You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (27 page)

One final piece of principal casting changed while the show was in previews at the Uris. Joshie Jo Armstead, who had been playing Gittel’s friend Sophie, left the company and was replaced by Cecelia Norfleet. Armstead did not, however, leave the show behind entirely. She released a single version of the song she’d originated in the production, “Ride Out the Storm.” According to columnist Leonard Lyons, the right to record it had been a “going-away present” from Coleman and Fields.
25

Beyond the work on the show’s material, there was another issue looming: given Stewart’s departure, who would be credited as having written the book? Coleman and Bennett discussed the issue and ultimately decided that giving Fields the credit would make the most sense.

In the early 1980s, Coleman described to Paul Lazarus in an interview on
Anything Goes
on WBAI Radio what happened next: “So we called up Dorothy and said, ‘You must do this Dorothy, for the good of the show.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I did not write that book. I’ve written a lot of books.’ And we said, ‘That’s precisely why. You’re the only one that can. You’re the only one who has real credibility, since you’re the only one who has written books here.’”

Fields was not unaware of the importance to the show of the credit, so she considered the request carefully for several days. She ultimately declined, saying, “I cannot do it. I cannot put my name on something I didn’t do.”
26
Given Fields’s decision, the only other logical choice was to give the credit to Bennett. He was, after all, the man whose vision had transformed the musical.

There was one more change Coleman and Fields decided on before opening. They wanted to make Gittel’s closing number, “I’m Way Ahead,” a stronger statement about the character’s journey. They expanded the number, and when it was done, Lee related, “Cy picked me up in a cab, and in the back seat he handed me all of this music and said, ‘This is the new ‘I’m Way Ahead’ finale.’ We went upstairs to the rehearsal studio, and on this very old, out-of-tune piano, he played me the new ‘I’m Way Ahead’ finale, which we put in the show that night.”
27

Finally, on March 18, after extending the show’s preview period by nearly two weeks,
Seesaw
officially opened to reviews that were, for a show that had gone through such turmoil, remarkably positive.

Coleman and Fields’s contributions were generally well received. Richard Watts’s review the following morning in the
New York Post
said that it was “steadily agreeable and tuneful,” and several weeks later in a
Time
magazine review, T. E. Kalem said, “Cy Coleman’s music is amiably melodic and Dorothy Fields’ lyrics ingratiatingly intelligent.”

Coleman received the highest praise from Martin Gottfried in a March 20
Women’s Wear Daily
review, not for the score itself but rather for his overall talent. “It is not his finest score—Coleman could doodle more interesting music on a ticket stub—but it sure as hell is melodic and singable.”

The artist who received almost unanimous praise was scenic designer Robin Wagner, who had devised a series of moving screens onto which still images could be projected. In his opening-night review in the
New York Times
, Clive Barnes wrote: “The American musical theater has for long [
sic
] neglected projection techniques in its production, and in this way was far behind dance company [
sic
] such as the Alwin Nikolais or even certain opera productions. ‘Seesaw,’ which has scenic design by Robin Wagner and media art and photography by Sheppard Kerman, makes a determined effort to catch up, and with its projections of skyscrapers and cityscapes it really does look very good.”

What Barnes and his colleagues didn’t realize, though, was how Bennett had transformed the use of the screens and the projections, which had originally been relatively static. As Wagner described it, “We discovered that if you put the projection on first against a black background and then the screens came into them, it looked like a moving projection. It was like watching movies. So when Michael saw that, he started building numbers around that. So suddenly he was choreographing the screens, which was a whole brand-new idea.”
28

As positive as the critics had been, they were not—as they’re called in theater circles—“money reviews,” and the production, which had been struggling at the box office during previews, needed help fast to spur ticket sales.

One of the opening-night attendees had been the city’s mayor, John Lindsay, and at the party that followed he had trouble containing his enthusiasm for the musical. Bennett latched on to this, as well as the striking resemblance between Lindsay and leading man Howard, and hatched an idea. What if, in this musical about New York City, the
actual
mayor made a walk-on appearance? Bennett had Lee call, Lindsay agreed, and on March 23 he showed up in the opening number, in which “he played straight man to half a dozen chorus girls.”
29

This widely reported stunt was followed by another welcome infusion of publicity when Walter Kerr’s Sunday review of the show appeared in the
New York Times
. It bore the headline “‘Seesaw’—A Love of a Show,” and it was simply a valentine, a rave through and through. Slowly ticket sales started to increase—but not nearly to the extent that was necessary to ensure the production’s longevity.

