KANDER: There was one night after talking with Scorsese, I discovered he hadn’t been there. We had three boys and there was a cover for the boys. One of the three, a guy named Michael Leeds, had dark hair and he had been out with back trouble. His cover, who was very blond, had been on all week. I was standing backstage with Marty when the cover, the blond kid, walked by. Marty asked me, “Who is that?” I said, “That’s Michael Leeds’s understudy. He’s been on all week.” Then, slow-witted as I am, I began to realize that Marty hadn’t seen the show all week.
EBB: What was surprising was the type of questions Marty would ask. “What’s a swing?” “What’s a wagon?”
1
He would ask questions like that and I realized that he had never been anywhere near musical theater.
KANDER: This went on all the while we were in rehearsals and out of town. We first played Chicago, then San Francisco, then Los Angeles.
EBB: During all that time, the atmosphere was roiling.
KANDER: It was a very uncomfortable situation, though nobody was mean. Cy Feuer was one of the producers, and he would sit in the back of the theater every night taking copious notes. At one time, Cy had been a stage manager and he was knowledgeable, but he realized there was no point in giving his notes to Scorsese because Marty would never execute any of them. That was so frustrating, watching him with these big yellow sheets of paper. At the end of the night, Cy would look at his notes, then give a deep sigh and just tear them up.
EBB: The terrible thing was that we never failed to sell out. When we were due in San Francisco from Chicago, on one of the front pages of the newspaper was a picture of the lines around the block to buy tickets for
The Act.
That was scary for us, to know that we had all these audiences and no real show.
KANDER: I don’t know what Cy said to Scorsese or how they got out of that commitment. That was done without us, thank goodness.
EBB: We were no braver than Liza was.
KANDER: No, because it wasn’t as if we were going to be getting rid of someone we didn’t like or someone who was unpleasant. There was never anything malevolent about Marty. We knew he was in over his head and that nothing would change as long as he was directing. The trouble was no one could confront Liza with the truth about the show’s lack of direction.
EBB: We were in San Francisco when Michael Bennett was brought in as a possible replacement. Ron Field was there because he happened to be with Michael that night.
KANDER: Michael Bennett and Ron Field proceeded to give us no advice whatsoever, but at great length. Between the
two of them, that was one of the most agonizing evenings in my life.
EBB: That was a terrible night, and they gave us strange advice. But they were asked by the producer to attend the show, at least Michael was, and we were summoned.
KANDER: We all sat there, a small audience, listening to them.
EBB: Liza and Cy Feuer were there too. We met in somebody’s apartment, and both Michael and Ron held forth on what was wrong with the show. I remember one thing they said. When Liza first appears onstage, she should be in a large gray wig, and she should be an older woman making a comeback in a club, not the younger person that we portrayed. They wanted to have her be middle-aged. I didn’t think much of any of their ideas.
KANDER: There was something that night that made my heart sink. We were hoping that they would come in and take over. But instead Michael Bennett gave us the most useless piece of advice about Scorsese. He said, “You’ve just got to help that poor baby.” That sentence rang in my ears. I thought,
What can he be thinking?
EBB: Oh, I could say more. I had the feeling they were stoned.
KANDER: Well, they were stoned a great deal of the time.
EBB: That also undercut their advice. Later, when we were in Los Angeles, one of the producers asked Gower Champion to see the show.
KANDER: It must have been Cy.
EBB: Gower came to a matinee, and then I took him home with me, and I must have had scabs on my knees from pleading with him to come in. “Please, Gower, just make it look professional.” Liza was badly costumed. The lighting was awful. How humiliating it was to come in with a show that wasn’t working for mechanical reasons.
KANDER: Gower saw at once what the problems were.
EBB: But he said, “I don’t want to do it. I don’t like the show. I think Liza is wonderful and I like the score. But I can’t see this show working.” I pleaded with him to come back to see the evening performance, and he did come back. After the show, he went into the dressing room with Liza and had a confab about what to do. Then he came out saying he would do it. What did he say, she was a “temptress”?
KANDER: I was going to have dinner with him, and I was waiting for her. Gower said, “I’m just going to go in and say a couple of things to Liza and then we’ll all go out to dinner.” This was right after the performance. So I waited, and I waited, and it was almost an hour later. I can’t remember now whether we all went out or I went home, but I remember his reaction was: “She is a
temptress.”
That was his word.
EBB: God only knows what happened between them, but he agreed to do it, and he was an enormous help. The show at least began to look like a polished presentation, maybe of dog shit material, but the lights and costumes worked. The reviews had been awful in California, terrible in Chicago, hideous in San Francisco, but then there were good reviews in New York. It was almost a case of reverse snobbery.
KANDER: Granted that Liza was very seductive and that Gower enthralled her, but he was also somebody who was very definite in rehearsal. Even though the show was never wonderful, he made it immensely better and made her immensely better because she had somebody strong at the helm. He turned it into a show, and we were extremely grateful to him.
EBB: Oh, God, yes. Gower was like a savior.
KANDER: Gower saved us. He was totally different than he had been on
The Happy Time
, when he kept us out of rehearsals. When it came to The Act, he wanted us there all the time.
EBB: I think he needed us there because that was a show already
scripted and formulated, whereas he was starting from scratch with
The Happy Time.
