You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (22 page)

Coleman also returned to the studio to record his own versions of “Rhythm of Life” and “Big Spender” for Capitol Records. The resulting single didn’t gain any sort of real traction on the charts, but Coleman’s honky-tonk piano work on “Spender” was impeccable, while “Rhythm,” featuring some decidedly perky arrangements for orchestra and voice by Ray Ellis, offered, albeit briefly, a hint of an album that Coleman would record two years later in which he would push mod and classical sounds to sublime effect.

The effort was Coleman’s goodbye to the label that had given him a trio of LPs, and as 1966 drew to a close he recorded a full LP,
If My Friends Could See Me Now
, for Columbia Records, which had stepped in as both investor and recording label for
Sweet Charity
after Capitol withdrew its support from the show. The album was the first that showcased Coleman as both pianist and vocalist and was made up entirely of his own creations. It featured ten of his best-known tunes along with one of his most recent ones: “Sweet Talk.” Lainie Kazan had given this tricky jazz waltz a sizzlingly intense rendition in early 1966, but Coleman, as he did with many of the songs on the album, found its more dapper and teasing charms.

Coleman’s work was greeted with accolades by industry press and in general-interest publications. It also proved to be a hit with the public. Columbia had to order a second pressing of it, and for a while it looked as if it would spur him back into a club career. There was talk, for instance, that he’d be making a return engagement at Chicago’s London House before 1967 ended.

Coleman, however, didn’t return to that venue, or any other, for a number of years, though he was back in the recording studio in short order for a pair of unique projects. The first was
Boozers and Losers
for his old friend, onetime band singer Claire Hogan. On this LP Coleman was credited for conceptualization as well as producing.

Hogan had been part of his circle of close friends (and sometimes interpreter of his songs) for over ten years. When Coleman opened Notable, she had volunteered to help out, and as Coleman wrote in his liner notes for the album, the notion “appealed to our collective sense of humor so we moved another desk into the office and Claire became my personal secretary, Girl Friday and good friend (still).”

As for Coleman’s vision for the record, it came into focus at the opening-night party for
Sweet Charity
in Philadelphia. It was at this event that Hogan took to the floor to perform one of the songs they had talked about having her record, “The Whiffenpoof Song” (the signature song of the Yale a cappella group). “As she sang, the room started to quiet down until all you could hear was the soft piano and the voice.”
8

It was enough to give Coleman a comprehensive sense of what Hogan’s album should be, and the result was an eleven-song recording that showcased her smoky, sultry vocals. Coleman commissioned Ray Ellis for the arrangements, which provided just the right backing for the singer and also contained some terrific surprises, such as an insistent, almost obsessive beat for the first measures of the Rodgers and Hart classic “Falling in Love with Love.” Alongside this number and the two that Hogan and Coleman had already agreed on, they chose a little-known song by Fields and Arthur Schwartz, “I’ll Pay the Check,” and Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball,” which Coleman outfitted with some new words.

Coleman’s work was also represented by the inclusion of “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life” and “Here I Go Again.” In addition, he and Murray Grand (a friend of both Hogan’s and Coleman’s) provided the jazzy torch song that gives the disc its title, which she delivers with smoldering elegance. On some levels it almost seems as if she and Coleman might have, intentionally or not, been paying tribute to one of his earliest interpreters, chanteuse Mabel Mercer.

Boozers
ultimately displayed Coleman’s artistic taste at one end of the musical spectrum—the quintessential art song—and in May 1968 his craft in this area was demonstrated by Mercer herself, along with Bobby Short, at a joint concert at Town Hall. People flew in from around the world for the event, and tickets were in such demand that crowds were accommodated by placing chairs on the stage behind the performers. They had all come, according to the
New York Times
May 20 report on the event, “to hear the specialized singing of Mr. Short and Mabel Mercer.”

