Anyone Who Had a Heart (3 page)

A lawyer who owned a hotel in the Catskills who had either seen or heard me play in the competition offered me a job the following summer playing with a bunch of guys at the Shandaken Manor. We weren’t going to make a lot of money but we could eat for free, and the guy who ran the place let us sleep across the road in an old converted chicken shack that still had feathers on the floor. There were five guys in one room, and I was the youngest, but I thought it was all great.

We started out making four hundred bucks a week, but because his mother was sick and we didn’t want to lose him, we gave most of the money to Eddie Shaughnessy, a terrific drummer who later worked with Doc Severinsen on
The Tonight Show
. The hotel wasn’t all that successful to start with and it became less and less successful as the summer went on, so the guy who owned the place kept dropping our salary. Every week he’d say, “I’d love to keep you guys, but I can’t afford you anymore.” Pretty soon we were down to sixty bucks a week for the whole band.

Getting out of the city for the summer was a big deal back then, so I didn’t want to go home. None of us did, because if you had a chance to work somewhere and came home early, that was a real loss of face. I was giving part of my salary away so my dad started sending me money, which I would use to buy Mounds and Almond Joys. I didn’t need much because the food was free.

We were asleep in the chicken shack one night and at four in the morning we heard all this noise and then the sound of fire engines and sirens. We walked outside and looked across the road and saw the whole hotel was burning down. When we got over our shock, we realized we were free. Now we could all go back to the city and say, “You know, we had a really good job but the place burned down so we had to come home.” I was okay with that, because I already knew I was not going to be living with my parents in Forest Hills much longer.

Chapter

2

Night Plane to Heaven

I
have no idea how I ever actually managed to get out of Forest Hills High School. My grade average was 69.74, and in a class of 372 kids, I ranked 360th. What I do know for sure is that I didn’t bother to attend graduation.

I really wanted to go to either the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, or the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music in Ohio, but my grades were so bad that both schools rejected me. The way my dad liked to tell the story, he and my mother had heard glowing reports about the music conservatory at McGill University in Montreal, so they had me apply, only to learn there was just one opening left for the upcoming semester. We all flew up for my audition, and according to my dad, I was halfway through a piece by Debussy when the dean I was playing for stopped me and said they had to have me there.

The truth is that I went to McGill because I didn’t know what else to do and I had nowhere else to go. The reason they welcomed me was that they were short of students. The music department at McGill is brilliant now, but back then there were just twenty-six students in an old broken-down conservatory with cold, dark rooms. My piano teacher was a German ball-buster named Helmut Blume, who had never listened to jazz or even heard of Dizzy Gillespie. If I had known he’d studied with Paul Hindemith in Berlin, I might have respected him a little more.

When I went back to McGill in 1972 to receive an honorary doctorate in music, Helmut Blume told what he thought was this really funny story about a lesson in which I was supposed to have prepared the allegro finale of a Beethoven sonata. When I asked him if I could take it slow, he insisted I play the piece at the proper speed. After sitting there and looking at my fingers for a while, I finally shouted “They’re off!” like an announcer at a racetrack, and started to play. At the time he was not amused.

During my first year at McGill, I lived in a rented room on Sherbrooke Street and took the bus to school. I thought it would be cool to have my own place, but all it did was make me less connected to campus life. I went to some football games at Molson Stadium but most of the time I was on my own. I used to envy the guys who were going to law school or medical school at McGill, because unlike me, they all looked like they knew what they were doing and had a real purpose in life.

In Forest Hills, I had gone to school with a light-skinned black football player who also wound up at McGill. Now that we were both away from home, he didn’t want anyone to know he was really black and I didn’t want anyone to know I was Jewish. Two weeks after I got there, the local chapter of the B’nai Brith sent me a letter inviting me to services for Jewish students, so that put an end to that.

Even though I could now do whatever I liked, I was still pretty weird in some ways, which I think had a lot to do with how I had been raised. I had always been scared of getting sick, so whenever it was snowing or raining and I was going out to Rockhead’s Paradise or Café St. Michel to see Oscar Peterson or Maynard Ferguson, I would put on my rubbers and carry a bottle of Listerine with me to gargle with so I wouldn’t catch cold.

When I went back to McGill for my second year, I moved into Douglas Hall, a dormitory overlooking the football stadium. I had two Norwegian roommates but I still pretty much lived by myself. Although I wasn’t any kind of artist, I would while away the time in my room by drawing pictures of Lizabeth Scott, a great-looking blond actress I was crazy for. On the movie screen, she had this blend of the masculine and the feminine thing that really got it for me and I used to dream about meeting her someday.

