EBB: We did? I don’t remember that.
KANDER: That’s my memory of it. I can sort of see us standing there, but maybe that’s my imagination.
EBB: All I know is that Stanley asked us on the phone to write those songs, and as I remember they came very easily.
KANDER: They were fun to write but the movie wasn’t great.
EBB: No. The ending was changed. The original ending was kind of grim. There were two characters played by Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman. Liza was one corner of the triangle. At the end they both died and she was left alone on a beach. She was holding one of them in her arms and the other one came floating by.
KANDER: And there was a very slow reprise of one of the songs.
EBB: I remember it was contrapuntal. But they cut that ending and instead gave it a happy ending with Liza behind a steering wheel singing, “Bless my soul …” It was silly. The whole movie didn’t do very well, but I enjoyed that assignment.
KANDER: We had no investment in it at all. Nobody was going to ask us how to make the movie. We just wrote the songs on assignment. Working on a movie, at least for me when I write background music, you really have to be working for only one person, and that has to be the director. You have to develop a relationship
with that person. He has to help you find—or sometimes you collaborate on finding—what the music needs to do in any given scene. But if I’m working for a committee of people, that scares me. I don’t know how to do that. I would not know how to be a regular film writer. I worked with Robert Benton on
Kramer vs. Kramer
[1979],
Still of the Night
[1982], and
Places in the Heart
[1984], and he was terrific. We would look at a scene and he would say specifically, “I need music to tell me this, which the actors are not telling me or the script is not telling me.” That’s a great help, and he’s a wonderfully talented man. But writing songs together as we did for a movie like
Lucky Lady
is a different process.
EBB: They weren’t specifically character songs either.
KANDER: When I write background music, the process involves watching the movie several times with the director. Then I get a machine and watch it by myself. John Erman is somebody else who I’ve done several movies with, and the process with John is exactly the same. I sit with the director, and he may say, “Right here it needs something,” and then we discuss it. Eventually, once we’ve done that, he will give me a machine to take home, and I work on it there. There will be a mark on the film where the music is to start. That may be something that the two of us have decided together, and there will be another mark where we decided the music should disappear. It’s like an oldtime piano player playing for a silent film. That’s fine if you have a director who is supportive and doesn’t make you feel like you’re untalented.
There was one movie with Meryl Streep,
Still of the Night,
and I remember writing the background music for that. It’s funny, but I work on a film so intently and for so many hours that I really come to think that I know the actress. I was later introduced to Meryl Streep, and because I had been looking at her so much, I thought,
She must know me.
The same thing happened with
An
Early Frost [1985], which I did with John Erman. Aidan Quinn had the lead in it, and he lives up near me in the country. I worked on it so intently that when I finally met him, I thought,
I know him but he has no idea who I am
. Working on movies is a strange experience, but it can be fun. I loved doing
Breathing Lessons
. That was a charming movie based on a novel by Anne Tyler.
EBB: With Joanne Woodward. Awesome.
KANDER: That was John Erman directing again, and we worked through the same process with the machine. One thing in particular strikes me as fun that I have with a director as far as the music goes. I’m not a fan of movies where music is playing all the time, but if a scene has been written in such a way that the characters are saying one thing and the music is to tell you that’s not what they’re really thinking about, then you have a chance to do something that’s more illuminating.
Freddy, you may think I’m too romantic about this, but I think that the theatrical community in New York is very small and much more close-knit compared to Hollywood. There isn’t really as much of a sense of community in the movie business. In New York, there is a kind of support that comes just from being part of the community. The theater really is sort of classless—the stage manager, the head carpenter, and the star of the show are all family. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re a success this year. You’re accepted as a professional once you have proven yourself through your work. I sometimes think of it this way. In Hollywood they ask, “What are you doing now?” In New York they ask, “Who are you?”
EBB: I think that’s right. I often do think you’re too romantic with your views, but not about that. There’s a totally different sense of community in the theater in New York. It’s more like a family here. [
laughing
] Or maybe an asylum.
