You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (16 page)

Leigh returned in short order with a police officer—some say a traffic cop—and demanded that he arrest Feuer, Simon, and Fosse for their complicity in violating her contractual rights. The situation was eventually defused. Feuer remembered the cop as saying “Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about” before leaving.
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Others remember him asking for a couple of passes to come see the show. Further variations on the tale extend to its timing. Some remember Leigh getting the policeman after arriving at the theater and learning some lyrics had been changed. Others remember it happening while the show was in performance and culminating with the officer asking if he might be able to stay to see the second act of the show.

There is one consistent detail in the accounts of Leigh’s attempts to find justice as
Little Me
evolved. She never demanded that Coleman be arrested.

Regardless of when this fracas occurred, there was still one question after Feuer’s announcement about “Lafayette,” namely, what song or number would replace it?

As the show moved closer to the point of being “frozen”—the moment when no more changes could be made so that the performers could settle into the show before the New York critics would see it—no answer was in sight. It was at this point that dance arranger Werner decided to pursue an idea he had been harboring for a while: replacing the boisterous can-can “Lafayette, We Are Here” with a gentle wisp of a waltz, “Real Live Girl.”

“I went to Gwen [Verdon, Fosse’s wife] and I said, ‘How about “Real Live Girl?” And she got very entranced about the idea, and she said, ‘I’ll talk to Bob.’ . . . She twisted Bob’s arm. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you one day, and we’ll put it in Monday night. And if it works, we’ll keep it.’”
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The day Fosse had given Werner and Verdon was the company’s day off, and the two of them spent it with the dancers. “She and I put the routine together and taught it to everybody, and it was a simple enough number so that the dancers could learn it very quickly. There were the finger snaps and all of that stuff—that was all Gwen. Bob had nothing to do with it. He didn’t see the number before it went in.”
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That evening, Fosse and Verdon waited in the lobby of the Erlanger to see what the audience’s reaction to the change would be. Copyist Charlap was also there and recalled that after the male ensemble finished singing the number “the audience went into applause that you just wouldn’t believe. Bob Fosse’s there and he’s listening and then . . . would you believe he did cartwheels out in the lobby of the Erlanger Theatre!?!”
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After this last revision, the show finished its run in Philadelphia and moved back to New York, where it settled into the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Forty-sixth Street.

For everyone involved, the opening night of
Little Me
on October 17 was fraught with tension, and not simply because nerves had been stretched to the breaking point during rehearsals and the tryout. They also had concerns about the audience that evening. A vast portion of the house had been filled with a theater party, which meant that some theatergoers would be late and, worse still, some might have overimbibed at the dinner preceding the show.

Simon described the scenario: “The house was half-filled as the overture started, two-thirds filled as the curtain went up, and the final three hundred stragglers filed in feeling for their seats in the half-darkened theater all during the first scenes.” It wasn’t long before one tuxedoed theatergoer roused himself and began to stagger up the aisle in search of a men’s room, and as he passed Coleman, Simon, and Fosse at the back of the theater, “He screamed at the top of his voice, ‘This is the worst piece of crap I’ve seen since
My Fair Lady
.’”
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The creators’ worries were compounded by what was happening on the stage. Caesar was delivering an erratic performance, mangling laugh lines by changing words and coughing while speaking. Meanwhile, Simon recalled, Fosse was at the rear of the darkened theater physicalizing the death their work was suffering: “[He] very simply put his arms down at his sides, closed his eyes, and fell backward, every part of his body hitting the floor simultaneously.”
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Because the opening for
Little Me
was held on a Saturday night, the creators, cast, and crew had to wait until Monday, November 19, until the papers ran reviews. When the critics’ assessments finally appeared, they didn’t mention theatergoers’ behavior or Caesar’s idiosyncrasies. In fact, most reviewers agreed that Caesar had made a triumphant return to the stage in the musical. “All Hail to Caesar!” proclaimed the headline of the review in the
Journal American
. “I Come to Praise Caesar” was George Oppenheimer’s headline for his assessment of the show that ran in
Newsday
on November 21. In it he wrote, “[Caesar] has never been in righter form than in the various and hilarious roles that he plays here.”

