You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (8 page)

Beyond all of this, an Italian comic, Harry Mimmo, who bolted unexpectedly the day after the show’s New York opening, was showcased in each act, and then there were production numbers that were generously interspersed throughout. One was a recreation of one of Anderson’s earliest successes, a lavish musical tableau based on Oscar Wilde’s story “Nightingale, Bring Me a Rose,” which had originally been in an edition of
The Greenwich Village Follies
.

Another grandiose number was “Ziegfeldiana,” where the themes of love and marriage led to one bit of heartbreak during rehearsals. During the course of this sequence, the showgirls appeared as brides (Louise was “The Winter Bride”), while the female dancers paraded after them en pointe as attendants. During one rehearsal Lee Becker, the show’s dance captain and a woman who would go on to become the head of the estimable American Dance Machine, broke down.

According to Ken Urmston, a member of the dance ensemble in the show and a man who would continue his Broadway career for several decades, “She suddenly exclaimed in the middle of the number, ‘I trained in ballet all my life to hold the train of a showgirl?’ I can’t do it! I just can’t do it!’”
10
Nerves were calmed and Becker remained with the show, but the tale gives a good indication of the splendor Anderson was lavishing on each number.

He paid similar attention to Coleman and McCarthy’s contribution, “Tin Pan Alley,” although getting the tune written seems to have been somewhat of a tough assignment for its composer.

On an undated sheet with a draft lyric, publisher Jack Robbins implored: “Cy: For God’s sake please write a verse at once for the song.” Later, on Robbins’s letterhead, a handwritten note dated October 2, 1953 informed Coleman that Anderson had let him know that “Tin Pan Alley” would be a centerpiece number in the show, and again Robbins asked Coleman to rush the music. Coleman eventually submitted a gently lilting melody that is distinctly and appropriately old-fashioned for McCarthy’s lyric, which pays tribute to the legendary birthplace of a bulk of the American Songbook.

Anderson staged the number so that it unfolded in sections. Carpenter was on hand to deliver the song itself, and then the proceedings evolved into musical routines that cast a backward glance toward such genres as “Mammy Songs,” “Rhythm Songs,” “Torch Songs,” and “Patriotic Songs.” Each of these was delivered by a different set of performers wearing costumes appropriate to the song style being saluted. Eventually all of the singers and dancers came together to create a tableau tribute “observed” by cartoon cutouts of three songwriting greats: George Gershwin, George M. Cohan, and Irving Berlin.

Urmston, who performed during the first dance section of the number, remembered that it was during rehearsals for it that Anderson’s dedication to beauty flared. He watched Urmston and Ralph McWilliams perform Saddler’s choreography, which included knee slides. Urmston said that Anderson immediately asked what they would be wearing. “We said, ‘White pants,’ and Murray just said, ‘Well, they can’t do a knee slide in white pants.’ He didn’t care about the physicality of something or trying to make it work. He wanted the beautiful picture.”
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Anderson’s attention to detail extended even to the way in which the curtain was drawn. What he had not looked at was how his compendium of divertissements was totaling up in terms of time. When
Almanac
finally played its first performance at Boston’s Shubert Theatre on November 4, it was running three and a half hours, a length that critics made sure to note in their reviews and that prompted
Boston Globe
critic Cyrus Durgin to write, “As the city edition deadline approached, ‘Almanac’ was going strong, with some seven numbers still to come.”
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Despite the show’s length, the critics found much to praise, from Gingold’s and De Wolfe’s work in the central sections to Harry Belafonte’s numbers to the sequences that featured Mimmo, Bean, Bergen, and the team of Carpenter and Dunn. The main objections were to the songs themselves. The November 11
Variety
review of the Boston engagement bluntly stated: “The music is relentlessly humdrum throughout.”

Nevertheless, the show was a hit in the making. In his November 6
Boston Globe
review Durgin said, “My hunch is the show will turn out well.” The
Variety
review echoed the assessment: “There’s enough good stuff in it to insure an extended Broadway run.”

