Anyone Who Had a Heart (5 page)

I did a lot of traveling with the Ames Brothers, and whenever material came in that people wanted them to record, I would either play the songs for them on the piano or listen to the demos. They were all terribly simple and an awful lot of them were like a big hit at the time that went “I’m in love with you / You, you, you.” That was when it occurred to me that I could go back to the Brill Building and write five of these a day. I also went back to New York to work on my marriage to Paula. For all the good that did me, I could have stayed out on the road for another six months.

Paula Stewart:
One of my best friends was Wilson Stone, a well-known songwriter who was signed to Famous Music, where he was working for Eddie Wolpin. Burt couldn’t find someone to write lyrics with him so I talked Wilson into writing a couple of songs with Burt. Wilson liked Burt’s music and took him over to see Eddie Wolpin, who signed Burt to Famous Music, and that was how Burt got his first serious music contract.

Burt and I were separated a lot because he would be out on the road and I was working constantly in New York and doing summer stock. That was one of the reasons I kind of lost interest in the marriage. I started playing around a bit, which he didn’t know. When you’re in summer stock, some of those leading men can be pretty handsome.

The breakup happened in 1956 and I still have the letter Burt wrote me begging me to stay. It was really heartbreaking. He didn’t want to give up the life we had, but it wasn’t going anywhere. The divorce was simple. I said, “You’re going to Vegas. Pick up a divorce while you’re there.” We were still friendly and he agreed to keep playing at all my auditions. That was part of our agreement but I also had to give him half of the five-thousand-dollar dowry my father gave us when we had gotten married and custody of our dog, a beautiful boxer named Stewba, which stood for “Stewart-Bacharach.”

While we were together, Burt never wrote a song that became memorable and he never wrote a song for me, which really pissed me off. But I never doubted his talent. In fact, I think I married his talent. That was how impressed I was by it. The other thing was that I never knew him as Burt. His family called him Happy and so did I. When he informed me that from now on he was to be known as Burt, I had a little bit of a hard time with that. But I did it to appease him. Although to me he will always be Happy.

To supplement the income I was getting trying to write songs, which was nothing at all, I played piano at one-night stands in Union City, New Jersey, with Steve Lawrence, who claims I once took him to a burlesque show in the middle of the afternoon because I liked listening to the music they were playing there. I also performed with Joel Grey in the Catskills, where we would do two shows on the same night at different hotels.

Back then, every hotel in the mountains had its own five-piece band, so we would leave the city in Joel’s car in the morning and drive up to Kutsher’s, to rehearse with their band. Then we would drive to Brown’s Hotel and rehearse with their band. We’d go back to Kutsher’s to do the first show, go to Brown’s to do the second one, and then get in the car and drive all the way back home again. It was a pain in the ass and very hard work for not much money. Maybe I would make eighty dollars for the night, if that much.

I also worked with Georgia Gibbs, Imogene Coca, and Polly Bergen. I had a mad crush on Polly, and we were sort of together for about a minute and a half. She and I would do evening boat tours. We would drive down to Baltimore, get on the boat, leave the port, rehearse the band, do the show, and come back at one in the morning. I also did a date in Florida with both Polly and Joel Grey, and although Joel also liked Polly, I liked her more. All of it was for very little money but I was learning how to conduct an orchestra.

I also did a USO tour in Libya with the Harlem Globetrotters and Abe Saperstein, the guy who owned the team. I was playing a lot of basketball at the Grand Central YMCA in the city and I was crazy about the game. On the scary old cargo plane going over there, I asked Abe if he would let me play for the Washington Generals, the opposing team of white guys who always lost every game. I told him all I wanted to do was take one jump shot from the corner and Abe said, “Yeah, sure, maybe we’ll let you suit up some night,” but he never did let me get in a game.

My roommate on the tour was Barney Ross, the former welterweight champion of the world. During World War II, Barney had won a Silver Star for single-handedly killing nearly two dozen Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal and then carrying one of his fellow Marines to safety on his shoulders. While recovering from his injuries back in the States, he got strung out on morphine and became a full-blown heroin addict for a while.

