You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (31 page)

The irony, of course, is that after working on the quintessential modern-sounding mini-musical
I Love My Wife
, Coleman had, with his collaborators, created what could be seen as a forerunner of the mega-spectacle poperas that would arrive from Britain in the 1980s.

Shortly after opening, Prince recalled, “[Kahn] got sick. Started to not come in. The handwriting was on the wall. We put Judy in. Judy knocked the ball out of the park, night after night after night. She would have been a superstar if she had opened on Broadway. As it is she’s won a couple of Tonys and she’s a terrific performer. But that night would have made her a superstar.”
33

Kahn’s absences continued. One of them remained vivid in the mind of Coleman’s assistant, Terrie Curran. On this particular night, she and he had dinner at Trader Vic’s at the Plaza. Afterward they were walking in the lobby, and Curran remembered: “As we turned, coming around the corner was Madeline and a friend. She looked at Cy. He looked at her. He said, ‘Madeline.’ She said, ‘Cy,’ and we went on, and he was furious because she wasn’t sick.”
34
Curran remembered that it wasn’t long after this encounter that Kahn left the production.

Another tale from the weeks leading up to Kahn’s leaving
On the Twentieth Century
came from choreographer Fuller, who remembered the events on the day that the show’s cast album was recorded. “We had the recording session the old-fashioned way, where everything was done in one Sunday. Madeline came in after the ensemble had done their stuff. And she did some of her stuff with them, but none of the high endings. And then everyone left, except Madeline. And I stayed, because Hal wasn’t there, and I felt like somebody from the creative staging staff should just be here. So I stayed with Cy and the guys in the recording booth.”
35

They worked on Kahn’s solos, and then “they’d play up to the last sixteen bars or so to lead her into being able to sing the end of the number,” Fuller said, adding, “And she did them. Every one of them—I think there were three but I’m not sure—without a problem. She’d do it maybe two or three times for each song. And she came into the booth and Cy was just gushing over her, trying to be so encouraging. “Oh, listen to this. It just sounds wonderful.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, well, I guess it’s okay, but my throat feels really rather raw. I don’t know.’ And she left in this state of emotional upset again.”
36

Kaye, who had played Lily ten times, officially stepped into the role full-time on April 24, just two months after the show opened. The announcement of the casting change in the
New York Times
included the statement that “Miss Kahn, who was supposed to appear in the musical until October, said she was withdrawing because of damage to vocal chords.”
37

Despite the backstage drama,
On the Twentieth Century
proved to be a total triumph for Coleman. He picked up his first Tony Award for best score when the prizes were handed out on June 4. The show also earned awards for Cullum and Kline as best actor and best featured actor in a musical, respectively; Comden and Green won best book; and scenic designer Robin Wagner was honored for his fabulous recreation of the luxury train.

The show had garnered an additional four nominations, including one for best musical, which it lost to the Fats Waller revue
Ain’t Misbehavin’
. Kahn was also nominated, even though the producers had campaigned for the nomination to be given to Kaye. (There was a precedent for this. In 1970 Larry Kert, who had replaced an ailing Dean Jones, was nominated for the musical
Company
.) Kaye did, however, earn a Theatre World Award for an outstanding performance and a Drama Desk Award. Coleman also earned a Drama Desk Award for score (his second), and, even more impressive, he received his first nomination for induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame just after
On the Twentieth Century
opened (an honor he would receive two years and two shows later).

As the musical settled into its run, Coleman, as publisher of the score, began to consider how to promote its songs. He hit upon an unusual idea. Having seen Linda Clifford’s success with a disco version of “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” Coleman decided to give some of the
On the Twentieth Century
songs the same treatment. He turned to his old friend Tony Bongiovi, who recalled that throughout their long relationship the composer would frequently come to him and ask, “Which of my songs will fit the new genre?”
38

Coleman and Bongiovi settled on two songs: “Never” and “Our Private World.” The former was given a treatment that brought to mind the work of Gloria Gaynor (with whom Bongiovi frequently worked), especially “I Will Survive.” With the second, a vaguely Middle Eastern vibe was layered onto the lush ballad.

