Hollywood lost one of its most treasured voices last Thursday when Alan Bergman, the legendary lyricist who helped craft the soundtrack to American cinema, passed away at his Los Angeles home. He was 99.
For seven decades, Bergman’s words danced through our collective memory, touching hearts and defining moments in film history. Working alongside his late wife Marilyn, he created the kind of songs that stick with you long after the credits roll — the ones you find yourself humming in quiet moments, their lyrics speaking directly to your soul.
The story of Alan and Marilyn reads like something straight out of a classic Hollywood romance. Born in the same Brooklyn hospital just four years apart, fate wouldn’t bring them together until they both landed in Los Angeles in 1950. Their courtship? Pure movie magic. Alan’s proposal came wrapped in a melody — he’d convinced none other than Fred Astaire to record “That Face,” a song he’d co-written. How’s that for raising the bar on romantic gestures?
Together, they became an unstoppable force in American entertainment. Their masterpiece, “The Way We Were,” captured lightning in a bottle with its opening lines about misty watercolor memories. When Barbra Streisand’s voice first carried those words into the world in 1974, it wasn’t just a hit — it became the year’s best-selling single and earned the couple one of their three Academy Awards.
But awards hardly tell the whole story. Three Oscars, four Emmys, two Golden Globes, and a pair of Grammys barely scratch the surface of their impact. The Bergmans had this uncanny ability to distill complex human emotions into verses that felt both profound and perfectly simple. Their words became part of the American vernacular, weaving themselves into the fabric of popular culture through iconic TV themes like “Good Times,” “Maude,” and “In the Heat of the Night.”
Alan once described their creative partnership with characteristic charm: “One washes, one dries” — a domestic metaphor that eventually found its way into their lyrics. This seamless collaboration attracted the biggest names in music: Sinatra, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, John Williams. They all wanted a piece of that Bergman magic.
Even in his final months, despite struggling with respiratory issues, Alan’s creative spirit burned bright. He was working with jazz guitarist Pat Metheny on new material — at 99, still chasing that perfect lyric, still trying to capture the ineffable in words and music.
The depth of Alan and Marilyn’s connection found its way into countless compositions, perhaps most poignantly in “A Love Like Ours”: “When love like ours arrives / We guard it with our lives.” Those words carry extra weight now, two years after Marilyn’s passing and with Alan’s departure.
His legacy lives on through his daughter Julie Bergman, granddaughter Emily Sender, and the countless songs that have become part of our cultural DNA. This September, a planned tribute concert at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage will go ahead as scheduled — no longer a celebration of his centennial, but a testament to a life lived in pursuit of the perfect phrase, the ideal rhyme, the words that could make us all feel a little more deeply.
In an era where AI-generated lyrics flood streaming platforms and algorithms try to crack the code of what makes a hit, Bergman’s passing reminds us of the irreplaceable human touch in songwriting — that magical combination of craft, emotion, and lived experience that no computer could ever quite replicate.
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