You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (11 page)

Coleman’s three-week engagement at London House started on November 26, and expectations among the Chicago press were high. Columnist Herb Lyon touted his arrival in the
Chicago Tribune
on November 21: “This new musical whiz, Cy Coleman (who’s only 27), must be quite a fellow. Among the many expected here for his Chicago debut . . . are TV’s Jackie Gleason and Actor [
sic
] Bill Holden, both ravin’ fans. And this is a fact, not the usual press agent hokum.” Coleman charmed Chicagoans thoroughly. He would return to London House year after year until the mid-1960s, always garnering critical accolades and enjoying—or perhaps enduring, as in New York—columnists’ coverage and scrutiny of his social life.

During this period writers such as Dorothy Kilgallen, Walter Winchell, and Earl Wilson began increasing the attention they paid to Coleman’s life, particularly the women he was dating. There had always been oblique references to Coleman’s romantic life or speculation about it. In the early 1950s some wondered whether he was dating Betsy von Furstenberg during
Dear Barbarians
, and there was a period when writers inferred something more than friendship in Coleman’s relationship with singer Claire Hogan, but as the decade proceeded their columns carried more spirited—and prurient—notices. Just before Coleman departed for Chicago, for instance, Kilgallen wrote: “Cy Coleman’s idyll with Madeleine Carr appears to have faded,” and a few months later Winchell leered, “Cy Coleman, the Roundtable piano star, reserves his dates for stunning Lorna Kennedy, 22, a Southampton socialite.”
7

The mention of the Roundtable in Winchell’s column refers to an additional club that Coleman had added to the growing roster of venues he could call home. Another was Arpeggio, where he enjoyed an extended engagement and for a while was on the same bill as Carroll and her trio.

Carroll remembered this room with genuine delight: “Arpeggio was a small club with a sort of circular bar in the middle, and at one end of the room was a little stage and that’s where you performed. Arpeggio’s claim to fame was, believe it or not, that Joey Gallo used to hang out there. He was a gangster who was killed at Umberto’s Clam House. They did him in. But he liked music and he used to hang out at the bar there. We didn’t know how famous he was or who he was. . . . It’s not important. Those rooms had a lot of color (so to speak). They were fun.”
8

A trio of albums from the Westminster label was also part of Coleman’s agenda as 1958 turned into 1959. The company, which had specialized strictly in classical recordings, was taking its first steps into new musical arenas and turned to Coleman for its initial jazz release,
Cool Coleman
, which hit stores in November 1959.

Both the cover art and the song list for this LP reflected the new heights that Coleman by now had reached. On the front of the album he was perched rather imperially on two giant blocks of ice, as if to proclaim not just his coolness but also his supremacy in the field. As for the selections, it was the first album on which he and the trio (in this instance bass player Bell and drummer Charlie Smith) were playing almost an equal number of Coleman’s own works alongside standards.

In fact, two of the songs were world-premiere recordings of Coleman’s work. The A side opened with “Jazz Mambo,” one of the first jazz tunes that Coleman had written and one that he described in the liner notes as being “intended as a jazz satire [that] pits the Latin feeling and the jazz against each other.” On the B side the opener was “Alley Cats,” the hep tribute that he had written as he finished his gig at the Waldorf Astoria’s Peacock Alley.

These two tracks, combined with “Witchcraft” and “You Fascinate Me So” (delivered as almost a delicate music-box melody), make the recording one of the best snapshots from the period of Coleman’s versatility as both writer and performer.

In addition, his work on “Fascinate” on this album—he highlights the vaguely Asian influences for the song, which was supposed to be sung in
13 Daughters
by a young Hawaiian woman—set the stage beautifully for his next record on the Westminster label: a jazz interpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Flower Drum Song
. For this album Coleman brought in a new drummer, G. T. Hogan, and according to the liner notes “surrounded him” with a host of instruments beyond his usual percussion set, such as antique cymbals and two gongs. The additional pieces helped to produce some highly exotic sounds on the disc, ones that deftly underscored and enhanced Coleman’s arrangements, built on the Asian influences in Rodgers’s music as refracted through a jazz prism.

In a rather sarcastic review of three albums inspired by the songs from
Flower Drum Song
in the
Washington Post
on February 15, 1959, Tony Gieske wrote, “Jazzmen have resuscitated some pretty terrible stuff. . . . Only the Cy Coleman Trio (Westminster 6106) achieves anything resembling music from this awful pap, at the cost of Heaven knows how bad an aesthetic hernia.”

