Alan Bergman, great American lyricist, dies at 99
Alan Bergman wrote a song with his future wife on the day they first met. Over the next 60 years they never stopped making music together.
Bergman was one half of one of the greatest American songwriting duos. The other was his wife Marilyn, who died in 2022.
Together, the couple wrote the lyrics for The Way We Were and The Windmills of Your Mind, tunes for the film Yentl and the theme songs for 1970s television comedies Maude, Alice and Good Times.
“It was a terrible song, but we loved the process,” Bergman said in 2011 of that first collaboration. “And from that day on, we’ve been writing together.”
The songwriting team went on to win three Oscars, four Emmys and two Grammy awards, and to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980.
Their lyrics were set to the music of composers including Michel Legrand, Marvin Hamlisch, John Williams and Quincy Jones. Singers ranging from Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra to Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand and Sting recorded their songs.
Bergman died on Thursday, aged 99, family spokesperson Ken Sunshine told Reuters.
‘THAT’S THE ADVENTURE’
Bergman wrote his first song when he was 13 years old and continued to pen lyrics into his 90s, after his wife’s death. The song Wherever I May Go (for Marilyn) was a tribute to her.
“It’s such a deeply personal song,” composer Roger Kellaway told the San Francisco Classical Voice newsletter in 2022. “You could look at this, like, that’s how committed Alan is to the relationship and how committed he is to songwriting.”
Alan Bergman was born in September 1925 in Brooklyn, New York in the same hospital as his wife a few years later. But the couple didn’t meet until 1956 when they were introduced by the composer Lew Spence in Los Angeles.
Bergman studied at the University of North Carolina and completed a Master’s degree in music at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met songwriter Johnny Mercer. Mercer, who wrote the lyrics of Moon River for the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961, became his mentor.
Despite his desire to write songs, Bergman first worked as a TV producer in Philadelphia. At Mercer’s urging he moved to California in the 1950s.
“I was writing both music and lyrics in those days, and he would listen to what I was writing and critique it and encourage me,” Bergman told JazzTimes magazine last year. “I would not be here today without him. He was a great influence.”
Bergman liked to use a baseball analogy to explain the couple’s writing process – pitching and catching ideas back and forth.
He preferred to have the music before he began to write the lyrics. Composers would leave their compositions with the couple. They would then write words that fit the notes.
“We believe that words are at the tips of those notes and it’s our job to find them,” he told radio station NPR in 2011. “That’s the adventure.”
‘THE KIDS’
Yellow Bird was the duo’s first money-making song, but their big break came with Frank Sinatra’s 1960 album Nice ‘n’ Easy. The crooner became a friend of the couple. He referred to them as “the kids.”
They had another career breakthrough when they worked with composer and producer Quincy Jones in 1967 on the song In the Heat of the Night for the film of the same name.
They won their first Academy Award for best original song for writing The Windmills of Your Mind the following year, with Michel Legrand, for the film The Thomas Crown Affair. They were awarded another Oscar in 1974 for The Way We Were with Marvin Hamlisch, as well as a Grammy for Song of the Year in 1975.
In 1983, the couple were the first songwriters to have written three of the five Oscar-nominated songs. Two years later they took home their third Academy Award for Yentl, starring Barbra Streisand. The singer became a friend and frequent interpreter of their music.
Streisand recorded more than 50 of their songs. She released the album What Matters Most as a tribute to the Bergmans and their music.
“When she does our songs, she finds things that always surprise us,” Bergman told Reuters in 2011. “She deepens them. She gets all the nuances, everything, so it’s thrilling.”
The couple’s Emmys included awards for the TV movies Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975) and Sybil (1977), and the song Ordinary Miracles from the 1995 Streisand special Barbra: The Concert.
The couple married in 1958 and had one daughter.
Bergman said he loved songwriting. Doing it for so long with someone he loved made it that much more beautiful.