You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (4 page)

Beyond its serving as Coleman’s introduction to Broadway,
If the Shoe Fits
offers an interesting chicken-and-egg conundrum, because it represents the first moment he was linked with the singer Adrienne, who played Widow Willow. When Coleman talked about the beginnings of his career in adulthood, the singer’s name came up frequently, as did that of her husband, Michael Myerberg, a daring producer of shows ranging from Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of Our Teeth
to Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. However, Coleman never mentioned them in the context of the failed musical. Instead, he would recall how he had served as her accompanist to make some money after school.

What’s unclear is whether his relationship with the singer had begun before
If the Shoe Fits
, which would explain how he got the job, or if it was a friendship that had started on the show and then continued. But regardless of the order of events, Coleman always mentioned the role that Adrienne and Myerberg played in the next step in his career. When they would meet to rehearse, Coleman told his old friend Skitch Henderson on the radio show
The Music Makers
, “I would play some of my original compositions for her, and she sent me to Jack Robbins, who was a very feisty music publisher at the time.”

This was no small introduction. Robbins was the head of J. J. Robbins & Sons, one of the most influential and successful companies in the industry. In 1946
Billboard
described J. J. Robbins and Warners’ Music Publishers’ Holding Corporation as “two of the top publishing groups in the music business.”
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At the time Robbins held the publishing rights to Victor Herbert’s extensive catalog of operettas and popular songs from the early twentieth century. It also had the rights to tunes from Broadway shows of the day, including
The Day Before Spring
, an early effort by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who would go on to write the landmark hit
My Fair Lady
, and
Song of Norway
, which marked the Broadway debuts of Robert Wright and George Forrest, who would later create the musical
Kismet
.

Seymour wasn’t daunted by his opportunity with Robbins. He presented himself to the older man, played for him, and described his desire to compose. Robbins immediately saw in the young man a midcentury incarnation of George Gershwin and asked him to write a series of preludes in the style of that composer.

But before the writing commenced, Robbins, according to Coleman, “decided that he had to give me a more commercial-sounding name. He said: ‘We’re going to change Seymour Kaufman to Cy Coleman.’ Nobody wanted the name Seymour—it was so nebbishy—so I was glad to change that to Cy, and he said the change of last name wasn’t too extreme: ‘It’s close, and it’s not like you’re trying to escape [seeming] Jewish.’”
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The decision provoked a pair of amusing incidents. The first occurred immediately after he’d chosen to adopt the new name. When he told his mother about his decision, she replied simply, “You want to change your name, be my guest. Do whatever makes you happy, Seymour.”
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Coleman and his family would also recount an event that came later when Ida was introducing her family to guests. She pointed at her children and introduced Adolph, Sam, Sylvia, and Yetta by name before indicating her youngest and saying, “And this is Cy Coleman.”

Irrespective of his mother’s reaction, the newly minted Cy Coleman went to work on what Robbins ultimately published as
New York Sketches
, a trio of pieces called “Morning,” “Noon,” and “Night.” Listening to the sole recording of the triptych on the CD
Classical Broadway
—made nearly sixty years after they were written—reveals that Coleman took quite seriously the notion that he was following in Gershwin’s footsteps. In fact, reviewer Steve Schwartz wrote: “It’s more Gershwinesque than Gershwin—less focused than the real thing,” but added, “Coleman’s little suite has its attractions. The piano writing is assured and varied. He makes use of the entire keyboard.”
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Seymour, as he was still known by school administrators, graduated from the High School of Music and Art less than a month after
If the Shoe Fits
folded, and he was at Robbins’s office a few months after getting his diploma. For a young man who had not yet reached eighteen, he already had two impressive credits on his résumé, but within the span of just two years (and well before he would hit his twentieth birthday), Cy Coleman’s curriculum vitae would become quite a bit longer.

3.
“Hey, Look Me Over”

After he graduated from the High School of Music and Art in early 1947, Coleman continued for a while with studies and performances at the New York College of Music, but there came a point when he needed to move on from that institution as well. He learned of the school’s decision when he was summoned to the dean’s office, where he was told that the administration felt that they had done all they could for him and that it was time for him to study with a master teacher who would help him refine his work. As Coleman recalled, the dean said that they were “sending me to the best.”
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The best turned out to be Adele Marcus, who since the 1920s had been making a name for herself as both a performer and an educator. At the time Coleman went to her, she was gaining particular acclaim for her influence on another pianist, a man who would become one of Coleman’s lifelong friends—Byron Janis.

Coleman admitted to having been, during their first meeting, “a little nervous, but cocky, as you can only be when you are eighteen” and to thinking that he would dazzle his prospective mentor with his performance of the Bach
Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue
. Her response to his performance was, “I am still on the first page,”
2
and Coleman took this to mean that she was somehow jealous of his abilities.