Coleman’s third Westminster release,
Why Try to Change Me Now?
, came out just a month later, offering up standards like “Smile” and “This Time the Dream’s on Me” alongside Coleman’s title track. The effort of putting out three LPs over the course of about six months shows on this one. Coleman’s work is still fine, but the overall experience pales in comparison to his two previous outings for the label. Nonetheless, the editors at
Vogue
remembered it by year’s end, putting it on their list of recommended “30 Records for Christmas” and calling it “a fine entertainment concocted of unhackneyed tunes, virtuoso piano by Coleman, and a steady, contagious beat provided by his associates Aaron Bell on bass and Edmond Thigpen on drums.”
9

Coleman told publisher Buddy Morris to expect this level of activity away from songwriting when he signed his contract. Leigh was also aware that this was part of the agreement that the two had made, and yet Coleman’s work as a performer fueled notes of discord between them. In 2002, Coleman recalled, “I warned them. I said, ‘Listen, I’m doing this, but I have a very good career that’s supporting me nicely, and I like it. And I’m not giving it up. So if that deal is not good for you, let’s not do anything.’ But he took the deal, and Carolyn took the deal too, but she didn’t want to honor it. And so we had a lot, a lot of fights about that.”
10

Squabbles notwithstanding, Coleman and Leigh’s work auditioning for
Gypsy
and drafting scores for
13 Daughters
and
The Wonderful O
had established them as a promising new team for musical theater, and Morris was simultaneously working to promote them to Broadway producers. Their collective efforts seemed to pay off in August 1959, when producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin announced they would be using Coleman and Leigh for an original musical called
Skyscraper.

Becoming part of the Feuer-Martin “family” of artists at this time was quite the coup for the composer and lyricist, because the producing team had an almost perfect record of generating hits. Their success dated back to 1948, when they introduced composer-lyricist Frank Loesser to Broadway with
Where’s Charley?
They followed this show with Loesser’s
Guys and Dolls
, which would run twelve hundred performances and become a staple of the American musical theater canon, and then Cole Porter’s
Can-Can
, which put future star Gwen Verdon into a featured role. Feuer and Martin produced a second Porter show in 1955,
Silk Stockings
.

In between these two musicals they also gave Sandy Wilson’s frolicsome valentine to 1920s musicals,
The Boy Friend
, its American premiere, and with it Feuer and Martin had a hand in bringing to the United States a performer who would become one of America’s most beloved screen icons. When
The Boy Friend
debuted at the Royale Theatre on September 30, 1954, it starred Julie Andrews, who would catapult to international attention a scant eighteen months later with her portrayal of Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Loewe’s
My Fair Lady
.

The producers stumbled with their sixth venture,
Whoop-Up
, which ran only fifty-six performances, but their reputation for taste and excellence remained undamaged.

In the
New York Times
announcement on August 28, 1959 about the plans for
Skyscraper
, Feuer and Martin were quoted as being “very excited” about having Coleman and Leigh do the score for this show about a woman who refuses to sell her brownstone to developers wanting to demolish it to make way for a high-rise. It was to have originally been written by none other than Rodgers and Hammerstein, but because the songwriting greats had been working on two others shows,
Flower Drum Song
and
The Sound of Music
, they had stepped away from the project and allowed Feuer and Martin to search for a new writing team.

Ultimately,
Skyscraper
, which was to have opened during the winter of the 1959–60 season, quietly faded into the background after Feuer and Martin announced another venture: a musical version of Elmer Rice’s 1945 play
Dream Girl
, which would have a book by the Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist himself and music and lyrics by Coleman and Leigh, who had been shifted away from their previous assignment. In addition, the producers announced that this new musical would star Carol Channing, who had captured audiences’ and critics’ attention with her performance as Lorelei Lee in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
some ten years earlier.

Dream Girl
centers on Georgina, an aspiring novelist who escapes the realities of her life in daydreams. Ultimately, however, she learns that in order to achieve real happiness, she has to stop fantasizing about what could be and embrace the truth of the world around her. Rice, who in the 1920s had written
The Adding Machine
, a seminal drama about the dehumanization of workers in a quickly modernizing workplace, experimented with form again in
Dream Girl
, which, as either play or musical, was meant to be a fluid experience for audiences, with naturalistic scenes giving way to heightened imaginary ones within the space of a line or two.

Coleman and Leigh, seemingly inspired by the wealth of possibilities provided by Rice’s plot, developed a range of song ideas. They outlined “Gemutlichkeit” for a Tyrolean fantasy. They also started work on two songs for the heroine, “Spare Me Your Kindness, Sir” and “In My Inimitable Way.” For the book critic who disdains Georgina’s worldview and also becomes the man to whom Georgina finds herself begrudgingly drawn, Leigh drafted two sets of lyrics: one for a song to be called “Reading the Blurb” and another for a tune that would explain his methodology for writing a review.

