You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (25 page)

The rapport was mutual. “Cy was very easy in the studio. He’d let it happen. He’d let the arranger and the musicians work it out, and if he was critical of anything, maybe he’d go out and say, ‘No. No. This is the chord here, not that.’ That’s why we became good friends; there was no arrogance. He wasn’t demanding. . . . He was one of the few people in New York who was a professional and a success whom I became friends with.”
10

A measure of Coleman’s success, just as Bongiovi was coming to know him, could be found in the growing number of appearances Coleman was making as a celebrity performer at fund-raising benefits. He had always been an active champion of causes, particularly ones with a liberal agenda, but as the 1960s drew to a close and the 1970s dawned he was featured almost monthly as part of the entertainment at events for organizations ranging from New York’s public television station to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Assisting such worthy causes provided Coleman with an outlet that his work as a businessman and a recording artist could not: he was able to return to live performance without having to commit to a two- or three-week period in a specific venue.

Coleman’s accomplishments also paid financial—and, by extension, personal—dividends. In August 1971, after years of summer rentals in Amagansett, he bought a two-level home in Southampton. It would be both a haven and a workspace for the remainder of his life. His love of the beach and this place even inspired him to write one of the few songs for which he supplied his own words, “September’s Coming,” which went unrecorded until
It Started with a Dream
, a late-life CD from Coleman himself. In the liner notes he wrote: “I didn’t start out as a beach person, but at a fairly young age turned into one. That, coupled with my fondness for autumn and my strong feeling that September is when exciting things start to happen, inspired me to write this tone poem.”

Coleman’s busy workload also included searching for properties for a Broadway musical to work on with Dorothy Fields. There had been
The Coffee Lover
just before the start of filming on
Sweet Charity
, and there were also rumors of other shows, such as one from early 1967, when Jack O’Brian reported that he had uncovered the project the writers had “been cloaking in such secrecy.”
11
It was a musical version of the 1941 movie
Hold Back the Dawn
, which had starred Charles Boyer and Olivia de Havilland. The idea for this project most likely came from Fields, who had for a while in the mid-1950s toyed with the idea of using some of Jerome Kern’s unpublished melodies as the basis for a musical version of the film. Nothing from Coleman or Fields ever materialized for it, however, and though the success of
Charity
prompted many offers, the team turned them down.

At the end of 1969 Coleman and Fields did find a property to musicalize: a prizewinning play by Jerome Coopersmith, who received a Tony Award nomination for his book for the Sherlock Holmes musical
Baker Street
and who also contributed to the book of the musical
The Apple Tree
. Coopersmith had recently taken first prize in a Massachusetts State College drama competition with a biodrama about Eleanor Roosevelt; it focused on her young adulthood at the dawn of the twentieth century as she struck out to forge a life on her own and found herself being wooed by the man who would become America’s only four-term president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As originally envisioned, the piece would contain songs. Coopersmith’s conceit had Eleanor repeatedly returning to a central musical theme and literally trying on different hats as she attempted to create her identity.

Coleman took an unusual step with regard to the project. He optioned it himself, and his decision to start work on it—without the benefit of an outside producer—demonstrates that he was trying to gain more control over his work and career. Now, in addition to serving as producer of his own records, publishing a growing catalog of music, and managing performers, he was considering the possibility of serving as his own theatrical producer, thus gaining the ability to completely shepherd a show as it was being developed.

In the first story about the project,
Variety
made special note of the new role that Coleman and Fields were taking. They would be “proceeding without a producer for present. They’ll most likely coproduce it with an outside management.”
12
With the announcement, which projected that the show could potentially reach Broadway within the 1969–70 season, came one other significant detail. A director had been signed to stage the production: Morton Da Costa, who after his work on both the stage and film versions of
Auntie Mame
and
The Music Man
had developed something of a spotty track record, thanks to shows like
Sherry!
> and
Maggie Flynn
, both of which had brief runs (fewer than a hundred performances) on Broadway.

Coleman, Fields, and Coopersmith worked on
Eleanor
throughout the course of 1970, but according to Coopersmith it was a rocky collaboration from the outset: “Dorothy was ill-tempered and negative about my work from the beginning. She wanted to throw out my concept entirely and start from scratch to write a musical play about the Roosevelts. I had to remind her what the situation was: namely, that the play was already written and I thought being considered for musical adaptation.”