Years later, when I was married to Angie Dickinson, I actually met Lizabeth at a party in Hollywood on New Year’s Eve. She was in her mid-forties at the time but still looked great. I told her how I used to draw pictures of her when I was in college and how I had felt about her. Then I went up to her place in the Hollywood Hills to have lunch with her. We went swimming in her pool, and began a little affair. We got together only once or twice but I had fantasized about her for so long that it was really special for me.

At McGill, I wrote my first song, with a fellow student named Don Smith, who was a very intelligent and self-confident guy. The song was a ballad called “Night Plane to Heaven,” and one of the verses goes, “On the night plane to heaven / On flight number seven / Along the milky way / In a world full of moon glow / Above where the stars go.”

At the time I was so obsessed with Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song” that I played nothing else for four straight months, but “Night Plane to Heaven” didn’t sound like that at all. A friend of my father’s published the song as a favor but it has never been recorded or performed because it wasn’t very good. I mean, just look at those lyrics.

After my second year at McGill, I spent the summer in California, where I studied composition with Darius Milhaud at the Music Academy of the West, in Carpinteria. Milhaud was a wonderful man who was also a great teacher. A French Jew who had been forced to flee for his life when Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Milhaud came to America and began teaching at Mills College in Oakland, where Dave Brubeck was one of his students.

There were just five of us in Milhaud’s composition class and the other students were all writing a very extreme kind of twelve-tone music. At the time I was into Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Alban Berg and Anton Webern, both of whom had studied with Schoenberg. My first assignment was to write a sonatina for violin, oboe, and piano that consisted of three movements. The second adagio movement was a lot more melodic than I felt comfortable with and even though it seemed right to me, I was kind of embarrassed to play it for Milhaud on piano.

He must have sensed my discomfort, because after I finished playing, he said to me, “Never be ashamed to write a melody you can whistle.” So he taught me a lesson I never forgot. And because he liked to take his students out to dinner on Sunday nights to a funky Mexican restaurant, Milhaud also taught me how to eat tacos.

After my third year at McGill, I decided I didn’t want to go back to get my degree. Even though I was still always trying to do the right thing and make my parents proud of me, they didn’t seem all that upset about it. Because I was twenty-one years old and the Korean War had just begun, I got a letter notifying me I was being drafted.

Unfortunately, I passed the Army physical with flying colors. I would have done anything I could have to get out of the Army because just the idea of having to learn how to shoot a rifle terrified me. Before I went to basic training, my parents took me on vacation to Florida, where we all went to the Hialeah racetrack, and then I reported to Fort Devens in Massachusetts.

Basic training was a total shock to me. I had always had trouble sleeping and now I had to be up at 6 a.m. every day. I knew I couldn’t give the drill sergeant a note from my mother saying I needed to sleep in so could you please cancel my KP duty? Instead, I had to learn how to survive sleeping in one room with eighteen other guys. I started out thinking I could buck the system by taking some poetry or the score to
Daphnis et Chloé
with me on marches so I would have something to read on the break and kind of stay above everybody else. After a while, I just tried to fit in as best I could with the other guys, most of whom didn’t want to be there any more than I did.

In an article my father wrote for the
Saturday Evening Post
many years later, he said what while I was in basic training, they put me in charge of a platoon during drills one day. When I forgot to say “Company, halt!” everyone marched right into a stone wall. The truth is they would never have let me lead a march. I was such a terrible soldier that I used to pay another guy to clean my M-1 rifle.

One day when I was sweeping out the recreation hall on the base, I saw a piano and sat down and started to play. An officer walked in and before I could explain what I was doing, he told me he was in charge of putting together touring musical acts to entertain the troops. Instead of being shipped out to Korea or Germany like the other guys in basic, I began playing concerts on different bases in the First Army area. I would sit there at the piano pulling things out of my hat and improvising stuff that I passed off as unpublished works by Debussy. I was sure that sooner or later I was going to get busted for what I was doing, but it never happened.

One of the places I played was Fort Jay, on Governors Island, just off the southern tip of Manhattan. There were a lot of officers stationed there who had been called up from good civilian jobs because of the Korean War. One of them was a major who hated being back in the Army. They had put him in charge of the officers’ club, so what he did every night was hang out at the bar and drink cognac with Women’s Army Corps officers.

