You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (13 page)

Another change also crept officially into the show’s score. Eventually a brief reprise of “Hey, Look Me Over” replaced the title song that had bedeviled Coleman and Leigh, and neither it nor “That’s What I Want for Janie” made it to the official final edition of the script. Both tunes were preserved, however, for the original cast album made for RCA Victor just two days after opening.

The recording session took place at Webster Hall, and, as was the norm, it was a daylong process, starting early in the morning and lasting until well into the night. A quip from Ball that day, now part of legend, gives a glimpse into her mental and physical state: “She walked into the studio in her mink coat and slumped against the wall grumbling[,] ‘I have all the money in the goddamn world and I have to get up at eight a.m. to make an album.’”
24

Then, in early February, Ball contracted a viral infection. She traveled to Miami to recover, and during that time the show went on hiatus rather than running with an understudy in the lead role. “Lucy is the one who made the show what it is,”
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was the statement from a production spokesperson. Her condition became front-page news. The press also monitored Ball’s recuperative period, including her active social life in Florida. Kilgallen wrote just a week after the temporary closure of the show, “Lucille Ball continues to do the Miami spots with comedian Gary Morton [who became her second husband], the chap who met her plane when she landed.”
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Of course, not all illnesses require continual bed rest, and given that Ball came back to the show on schedule and made an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
performing “Hey, Look Me Over” with Paula Stewart, her time away from the rigors of the production, regardless of how it was spent, appeared to be all that had been needed.

It was as if she had never left. Box-office revenues returned to the level they had been at before her illness, and as soon as it was released the
Wildcat
cast recording began climbing
Billboard
’s list of “Retail Album Best Sellers.” It debuted at number 36 on February 15, 1961, and stayed on the ranking for twenty-eight weeks, peaking at number 10 and spending most of the summer in the Top 20.

By early April audiences probably didn’t know that anything was wrong with the actress, at least based on the way she was behaving at the end of the performances: “[Ball] is now giving audiences a little bonus solo act at the curtain calls. She makes an informal thank-you speech, does a few bumps to comedy sound effects by the drummer, dances a little and then calls for another chorus of the show’s top tune, ‘Hey, Look Me Over.’ The customers lap it up.”
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On April 22, however, Ball didn’t make it to the final curtain of
Wildcat
. She fainted during “Dancing on My Tippy Tippy Toes,” the opening number of the second act. Shelah Hackett, who was a dancer in the show and also Kidd’s assistant, finished the performance, and Ball did appear by her side at the curtain call that evening.

Performances continued as usual after this event, but just a little over a month later, during a Wednesday matinee performance, Ball collapsed again. By this point an understudy, Betty Jane Watson, was prepared and went on for Ball for the remainder of the show and for the evening performance, ending up finishing out the week.

Six days after the second fainting spell news came that the show was going on hiatus, effective immediately, for a full two months. It would reopen at the end of the summer. Ball was suffering from “a serious respiratory infection complicated by exhaustion.”
28
The following day
Variety
reported that the idea of doing the television special that would have highlighted the show had been abandoned. Then, nine days later, Kidd and Nash announced that
Wildcat
would not reopen on August 7 as planned. They blamed the closing on the musicians’ union, which was demanding full salary for the twenty-six-piece orchestra for the nine-week hiatus.

Coleman pleaded with the union to reconsider its stance, to no avail. During a 2002 documentary on BBC Radio 2, he recalled the production’s demise sadly: “So the show closed—a hit show—full audiences, 100,000 albums sold in the first six months, and that was a lot in those days.”

Nevertheless, he and Leigh had achieved their goal of getting a production on Broadway. It had enjoyed a run of 171 performances and spawned a hit song that would itself be newsworthy for years to come. And though it might have been tempting for either writer to wallow in self-pity about the premature death of
Wildcat
, too much had been happening or was in development for them to allow themselves that luxury.

11.
“The Best Is Yet to Come”

Coleman and Leigh’s ambition and drive meant that they never allowed themselves to become so immersed in any one project that they neglected to pursue other writing possibilities. And so, even as they tackled writing on spec for some projects or began preparations, rehearsals, and production for
Wildcat
, their schedules were filled and their output was significant.

