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

Read Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz Online

Authors: Greg Lawrence,John Kander,Fred Ebb

The authors wish to thank the following people for their encouragement and efforts on behalf of this book: our sensitive editor, Linda Rosenberg, and her good offices at Faber and Faber, our savvy agent Peter Sawyer of the Fifi Oscard Agency, Paul McKibbins, Albert Stephenson, David McKeown, and Tim Pinkney.
by Liza Minnelli
I
first heard about John Kander and Fred Ebb in 1965. A friend of mine named Carmen Zapata sang a song called “If I Were in Your Shoes, I’d Dance.” I loved it and said, “My God, who wrote that song?”
Throughout my life, my favorite poetry always has come from songs and the lyrics that went into them. If I didn’t know how to express what I felt as a kid, I could always find a song to express what I was feeling. At that point in my life, when I said, “Who wrote that song?” I had already learned all the Gershwin I could get my hands on and I was also into Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter. Between their music and their words, those writers gave voice to what I was feeling, and with Kander and Ebb, I heard my feelings stated exactly as I felt them, in the kind of language that I thought was so marvelously straight ahead and in the moment. In that song, “If I Were in Your Shoes, I’d Dance,” these two writers caught envy and regret and a lost chance—and yet without self-pity because the feeling was stated in such a positive way and with such passion.
“If I were in your shoes, I’d dance—I would dance on air! I would bless my lucky star, there’d be smiles to spare, if I were who you are.”
I understood vividly why the song said what it said and didn’t say what it couldn’t say. I had found my truth.
After Carmen sang their song, she explained, “There’s this
new team called Kander and Ebb. They’ve just gotten their first Broadway show. It’s being directed by George Abbott. Do you want to hear more of their songs?” I said, “Yes, please! Anything else they’ve written. Anything! And can I meet them? Can I meet them!” A few days later we went to Fred’s apartment. I remember it was cold and I had on a red hat with earflaps. The hat was kind of awful but I didn’t know what else to do with my hair. Freddy opened the door and said, “Hi.” That welcome was the beginning of my career, the beginning of my world, and the beginning of my life as a performer. John and Fred made everything possible. I was like a person in the desert looking for a glass of water and finding a well. They gave voice to everything that I felt, and they still do with every song that they write for me.
At that first meeting, they played two songs from
Flora, the Red Menace
, and I immediately jumped up and said, “Can I learn them? Can I sing them? Can I audition for this show?” At the time I had received good reviews for my first show,
Best Foot Forward
, and I was auditioning for other shows. My agents had wanted me to take a show written by Richard Adler that was based on the movie
Roman Holiday.
I had auditioned for that show and almost had the part but once I heard
Flora, the Red Menace
, I wanted to be Flora. So behind my agents’ and everybody else’s backs, I kept auditioning for it. They probably got so sick of me, but Freddy and John were on my side. When I finally did get the part, it was a very, very special moment.
Freddy soon became my mentor, my best friend, my inspiration, my guide, and my parent figure because at the time I was a teenager living by myself in New York. There was a door opening for both of us and we walked through it together. It’s true that over the years I’ve occasionally worked with other writers in my performing career, and John and Fred have done so many wonderful shows, too, without me, but we came up together. I paid my dues and they paid theirs, and with
Flora
we got our first break at the same time.
God, in the beginning I had so much to learn and I listened to everything they told me. I often asked Fred how to do things. I’d say, “Show me,” and he’d show me by performing their songs. I wouldn’t interpret them exactly as he did, but I’m good at taking direction. I’m a director’s daughter. I’ve always said in jest that I thought Fred Ebb invented me, and it’s true because there were certain things I didn’t know coming from the glamour of Hollywood and a Hollywood family. By his example, he inspired me to become an “entertainer of integrity,” that is, a performer who always entertains to the best of his or her ability. Fred was so sure of the integrity he wanted me to have within performing. He knew that I could stand on my own, that I was my own person, and in a way, he later gave me my identity. It’s called “Liza with a Z.”
Over the years, the three of us worked together on my concert tours, on movies and TV specials, and on their shows
Cabaret
,
Chicago, The Act
, and
The Rink.
They became my voice, and I became their voice. You see, I never considered myself a singer. I was always an actress who told a story to the most beautiful music and the most wonderful words I could find. For me to find those two things, lyrics and music, in this wonderful team was so extraordinary. As an actress—and this is something I learned from Charles Aznavour, who was also a great influence on me and who they love too—you find the reason the character is singing the song. You can take a song like “Sing Happy” in
Flora
and really mean it,
Sing me a happy song!
because that’s where you’re at that night. The next night, so it doesn’t become stale, you can turn the tables and sing it with anger, and if you’re a thorough and faithful actress, the song still works. It’s still powerful, and the lyrics still apply. You can sing it with faith. You can sing it to God —
Please get
me out
of this! —
with that kind of emphasis. There are many ways to interpret their songs, but of all the songwriters I know, I hear their songs and think,
Yes, that’s what I meant
.
That’s what I want to say. And that’s how I want to say it.
Another example is “And the World Goes ‘Round” from the movie
New York, New York