One night when we were in Tripoli, the two of us went into a café and had a few drinks. Then Barney tried to pick a fight with a couple of Arabs. “Hey, you,” he said to them, “we’re Jews. You got a problem with that?” Somehow we both got out of there in one piece, rented two camels with drivers, and decided to have a race through the streets. I don’t remember who won but it didn’t matter because neither of us fell off.

Basically, I was doing anything I could to make ends meet, but when it came to writing songs, I had no idea how hard it was going to be, and the ones I wrote were so bad that I went close to a year and a half without getting one sold. In 1955, Patti Page recorded “Keep Me in Mind.” I had composed the melody and a family friend named Jack Wolf wrote the lyrics, but it wasn’t a hit. Things were so bad that I had to borrow five thousand dollars from my dad. That was a lot of money back then and it would be like thirty-five thousand dollars today. It kept me going for a while, but what I really needed was to write a hit. No matter how hard I tried, it was something I couldn’t seem to do.

Chapter

4

Warm and Tender

E
ven before I was signed by Famous Music, I had already started working out of a little office in the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway. Everybody you needed to know in the music business was there but the offices were so small that there was just enough room for a desk, an old upright piano, and an air conditioner that didn’t work in a window you could never open.

Downstairs was the Turf Restaurant, where a lot of songwriters who weren’t broke went for lunch, and Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant and Bar, where only people who really had money could afford to eat. Agents and performers looking for work would sit in the phone booths in the lobby making calls with dimes stacked in front of them. In the elevator going up to my office on the fifth floor, I would sometimes see Phil Spector, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Jerry Moss, who later founded A&M Records with Herb Alpert.

Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich were all right across the street at 1650 Broadway working for Donnie Kirshner, who had kind of an empire going at Aldon Music, with lots of office space and pianos and work rooms. Unlike them, I never got into writing the kind of songs you would call teen pop.

I don’t know if it was my classical training or because I had fallen in love with jazz as a kid but the kind of music Bill Haley and His Comets were making also never did much for me. A lot of those songs consisted of just three chords, C to F to G. If they had thrown in a C major seventh that would have been a lot more interesting, but the plain C major chord just seemed so vanilla to me.

The way it worked in the Brill Building for a songwriter was that when you finished a song, you would take it to a publisher and play it. If the publisher liked it, he would say, “Go make a demo.” The publisher would pay for the demo and then it would be up to him to peddle the song to an artist who would record it. Some publishers knew a good song when they heard one, and some had no idea.

My first year and a half in the Brill Building was very hard and I got a lot of rejections. After I had come up with a few songs that were recorded, someone arranged for me to see Connie Francis. She’d already had a huge hit with “Who’s Sorry Now?” and was a big star, but when I went in to play a song for her, she took the needle off the demo after eight bars.

Pretty much the same thing happened when I went to see Carolyn Leigh, a well-known lyricist who wrote hits like “Witchcraft” and “The Best Is Yet to Come” with Cy Coleman. I played her some of my music and asked if she would be interested in writing with me but she turned me down flat. So it was not as though people were knocked out by what I was doing.

While both Connie Francis and Carolyn Leigh might have been right about the songs I played for them, I’ve always thought that if a lot of the people who were trying to write hits back then had been able to stick it out and have the stomach to be repeatedly rejected, they might have eventually become very successful.

After I had written some songs with Jack Wolf, Eddie Wolpin hired me to write for Famous Music, a division of Paramount Pictures. A classy guy in his fifties who always dressed very sharply and was related in some way to the Gershwin family, Eddie had better taste in music than most of the publishers in the Brill Building. The two of us would sometimes go out to the racetrack at Jamaica and Belmont, and Eddie kind of liked having me around, which made it easier for me to get an office at Famous Music. I got paid fifty dollars a week for working there but since my salary was charged as an advance against future earnings, this meant that every week I went without writing a hit just put me in a deeper hole in terms of what I owed the company.

Eddie Wolpin thought it would be a good idea for me to write with Hal David, but we were both also working with other people at the same time. Hal might write three days a week with Mort Garson in the morning and then with me in the afternoon, and I also wrote with Bob Hilliard and Hal’s older brother Mack.