One of their biggest career hits, in fact, had its roots from the time when they were writing material for
13 Daughters
and
Gypsy
, but it didn’t hit store shelves (or the charts) until the middle of the
Wildcat
run.

The melody started out simply as an instrumental that Coleman had written for his club engagements, where Leigh was frequently on hand as an interested audience member. Coleman’s drummer Ray Mosca recalled, “She’d be sitting in a booth, right next to the trio. And she’d always be taking notes, I guess of tunes we were playing.”
1

Indeed, she was listening for potential material. Coleman joked about her propensity for looking for new songs in his work: “The fact is that [she] was such a voracious lyric-writer that I used to say, ‘I have to hide my arpeggios from her, she’d put words on ’em.’”
2

Coleman said that the tune Leigh had latched onto in 1959 was one that “was very fast and it went all over the place. And Carolyn came to me and said, ‘I want to write a lyric to that.’ I said, ‘Carolyn, you’re crazy. Who’s going to do this?’ She said, ‘I can do it.’ And I said, ‘Nobody will ever sing it.’ And so, we slowed it down and it became ‘Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum.’”
3

That lyric, of course, became the beginning of the song “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Once it was finished, toward the middle of 1959, Coleman made a demo of it, and he and Leigh sent a record off to Frank Sinatra (after all, they had done well by him as a team with “Witchcraft” and with other partners on “Young at Heart” and “Why Try to Change Me Now?”).

Sinatra liked what he heard, but with one caveat: he felt that the song needed to be longer. So Coleman and Leigh developed an extension for the tune. Coleman recalled that he did something unusual for this: “I’d started off in the key of A-flat, and I ended up in the key of A. But it seemed natural and I thought, ‘This is very unusual. How are we going to do the key signature on this? Is it going to be A-flat or A?’ And I said, ‘Oh, we’ll let everybody else worry about it.’”
4

Sinatra didn’t mind the shift and agreed to record the song. But then there was silence.

About a year later, Tony Bennett asked Coleman and Leigh if they had a song that might prove to be as big a hit for him as “Witchcraft” had been for Sinatra, and they suggested “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Sinatra didn’t balk when they asked about Bennett recording the tune, so they sent it off to Bennett, who was immediately enthusiastic about what he heard.

He decided to record it as soon as possible, but, as he later recalled, “I couldn’t get any of my usual top-drawer arrangers on such short notice, though I did find a writer who was able to turn it around overnight. The next day he dropped by the studio and unceremoniously dumped the chart on me about an hour before the session and then split. We didn’t have a conductor, but Cy was there and when we started going over the orchestrations, we realized it wasn’t what we wanted, so Cy rewrote it. When it was finally finished we knew we had a winner.”
5

It was a moment when all of Coleman’s talent and training coalesced into an ideal whole, and his classical-music background provided the necessary tools for both artists to realize their vision for what the song could and should be.

The recording session for “The Best Is Yet to Come” took place at the end of July 1960. The resulting Columbia single—with another Coleman-Leigh tune, “Marry Young,” on the B side—hit the market in early 1961, just as Lucille Ball was about to face her first bout of illness during
Wildcat
.

Critics gravitated toward the record from the outset. The
Billboard
review on February 27 said that the A side would be “on deejay turntables from coast to coast for many months.” And a few weeks later
Variety
described “The Best Is Yet to Come” as an “excellent ballad delivered at the top of this singer’s form.”

Pretty soon other singers started to perform and record the tune. Peggy Lee had it in her act by the end of the year, and both she and Sarah Vaughan had released their own recordings of it within a year. Eventually Sinatra made a recording of it in 1964, including it on his LP
It Might as Well Be Swing
.

Bennett’s rendition of the song, however, did not constitute its first major public performance. That distinction belonged to Coleman himself, who offered it up on the premiere episode of
Playboy
magazine founder Hugh Hefner’s syndicated television show
Playboy’s Penthouse
.