Coleman attempted to defuse the situation: “At one point, she went into the kitchen to get coffee and cookies for all of us. When she was gone, Cy whispered to me, ‘Watch out for her. She’s half monster, half Jewish mama.’”
13

Despite the differences between Fields and Coopersmith, he did begin making changes so that the book for the musical focused more on the romance between Eleanor and Franklin. But the goal of having
Eleanor
reach Broadway before summer 1970 was not met. Instead, it began to appear among the shows being touted for the 1970–71 Broadway season.

By this point not only had Coopersmith given the show a new title—“If There Were More People Like You”—but Coleman and Fields had also outlined some seventeen songs that would be part of it, including the trunk songs “Keep It in the Family” and “After Forty, It’s Patch, Patch, Patch.” Coleman and Fields also completed work on another nine numbers, and the show was in good enough shape that they offered a reading of it to Alexander Cohen, who came on board to serve as producer.

The team also began looking for stars and found the performers they believed could play the central roles. For the future president they turned to Ken Howard, who recalled, “Dorothy Fields, and maybe Cy too, liked me a lot from
1776
, and maybe she’d seen me in something else, and she had it in her mind that she wanted me to play the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I said, ‘I’m a little tall and I’m a little young.’ She didn’t care.”
14

For the title role, they set their sights on Jane Alexander, who had earned raves for her performance opposite James Earl Jones in Howard Sackler’s
The Great White Hope
. Years later Coleman remembered, “Jane Alexander, who later did ‘Eleanor and Roosevelt,’ was somebody I was working with for that role.”
15

The team redrafted the work once Cohen became involved, and plans started for a Broadway bow in the spring of 1971. In January of that year, however, Cohen withdrew from his involvement. Coleman later recalled: “We couldn’t get it produced. Everybody disliked the book. . . . But the book writer didn’t want anybody coming in and changing anything,” Although Coleman attempted to do some more fund-raising himself, he was, according to columnist Hobe Morrison, “unable to get the project in motion.”
16

Eventually, the show was abandoned, and for the rest of his life Coleman would often say that it was a score of which he was particularly proud. Houston Huddleston, Floyd and Nancy Huddleston’s son, recalled that when he was a young adult working to get his start in the film business he spent some time with Coleman, who, no matter how busy, would always find time for his friends and their kids. When Huddleston asked the songwriter about his career, Coleman told Huddleston that
Eleanor
had “the best score I ever wrote that no one will ever hear.”
17

The difficulties with getting
Eleanor
to the stage might have contributed to a shift in Coleman’s focus on writing partners other than Fields during this period. Perhaps most surprisingly, and even though they hadn’t worked together in any substantive or genuinely collegial way in nearly ten years, Coleman started working with Carolyn Leigh again.

Their renewed collaboration resulted in a single song, a curious bit of specialty material, “Feathers,” which has a slight 1920s bounce to it. Its sound may indicate that they intended it for a production that producer Arthur Whitelaw announced at the end of 1971: a full-scale revival of
Little Me
that would feature a revised book by Neil Simon and new songs by Coleman and Leigh. But, like
Eleanor
, the project never got further than the drafting stages.

A similar fate lay in store for one other show to which Coleman and Leigh were attached during their trial reunion. In early 1972 Alexander Cohen announced that he would produce a new version of the topical revue
Hellzapoppin
, which had enjoyed a nearly three-year run in the late 1930s. It took over four years to bring this production to the stage, and when he did it featured only one song from Coleman and Leigh: a cutout from
Wildcat
, “Bouncing Back for More.” The songwriters, however, would never see the day when this tune would debut on Broadway.
Hellzapoppin
, which starred film comedian Jerry Lewis and stage and screen star Lynn Redgrave, closed during its out-of-town tryout.

The troubles that Cohen had in getting
Hellzapoppin
to the stage were indicative of changes that were taking place in the paradigm of bringing a new musical to Broadway. No longer could producers simply announce a show and have it arrive within the span of a year. The cost of bringing a show to Broadway had risen too steeply. For instance, Coleman’s first show,
Wildcat
, required an investment of $450,000 (or, in 1976 dollars, roughly $850,000). In comparison, when
Hellzapoppin
closed out of town in 1976, it cost nearly $1.3 million.

It was a trend that Coleman took seriously and attempted to address throughout the remainder of his career. He always had at least three or four different shows, with different collaborators, in process at any given moment. One musical that would be part of his life through the end of the decade was born alongside these other projects.

