You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (37 page)

Beyond this central melody, from which the composer builds a series of intriguing variations, the
Family Business
underscoring contains elements that evoke his work in 1960s Hollywood, particularly during the movie’s heist sequence, when the avant-garde orchestrations of
The Troublemaker
sound as if they’ve met Coleman’s musical impersonation of Henry Mancini from
The Art of Love
.

As playful as Coleman could be in his film scoring, it didn’t allow for the sort of collaboration that he enjoyed most and could be readily found in theater. So, even as he began contemplating the music for
Rio
and
Garbo
, he was still actively creating new theater work.

25.
“Good Intentions”

Even for Coleman, who seemingly was capable of juggling musicals with the ease of a circus performer, the end of 1983 was a particularly busy time, with two new shows going into performance in different cities: New York and Chicago.

In New York, the production was
Peg
, a show that starred his old friend and sometime writing partner, singing great Peggy Lee.

The thought of doing the show came to Lee in 1980 while she was in Michigan performing in the revue
Side by Side by Sondheim
. She liked the theater, and furthermore, she found herself inexorably pulled to a melody that she heard one of the production’s accompanists, Paul Horner, playing during a lunch break. When she discovered that the tune was Horner’s own and that he had written it hoping she would pen a lyric for it, a collaboration developed.

They started writing together, conceptualizing the show that would become
Peg
. As Lee recounted in her autobiography, “We wrote thirty songs for the score, and when it was finished, we began having backers’ dinners at my house.”
1
One such event wasn’t necessarily intended as an audition; it was a party at which hoteliers Irv and Marge Cowan were present during which Lee and Horner offered an impromptu performance of the score. The Cowans liked what they heard and promised to help get the show produced. They eventually brought on Zev Bufman, who had among his producing credits
The Little Foxes
;
Private Lives
, with Elizabeth Taylor; and the Andrew Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice musical
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
.

By 1982 Lee herself had penned the book for the show. “Eschewing the one-woman-show format filled with her best-known hits, Miss Lee preferred ‘to bring my own little contribution to the theater,’ she said in a telephone interview,” wrote Susan Heller Anderson in an August 18
New York Times
article about the production. At this point, the producers were envisioning a show that would have twenty-two performers and were budgeting it at $2.5 million.

As for the show’s format, Lee told Anderson, “I’ll be in the show substantially . . . with someone to play the younger Peg.” Lee also indulged in some fantasy casting about one of the central figures in her life, jazz musician Dave Barbour, whom she had met while performing with Benny Goodman’s band and married. As she thought about the show, Lee said, “Dustin Hoffman would be a lot like Dave.”

At this juncture
Peg
was simply a collaboration between Lee and Horner, but as it continued to evolve, the creative team for it grew. First, William Luce, who wrote
The Belle of Amherst
, the acclaimed biodrama about poet Emily Dickinson, was brought on board to work on the show’s book. Then Coleman, much as he had for his pal Shirley MacLaine when she was working on her solo show in the early 1970s, signed on as artistic consultant to work with the man hired to direct the piece, Robert Drivas, who had helmed the ill-fated
Little Me
revival.

Luce kept Lee’s original multicharacter conceit for the show as well as the concept of having the star played by different actresses, and in early 1983 Lee was seemingly content with the idea. She told
Chicago Tribune
reporter Larry Kart that she would be “coming into and out of [the action] all the way through.”
2
Eventually, however, the idea of multiple actresses playing her went to the wayside. “She always wanted to play herself,” recalled producer Irv Cowan.
3

There were conflicts not only about the way the piece should be constructed and cast, but also about the music it would contain. Lee and Horner had written enough material for two musicals, so Lee would not need to perform any of her hits. Nevertheless, there was a push to include some of them in the show.

Eventually Luce was removed as book writer, and though the show had been intended as “a kind of impressionistic piece,”
4
it gradually transformed into an essentially standard-issue evening of autobiography and song.

