'The Rose' Changed It All : Music: A hit song meant challenges and for Amanda McBroom and her husband, George Ball. Her musical 'Heartbeats' opens at Cassius Carter Stage tonight. : DIEGO COUNTY

By NANCY CHURNIN

Sept. 5, 1990 12 AM PT

SAN DIEGO — They met 20 years ago, during an audition for a part in a San Francisco production of “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.”

George Ball already had a part. Amanda McBroom--who had seen him in the show and had already developed a crush on him--was auditioning, and the director asked Ball to check her out.

“She had an aura,” Ball recalled. “They auditioned 10 girls, but when she came out and sat on a stool and played guitar, I said ‘Wow.’ She was a little too young for the part, but I thought she was powerful.”

That young girl went on to get the part, get the man and get fame as the songwriter of “The Rose,” the song Bette Midler catapulted to stardom in the 1979 movie of the same name.

McBroom has now written a small musical, “Heartbeats,” in which she will co-star with Ball, her husband of 16 years, at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage starting tonight.

It premiered at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles as an unscripted musical revue in 1986, but it will premiere with several new McBroom songs as well as a script by McBroom and director Bill Castellino at the Old Globe.

McBroom wrote all the lyrics, but some of the music was written by Jerry Sternbach, Michelle Brourman, James Dunn and Tom Snow.

“Heartbeats,” which McBroom and Ball sometimes jokingly refer to as “McBrel,” tells the tale of what McBroom describes as “a woman facing her 40th birthday, her 20th wedding anniversary and a potential nervous breakdown as she wonders what her life is coming to. Her marriage is falling apart, and she is trying to see if she can save the marriage.”

McBroom is 43, but when she started developing the show back in 1982, she was still looking ahead to that milestone.

And, though the two, speaking in an Old Globe conference room, denied any connection between the marital problems described in the play and their marital problems at home, they did concede that a strain was put on their relationship by the sudden fame McBroom earned with “The Rose.” The song will be in “Heartbeats.”

“It wasn’t hard for me personally with her,” Ball said quietly. “But it was hard for me to watch other people’s perception of one person having a success while the other is going along. A lot of buttons got pushed.”

The first button that got pushed was his ego.

It was hard for Ball to accept that his wife would be the one “paying the mortgage for a while,” as McBroom put it.

And then, he had to come to terms with the ways in which money can alter the way one looks at one’s relationship.

“I sat down and said, ‘Why am I in this relationship?’ And I said, ‘I’m here because I love this person, not because there is a bunch of money.’

“We were lucky we didn’t have anything when we started--just a stereo and a few hundred bucks--because we know that didn’t bring us together.”

One of the things that brought them together was that Ball was the star and McBroom the stage-struck young girl.

“I saw it (‘Jacques Brel’), and I saw him, and I went nuts,” McBroom recalled of the first time she saw Ball perform.

Although Ball, now in his mid-50s, resisted a commitment at first, McBroom persisted.

“We hung out and lost each other and came back,” Ball said. “I guess Amanda knew before I did that it was meant to be.”

McBroom laughed.

“I was too stupid to think that it could be anything else,” she said.

When McBroom emerged as the star, both agree that what saved their relationship was mutual respect.

“He taught me everything I know about singing performance,” McBroom said. “We are each other’s best friends.”

What also seemed to help them was their understanding of how quickly things can change in Hollywood--for better and for worse.

Certainly the changes wrought by “The Rose” took both of them by surprise.

McBroom never set out to be a songwriter. She is more comfortable referring to herself as an actress who happens to write songs rather than as a songwriter.

Still, her musical credits are impressive: “The Rose,” which was nominated for a Grammy and won a Golden Globe award, went platinum both as a No. 1 pop single, recorded by Midler, and as a No. 1 country hit for Conway Twitty.

Barry Manilow, Judy Collins, Harry Belafonte, Betty Buckley and the Manhattan Transfer have recorded her songs, and she herself has released three albums and is recording her fourth under her own label. She has just been signed to write music for Steven Bochco’s new series, “Cop Rock.”

But the reluctant songwriter only began dabbling with music to pass the time in a Cincinnati hotel room while she and Ball were touring with “Jacques Brel.” In the conference room, Ball, who said he was stunned from the beginning with her songwriting talents, began singing that first song she wrote while she, flattered but embarrassed, tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to stop.

McBroom and Ball live in Los Angeles, and she wrote “The Rose” in 1978 while driving on the Hollywood Freeway. She had been listening to a song by Danny O’Keefe which had the lyric: “Your love is like a razor/My heart is just a scar.”

“I said to myself, ‘That’s a great line, but that’s not what I think love is,” said McBroom.

She immediately came up with the line, “Some say life is a razor/That leaves the soul to bleed,” and the rest of the song quickly followed.

The song contains nothing less than her philosophy of life, she said. For her, the heart of the song lies in these lines:

“In the winter, far beneath the bitter snows/Lies the seed that with the sun’s love/In the spring becomes the rose.”

When she wrote it, only one of her songs, “Ex-Lover” had been recorded. And the success of “The Rose” was due, in part, to the song being in the right place at the right time.

She sent it to the producers of the movie “The Rose” because the name of the movie happened to be the same as her song, and a girlfriend of hers told her that the producers were looking for tunes.

McBroom said the producers hated the song and didn’t want it in the film, but the music director loved it and sent it directly to Bette Midler who loved it, too.

“I bless Bette Midler every day,” McBroom said.

She also blesses all the odd twists of fate that have brought her where she is today.

Her father, David Bruce, was a B-movie star, and her original dream was to be a movie star. But she’ll take her current stardom.

“I believe you can see blessings in just about everything,” said McBroom. “Even the Hollywood Freeway.”