Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach

would say, “Burt, I vant to make one more record.” She wanted to sing “Any Day Now” and had already worked out how she wanted to do it and how the timpani would sound. She would say, “Burt, I vant to sing it for you,” and then she would go right into “Any day now / I vill hear you say / ‘Goodbye my love. . . .’ ”
    I knew there was no way I could ever get her into a studio, so I would say, “Well, Marlene, why don’t we do it? I could make an orchestra track and slip a microphone through your door and you wouldn’t even have to see anybody. You could just put earphones on and sing if you really do want to make one more record.” And she would always say, “Ja, Burt. I do.”
    It would have been impossible to do but I kept talking to Marlene about it because I think the idea gave her a little glimmer of hope. Like “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could work together again?” We never did record the song, but I really wish we had because it would have been truly memorable.
    What I learned from Marlene was that if you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself. If Marlene had to stand onstage for an hour during rehearsal while they adjusted a light on her, she stood there. No stand-in, just Marlene right there for as long as it took. Then during the show, the pin light would be on her just the way it was supposed to be. She also taught me to never give less than 100 percent onstage because her attitude was to always go for it all.
    Marlene Dietrich: Most of the time while I was with Bacharach, I was in seventh heaven. Up to now, I’ve spoken of the artist. Burt Bacharach, as a man, embodied everything a woman could wish for. He was considerate and tender, gallant and courageous, strong and sincere; but, above all, he was admirable, enormously delicate, and loving. And he was reliable. His loyalty knew no bounds. How many such men are there? For me he was the only one.
    When he became famous, he could no longer accompany me on tour around the world. I understood that very well and have never reproached him in any way.
    From that fateful day on, I have worked like a robot, trying to recapture the wonderful woman he helped make out of me. I even succeeded in this effort for years, because I always thought of him, always longed for him, always looked for him in the wings, and always fought against self-pity. Whenever he had the time, he still worked on the arrangements for my songs, but as director and pianist, he had become so indispensable to me that, without him, I no longer took much joy in singing.
    When he left me, I felt like giving everything up. I had lost my director, my support, my teacher, my maestro. I was not bitter, nor am I today, but I was wounded. I don’t think he was ever aware of how much I needed him. He was too modest for that. Our separation broke my heart; I can only hope that he didn’t feel the same way. We were like a true small family when we traveled together, and laughed at everything together. He misses that, perhaps.
    After Marlene died of renal failure in Paris in 1992, at the age of ninety, a writer called to interview me about her. I had never read her autobiography, so he started quoting what Marlene had written in it about me. It was so overwhelming that I broke down and began to cry.

Chapter
    6
    Baby, It’s You
    E ven during the period when I was spending a lot of time out on the road with Marlene, I would always come back to New York as soon as the tour was over and start writing songs again in the Brill Building with Hal, his older brother Mack, and Bob Hilliard. I wrote a lot of songs and I thought some of them were pretty good, so I would make demos and send them to the A&R men at different record companies. The response I would usually get from them was “You’ve got a three-bar phrase in this song that should really be a four-bar phrase.”
    It was like getting an order from a second lieutenant in the Army telling me to charge up a hill in battle so I