Coleman attempted to shape the production, but as Mike Renzi, the pianist who had come to it at Coleman’s insistence from Lena Horne’s successful one-woman show, recalled, “Cy’s forte was Broadway. . . . [Lee] recruited him, and he decided he’d give her creative input. They were such good friends anyway, right? So we’re rehearsing at Minskoff Studios, me and Grady [Tate, the show’s drummer], no bass. Well, she’d never done a Broadway thing in her life, and she’s fighting Cy all the way. Cy is saying, ‘Peggy, I’m telling you—I know this is what we should do.’ And then she would listen and she would say, ‘Yeah—but no.’ One day he got so fed up he walked out on her.”
5

Coleman and Lee made up, and during the show’s two weeks of previews at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (the original home of
Little Me
), they would revise things, but bassist Jay Leonhart felt they focused on the wrong things: “A show like that is almost a vanity project, it’s gotta be perfect, and in the end, she didn’t have the energy for the rewriting it needed.”
6

What emerged was a show that had a smattering of original dialogue (prose voice-overs from other characters in Lee’s life and autobiographical poetry) combined with fourteen of Lee and Horner’s songs and eleven of the songs familiar to theatergoers from her long career, including Coleman’s “Big Spender,” which was heard late in the second act, alongside two Leiber and Stoller tunes, “I’m a Woman” and “Is That All There Is?” There was also one Coleman original in the show, “I Never Knew Why,” which has a melody that could be counted among the most downbeat of any that he ever wrote. The song, with a lyric by Lee, allowed the performer to reflect, with brazen superficiality, on the demise of her relationship with Barbour.

The show opened on December 14, and the reviews were dismal. Frank Rich wrote in the
New York Times
that the piece was “nothing if not a religious rite . . . most likely to excite those who are evangelistically devoted to both Peggy Lee and God—ideally in that order.” Of Drivas’s and Coleman’s work, he said, “The staging is efficient, but these experienced theater men can only take their star so far.” The December 21
Variety
review not only echoed Rich’s sentiments when it said
Peg
was “clouded by awkwardly written, mawkish autobiographical material that veers close to self-glorification,” but it also appeared three days after the show had abruptly closed after just five performances.

While
Peg
was rehearsing and previewing, Coleman was also busy with an out-of-town project,
Shecago
, a show that would debut at a new cabaret venue in Chicago that had an unusual name: the Institute for Advanced Studies and Bar & Grill. The place was the brainchild of Arnie Morton and Victor Lownes, the men who, with Coleman’s old friend Hugh Hefner, founded the Playboy clubs.

The show that went into this space actually had its origins in Coleman’s conversations with Judy Gordon prior to their work on
Barnum
. She wanted to do a revue of his songs, but, she remembered, “He said that I had to have a concept for the show. . . . So I got in touch with Tommy Tune, who at that time was at the beginning of his career, and said, ‘What about doing a show of Cy’s music?’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah!’ And so the three of us had a meeting in Cy’s office, and Tommy came up with the idea of doing Crazy Horse in New York.”
7

Alain Bernardin had opened the club that Tune was talking about in Paris in 1951, creating a venue in which he could explore his artistic vision and showcase his love of beautiful women. Over the years it had established itself as one of the world’s preeminent homes of avant-garde cabaret and burlesque. At the center of the Crazy Horse shows were numbers performed by scantily clad or nude women, with magic and variety acts interspersed.

Coleman immediately latched on to the idea, and the three began scouting for locations in which such a show could be produced. “We looked at all of these defunct nightspots,” Tune recalled. “The El Morocco was gated up, and we went to look at whether we could work in there and different places. He wanted to call the show
Quail
,
because that’s what musicians of a certain period called girls. In England, they called them birds.”
8

Their plans were put on hold because of other projects (and New York City’s restrictions on public nudity). Then, in 1983, Coleman, now with Joe Layton as director and choreographer, resurrected the project when Morton asked that they come up with a show for his new venture. The ads for the auditions—at one point a half page in the industry casting bible
Back Stage
—featured not only a Picassolike drawing of a woman in a provocative pose but also a blunt statement of what was required of potential cast members: “You must be able to dance or move very well, and must have both a beautiful body and good looks to be able to qualify for this extraordinary job.”
9

These requirements caught the eye of columnists Michael Sneed and Cheryl Lavin (both women) in the
Chicago Tribune
, who followed the project with raised eyebrows and a healthy dose of sarcasm. On November 25, after the first auditions had been held, the writers revealed that the creators had not been able to fully cast the show and then reported that “[Lownes] has, if you’ll pardon the expression, broadened the requirements” for potential cast members.
10
He upped the eligible age cap for dancers who wanted to audition from twenty-two to twenty-six and lowered the height requirement from five feet nine inches to five feet six inches.

