It begins, improbably, with a cake. In the autumn of 1978, the biggest record in America was a disco remake of a song about a birthday cake left out in a Los Angeles park, its sweet green icing melting in the rain. It had first been sung, a decade earlier, by an Irish film actor who was nobody’s idea of a pop star. Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” should not have worked: the lyric is surreal, the melody keeps changing its mind, and the original recording ran well past seven minutes in an era when a radio single was expected to run three. Yet Summer, with her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, rebuilt Jimmy Webb’s baroque heartbreak ballad into a record that conquered dance floors and pop radio at the same time. Released as a single in September 1978, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that November, stayed there for three weeks, gave Summer the first chart-topper of her career, and carried its parent album, Live and More, to No. 1 in the very same week. This is the story of how the strangest song in the Summer catalogue became her first coronation.
A Real Park, a Real Goodbye
The park is real, and so was the heartbreak. In the mid-1960s, a young Jimmy Webb — Oklahoma-born, newly arrived in Los Angeles, and barely out of his teens — used to meet his girlfriend, Susie Horton, for lunch breaks in MacArthur Park, the old Westlake Park in the Westlake district, renamed on 7 May 1942 in honour of General Douglas MacArthur. The couple would sit by the lake while she was on her break from a nearby insurance office. When the relationship fell apart in 1967, Webb poured the whole affair into a song built like a small symphony: shifting movements, an orchestral swell, and a central image drawn straight from those afternoons — a cake, left out in the rain, its icing running green in the downpour. “Someone left the cake out in the rain” became the most quoted, mocked and misunderstood lyric of his career, and Webb, who titled his 2017 memoir The Cake and the Rain, has spent half a century explaining that everything in the song actually happened in that park. He was twenty-one years old, and already a Grammy winner for “Up, Up and Away.” “MacArthur Park” was the moment the prodigy tried to write something too big for the radio — and very nearly got away with it.
The Hit The Association Turned Down
The song was not written for Richard Harris at all. Producer Bones Howe had asked Webb for a long, cantata-like piece to fill a side of an album by The Association, the harmony group behind “Cherish” and “Windy.” The Association passed: the piece was too long and too strange. Webb then met Harris, the Irish star of Camelot, at an antiwar fundraiser in Los Angeles, and talk turned to making an album together. Webb later recalled receiving a telegram that read, in full: “Dear Jimmy Webb. Come to London. Make this record. Love, Richard.” The result was A Tramp Shining (1968), an album of Webb songs produced and arranged by Webb himself, with “MacArthur Park” as its centrepiece — all seven minutes and twenty-one seconds of it.
Against every commercial instinct of 1968, it worked. Harris’s theatrical, trembling performance climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1968 and No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart, becoming, at that point, the longest single ever to reach the American Top 10. Webb won the 1969 Grammy Award for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) for his orchestration, and the song kept travelling: Waylon Jennings’s 1969 country version, cut with The Kimberlys, won a Grammy of its own. By the mid-1970s “MacArthur Park” was a standard — admired, covered, and filed away as a glorious period piece. Nobody thought of it as a dance record. Nobody, that is, except the two men then busy inventing Eurodisco in Munich.
Moroder, an Eight-Track and a One-Man Choir
By 1978, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte had been hunting for almost a year for the right 1960s hit to remake as a dance record for Summer. Moroder later told the story himself: driving on the Hollywood Freeway, he heard Harris’s original on the radio and thought, “That’s it — that’s the song we’ve been looking for.” He asked Casablanca Records president Neil Bogart for a copy of the Harris recording; Bogart duly supplied an 8-track tape, and Moroder had to buy an 8-track player specially to hear it. What he heard convinced him completely. “A great song for Donna,” he recalled, “with all those high notes — it was perfect.”