Sadly, little of what Coleman might have contemplated for these songs exists either as drafts in his files or in demo recordings. One explanation might be that Coleman was suffering from an apparently crippling writer’s block during the first few months of 1960, even as Leigh was working on her lyrics.

In a letter to Bud Morris dated March 7, Leigh wrote: “He told me several times that he hadn’t the ‘heart’ right now to sit down and right [
sic
] ‘just’ songs—although he wasn’t sure he’d always feel that way.” Leigh doesn’t mention
Dream Girl
in the three-page letter, but she does write about a conversation she’d had with the singer Andy Williams: “I mentioned when he asked what other pop stuff I had, that I was set on writing ‘The Rules of the Road’—and he leaped immediately at the idea . . . [he] wants to see it the moment it’s even half done. Now if only Cy would try some more. . . . He’s given it a little time, but I know that what he said is true. . . . His heart isn’t in it.”
11

Leigh offers some speculations about what might have been troubling Cy. She wonders about his ongoing analysis: “I know from what people tell me it’s a difficult thing to go through.” Furthermore, she considers the frustrations that he might have been having with the meetings regarding Broadway projects: “He’s as anxious to have a hit song as anyone—but he labels working at it futile.”
12

Coleman confirmed the feeling in public just a few weeks before Leigh’s letter. In one of his regularly syndicated “My New York” columns, Mel Heimer reported on a conversation he’d had with the songwriter: “‘I’ve been attending more darned meetings,’ Cy said as we sat back and listened amiably to Clyde McCoy’s chiseled corn, ‘and have had my head filled with more darned suggestions. Gee, the other day, I finally got so weary that I just said—kind of pathetically, I suppose—‘Hey, fellows, can I just go home and write some music now?’”
13

There’s no record of how or exactly when Coleman pulled himself back to the piano to write, but news in the
New York Times
on April 12, 1960—just five weeks after Leigh’s letter to Morris—must have had a hand in his return to work and helped, at least in part, to dispel some of the futility he had been feeling.

10.
Wildcat

Coleman’s sense of futility about endless meetings and no time for songwriting came to an end in early 1960, when he and Carolyn Leigh found themselves on a fast track to a Broadway opening for a musical that would star Lucille Ball.

For years Ball had been the toast of television in the iconic series
I Love Lucy
, playing the lovably antic Lucy Ricardo opposite real-life husband Desi Arnaz’s Ricky Ricardo. Before this she had made a host of films but had done little work onstage. Coincidentally, one of her primary theater credits was a production of Elmer Rice’s
Dream Girl
that had toured the summer stock circuit in the late 1940s.

Reports of Ball’s desire to appear on Broadway had circulated before 1960. At one point it seemed that a stage version of Dorothy Parker’s short story
Big Blonde
would be the vehicle that would help the star realize her goal. This drama, however, turned out not to be the show that would bring America’s most beloved redhead to the Great White Way, and in an early March column Hedda Hopper delivered the news about the show that would. “Lucille Ball’s new play will be a musical titled
Wildcat
, which Richard Nash has written. Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn are doing the music, and Michael Kidd will direct.”
1

Hopper’s announcement came just one week after another major story about the actress broke: on March 3 Ball filed for divorce from Arnaz. This was news that made the front pages of papers around the country and also ensured that any show Ball chose would be heavily reported on.

By the end of March, Ball was throwing herself fully into a life that would not involve her husband, business partner, and costar, and she traveled to New York to begin discussions about
Wildcat
and start the preparations for her relocation from California. During an interview on this trip with columnist John Crosby, she mused about the new directions she was taking with the show: “I’ve clowned a couple [of songs]. I’ve satirized a song. Now I’ve got to sing. I’m working on—what do you call it?—projection. I’ve got a two octave range.”
2
Crosby’s article also mentioned that Kermit Bloomgarden (who had been responsible for bringing such dramas as Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
to Broadway) would be producing the new musical.

Within two weeks of the story, however, the team for
Wildcat
had changed dramatically. First, an April 6
Variety
article—with the banner headline “New Writers Duet in Legit”—announced that Coleman and Leigh had become the songwriters for
Wildcat
and that their projects for Feuer and Martin,
Dream Girl
and
Skyscraper
, had been “put in abeyance.” Shortly after this, director-choreographer Kidd and book writer Nash took over as producers, although the show’s financing—almost its complete $400,000 capitalization—was ultimately provided by Desilu, the company co-owned by Ball and Arnaz.