It was a show that Coleman developed with his longtime friend and sometime collaborator James Lipton, who had provided lyrics to one of Coleman’s melodies from the score of the movie
The Art of Love
. By the time it was announced in the fall of 1971, the musical the two men had written was known as
Beautiful People
.

The tuner centered on a forty-eight-hour marathon group encounter session. During the course of the show, all of the patients—from an unhappy Westchester housewife to a repressed gay man to a woman who had once been a centerfold model for a
Playboy
-style men’s magazine—stripped away their repressed feelings and desires to emerge as relatively cleansed souls.

For
Beautiful People
Coleman worked in a pop vein, supporting Lipton’s tale. It was one that aimed at being as frank as possible about life in 1971, covering not only issues of sexuality and sexual identity but also the strictures that society was placing on the group participants.

Coleman and Lipton’s work attracted producer Herman Levin, who was responsible for bringing
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
My Fair Lady
to Broadway and at the time was enjoying another very different success with the drama
The Great White Hope
. Levin’s plan, during the final months of 1971, was to produce Coleman and Lipton’s show on Broadway the following spring. However, simultaneously with Levin’s acquisition of the rights, Coleman and Fields finally found the property that they had been seeking for two years.
Beautiful People
would have to wait.

18.
Seesaw

With their new project, a musical version of William Gibson’s two-character play
Two for the Seesaw
, Coleman and Dorothy Fields found themselves returning to both a milieu and character types that had helped inspire them during their first outing together. This portrait of a conventional man from Nebraska and a decidedly unconventional woman from New York falling in love despite their differences bowed on Broadway in 1958 starring Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft. With its backdrop of New York City and its slightly kooky heroine, who yearns for a man with whom she can share her life, Gibson’s play had more than a passing similarity to
Sweet Charity
, and the fact that the film version of it starred Shirley MacLaine (opposite Robert Mitchum) only reinforced the sense that Coleman and Fields were returning to familiar territory.

The first inkling that the intimate piece was being turned into a musical came in September 1970 in a season preview in
Variety
. The show, like
Eleanor
, was expected during the course of the next seven months. At the time, however, producers Joseph Kipness and Lawrence Kasha—whose most recent productions were
Applause
(the musical adaptation of
All About Eve
) and the rock musical
Inner City
—could not release any information about who the creators might be.

For the next year the project disappeared from the news. Stories about the spring 1971 season didn’t mention it, and when previews of the 1971–72 season ran, a musical version of
Seesaw
was not among the shows anticipated. Then, in November 1971, Jack O’Brian led his column with the news that Coleman and Fields would be creating the score and that Michael Stewart (who wrote the book for the Tony-winning musical
Bye Bye Birdie
and picked up a Tony Award for his book for
Hello, Dolly!
) would write the show’s book. O’Brian even added a bit of Shubert Alley gossip: “Liza Minnelli can have the role originated by Anne Bancroft.”
1

The Minnelli rumor went no further, and she wasn’t mentioned at all when the
New York Times
carried a story about the show in January. Fascinatingly, however, the piece did remind readers that another musical version of Gibson’s play had once been in the works. In 1967 Hillard Elkins, who produced the Sammy Davis Jr. musical
Golden Boy
, with a book by Gibson, announced that he had convinced the playwright to write
Gittel
, a musical that would “weave a brand new script” around the heroine.
2

This plan evaporated when Gibson grew “reluctant” about the idea, and it was only after the success of
Applause
, which starred Lauren Bacall, that Gibson allowed Kipness and Kasha to option his play for musicalization. When the
Times
story was published, Stewart had already been working on the adaptation for nearly six months, and he told the paper, “I hope I’ve kept the spirit of the play without swamping it.”
3

By May
Seesaw
appeared to be picking up steam. The producers announced that they had engaged Robert Moore (who’d helmed
Promises, Promises
) to direct and that they anticipated the show would arrive on Broadway by Christmas, after tryout engagements in Washington, D.C., and Detroit. But by July it seemed as if these announcements had been premature: a
Variety
article about Broadway productions for the coming season made no mention of
Seesaw
. Its omission might have struck insiders as particularly peculiar, since the story outlined plans for numerous other and much more speculative projects, such as the Coleman and Leigh–scored
Hellzapoppin
and
Eleanor
, which still had Coopersmith as book writer, along with a new set of producers and a songwriting team that had yet to be named.