Anderson got down to the business of reshaping the show. “Tin Pan Alley” got moved from its prime location at the top of act 2 (“Ziegfeldiana,” with brides and twirling ballerinas, took its place) to a spot toward the end of the first act. A thread involving Tina Louise’s primary character, Miss Rhinestone of 1953, was removed.

Along with cuts there were additions, notably a bit of theatrical satire, “Don Brown’s Body,” which imagined what a Mickey Spillane detective story might look like onstage if it were treated to the same sort of theatrics seen in the drama
John Brown’s Body
.

During the Boston run, Anderson also attempted to satisfy the critics’ desire to hear more from singer-dancer Dunn. Urmston recalled, “They gave her a number—‘Going Up’; it was an elevator song. And they put it in in Boston, and it stopped the show cold. And so what was told to me was that Polly Bergen said that is the last time she’d be doing that. ‘I’m the singer in the show. She’s supposed to sing and dance with Carleton Carpenter.’”
13

Anderson’s work paid dividends even before the show had started its journey back to New York.
Boston Globe
critic Durgin revisited the production and on November 24 wrote: “Anderson has cut, swept, trimmed, shortened, paced, re-arranged, brightened, tightened, and otherwise polished his revue. . . . All told, ‘Almanac’ now is close to the shape it must be in for its test on Broadway.”

In New York the show settled into the Imperial Theatre on Forty-fifth Street and opened officially on December 10, 1953. The critical reaction from the New York press corps was essentially the same as that of the reviewers in Boston. They all felt that the production’s exceptional parts never quite added up to an entirely satisfying whole.

Each critic had his own thoughts about what aspects of the production worked best. Most were quite enthusiastic about Jean Kerr’s last-minute contribution, “Don Brown’s Body,” and about Gingold’s and De Wolfe’s work in “Dinner for One.” Belafonte’s numbers were also uniformly praised; he earned a Tony for his work in the production.

As for “Tin Pan Alley,” the song and number went unmentioned in all but one review. In his December 11 notice in the
New York World-Telegram
, William Hawkins wrote, “Like most new musicals, ‘Almanac’ seems overloaded. I would never miss ‘Tinpan [
sic
] Alley’ or ‘Hold ’Em Joe.’” (This last was Belafonte’s major calypso number.)

But even in this review enthusiasm for the show outweighed any negative reaction. Hawkins went on to say that Gingold’s work in a sketch about a cellist and Medford’s imitation of Dame Judith Anderson in “Don Brown’s Body” were enough to compensate for any of the production’s deficits.

The show settled into a comfortable run at the Imperial, but in January its momentum was stalled by Anderson’s unexpected death from a heart attack. The production continued under the supervision of producer Harry Rigby.

When
John Murray Anderson’s Almanac
concluded its Broadway run on June 25, 1954, it had played a respectable 299 performances, and though Coleman and McCarthy didn’t get the sort of reviews that make for a breakthrough debut,
Almanac
was a solid Broadway credit. In addition, the revue provided Coleman with his first trunk song, “The Riviera,” which had been intended for the show but never used. It was a tune that proved to be a valuable commodity as he continued his ascent as a songwriter.

7.
“I’m Gonna Laugh You Out of My Life”

The unused tune from
John Murray Anderson’s Almanac
became useful to Coleman as he bolstered two aspects of his professional life that had been fallow for a few years: those of accompanist and arranger.

The opportunity came about thanks to the long-standing relationship between Joseph A. McCarthy Jr. and the famed chanteuse Mabel Mercer, whose career had begun in her native England in the 1920s when she appeared in touring music-hall productions. She eventually made her way to the West End, appearing in
Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1926
. From the theater she had moved on to London’s supper clubs and eventually boîtes in Paris. There she most notably played the chic club Bricktop’s, where she became a favorite of American expatriates enjoying the heady atmosphere of the City of Light between the wars. After World War II broke out Mercer settled in New York and promptly became a fixture at Tony’s West Side, a club on West Fifty-second Street that combined the elegance of the East Side with more bohemian qualities.