Hefner and Coleman had become friends during the songwriter’s days playing in New York at places like the Playroom, and once he started his gigs at London House in Chicago, where Hefner and his growing magazine empire were based, their relationship deepened. It was during Coleman’s second gig at this club that Hefner approached him about writing a theme song for a new television venture.

The show Hefner created had basically the same format as that of
Art Ford’s Greenwich Village Party
, on which Coleman had been a fixture. Each week on
Penthouse
Hefner welcomed some of America’s pre-eminent artists into his apartment (actually an elaborately realistic set on a soundstage that had cost the then-astronomical sum of $15,000, about $125,000 in 2014 dollars) for an unscripted, unrehearsed party. As Hefner said on the show’s debut episode, it was “a sophisticated weekly get-together of the people that we dig and who dig us.”

To set the tone for this weekly televised event, Coleman wrote “Playboy’s Theme,” a suavely swinging number that played during the show’s opening moments. As with the set, Hefner spared no expense in recording the melody for the program. He brought together a forty-piece orchestra featuring members of the Chicago Symphony for the number.

The show was an astute extension of Hefner’s ongoing efforts to establish the
Playboy
brand as a tastemaker for the era. Guests on the debut episode included singing legends Nat “King” Cole and Ella Fitzgerald; writer Rona Jaffe, who was enjoying the limelight as the movie version of her novel
The Best of Everything
opened; and comedian Lenny Bruce, who got to offer up his brand of “sick” humor without the meddling of producers and sponsors.

Hefner’s efforts to ensure that the show had a spontaneous feel were largely successful. When Fitzgerald performed she paid no attention to the camera, giving the impression that she was just vocalizing among a group of friends. Bruce’s conversation with Hefner sparked, albeit tamely in hindsight, and Jaffe found herself defending some aspects of her writing. It all was persuasive enough for a
Variety
reviewer, who wrote, “It convinced . . . that this was an actual taffypull, happening spontaneously.”
6

As for Coleman, he didn’t just provide background on and perform “The Best Is Yet to Come.” He also offered up some history on “Witchcraft” and delivered “You Fascinate Me So,” while one of the many gorgeous Playmates who populated the show sat by his side on the piano bench ogling him.

During this broadcast Hefner said that he had started to think that he would release the show’s theme song on a record, and by the end of the year a single was being test marketed in Chicago. By the beginning of 1961, Playboy Records’ PB-1001 was released nationally. The disc’s B side featured Coleman as pianist-vocalist, along with full orchestra, delivering a sparkling version of “You Fascinate Me So.”

The success of this 45 led to an LP,
Playboy’s Penthouse
, released by Everest Records just as
Wildcat
was beginning its full rehearsal period and as Hefner’s show was going into its second year of syndication, reaching a dozen markets nationally. The ten-song album, featuring Cy Coleman and His Orchestra, offered up a brassier incarnation of the Playboy theme, along with covers of such tunes as Irving Berlin’s “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails,” Thelonious Monk’s jazz standard “’Round Midnight,” and “Just in Time,” the Jule Styne–Betty Comden–Adolph Green hit from
Bells Are Ringing
.

Perhaps most notably, the album, described by
Billboard
as “nice jockey wax for hip spinners,”
7
also featured two other Coleman originals. There was “Dorothy’s Dilemma,” which began as a sort of mournful film noir–like number before transforming into a more mod, Latin-infused piece, the two styles cleverly illustrating the conundrum of the title. In “Tennis Bum Blues” Coleman created a dapper, swinging mood with piano and brass that managed to evoke the sense of crisp whites glistening under the sun as a match was being played.

Coleman’s appearance and affiliation with
Penthouse
helped to define him not just as an urbane man about town but also as a man who was part of a social set that embraced the daring and new. After all, this program, like Art Ford’s show, depicted parties where whites and blacks mingled. In an era before the civil rights movement, this was a profound occurrence, and Hefner said, “The appearance of black performers on ‘Playboy’s Penthouse’ in a social setting in what appeared to be my apartment assured me no syndication in the still-segregated South, but it made me a hero on the South Side.”
8

It’s a facet of Coleman that Mrs. Vanderbilt and the other guests at the Sherry-Netherland would not have expected when he started his career there in the late 1940s, although manager Serge Obolensky might certainly have seen Coleman’s desire to branch out into such directions. He had, after all, told Coleman that he wouldn’t allow jazz at the hotel, prompting Coleman to quit and find employment at the Shelburne Lounge, where the waitresses were clad in cellophane skirts.