A healthy, extended stay on Broadway required more than reviews and stunts (like an appearance by the company at City Hall in downtown Manhattan in late April). What was needed was a concerted advertising campaign that would raise the visibility of
Seesaw
and awareness of the positive reviews it had gotten. Unfortunately, however, the producers didn’t have the money for such a push, and in fact Kasha and Kipness had misrepresented the production’s financial health. Things were so bad that “at one point they had to lock the doors of the theater, because they had not turned in the tax money to the government,” according to Pippin. “That was cleared up pretty fast. We didn’t miss a performance; it was cleared up before that evening.”
30

Coleman, who had been taught well by his original publisher, knew that getting the music into public consciousness could help a show, and he had worked concertedly to get popular artists to record individual songs from the score. At one point it looked as if Tony Bennett would record “She’s Good for Me” and that Peter Duchin would take on “Spanglish,” but neither project materialized.

Coleman did convince singing legend Bing Crosby to return to the studio to record “It’s Not Where You Start,” but Crosby’s version of the song was released only in the United Kingdom. And in a telling sign of how tastes in music had changed since Coleman had had over a dozen recordings in advance of
Sweet Charity
’s opening on Broadway,
Seesaw
ultimately spawned only two other singles: Armstead’s “Ride Out the Storm” and a version of the title song recorded by the Cy Coleman Co-Op, an ad hoc singing group that had been created at London Records.

These records gave listeners only a limited sense of the show. Coleman knew that a cast album was needed, but in absence of a record company willing to bankroll such a venture, it fell to the producers to underwrite an LP. Once again, the limited funds that Kipness and Kasha had on hand meant that an original cast recording had to be financed some other way.

Eventually, Coleman, Kipness, Bennett, and Fields pooled money to get a studio session for the company. To keep costs low, the actors and musicians all agreed to work for scale. The LP hit stores by mid-June, and though well received, it was certainly no panacea for the show’s box-office woes.

Ironically, the delay in opening—which had allowed the creative team to effect the final and important changes that Simon had recommended—also precluded its being eligible for the Tony Awards, which would have given
Seesaw
a much-needed jolt of publicity. Still,
Seesaw
attracted award attention that spring.  Lee won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and in New York Drama Critics Circle voting the show placed second, losing out to 
A Little Night Music
. And when the 1974 Tony Awards rolled around,
Seesaw
received seven nominations, including one for best musical and one for Coleman and Fields’s score. It won two, for Bennett’s choreography and Tune’s performance in a featured role.

Those awards, however, were not handed out until April 1974, and in the interim the show struggled. More cash was infused, and in June 1973 Jack O’Brian reported: “‘Seesaw’ needs more than its last-week gross of $66,000 to break even—even with all of the writers foregoing royalties—and even lyricist Dorothy Fields and composer Cy Coleman losing more than royalties—they helped out with fat five-figure donations each to keep it alive.”

Within a month of this story came the news that
Seesaw
would go on hiatus in New York to play a weeklong engagement at the St. Louis Municipal Opera (familiarly known as the Muny), then return to New York and resume performances. In the process, the musical gained a new leading man, John Gavin. The show did indeed return to New York—but not to the Uris Theater: it reopened at the less cavernous Mark Hellinger Theatre.

Its return, however, did not spark ticket buyers’ interest, and just a month later a closing notice was posted. This news, however, did attract buyers, and the production managed to stay open through the beginning of December, having played a total of 296 performances.

As with
Little Me
, which had been well received but never caught fire among theatergoers, Coleman would muse in later life about what might have contributed to the closing of
Seesaw
. At one point, he opined, “We should have stayed out on the road for two more weeks, but we didn’t have the money. I think the negative rumors [about what happened in Detroit] influenced New Yorkers. . . . The show turned around and they weren’t ready for it yet.”
31

The closing on Broadway didn’t mean the end of the show, though. A national tour was planned for the spring of 1974. The road company would star Lucie Arnaz, along with Gavin and Tune. In addition, it would feature a new song, “The Party’s on Me,” an edgily funky number written specifically as an ensemble number to replace “Ride Out the Storm.”

