Hitman by David Foster

Author:David Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2008-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

6

Barbra. Madonna.

Michael.

After the unexpected success of Unforgettable: With Love, and after that amazing experience on The Bodyguard, my life literally came crashing to a halt when, late one night, I plowed into Ben Vereen with my Chevy Suburban. Eventually, I was able to speak with Ben on the phone—“Good hit”—and two weeks later, when he was up and about, I finally got permission from the hospital to visit him. Considering that I thought I’d killed him, he looked great. “You know,” I said, “other than the day my father died, that day on PCH was the worst day of my life.”

“It wasn’t my best day, either,” he said, smiling. “But I’m feeling much better.”

He went on to make a full recovery.

Three months later, I was tooling along the PCH again, in the middle of the day, not a hundred yards from the scene of my earlier accident, when I heard a roar and looked up to see part of the mountain crumbling just ahead of me. Being more than mildly claustrophobic, and thinking I was going to be buried alive, I hit the gas, hoping to outrun the landslide, and I struck that wall of earth—600 tons of dirt and rock—at eighty miles an hour. Except for the driver’s seat, the car was totaled.

If anybody had been in the car with me, they would have been killed.

I remember thinking, I am the luckiest guy in the world.

Several weeks after that harrowing second accident, I found myself, once again, producing for my old friend and Malibu neighbor, Barbra Streisand. I love Barbra, and I’ve actually grown to love her exacting standards. Everyone thinks she’s a perfectionist, and she may well be, but putting that label on her really misses the point.

There are two principal things you need to know about Barbra. The first is that she likes people to get things right. If she’s reading a lyric sheet, for example, and they’ve got the wrong word in there— “and” instead of “but”—you will be corrected. She doesn’t like spelling errors and dropped letters, either. I used to think, Just chill, Barbra. Take your pencil and put an F in front of the O and the R, and there’s your word, F-O-R. But as I get older, I see her point. If you’re going to do a job, any job, why can’t you do it right? If I hire you to do something, why should I have to come up behind you sweeping up the mess you made? Just do it right. Period. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, and neither, obviously, does Barbra. She hates incompetence, and she taught me to hate it, too.

The second thing—and this is what earned Barbra her reputation—is far more significant, and simply put it’s this: Barbra needs to know every single option that’s available to her, which I don’t think is exactly the same as being a perfectionist. Could the note go this way? Could the note go that way? Could that chord

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