You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (17 page)

Understudy Deems finished the performance, and Caesar was back in the show the next night. But at this point the producers decided to post a closing notice, announcing that
Little Me
would embark on a national tour with the star, who, despite his personal problems, had committed a full two years to the musical.

The show ended its Broadway run on June 29, 1963, having played a disappointing 257 performances. For Coleman, the musical would remain one for which he had an ongoing fondness, and it would come back into his life frequently through the next thirty-plus years.

The musical was also one that ultimately provided him with two of his most enduring hits and one song that would become part of pop-cultural history. “Here’s to Us” became a favorite of Judy Garland’s, and she performed it for the final episode of her television series,
The Judy Garland Show
(although the segment was never aired). When Garland died in 1969, the song was so much a part of her life that, according to the
New York Times
, “Jack French, Miss Garland’s musical accompanist, began the funeral with an organ rendition of one of Miss Garland’s favorite songs, ‘Here’s to Us,’ from the Broadway production ‘Little Me.’”
32

But as the curtain fell on
Little Me
on Broadway, such recognition could not have been imagined. Besides, Coleman was facing other issues and prospects, both personally and professionally.

13.
“Poor Little Hollywood Star”

The events surrounding the rehearsal and production of
Little Me
took a toll not only on Sid Caesar; they also dealt a blow to the songwriting team of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh. Under the strain of writing and then furiously rewriting and crafting new material, their already fractious relationship buckled. A feature interview with syndicated columnist Whitney Bolton that ran just before
Little Me
’s tryout gave them a chance to openly discuss their partnership.

During the conversation, Leigh admitted that arguing was “the best way for us.” She went on to describe what might happen if she didn’t like a melody that Coleman thought they should work on. She’d bluntly tell him, “‘Cy, no. I won’t write words for that.’” And when Coleman described their summertime of writing together in the Hamptons, he told Bolton that their proximity to one another was important, because “snarling on a telephone is empty compared to insults face to face. Besides[,] on a phone the other collaborator can always just hang up.”
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It’s the sort of humor that signals storm clouds in a relationship, and, indeed, within a month of
Little Me
’s opening, word of a split was in the papers. In early December Earl Wilson reported, “Composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Carolyn Leigh (who wrote the ‘Little Me’ score) had a most unhappy bustup of their writing partnership.”
2

Just after New Year’s Coleman confirmed to Wilson the dissolution of his working relationship with Leigh, saying, “It had been coming on for a long time.”
3
In later years, Coleman would describe the five years of their working together as being a “stormy relationship.”
4

As for the reasons behind what he once called “legendary battles,”
5
Coleman commented that it had to do with “my working with the trio. . . . Carolyn was very jealous of that fact. She wanted me all to herself. Carolyn was very possessive and she was tough.”
6

Leigh would also remember that their fights could stem from a variety of issues, both personal and professional. After much reflection she acknowledged, “We were growing up. . . . There were a couple of very sensitive egos involved.”
7
As proof of this, one only need look at the alternating billing that they had written into their contracts for
Little Me
. In some instances, Leigh’s name appeared first; in others, it was Coleman’s.

Eventually, the two chose to forget what exactly had caused them to part ways. During a 1982 interview in
Newsday
, Leigh remembered the process of mounting the show as having been “stressful—to me, and I think to Cy too.” And then she added, “I don’t know what happened, but I know we came away from that not speaking to one another and with a music publisher [Buddy Morris] in tears. He built an office for us and the day he wanted to show us the office, we had split up.”
8

For Coleman, the dissolution of the relationship was so painful that he flew off to London immediately after
Little Me
opened and stayed there for a month, simply trying to sort out what his next steps would be. Before he left, he took another important step, filing papers to legally change his name from Seymour Kaufman to Cy Coleman. In 1982 he recalled this period during a WBAI radio interview with Paul Lazarus, “When you break up a collaboration, it’s very difficult. You wonder what you’re going to do. And then, you’re not anxious to become involved in another.”

The indefatigable Leigh, on the other hand, took little time finding another collaborator, and by the end of February Dorothy Kilgallen reported that Leigh and E. J. Kahn would be working on a new show together,
The Big Drink
. During the course of the year two other projects would surface. One was a musical version of
Roman Holiday
with Richard Adler. The other was a show called
How Now Dow Jones
, based on an idea of Leigh’s, which she began with writer Howard Teichmann.