KANDER: He did an interesting thing which for that show was perfect. He took the songs in the show and he made cards for each number. Then he arranged them on a table to see what the balance of the score was like, what followed what and what impact each would have with an audience. Before Gower came on, the numbers that she was singing in her act were non sequiturs and didn’t relate to her story. Gower told us, “Fellas, you have to connect them.” He was absolutely right, and he made the show make sense in a way that it had never made sense before.
EBB: Gower also went into the show after a while. He played the lead for a time after it opened in New York. I had forgotten that.
KANDER: He played the show for a couple of weeks. He was never a major actor, but he was all right.
EBB: Do you remember the S & M song we wrote for
The Act?
KANDER: I thought that song was terrific.
EBB: It was in
The Act
for a time, though we didn’t open with it. It was about a girl who liked to be smacked around. I love to write about offbeat subjects like that.
KANDER: The girl in that song was brought up like her mother to be a very good girl and always say, “Yes, sir. Please, sir. Thank you very much, sir.” She marries and becomes very rich, which was her ascent into society.
EBB: But then she picks up guys who are going to hit her.
KANDER: She has her chauffeur drive her down to the docks to find guys who would beat her up.
EBB: [
singing
] “James, drive me to the docks again.”
KANDER: [
singing
] “Down where the river flows? Hey, Mister. Are you calling me, honey?”
EBB: At the end it was “Yes, sir. Please, sir. Thank you very much, sir.”
KANDER: As he beats her up. [
singing
] “Little girls who always watch their manners / Turn out to be ladies …”
EBB: We kidded each other about that for a long time. But we were supposed to write Liza’s club act credibly, and we were looking for as much variety for her as we could find. Because the character she portrayed was a woman who had been a movie star and was now doing a club act to make a comeback, we made a decision that she should sing something highly dramatic and a little shocking to cast her out of her former image. She had always been the girl next door in the movies. So we asked ourselves what could she sing that was really very grown-up and shocking.
KANDER: You told me that Liza never liked that song.
EBB: No, she didn’t. I don’t think the audience liked that song either. That was why we finally cut it. I know that it was later done in a nightclub act by a Latin American woman, Aurelia.
KANDER: Right. She was Brazilian or Argentinian.
EBB: “Please, Sir” was her big number. She had a following and her audiences would ask her to sing that song all the time. Can you imagine? We’ve written a lot of made-to-order songs like that. Write an S & M song. Write about baseball. Write a Noel Coward song. Write a song about abortion. They were specific assignments.
KANDER: We’ve done that kind of thing a number of times. Remember “What’s the Hurry, Larry?”
EBB: Oh yeah, that was about a girl—
KANDER: On her way to have an abortion. We wrote that song for a PBS television show about birth control.
EBB: And Larry was speeding. [
singing
] “Must you go so fast?” He apparently wanted to get there fast because he didn’t want her to back out.
KANDER: That was your idea.
EBB: I love to write material like that.
KANDER: I remember Hal asked us to write a couple of
songs for
Diamonds
, which was a revue about baseball. We wrote a song about this organist, a woman who plays the organ at the baseball game. She studied for years to be this great organist, and now she’s playing for baseball games.
EBB: We wrote that?
KANDER: I thought it was funny.
EBB: That was not a successful show, and in my memory our work was not all that good. I loved writing for the revival of
Hay Fever
[
December 12, 1985, Music Box Theater
]
.
We were asked to write a Noel Coward–type of song for Rosemary Harris to sing at a piano. The song worked fine, and everyone seemed pleased with it, which was pleasing to us.
KANDER: “No My Heart” was the title, and it really was a kind of Noel Coward song. Brian Murray directed that piece and I ran into him in the elevator the other day. Brian was singing it in the elevator as we were going down.
EBB: We wrote another made-to-order song for The
Mad Woman of Central Park West
[June 13, 1979, 22 Steps Theater]. Arthur Laurents directed that and he asked us for a number for Phyllis Newman.
KANDER: What was that song? It was kind of nice.
EBB: That was called “Cheerleader,” and at the end she had a nervous breakdown. [
laughing
] But don’t we all! At the end the poor lady was taking lithium. I actually don’t remember seeing Phyllis perform it. I didn’t see that show. Did you see it?
KANDER: I remember seeing her do it. I like Phyllis.
EBB: So do I. We just wrote the number and they seemed to like it. Then it was in the show, and that’s all I know.
KANDER: One thing that all of those songs have in common, whether they work or not and whether anybody will ever sing them again, they really were all great fun to write.
With a book by Peter Stone and directed by Robert Moore,
Woman of the Year
was based on the 1941 Tracy/Hepburn movie. After opening at the Palace Theater on March 29, 1981, the show became a Tony-winning vehicle for its star, Lauren Bacall, and for Kander and Ebb. The songwriters crafted the score for performers who were not major singing talents and yet the show managed a Broadway run of almost two years, with Raquel Welch and later Debbie Reynolds following Bacall in the lead role. The original cast also included Harry Guardino, Roderick Cook, Rex Everhart, and Marilyn Cooper.
KANDER: Peter Stone came to us with the idea for
Woman of the Year,
and Bacall was built into it from the beginning.
EBB: I think
Woman of the Year
was a mistake. We did that show because it was Lauren Bacall and it was a good title. But I didn’t have any real conviction or passion about it. We won Tonys but mostly because there was nothing much up against us.
KANDER: That was another show where I don’t think our work was so great. It’s been a lesson to me that there are shows we have done which I think were really good but received no attention at all—I mean, major flops—and then suddenly we get a Tony Award for a show that is just professional.