Songs to Live By

In 1969 Dory Previn was one of the country's top lyricists, and her collaboration setup seemed ideal. Teamed with her husband, Composer Andre Previn, she had written songs for a dozen films, including Valley of the Dolls, Irma La Douce and Goodbye, Charlie. Two of their songs had won Academy Award nominations. But the collaboration was less than it seemed. Dory's lyrics were good, even sensitive. But, as she explained to TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler, "they weren't my feelings. I was writing from other people's viewpoints. And while I was married to Andre, I was never presumptuous enough to write my own music."

Then, 2 1/2 years ago, Andre left Dory to live with Mia Farrow, and Dory's psyche cracked. She spent four months in a sanitarium. "With Andre gone, I thought, 'God has canceled out, I'm canceled out.' And so, while I was in the hospital, I started writing, to get some order out of the chaos."

When Dory emerged from the hospital, she carried a sheaf of lyrics that turned out to be the beginning of a new career. They unmistakably expressed her own feelings: they told what it is like to lose your mind, to talk to imaginary people, to consider incest and suicide. Set to her own deceptively light tunes, sung in a breathy voice and gathered in an LP album titled On My Way to Where, they sold 25,000 copies. A second album followed, which doubled those sales. A third, just out, is selling even faster. Dory has written a musical about her life, which she hopes to see produced on Broadway. She has also turned the same material into a screenplay, which is now being shown to producers.

"What I've tried to do," she says, "is bring the madness out in the open. Keep it under wraps, and it erupts into wars and violence." Dory grew up in Woodbridge, N.J., under a sort of terror imposed by her father, a laborer named Michael Langan. Once, in a rage, he confined Dory, her mother and baby sister in the dining room for several months. That episode became a song in Dory's first album. (Also in that album is a bitter song dedicated to Mia: "Beware of young girls/who come to the door/wistful and pale/of twenty and four . . .") Langan, a frustrated clarinetist, determined early that Dory would be a show-business success. He sent her out to sing in saloons at the age of eleven. Later he sent her to New York, where she dutifully enrolled in drama school.

After a year of that, Dory tried modeling, but at 5 ft. 5 in. she was too short. She got a job as a chorus girl in a road company of Top Banana, but was fired on the road. Too broke to get back to New York, she holed up in Chicago. She kept alive with odd jobs, and began to read books, something she had been forbidden as a child. "I leaped into Kafka, Joyce, T.S. Eliot," she recalls. "I began writing short stories, song lyrics." These led to a job writing movie lyrics for MGM in Hollywood, and soon after that she began her successful collaboration with Andre. "But all this time," she says, "I felt this terrible guilt because I hadn't become a star. I called my father to tell him about my lyric writing, and all he said was, 'Oh, so you've failed at singing.'

Dory, who was under constant analysis during her marriage and suffered breakdowns toward the end, still goes to group therapy every week, refuses to fly or even leave Los Angeles for fear of losing contact with her group members. "I've got to be careful to stay close to people who can handle my madness," she says. The walls of her one-bedroom house in the Hollywood hills are covered with therapeutic needle point. But her worktable is covered with songs, and through them she has developed a philosophy to help her survive. She expressed it in one of her lyrics:

I can't go on/I meanII can't go on/I really/Can't go on/I swear/I can't go on

So/I guess/I'll get up /And go on.

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