You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (2 page)

Acknowledgments

There are so many people who have helped make this book happen, starting with Shelby Coleman, who had the faith in me from the outset to write this chronicle of her husband’s life and work.

Furthermore, I must thank Ken Bloom, whose initial support and ongoing encouragement has been invaluable, as well as Damon Booth at Notable Music, who has been on hand to help with my requests for materials and backup from the company’s files.

I also need to thank Erik Haagensen, whose keen eye and insight have helped shape what’s contained in these pages; and Ted Kociolek, who not only opened his home to me for an interview but welcomed me back time and again to play through unrecorded pieces of music, giving me a deeper sense of Cy’s creative process.

To the many friends, old and new, who have been on hand to lend materials, their counsel, and their patience, all of which combined to make this book possible, I also need to say a heartfelt thank you: Danny Abosch, Dan Bacalzo, Brian Belovarac, Chris Byrne, Aaron Cahn, Mark Charney, Michael Croiter, Helene Davis, Joe Dziemianowicz, Josh Ellis, Peter Filichia, Harry Forbes, Dan Fortune, Merle Frimark, James Gavin, Bob Gazzale, Scott Gorenstein, Karen Greco, Simon Greiff, Erik Hartog, Harry Haun, Paulette Haupt, David Hurst, John Issendorf, Judy Jacksina, Chris Johnson, Ken Kantor, Maryann Karinch, Darrel Karl, Penny Landau, Daniel Langan, Brian Scott Lipton, Joseph Marzullo, Alan Mehl, Keith Meritz, Ken Miller, Peter Monks, Bob and Carol Nagle, Charles Nelson, Richard C. Norton, Craig Palanker, Gail Parenteau, Joshua S. Ritter, Caesar Rodriguez, Bill Rudman, Jim Russek, Frank Scheck, Bob Sixsmith, Stephen Soba, Doug Strassler, Richard Tay, Peter Tear, John Torres, Joseph Weiss, and Andrew Wilkinson, as well as a superlative cadre of friends from P.S. 41 on Staten Island.

Deep appreciation also goes to Cy’s collaborators, colleagues, and friends who so generously gave of their time, sharing their memories of him (and sometimes even mementos): Sue Agrest, Ruth Allan, Russell Baker, Fred Barton, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Pat Birch, Michael Blakemore, Tony Bongiovi, Mark Bramble, Mike Burstyn, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Carleton Carpenter, Keith Carradine, Barbara Carroll, Emile Charlap, Charles Cochran, Eric Comstock, Chuck Cooper, Jerome Coopersmith, Nick Corley, Avery Corman, Bill Crow, John Cullum, Terrie Curran, Clifford David, Ed Dixon, Harvey Evans, Robert Fletcher, Larry Fuller, Ira Gasman, Yaron Gershovsky, Anita Gillette, Joanna Gleason, Judy Gordon, Ilene Graff, Randy Graff, Leonard Green, Jonathan Hadary, Sheldon Harnick, Valerie Harper, Gordon Lowry Harrell, Sam Harris, Jack Heifner, Jim Henaghan, Dee Hoty, Ken Howard, Houston Huddleston, Nancy Huddleston, Susan Israelson, Craig Jacobs, Bobby Kaufman, Judy Kaye, Lainie Kazan, Bruce Kimmel, Allan Knee, Jess Korman, David Lahm, Paul Lazarus, Michele Lee, Steve Leeds, Mundell Lowe, Ronald Mallory, Alan Marcus, Daniel Marcus, Sally Mayes, Charlie McPherson, Sylvia Miles, John Miller, Liza Minnelli, Jerry Mitchell, Ray Mosca, Lee Musiker, James Naughton, Bebe Neuwirth, Phyllis Newman, Julie Newmar, Christine Ohlman, Thelma Oliver, Michon Peacock, Ezio Petersen, Don Pippin, Hal Prince, Louise Quick, Teri Ralston, Lee Roy Reams, Chita Rivera, Jana Robbins, Bill Rosenfield, Annie Ross, Irv Roth, Susan Schultz, Barbara Sharma, Keith Sherman, June Silver, Eric Stern, Lynn Summerall, Marianne Tatum, Tommy Tune, Ken Urmston, Betsy von Furstenberg, Robin Wagner, Tony Walton, Fred Werner, Lillias White, Terri White, Mark York, David Zippel, and Alan Zweibel.

1.
“Baby, Dream Your Dream”

It’s hard to imagine that a tenement home in the Bronx where Yiddish was the primary language and the music being played was primarily religious or klezmer would prove to be the breeding ground for a career and body of work as broad as Cy Coleman’s, but Coleman was born and raised in just such a place. He described it in later life as a “phony religious house. . . . My mother would go with us to a Chinese restaurant and place her order. I’d say, ‘Mom[,] that’s pork you’re ordering. She’d say, ‘It’s chicken.’”
1

Coleman came into the world as Seymour Kaufman on Flag Day, June 14, 1929, just a little over four months before the Wall Street crash that began the Great Depression. He was a “surprise” baby, the fifth child for Max and Ida Kaufman, arriving in the twentieth year of their marriage.