The performance, which generated a live recording and prompted a second concert a year later, featured Coleman’s work heavily, and not just the songs he had written with Joseph A. McCarthy Jr. early in his career (the ones that Mercer had often originated). She also offered a tune from
Charity
, introduced one that he had written with Robert Wells (“Bad Is for Other People”), and tackled “Sweet Talk,” all in her own inimitable fashion. Short’s portion of the bill also contained a pair of Coleman numbers, and the two singers closed the show with “Here’s to Us” from
Little Me
.

But even as this event and Hogan’s album exhibited Coleman’s work as an artful modern songsmith, he himself was involved with another recording project that cunningly utilized his affinity for—and facility with—classical music.

The album,
Ages of Rock
, featured Coleman playing works by Mozart, Bach, and Chopin, among others, accompanied by an ensemble playing rock settings and arrangements that he had created and that had been orchestrated by Larry Wilcox. In an interview with Skitch Henderson on the
Music Makers
radio program some years later, Coleman explained his inspiration for the fusion: “I was fooling around with the idea of ‘rhythm.’ You know when you sit down and you start getting theoretical about your work? And I was working in eighth notes and I kept figuring out different accents for it. And I said you take just one steady stream of eighth notes and you place the accent in different places, and all of a sudden you have a different style of music. And this theory started me off on this album.”

The record’s eleven cuts were the product of about two years’ worth of work. Coleman described his process in his notes for the LP, saying that throughout it all he had to be aware of “keeping myself honest, not imposing myself on the music, but taking from the music. I remained in tempo and played the melodies straight. And the rock backgrounds, while remaining true to themselves, set up variations. It’s a meeting of two honest commodities and if one is falsified both are immediately cancelled out.” Coleman associated each finalized piece with a color, resulting in melodies with names like “Sonata in Shocking Pink” and “Pavane in Purple,” and when the album was released, a March 3, 1968 review in
Billboard
lauded his success in “tearing down the barriers” between different musical forms.

MGM, which released this and Hogan’s LP, promoted the album heavily with localized contests around the country and by releasing several 45s pairing selections from the album. Coleman participated in these and also made sure that Notable published the selections. Further promotion came through a series of humor-laced postcards that featured period illustrations and “endorsements” from the composers of the works Coleman had selected.

This album and the efforts surrounding its marketing were indicative of the new directions into which Coleman was moving as composer and performer, as well as businessman and entrepreneur. In this last arena there were other activities as well, perhaps most noteworthy among them his expansion of his company with the establishment of Portable Music, which was created so that he could publish and promote BMI songwriters like Bobby Hebb (“Sunny”) and even songstress Blossom Dearie.

It was in early 1967, too, that Coleman made his first forays into serving as a lobbyist for ASCAP when he traveled to Washington to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents as it considered different provisions to include in the renewal of copyright law. ASCAP’s choice of Coleman made perfect sense. He was the youngest of the organization’s board members at the time. Furthermore, he was energetic and charismatic and could speak passionately to the issues at hand, namely per-play fees from both radio stations and jukebox operators.

As if all of this were not enough—and by this stage in his life, Coleman’s modus operandi was to have myriad projects in the works at once—he was also finishing the score for his second industrial show for Ford Motor Company, and there were individual songwriting projects, including a pair of seasonal tunes that he penned with Peggy Lee. In addition, he and Fields had begun drafting songs for a new musical that Alexander H. Cohen, the prolific producer who would eventually be responsible for bringing the Tony Awards to television, was developing for Broadway.

The show was to be based on Stefan Kanfer and Jess Korman’s
The Coffee Lover
, a comedy that had its premiere out of town at Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse in August 1966 in a production directed by Morton Da Costa. The play focused on Tom Gordon, a successful voiceover talent for television ads, who, believing that his life and career had become meaningless, has a mini-breakdown on air and promptly sells the home in Great Neck that he shares with his wife, Julie, to buy a derelict building in Greenwich Village that he plans on turning into a hip coffeehouse. His decision, unsurprisingly, rocks his marriage, but he still proceeds with his designs, aided (and sometimes distracted) by a colorful crew of characters from the downtown scene.

