Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (3 page)

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Authors: Greg Lawrence,John Kander,Fred Ebb

BOOK: Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz
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EBB: On my fifteenth birthday, I told my family, “I would like to see a musical.” They hated the idea, and I remember the looks on their faces: “Oh God,
that’s
what he wants!” But they took me. I saw Nancy Walker in a show called
Barefoot Boy with Cheek
. That might have been the first musical I ever saw. My sisters and I sat in the second balcony. I thought the show was just marvelous, and they hated it. I remember Nancy Walker, though little else about that show. Years later I had dinner with Nancy Walker and her husband, David Craig. It was one of those moments in life like that film technique where you zoom in on someone and then zoom out again. I remember looking at Nancy Walker that night and thinking,
My God, when I was fifteen, you were the star on the stage, and now here we are having spaghetti together.
KANDER: When I was twelve, my father’s business had prospered enough that during spring vacations my folks started taking us to New York. We talked about making that trip all year long. I had also started a record collection. Records were all I ever wanted for birthday and Christmas gifts. The great record store in New York City, the Gramophone Shop, had a supplemental
catalog that they sent out, and I would make a list of records that I wanted from it. I would save all year and when we visited New York, I would browse that shop. We always went to the theater. Coming to New York was something I was already romantic about. When my brother and I came here the first time, he had his head out one side of the taxi and I had mine out the other. Of course, the two of us were thrilled by everything we saw. I remember once we had tickets to
Carousel
and flew on ahead of my parents to make sure that we arrived on time for the show. We had heard the record and we knew the score.
EBB: When I went to the theater at that age, there was nothing that I didn’t like. I had no critical faculty whatsoever. But now that we are older we see shows in an entirely different way, don’t we? We break them down into whether we liked the lyrics and whether any other elements impressed us. And we’re actually able to say, “I didn’t like that.”
KANDER: I don’t go to the theater to find out what I think about it. I’m a true member of my family—I go to have a good time. If I don’t have a good time, maybe later I will talk about it. Seeing a show now may not be exactly the way it was for me when I was a kid, but I still go to the theater expecting to have a good time.
EBB: I used to go to find out how they did it. One musical that made an enormous impression on me was
Guys and Dolls,
because I could not figure out how they did it. How did all those elements come together? How do you write a song that pays off later? How can you stop and do a whole song that has no real import in the piece? It was like going to a classroom when I went to the theater. I loved
The King and I
more than any of their other musicals because of all those subtle moments in it. In “Shall We Dance,” when the King gets up and finally puts his hand on her, I thought that was the most amazing moment in every way. Who thought of that? The actor? The director? Was it written down?
To this day, that moment is a wonder to me. I gasped when he put his hand on her.
KANDER: I have a hand memory like that with Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was the end of
South Pacific
when I first saw it. Emile de Becque comes back, and Nellie Forbush is sitting at the table. She thinks he’s dead and is taking care of the children. She is at the table when he comes in, and they look at each other and they don’t say a word. He sits at the other end of the table.
EBB: And they touch hands.
KANDER: They touch hands right underneath the table! Even talking about it will make me cry.
EBB: What interests me always is who thought of that.
KANDER: If you want to think of it professionally, obviously, what could happen when he comes back is that he would stand and they would have a big love duet. That would end the show. But to realize that that single gesture was more powerful than anything you could write for them!
EBB: Yes, but still, who thought of it?
KANDER: Somebody smart.
EBB: And how!
KANDER: Just to get off writing for one second, in
Pelléas et Mélisande,
in the final scene of the fourth act with the two of them, their passion builds up for each other and they’ve never spoken, and the orchestra is building and building, and he says, “
Je t’aime
.” And she says, “
Je t’aime aussi.
” Any other composer would have made a big orchestra deal out of it, but what Debussy did was cut out the orchestra altogether. He has just those words and nothing else. Those two lines are more powerful than anything else he could have written, just like the hands.
EBB: That’s how we learn, I suppose.
KANDER: I only learn in retrospect. I don’t think about those things at the time.
EBB: When did you first take piano lessons?
KANDER: My first piano teacher was an eccentric woman named Lucy Parrot. I started with her when I was six after I had already been playing on my own for two years. I loved her name, and she actually looked like a parrot. She lived with her senile mother in a rather dark house about four blocks away. Miss Parrot was a kind of Wicked Witch of the West. I was a bit intimidated by her and in awe of her at the same time. She was actually quite a good teacher and introduced me to a lot of music that I would not otherwise have heard. She was stern, but on a good day if I did especially well, she would give me cookies and goat’s milk—
EBB: My God, a sleeping porch and goat’s milk. What a privileged childhood.
KANDER: And Miss Parrot’s mother and I would listen to sections of
Tristan and Isolde.
I was enthralled listening to that music and that experience began my lifelong love affair with Wagner. About once a month Miss Parrot would have her students give little recitals at her house. While I was in high school, I studied at the conservatory in Kansas City and played at recitals, but I hated that because performing was so terrifying to me. I remember one time I had to make up the last couple of pages of Rachmaninoff’s E-flat Major Prelude because I’d forgotten, and I decided that I would rather be dead than be in that position again. But I continued studying music and performing in college. What was your first piece of writing, one of those funny limericks?
EBB: Maybe.
KANDER: Go on. Recite one. I know you’re dying to. What was that one about the telephone booth?
EBB: I don’t remember.
 
A wildly obstreperous youth
Got locked in a telephone booth
When hit by the fever
He screwed the receiver
And knocked up a girl in Duluth.
 