In the intervening decade, however, Coleman had learned to shift fluidly between “uptown” and “downtown,” starting with the late-night sojourns with Joseph A. McCarthy Jr., Veronica Lake, and appearances in the early 1950s at Cafe Society, whose motto was “The wrong place for the right people.”

Coleman’s sometimes immersion in the world below Fourteenth Street deepened as 1960 dawned, thanks to the new woman in his life, actress Sylvia Miles. When the two met she was appearing at the original Circle in the Square Theatre in one of the hottest and most controversial shows running: the New York premiere of Jean Genet’s
The Balcony
, which paints a scathing portrait of society as a string of dignified men, all representing different aspects of the upper crust, visit a brothel while a revolution unfurls in their unnamed country.

Miles, who would receive Academy Award nominations for both the 1969 film
Midnight Cowboy
and the 1975 picture
Farewell, My Lovely
, had been working steadily as a stage actress since the early 1950s. Among her other credits was Jose Quintero’s staging of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh
, which starred Jason Robards and also ran at Circle in the Square.

The couple met, as Miles remembered, from Coleman being “around.” She thought that Mickey Sheen, a drummer who also worked with the trio, might have introduced them. It was an era in which the seeds for the tumultuous decade that followed were being planted, as Miles put it: “The flower children and all were in the ’60s, but what precipitated it was the ’50s.”
9
Among the people in their social circle were comedian Bruce, composer Burt Bacharach, and James Lipton, who at that time was playing Dr. Dick Grant on the CBS soap opera
The
Guiding Light
.

After Miles and Coleman became an item, he often had to play the stage-door Johnny, and on some evenings he would wait for her at Alfredo Viazzi’s restaurant Portofino, on Bleecker Street. It was there that he came to know Elaine Kaufman, who would go on to establish her own eponymous restaurant on the Upper East Side, a place that would serve as a watering hole for Coleman and many of his friends and colleagues.

“I’ve always felt that I deserve a special place on the long list of Elaine-philes since I was one of the very first to know her and banter with her about the world at large and the state of practically everything,” Coleman once recalled about his time with her downtown. She could “make you feel comfortable when you’re alone at a bar waiting for the curtain to come down around the corner, which I did, night after night.”
10

Portofino wasn’t just a restaurant. Like many of the tiny eateries in the Village at the time, it was also a hub for the Off-Broadway crowd. On Monday nights there would be readings of new plays there, much like the ones that avid theatergoers could also find at places like the famed Caffe Cino, where playwrights such as John Guare and Lanford Wilson had their earliest works done.

It was in places like this, and in the galleries and bars the couple frequented, that Miles remembered Coleman not only meeting future collaborator Lipton but also writer A. E. Hotchner. In addition, the fare seen at these venues—along with work at places like Julius Monk’s club—was providing Coleman with a broad education in theatrical forms and styles.

The Miles-Coleman pairing attracted the eyes of gossip columnists, who chronicled some of their comings and goings at clubs around town. What they couldn’t know was the playfulness that the couple enjoyed. Coleman would often recount how, in the apartment at the Parker Meridian that he shared with pianist Byron Janis, Miles would lounge nude on the floor, doing crossword puzzles.

Miles herself related one story to a reporter ten years later during an interview about her role in
Midnight Cowboy
. “What do you think of my chest?” she asked Coleman one night at her apartment. “Wonderful! Let’s play,” he said, meaning “Let’s play chess.”
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(One of the centerpieces in her Central Park South apartment was a faux-antique chess set that she had made herself out of “linoleum, plywood and discarded dime store chessmen.”)
12
Coleman’s quip disarmed her: “And that’s the first time I ever lost to anybody who didn’t play well—I was that distracted.”
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