EBB: Philadelphia was not good.
KANDER: I wasn’t going through it as badly as you, but I remember lying on the bed in my hotel room and thinking,
I’m going to die here.
EBB: I realize now that I was really the whipping boy. It was not only that I was the most vulnerable, but something else that he told me later. He said that he liked me the best. Maybe I suited some image of a whipping boy that was pleasant for him because I was malleable. I never stood up to him. I never argued with him. That was how the show was written. I would go home every night, write a scene, bring it in the next day, and show Bobby. He would say, “Oh, this is all right,” but he was never very wholehearted in his praise. The mere fact that he accepted it was terrific as far as I was concerned. I revered him back then, and he did initially give me the courage to write the book. I also knew when I played a number for him and he approved it, that number was going to be terrific.
For all the difficulty working with him, and that was enormous, I always thought it was worth it. It’s a very complicated issue, isn’t it? There you are working with a man who in your
opinion is a bona fide genius. But at the same time, he shows discernible signs of being a detestable bully. I can’t imagine how other people would deal with that. I know what I have seen. I saw Herb Gardner and Paddy Chayevsky have lunch with him daily. They thought the world of him and yet were able to say to me, “Don’t be afraid of him. He’s an arrogant son of a bitch, but he knows what he is doing. Don’t let him bully you. Stand up to him. You’re every bit as talented as he is.” I think what happened was that I made peace in my mind with all of the contradictions and allowed my own love of the work on
Chicago
to supersede everything.
KANDER: I remember that you were extremely enthusiastic from the start, and I was excited to work with Bobby and Gwen as well, but I was concerned at first that
Chicago
might be another piece that we were writing where show business would be a metaphor for life.
EBB: I was interested in the original play,
Chicago.
The film adaptation,
Roxie Hart,
starred Ginger Rogers, but the movie was of no use in writing the book. As I understood it, Bobby and Gwen always wanted to adapt the play
Chicago,
but they never figured out how to make it into a musical. Bobby and I were close after working on
Cabaret and Liza with a
Z, and one day he said to me, “Can’t you find a way to make this
Chicago
material into a musical? Fred, I think you could write the book.” When Bob Fosse said you could do something, you somehow felt you could do it. So I made it vaudeville based on the idea that the characters were performers. Every musical moment in the show was loosely modeled on someone else: Roxie was Helen Morgan, Velma was Texas Guinan, Billy Flynn was Ted Lewis, Mama Morton was Sophie Tucker.
KANDER: One of the reasons that we call
Chicago
a vaudeville is because many of the songs that we wrote are related to specific vaudeville performers like those you mentioned, and Eddie
Cantor and Bert Williams as well. We listened to recordings by those people. Again, it was that unconscious process of listening to a lot of jazz from that period, letting your brain soak it in and then writing. To some people, this may sound like a crude way of doing research, but it works for me. I have this absolute confidence that the style of the music that we’ve been listening to seeps into our unconscious and comes out in our own language.
EBB:
Chicago
was an entertainment, but it also said something about celebrity, about our celebrating killers. At the time Squeaky Fromme of the Manson family was on the cover of
Time,
and that sort of infamy was initially what the show was about. I thought of it this way: ask most Americans who the secretary of state is, and they won’t be able to tell you; but ask them who Al Capone is, and they will know right away.
KANDER: Life around the
Chicago
production was never pleasant. When we were out of town, the ending of the show had two songs in it for the girls, and they just didn’t quite work, though we liked them.
EBB: Right. We had a finale in which Roxie and Velma come together to do their club act, and the act that we decided to do was a rather cheesy club act where Chita played the drums and Gwen played the saxophone. They sang a song called “It” and another called “Loopin’ de Loop.” They were very amusing, but mostly to us, the sight of Chita banging the drums—
KANDER: And Gwen honking on the saxophone. I remember we were rehearsing in a hotel ballroom. Fosse and Stuart Ostrow, who was assisting him, came to us much more politely than usual and said, “Would you mind going off and reconsidering the ending and writing another song for it?” They were terribly apologetic.
EBB: Bobby thought the girls should have a more sophisticated club act, so he wanted us to scotch those two songs and replace them with one song to accommodate the club act.
KANDER: We said we would try, reluctantly, with an attitude that we would do it just to be cooperative. I will always remember the face we put on for them. As we left, we didn’t even look at each other. We went out the ballroom door and started skipping down the hallway, laughing gleefully.
EBB: It was like they gave us a vacation in Florida.
KANDER: We went out to where the piano was and wrote the song “Nowadays” in a very short time.
EBB: No more than an hour.
KANDER: We took the day off and then brought in the song so it would seem like we had done a lot of work to come up with the new number.
EBB: We spent the entire day away just to make it look hard, and then Bobby and Stuart liked the song, and it went into the show.
KANDER: I remember when we wrote “Razzle Dazzle,” before we took it in and played it for Bob, you said with absolute confidence, “Try adding a couple of finger snaps to it. Bobby will love that.” We added them, and then we took it in and played it for Bob, and as soon as he heard the finger snaps, he loved the song.