Coleman took a different tack when it came to regrouping; once he was back stateside, he started the process of reinvigorating his life as a performer. By February he had organized a quartet that was set for a three-week engagement at London House. Gossip columnists’ tongues wagged during Coleman’s Chicago engagement, because he was seen frequently with Claiborne Cary, one of the actresses who had been let go from
Little Me
and who was appearing in a revue at the Happy Medium, the club owned by Marienthal brothers, who also ran the venue where Coleman was appearing.

If there was anything romantic going on between Coleman and Cary, it was a relationship that was ultimately upstaged by his professional obligations, starting with news in March that he and Johnny Mercer would collaborate on a show together. In 2004 Coleman remembered discussing the idea of working with the lyricist: “I once said: ‘Johnny, why don’t we do a show together?’ but he never had that Broadway feeling. He said: ‘Okay, Cy, just send me the tunes to California, and I’ll write the words.’ He used to do that for people like Blossom Dearie; Johnny was very generous in that respect. But [for a Broadway show] it wasn’t going to work that way.”
9

The idea of these two men working together is an intriguing one. An undated letter from the lyricist that Coleman held on to until his death indicates that Mercer had received a melody from the composer but had not had time to outfit the tune with words. It was, as Coleman wistfully recalled, “a deep flirtation never realized.”
10

In later years, Coleman would also recall ruefully one other collaboration that never came to fruition: one with Alan Jay Lerner. The men weren’t discussing working together in the 1960s, but rather twenty years later. Coleman described what happened: “Alan Jay Lerner called me when I was in London and he was doing a play,
My Man Godfrey
. He was working with someone; he wasn’t happy. He said he would like to work with me. And we worked together a little bit, but we didn’t really write anything. But the girl that he married, Liz Robertson, was in
I Love My Wife
in London. So we got over there, and he became very fascinated with me, and somehow he missed me in the lineup. Then, he said, ‘I think we can write something more important.’ And I said, ‘Great,’ and then he went to the hospital and he died. . . . I’m sorry about missing that opportunity.”
11

But in 1963 Coleman was still without a writing partner, so he turned to composing instrumentals, including a score for an American Airlines promotional movie,
The Masters
. Filmed by Bernard Hirschenson (who had just done
David & Lisa
), the short was intended to acquaint audiences with the ways in which the company maintained its fleet. It used almost no dialogue but rather coupled footage with jazz backing, and a reviewer in the October 18, 1963 issue of
Back Stage
wrote that Coleman’s work was “good enough to tempt a record album release.”

The album didn’t materialize, but a single did. Just after the movie came out, Coleman, backed by an orchestra conducted by Billy May, recorded the film’s seductively jazzy “You Turn Me on Baby” for a Capitol Records single.

The disc was just one pairing of Coleman and May during the year for the label. They also went into the studio to record Coleman’s second Capitol LP,
The Piano Witchcraft of Cy Coleman
. Whereas his first outing for the label,
Broadway Pianorama
, had been essentially a cover album, featuring tunes by the likes of Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Cole Porter,
Piano
Witchcraft
was dominated by Coleman’s own songs.

Furthermore, the albums were conceived on two distinctly different scales.
Pianorama
was an intimate affair, featuring piano, guitar, bass, and drums, while
Piano Witchcraft
showcased Coleman’s work as a composer and pianist on a grand scale. It’s an energizing album—particularly when May’s brass section blows the roof off with “Hey, Look Me Over”—and for anyone who wondered about what the tune for “The Best Is Yet to Come” might have sounded like before it was slowed down for vocals, Coleman’s deft playing here gives a pretty clear indication of the melody’s original tempo.

These two recordings—there was a third,
Comin’ Home
, recorded in 1963 but not released until 1987—were not the only albums Coleman had out during the early 1960s. There were also singles and albums featuring his work for three feature films that were released during the period, a level of activity that almost made it seem as if Coleman was abandoning Broadway for Hollywood.

His first foray into scoring a feature film came with the indie
The Troublemaker
, released in the middle of 1964. Directed by Thomas J. Flicker (who shared writing credit with Buck Henry), the rollicking comedy, laced with social commentary, centers on Jack Armstrong (Tom Aldredge, a future Tony nominee for shows like
Sticks and Bones
and
Passion
), a chicken farmer from New Jersey who comes into Manhattan to open a coffeehouse. He quickly discovers, however, that before he can get the place opened he needs to grease the palms of both government officials and members of the mafia. He refuses to acquiesce, and so his pal T. R., a hotshot, womanizing attorney played by Henry, concocts ways of paying the bribes unbeknownst to Jack.

