You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (23 page)

The variety of projects that Coleman undertook from early 1966 through the beginning of 1968, with the seeming hunger of an artist just at the beginning of his or her career, belied one small fact. He had a hit Broadway show that was turning into a big business.
Sweet Charity
on Broadway and beyond was taking on a life of its own in many forms.

On Broadway, the musical continued with Gwen Verdon at its center, but there were a few bumps as the run progressed. For instance, there were problems with the theater itself—not in the front of the house, where theatergoers were enjoying the renovated building’s opulence, but backstage, where the company was roasting during the summer and freezing during the winter. “It got so bad once that a bucket of water had to be thrown on me,”
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Verdon told columnist Earl Wilson.

Lee Roy Reams’s memory of the theater and backstage in particular was that “it was dirty as hell. The house looked great, but backstage it was a mess. And they had torn up all of the carpeting and had it out in the alley and we had nothing to stand on but concrete floors. The dressers went out and pulled in some of the old carpeting for us to stand on. And they made quick-change rooms for us in the basement. They hung up sheets and took mirrors and taped them on walls for us.”
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Verdon complained about all of this and more to both management and her union, Actor’s Equity, and when her grievances appeared to fall on deaf ears, she took a bold stand, announcing that she would resign from Equity. The tactic worked. Conditions soon began to improve for the company, and Verdon remained an Equity member.

It was a threat that resonated with the union. One night six months later the theater’s air conditioning failed. A representative from the performers’ union was at the Palace the next day. He heard both the star’s and the company’s complaints and in short order informed the management that “it might be wise to cancel the show.”
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But as
Sweet Charity
moved into its second full year, there was another, bigger snag. The show’s demands were taking their toll on the star, and, at certain performances, in an effort to minimize the strain she was feeling from performing eight times a week, Verdon would inform the conductor before the curtain went up that she would be eliminating a number, often “Where Am I Going?,” during the show.

According to Reams, it was a number that she had disliked performing from the outset. “Gwen hated singing ‘Where Am I Going?’ Hated it. I was there the day she broke down and cried, and said, ‘Bobby, I don’t want to sing this song.’ She was very insecure just standing there singing the song.”
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The decision to omit the number prompted an angry letter from one patron, who wrote to the star and demanded a refund. When she got the note, Verdon sat down and calculated how many minutes had been taken off the show when the song was omitted and sent the patron a refund check for that portion of the ticket. It came to forty-two cents.

Things went more smoothly with the Las Vegas
Charity
company. It settled into its run and played ten weeks longer than originally scheduled. By the time the show had concluded its six-month engagement, it had played to over 300,000 people (about 11,000 per week). In recognition of Prowse’s drawing power, Caesar’s management presented her with a Jaguar. Her success in Vegas ultimately led to her, rather than the originally announced Chita Rivera (who eventually starred in the show’s national tour), taking on the role in the show’s London production.

Prowse opened the show at the Prince of Wales Theatre on October 11, 1967, and, unlike
Little Me
, the musical arrived without substantial revisions. The next day critics embraced the show, its star, and its score almost wholeheartedly. John Peter wrote in the
Times
that it was “easily one of the best musicals to have come to London for some time,” and in a follow-up Sunday review in the
Guardian
Ronald Bryden said that the show was “good, fast and loud.” He also made sure to mention the man who had restaged Fosse’s dances: Eddie Gasper, an original Broadway cast member who would eventually become Prowse’s husband.

The production, which also featured Paula Kelly as Helene, Josephine Blake as Nickie, and Rod McLennan as Oscar, went on to enjoy a healthy run, and Coleman, Fosse, Fields, and Simon could share credit when the show picked up the Evening Standard Award for best musical of the year. The London production also spawned a new set of singles of songs from the show, most notably a swingingly hip incarnation of “Where Am I Going?” by Simone Jackson, who once had, during a concert in 1962, a rather impressive quartet as backup singers: the Beatles, just before the dawn of their global popularity.

The press that the various stage incarnations of
Sweet Charity
received was matched, and soon exceeded, by the coverage being garnered by the film version. Universal spent lavishly to acquire the rights and gave the title role to Shirley MacLaine, then one of Hollywood’s top-drawing stars and at that point a three-time Academy Award nominee.