This song turned out to have the last lyric Fields would ever write. She died on March 28, 1974, shortly before the tour was slated to launch. But she did get to see the company perform it. After Bennett had choreographed it, Tune said, “We got the number together and showed it to Dorothy. The lyrics were ‘Everybody drink up. Everybody drink up. Drink up. The party’s on me,’ and she saw it in the afternoon. . . . Dorothy went home and died. So the last lyric she wrote was ‘Drink up. The party’s on me.’ It was stunning. We got the news the next day, and it was so ironic that she had seen that number done and she was finished. She was finished with it.”
32

Two weeks later Ken Howard introduced Lee at the Tony Awards and paid tribute to Fields, saying, “Her death two weeks ago has left a hard-to-fill void in the musical theater.”

19.
“Bouncing Back for More”

For other musical theater writers, such as Richard Rodgers, who spent a majority of his career working with just two primary lyricists, or Alan Jay Lerner, whose main body of work was written with one composer, the death of a partner like Dorothy Fields might have resulted in a period of inactivity. But unlike these authors, Coleman had maintained and cultivated a host of different collaborative relationships since he and Fields first explored working together in the early 1960s, and his workload in the months following the opening of
Seesaw
was typical of how he juggled work with different partners while also creating opportunities for himself as a performer.

In May 1973 it looked as if Broadway would be welcoming a new Coleman musical before the end of the year:
Beautiful People
, the tuner about a marathon group encounter session that he and James Lipton had completed in late 1971. Herman Levin had originally planned on producing it, but after
Seesaw
started heading for the stage, he moved away from the project, making way for an unexpected producer, Warner Bros., which announced its intention not only to bring the show to the stage in the fall of 1973 but also to turn it into a feature film.

The company’s investment in the show and its wide-ranging plans for the property fueled almost immediate interest in the musical among the general press, and soon details about the musical were fodder for columnists. Jack O’Brian became one of the first (and then most frequent) chroniclers of the aborning show when he reported that
Beautiful People
had a “fat role for a slender beauty that should make her a star. Agents have hundreds of clients lined up. The character’s named Miss January because she’s so-named in a Playboy centerfold.”
1
In a subsequent column he teasingly told readers, “Eighteen roles are up for grabs in the Cy Coleman–Jimmy Lipton musical ‘Beautiful People’ and you’d be amazed at the stars fighting for them.”
2

Not to be left out, Earl Wilson used his column to tout the show over the summer: “None of the actresses up for Miss January in Cy Coleman’s new musical, ‘Beautiful People,’ mind the nudity in one scene—what scares them is the torrid lesbian action.”
3

The section of the musical to which Wilson was so luridly referring was a dance sequence in which one of the women in the group became entranced by the sexuality being expressed by Miss January and one of the male group members, and in the process a heterosexual pas de deux transformed into a homosexual one.

Tellingly, neither these general-interest columnists nor reporters from industry press speculated about who might stage the work during the course of the summer, and in the absence of a director, there was no mention of when
Beautiful People
might be reaching the stage. As the 1973–74 season progressed, the show’s title was never touted even as a dim possibility for production.

Glimpses of the show would be caught in articles over the next seven or eight years when the title would surface periodically on Coleman’s slate of in-process projects. In most instances, however, the show was merely mentioned in tandem with another project that was in rehearsal or already in production.

Still, Coleman, who had gotten Tony Bennett to record one ballad from
Beautiful People
, “It Was You,” for the 1972 LP
The Good Things in Life
, sustained his efforts to promote songs from his pop-heavy score for the show, and Carmen McRae recorded the bluesy torch song “Would You Believe” as part of her 1976 album
Can’t Hide Love
. Furthermore, she included it in her act that year. One of her performances was preserved on
Live at Ratso’s, Vol. 1
. The recording demonstrates the rich complexity of Coleman’s melody, which strategically uses syncopation to underscore hairpin emotional turns in Lipton’s lyric.

