You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (36 page)

Coleman’s admission about his need to do things other than compose and the frustrations that Stewart and Bramble had with him (which echoed Leigh’s from the late 1950s just before work on
Wildcat
began) make it slightly ironic that Coleman found himself working closely with her during this period—not only on the abortive attempt to bring
The Wonderful O
to the stage but also on a full-scale revival of their second show together,
Little Me
.

At the time, Coleman said, “It’s not a revival like so many of the successful musicals are these days. . . . What we’re doing is practically a new show.”
17
Indeed, Neil Simon had rewritten the book for the 1962 tuner, dividing the male roles, all originally played by Sid Caesar, between two performers. Furthermore, he removed the character of George Musgrove, the childhood friend of heroine Belle Poitrine, substituting a character that had been in an early draft of the show, gangster Frankie Polo. The other major reworking involved the musical’s framing device. No longer did Belle look back on her life from a world of affluence but rather from a seedy bar in New Jersey, where, washed and thoroughly liquored up, she retold her life story.

This last change indicates how drastically Simon had shifted the overall tone of the musical. No longer a lighter-than-air comedy, it was cynical and slightly bitter. Belle now hailed not from the obliquely humorous burg of Venezuela, Illinois, but rather from the crassly comic Twin Jugs, Illinois, and instead of the Steinbeckian “Drifters Row,” Belle found herself living in the bluntly named “Dump Town.”

To complement Simon’s changes, Harold Wheeler was brought in to provide new, contemporary-sounding orchestrations, and Coleman rewrote the show’s vocal and dance arrangements. More notable, however, was the addition of two new songs from the team of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the first tunes they had written together for a musical since
Little Me
premiered.

The first was a brassy honky-tonk tune for the older Belle, “Don’t Ask a Lady,” which opened the show and necessitated the excision of “The Truth,” the song that Coleman had rewritten so often for the original production. The second was “I Want to Be Yours,” a silky ballad almost in the style of Jule Styne that was delivered by the younger Belle and a new beau, Philip Randolph Worst, whom Simon had created for the revision. Two songs were also jettisoned for the revised
Little Me
: “Be a Performer” and “Dimples,” tunes that had come to the musical from Coleman and Leigh’s
Gypsy
trunk.

Hopes were high for the production, which brought James Coco back to the stage after an absence of more than a decade, during which time he had established himself as one of Hollywood’s most reliable comics. Coco was to play the older men Belle encountered in her life, while Victor Garber, who was just coming off the original
Sweeney Todd
, in which he played the sailor Anthony, would portray the younger men Belle knew, including the love of her life, Noble Eggleston.

As the “little me” of the show’s title, Simon’s new script retained the original conceit of having the part played by two actresses. Mary Gordon Murray (who had been a standby for both roles in
I Love My Wife
and eventually played each as a replacement) was the heroine in her prime, and Jessica James (who was a standby for Elaine Stritch in the original cast of
Company
and who played the eccentric Bunny Weinberger in the original cast of the long-running comedy
Gemini
) was on hand to play her in her later, blowzy years.

Robert Drivas, who guided the original production of Terrence McNally’s farce
The Ritz
to acclaim in 1975 but had not had a similar hit since, helmed the production, which had choreography by Peter Gennaro (a member of the original
Little Me
company who moved on to a successful career creating dances for the film version of
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
and for the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall).

The new
Little Me
opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on January 21, 1982 to primarily negative reviews. In the
New York Times
, Frank Rich called it “a spotty, sloppy substitute for the zestier and grander ‘Little Me’ of 1962,” while the
Variety
review that appeared a week after the show opened forecast that “the revival seems a questionable prospect to last more than a few weeks.”

Indeed, the show ran a mere thirty-six performances before shuttering. In 1994, when Coleman talked about the revival with Michael Barnes of the
Austin American-Statesman
, he reflected, “That version was a mistake on all our parts. We tried something new—we split up the roles among several actors (brash Sid Caesar played all the male leads in the original). The whole thing was created as a tour de force. We made bad cuts, and the scenery was cartoonish. We tried to do a different production instead of just ‘Little Me.’”