MacLaine had started her career as a Broadway performer and lived a real-life
42nd Street
tale while understudying Carol Haney in
The Pajama Game
. When Haney broke her ankle during the run of the show, it was MacLaine who performed the Fosse-choreographed “Steam Heat” number. One night film producer Hal B. Wallis spotted her and signed her to a contract with Paramount Pictures. Since that time she had been in movies ranging from Mike Todd’s grandiose
Around the World in 80 Days
to Lillian Hellman’s drama
The Children’s Hour
to the musical
Can-Can
.

Given MacLaine’s visibility, press about the
Sweet Charity
movie would have come naturally, but once the studio’s publicity machine kicked into gear, the project was garnering stories and generating buzz even before filming began.

The first big news about the film, which was slated to start filming on November 1, 1967 for an October 1968 release, was the announcement that producer Ross Hunter, who was riding a crest of success with another film,
Thoroughly Modern Millie
, had hired I. A. L. Diamond to write the screenplay. Diamond had been responsible for movies like
Some Like It Hot
, as well as
The Apartment
, which also starred MacLaine, in one of her Oscar-nominated performances.

Diamond completed an outline for the film, which included a scene that provided a reason for using one of the cut numbers from the show, “Pink Taffeta Sample Size 10.” It also indicated that there needed to be a new title song for the opening moments of the movie and provided a new twist to the ending. Charity would give Oscar her dowry to make a down payment on a business he had always dreamed of buying, but when it came time for them to meet and go away together, he wouldn’t come for her.

Both of these changes would have made the movie version of
Sweet Charity
more like its source, Fellini’s
Nights of Cabiria
, and the alterations sparked conflict between Diamond and Fosse, who was concurrently working on his own scenario for the way in which the romance between Charity and Oscar should unfold in the film. Producer Hunter stepped in, and within six weeks of announcing Diamond as the screenwriter Hunter replaced him with Peter Stone, who had picked up an Academy Award for another movie with Coleman’s music,
Father Goose
.

This shift, just three months before filming was to commence, was an omen of the troubles that were brewing and the changes to come. In November, just as MacLaine was reporting for dance rehearsals for the film, Hunter withdrew as producer. “There were serious and irreconcilable differences . . . between the director and me,”
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Hunter said in a statement.

One of the conflicts Fosse recalled was the tone and content of the film. “There was quite a fight,” he said, “about whether Charity could say Up Yours [
sic
]. I felt that if she couldn’t, then we might as well make Mary Poppins all the way. I get very upset about innuendos, not about Charity’s straight talk.”
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Universal replaced Hunter with Robert Arthur, who had worked with both Coleman and screenwriter Stone on
Father Goose
. Among his many other Hollywood credits were such hits as Fritz Lang’s
Big Heat
and
Operation Petticoat
, which starred Cary Grant.

Some in the industry saw the shifting of control away from Hunter as a victory for Fosse, who, now with a delayed filming schedule, began reaching out to stage performers, rather than Hollywood A-list names, for the movie’s central roles. Before Hunter’s departure, potential actors had included Alan Alda, who had reportedly been offered the role of Oscar, and Mitzi Gaynor, whom Hunter was wooing for the project.

One of the first people Fosse contacted was Chita Rivera, who flew to Los Angeles for a screen test while she was playing Charity at Chicago’s Shubert Theatre. Because of her stage commitments, she flew to California immediately following a Saturday night performance, rehearsed with Fosse on Sunday, and shot the test on Monday before flying back to the Midwest. Rivera recalled the experience: “These are the things you want to do in your life. You don’t say I’ll think about it.”
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By mid-December Rivera had snagged the role she tested for: Charity’s best friend, Nikki. Not long afterward it was announced that Paula Kelly, from the Las Vegas and London companies, would be reprising her portrayal of Helene.