Beautiful People
, though never produced, would carry with it one additional legacy. In late 1975 it became the center of a lawsuit that Coleman brought against director-choreographer Michael Bennett, with whom Coleman had shared both the script for the musical and a film treatment that he and Lipton had written about a group of Broadway chorus performers, also known as “gypsies.” Coleman’s contention was that Bennett had used the two projects as inspiration for his landmark hit
A Chorus Line
.

Terrie Curran, Coleman’s aide-de-camp from this period until his death, recalled, “Cy and Jimmy were working on a thing called ‘Gypsies,’ and they liked Michael’s direction after he’d stepped in on
Seesaw
. And apparently they invited him out to Southampton and told him the whole story, and he said he wasn’t interested. Then, a little bit later, he came out with
A Chorus Line
, and Cy said, ‘That’s mine and Jimmy’s idea.’”
4

While generic elements from the two Coleman-Lipton projects, such as the audition process itself, surface in
A Chorus Line
’s tale of dancers vying for a coveted place in the chorus of a new Broadway musical, it contains nothing—either in terms of plot or character—that links it substantively to Coleman and Lipton’s work. In his defense, Bennett denied that he ever saw either the script or the treatment. He eventually agreed to an out-of-court settlement.

Looking back, Nicholas Dante, who with James Kirkwood wrote the book for
A Chorus Line
, said, “Michael claimed he never read Cy’s script, but I think he did, because he was so nervous about the case. I didn’t see why, because the material in the show came from the tapes and the other interviews, and Jimmy and I never saw Cy’s script.”
5

The details of what, if anything, transpired between Coleman and Bennett regarding
Beautiful People
must remain the source of speculation. There is, however, certainty about their plans to collaborate on another project: a new musical that, like
Beautiful People
, looked like it might reach Broadway during the 1973–74 season.

This show, known as
Pin-Ups
, was one that Coleman undertook with Fields as well as with book writer Leonard Gershe, whose play
Butterflies Are Free
had enjoyed a nearly three-year Broadway run and who also wrote the book for the musical
Destry Rides Again
. The
New York Times
described it as “a history of pin-ups, roughly from the time advertisers began using girls as sex symbols.” Bennett didn’t only plan to direct and choreograph
Pin-Ups
; he was also going to produce the multi-decade show, which he envisioned as “employing five or six top fashion designers to create the costumes.”
6
This extravagant vision ultimately proved too costly, however, and Bennett abandoned the idea.

The loss of
Pin-Ups
as a new project and the ongoing difficulties in getting
Beautiful People
produced did not mean, however, that Coleman was stalled professionally. He began to create other opportunities for himself as a writer, initiating projects that would be on his docket for the next five to ten years and accepting offers for unexpected jobs as they came along. Most notably, he returned to New York’s cabaret scene in late 1973 with a two-week engagement at the Rainbow Grill, the intimate venue adjacent to the fabled Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center.

Coleman’s two-week stint was billed as “Cy Coleman and His Music,” but unlike his first nightclub forays, when he fashioned a jazz trio, Coleman assembled a sextet of artists to appear alongside him: four musicians and two female backup singers. His program, as the title promised, was made up of his own songs, which he played and sang, along with one work that paid a nod to his earliest days of performing: a piece by Mozart.

Critics responded warmly to Coleman’s return to performing after an absence of ten years. An October 24
Variety
review called the show “a highly informal and entertaining act,” and John S. Wilson, in his write-up in the
New York Times
on October 22, described him as “a lively, puckish singer.”

It was an engagement affectionately recalled by Coleman’s friends and colleagues, including Tommy Tune, who remembered how Coleman singled him out the night he attended the show: “He introduced me from the audience as ‘that Dancing Devil, Tommy Tune.’ It was the first time that had ever happened.”
7

Coleman’s assistant Curran even held on to one of the lesser-known songs that Coleman included in the show: “Cy did a song that has one of my favorite lyrics, a song called ‘Suddenly.’ It was this song about New York, and one of Jimmy’s lyrics was ‘There’s a lemony snap in the air.’ It was just a clever turn of words.” In thinking about her boss’s relationship with the lyricist, she added, “Cy was very loyal, and he would always use people he liked, and he liked Jimmy.”
8

And though Coleman ruefully told columnist Leonard Lyons that by returning to the cabaret scene “I feel like I’m opening an old can of peas,”
9
the Rainbow Grill experience set the stage perfectly for a new opportunity that was to come in 1974 just months before Fields’s death: working on a solo show that Shirley MacLaine was preparing to open at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Coleman recalled how he became involved with this project during a 2002 interview for a BBC Radio 2 documentary: “She was given a lot of money to do a nightclub act in Las Vegas, but she hadn’t the slightest idea of how to go about it.” He remembered her saying, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” to which he responded, “For one, you do this, and then, you do this and this.”