As the meeting progressed, he played several other pieces before she asked him to do a few exercises, culminating with an A major scale in double thirds, which he, by his own description, performed “clumsily.” She then took to the piano herself, and Coleman recalled how she “effortlessly glided through the A major thirds. It was as smooth as a fine piece of silk gently falling off of a table.”
3

The audition ended cordially but coldly, and the next day Coleman complained to the school that he had been humiliated by Marcus, convinced that she must have used some sort of trick fingering to maneuver through the exercise that he had fumbled. For weeks afterward, though, he couldn’t let her demonstration go, and he finally called her to inquire about a second meeting. She eventually acquiesced after Coleman offered a “feeble apology” and agreed to her terms for the way in which his studies would proceed. Coleman later described his work with her over the following years as being among “the best musical experiences of my life.”
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Besides continuing his education, Coleman needed to cobble together a living, and in this his talents and tenacity served him well. His work as an accompanist continued to provide some income, and he also played private functions around New York. He also worked for his brothers Adolph and Sam, who had followed in their father’s footsteps after their tours of duty in World War II by opening Kaufman Brothers, a furniture company in the Bronx.

For a teenager with Coleman’s talent and ambitious drive, having to piece together an existence like this must have made it seem as if a genuine breakthrough might never come, but in the middle of 1948, just after he turned nineteen, his networking, charm, and skills as a pianist combined to give his career arc a decisive upswing.

It all started on July 4, 1948, when Leonard Sillman, who had begun a radio program similar to his
New Faces
revues, put the spotlight on Coleman during a national broadcast. Sillman introduced his guest with lavish praise: “We want you to meet our guest new face of the week—the brilliant young pianist Cy Coleman.” Patter from Sillman’s cohosts on the program, including June Carroll, followed, and then Coleman played “his own version of ‘Yankee Doodle.’” For a man born on Flag Day, receiving such attention on the national holiday seems a more than fitting choice. Sadly, there are no recordings of the program showing how the young Coleman embellished or expanded upon the familiar tune.

A few months later Coleman moved from this national gig to his first important one in New York’s club scene, an engagement that he got through his unflagging tenacity. Realizing that he needed representation, he went one day to the offices of Leonard Green, who had opened a small agency on Forty-second Street in 1946 and rapidly established himself as an important force in booking artists in clubs, both in New York and also around the country.

Green handled two sorts of musicians. There were Latin bands, which, just after the war, were among the hottest music attractions in the United States. Among Green’s clients were the Lecuona Boys, José Curbelo, and Freddie de Alonso. Green had also taken on a handful of non-Latin groups, such as the Irving Fields Trio and the Claude Hopkins Quartet, as well as pianist Joe Harnell (who would go on to serve as singing legend Peggy Lee’s pianist for many years).

According to Green, Coleman simply arrived at his office one day—not unusual for young performers at the time. Green agreed to see him, and when he heard the young man play, he realized that “Cy was, without a doubt, one of the best I ever heard. He was a sensational musician.”
5

The agent believed in Coleman so strongly from the get-go that he got in touch with an old friend, Billy Reed, to see about getting Coleman a job. Reed was a performer who had started in burlesque. He had been a part of the team of Gordon, Reed, and King, which played the Palace during its vaudeville heyday, and then gotten a Broadway credit appearing in Cole Porter’s
Fifty Million Frenchmen
. In 1947 Reed opened the Little Club, which boasted as its first headliner a blonde who had just broken off from Les Brown’s band: Doris Day.

In fact, Green attended Day’s debut, having booked the La Playa Quartet (which later morphed into the renowned La Playa Sextet) into the venue. He remembered the evening and how Reed came over and whispered to him and Bert Lahr (a man most memorably known as the Cowardly Lion in the film
The Wizard of Oz
), “Wait until you hear this girl.”
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Day’s reception in a review in
Variety
on March 5, 1947 was probably not as glowing as Reed might have hoped. The paper’s critic praised the singer only modestly but was nonetheless enthusiastic about the potential of the venue: “It has all of the earmarks of becoming a potential hangout because of the generally congenial auspices and the attractive environment. It’s one of those long rooms with enough bar space up front for the dropper-inners, and the main interior possesses a tiny dance floor.”

After its opening, the Little Club went through some changes, and at one point Reed scaled back the entertainment to a lone piano player. But by mid-1948 the place was hitting its stride, prompting the
New Yorker
to describe it amusingly as “a halfway house to Broadway and Park Avenue” and admiringly as “a throwback to the bustling twenties.”
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Reed agreed to take on Green’s client, and Coleman made his debut at the Little Club in September 1948.