Kidd, new to producing, was anything but a neophyte when it came to staging musicals. At the time he was represented on Broadway by
Destry Rides Again
, starring Andy Griffith, who would shortly become a television star in his own right, and Kidd had staged and choreographed the musical
Li’l Abner
. In addition, he had provided the dances for shows ranging from
Finian’s Rainbow
to
Guys and Dolls
and
Can-Can
.

Nash, on the other hand, came to the show with no direct experience. He had never served as a producer before, and while he had written the screenplay for the film adaptation of
Porgy and Bess
, starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in the title roles, he had never written a musical. His biggest hit to date had been
The Rainmaker
, which enjoyed a respectable run of 125 performances during the 1954–55 season and went on to become a film starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn.

Beyond
Rainmaker
, which would ultimately serve as the source material for the musical
110 in the Shade
, with a score by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, Nash’s track record on Broadway was spotty. He had had another five plays produced, but three of them closed within days of their openings. The others limped to runs of about two months, including
Girls of Summer
, which starred Shelley Winters and George Peppard and featured a title song by none other than Stephen Sondheim.

Nash had been contemplating the story of
Wildcat
for nearly three years. He originally thought it would be a play but realized during his development of the script that “the hoped-for vigor and color and American excitement of this material could be best captured in a musical.”
3

Nash’s book, which evolved under Kidd’s guidance, centers on Wildcat “Wildy” Jackson, a woman traveling through the southwest in 1912 looking to strike it rich in the oil business. At her side is her younger sister, Janie, who has a clear-sightedness that her sibling lacks. Wildcat pins all of her hopes for finding a gusher on one man, Joe Dynamite, an itinerant derrick foreman whom she has never met. Ball described what happens after the two meet: “We fight all through the thing. . . . Do I have to tell you what happens with [Joe] and me at the end?”
4

Beyond Wildy’s search for oil and her relationship with Joe, there is a second-tier romance between Janie and Joe’s bosom buddy, Hank, and a subplot involving an erstwhile countess. Other characters include Sookie, the colorful old coot who owns the land that Wildy decides to drill on, and a corrupt sheriff, who is out to get his own portion of the riches the oil boon promises.

Once Ball committed to the tuner and preproduction began on all fronts, she decided to take on another project in an effort to distract herself from her divorce. She accepted a summertime movie,
The Facts of Life
, a gentle comedy about two old friends, both married to other people, who find themselves falling in love with one another.

Filming was supposed to take only a few weeks in June and July, but midway through production there was a mishap on the set. Ball, after taking a break, returned to a boat that was moored in a water tank for a new shot. As she started to get aboard, she slipped and struck her head against the edge of the craft. The impact was enough to knock her unconscious, resulting in a concussion. In addition, she suffered a long gash on her left leg.

After a brief hospitalization and recuperation, Ball resumed filming a couple of weeks later but then needed additional treatment for her leg injury after an infection developed due to a piece of nylon stocking that had not been removed from the cut. In short, she would soon be rehearsing a musical in which she would be dancing with a just-healed leg—not a promising prospect.

Despite her injuries and alongside her filming and plans for relocating herself, her children, and her household staff to Manhattan, Ball continued to be integrally involved in the preproduction process of
Wildcat
. Part of her work involved revisions to the script. Bill Brader reported on a meeting he had with Ball in June to discuss
The Facts of Life
: “There apparently are still some rough spots in the ‘Wildcat’ script, however. The interview was interrupted by a phone call during which Miss Ball had some pungent points to make about enlivening the play.”
5

Ball was also involved in casting. During the course of the summer, Kidd and Nash flew to California to hold auditions while Ball was recuperating. Some impressive names were bandied about in gossip columns regarding likely casting choices. Anthony Quinn, Stephen Forrest, and Stephen Boyd were all mentioned as possibilities for Ball’s leading man, while performers like Julius La Rosa and Phyllis Newman were touted as being candidates for the roles of Hank and Janie, respectively.

Eventually, it was Keith Andes, then the lead on the television police drama
This Man Dawson
, who won the role of Joe Dynamite. Unlike his costar, Andes was no stranger to the stage. He had starred in the short-lived musical
Maggie
, and after touring the country in Cole Porter’s
Kiss Me, Kate
, he succeeded the show’s original star, the legendary Alfred Drake, on Broadway.