As news of his plans for his songs reached the media, there was talk that leading lady Judy Kaye would be the featured vocalist for the new versions, backed by the actors who were playing the Pullman porters. Ultimately, the new incarnations of the songs were recorded by the Body Shop and released both on a 45 single and as an extended dance mix on a 33
1/3
single.

Billboard
described Coleman’s first foray into disco—the 1976 recording of “Chloe”—as having “made minor waves.” These two new tracks didn’t cause a ripple, but they do keenly demonstrate Coleman’s determination to navigate the changing tastes of American music buyers.

A fate similar to that of these covers of
On the Twentieth Century
songs lay in store for the show itself, which never caught fire at the box office, although while it was running Coleman could boast for the first time in his career that he had two shows simultaneously on Broadway. And even before
On the
Twentieth Century
ended its run at the St. James Theatre on March 18, 1979, it looked like Coleman might actually be on his way to having a trio of musicals playing concurrently on the Great White Way.

22.
Home Again, Home Again

During the months that followed the acclaimed opening of
I Love My Wife
, Coleman and his forthcoming projects were profiled extensively. At the time he had on his docket not only
On the Twentieth Century
but also the still-in-waiting
Beautiful People
(or
Encounter
, as it had been retitled), a project with Christopher Gore, and another one that would feature a book by
New York Times
columnist Russell Baker and lyrics by Barbara Fried.

When Coleman talked about having four shows all in various stages of readiness for production, he said, “I wouldn’t want to give the impression I’m grabbing off a lot of projects all of a sudden. . . . They’ve all been around from seven to two years. But you simply cannot just sit around and wait for people to raise the money, to wait for a director or something else.”
1
Indeed, the Baker-Fried project had been on Coleman’s docket since the early 1970s, not long after he and Fried first met.

Fried had spent much of her career working as an editor of music and psychology books at W. W. Norton, and she had turned to lyric writing only in the late 1960s, when she was approached by some friends about collaborating on a children’s musical. During her initial foray into the field, she discovered that the process and work suited her and began to take on other projects.

It wasn’t long after this that she found herself at Notable Music with composer John Morris, who did the dance arrangements for
Wildcat
and went on to write the musical
A Time for Singing
, an adaptation of
How Green Was My Valley
. Fried and Morris had just completed work on a musical with the working title
The Ways of My Youth
, which was based on her book,
The Middle Age Crisis.

“We had a producer who brought us to Cy,” Fried recalled, “and Cy liked it, and he took the show to publish it.” Before it could go into production, however, Morris got a call about writing music for one of Mel Brooks’s movies. “John went to California to work, and I was bereft,” said Fried, who then took an approach to finding a new collaborator very similar to Coleman’s own when he embarked on his relationship with Dorothy Fields. Fried simply went to him and asked, “‘Do you want to work with me?’” And his answer, she said, was “Sure.”
2

Coleman and Fried’s first two songs—not intended for a musical—were released in mid-1972, just as Coleman was embarking on a new relationship with London Records. When
Billboard
announced the deal, which gave Coleman an outlet different from his own with Notable Records, it was described as being one that would “bring a contemporary approach to melodic music . . . geared for the top 40 market without competing with the current rock groove.”
3

The London releases featured Coleman and a group of backup singers collectively billed as the Cy Coleman Co-Op. The first effort for the label was a single that had his setting of Christina Rosetti’s poem “What Are Heavy?” on the A side and his and Fried’s “When It Comes to Lovin’” on the B side. It was an unusual pairing of tunes. Coleman’s music for “Heavy” bordered on the liturgical, while his melody for the song with Fried had a spry R&B vibe to it. The
Variety
review of the 45 deemed the first song “interesting,” implicitly preferring the second by calling it “neatly swinging.”
4
In the hipper publication
Melody Maker
, the sound of the record was snarkily described as sounding like “some old ladies [
sic
] choir.”
5

Regardless of the recording’s critical reception, “When It Comes to Lovin’” demonstrated that Coleman had found a lyricist who could provide erudite and tricky rhymes for his music.

Coleman and Fried’s second song together was “Think Love”; it was featured on the B side of a London Records release of Coleman and Sheldon Harnick’s “Theme from
The Heartbreak Kid
.” This happier pairing of tunes resulted in a more cohesive, contemporary sound.

