Songwriter Alan Bergman, who—with his wife Marilyn (who died in 2022)—wrote numerous hits, died on July 17. He was 99. The New Yorkers met in L.A. in the late 1950s, and married in ’58. The pair wrote for Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, and songs for various movies and shows. They won an Oscar for the unbearable, inescapable “Windmills of Your Mind,” and also wrote the less-objectionable “The Way We Were,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?,” and the theme songs for TV’s Maude, Good Times, and Alice. Bergman told interviewer Christopher Loudon of his meeting with Marilyn, “I was writing with a composer in the mornings and she was writing with the same composer in the afternoons, and one day he decided to introduce his morning lyric writer to his afternoon lyric writer. We met, and wrote a song that same day. Not a very good song, but we enjoyed the process.” Of that process, he elaborated, “The process is like pitching and catching. One is the creator and the other is the editor, and those roles switch from moment to moment. The words have to sit on the notes so that singers can sing them well. So if a word doesn’t sit on the note, we can’t use it.”
