“MacArthur Park” was written and composed by Jimmy Webb in the summer and fall of 1967.[1] The inspiration for the song was his relationship and breakup with Susie Horton,[5] who later married David Ronstadt, a cousin of singer Linda Ronstadt. MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles, California, was where the two occasionally met for lunch and spent their most enjoyable times together.[4] At that time (the middle of 1965), Horton worked for a life insurance company whose offices were located just across the street from the park.[4] In an interview with Newsday magazine in October 2014, Webb explained:
Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. ... Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.[5]
Webb and Horton remained friends, even after her marriage to another man. The breakup was also the primary influence for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” another selection of Webb’s authorship and composition.[4] After his relationship breakup, Webb stayed for a while at the residence of Buddy Greco, upon whose piano the piece was composed and originally dedicated. Greco closed all his shows with this number for the most recent forty years.
Thanks Moonman,
Great background on the songs.
In "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," the singer doesn't say where the journey to Oklahoma starts. I figure that it's Buckeye, Ariz. To get from there to Texhoma, the nearest town in Oklahoma, in a day in 1967, when the song came out would have taken some determination on the driver's part, as the 800-mile distance would have mostly been over two-lane highways.
Had the singer started farther to the west or southwest, he would have been singing, "by the time I get to Flagstaff" or "by the time I get to Casa Grande."