Once the show was cast, the company members, which included the women and three men (two dancers and a magician), found themselves performing to roughly two dozen of Coleman’s songs. The selections, which were all prerecorded, encompassed the entirety of Coleman’s career, from “Isn’t He Adorable?,” with its lyric by Joseph A. McCarthy Jr., to numbers from
Barnum
. In between were hits from his shows, such as “Real Live Girl” and “Big Spender,” both of which fit easily into the piece’s conceit. There were also tunes that had gone unperformed, such as “I’m Watching You,” written for
The Wonderful O
.

Ted Kociolek, who after serving as associate conductor and one of the pianists for
Barnum
became the musical coordinator on
Shecago
, remembered how inventive Layton’s staging was for even the most familiar of tunes, like “The Colors of My Life”: “In this number, one of the guys was a painter, with Day-Glo colors on a canvas. They also had one of the ladies dressed in a Day-Glo unitard of various hues, but it was covered completely in black Velcro, so the guy would take his paintbrush of neon color and do a splash at her. At which point somebody would rip off a piece of the Velcro to reveal a Day-Glo pink, for instance. And thus the woman is ‘painted’ by ripping off the Velcro.”
11

Kociolek also recalled how a dreamy, ethereal rendition of “You Fascinate Me So” became a “quasi-Sapphic encounter” as two of the women “crawled up and over a jungle gym–like [set piece] in almost Cirque du Soleil or balletic fashion.”
12

None of the sequences, according to Kociolek, was “salacious,” and indeed, when Larry Kart’s review appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
on December 20, he dubbed it “moderately entertaining, mildly erotic, and probably of interest mostly to conventioneers.” Kart also took great pains to describe how much the show had improved since he first saw it, at what was supposed to have been a press preview but turned out to be a performance to which reviewers had been disinvited.

On that night, Kart wrote, “everyone (onstage and in the audience) was wondering whether these people were going to fall down.” What had happened during the course of the week, Kart reported, turned an event that had been “ludicrous” into “a decently indecent piece of entertainment.”

Unfortunately, the show never caught on, with either Chicagoland natives or tourists, and by the spring of 1984
Shecago
shuttered. In the wake of its relatively quick demise, Cheryl Lavin, one of the two
Tribune
columnist baiting Morton and Lownes from the beginning, provided a postmortem of the show to the London
Observer
. In her April 22 report she cited a number of missteps made by Morton and Lownes and also found fault with the director and composer. “Coleman and Layton were too big for the job. They each had more important, more exciting projects to worry about.” Layton, she wrote, “flew back and forth from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he was directing a video for Lionel Ritchie.” Coleman, she said, “managed to get to Chicago only twice.”

Kociolek remembered that a good deal of his work with Coleman had indeed been done by phone and FedEx before the show opened, but he said that Coleman was on hand and added, “To be fair, though, there would have been little for him to supervise in Chicago, since there was no singing or live music.”
13
Another point Lavin failed to acknowledge was the relatively short period of time that the two men were given to move the show from rehearsal and into performance—essentially three weeks. Casting wasn’t completed until the end of November, and performances began on December 8.

Following the critical and popular failures of
Peg
and
Shecago
, Coleman, curiously, turned his attention to another show of his that had fared badly. In early 1984 he, writer Russell Baker, and lyricist Barbara Fried were all taking a second look at
Home Again
, their musical that closed on its way to Broadway in 1979. They were not, however, trying to figure out a way to revive the prospects of the show. Instead, they were writing a new musical, using their experiences from the
Home Again
tryout period to create something new.