DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. Today, we're going to remember lyricist Alan Bergman, half of the long-running songwriting duo with his wife Marilyn Bergman. Here's a sampling of some of their songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE WAY WE WERE")
BARBRA STREISAND: (Singing) Memories light the corners of my mind. Misty watercolor memories of the way we were.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THAT FACE")
FRED ASTAIRE: (Singing) That face, that face, that wonderful face, it shines. It glows all over the place.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?")
JOHNNY MATHIS: (Singing) What are you doing the rest of your life? North and south and east and west of your life. I have only one request of your life, that you spend it all with me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NICE 'N' EASY")
FRANK SINATRA: (Singing) Let's take it nice and easy. It's going to be so easy for us to fall in love.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU MUST BELIEVE IN SPRING")
TONY BENNETT: (Singing) When lonely feelings chill the meadows of your mind, just think - if winter comes, can spring be far behind? Beneath the deepest snows, the secret of a rose is merely that it knows you must believe in spring.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUMMER WISHES, WINTER DREAMS")
ABBEY LINCOLN: (Singing) Summer wishes, winter dreams, drifting down forgotten streams.
BIANCULLI: Songs by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Alan Bergman died last week at the age of 99. His wife Marilyn died in 2022. Their songs won Oscars, Grammys and Golden Globes and were popularized by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Fred Astaire and Barbra Streisand, just to name a few. The Bergmans also wrote the words to the TV theme songs for the sitcoms "Maude," "Alice" and "Good Times." The couple collaborated on songs for more than 60 years.
We're going to listen back to some of Terry's 2007 interview with Alan and Marilyn Bergman. At the time, Alan Bergman had released a CD of him singing many of their songs. The couple met through composer Lew Spence. The three of them collaborated on a song that was written for Frank Sinatra. It became the title track of an album he released in 1960.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NICE 'N' EASY")
SINATRA: (Singing) Let's take it nice and easy. It's going to be so easy for us to fall in love. Hey, baby. What's your hurry? Relax. Don't you worry. We're going to fall in love. We're on the road to romance. That's safe to say, but let's make all the stops along the way. The problem now, of course, is to simply hold your horses. To rush would be a crime 'cause nice and easy does it every time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: How did you come up with the phrase nice and easy, which became the title of the song and Sinatra's album?
ALAN BERGMAN: Yeah. Well, when you write for somebody like Frank Sinatra, who has a definite personality, you try to write - it's easy to write a custom-made suit for him, you know. He's very theatrical. He has a definite character. And we felt, because they wanted something that was easy swinging, that nice and easy - the phrase, that nice and easy does it every time would be good for him.
MARILYN BERGMAN: It also had a kind of subtext to be a little sexy, which certainly also was part of Sinatra.
GROSS: This is one of those many songs about sex that isn't literally about sex, but it's absolutely about sex.
(LAUGHTER)
M BERGMAN: Yes, it is.
(LAUGHTER)
M BERGMAN: Yes, it is.
GROSS: Did he ever ask - did Sinatra ever ask you to write for him after having such success with this song?
A BERGMAN: Yes (laughter). Yes, he did, several times. There was one time we received a call from him that said, I want you to write me a 10-minute number. And we said, about what? He said, well, you know, boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl and so on. And we said to him, well, that's really been written. He said, you'll figure it out. He used to call us the kids, and he said, you kids, you'll figure it out. And he said, get Michel Legrand to be the composer. And Michel's father was very sick at the time, and Michel couldn't do it. So we called him and said, is John Williams OK? It was Johnny Williams. It was - he was not the, you know, well-known conductor-composer then. And we said, John, would you like to do this? And he said, yeah, let's do it.
M BERGMAN: So we wrote a 10-minute piece, which incidentally he wanted for his nightclub act. So we wrote a piece that talked about the fact that the protagonist of the piece - in this case, the singer - fell in love with the same woman over and over and over. I don't mean literally the same woman, but, you know, the same woman. And each love affair ended badly. And I think I remember the phrase, the same hello, the same goodbye. And when we finished it, we called him and told him that we had finished it, and he asked us if we would come down to Palm Springs, where he had a home and play it for him.
M BERGMAN: So the three of us drove down to Palm Springs, and we got to his - I started to say house, but more like a compound, actually. And he opened the door himself when we finally made our way to the house. And Alan sang the song for him. Alan, what was that experience? You tell it.
A BERGMAN: Well, he was sitting on an ottoman in front of me, and I sang for 10 minutes. You know, that's a long time. When I was finished, he was crying. And he said to Marilyn, how do you know so much about me? As if his life was such...
M BERGMAN: Such a closed book.
A BERGMAN: Such a closed book, you know? But it must have hit some nerve. And he said, I have to learn this. This is terrific. I love it. And - but he never learned it.