But the good-natured rube ultimately catches on and puts a stop to the payola, only to find himself crusading against a corrupt world, often to comically surreal effect. In one sequence, Jack arrives at City Hall to complain to the mayor about the graft, and as he does, he inadvertently leads a group of picketing latter-day Nazis into hizzoner’s office. In another scene Jack finds himself committed to a psych ward in which it’s difficult to tell the patients from the nutty doctors.

Developed improvisationally with members of the Off-Broadway troupe the Premise, the movie, which takes some of its cues from 1930s screwball comedies, also features Joan Darling as Denver, Jack’s kooky love interest; James Frawley, in a trio of roles; and a bevy of Playboy bunnies playing T. R.’s various girlfriends.

Coleman didn’t just compose the score for
The Troublemaker
; he also provided the arrangements and conducted the orchestra. And more than in any of his previous pop or theater work, his zinging melodic wit shines through. For Jack’s arrival in Manhattan, Coleman wrote a twangy banjo solo that both establishes character and the collision of two worlds (country versus city) about to take place.

Once the film’s comedy kicks into high gear, Coleman lavishly uses brass to give Jack’s plight a sort of circus feel, and for the movie’s main romantic theme he developed an Asian-sounding motif, inspired by the curious fifth-century Manchurian outfit that Denver wears when she slips into something “comfortable” during an evening with Jack.

Coleman’s eclectic work, including the kazoo sections of the music, was preserved on an LP augmented by a quartet of covers of mainstream film hits of the time, along with a vocal rendition of one of the
Troublemaker
tunes, “Here I Go Again.” The number, performed by China Lee (one of the Playmates in the film), featured a lyric by Tommy Wolf, who also wrote “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” a hit for singers ranging from Rod McKuen to Roberta Flack. Coleman obviously had some affection for the unusually ethereal melody, because he also had it outfitted with a lyric by Edward Heyman (“Body and Soul” and “Blame It on My Youth”), resulting in the unrecorded “Roses in the Sky.”

While
The Troublemaker
was limited primarily to art-house theaters in metropolitan areas, Coleman’s next film outing,
Father Goose
, was a big-budget mainstream film starring Hollywood luminaries Cary Grant and Leslie Caron. The lighthearted romantic comedy centers on Walter Eckland (Grant), an American who is drafted by an old pal in the British navy to watch over a Pacific island and finds himself sharing it with Catherine Frenau (Caron), the daughter of a French diplomat and tutor, who has in her care a septet of girls whom she has been attempting to take to safety from New Britain. Dissolute and self-involved, Walter, whom the British navy has given the galling code name of “Mother Goose,” finds himself turning into a “Father Goose” for the girls, as well as Catherine, with whom he becomes romantically involved.

Coleman got the assignment after a phone call from Grant, whom he had come to know socially. Coleman set off for California not at all clear about what he would need to write, but during filming he got his primary inspiration. He found himself watching the lilt in Grant’s step, and from this came the inspiration for the movie’s main song and theme. Once he had written the melody, though, he knew he needed a lyric.

Even though they hadn’t spoken since the
Little Me
opening eighteen months earlier, he called Carolyn Leigh from California and asked if she would consider doing a lyric. She agreed, and he flew back to New York, spent some time at her apartment playing what he had written into a tape recorder, and departed. A few days later Leigh came up with the lyric for the song, “Pass Me By.”

The song itself, sung by English performer Digby Wolfe, who had just moved to America and was attracting attention for his work in cabarets on the West Coast, is heard during the film’s opening credits and then used in variations as underscoring and as Walter’s theme. Walter even hums the jaunty tune throughout the picture.

One way in which Coleman used the tune was actually suggested by Grant himself. As Coleman recalled during a
Music Makers
radio interview with Skitch Henderson, “[Cary] was very helpful, by the way, he’s a really very astute man when it comes to films. He said to me, ‘How would you like a good musical joke?’ and I said, ‘Well, sure, I’ll take it where I can get it.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m in this small boat that’s being followed by this big boat. Now, when you see me in that small boat, you give me that funny little theme’ (which was ‘Pass Me By’), and he says, ‘Play it very small.’ And then he says, ‘Afterward, when the big boat comes in, go very, very big with the music. That’ll get you a big laugh.’ I said, ‘It will?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll guarantee it.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’”