The couple’s relationship had begun in their native Bessarabia, a region of Eastern Europe that had been ruled by Russia and was later part of Romania before becoming part of Moldavia and ultimately a part of the Republic of Moldova. Their families arranged the marriage even though Ida, according to family lore, had been in love with another man.

Ida’s passion for this other person meant the foundations of her marriage were rocky at best. The union was strained further by the fact that she and Max made such an unlikely couple temperamentally. She was outspoken and fierce, while he was a meek, mild-mannered soul.

Also complicating their lives was a disparity in their upbringing. As Coleman’s nephew Robert Kaufman recounted, “Max was a late-in-life baby, so late that his brothers had children older than him, and they had dispersed, two of them allegedly to England and one to New York. . . . Then, when Max was six, Great-Grandma and -Grandpa died. Nobody knows how or why. The neighbors gave him a trade, and he became a carpenter and a cabinetmaker, and when he was about twenty he got matched up with grandma, who came from ‘the rich’ family.”
2

Despite their differences, the two managed to forge a life together. In 1913, three years after they were wed, Max and Ida immigrated to the United States, the same year in which their first child, Adolph, was born. Three other children—Sam, Sylvia, and Yetta—followed over the course of the next twelve years.

Ida was unable even to sign her name, but her business acumen was sharp, and the family thrived. She ultimately came to own several tenements in the Bronx, including the one at 547 Claremont Avenue in which Seymour was raised.

Ida’s business affairs meant that tending to Seymour fell to his older sister, Sylvia, who was thirteen when her baby brother was born. She didn’t necessarily want to be in charge of looking after an infant, but it was an era in which one did not overtly disobey one’s father or mother, particularly a woman as formidable as Ida.

Sylvia’s oversight of her younger brother led to one of the first major pieces of lore about Coleman’s youth. In the spring of 1932 Sylvia was out playing with her friends while her three-year-old brother sat on the stoop watching. She was unaware that just at that moment a massive manhunt was on for Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped son, a blond boy whom Seymour resembled because of his own fair curls. Furthermore, Sylvia had no idea that the police had been ordered to pick up any child who fit the description of the Lindbergh baby, so she was shocked when she turned away from her friends to check in on her baby brother, only to see him being bundled into a police wagon.

It peeled away and Sylvia sprinted after it, following all the way to the precinct house. The situation was sorted out in short order leaving behind an anecdote about a brush with history that would make the family laugh for years to come.

But it was overshadowed by the events of a year later, after the Lindbergh headlines had faded but papers continued to report on the extreme hardships the country was suffering in the Great Depression. Ida herself had been victim to the period’s economic vagaries, seeing tenants come and go depending on their ability to pay rent and leaving her to figure out how to pay the taxes on the properties she owned. One family renting from Ida slipped out in the middle of the night, taking their belongings with them in a hasty departure.

But there was one item that they could not move during their getaway. It was just too bulky, and moving it might have given Ida some idea of what they were up to. And so, when she discovered that they had gone, Ida found an upright piano standing in the otherwise empty apartment. Pragmatic as always, Ida brought the instrument into the Kaufman home, figuring that at least she had gotten something from her former tenants.

The arrival of the piano was an addition, not the introduction, of music into the family’s lives. Stories among the Kaufman children and grandchildren include reports of a radio, as well as a phonograph. In addition, Seymour’s eldest brother, Adolph, had for a while studied violin, an instrument on which he had shown promise. His son Robert remembered: “According to Grandma, my father was an excellent violinist, and there came a point when some folks said they wanted to take my father to Vienna to learn violin. And all Grandma understood was, ‘They are going to take the oldest away,’ and her response was, ‘Well, no, you’re not.’ So that sort of ended his career as far as that goes.”
3

One might think that Adolph would have gravitated toward the newly arrived piano, or maybe even Yetta, who was just about grade-school age. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was the youngest Kaufman, little Seymour—only four years old—who took to it instantly, showing almost immediately signs of significant musical talent.

Seymour’s playing initially consisted of plunking on the keys. But before long he was piecing together music that he had heard on the radio or ditties that his siblings would sing and then ask their little brother to replicate on the keyboard.

“I was obsessed with the piano,” Coleman said in adulthood, adding, “The piano was mine and my obsession. As a matter of fact, it got to a point that my father got so bugged about hearing the piano over and over again, he nailed it shut one day. It wasn’t mean; he just couldn’t take it. But I pried it open and the battle was won.”
4

This tale, often repeated by Coleman and by those who knew him well, became something of a mythic creation story, and like all legends, it was embellished through the years. Scenic designer Robin Wagner, who designed four of Coleman’s shows, recalled that he had heard that Seymour had gone so far as not only to remove the nails that held the piano lid down, but also to dismantle the screws from its hinges, so that the lid could be removed entirely, ensuring unrestricted access to the instrument.

Seymour’s playing eventually caught the attention of neighbors, notably the family’s milkman, who promptly recognized the child’s potential and arranged for his own son’s piano teacher, Constance Tallarico, to visit the Kaufman home to hear the young man for herself.