About a year after these records had been released Fried got a phone call from Coleman. He wondered if she was familiar with a writer for the
New York Times
, Russell Baker, whose “Observer” columns pointedly and humorously tackled the topics of the day, from the Watergate scandal to the growth of militant movements to the inferiority of coffee making in the United States. Beyond his initial question, Coleman wanted to know if she thought Baker’s columns might serve as the basis for a musical. She said, “I think so.”
6

Fried then wrote a series of lyrics based on Baker’s columns, and Coleman set them to music. Eventually they had enough to show a producer, so she and Coleman took the songs to Herman Levin, who, for a while, had been considering producing Coleman and James Lipton’s
Beautiful People
. During the meeting Fried recalled, “Herman said, ‘You need a book writer. Why don’t you ask Russell Baker?’ So we asked Russell Baker.” At the time Baker had just relocated from Washington to New York, and Fried had the sense that he, as she had been several years before, “was looking for something else to do.”
7

Baker recalled the events leading up to his hearing Coleman and Fried’s work differently: “I had a call from the producer Herman Levin.”
8
Levin told Baker of Coleman and Fried’s efforts and then asked if he would be willing to come into the office to hear them play their songs.

Baker knew of Levin’s success with shows like
My Fair Lady
. Furthermore, “Cy Coleman was also a big Broadway name to me. Also, I used to come up to New York from Baltimore in my Baltimore Sun days back in the 1940s and I remembered hearing Coleman playing cocktail music, at the Sherry-Netherland I think it was, and thinking he was pretty good.”
9

Thus, via a phone call either from Coleman and Fried or from Levin, Baker found himself in Levin’s office in early 1975, where he “listened to Cy play and sing the songs with Barbara. It was exciting and inflating. The theater bug had bit. Pretty soon I was working on a primitive script designed to provide a setting for the songs.”
10

By July 1975, while Coleman, Comden, and Green were discussing what they might do as a follow-up to their collaboration on
Straws in the Wind
, and well before
I Love My Wife
was on the horizon, there was enough to the work with Baker to warrant a complete feature about the gestating show.

Baker admitted to
Newsday
writer Leo Seligsohn, “I feel quite innocent about the musical, like a boob in the big town. But, it’s something to do, a challenge.”
11
He noted that this was particularly true given that while the show would stretch from the Depression years through Watergate, he was used to writing columns that were only seven hundred words long.

Fried remembered in particular one instance of the difficulties Baker was facing as he shifted into the realm of writing dramatically: “He once said to me, ‘I’m having a terrible time with this problem.’ He had gotten to the point where [the show’s protagonist] had grown up and become a reporter. He meets this girl and they fall in love, and he said, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get to his three teenage kids.’ I said, ‘Russell, you have him turn to the audience and say, “These are my children.” That’s all you have to do.’ It would never have occurred to him.”
12

Eventually Baker’s script took shape as a book musical, and after he shared it with Levin, Baker said that the producer “seemed, I thought, unenthusiastic.”
13
Levin’s response, as well as the songs that Coleman and Fried had already crafted, led Baker down a new path, and what emerged was something more episodic: a journey through a man’s life from birth to middle age as well as an investigation of the metamorphosis—or devolution—of the American Dream from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Baker began the show with a scene in an amorphous void somewhere in the universe where past and future collided as the musical’s protagonist, Philip (as he was known in early drafts), was learning from his deceased father, known just as Witherspoon, that he was about to be sent to Earth to be born in 1926. The wry tone of the show could be summed up by Witherspoon’s reverie about the state of the country, which came in the middle of the song “America Is Bathed in Sunlight”: “We had bootleg whiskey and those great gangsters Legs Diamond, Al Capone.” It was a sentiment that stood in stark contrast to Coleman’s melody, a pastiche of a pleasant, leisurely tune from the early twentieth century, the sort of thing that families might have sung together repeatedly around an upright piano.

From this opening the show moved on to a huckster’s number, performed as a song in front of the curtain, extolling the portrait of the American Dream that was about to unfold as Philip’s life eventually encompassed an existence in the suburbs with a wife and three children. Once they reached maturity, one son was drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam, while the daughter became a hippie, forcing her folks to confront her involvement with drugs and her promiscuity.

