Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach

music Bill Haley and His Comets were making also never did much for me. A lot of those songs consisted of just three chords, C to F to G. If they had thrown in a C major seventh that would have been a lot more interesting, but the plain C major chord just seemed so vanilla to me.
    The way it worked in the Brill Building for a songwriter was that when you finished a song, you would take it to a publisher and play it. If the publisher liked it, he would say, “Go make a demo.” The publisher would pay for the demo and then it would be up to him to peddle the song to an artist who would record it. Some publishers knew a good song when they heard one, and some had no idea.
    My first year and a half in the Brill Building was very hard and I got a lot of rejections. After I had come up with a few songs that were recorded, someone arranged for me to see Connie Francis. She’d already had a huge hit with “Who’s Sorry Now?” and was a big star, but when I went in to play a song for her, she took the needle off the demo after eight bars.
    Pretty much the same thing happened when I went to see Carolyn Leigh, a well-known lyricist who wrote hits like “Witchcraft” and “The Best Is Yet to Come” with Cy Coleman. I played her some of my music and asked if she would be interested in writing with me but she turned me down flat. So it was not as though people were knocked out by what I was doing.
    While both Connie Francis and Carolyn Leigh might have been right about the songs I played for them, I’ve always thought that if a lot of the people who were trying to write hits back then had been able to stick it out and have the stomach to be repeatedly rejected, they might have eventually become very successful.
    After I had written some songs with Jack Wolf, Eddie Wolpin hired me to write for Famous Music, a division of Paramount Pictures. A classy guy in his fifties who always dressed very sharply and was related in some way to the Gershwin family, Eddie had better taste in music than most of the publishers in the Brill Building. The two of us would sometimes go out to the racetrack at Jamaica and Belmont, and Eddie kind of liked having me around, which made it easier for me to get an office at Famous Music. I got paid fifty dollars a week for working there but since my salary was charged as an advance against future earnings, this meant that every week I went without writing a hit just put me in a deeper hole in terms of what I owed the company.
    Eddie Wolpin thought it would be a good idea for me to write with Hal David, but we were both also working with other people at the same time. Hal might write three days a week with Mort Garson in the morning and then with me in the afternoon, and I also wrote with Bob Hilliard and Hal’s older brother Mack.
    When I first met Hal, I was twenty-seven, single, and living with my dog Stewba in a nice little apartment with a tiny terrace overlooking Bloomingdale’s at 166 East Sixty-First Street. Hal was thirty-five, married, and living in Roslyn, Long Island. Along with his two older brothers and his sister, Hal had grown up in Brooklyn in an apartment over a delicatessen run by their parents. During World War II, Hal had served in a Special Services unit in the Pacific, where he had written songs and sketches for people like Carl Reiner and Howard Morris.
    After the war, Hal followed his brother Mack into the songwriting business and went to work at the Brill Building. By the time I met him, Hal had already written the lyrics to “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” a hit for Guy Lombardo that Vic Damone also recorded. Hal had also worked with Frank Sinatra and Teresa Brewer.
    The best way I can describe Hal is to say that he was a regular guy. Sammy Cahn once said I was the only songwriter who didn’t look like a dentist, and if you had met Hal at a party back then, that was exactly what you would have said he did for a living. Like me, Hal was a perfectionist but he didn’t have