M BERGMAN: Every time we would see him...
A BERGMAN: Yes.
M BERGMAN: ...He would say, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that.
A BERGMAN: Kids, I'm going to do that. Don't - you know.
M BERGMAN: But he never did.
A BERGMAN: He never.
M BERGMAN: But it was a very nice experience, I must say.
A BERGMAN: Yeah.
GROSS: Now, you've written a lot of songs for movies. Some of your best-known songs are songs you wrote for movies. You haven't written that much for theater. How did you gravitate to writing songs for movies?
M BERGMAN: I think maybe movies made a deeper impression growing up, and we always knew that we wanted to write in a dramatic context. We were more interested in that than we were in just writing songs in limbo. Writing for - in a narrative or dramatic context, when we were honing craft, you can't write for a picture unless somebody hires you, you know? So it's like an actor not being able to act unless he gets a job or she gets a job. So we would do exercises. We would find either short stories or scenes from plays or articles in the newspaper and pretend that they were assignments. And we wrote many, many, many songs that never saw the light of day, but were exercises that we gave ourselves. So I like to think that when the first job came, we were ready.
GROSS: Well, let's listen to Alan Bergman sing. This is "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" which was written for the 1969 film "The Happy Ending." The composer was Michel Legrand. Why don't you tell us the story behind the song before we hear it?
M BERGMAN: Richard Brooks, who was a wonderful writer and director, directed and wrote this film called "The Happy Ending," which I think was well ahead of its time and occasionally will appear on very, very late-night television but really didn't find an audience. Anyway, he came to us one day and said, I want you to write me a song that is to appear twice in the film, early in the film. I want it to be - I want it to function as perhaps a proposal of marriage between these two young lovers. But I want to hear the song again at the end of the film, at which time the wife, they since married, 16 years later, the wife has become alcoholic and has left her husband and is in a bar and goes to a jukebox and selects a song and then sits down with a lineup of martinis in front of her. And he shot this beautiful montage of Jean Simmons, who played the wife, during which time she drifts into kind of reverie while listening to the same song. And he said, I don't want you to change a note or a word, but I want this song to mean something very different when you hear it the second time.
So that was a very interesting, challenging assignment. And Michel Legrand wrote perhaps, I don't know, six or eight tunes as his wont for this part. And they were all beautiful, but none really struck the three of us as being right. And we said to him - 'cause while he was writing music, we were sitting trying to solve the dramatic question of what the song should be about. We said to him, what happens if the first line of the song is, what are you doing the rest of your life? And he said, oh, I like that. And he put his hands on the keys. And as long as it takes to play that song, that's what he played from beginning to end. And he said, you mean something like that? And we said, no, we mean exactly like that.
GROSS: (Laughter).
M BERGMAN: And Alan said to him, play it again. And he said, oh, I don't remember quite what I played. Luckily, we had the tape machine going. So we had the music.
GROSS: So...
M BERGMAN: And then we zipped through it.
GROSS: ...The first line of the song inspired the melody.
M BERGMAN: Exactly.
GROSS: Yes.
M BERGMAN: Exactly.
A BERGMAN: But that happens sometimes. With Michel, we can't write lyrics first. We prefer not to write lyrics first. We prefer to have the melody. We feel that, when we have the melody, that there are words on the tips of those notes, and we have to find them.
GROSS: Well, let's hear Alan Bergman singing "What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?" that he and Marilyn Bergman co-wrote.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?")
A BERGMAN: (Singing) What are you doing the rest of your life? North and south and east and west of your life. I have only one request of your life - that you spend it all with me. All the seasons and the times of your days, all the nickels and the dimes of your days. Let the reasons and the rhymes of your days all begin and end with me. I want to see your face in every kind of light, in fields of dawn and forests of the night.
BIANCULLI: That's Alan Bergman, singing a song he wrote with his wife, Marilyn Bergman. We'll get back to Terry's 2007 interview with the Bergmans after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Lyricist Alan Bergman died last week at the age of 99. We're listening back to our interview with him and his wife, co-writer Marilyn Bergman, from 2007.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: You were both writing lyrics for the composer Lew Spence, who wrote the melody...
A BERGMAN: Yes.
GROSS: ...For "Nice and Easy," which was one of...
M BERGMAN: Yes.
A BERGMAN: Right.
GROSS: ...Your first hits. And, Marilyn, the way you described it, one of you was his morning lyricist and the other was his afternoon lyricist. How did he end up having two different lyricists?
M BERGMAN: Because I like to sleep late.
A BERGMAN: (Laughter) And it was early in our careers and, you know, we were feeling - trying to find out who we are, what we're saying. And he was writing.