EBB: As I recall, “Cell Block Tango” was a very difficult number to write. It’s not so much a song as a musical scene for six women, and each has to tell her personal story in the course of a musical refrain that keeps repeating. It was difficult because each of the stories had to be entertaining and also meaningful. Each one had to be of a length that didn’t go on too long and run the risk of being boring. We kept rewriting and rewriting those stories that the women told to go with the refrain—
He had it coming
He had it coming
He only had himself to blame.
If you’d have been there
If you’d have seen it
I betcha would have done the same!
KANDER: When Gwen was sick during
Chicago,
Liza took over for eight weeks and she came close to making the show a hit.
EBB: She did all of Gwen’s blocking.
KANDER: She learned that show in a week.
EBB: I guess I should confess this. I had been with Liza in California, and when we were on our way back to New York on the plane, when I knew Liza was going to do
Chicago,
I was egging her on to get little things back into the show that I lost during my collaboration with Fosse. I desperately wanted “My Own Best Friend” to be a song just for Roxie. That was the way it was originally supposed to be done. But Bobby took that song and added Chita as Velma. He had them at the edge of the stage, obviously mocking the high-end cabaret singers with their phony Oh-look-at-me attitude. He hated songs like—
KANDER: “I Did It My Way.”
EBB: And “I Gotta Be Me.” He hated them. And this was his take on how you would sing “My Own Best Friend” if you were that kind of performer. I thought what he did belittled the song. But Liza knew she had power coming into the show, and on the plane she told me, “I’ll get it back.” During a rehearsal, she said, “Bobby, I would like to sing this number by myself.” That meant having Chita not come out, which was fine with Chita. The first night that Liza sang it, she got a tremendous hand, and she whispered into the microphone, “How about that, Bobby!” I don’t know who heard her. To me it was like she had yelled it out.
KANDER: I never heard that.
EBB: I was frightened that she said it. “How about
that,
Bobby.” But she idolized him. I remember when we did
Liza with a
Z, Bobby made “Ring Them Bells” a production number.
KANDER: “Ring Them Bells” had always worked reasonably
well, but it had never been staged like that. What Bobby did was breathtaking.
EBB: He did it wonderfully. Interestingly enough, after
Liza with a
Z, she was going on the road and she couldn’t afford to take as many people with her in the
Liza with a
Z company. She had to call Bobby and ask him to restage the number for fewer people. It doesn’t look as good with fewer people, but he was fine with it and very loving about it. He came to the studio in the morning about ten, and he had to go to East Hampton at exactly twelve-thirty because he was being picked up. So he was there two and a half hours. About a week later, Liza called me and said, “Bobby charged me twenty-five thousand dollars for restaging that number.” I said, “Oh, really?” She said, “Yes, what should I do?” I said, “It’s like that old line, pay the two dollars.” Liza said, “Pay it!” I said, “What are you going to do, argue with him? No.” She said, “Isn’t that a lot of money?” I said, “Oh yeah!” He soaked her, but he got his money.
KANDER: During the
Chicago
run, there was no publicity for Liza replacing Gwen, no sign in front of the theater. Every night the stage manager would say, “Tonight the role of Roxie Hart, usually played by Miss Gwen Verdon, will be played by Liza Minnelli.” We weren’t doing well before Liza came into the show. Our reviews had been very mixed.
EBB: Oh, I think the show was going to close. Liza was the one who made it a hit, right?
KANDER: It wasn’t really a hit. It never paid back. What happened was that people began thinking of the show as a hit with Liza, so when Gwen came back, business was good. That was Liza at her most amazing.
EBB: I remember Brooks Atkinson’s review of
Chicago
basically said something like, “It is too slight a piece to sustain its atmosphere.”
KANDER: Many critics thought it was just too mean.
EBB: Yes, sardonic wasn’t in that year.
KANDER: Writing “Class” was fun in that way where we were able to just let go.
EBB: That was a duet for Velma and the prison matron. After we had written it, I remember having serious second thoughts about that number:
Velma:
What ever happened to fair dealing,
And pure ethics
And nice manners?
Why is it everyone now is a pain in the ass?
What ever happened to class?
Matron:
Class?
What ever happened to “Please, may I?”
And “Yes, thank you”?
And “How charming”?
Now every son of a bitch is a snake in the grass.
What ever happened to class?
Velma and Matron:
Class!
Ah, there ain’t no gentlemen
To open up the doors.
There ain’t no ladies now,
There’s only pigs and whores,
And even kids’ll knock you down
So’s they can pass.
Nobody’s got no class!
Velma:
What ever happened to old values?
Matron:
And fine morals?
Velma:
And good breeding?
Matron:
No one even says “oops”
When they’re passing their gas. What ever happened to class?
Velma:
Class!
Velma and Matron:
Ah, there ain’t no gentleman
That’s fit for any use,
And any girl’d touch your privates
For a deuce.
Matron:
And even kids’ll kick your shins and give ya sass.
Velma:
And even kids’ll kick your shins and give ya sass.
Velma and Matron:
Nobody’s got no class!
Velma:
All you read about today is rape and theft.
Matron:
Jesus Christ! Ain’t there no decency left?
Velma and Matron:
Nobody’s got no class.
Matron:
Everybody you watch
Velma:
S’got his brain in his crotch.
Matron:
Holy crap.
Velma:
Holy crap.
Matron:
What a shame.
Velma:
What a shame.