. That song can be sung very cynically, or full of hope. I choose to sing it as the truth, that sometimes you’re happy and sometimes you’re sad, but the world goes ’round. It’s that moment of clarity, of humor, of knowing the past is the past, and there’s still the future, always the future. They capture exactly how the character feels within a certain set of circumstances at that precise instant, and for me it was the closest to the way I felt. I don’t know the precise reasons, but I understood their thinking. I think it must have something to do with accepting one’s self, and that’s why I’ve never had to ask, “Should I sing this song differently?”
It’s like I’ve said, as a kid I tried to be quiet so I wouldn’t get into trouble, and I didn’t know how to say things properly. I felt like the whole world spoke a different language than I did. I hadn’t learned it yet, so I couldn’t describe what I was feeling. When I finally found out how to make myself understood, it was their songs. If I had trouble finding the words to express myself, Freddy could say them for me, and then the music that went underneath was all the scoring that I’d seen my father use to make you feel what the character feels. After I learned their first few songs, I sang them for my dad. My father was the one who taught me all the songs when I was a kid, and my father was the one who said, “These are the people you should go with. These people.”
Years later, when we were working on my show
Stepping Out
at Radio City, I said, “Freddy, I need a song that I can use to show my father’s designs. I want to talk about my father.” Fred said, “What about ‘Seeing Things’?” He sang me some of the lyrics, and then he wrote me a speech that included the line “My father was the dreamer and I was the practical one.” Fred told me, “You can illustrate that with pictures of your father’s designs, and you can edit them together on film.”
That’s how we work together. Fred always gives me what I need as a friend and as a performer, and Johnny is the salt of my earth. I could apply the realist and the dreamer idea to Fred and John too. When they’re working, sometimes Fred is the one who says, “Now, wait a minute.” And sometimes John says, “Now, wait a minute.” They may change roles but they get to the same place, which is how to make each piece the best it can possibly be.
I’m reminded that I went to a forum once about my father, and my father was there. He was answering questions for students, and I remember clearly somebody said, “Mr. Minnelli, in
An American in Paris
, when the rich heiress was showing the painting to the young artist, symbolically I think what you were trying to get at was that everyone has their peak in life, and it doesn’t matter what area.” Then someone else gave another interpretation of that scene in the movie, and someone else gave one, what he thought my father was saying. Finally, somebody said, “Mr. Minnelli, what were you saying? Why did you do that?” And Daddy said, “I thought it was funny.” In a way, John and Fred are saying that with their reminiscences in this book. “We did all of that work, but we didn’t necessarily know what layers of meaning would be found in our work at the time that we created it.” That’s what’s so great about them—between the sense of humor, the integrity and the talent, and what they bring out in each other, and what they brought out in me, I don’t know where to start to tell you about that. You look at the work, and the work speaks for itself. Their songs say what we’re really thinking and they expose what lies behind the facade and behind the secrets, behind the bluster and behind everything that society teaches you to be. They challenge and inspire you to stand up for yourself.
How do you talk about Kander and Ebb? They’re my heroes. In my case, they locked into the best part of me as a performer, which I think was my humor and my kind of we’ll-get-through-this spirit. Their devotion to the work and their respect for each
other have enabled their collaboration to last longer than any other lyric and music partnership in the history of Broadway. As friends and collaborators, they kept the integrity of their childhoods and their backgrounds intact—John is from the Midwest and Fred grew up in New York. They complement each other perfectly. They love being with each other, but they also understand working hours and don’t necessarily hang out together when they’re not working. John loves opera, and Fred loves all kinds of things that John doesn’t like. Fred is so into words. He might tell a story to make his point, as he often does with his lyrics.
I remember one time Fred and I were on a plane, and I had been having a romance that had just broken up. I was twenty-two and it seemed like the end of my world. I thought,
That’s it, I’ll never fall in love again.
I started crying and said, “Freddy, I don’t know what to do. I’m funny looking. I say the wrong things. I’ll never find anyone who will love me.” At first he tried to calm me down, but when he saw that wasn’t working, he said, “I have a story to tell you. When I was a boy, we lived in Manhattan near a Nabisco cookie factory. Some of the cookies that they made in the factory would break, and they would take the crumbled cookies and leave them outside. My mom would sometimes pick up a load of the broken cookies in an old pillowcase and bring them home for us. I used to go through that pillowcase and spread the broken cookies out on the oil cloth of our kitchen table. Then I would sort through the broken cookies. One day my mother said to me, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m looking for the whole cookie.’ She said, ‘You’re not going to find a whole cookie. The reason those were in the pillowcase is because they were broken. That’s the only reason that we have them.’” Fred said, “All right.” But he kept looking. On the plane, he looked at me and said, “But, Liza, one day I found it. As my mother stood at the sink, I held it up and said, ‘Look, Ma, the whole cookie!’” And his
mother said, “No, I told you, that’s impossible.” But she turned around and saw it in his hand. Then she said, “Well, you’ll never find another one.”
“But I had found it,” he told me. “And I knew somehow that I could find another one. So, Liza, never stop searching for the whole cookie! Maybe it’s in there someplace.” When you listen to the songs, and when you hear Kander and Ebb describe how they wrote them and recall the joys of their collaboration, as they do so marvelously in this book, you too will know you have found the whole cookie.

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