Bacharach Burt - Anyone who had a heart: my life and music

For Jane, Cristopher,

Oliver, Raleigh,

and Nikki

I think that what you write is what you are....

Burt

Contents

I had only been married to Angie Dickinson for about nine months when I started thinking about getting a divorce. Our problems had nothing to do with the fact that she was a much bigger star than me. We just werent really communicating with one another and part of that was my fault because I was still pretty immature at the time and so totally into my music that I could not have kept a real relationship going with anyone for an extended period of time.

When Angie told me she was pregnant, I was so surprised and overjoyed at the prospect of having a child that I completely forgot about all that and began doing everything I could to keep our marriage going. Angie had a difficult pregnancy, and while we were in New York together, she started having what looked like a miscarriage, so she went to see a doctor, who gave her some medication that was partly experimental.

Angie was just starting her sixth month when we went to a Dodgers game in Los Angeles. I had already written Alfie and recorded it with Cilla Black at the Abbey Road Studios in London, but the director of the movie decided he wanted Cher to cut the song so the picture could be distributed in America. I knew I wasnt going to have any input at the session but on our way home after the game that night, Angie and I dropped in at Gold Star Studios, the magical room where Phil Spector had done all his incredible Wall of Sound records with the Ronettes, Darlene Love, and the Righteous Brothers.

Sonny Bono was producing the session. He had been heavily influenced by Spector so he had the same kind of setup, three percussion players and three guitars, and it was not at all the way I heard the song. By then I was used to controlling what was going on in the studio, but Sonny never once asked me, Do you like the way it sounds? It was not the way Cher was singing but what Sonny was doing to Alfie that I found so distressing.

I know it was just a coincidence, but as I remember it, Angies water broke while we were in the studio that night, so we both got out of there as fast as we could and went right to the old Cedars-Sinai Hospital, on Beverly Boulevard in Silver Lake. Angie managed to hold on to the baby so they let her go home.

About a week later, an infection started. Her doctor told us she was losing the baby, so Angie went back into the hospital, where she was in labor for the next twenty-six hours. It was a Tuesday and there was no radio or TV in her room. The All-Star Game was being played in St. Louis so Angie kept asking everyone, Whos ahead? Is the National League ahead?

On July 12, 1966, our daughter was born, three months and twenty days prematurely. She weighed one pound, ten ounces and the doctors didnt think she would live through the night, but somehow she did. Because no one had any idea how long this child might live, Angie and I were told not to give her a name.

When a baby was born prematurely back then, their chances of survival were not very good. Three years earlier, Jacqueline Kennedy had given birth five and a half weeks early to a baby boy who weighed four pounds, ten and a half ounces. The doctors put him into a hyperbaric chamber so he could be given oxygen under high pressure to keep his lungs clear, but he still died, thirty-nine hours after being born. If medical science could not keep the son of the President of United States alive, a baby who weighed four times as much as our daughter, how could Angie and I possibly think we would have any better luck?

Angie was in the hospital for five days before the doctors ever let her see our daughter. They didnt want her to have that memory of her if the baby died. Like clockwork, I would go to the hospital every day to see her by myself.

Even after Angie had come out of the hospital and could drive, I would still go there on my own because I thought that if I changed anything I was doing, something bad might happen to our daughter. It had to be my own private thing so I could commune with her through the window of the preemie ward, where incredible nurses were doing everything they could to keep our baby alive.

Day after day, I would stand in front of the preemie ward, looking at my tiny little doll of a daughter in her incubator. Even though I knew she couldnt hear me, I would start singing to her. You might think it would have been something I had written, but the song that got stuck in my head was Hang On, Sloopy, by the McCoys.

I stood there and sang that song to my daughter every day because I was afraid that if I didnt, she wouldnt be there when I came back to visit her the next day. I also got into doing all kinds of other things I thought might keep her alive. Right across the street from where Angie and I were living, on North Bundy Drive, our neighbors had a pool where they would always let me swim. Whenever I went there after Nikki was born, I would try to save all the bees and insects that fell into the water. I was hoping and praying this act would somehow also help save my baby girl. For me, it became another ritual.

One day about eight weeks after our daughter was born, I was standing in front of the preemie ward singing Hang On, Sloopy to her when two women who had been visiting someone in the maternity ward walked up. They began looking at all the preemies and one said to the other, God, if I had one like that, Id just throw it away. Completely losing it, I started to scream at them. Then I chased them all the way to the elevator.

Angie and I had wanted to name our daughter Lea, after Leon Krohn, the doctor who had delivered her. I really loved the nurses in the preemie ward, and since they had been calling the baby Nikki, we decided to name her that. Nikkis situation was so touch-and-go that she spent the first three months of her life in an incubator.

Because she stopped breathing a couple of times, they would sometimes have her on this little device that was kind of like a seesaw, to help clear the fluid from her lungs. The doctors had also instructed the nurses to give Nikki high doses of oxygen, which can sometimes be toxic to the eyes of premature babies. I had so much passion in wanting this child to make it that I said, If shes blind, shes blind. Just let her live.

Having a child changed me in ways I didnt even really understand at the time. Despite all the hits I had already written and all the success Id had in the music business, none of that seemed all that important to me anymore. So what if one of my songs went to number three or four on the charts? It didnt matter nearly as much as my daughters life.

W hen I was a kid, everyone in my family called me Happy. When I was born, my dad wanted to name me after himself so there would be a Big Bert and a Little Bert, but my mother didnt want to put me through the hassle of being called Bertram, as my dad had been when he was a boy, so they compromised on Burt. But even though our names were spelled differently, people would always ask my mother, Oh, is your son Bert Junior? and she would say, No, hes not.

To lessen the confusion, my mother finally just said, Lets call him Happy. Im not sure where she came up with that name, because I dont think I was very happy as a kid. In fact, I was lonely most of the time. Since my dad was working as a buyer of mens clothing in Kansas City at the time, he probably never thought that either of our names would ever be known outside our neighborhood.