Mercer’s performance style was simplicity itself. She sat next to the piano with her hands clasped in her lap. While she sang, she rarely moved. There might be a gesture to accent a word of phrase, but that was it. It was a style that caught on with clubgoers, and by 1953 she was performing in the aptly named Show Case, a small space created especially for her above the bustling Byline Room on West Fifty-Second Street, just blocks away from Tony’s.

Mercer’s devoted following prompted Atlantic Records to celebrate her work in a series of albums. The first installment featured Mercer delivering popular songs by established songwriters. By the time the company issued its second Mercer album in early 1953, she was performing both standards and titles by new talents. One of these was “Over the Weekend,” which had a lyric by Coleman’s writing partner McCarthy and a melody by Jerome Brooks.

Such selections were indicative of Mercer’s passion for interesting untested material, and given that she could “make” a song by performing it, it’s little surprise that songwriters aggressively plugged their work to her. One of Mercer’s close friends, visual artist Beata Gray, recalled, “She also got the lead sheets of musicals before they were produced, and so she would start singing some of the songs even before they appeared on the Broadway stage. I think people just gave them to her.”
1

This certainly was true of Coleman once he had been introduced to Mercer. Years later he looked back on their friendship and collaboration: “When I first started writing, she was the one who was picking up every song I wrote. And she did so many of my songs . . . even silly little things, and she would make them sound like something.”
2

One such song was “The Riviera,” which had been intended for the John Murray Anderson show and then found its way to Atlantic’s third
Songs by Mabel Mercer
album, which carried the subtitle “Written Especially for Her.” Also on the disc was another Coleman-McCarthy song, “Early Morning Blues,” as well as tunes by writers like William Roy and Bart Howard, two other Mercer favorites.

Coleman’s involvement with the album extended beyond providing the music for two of its tracks; Mercer also had him serve as the arranger for all eight tunes on the disc and as her accompanist. The songwriting and Coleman’s oversight resulted in a compendium of songs that provides a compelling snapshot of progressive music and lyric writing at the time; in many ways it’s an early 1950s equivalent to recordings that Audra McDonald made to spotlight new songwriting talent some fifty years later.

“Early Morning Blues” serves as a perfect example. It’s a bittersweet monologue about the way in which love dies after a night of passion, and Coleman’s melody and accompaniment combine elements of jazz and classical music to heighten the intensity of McCarthy’s lyric. On other tracks Coleman, as accompanist-arranger, easily shifts between different styles and moods even as he lends graceful support to Mercer’s gentle, perfectly phrased vocals.

Unfortunately, critics were unimpressed. A review in the
New Yorker
complained that the selections were “marred by self-consciousness in the writing.”
3
And in the January 23 issue of
Billboard
, Bob Rolontz wrote dismissively, “The set will appeal strongly to that special audience to whom the best songs are sad songs.”

Mercer’s album was the second to be released during the period that featured Coleman. The first,
Keyboard Kings
, was his sole outing with MGM, which had signed him back in 1952, an eight-song extended-play release that featured Coleman’s interpretations of standards by the likes of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and Arthur Schwartz.

The pleasant but unremarkable recording went largely unnoticed, and, when combined with the lack of response to “Tin Pan Alley” in
John Murray Anderson’s Almanac
, a sense of a career stalling could certainly have begun swelling in Coleman as he approached his twenty-fifth birthday on June 14.