A native New Yorker, Tallarico had established herself as a successful music instructor by the time she met four-year-old Seymour. For evidence of her skill one need look no farther than her own family. In 1928 her fourteen-year-old son Victor had been one of the gold-medal winners of the prestigious citywide New York Music Week competition. Victor would go on to study at Juilliard, enjoy a long career as a pianist, and raise a much-heralded musician himself: Victor’s son is (after a name change) none other than Steven Tyler, of the rock band Aerosmith.

On the day she visited her prospective student, Tallarico was accompanied by her husband, conductor Giovanni Tallarico. After hearing Seymour play, both Tallaricos agreed with the deliveryman’s assessment: Seymour was talented and would benefit from musical training and guidance.

The issue of payment arose instantly. Coleman described what happened when talking in 1990 with his old friend pianist Marian McPartland on her radio program
Piano Jazz
: “[The Tallaricos] spoke to my mother, who had no idea about music and couldn’t care less about it. She was like, ‘It’s musical and nice, but it’s certainly not a serious thing.’” But Ida, the consummate businesswoman, knew how to haggle, and ultimately a deal was struck. The couple agreed to provide two free lessons for each one that the Kaufman family paid for. Coleman remembered that Ida eventually soured on—and often complained bitterly about—the agreement: even though she wasn’t paying for two of her son’s three weekly lessons, she was still paying for his music books.

So Seymour’s education began in earnest in 1933 under Tallarico’s guidance. In later years he would remember her sternness, going so far as to compare her to the taskmaster title character played by Shirley MacLaine in the 1988 movie
Madame Sousatzka
. Seymour studied for years with Tallarico in Manhattan and at the music camp she and her husband established on a property they held in Sunabee, New Hampshire. Called the Trow-Rico Farm, the camp was established in 1935, and Coleman, quite tellingly, would hold onto one detail from his trips there well into adulthood.

According to Terrie Curran, who worked for Coleman from the early 1970s until his death, one evening early in their relationship he began telling her about his childhood and in particular his trips to the camp. He wistfully described how all along the road there were banks of tiger lilies, ending the recollection with, “And I loved tiger lilies.”
5

This memory is made all the more poignant when one learns why Tallarico insisted that Seymour be separated from his family during the summer. She was not looking to provide the child with a bucolic getaway from the city, where he might indulge in playtime activities. Instead, she was ensuring that she could keep a careful eye on him and his progress while also ensuring that he constantly practice.

And though Tallarico’s demands on Seymour might have seemed to be too much for a little boy, dividends were paid in short order. In 1936 he was entered into the Music Week competition, playing in Steinway Hall. He won a gold medal in his category, and on June 10, just four days shy of his seventh birthday, he was playing Town Hall at the concluding ceremonies for the annual event.

His achievements in the competition that year are especially impressive given that the event had its largest pool of entrants ever, because for the first time young people from the city’s parochial schools were eligible. This added some twelve thousand participants to an already formidable pool of school children.

Seymour continued to play in contests, and just a year and a half after his first win another victory provided him with a scholarship to study with another master pianist, Rudolph Gruen, an interpreter of the classics renowned in New York and nationwide thanks to his radio broadcasts. Gruen, a faculty member at the New York College of Music, continued drilling Seymour, and before he was a teenager he began taking part in recitals at the school.

It was around this time, too, that a proposal came to the Kaufman family—it may have been the doing of Gruen, Tallarico, or both—suggesting that Seymour be sent even farther away than New Hampshire: to Germany. It was there that his mentors believed he could receive the training to become not only a premier pianist, but also perhaps one of the world’s great conductors.

Ida refused to send Seymour away, much as she had when it had been proposed that her oldest son travel to Europe for his own musical education. But in Seymour’s case, her reasons for keeping him close to home were slightly more ambiguous. On one level, her refusal to send her boy away could have stemmed from her disdain of music as a potential career path, which she had already made quite clear when he first began to study. On another level, however, she might have been inspired by genuine maternal feelings of not wanting to be separated from her youngest—her baby—or by her awareness of the danger inherent in sending her child to Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

This foiled opportunity to travel and study troubled Coleman throughout his adult life, as did another event involving his achievements as a child performer. Family members and Coleman’s friends agree on how the incident began: after Seymour had won a competition and was presented with his prize. He was beaming with pride. Some say that he had worked particularly hard for this event because he had specifically wanted the reward: a beautiful etching set. Others remember Seymour as simply winning a medal.

And there’s further agreement on what happened next: a little boy who had lost to Seymour began to cry and scream uncontrollably. To placate the boy, Seymour was told to relinquish his prize.

Once again, however, accounts vary as to who told him to do so. Some say it was his mother, Ida, while others say it was Tallarico. In either case, Seymour did as he was told, but it was an event that would leave a lingering scar; in adulthood, Coleman would fight vociferously and tenaciously in business to retain what he had earned.

Despite this incident, Seymour continued to study dutifully and avidly through the rest of his grade-school years and into his teens. But as he did, he found himself coping not only with another of his mother’s rankling decisions but also with a growing restlessness about the artistic path being laid out for him.