Along the way, songs—many inspired by Baker’s columns—commented satirically on how the foundations on which the couple had built their lives were shifting and crumbling. From a piece about the homogenized worlds of gargantuan supermarkets and shopping malls, the songwriters wrote “Superland,” a buoyant march. A column about the failings of industry inspired “America Don’t Know How Any More,” an ironically chipper ditty to be sung by four presidents.

But despite the impressive buildup the
Newsday
preview had given the musical in mid-1975, it wasn’t mentioned in print again for over a year. Then, in a September 11, 1976
Billboard
article, Radcliffe Joe included it in a story about shows that might be part of the 1976–77 season, The article also gave the musical a name:
Baker’s Dozen
. Again, though, the show disappeared from view, eclipsed by Coleman and Michael Stewart’s
I Love My Wife
and the news of
On the Twentieth Century
.

Then, just as speculation about the actor and actress who would star in the latter show was kicking into gear, columnist Jack O’Brian brought up
Baker’s Dozen
, noting that the marriage of Baker’s columns and musical theater might not be a happy one before adding: “But if anyone can turn this mess of reportage into tunefully successful shape, it is its producer, the immaculately tasteful Herman Levin, who gave us ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,’ ‘No Exit’ and other carbonated smashes all the way back to ‘Call Me Mister’ some 20 years ago.”
14

Unfortunately, after O’Brian’s touting of Levin’s ability to shepherd
Baker’s Dozen
to a successful Broadway bow, the producer retired, and the writers, as Baker described it, “plunged mindlessly on, without a producer and no director in anybody’s minds.”
15

For a while it looked as though the former problem would be solved by the Producers Circle, which added the show to its slate of upcoming productions immediately following
On the Twentieth Century
. When the group’s involvement was announced in June 1978, Mary Lea Johnson told the
New York Times
’s John Corry that “it’s a little difficult to describe. . . . It’s a little like ‘Our Town.’” She went on to describe the physical production that was envisioned, despite the fact that the show had neither an official director nor a designer. Johnson said the musical would have “big sets, like
Saturday Evening Post
covers, many primary colors, sunflowers, and gingham.”
16

The Producers Circle, however, did not end up being the official producers of the show. Instead, Irwin Meyer and Stephen R. Friedman took up the task, under the umbrella of their company, Regency Communications.

The two men owned Broadway’s 46th Street Theatre (later renamed the Richard Rodgers Theatre), as well as the Helen Hayes and the Morosco, two theaters that were later demolished to make way for the Marriott Hotel and Marquis Theatre between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets in Times Square. In addition to their work as theater operators, they served as producers on a couple of shows, most notably the megahit
Annie
, as well as the musical
Working
. Their real-estate holdings and their success with
Annie
conferred a terrific pedigree on Meyer and Friedman. Their importance as players in the entertainment field was further enhanced just before they came to the now renamed
Home Again
when Warner Bros. infused their company with capital, making Regency one of its many subsidiaries.

As Friedman and Meyer came on board, so too did a director and choreographer. Gene Saks and Onna White, who had scored a success for Coleman when they stepped in at a moment’s notice for
I Love My Wife
, would, respectively, direct and choreograph
Home Again
, which was on schedule for a Broadway opening in late February or early March 1979.

Saks and White quickly began assembling the cast, which came to have three above-the-title stars. Ronny Cox, who was an ensemble member in Arthur Kopit’s
Indians
on Broadway in 1969 before embarking on a television and film career that would grow to include feature roles in
Total Recall
,
RoboCop
and
Beverly Hills Cop
, was cast in the leading role of Thomas Jefferson (TJ) Witherspoon, the character that had previously been named “Philip.”

To play TJ’s father and other patriarchal figures in his life, the creators turned to Dick Shawn, an actor who had Broadway credits ranging from
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
to
Fade Out/Fade In
. He also had a significant amount of film and television work on his résumé, notably Mel Brooks’s
The Producers
, in which he played Lorenzo St. DuBois (LSD for short), the leading man in the musical-within-the-movie,
Springtime for Hitler
.