Still, it was enough to reunite Coleman with both Leigh and Simon, and as the year progressed, they started in on an entirely new show together, a stage version of the 1972 film comedy
The Heartbreak Kid
.

Written by Simon and directed by Elaine May (who, after years of being Mike Nichols’s partner in comedy, had established herself as both a writer and a director), it was a property with which Coleman had more than passing familiarity. After all, he wrote the movie’s theme song, “You’re Going Far,” with Sheldon Harnick, the man who had been the lyricist on numerous Broadway shows, most prominently
Fiddler on the Roof
. It was actually May who thought of Coleman and Harnick (to whom she had been married in the early 1960s) for the movie, but as Harnick recalled, “She felt very awkward about calling me directly, so she called Cy and he called me.”
18

Coleman set up the meeting, and Harnick described what happened: “She said, ‘I need this song. Can I have it tomorrow?’ That’s what she said, and we looked at each other and said, ‘No.’ We said we’d do it as quickly as possible, and I think we did it in about two or three days.”
19
The assignment, however, wasn’t just a straightforward song; May wanted something that could have dual meanings.

Harnick explained, “What she wanted was a song that when you heard it at the beginning of the film it would register one way, and when you heard it at the end of the film you would hear it with great irony, knowing what the film had been. It was not possible to do something like that in three days, but we came up with a very nice song.”
20

May wanted the dual meanings in order to underscore the relatively static journey that the movie’s central character, Lenny Cantrow, takes in learning that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. For the proposed musical, Simon kept this premise: Cantrow marries one woman, who, like him, is a Jewish New Yorker, only to jilt her on their honeymoon for another woman, Kelly, who is his wife’s antithesis: younger, Midwestern, and Christian. Lenny struggles to win Kelly, but once he has, he discovers that life with her will be filled with the same compromises that he would have had to make with his first wife.

Leigh and Coleman began drafting a half dozen songs, all of which had the sort of wit and sophistication that typified their earlier work combined with a musical fizziness that had become part of the pop world in the intervening years.

By mid-1983, however, the creative team for the show went into flux. First, there were reports that the lyricist would be not Leigh, but rather Tim Rice, lyricist for Andrew Lloyd Webber on
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Evita
. Then came the news that Simon had turned to another composer, Burt Bacharach, who had worked with Simon on the 1968 musical
Promises, Promises
. Eventually Simon shelved the project and moved on to what could be termed the second act of his career. He began working on darker and more introspective plays: his autobiographical triptych
Brighton Beach Memoirs
,
Biloxi Blues
, and
Broadway Bound
.

Even if Simon and Coleman had not begun talking about different collaborators during the first part of 1983, they would have had to turn to a new lyricist by the end of the year, after Leigh’s unexpected death from a heart attack. She was only fifty-seven.

“Mr. Coleman hailed Miss Leigh yesterday as one who strove endlessly for perfection and worked at her craft very hard,” read her obituary in the
New York Times
on November 21. Coleman also described her to the paper as a “poet” who “had a great feeling for music.”

The affection and appreciation that Coleman expressed at the time of Leigh’s death was moderated years later when he discussed her passing with a sense of anger. “She’d had a heart attack, and it was not diagnosed properly, so it was one of those terrible stories where her doctor said, ‘Well, take a couple of aspirin.’ And, you know, Carolyn was a big woman. I mean really big, so she was tall and big. And I always thought about that. How could you tell somebody like that to take a couple of aspirin? But it was very sad, and it was just a shame that her career was nipped in the bud like that.”
21

Her death dovetailed with a return that Coleman was making to some Hollywood work. In fact, he and Leigh had one assignment on their docket, a pair of songs for the film comedy
Blame It on Rio
, about a middle-aged man who, during a monthlong holiday in Brazil, is seduced by his teenaged daughter’s best friend. Coleman needed a collaborator who could work quickly, so he turned once again to Harnick, with whom he’d written “You’re Going Far” in just two days.