The omission of
Seesaw
from this article might have stemmed from the fact that Kipness and Kasha had to find a new director: over the summer Robert Moore withdrew. In his place came Edwin Sherin, who had been steadily establishing himself as a director of nonmusicals, particularly at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where he had served as associate producing director. Among his credits were classics like Bertolt Brecht’s
Galileo
and Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, as well as new works, perhaps most notably Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning
The Great White Hope
, which marked his Broadway debut as a director. Sherin (who married
The Great White Hope
’s star Alexander in 1975) was a bold choice that underscored the fact that both the producers and creators felt
Seesaw
had the potential to be something other than a run-of-the-mill musical comedy.

While Kipness and Kasha were working on nailing down the specifics of the production, which by August had been delayed to March 1973 and booked for the Palace Theatre, Coleman and Fields worked steadily at outfitting Stewart’s evolving book with songs. Because of the similarities between Gittel and Charity, the team had a pair of trunk songs that easily fit into the show. They found a spot not only for “Poor Everybody Else,” which had briefly been used in
Sweet Charity
, but also for “Big Fat Heart,” which had never been performed.

The songwriting team also looked to their most recent collaboration for material as they contemplated the
Seesaw
score, and they found places for “If There Were More People Like You,” “We’ve Got It,” and “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish,” from
Eleanor
. They were even able to use one song from
The Coffee Lover
, the teasing “You’re in a Highly Emotional State,” in this new project.

They augmented these songs, which with the exception of one were for the central characters, with another fourteen during
Seesaw
’s development and rehearsal process. Coleman worked in a variety of musical vernaculars to bring a genuinely contemporary sound to the show and to emphasize the multiethnic landscape that Stewart was building into his book. Before going into rehearsals, Coleman and Fields completed a rousing Latin-infused ensemble number, “Spanglish”; a gospel solo for one of Gittel’s best friends, “Ride Out the Storm”; and a semi-funkadelic paean to Manhattan, “My City.”

Alongside these were other songs that brought a smooth pop sound to the show. “Pick Up the Pieces,” “He’s Good for Me,” and “Loveable Lunatic” all coursed with the sort of energy and rhythms that were associated with performers ranging from Neil Sedaka to Dionne Warwick.

Coleman’s knowledge of pop and his facility with any number of styles uniquely suited him not just for a show like
Seesaw
but also for the changing musical landscape of Broadway. After all, he’d brought in a synthesizer for
Sweet Charity
in 1966. Since then such landmark shows as
Hair
,
Jesus Christ Superstar
, and
Godspell
, as well as lesser-known ones like Melvin Van Peebles’s
Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death
and
Don’t Sell Us Cheap
, had radically changed the sound of Broadway musicals. In his work on
Seesaw
, Coleman was attempting to bridge the divide between a “golden age” sound and a pure rock score.

With the particulars for the production in place and the script and score being finalized, casting began. For the leading man, Fields suggested the performer she had wanted to play young Franklin Roosevelt, Ken Howard, and after a pair of auditions he had the role of Jerry Ryan.

For Gittel Mosca, there had been some big names floated in columns (generally by Jack O’Brian, who after stumping for Minnelli, suggested both Barbra Streisand and the original Gittel, Anne Bancroft). The role eventually went to Lainie Kazan, Coleman’s longtime friend, whose career as both a singer and actress had been steadily on the rise since the mid-1960s. She recalled how she got the part after seeing an announcement of the show in a trade paper: “I called [Cy], and I asked him if I could come in on my own dime and audition for them. And he said, ‘Of course,’ and so I flew in and I auditioned for Ed Sherin and Cy and Dorothy and Michael Stewart, and from that I won the role.”
4

As casting continued through the latter part of 1972, the company grew to include Bill Starr, who would play Gittel’s good friend and dance teacher, Larry; and Joshie Jo Armstead, who played her best female friend, aspiring actress Sophie. Tellingly, both performers came to
Seesaw
after having worked in musicals that featured a pop sound. Starr had been in
Via Galactica
(a short-lived rock musical by Galt MacDermott, who had written
Hair
), and Armstead had been seen in one of Van Peebles’s musicals. The company also featured another
Galactica
vet, Richard Ryder, along with Chris Wilzak, who was making her Broadway debut, as the couple who ran Gittel’s favorite health-food restaurant. Playing Jerry’s Latino neighbors were Gloria Irizarry and a very young Giancarlo Esposito.