Chicago
on Broadway
K
ander and Ebb worked with Bob Fosse again on
Chicago,
the sensational twenties tale of murder and vaudeville, loosely based on the 1926 play by Maurine Dallas Watkins. In addition to writing the lyrics, Ebb collaborated with Fosse on the book. With work on the musical barely under way, Fosse suffered a heart attack in November 1974. When he returned three months later to rehearse the show, he became increasingly abusive with his cast and collaborators. During the tryout run, Kander told Ebb, “No show is worth dying for. Let’s go home.”
But the songwriters persevered and stayed with the production. The cast included Fosse’s wife, Gwen Verdon, as Roxie Hart, Chita Rivera as Velma Kelly, and Jerry Orbach as Billy Flynn.
Chicago
opened to mixed reviews on June 1, 1975, at the 46th Street Theater. Some critics found the show, with its crimedoes-pay theme, too cynical. Though losing across the board at the Tonys that year to Michael Bennett’s
A Chorus Line
,
Chicago
managed a run of 923 performances. Kander and Ebb scored memorably with “All That Jazz,” “Razzle Dazzle,” “My Own Best Friend,” “Me and My Baby,” “Cell Block Tango,” and the heartrending “Mr. Cellophane.” Bob Fosse’s 1979 movie,
All That Jazz,
was based in part on his experiences bringing
Chicago
to the stage. Kander and Ebb begin their reminiscences by recalling how Fosse’s movie distorted the personalities and actual events that took place while they were working on the show.
EBB: I was initially offended by
All That Jazz
.
KANDER: I was too.
EBB: By Bob Fosse’s depiction of the character who was the songwriter.
KANDER: Oh, I wasn’t thinking about the songwriter.
EBB: Who people easily could have thought was based on me or you.
KANDER: No, I know who the character was based on, as a matter of fact, because Bobby told me. It was someone Bobby worked with long before he met us.
EBB: I knew too. But my fear was nobody else was going to know.
KANDER: The thing that offended me about the movie was this: it was all about Bobby pretending to be honest. He was saying, I’m not worth much, but everybody around me is worth even less. The fact is that he was ascribing motives and activities to people around him during the making of
Chicago
that simply were not so.
EBB: If you watch the movie carefully, Bobby is always the victim and that was not so in reality.
KANDER: He pretends to be confessing to his own failings, but it’s a put-down of almost everybody else with the exception of Gwen Verdon. Everybody in the movie is portrayed as really trying to do terrible things behind Bobby’s back. Do you think he really believed all of that?
EBB: Yes, I do. I think that Bobby had a classic victim complex. There are many in my experience, performers especially, who are constant victims—“I was a nice guy,
but …”
“I behaved beautifully,
but …”
It’s always the other guy who’s doing them in. I find that very disconcerting. It was fascinating with Bobby because he made up things out of whole cloth. I wasn’t positive
that was what he was doing until he called to interview me for the movie he was making. I was in California when Bobby called. He was very pleasant, very loving, first asking me, “Can I use the song title ‘All That Jazz,’ for the movie? Because it’s yours.” I said, “Actually, it’s not. I was reading one of the
Time-Life
book series, and there was a chapter entitled ‘All That Jazz.’ I took it from there. I didn’t really invent it, Bob.” He was impressed with that and how I had always done that kind of thing ever since he had known me. He said, “If there is a line that you take from somebody, you acknowledge it. I never do. The sincerest form of flattery is to steal.” He believed that, and when I look at the work he did, I can see that he often borrowed from other sources, vaudeville routines and so forth.
During our phone conversation, he used a tape recorder and proceeded to question me. I remember him asking, “When I had my heart attack during
Chicago,
when you knew that I wasn’t going to be back for rehearsals for a while and that it might have meant closing down the show, what was your reaction?” I said, “I was horrified, Bob. I was disappointed and sad.” Then he asked, “What about the rest of the people who were involved with the show? Was anybody happy?” I said, “No, nobody was happy.”