“I got a call from Cy, and it had to be done immediately, because they were behind schedule. He recorded one, gave it to me, and then he went off to Cincinnati or some place to do a gig,” Harnick recalled, and then added, “It truly was effervescent. It is a wonderful song.” Harnick was speaking of the film’s title song. Once it was done, the two men completed “I Must Be Doing Something Right.”
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Harnick didn’t mind Coleman’s approaching him at the last minute for things like this. “Anytime he called, professionally, I was delighted, because I knew that it would not only be fun to work with him but that the result would be something that I’d really like.”
23

During the early 1980s Coleman also began working with director Sidney Lumet, whose recent films had ranged from the Oscar-nominated
The Prince of the City
and
The Verdict
to the less than critically acclaimed
Deathtrap
. The first outing Coleman had on one of Lumet’s films was the bittersweet comedy
Garbo Talks
, which centers on a man who, when his mother is diagnosed with an inoperable and fatal brain tumor, sets about making her dying wish—to meet Greta Garbo—come true.

Starring Anne Bancroft and Ron Silver as the mother and son, the movie (thanks to Larry Grusin’s screenplay) never swerves into the realm of maudlin sentimentality. Instead, it uses the woman’s illness to explore the son’s midlife coming-of-age story as he discovers new things about himself (and his mother) while he searches Manhattan and beyond for the reclusive star.

Given that the film uses sequences from Garbo’s pictures, notably
Camille
just after the opening credits, Coleman had to create a score that could evoke and blend with movie music from the 1930s while also supporting the picture of life in 1980s New York that was central to the film. To this end Coleman developed a main theme that was a waltz with a decided Viennese sweep and yet the simplicity of a delicate music-box air. He went on to develop a second theme that had an edgier quality and found ways to blend the two to underscore several of the montages showing the son as he researches and searches for Garbo.

Perhaps most impressive was the way in which Coleman eventually expanded the central melody for a scene in which the son narrowly misses meeting the screen star as she leaves her house on Fire Island, flying off in a sea plane. Before it has taken off, he rushes into the ocean, shouting in the hopes that he will manage to at least delay her; as he does so, Coleman’s score swells as the tide surges and the plane zooms. The combination of action and music perfectly capture the marriage of high drama and extravagant music that was typical of the films of Hollywood’s Golden Era.

Over the course of the next five years, Coleman would provide the scores for two additional Lumet movies:
Power
and
Family Business
. Neither of them proved to have the popular success of
Garbo
, but in each Coleman demonstrated a shrewd and delicate hand in the art of scoring.

In
Power
, a drama about a media consultant (played by Richard Gere) who, while juggling several political campaigns, has a crisis of conscience about his practices, Coleman’s music blends the percussive rhythms of “Sing Sing Sing” (made a classic by Benny Goodman and a favorite tune of the movie’s hero) with the staccato clicks and whirs of the then just emerging personal computer. The result is a subtle set of brief interludes that gracefully capture the mounting tension Gere’s character feels as he sees a political campaign being undermined by an unscrupulous lobbyist.

The music in
Power
is so distinctive that it garnered the attention of one critic. In a January 31 review in the
Hartford Courant
, Malcolm L. Johnson commented on how “the jazzy, up-tempo scoring by Broadway’s Cy Coleman” helped to keep “juices flowing, even when David Himmelstein’s screenplay makes a clumsy move, or Lumet overstates a scene.”

Coleman’s final outing with Lumet was the 1989 movie
Family Business
, a dark comedy about three generations of con men (played by Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick). While
Power
uses an existing swing song for its opening credits,
Family Business
has an original Coleman theme that evokes the era of Goodman, Ellington, and Dorsey even while sounding entirely contemporary. The latter quality is the result of an insistent vamp reminiscent of John Kander’s work.