One springtime highlight for him came as he returned to the Mermaid Room at the Park Sheraton, where the management touted his engagements with weekly ads in publications such as the
New Yorker
. One other perk for Coleman (as well as the club’s patrons) was reported by syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons: “Martha Raye, who has been
spurning
$15,000-a-week cafe offers, accompanied Cy Coleman in a dozen tunes each night last week at [the] Mermaide [
sic
] Room for free.”
4

But something was troubling the seemingly unstoppable Coleman, and during the summer of 1954 he disappeared from the performance world of Manhattan.

How he spent this time is undocumented, but it would seem that he retreated to Monticello and the Kaufman Bungalows. Irv Roth, in thinking about his vacations there between 1954 and 1957, wrote, “He created a sensation here one week-end when he drove up with a male friend and Veronica Lake.”
5
As Coleman’s professional activities from 1955 to 1957 would have kept him in Manhattan on weekends, it stands to reason that Roth’s memory focuses on the period when Coleman took a hiatus from his career.

That he needed some time off is understandable. He had been performing almost nonstop for nearly twenty years. Also, one suspects that he might have used the time to contemplate whatever had compelled him to start visiting therapist Morton B. Cantor eight times a month during early 1951.

What might have been troubling him? Conversations with friends revealed a number of hypotheses. Some think he might have been struggling with the guilt he felt over disappointing his mentors and parents by pursuing a career in jazz. Others speculate that it might have been to discuss issues surrounding his rapid success in clubs and on television and radio.

Such issues don’t easily disappear, and in mid-1954 he obviously needed some time to reflect and maybe even work through what might be considered a quarter-life crisis.

Coleman’s resiliency and drive took over just before the end of the year, when he, along with a newly assembled trio, were hired to play at a newly opened club, the Composer, on West Fifty-eighth Street. His “streamlined modernist piano and the quiet fretwork of his trio” were offered six nights a week through the end of the year.
6

As 1955 dawned, however, work at the club came to an end, and by February Coleman was facing some tough times financially. He described his plight in a letter dated February 16, 1955: “I have not worked steadily since Park Sheraton. . . . Nothing but low money jobs, scale in fact (on some) since then. I have numerous creditors, all of who I am trying to pay off at the rate of ten dollars a month.”

Coleman wrote this while playing, presumably, one of those “low money jobs” at L’Aiglon Restaurant in Miami Beach, where he received a letter from Boston clothier Zareh Thomajen, who extolled Coleman’s work there. Thomajen also enclosed a copy of an advertisement he and his company placed in the Boston papers about his vacation, which implicitly underscores the distinction of wearing the brand. Describing Coleman’s talents, the advertisement says, “[They] do things with piano, bass and drums that will take 20 years off’n your spirit.”

After his time in Florida, Coleman’s career back in New York started on an upswing. Within the month of his return he was back at the Composer, where he stayed through the spring and summer. Almost concurrently he got a new record deal, and before the Memorial Day holiday. a May 25, 1955
Variety
review of his new album,
Piano Patterns
(released on the Benida label), praised how Coleman, along with drummer John Cresci and bass player Eddie Furtado, were giving “the eight standards an inventive and rhythmic beat that displays a progressive attack.” The word “standard” was a bit of a misnomer, because alongside songs like “Taking a Chance on Love” and “Heat Wave,” it also contained one Cy Coleman original, “One-Two-Three,” which Coleman reused for the song “By Threes” in
I Love My Wife
in the mid-1970s.

Just as this notice appeared, the trades and general press began revisiting Coleman’s work as a club performer, and reviews of his work ran regularly. Perhaps the highest accolades he got came from Douglas Watt in the
New Yorker
, who had praised him so lavishly several years earlier. After taking in Coleman at the Composer, the music critic wrote: “There’s never been any doubt in my mind about his dazzling technique; it was just that his work used to sound too calculated. Now there’s a lot more warmth and inspiration to it.”
7

The refinements in Coleman’s technique caught the attention of the management of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and he and the trio were lured away from the Composer in late 1955 with a gig at the hotel’s famed Peacock Alley, where they became the first jazz ensemble to play that refined venue. The group’s arrival was so notable and well received that rumors began to swirl that an album based on the trio’s performances there might be developed.