KANDER: I never heard this story.
EBB: He said, “I thought people were happy. Gwen told me a couple of people were happy.” I said, “Nobody was happy It was the loss of a job if nothing else, and a concern for you, who we all clearly idolized. Why would we be happy?” Then he said, and this I remember distinctly, “Let’s get off that. What about Hal Prince?” I said, “What about Hal Prince?” He said, “When you and Kander went to Hal Prince to have him take over the show …”
KANDER: What?
EBB: “ … With Bobby Fryer and Marty Richards.”
KANDER:
What!
EBB: He said, “You apparently thought I was going to die.” I said, “That never happened. We never went to Hal.” But he insisted, “Well, somebody went to Hal Prince.” I said, “I don’t know who your sources are, Bobby, but if somebody went to Hal Prince, it was certainly not John, and it was certainly not me, and we certainly would not have approved of that. Nobody wanted to take the piece away from you. I mean, you wrote it with me and it was your idea from the beginning.” The conversation went on and on like that.
KANDER: Obviously, he held on to the belief—
EBB: That he had been betrayed.
KANDER: That we wanted Hal to take over as director. In the first place, oddly enough, if we were going to go to somebody to take over that show, it would not have been Hal. He didn’t like the material.
EBB: Hal never liked
Chicago.
He hated the show even when it was a hit. He thought we ripped off
Cabaret
. He wrote us a note saying that.
KANDER: One of his less temperate notes.
EBB: “Tell Bob Fosse that Chicago in the late 1920s is … not Berlin.”
KANDER: “Not Berlin,” right.
EBB: I remember that vividly
KANDER: But this is interesting. Why in the face of not only denial but no proof would Fosse put it in the movie?
EBB: Because he wanted it there.
KANDER: Yes, but why would he cling to believing that?
EBB: Because it gave him pleasure to feel that he was being betrayed. He wanted to be the victim.
KANDER: So he really believed that?
EBB: Absolutely. He believed it.
KANDER: That’s really sick.
EBB: Because we had already a long relationship with Hal,
if Bobby were to conjecture who we would go to, he would select Hal.
KANDER: So imagining makes it true.
EBB: Yes.
KANDER: When he came back after his heart attack, he got really dark. He was not that way as much before he was sick. He was much more fun when we first knew him. I think he had gone through a great deal with his heart bypass operation, and I think in some way that affected the work we did on the show. The show became more cynical and biting than it had started out to be. Bobby was a terrific man with a very dark side, and there was always something self-destructive about his behavior. But once we got into rehearsal, things became very unpleasant, not so much for me, but you had a terrible time. The atmosphere was not good, and he and Gwen were having a difficult time, too. At one point I remember she said, “They can pack his heart in sawdust as far as I’m concerned.” But Gwen’s feelings for Bobby were so complicated that it’s very hard to know what the truth was from her vantage point.
EBB: In that same conversation I had with him, he said, “I know you must have thought while we were working on
Chicago
that I was picking on you.” That was exactly what he said, and I told him, “Honestly, Bobby, yes, I did think that.” He said, “Well, I
was
picking on you. Do you know why? Because you are vulnerable, and vulnerable people drive me crazy.” As if that were enough of a reason! One of his scapegoats during
Chicago
was Michael Vita.
KANDER: Oh, God!
EBB: Michael Vita played the district attorney, and during the trial scene he had only two words to deliver: “Your witness.” After that line, Billy Flynn would launch into his summation.
KANDER: I remember Bobby was horrible to Michael.
EBB: Poor Michael could not say “Your witness” the right
way. Bobby would do the line for him, “No, no! Yooooouuur … witness.” Michael would dutifully say, “Yooooouuur … witness.” It went on and on, and Bobby had the poor guy in tears. He simply could not say it the way that Bobby wanted. Two words. It was terribly frightening. I took Michael Vita out to dinner that night to try to console him. He was absolutely distraught.
