‘The Way We Were’ Songwriter Was 99

Alan Bergman, the Oscar-, Grammy- and Emmy-winning songwriter whose lyric-writing partnership with his wife Marilyn lasted more than six decades and produced such hits as “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “The Way We Were” and “In the Heat of the Night,” died Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99.

Marilyn Bergman, who died in January 2022, was the first woman president and chairman of the board of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), a leading performing-rights society for music-makers. Alan soldiered on even after her death, continuing to put words to music.

The Bergmans, who penned hundreds of songs, mostly for movies and TV, bridged the traditional Great American Songbook era of Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin with the more modern pop sensibility of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

Their poetic touch, combined with the melodic gifts of so many of their collaborators, elevated the films on which they worked, and made them first-call songwriters for A-list directors like Sydney Pollack, Norman Jewison and Richard Brooks.

“Windmills” is a modern classic (“round, like a circle in spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel…”), as is “Way We Were” (“memories light the corners of my mind, misty watercolor memories…”), while the soulful words of “Heat of the Night” astonished singer Ray Charles when he learned the married couple who wrote them was white.

The Bergmans’ catalog, even apart from their many awards, constitutes a large portion of the truly great movie songs of the last half of the 20th century. Collaborating with such top composers as Michel Legrand, Marvin Hamlisch, John Williams, Johnny Mandel, Dave Grusin, Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini, David Shire and James Newton Howard, they built a stellar reputation for clever, insightful wordplay.

The Bergmans won three Academy…