The session work was anything but simple. Moroder sat at a piano with Summer to find the key in which she could sing the song’s punishing climaxes “really high, but still with a big voice,” then handed the framework to arranger Greg Mathieson. “To be honest, it was a very difficult song to arrange, especially the brass,” Moroder admitted, “but we had the best musicians in town.” His most ingenious touch was invisible: the choir that seems to rise behind Summer on the choruses is Moroder himself, recorded note by note — he sang short bursts of every required pitch onto the multitrack and then, as he put it, played the chords “by moving the track according to the chord that I needed,” effectively turning his own voice into a keyboard. Underneath the orchestra, the future of electronic dance music was quietly being soldered together by the man who had given Summer “I Feel Love” the year before.
Seventeen Minutes on Side Four
“MacArthur Park” did not arrive as an ordinary album track. It closed Live and More, Summer’s double album of 1978, whose first three sides were recorded live at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles on 17 June 1978. The fourth side was something new: a studio recording called the “MacArthur Park Suite,” a continuous medley of roughly seventeen minutes. It opens with Summer’s full reading of the Webb song — eight minutes and forty seconds — before flowing into two originals written by Summer, Moroder and Bellotte: the strutting “One of a Kind” and the romantic “Heaven Knows,” sung with Joe “Bean” Esposito of Brooklyn Dreams, then circling back to a reprise of “MacArthur Park” itself. Issued on a 12-inch single, the suite spent five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Songs chart, a marathon running time turned into a dance-floor asset rather than a liability. And the suite kept giving: “Heaven Knows,” released as a single in December 1978, reached No. 4 on the Hot 100 in March 1979, proof that the medley had contained a second hit inside the first.
Three Weeks at the Top
For the pop single, the suite’s centrepiece was cut down to under four minutes, the song’s slow ballad movement removed so the record could sprint. Released in September 1978 — and certified Gold by the RIAA on 26 October — “MacArthur Park” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on 11 November 1978, pushing aside Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me,” and held the summit for three weeks before the Streisand–Diamond duet “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” took over. In the same week, Live and More topped the Billboard 200, making Summer the first female artist of the rock era to hold America’s No. 1 single and No. 1 album simultaneously. The record travelled, too: No. 5 in Britain, No. 1 in Canada, and No. 8 on Billboard’s soul chart, finishing at No. 12 on the Hot 100’s year-end ranking for 1979. For Jimmy Webb, watching from the songwriter’s seat, it was a career landmark of a peculiar kind: “MacArthur Park” remains the only composition of his ever to top the Hot 100, and Summer’s disc was the last of seven hit versions of his songs to reach that chart’s Top 10.
Grammy Night’s Consolation Prize
There was one honour the song narrowly missed. At the 21st Annual Grammy Awards, held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on 15 February 1979, “MacArthur Park” earned Summer a nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female — her first Grammy nomination in a pop category. The field was formidable, and the award went to Anne Murray for “You Needed Me,” the very ballad Summer had displaced from No. 1 three months earlier; pop’s wheel of fortune rarely turns so neatly. But the evening did not end in defeat. The same night, Summer won the first Grammy of her career, Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female, for “Last Dance.” The coronation that “MacArthur Park” had begun on the charts was completed, in another category, on the Grammy stage — and five Grammy wins across four different genres would follow over her career.
The Cake That Wouldn’t Melt
Few No. 1 songs have been argued about so happily for so long. In 1992, voters in humourist Dave Barry’s Miami Herald poll named “MacArthur Park” the worst song ever written, an honour Webb bore with good grace; the lyric that baffled a generation had by then become a beloved cultural punchline. The recording itself kept resurfacing. A 2013 remix by Laidback Luke, made for the remix album Love to Love You Donna, returned the song to No. 1 on Billboard’s dance chart — Summer’s first posthumous No. 1 there. In 2024, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice used both great versions, Harris’s original in a wedding sequence and Summer’s over the closing credits, introducing the song to yet another audience. Webb, for his part, never joined the mockers of Summer’s remake: he called her singing on it “a fabulous vocal performance.” Strip away the jokes about the cake and what remains is a genuine feat of reinvention — a seven-minute orchestral lament, written by a lovestruck twenty-one-year-old in a Los Angeles park, rebuilt in a Munich-minded studio into the record that made the Queen of Disco a pop monarch. The icing melted. The song never did.