After he saw me perform, the major said, “I’m going to have you transferred from Fort Devens to Governors Island, and here’s what you’re going to do. You will no longer wear your private’s uniform. You’ll wear a tuxedo and play piano here in the officers’ club, and you can live off the base.”

By now my parents were living in an apartment in Manhattan, so I moved in with them. Every day before I had to report for duty, I would go to the major’s apartment on Park Avenue to give piano lessons to his two kids. It was a real pain in the ass for me because I had no patience. After the lesson, I would drive my father’s car to the Maritime Building on the Battery, take the ferry, and get to the base at around one o’clock in the afternoon.

Sometimes I’d be playing piano at night in the officers’ club when some second lieutenant who’d already had a few drinks would put money in the jukebox while I was performing. What I really wanted to say was “What the fuck are you doing, man? Can’t you see I’m playing here?” But because I wanted to stay there at all costs and I was just a private, I knew I couldn’t make waves, so I would just stop playing, take a little break, and then start up again when the song was over.

After a while, I got to know every officer’s favorite song. Whenever General Willis Crittenberger, who was in charge of the First Army, walked into the club, I would go right into “Back Home in Indiana” for him.

This went on for a while, until I got myself into some deep trouble by dating the daughter of Colonel Doubleday, the head of personnel for the First Army District. His daughter was cute but I guess she told him what was going on between us and he didn’t like it, because, number one, I was Jewish and, number two, I was a private. So one day he called the major and said, “What does Private Bacharach do? What are his duties?”

The major said, “Well, he works in the officers’ club.”

“I know he plays piano in the officers’ club but I have never seen a table of organization stating this. What else does he do?”

“He’s in charge of the linen room,” the major told him.

The next time I showed up at the base, the major said, “Go into the linen room in the officers’ club and count all the napkins and tell me how many there are.” There were four hundred napkins in the linen room. After I had counted them, I asked the major what else he wanted me to do. He said, “Go back in and count them again.”

Even though I was now in charge of the linen room, the colonel still wanted me out of there so he had me transferred to Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, where soldiers would usually stay for three days before being shipped out to Korea or Germany. I remember standing in a long line, carrying my military records and my duffel bag. When I finally got to the sergeant at the desk, he pulled up my papers and said, “We have a request from General Crittenberger to hold you here.” Every three days, a brand-new bunch of soldiers would arrive on the base and then get shipped out, but not me.

When I was allowed off the base I would take the train from New Brunswick, New Jersey, into the city to see my parents. I wasn’t playing piano anymore. I was just being a soldier, doing nothing else, but it was a lot better than being in Korea. They kept me at Camp Kilmer for about five months, which probably saved my life. Finally somebody in personnel said, “What the hell is this? Ship this guy out!”

Instead of going to Korea, where I would have probably seen combat, I got lucky and was sent to Germany. I was stationed in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a resort town in Bavaria at the base of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany. The Army had a very low-level Special Forces base there, with an entertainment center for soldiers on leave. I lived with three other guys in what had been an old German officers’ club, so that was pretty nice.

My job was to write orchestrations for the band that played in Casa Carioca, a nightclub in the rec center that had an ice rink under a movable dance floor and a roof that opened to the sky. I had a great band to work with but when they asked me how many arrangements I could write for them, I said, “Maybe one every three weeks.” I could have written two a week, and have really benefited from having that kind of a laboratory, but I didn’t want to work that hard, so I just took the lazy way out.

Instead of really learning how to orchestrate, I was just biding my time. I began learning how to ski on wooden skis on the Zugspitze, which is a pretty terrifying mountain. I had never been that scared in my life. My parents came to visit while I was on furlough and we went to Paris and then Venice, where I met a girl who couldn’t speak English but was spectacular. I arranged to meet her later that night.

After dinner with my folks, I told them I was going to take the boat from the Lido to meet a friend, but my mother said, “No. You can’t go.” I said, “If I’m old enough to be in the Army, I’m old enough to go.” I went into town and looked for the girl, who was supposed to meet me by some canal, but I never found her, and then my mother wouldn’t talk to me for the next couple of days.

I have a photograph of myself taken back then that says it all about my time in the Army. With one foot propped up on the edge of a fountain and my knapsack beside me, I’m standing in full uniform in front of some ancient ruin. In a lot of ways I look just like every young soldier. The only difference is that I’m holding a tennis racquet in my hand.