Similar sentiments were to be found in
Time
when the magazine’s review ran on November 30. It began: “Caesar vanquishes Broadway in a one-man comic population explosion.” The article continued: “It is more wonderful than getting a genie out of a bottle to have that full-grown master of comedy, Sid Caesar, released, at last, from that little 21-in. glass box.”

Fosse’s dances also earned accolades from many writers, particularly “Rich Kids Rag,” which Norman Nadel described as “the choreographic coup of the season so far” in his
New York World-Telegram
review. Fosse’s work on “I’ve Got Your Number,” the solo dance for Swenson, also got high marks. John Chapman said it was “the highlight of the show” in his
Daily News
review: “As a performer, [Swenson] has the style and class of a male Gwen Verdon.”

But even as critics admired the dancing and attempted to single out which of the seven roles Caesar was playing was their favorite (his turn as the German director was often the choice), their assessments of other aspects of the show weren’t as glowing. Simon’s book took some particularly hard shots. Melvin Maddocks, in his November 24
Christian Science Monitor
review, described it as “cheerfully slapdash. Occasionally, it pretends to satire. But it has no more bite than a month-old baby.” And in the all-important
New York Times
review, Howard Taubman wrote that the plot “plods as much as it romps.”

Coleman and Leigh’s work got kinder (but still decidedly mixed) notices. Walter Kerr said in the
New York Herald Tribune
that “controlled slyness slips in and out of Carol [
sic
] Leigh’s lyrics and Cy Coleman’s melodies without begging for favors or pushing the beat.” And in the
New York Post
, Richard Watts Jr. described Coleman’s music as “bright and attractive.”

At the same time, however, their work was being labeled merely “sturdy” by Associated Press writer William Glover, and in the December 1 issue of the
New Yorker
, John McCarten wrote, “The score, by Cy Coleman, isn’t more than serviceable, and the lyrics, by Carolyn Leigh, aren’t long on originality.”

The critics’ reactions overall were best summed up by the UPI’s Jack Gaver, who concluded his review by saying that it was one of those shows where “if you don’t like the star, don’t go. Caesar is the works,” and by Maddocks, who wrote: “The aura of a hit has been so skillfully imitated that, in a business where hits, after all, are only an impression in the public mind, the imitation has almost the same effect as the real thing.”

Theatergoers must have been eager for a chance to catch Caesar and to believe that
Little Me
was a hit, because from the moment it opened it did capacity business, even in the wake of a newspaper strike, which began only a few weeks after the opening and continued into March of the following year. Through February 1963, in fact, it was sometimes as difficult to get a ticket to
Little Me
as it was to get one for one of the other blockbuster hits—such as
How to Succeed
and Lionel Bart’s Dickens adaptation,
Oliver!
.

But with the arrival of March the numbers at the Lunt-Fontanne box office started to slide rapidly. Feuer and Martin hadn’t committed to any display advertising to promote the raves that the show had received, but with the newspaper strike grinding forward, it’s uncertain whether keeping the show in front of ticket buyers in that manner would have been worthwhile.

They did, however, institute a first on Broadway. In a column in early March, Earl Wilson announced: “For the first time, a Broadway show is going to take telephone orders for tickets. (‘Little Me’ due to the newspaper strike.)”
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Dorothy Kilgallen also announced the unprecedented step in her column that week, adding that “[Caesar] has promised to accept some of the calls himself between the matinee and evening performances.”
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The innovation worked for a brief period, but by the time the newspaper strike ended, the show’s grosses had been cut by a third, and when all Broadway shows suffered during the Easter holiday season, the grosses were down by almost 50 percent.