When I first met Hal, I was twenty-seven, single, and living with my dog Stewba in a nice little apartment with a tiny terrace overlooking Bloomingdale’s at 166 East Sixty-First Street. Hal was thirty-five, married, and living in Roslyn, Long Island. Along with his two older brothers and his sister, Hal had grown up in Brooklyn in an apartment over a delicatessen run by their parents. During World War II, Hal had served in a Special Services unit in the Pacific, where he had written songs and sketches for people like Carl Reiner and Howard Morris.

After the war, Hal followed his brother Mack into the songwriting business and went to work at the Brill Building. By the time I met him, Hal had already written the lyrics to “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” a hit for Guy Lombardo that Vic Damone also recorded. Hal had also worked with Frank Sinatra and Teresa Brewer.

The best way I can describe Hal is to say that he was a regular guy. Sammy Cahn once said I was the only songwriter who didn’t look like a dentist, and if you had met Hal at a party back then, that was exactly what you would have said he did for a living. Like me, Hal was a perfectionist but he didn’t have a lot of personal eccentricities and he didn’t dress like a guy in the music business. When it came to writing a song, he always had the ability to unleash some extraordinary lyrics. I really believe that what you write is what you are, and the deeper core of Hal’s being always came through in his craft.

Hal was also pretty structured. I remember him telling me, “I work between ten and five and then I get on the train and go home.” Hal and I were never able to write a song together in a minute and a half, and we couldn’t be in the Brill Building after six at night because they would lock the front door and neither of us had a key. So there was no such thing as an all-night session.

Unlike a lot of the other guys I wrote with, Hal was flexible. Sometimes he would bring me a song title or some lyrics he had written, sometimes I would play him the opening strains of a phrase or a chorus I had come up with, and sometimes we would actually sit in the office at Famous Music and write together. At the end of the day, Hal would go home to do his work and I would go home to do mine. The next day we’d come back to the office and work together on whatever we had come up with overnight.

Our office was so narrow that Hal had to squeeze by me to get to his desk, where he would chain-smoke one Chesterfield cigarette after another as I sat at the piano. The room was always filled with smoke, and although I hated the smell, I never asked him to stop or told him how much it bothered me. At some point, thank God, he finally broke the habit.

Hal and I wrote some really bad songs together, like “Peggy’s in the Pantry” and “Underneath the Overpass.” Then Syd Shaw and I came up with “Warm and Tender” in 1956, which became the B-side of Johnny Mathis’s first big hit, “It’s Not for Me to Say.” At the time, Johnny was not a well-known artist. He had done a jazz album at Columbia and then Mitch Miller decided to record him and change Johnny’s image by having him do romantic ballads, with Ray Conniff conducting the orchestra.

Since Syd and I got paid as much for writing the B-side as whoever had come up with the hit, “Warm and Tender” was really important for me. The money I earned from it pulled me out of the financial hole I was in with Famous Music. “It’s Not for Me to Say” went to number one on the pop chart and Johnny became a big star. Both songs were used in the movie
Lizzie
, the story about a girl with three personalities, starring Eleanor Parker and Richard Boone, and then ended up on Johnny’s
Greatest Hits
album.

Syd Shaw was a very funny gay guy, and every time we wrote a song that Johnny Mathis recorded, Syd wanted to celebrate by giving me head. Quoting the A-side of “Warm and Tender,” I would tell him, “It’s not for me to say but thank you very much, I don’t want that.”

A year later, Hal and I came up with “Magic Moments” and “The Story of My Life” at about the same time. After Perry Como recorded “Magic Moments” and sang it on his television show, the song became a hit and I made enough money from it to pay my father back the five thousand dollars he had loaned me. Perry Como would never have recorded most of the pop material that was coming out of 1650 Broadway, but “Magic Moments” was a lot more adult and mainstream than what I started writing later on.

I don’t know how Hal and I did it, but “The Story of My Life” definitely sounded country, so it was sent to Nashville. Marty Robbins recorded the song and it went to number one on the country-and-western chart. I remember being in Las Vegas conducting for Marlene Dietrich around that time and there was a chorus line at the Sands called the Texas Copa Girls, all of whom were beauty contest winners. “The Story of My Life” was being played like crazy in Houston and none of the girls in the line at the Sands believed a New Yorker like me could have written it. I had a copy of the sheet music sent out so I could prove to them that I had.