As for the men, Fosse lined up other actors with theatrical experience, including John McMartin, who originated the role of Oscar. Other performers to whom Fosse turned had both stage experience and brought star power to the project, notably singing sensation Sammy Davis Jr. (who had done the Broadway musicals
Golden Boy
and
Mr. Wonderful
). He was offered—and in a matter of hours accepted—the role of Daddy Johann Sebastian Brubeck (or “Big Daddy”), the head of the Rhythm of Life Church. The film’s cast also boasted the popular comic actor Stubby Kaye (Broadway’s original Nicely-Nicely in
Guys and Dolls
), who took on the role of Herman, the owner of the Fan-Dango, and screen heartthrob Ricardo Montalban (who had starred opposite Lena Horne in
Jamaica
), who signed on to play Vittorio Vittale, the Italian film star.

For the ensemble, Fosse also brought a host of the performers with whom he had worked on Broadway, including Suzanne Charny (who danced the lead in “Frug” onscreen), Lee Roy Reams, and Bud Vest. Another member of the movie’s ensemble was future star Ben Vereen, who was in the Las Vegas company.

As news of the major casting was slowly rolled out during the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968, an important element of the film’s creative team fell into place. Coleman was signed as musical director; as reported by columnist Joyce Haber in January 1968, he was to “write additional background music, as well as score the film.” His duties, along with those of lyricist Fields, eventually grew to penning a trio of new songs, among them a new title number.

Coleman remembered the evolution of this last piece during a radio interview with David Kenney in 2004: “Fosse said, ‘Maybe we can make [
Sweet Charity
] feel more contemporary. It is the title song of a movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, maybe I can put in a slow rock beat,’ and he said, ‘That sounds great to me.’”

Eventually, Coleman began to think that his revisions should have a new lyric, and when he approached Fields with the idea, she said, “‘Oh! I’ve said everything I have to say about ‘Sweet Charity’ in that song; I don’t have another word to say.’”
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It was at this point that Coleman decided to change the music for the song entirely.

The new melody that Coleman created for Fields’s lyric ultimately came to have a number of different purposes in the film. Coleman created a bouncy, mod variation on it that would be heard during the opening credits with background vocals. For these he turned to Nancy Adams, the wife of lyricist Floyd Huddleston, with whom he had collaborated occasionally.

Adams, herself a performer, had recorded several demos for Coleman in New York, including ones of “Sweet Talk” and another Coleman-Huddleston tune, “I’m Serving Out a Heavy Sentence Loving You.” By the time work on the film was under way, the Huddlestons had moved to the West Coast. According to Adams, “Cy was really loyal, and he absolutely loved Floyd. When we moved out here, he got in touch with us regarding
Sweet Charity
. . . . I had done a lot of work, studiowise, with vocal groups for arranging and that kind of thing. And Cy knew that, and he called Floyd, and they contacted Ralph Burns [who was serving as the film’s orchestrator] and asked him to hire me as vocal-group contractor, because that’s what I was doing at the time.”
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Burns agreed, and Adams put together a group of singers—including Sally Stevens, who would eventually tour with Burt Bacharach—to record background vocals that would be heard during the film’s opening moments, at its midpoint, and then again at the end. According to Adams, “They wanted a young, pure kind of sound. . . . The open fifths and open fourths that they used during the ’60s that were not Broadway at all. It was more of a record-company sound.”
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The “oohs,” “ahhs,” and “bah-bah-bah-bahs” that are heard in these sections, which do indeed evoke the polished recordings of Bacharach’s tunes, are not the only riffs on the new melody for the song “Sweet Charity” heard in the film. Coleman also used it for two significant pieces of underscoring: he conceptualized a pair of suites that were extended variations of the tune, each of which accompanied montages of still photographs of Charity designed to give audiences a sense of her life as well as the passage of time.

Beyond these various pieces, Coleman, with Fields, came up with an additional two songs for MacLaine before filming began. With “My Personal Property,” they wrote a bubbly paean to New York that established Charity’s innate ebullience during the movie’s opening moments. “It’s a Nice Face” was penned as a replacement for “I’m the Bravest Individual,” the tune that Charity and Oscar performed together while stuck in an elevator. The gentle ballad provided Charity with a moment of introspection as she reflected on this new man in her life.