There were some positives in what otherwise might have been a steady free fall. Just after the company of
Little Me
appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, performing “Deep Down Inside,” Coleman and Leigh’s faux hoedown number with Fosse’s exuberant choreography, the show got a substantial boost in ticket sales.

Similarly, the announcement of the Tony Award nominations for the 1962–63 season also helped boost the box office.
Little Me
scored a total of ten nominations, tying with
Oliver!
Coleman and Leigh’s score got a nod, the first in what would become an almost unbroken string of nominations for the composer. With the exception of
Welcome to the Club
in 1989, Coleman was nominated for each of his subsequent Broadway shows.

Other nominations went to Caesar, Swenson, and Martin in performance categories. In addition, Simon was recognized with a nomination for his book, while Feuer and Fosse were nominated for their work as codirectors. Fosse received an additional nomination for his choreography.

When the awards were finally handed out at the end of April,
Little Me
walked away with only one: Fosse earned the fourth in a long string of Tonys for his dances. Caesar lost his bid for an award to Zero Mostel, another funnyman, who had made a mark that year in the rollicking
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, and while it might be easy to assume that Stephen Sondheim’s score for this show had trounced
Little Me
, it was Lionel Bart who took home the prize that year for
Oliver!
In fact, Sondheim’s work was ignored in favor of the now mostly forgotten
Bravo Giovanni
.

A Funny Thing Happened
, which had gotten nine nominations, actually ended up winning the majority of awards that season, including one for Larry Gelbart (Coleman’s future collaborator), who, with Burt Shevelove, won for his book for the show.

Immediately after the Tonys
Little Me
’s slide at the box office accelerated perilously. When they looked back on the events of spring 1963, Coleman and his cocreators often mused about what the reasons. Some pointed to the fact that Caesar was not only doing a television show, which meant his fans could still catch him for free once a month, but also that he was doing one that wasn’t terribly popular. When the monthly series of specials began airing on ABC after
Little Me
opened, the
Variety
critic gave the backhanded compliment that with the show “Caesar furnished an insight into human behavior, but generally failed in the entertainment sector.”
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And Rick Du Brow, in his UPI review of the debut episode, announced that the special “never reigned but it bored.”
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But while potential ticket buyers might have wondered about the quality of the performance they might catch at the theater, they walked in knowing a good deal of Coleman and Leigh’s score. As he had done with
Wildcat
, publisher Morris made a push to get the music out to the public early. George Chakiris (who starred as the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo, in the film of
West Side Story
) recorded a version of “I’ve Got Your Number” infused with a seductive Latin sound, and both crooner Jerry Vale and the felinesque thrush Kitty Kallen did “Here’s to Us.” These records and others preceded the original cast album, which was attracting attention in the trade papers before the show hit its one-month anniversary, and just after the first of the year the album (in both its stereo and mono versions) was charting in
Billboard
.

Regardless of how the music was being received when separated from the production, Feuer and Martin had to figure out a way to keep the production alive. They attempted to shore up their receipts and gain some word of mouth on the show by offering twofers in late May, but in less than a month, and in a scenario all too familiar to Coleman from
Wildcat
, Caesar fainted onstage.

In this instance, however, it wasn’t exhaustion that caused the star’s collapse. Throughout the run, despite the rave reviews he received, he was plagued by his own “paranoia and lack of self-esteem.” It got so bad that he began to believe he was contributing nothing to the show: “Even though I was getting applause through the performance, I’d listen to [Swenson’s] applause [for “I’ve Got Your Number”] and say to myself: ‘The people aren’t coming to see me. They’re coming to see Swenson.’”
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Caesar further admitted, “One night, in
Little Me
, the pressure finally did catch up with me. Someone gave me a new, strong tranquilizer. ‘This will really give you a zoom,’ he said. It gave me more than a zoom. I collapsed on the stage and had to be rushed, unconscious, to Roosevelt hospital.”
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