“If, on the other hand, he liked it, I would get the job of scoring the whole movie. I’d be here today, gone tomorrow,” Hamlisch wrote. “Which meant that if he didn’t care for the song, it was no harm, no foul.

In his 1992 memoir “The Way I Was,” Hamlisch describes how producer Ray Stark asked him to write a theme song for the new movie he was working on – on spec.

composer who is one of only 12 people to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, is born in New York, New York.