I still wasn’t doing that well, but I wanted to get out of the city for the summer, so I took a house in Ocean Beach on Fire Island. I split the $3,000 rent for the season with four other people, one of whom was Merv Griffin, who back then had a game show on local television in New York. A friend of mine named Charlie Herman, whom I had met playing basketball at the YMCA in the city and who later became my road manager, was also out there for the summer.

Charlie was a Brandeis graduate who liked to hang out at the Bayview Club because it was so quiet. Even on a Saturday night, there would be no more than ten or twelve people there. Among his other talents, Charlie could drink eleven martinis and not fall off the bar stool, and he got to know Billy Kohler, who owned the place.

I was in there one night when Billy came over to me and said, “Charlie says you play piano. Are you any good?” I said, “Yeah, I am.” We made a deal for me to play on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights and Billy said, “You’ve got a choice. I can give you a percentage if we do well or I could just give you forty dollars a weekend and you can have all the food and drink you want.” I said, “I’ll take the forty and food and the drink, yeah.”

After I started playing there, a guy who wrote for
Variety
or the
New York Post
came in and had a couple of drinks and wrote a rave review about me. The next weekend, you couldn’t get into the fucking joint. The Bayview Club became the place to be on Fire Island on weekends, and there were so many people trying to get in that Charlie became the bouncer. In order to get into the club, you had to go through him. The place got so jammed that it wouldn’t have mattered if Charlie had been playing piano.

By the first week in July, so many girls had spilled their drinks on my piano while I was playing that they had to set up a white picket fence to keep them away from me. If I had taken the percentage I would have been making a fortune, but to make up for that I was eating as much lobster as I could and also drinking a lot.

I was playing there on a Sunday night when Tracy Fisher walked in. She was a great-looking California girl with beautiful hips, sun-streaked blond hair, a dark tan, and blue eyes. At the time, she was married to Marvin Fisher, who had written the lyrics to “When Sunny Gets Blue.” Tracy was older than me and after we left the club together, she said, “When I came in to have a drink tonight, I had a choice. I was either going to fuck you or the guy at the end of the bar, who’s a fisherman.”

I didn’t know if she was serious or making a joke, but I thought she was incredible. Tracy had been a showgirl and had great legs and I was just crazy about her, so we started an affair that lasted all summer long. When I went back to the city, she left Marvin and moved in with me in my fourth-floor walk-up on East Sixty-First Street, where we lived with Stewba and Tracy’s dog, a poodle named Killer.

If Tracy and I had stayed together, I would never have had a career. I would also probably be long since dead. Every night when I came home from the Brill Building, Tracy and I would start the evening by drinking martinis before dinner. After the fifth martini, we would go out and walk our dogs on Park Avenue. Then we’d come back home and go to bed and I would never get any writing done.

Our relationship started to come apart after a few months because I started wondering, “How much can you drink? And then not write?” We finally broke up when she gave me the crabs after sleeping over at a friend’s apartment. Tracy just kept right on living the same way and eventually wound up with some low-level hood, who killed her on a boat.

Despite “Magic Moments” and “The Story of My Life,” I still hadn’t found my own voice as a writer, and I wasn’t doing all that well with the assignments I got from Famous Music. Without being given credit for it, I wrote the instrumental theme for
The Blob
, a Paramount picture starring Steve McQueen. I got five hundred dollars for the song. Mack David put words to it and the song was recorded as “Beware of the Blob,” by the Five Blobs. Bernie Knee, a demo singer and musician at Associated Recording Studios in Times Square, where everyone cut their demos back then, sang all five parts on the song and it became a moderate hit.

During the next four years I wrote eighty songs with Hal, Wilson Stone, Syd Shaw, and Bob Hilliard, including one called “Happy and His One Man Band.” None of them were hits, and most were never even recorded. Even though it bothered me a lot that my songwriting career was going nowhere, I kept myself busy by touring the world with Marlene Dietrich.