Coleman hadn’t anticipated doing much more than offering some phone advice: “I had no intention of getting involved. It was just ‘Here I can help you, take it and be well and any time you need something call me.’” Eventually, however, Coleman found himself composing new music for the show and consulting on the production with its writer, Bob Wells, as well as Alan Johnson, who staged the piece.

When MacLaine’s show officially opened in July 1974, she received rapturous reviews, and before the end of the year Coleman, with Wells and John Bradford, had adapted the act for television. The special,
Shirley MacLaine: If They Could See Me Now
, aired in December 1974 and went on to score five prime-time Emmy nominations, winning one for Coleman in the category of outstanding writing in a comedy-variety or music special.

Coleman’s work with MacLaine in this vein would continue over the next two years, starting with a second TV special,
Gypsy in My Soul
, which aired in January 1976 and which Coleman coproduced with Fred Ebb and executive producer William O. Harbach. The program, written by Ebb, paid tribute to MacLaine’s roots as a Broadway chorus dancer (i.e., a gypsy). It was actually performed for an audience of working dancers and also featured
Wildcat
star Lucille Ball. The program used a number of Coleman’s existing songs, including “Bouncing Back” (one of the cut
Wildcat
songs) and “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish,” as well as one new one, “Bring Back Those Good Old Days,” a number that managed to evoke old-style New Orleans jazz while also sounding like a chipper contemporary pop tune.

Gypsy in My Soul
was even more widely acclaimed than MacLaine’s first special, and after calling the show a “delight” in his January 20
New York Times
review, John J. O’Connor predicted that it “should devour every musical Emmy Award they have next year.” His expectations were partially met. The show garnered numerous nominations—including one for Coleman’s music and one for the specialty material he and Ebb provided. Yet it picked up only two wins. One was for Tony Charmoli’s choreography, and, more important, one named it “Outstanding Special—Comedy-Variety or Music,” an award that included Coleman among the honorees.

Following its air date MacLaine took a stage version of the show on an international tour, garnering raves in London, and then brought it back to the United States, playing at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
Gypsy
eventually served as the vehicle that brought MacLaine back to Broadway, and she opened it at Broadway’s Palace Theatre in April 1976.

MacLaine’s one-woman show did not, however, give Coleman his first post-
Seesaw
Broadway credit. That distinction went to a drama, Peter Shaffer’s
Equus
, which opened on Broadway in October 1974 after an acclaimed run in London’s West End. The play, a mystery of sorts, centers on a psychiatrist who is trying to find out why an adolescent boy for no apparent reason blinded a group of horses.

Coleman’s contribution to the show was an original composition that played during a critical moment in the young man’s treatment, when he relives an evening in which he and the young woman he’s interested in go to the movies to take in a “skin flick” that’s all the rage. Audiences didn’t see the sexually explicit film that the two characters were watching, but they did hear the insistently rhythmic instrumental that Coleman had created as its soundtrack. Beyond crafting a melody with an unquestionable drive, Coleman had also written one that was disturbingly creepy, and his work was made oddly futuristic thanks to the electric guitar work of Vinnie Bell, who hit the charts in 1970 with a similar-sounding solo for the love theme from the movie
Airport
.

Coleman’s eye toward the future on this brief (under six minutes) piece of music presupposed his next theatrical outing, one made with old friends but new collaborators, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The two had written lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s music for
Wonderful Town
and
On the Town
and had worked with composer Jule Styne on shows like
Bells Are Ringing
and
Do Re Mi
.

The friendship between the writers dated back to the 1950s (Comden and Green were guests on the debut episode of
Art Ford’s Greenwich Village Party
, where Coleman was the regular musical artist), and through the years the relationship deepened to the point that Green’s wife, actress-singer Phyllis Newman, recalled the countless evenings they had all spent together at the Greens’ Central Park West apartment, where music and humor intermingled freely.