M BERGMAN: I mean, he was talented.
A BERGMAN: Yeah.
GROSS: You were both independently writing lyrics for Lew Spence. You met...
M BERGMAN: With Lew Spence.
GROSS: ...Through him.
A BERGMAN: With, yes.
GROSS: Oh, with Lew Spence?
M BERGMAN: With Lew Spence.
GROSS: OK.
A BERGMAN: Yeah.
M BERGMAN: Yes.
GROSS: OK. You met through him, and then you decided that you should be writing lyrics with each other.
A BERGMAN: Yeah.
GROSS: So...
A BERGMAN: And we wrote a song that day.
GROSS: Yeah?
A BERGMAN: We just - the first day we were introduced to each other, we wrote a song. It was a terrible song, but the - we love the process. We enjoy the process. And we - that - from that day on, we've been writing together.
GROSS: Can you share a few bars of the awful song?
M BERGMAN: Oh, my God. I was afraid...
A BERGMAN: I only know the title.
GROSS: Which was?
A BERGMAN: "I Never Knew What Hit Me."
M BERGMAN: Ouch.
GROSS: (Laughter).
A BERGMAN: Something like that. Ouch is right.
GROSS: So, Alan Bergman, Johnny Mercer was your mentor. How were...
A BERGMAN: Yes.
GROSS: ...You lucky enough to get...
A BERGMAN: Yes.
GROSS: ...To know him?
A BERGMAN: Well, I met him when I was in graduate school at UCLA. And he heard some things I had written, and he took a liking to me. And we - he spent, you know, over a period of two or three years - yeah, he would call me and say, I know all you're doing is working. And this is before I met Marilyn. And he would - we would go down with his family to Newport, where he had a place, where he had a house, and we would spend the weekend. He would sit at the piano and listen to me play and sing. He liked the way I sang, and he was just terrific. I mean, I wouldn't be talking to you without him. He was just marvelous to me.
GROSS: So...
A BERGMAN: Yeah.
GROSS: What was some of the best advice that Johnny Mercer ever gave you about songwriting?
A BERGMAN: Well, you know, he just outlined the craft about singing. Yeah. You're writing for an instrument, and you have to respect that. And about - a lot about imagery. More - it would be more, you can do better than that. It wouldn't be specific, really, which was great because that helped. The more specific he would - I think teachers get, the less you are - you feel free to express yourself. And some of the early songs of mine, you can hear Johnny Mercer in them, trying to emulate him till I found and we found our own voice.
GROSS: Alan Bergman, one of the songs you sing on your new album lyrically is a song that you say was an engagement gift to Marilyn...
A BERGMAN: Yes.
GROSS: ...Bergman.
A BERGMAN: Yes.
GROSS: And the song is "That Face," which was first recorded by Fred Astaire.
A BERGMAN: Yeah.
GROSS: So before we hear you sing it, what's the story behind this song?
A BERGMAN: Well, Lew Spence, who wrote the music - he was going out with a girl, and Marilyn and I were going out together. And I wanted to ask you to marry me and have a - some kind of engagement, but I didn't have any money. So we wrote this song, and we did get a - we got an appointment with Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire was Marilyn's favorite singer. She loved the way he sang. And...
M BERGMAN: Still do.
GROSS: Me too.
A BERGMAN: Oh, yes. Well, you know, the - just to digress for a second, you know, the literature of the popular music in this country would be much poorer without a Fred Astaire because all those great writers - Berlin, the Gershwins, Cole Porter - and so they all wrote for him. Johnny Mercer. So we got - wangled an appointment with Fred Astaire and sang him the song. He said - before I listen, he said, I - he owned a record company. He said, I only record what I sing in movies, but I'll listen. He was very sweet. And so we played and sang him the song, and he said, I'm going to record this next week. And he did. And I handed Marilyn this record, and I said...
M BERGMAN: And I married him.
A BERGMAN: And she married me. Yeah.
GROSS: Let's hear you sing it from the new Alan Bergman CD, "Lyrically."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THAT FACE")
A BERGMAN: (Singing) That face, that face, that wonderful face. It shines. It glows all over the place. And how I love to watch it change expression. Each look becomes the prize of my possession. I love that face, that face. It just isn't fair. You must forgive the way that I stare. But never will these eyes behold a sight that could replace that face, that face, that face.
BIANCULLI: That's Alan Bergman. He and his wife, co-lyricist Marilyn, spoke with Terry Gross in 2007. He died last week at the age of 99. She died in 2022. After a break, we listen back to a 1989 interview with Jessica Mitford, one of the aristocratic, unconventional Mitford sisters. They're the subject of a new BritBox drama series. And I'll review the new Dexter spinoff, "Dexter: Resurrection." I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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