Given the way 1955 started, Coleman could have taken pleasure in this engagement and the acclaim it received alone, but in November he also found new success as a songwriter.

At some point during this period (perhaps during their getaway to the Catskills), Coleman and McCarthy crafted a new song: “I’m Gonna Laugh You Out of My Life.” While Coleman couldn’t recall the date of the song’s writing, he clearly remembered its genesis: “[Joe] came in and he said, ‘You know, I’ve got this title, “I’m Going to Laugh You Out of My Life,” and it’s sort of like “Just One of Those Things.”’ . . . I was feeling in a very romantic mood, a little bluesy and self-pitying, you know as you do at that age. And I said, ‘No, no, I couldn’t do that. I’ve been listening all day to Judy Garland singing “Last Night When We Were Young.”’ I think I was also listening to ‘Tristan and Isolde’ before that, and I just couldn’t get my head up into the rhythmic clouds of ‘Just One of Those Things’ that he was thinking about. And he kept saying to me, ‘No. You see, it’s really like one of those sophisticated, smart fast songs.’ And I kept saying, ‘No. No. No. Joe. No you understand, it’s a ballad.’ And actually that’s what happened; it became a ballad.”
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And it was one that perfectly suited Nat “King” Cole. The singer had previously been one of the many artists to record McCarthy’s “A Boy from Texas, a Girl from Tennessee,” and by the time he opted to record the new song from McCarthy and Coleman, Cole’s currency had surged to new heights.

The single, which was released in late 1955 and featured Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe’s semi-holiday-themed “Toyland” on the A side, began instantly to attract attention. On December 10
Billboard
made it one of its “Spotlight” picks for the week, and two weeks later it was included in the week’s “Best Buys” for retailers (releases that were “recommended for extra profits”). By January 1956 “I’m Gonna Laugh You Out of My Life” was in the
Billboard
100. It stayed there for an additional four weeks, peaking at number 57. The song also became, according to
Variety
rankings, one of the “Top 30 Songs on TV.”
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The recording’s allure remains evident. Cole’s signature smoothness and a string-filled orchestra led by Nelson Riddle give the already melancholy song a sense of palpable heartbreak that’s mitigated by the gentle ironies in McCarthy’s lyric.

At the time the recording was peaking Coleman was in Florida, where he was playing a two-month engagement in Harry’s American Bar at the Eden Roc Hotel. This spot, located just off the pool deck at the luxury establishment, was a place where on any given night one might glimpse the glitterati of the period, including Jackie Gleason, Joe DiMaggio, Lauren Bacall, and Humphrey Bogart, in a casual setting.

It was during this stint that his ambitions as a songwriter came more fully into focus and—simultaneously—appeared to be becoming a reality. In an interview with syndicated columnist Mel Heimer from mid-February, Coleman said quite simply, “I want to compose now. I was a boy prodigy pianist and I once almost had a sonata of mine played at Carnegie and I used to play at the Shelburne Lounge in New York where the waitresses wore cellophane skirts—so what else is there?”
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Apparently Coleman knew the answer to his gently sarcastic and seemingly rhetorical question, because before the end of the column Heimer announced that Coleman and McCarthy would be contributing material to a highly anticipated new version of
The Ziegfeld Follies
, which had been the epitome of theatrical extravagance during the first quarter of the century.

The new show had been making news for nearly a year after word circulated that its headliner might be the inimitable husky-voiced siren Tallulah Bankhead, familiar to audiences from her work in films like
Lifeboat
and
A Royal Scandal
and from early stage successes such as Lillian Hellman’s
The Little Foxes
. Bankhead’s casting became a reality in November 1955, and the show’s neophyte producers, Richard Kollmar and James W. Gardiner, began packing the show with a veritable who’s who of stage and screen.