If you missed today's Serenade Radio edition of our Song of the Week, here's a chance to hear it at SteynOnline. I offer it in tribute to one half of a great writing team, who died on Thursday in California. Alan Bergman was ninety-nine and I was reasonably confident he would make it to his centenary in September. But it was not to be.
Alan and his late wife wrote lyrics together for two-thirds of a century, and, after Marilyn's death three years ago, her widower went back to doing something he hadn't done since the 1950s: writing songs without her. Their catalogue includes lyrics for blockbuster movies, classic albums, the Top 40 singles chart, including "The Windmills of Your Mind", "The Way We Were", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "It Might Be You", and many more, all sung by the best singers from Sinatra to Sting, Barbara Streisand to Dusty Springfield.
In this episode of Steyn's Song of the Week, I talk with Alan Bergman about the birth of their songwriting partnership and the title track for a classic Sinatra album. Along the way, Alan tells me how he first met Marilyn, which sounds too impossibly cute even for a romantic comedy. We'll hear Alan sing the song he wrote for her, and the song she wrote for Gene Autry's horse. And we'll listen to Sinatra presenting the Bergmans with the first of three Oscars - for the song in which Alan and Marilyn found their lyrical voice.
Click above to listen.
I first met Alan over forty years ago, after I'd said something about a song of theirs on the BBC. Evidently, it had gotten back to them, and a few weeks later (in those pre-Internet days) I found a note on my doormat from Mr and Mrs Bergman saying that they were coming to London and wondering if I were free for lunch. I tried to come up with a restaurant suitable for guests who get three Oscar nominations in one year, and, as you might expect, I overthought the matter. So I picked disastrously, and Marilyn didn't enjoy the food at all.
But the conversation went pretty well - and they were very kind to me as the years rolled by, opening a lot of doors. I remember a half-decade or so after that lunch being at a music biz event in New York - very starry, very glittery, and with me by far the least stellar person in the room. Marilyn, who was by then the president of Ascap (the songwriters' licensing society), suddenly espied me and walked across the room crying "Mark Steyn!", as if Cary Grant had just walked in. I owe them more than I can ever thank them for.
As I said, the above show focuses on the dawn of their partnership. If you want to hear what came later, we shall focus on that for next weekend's On the Town, which will include a special live performance of one of Alan and Marilyn's best songs. And, if that's not enough, I should mention that two of the songs we feature in tonight's show - "Nice 'n' Easy" and "The Windmills of Your Mind" - are analysed by me in more detail here and here.