Before the comedy opened in Connecticut, there were rumors that it might transfer to Broadway, but lukewarm reviews from the local press and a similarly mixed notice in
Variety
scuttled these plans, and it was about a year later that Cohen acquired the rights for transforming the play into a musical.

Work on the show began during the last few months of 1967, with Korman and Kanfer adapting and expanding their work so that it encompassed more characters and locations. As they did this, the story line of the show grew to include a broader journey for the hero. He toyed with mysticism, club hopping, and even moviemaking with an Andy Warhol wannabe before turning to life as an activist. For Coleman, who had to deliver commercial messages throughout his early days on television, Tom’s desperation for a change must have had a savory resonance.

As the script evolved, Tom’s divergent escapes from the mainstream world became more central to the show, while certain details about his life changed. In a first draft, he and Julie had two preteen kids, but in a later draft they are just expecting their first child. With each draft the narrative for the musical becomes increasingly taut as the writers reconsider and restructure existing scenes and in some instances create new sequences altogether.

It was a process that required the songwriters to develop—or at least begin conceptualizing—a wide variety of songs. In two instances Coleman and Fields turned to their trunk. They found that “Poor Everybody Else” could function as a kind of musical red herring for Julie as she seemingly accepted the new world she shared with Tom. In one draft, too, they inserted “Meat and Potatoes,” which they had developed for
Keep It in the Family
, its melody and lyric seemingly tailor-made to suit Tom’s jaded worldview.

In all other instances, though, the musicalized
Coffee Lover
required new songs and dance music, which Coleman and Fields supplied over the course of the first portion of 1968, often after working meetings with Korman and Kanfer at Fields’s Upper West Side home.

A few of the ideas they developed were ultimately realized as full-blown songs, including “After Forty, It’s Patch, Patch, Patch,” which was envisioned as a song for Julie—and her suburban friends—as she contemplates what her own existence might become as she moves into her middle years. Another completed song was “We’ve Got It,” an exuberant duet for Tom and Julie as they settled into a seemingly happy existence together in the Village. For one of the secondary characters, Coleman and Fields came up with the seductive “You’re in a Highly Emotional State,” which helped spur Tom’s exodus from corporate life, and finally, for a young woman who became a kind of surrogate teenage daughter to the couple, Coleman and Fields created a folksy ballad, “Whisper on the Wind.”

Fields completed lyrics for an additional four songs, including “Yoga and Yogurt,” for a spiritual guru to whom Tom turns for guidance; “That Does It,” which, in addition to serving as a new title for the piece at one point, gave Tom the opportunity to express in song his resolve to start anew; “Daddy, Come Back to Scarsdale,” a number that would have been performed by the couple’s nine-year-old son; and “You Could Last Me a Lifetime,” meant to be a parody of 1930s schmaltz that was used alongside one of a young film auteur’s projects.

The various drafts indicate almost another dozen songs that the team planned to write, ranging from possible solos for both the principals and secondary characters to group numbers, including one possible cantata that would have been heard as Tom opened his new business. The scripts also indicate that Coleman might have been contemplating at least two different pieces of extended dance music, including one for a scene at a high-end restaurant frequented by executives looking to pad their expense accounts.

Korman remembered that the process was a drawn-out one. Coleman, overextended with so many different projects unfolding at once, would show up late to meetings and was often simply unavailable: “He was always out on the coast. You know, it was the period of
Sweet Charity
.” Still, the writers were able to complete enough work that they could present a reading of the show “at Dorothy’s for Alex. Neil Simon was also in attendance,”
9
as Korman remembered it. Unfortunately, the project stalled, and Coleman turned the majority of his attention to
Sweet Charity
, for which filming was about to commence.

16.
Sweet Charity
Onscreen