Other principals in the cast included Paula Stewart—who had attracted notice when she starred in a revival of Frank Loesser’s
The Most Happy Fella
in early 1959—as Wildcat’s sister. Clifford David, an actor who would go on to appear in shows like
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
and
1776
, got his first Broadway musical role as Hank. Character actor Don Tomkins, who had been in the original casts of two long-running 1920s musicals,
Good News
and
Follow Thru
, came out of retirement to play Sookie, and Edith King, an actress with significant work on Broadway in both new plays and the classics, was cast as the Countess.

Coleman and Leigh busily worked on their score during casting. They had signed their contracts in early May, and a few days later December 15 was set for
Wildcat
’s opening night. This timeline suggests that the team had about four months to complete their songs, provided that rehearsals began sometime in September.

In actuality, however, they had even less time, because Kidd opted to have a series of prerehearsals with the principals starting in late July and early August. The songwriters had to have Ball’s numbers completed for this, and foremost on their minds was what they would write for their star—the first notes that the one and only Lucille Ball would sing on Broadway.

For a while they avoided tackling the task, writing other numbers instead. They also went through their existing songs to see if anything might fit into the fabric of the show, and in the process they dusted off a pair of tunes they had developed for
The Wonderful O
: “A Little What If” and “Bouncing Back for More” (although both songs again went unused).

Some of this work they did in the Catskills, not at the Kaufman Bungalows in Monticello but at the upscale Grossinger’s in nearby Liberty, New York. Coleman’s choice may have been intended as a rebuke to his mother, who throughout the 1950s questioned the validity of his profession. This changed with the news of
Wildcat
, as he told an interviewer in 1987: “When my mother read about ‘Wildcat’ in the
Daily Forward
, that’s when she knew I wasn’t wasting my life.”
6
Coleman also mentioned in later years that his mother ultimately had been more interested in getting tickets to see Ball film her television show than she had been in seeing the musical he had written for the star.

As troublesome as all of this must have been for him, Coleman simply pushed forward with Leigh, and over the course of the summer they were able to complete nearly all of the required numbers. Their drafts and early ideas even went so far as to bring the presence of the southwest’s Mexican culture into the score. For a scene in the second act centering on a fiesta they developed “Es Muy Simpatico,” writing it in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. The song was ultimately not used (it was succeeded by the less linguistically challenging “El Sombrero”), but it did plant the seed for another Coleman creation that would reach the stage over a decade later.

But even with the bulk of the score under their belts, there still was the question of what the opening number for Ball would be. As Coleman put it: “Here was a problem: how to write for a woman who had five good notes. And not just any woman, but the biggest star in the world at the time. What is she going to sing when she steps out on that stage for the first time? She had to land big or else we were all dead.”
7

Finally, Coleman remembered, “Carolyn could see I was stuck and because she knew me so well, she figured out a way to take the pressure off. She said, ‘Cy, let’s get the specter of this big star out of our eyes. What if it wasn’t Lucille Ball? What if you had to write the opening song for somebody who had just an ordinary amount of talent?’”
8

Coleman immediately plunked out a line of music that he thought might be effective. It was straightforward, but nothing that seemed like anything the songwriters would want to put their names on. Then, as Coleman related, “One morning she called and said, ‘You know that funny little melody you left with me. I have a really funny lyric. You are going to break up.’”
9
It was then that she sang the first words to “Hey, Look Me Over.”

Coleman and Leigh continued with the melody and lyric, still not fully believing in what they had written. Their minds were changed, however, when they took this song, along with others, to their publisher, Buddy Morris. He adored what they had written and assured them that they had a hit song.

Eventually it came time for them to share what they had crafted for Ball. It was a memory that Coleman never forgot: “We finally met her in the publisher’s office. What impressed me was that she was more frightened than I was.”
10
He played through the score, leaving “Hey, Look Me Over” for last. After he played it, she was delighted with what she heard, and a major hurdle for both star and composer was cleared.

Kidd’s prerehearsals took place in Los Angeles “at the Masonic Temple on Hollywood Boulevard. We started the beginning of rehearsals in Los Angeles, because Lucy lived there and it was easy, and she and her mother, DeDe, lived out near me in the Brentwood area,” Clifford David recalled. He also distinctly remembered his first encounter with Coleman: “This very kind and just really all-around good guy came up to me and said, ‘I’m so glad that you’re going to be doing some of my songs.’ . . . It was that kind of largesse that exuded from Cy.”
11

Once rehearsals shifted to New York, another member of the company met the composer: future television star Valerie Harper, who remembered him as being “a cute guy. He kind of looked like the guys I went to high school with. He was funny and wisecracking and warm . . . a Jewish guy. And he was so unassuming and [there was] nothing pretentious about him at all. I always remember him as being fun.”
12