Via Galactica
not only provided
Seesaw
with some of its players but also with a home, the Uris Theatre (later renamed the Gershwin), which was left vacant when the former show closed after a mere seven performances. With the new theater came a new opening date, February 27, 1973.

The casting of Starr and Ryder—who were performing in
Galactica
until December 2—indicates how tight the rehearsal process was for
Seesaw
, which was slated to begin previews at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit on January 8. Sherin, along with choreographer Grover Dale, had been able to do certain amounts of work with the principals and the dancers, but the company had only the month of December—and a short month at that, because of the holidays—to get the musical in shape for audiences.

A further sense of how
Seesaw
was coming together at the eleventh hour came from musical director Don Pippin, who had a long string of Broadway credits on shows like
Irma La Douce
and
Mame
and had won a Tony Award for his work in this capacity on
Oliver!
He recalled how he was hired for the new show: “I was called by the producers a few days before rehearsals, and I just happened to be free, so I said, ‘Okay. Fine.’ As a favor.” A few days later Pippin, who had never met Coleman, had his first meeting about the score with the composer. “After about an hour of our first meeting, knowing I had to get vocal arrangements done before rehearsal, which was only three days away, I suddenly realized we were never going to get through the material, because there were so many different ways his mind kept going about everything.”
5

It was, Pippin recalled, an indication of Coleman’s “nimble, fast mind . . . . It wasn’t a question of any of them weren’t very interesting, but you had to choose one of them.” Eventually, Pippin decided, “I had to start making very fast choices, so I could get out of there and start doing my work.”
6

Neither Howard nor Kazan recalled time being an issue as they rehearsed, but there were others. Howard remembered that Sherin “sort of wanted to deal with this great
Two for the Seesaw
story and leave the singing and dancing to the others. Somebody like Robert Moore [with whom Howard had worked on
Promises, Promises
] can do that with a certain amount of style and say, ‘Listen, as far as I’m concerned, a key is something you open a door with.’ He would defer to others, but he had a sense of what the whole musical was.” He added, “I got the feeling that Michael Stewart, right from the beginning, wasn’t happy with Lainie, so there was a little bit of an edge.”
7

Kazan remembered, “I had been studying with Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner, and I was very much the method actress, you know? And I was trying to be pure in my approach to the role, and I became Gittel Mosca.”

Because of Sherin’s background, she said, “he understood my approach to the role, where no one else did because they were all from the musical theater. You know, ‘Hit your mark,’ ‘Say your lines,’ and ‘Sing out, Louise.’ I was going deep into the role. I was carving this role out and knowing where it would end up but getting there in a different manner. The impatience for success from everyone was so immediate that they didn’t allow that kind of work.”
8

It all came to a head one afternoon when Stewart exploded and Kazan ended up in tears. At this point, Howard recalled, “I left. I just didn’t want to be part of it. This was a disaster. You could just sense it. It was all wrong.” Producer Kipness, who owned a nearby restaurant, Joe’s Pier 52, saw what had happened and stopped Howard, saying, “C’mon kid. Let’s go to my place and have a drink.” Over a couple of shots of Jack Daniels, Kipness assured the leading man, “Don’t worry, kid, you’re doing fine. We’ll see what happens on the road,” to which Howard replied, “Joe, no. I don’t want to get in the middle of this back and forth.”
9

But Howard didn’t want to leave the show, particularly because he was enjoying his work with the songwriters so much: “That was always a joy and nothing less than really, really helpful. Cy was—I don’t think I was so square—but Cy was cool. He really knew how to kinda swing it.”
10

Yet the tension continued to concern him, and a few nights later he ran into producer David Merrick at a theater district restaurant. Howard and the producer had worked on a number of shows together, not only with the touring company of the musical
Promises, Promises
but also with the Broadway production of Robert Marasco’s thriller
Child’s Play
, for which Howard won a Tony Award.

“I tell him what’s going on and that I’m nervous. He said, ‘All right. This is what’s going to happen.’ He said, ‘Just do what you do. Don’t get embroiled in all of this. You’ll be fine. They’ll replace the role of Gittel. It will be one of four actresses.’” Howard said he remembered Merrick specifically named Linda Lavin, Brenda Vaccaro, and Michele Lee. Howard also recalled that Merrick’s forecast continued: “And I think Michele Lee might be the smartest choice.”
11