I had an English teacher at New York University named Miss Fergus, who heard that and encouraged me, saying, “You know, Fred, you put yourself down all the time but you have a talent. You ought to consider being a writer.” Good old Miss Fergus. I liked to rhyme and later I wrote short stories. I once went to a short-story seminar at NYU and that’s when I fell in love with the idea of writing. Although I had no formal training in drama, by the time I finished college I wanted so much to be in the theater, and I figured the only real chance for me to enter that world was to write lyrics.
I remember writing my first lyric about five years before we met. I wrote it on the bus on the way to endear myself to a composer who I hoped would write with me because I wanted to be a lyric writer. A girl named Patsy Vamos who I had dated in college told me about this fellow she knew who was a professional named Phil Springer. Patsy arranged for me to meet Phil so he could ascertain whether or not I had any gift. He was way over on the East Side, and I was on the West. I got on a bus and I thought,
How am I going to show this guy something?
So I scribbled this lyric out on a couple of matchbooks. It was called “Four-Eyes.”
KANDER: Go ahead and recite it. I know you’re dying to.
EBB: [
laughing
]
 
More and more as each day passes
My romance in horn-rimmed glasses
Seems to mean much more and more to me.
Less and less am I concerned by
All the woman he’s been spurned by,
Just because he finds it hard to see.
He hasn’t got a lot I know
And yet he’ll always be my darling, myopic Romeo.
So let him fall and let him blunder,
He remains my cockeyed wonder,
Still the one most wonderful to see,
And how I pray for the day
That my four eyes
Has eyes for me.
 
Ask me how come I remember the whole thing. No, don’t. I’m already deeply ashamed of myself. But that was my bus composition. When I met Phil, I gave him the matchbooks, and he couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. He didn’t seem particularly impressed, but at least it was a way for me to start a conversation to see if I had any talent or not. Later, Phil sat down at the piano and played a tune he had written. I sat behind him with a pad and pencil and scribbled out a lyric. When I finished the song, I put it in front of him and he played it. That one was called “I Never Loved Him Anyhow.” Phil said he thought that I had talent and wanted us to work together every day from nine to five, like regular business hours. He promised to teach me everything he knew. At the time I was working as a credit authorizer on the graveyard shift at Ludwig, Bauman & Spears, but I soon quit my job and started to work with Phil every day. He took “I Never Loved Him Anyhow” to a music publisher who accepted the song, and before the end of the year, Carmen McRae had recorded it. Of course, I was thrilled, though I think we only made about eighty dollars.
KANDER: Why don’t you recite it. You know you’re dying to.
EBB: No.
KANDER: When I was in graduate school, the head of Columbia University’s music department was Douglas Moore, and he became a father figure to me. Back then I was still undecided as far as my direction and goals were concerned. I didn’t yet have
a specific vision of where I was going. I had written music for shows in college, and I was also writing some fairly dreadful chamber music. Douglas made it acceptable for me to go into musical theater by telling me that was what he would have done if he could have started his career over. His saying that was a blessing, and at some point in the early fifties I made the decision to devote myself to musical theater. I made a living coaching singers, playing auditions, and conducting in summer stock.
I happened to go to the opening night of
West Side Story
in Philadelphia in 1957 and afterwards there was a party at what was then called the Variety Club. There was a large bar in the center of the club and it was crowded, about five or six deep. I’m a very nonaggressive person, and I could not get a drink. But a short bald man standing in front of me saw my distress and said, “Why don’t you tell me what you want to order, and when I get mine, I’ll get yours.” He did, and then we struck up a conversation. His name was Joe Lewis, and he was a pianist with the company, playing in the pit. Later, we kept up a correspondence, and when the time came for him to take his vacation, he asked me if I would like to sub for him. I said, “Sure!” I learned to say yes whenever I could back then.
Joe sent me the music, and for several weeks I played in the pit for
West Side Story.
During that time, they were putting in some replacements and doing auditions, and I had to play for those and for rehearsals. Ruth Mitchell was the stage manager, and when the time came for the director, Jerry Robbins, to start casting
Gypsy
, Ruth asked me to come along, which I did. I played auditions for weeks and weeks, and Jerry became accustomed to having me around. At the end of the auditions, he asked me, “Hey, would you like to do the dance arrangements on this new show with me?” I said, “You want me to?” He said, “Yeah!” and I said, “Yeah!” That was the entire conversation—it’s emblazoned in my memory. From then on, it was a fascinating
learning experience, but I’m convinced to this day that if I had been able to order my own drink at the Variety Club, I would never have had a career.
It is a terrific education to work with a great director or choreographer. In
Gypsy
, while we were working on “All I Need Is the Girl,” when Tulsa says, “Now we waltz, now the strings come in,” as I recall all of that was invented by Jerry Robbins while he was onstage attempting to improvise that scene. The lines of that piece were an edited version of what Jerry ad-libbed. Later, when I was working on
Irma La Douce,
the choreographer, Onna White, said in rehearsal at one point, “Is there anything that we can do with penguins?” Then she turned to me and said, “John, can you give us a little penguin music.” That moment led to a penguin ballet. Improvisational experiences like that can be terrifying but they eventually give you a theatrical looseness. You eventually learn how to go with the flow of your collaborators, and you also learn not to be afraid of making a fool of yourself.
EBB: Phil Springer taught me much of what I know about lyrical form, prosody—that is, putting the words to the music naturally so the accent doesn’t fall on the wrong syllable—AABA, as opposed to verse chorus. I never knew any of that. I had an instinct but no knowledge or technique. I worked with Phil about a year, and then he was offered a job as an arranger for a music publisher for fifty dollars a week. He needed the money and took the job. That more or less ended our collaboration. Phil went on to write some popular songs like “Moonlight Gambler” and “Santa Baby.”

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