KANDER: This may seem like a detour, but it’s not. There is a long chapter about Kathleen Battle in the book
Molto Agitato.
Apparently, her behavior became more and more insulting to the people who she worked with, and eventually she was fired by the Metropolitan Opera. After those occasions when she was abusive to people onstage during rehearsals, her manager would always come back and say, “Well, you just don’t understand her—she’s a perfectionist.” Isn’t that a wonderful word? Most bullies like that will try to justify their behavior that way. If you caught them in mid-shriek or mid-insult when they were screaming at an actor, and if you asked why they were doing that, they would say, [
shouting
] “BECAUSE I WANT IT RIGHT!”
EBB: Oh, not so loud.
KANDER: That’s exactly how scary it is when you confront them.
EBB: The thing is that seldom happens to them. Nobody does stop and say, “Hey, why are you doing that?” You just become more terrified, even as a spectator sitting there watching it happen. I don’t know anybody who had the guts to go up to Bob Fosse and say, “Hey, why are you doing that?” He just did it. I remember Neil Simon was called in by Bobby to see the show. He was another guy who we heard Bobby felt had betrayed him because Neil Simon and his wife, Marsha Mason, gave shelter to Gwen during one of their marital altercations, and Bobby considered that really hostile. But Neil Simon and Marsha Mason came to see
Chicago,
and Bobby was talking to them at the end of the show, asking Neil if he would come in and add some jokes to pep the thing up or fix whatever he imagined was wrong with it.
KANDER: That was during previews. We were all onstage with the creative staff, and it was a humiliating moment for Bobby.
EBB: He and Neil went over and sat on the stairs to talk privately, and eventually Neil and Marsha left. You thought she and Neil didn’t love the show, and you were right. When they left, I asked Bobby, “Is Neil going to help us?” Now, mind you, I didn’t really think we needed all that much help, but Bobby did, so therefore we did. He said, “Oh no, Neil hated it. But don’t feel bad.” Neil Simon did not like the show and would not come in to help us.
KANDER: He was very public about it, Freddy. There was another incident that took place three or four days before we opened. Bobby had some really awful stuff that he was putting in the show and we kept wanting him to take it out. It was something really vulgar that distracted from the piece, and we went backstage with all our courage and asked him about it. He got very nasty. Then suddenly he said, “And by the way, why didn’t you ever give me the rewrite on the ‘Roxie’ number?” You started to say, “But, Bobby!”
EBB: I said, “I didn’t know you wanted a rewrite!” I was very upset at that point, and you took me by the shoulder, turned me around, and walked me straight out of the theater.
KANDER: Yes, I turned you around and said, “Good night,” and we walked out the stage door. That was, believe it or not, something I had learned from Liza, a healthy thing that I learned from Liza. She told me a story about shooting the movie of
Cabaret
. At one point after she did a scene, Bobby demanded, “Liza, I want you to come into my office right away. I want to talk about this right now!” She said, “No, Bobby, we’ll talk about it tomorrow because if I go in there now, you’re going to say something to me and tomorrow you’re going to send me flowers to apologize for it. So we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” Then she left. Now, whether that story is true or not, it was a real lesson for
me, the idea that you don’t have to play somebody else’s script. That flashed in my head when I turned you around and we went out the door.
EBB: Liza had other devices, too. When she was on the brink of being yelled at by Otto Preminger during
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon,
she would cry. She would start bawling and suddenly be this pathetic little girl, and Preminger deferred. He wouldn’t yell at her. So there were devices for putting people like that off. Unfortunately, I didn’t know any of them.
KANDER: When you were in the midst of your agony with Fosse while we were in Philadelphia, I said to you, “Why don’t we get on a train and go back to New York. This isn’t worth it. No show is worth dying for. Let’s go home.”