TOM LEONARD: Burt Bacharach, who died, broke as many hearts as he wrote unforgettable songs

An Edinburgh nightclub in the 1950s and a crowd had gathered by the stage door, clamoring for screen icon Marlene Dietrich’s autograph.

‘Ah,’ he told them in his thick German accent, ‘you don’t want my autograph… you want Mr. Bacharach’s!’ When asked who he was referring to, he said: ‘Someday you will know.’

And she was not wrong. Burt Bacharach, then in his 20s, had been hired to arrange Dietrich’s songs as his musical director.

He would go on to not only be crowned the King of Easy Listening, but over a remarkably long career he would establish himself as one of the greatest songwriters of all time with multiple Oscars and Grammys to his name.

Bacharach, who enjoyed more than 50 UK Top 40 hits including Close To You, I Say A Little Prayer, Do You Know The Way To San Jose and the Oscar-winning Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head, has died.” of natural form. she causes’ at her Los Angeles home on Wednesday, aged 94.

Though detractors scoffed that his silky yet sophisticated melodies were mere “elevation music,” his peers in the music world disagreed.

Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Frank Sinatra were among more than 1,000 artists who covered their songs.

Walk On By Solo was recorded by everyone from Dionne Warwick and Isaac Hayes to punk band The Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.

And while Bacharach and his longtime collaborator, lyricist Hal David (died 2012), primarily worked with Warwick, they also created songs for British singers Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, and Cilla Black, as well as American star Aretha Franklin.

Though every self-respecting cocktail party of the 1960s and early 1970s was held to a soundtrack of Bacharach tunes, it fell out of favor in the era of raucier rock music, only to find a new generation. of fans when artists like Elvis Costello and, perhaps surprisingly, Oasis’ Noel Gallagher championed their music in the 1990s.

In fact, it was wild rocker Gallagher who perhaps put his finger on what made Bacharach’s songs special.

“If you can’t get a girl to make love to you by playing a Bacharach song, you better give up,” he said.

Yesterday, Gallagher was among several generations of music stars who paid tribute to Bacharach, saying: ‘RIP Maestro. It was a pleasure to have met you.

Meanwhile, actor and screenwriter Mike Myers said hearing the supremely smoochy The Look Of Love on the radio provided much of the inspiration for his Austin Powers spy comedy franchise.

Bacharach even made cameo appearances in two of the films, most memorably singing What The World Needs Now Is Love on top of a double-decker bus while Myers’ buck-toothed British intelligence agent seduces Liz Hurley, playing Vanessa. Kensington.

Yesterday, Oscar-winning composer Diane Warren tweeted: “The songwriting world has lost its Beethoven,” while The Kinks’ Dave Davies called him “one of the most influential composers of our time.” Beach Boy Brian Wilson stated, “His songs from him will live on forever.”

If he was the king of seductive music, Bacharach, a handsome, elegant milkshake in his elegant cashmere turtleneck, was also a prolific lover.

An inveterate ladies’ man with twinkling blue eyes and a mischievous charm, he was “the only songwriter who didn’t look like a dentist,” lyricist Sammy Cahn observed.

His personality helped, too: Dionne Warwick once described a “little boy quality that endears him to the opposite sex.”

He was married four times, including to movie star Angie Dickinson (a supposed girlfriend of John F. Kennedy), and had such a reputation as a Lotharian that friends dubbed him ‘the playboy of the Western world’.

Even Dietrich, almost twice his age and an international sex symbol, fell in love, haltingly describing him as “seventh heaven…as a man, he embodied everything a woman could want…how many men like that are there?” . For me he was the only one.

Although Bacharach insisted their relationship was platonic, he revealed that she was so jealous of him when he was about to marry Dickinson in 1965, that she stuck pins in voodoo doll effigies of the younger woman.

Dietrich was not the only one who fell deeply in love with him. Vic Damone, the first singer Bacharach backed early in his career, fired him after three weeks for upstaged him by flirting with women in the audience, while singer Paula Stewart, his first wife, married him despite the fact that her mother warned her that she was ‘really not marriage material’.

And his looks and charm certainly helped some of his female collaborators deal with his less attractive side: his volatile personality and relentless perfectionism. “I don’t have rules other than one,” she said.

‘Don’t make it difficult for the listener. Just the singer. He fell out with almost everyone he worked with, including Warwick and Hal David.

After a long and fruitful association, Bacharach decided that he was the biggest star in 1973 and demanded to receive a larger share of the profits than David.

The lyricist refused to work with him again, and the pair spent the next decade suing each other.

‘Mr Cool’ occasionally let his temper show: when Bacharach confronted a photographer in London in 1965 and yelled at him to ‘get out of my way’, the snapper embarrassingly turned out to be Lord Snowdon, at the time Mr Cool’s brother-in-law. the Queen.

Cilla Black recalled nightmarish sessions with him at London’s Abbey Road Studios, during which he made her sing 29 takes of the song Alfie. “She wanted to kill him, but he was fucking beautiful,” she said.

When asked many years later about his former reputation as a ladies’ man, he replied, “I thought I was a good boy and I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”

“But when you end up getting married four times, there are a lot of bodies strewn in your path.”

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1928, his father was a successful fashion journalist and his mother an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged an initially reluctant Burt to study music.

Despite being nicknamed ‘Happy’ by his mother, he was a lonely child. After the family moved to New York when he was four years old, the teenage Bacharach would sneak into Manhattan jazz clubs to hear performances by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

After music school, he worked as an accompanist, then toured with Dietrich and married Paula, one of his singers.

His second marriage, to the beautiful Angie Dickinson, star of Ocean’s 11, Rio Bravo and later the 1970s TV series Police Woman, finally brought him the celebrity stardom he longed for and that his musical collaborator David, happily married and modest, got to resent

Bacharach later admitted in his memoirs that he had cheated on Dickinson with two other women within months of their wedding and had countless affairs with dancers and singers.

He and Dickinson divorced in 1981, by which time they already had a daughter, Nikki. She was born four months premature and it was later discovered that she was autistic.

In her teens, Bacharach had her institutionalized and spent a decade there.

Dickinson never forgave him, saying, “He thought this would help Nikki, but it destroyed her.”

Their daughter was 40 when she committed suicide in 2007. Bacharach later married lyricist Carole Bayer Sager in 1982 and the couple adopted a son, Christopher, before divorcing in 1991.

When Bacharach invited Carole to make a contribution to his biography, she mocked his vanity, writing: ‘I used to take pictures of him. I had my camera and he was 53 and I said, ‘You’re so handsome.’ He said, ‘Hey baby, you should have seen me ten years ago.

Bacharach married his fourth and surviving wife Jane Hansen, a ski instructor 32 years his junior, in 1993 and they had two children together: a son Oliver and a daughter Raleigh.

He was a regular visitor to the White House over the years and was awarded the Gershwin Prize by Barack Obama in 2012.

Bacharach, who performed on stage with Adele at the BBC Electric Proms in 2008 and at the Glastonbury Festival in 2015, when he was 87, had vowed never to retire.

“Music softens the heart, it makes you feel something if it’s good, it brings an emotion that you may not have felt before,” he said in 2018.

It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.’