yeah.” So I went to the piano and played it for her and she loved it. We recorded it with Dionne and Glenn Jones. The song wasn’t a hit but it got Dionne and me back together.

About a year later, Carole and I were invited by President Ronald Reagan to play at a state dinner at the White House for the Prince of Liechtenstein. When we got there, they asked us how long the show was going to run, because everything had to be rigidly timed. Then we moved into a drawing room that had about forty people in it to do our twenty-nine-minute set.

Everyone had finished dinner and taken their seats when President Reagan introduced us by saying I had won two Academy Awards, and I said, “Three.” When I sat down at the piano, I was looking at the Jefferson Memorial and my back was to the audience. I said, “I can’t play like this.” So they had a couple of guys come in to move the piano, which took some more time and was like a major thing.

Now we were finally ready to start and I played the first chord—but nothing happened. I said, “The piano doesn’t work.” That caused a stir, of course. Carole knew the inner workings of the piano so she found this piece of wood that had slipped during the move and was locking the keys in place. Carole pulled it out and everything was fine. When we were done playing our set, the fashion designer Bill Blass came up to us and said, “That was very entertaining. Was the piano not working part of the act?” And he was serious.

Carole Bayer Sager:
Neither one of us were Reagan fans but the idea of being asked to perform at the White House was very flattering. Liechtenstein was one of the smallest municipalities in the world, so I said, “Well, they’re starting us small and they’re going to see how we do.” We sat next to Henry Kissinger at dinner and while we were performing, Reagan fell asleep.

Carole was intensely social. Early on in our relationship, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were appearing together in a play in Los Angeles and I knew Elizabeth, though not all that well. Carole asked me if she could meet her and I introduced them to one another at the theater. After we found out Elizabeth was living down the street from us on Nimes Road, she and Carole became really close friends and Carole started wearing her hair like her.

Carole Bayer Sager:
I started talking to Elizabeth one day while Burt and I were at the Breeder’s Cup at Hollywood Park and I realized we were moving into the street she lived on. Our house was just a couple of doors away and she actually sent us sugar when we moved in. We became kind of friendly, and on my birthday this big gift-wrapped box was delivered to our house. It was a birthday present from Elizabeth, a white mink jacket she had brought back from Christian Dior, Paris. I remember Burt saying, “I don’t understand. What am
I
supposed to get you? What does this mean you get her?”

Carole and I went out to dinner one night with Elizabeth and Neil Simon. At one point, Elizabeth got up to go to the bathroom. While she was gone, Carole said to Neil, “What do you think? Do you like her?” Elizabeth had been sitting there wearing these big diamond rings and Neil said, “She’s got too many fingers.”

Carole Bayer Sager:
Elizabeth was looking great that night. She was a little overweight, not at her heaviest, but loving food and not denying herself much. She was looking at this menu and couldn’t decide what to eat. When the waiter came over, Neil said, “Miss Taylor will have the entire left side of the menu.”

Carole and I had written “That’s What Friends Are For” in 1982 for a movie I was also scoring called
Night Shift
, starring Henry Winkler, Michael Keaton, and Shelley Long, which was directed by Ron Howard. We’d had a really tough time writing the song because Carole didn’t like the original bridge, and she was right, so I’d replaced it. Rod Stewart cut the song and it was sort of a hit, but neither Carole nor I really liked the record.

Carole Bayer Sager:
Burt and I had a big thing about “That’s What Friends Are For,” because I started the song with the word “I” and he said, “That’s not what I played. I played da-dom.” I said, “What’s the difference?” And he said, “There is a difference. There is a difference.” So what was the difference? It was a little eighth or sixteenth note. I got annoyed but I think that’s part of Burt’s brilliance. Those sixteenth notes. Most of the people I’ve written with would have said “Fine,” but he was so precise and it was so important to him that he would sit in the music room and spend an hour figuring out whether he did or didn’t like the sixteenth note.

Which, I might add, could be rather maddening if you were the lyricist, because by now you were drawing many pictures and writing your name in different forms and colors, but he was right so I finally said, “Fine. Just add ‘And.’ ” And that’s why the song starts with “And I thought . . .” I’ve told him many times since then that whenever I hear the record on the radio, I think, “Not only was he right musically, but just by throwing that word in, he made it a better lyric, because you’re beginning in the middle of a conversation rather than starting with a statement.”

In 1985, Carole and I played Dionne “That’s What Friends Are For” for a new album she was about to record and she liked it. I thought we needed another female voice on the track so we brought in Gladys Knight, and then Dionne got Stevie Wonder to accompany her on chromatic harmonica and sing with her. The way that song was built, we still needed one more voice on it and I wanted a cleanup hitter who could hit a home run. That was Luther Vandross, who I always thought was an unbelievably great singer and very cool.

The day after we put Luther on the record, I called Clive Davis and said, “Clive, I’ll send you the record, but it doesn’t work with Luther on it and I really feel terrible about this.” Clive said, “I’ll talk to Luther and tell him.” We brought in Elton John to do it and about a month later I called Luther to tell him how sorry I was that it didn’t work out. He said, “What didn’t work out?” Clive had never told him what we had done. I felt awful about that, because I could tell Luther was really hurt.

Carole Bayer Sager:
Elizabeth Taylor loved Stevie Wonder and we were recording him for “That’s What Friends Are For,” so I asked her if she wanted to come in to the session. While she was in the studio and we were listening to the playback, the idea came to me that because Elizabeth was so committed to the American Foundation for AIDS Research, we should donate the proceeds of this record to them. Although Dionne Warwick has taken credit for it in every interview I’ve read, the idea came from me. What Dionne actually said was “Do I have to? I just gave for ‘We Are the World.’ ”

“That’s What Friends Are For” went to number one on the charts and stayed there for a month, and we raised $3 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. It was
Billboard
’s number-one single for 1986 and won a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. Carole and I also won a Grammy for Song of the Year. After the song took off, Dionne and I went back out on tour together and played all over the world.