Coleman’s stint there only lasted two weeks, because, as he remembered, “I was a brash kid and Billy Reed didn’t like it. He said I was playing too much and too loud. I think I was playing every note. Everything was fast, and there was a lot of technique. I wanted to show off. I played a few ballads in between, but we had a lot of arguments, and I left after two weeks in a huff.”
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Coleman was followed by a much more established name at the time: Sonny Kendis, who had been part of New York’s entertainment scene for a while and in the early 1940s had been featured with his group on an album that paid tribute to the legendary nightspot the Stork Club. Just a year after his gig following Coleman at the Little Club, Kendis hit the television airwaves with a CBS music program bearing his name. Coleman would need to wait a bit longer than Kendis for a shot at television, but there was little question that as 1948 drew to a close he was making a name for himself as an entertainer and, thanks to Green’s representation, establishing a foothold in the Big Apple.

Coleman’s most continuous work as a performer in New York’s niteries began just three months after his engagement at the Little Club. By the beginning of 1949 he had a gig at the Hotel Park Sheraton’s Mermaid Room, serving as one of three pianists in a venue that provided continuous music throughout the evening for its patrons. (Another was Billy Barnes, who became the creator of a series of popular revues and a writer of special material for television’s
The Carol Burnett Show
and
Laugh-In
.) Years later Coleman would wax nostalgic about his five months at this venue: “It was [a] wonderful room to play, and of course you didn’t get paid much. When you did get paid, you were lucky to get it from them. It was a wonderful place to work, a really good atmosphere. It was intimate and had good lighting. . . . I miss that kind of room in town.”
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Despite his fondness for the Mermaid Room, Coleman left in May 1949. This time it wasn’t because of disagreements with management; rather, he had gotten a featured slot at Vito Pisa’s Le Perroquet on Second Avenue. Pisa, who would ultimately go on to lord over the highly renowned Chez Vito, had opened the club in late 1948 and, given his modest show budget (a mere $400 a week for all of the entertainers), he often had to turn to up-and-comers, like Hugh Shannon, who made some early appearances there and was at one point on a bill alternating with Coleman. In later years Shannon would remember his young colleague as being “very shy.”
10

Coleman’s stint at Le Perroquet garnered him recognition in the trade journal
Variety
as a “New Act,” and in the May 4, 1949 edition of the paper he received his first full review:

Cy Coleman looks like a find for intimeries. A pianist with a classical background, this teenster distinguishes himself with fanciful melodic patterns, individualistic interpretation and a mature styling.

Coleman has a fresh approach which takes him off on non-commercial cadenzas with complicated counterpoint best understood by the Carnegie Hall-pewholders. But fortunately these lapses look well on his keyboard and frequently cause the customers to cease conversation and listen.

In alternating between classics and pops he embraces a variety of styles, but once Coleman determines where he wants to go, it’s most likely he’ll get there.
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Coleman’s playing also attracted two Manhattan tastemakers: Serge Obolensky, president of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and Popsy Whittaker, from the
New Yorker
. Coleman remembered the latter fondly: “[He] was a dear, and it’s a sad loss not to have Popsy around.”
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He also recalled how Whittaker had shown him clippings from the magazine’s “Goings On About Town” listings in which the writer had used such adjectives as “brilliant” and “dazzling” to describe Coleman’s playing.

Coleman was pleased but also brash, as always. He remembered that, after looking at the write-ups, “I said, ‘Does anybody read that small print?’ But it wasn’t really meant to be smart.”
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Whittaker wasn’t fazed by the quip and remained supportive of Coleman’s work, as did the magazine’s music critic, Douglas Watt, in the years to come. As for Obolensky, he opted to book Coleman into the Sherry-Netherland that summer.

This new job meant that Coleman would experience for the first but hardly the last time what it was to juggle two concurrent professional obligations; he already had another project on his schedule for the summer: the production of his first musical,
You Got a Regatta
, which was slated to premiere in August at the Bellport Summer Theatre on Long Island.

The theater was founded in 1947 by Lesley Savage, who, although raised on the Upper East Side, had spent her childhood summers in the small beach community. The theater was a way of returning to her roots while also affording her the ability to continue the acting career she had begun as an adult.

Savage had garnered only one Broadway credit in her career, appearing opposite future film star Fredric March in
The American Way
, but she had worked extensively in touring productions and summer stock. In addition, during the war years she had appeared in USO shows entertaining troops, and though it’s not documented, it seems likely that she and Coleman may have struck up a friendship at one of these events while he was doing his part for the war effort as a teen entertainer.

Bellport Summer Theatre distinguished itself by offering seasons that included some of Broadway’s most recent hits with name talents. In 1949, two years after its founding, the theater was continuing that tradition with
The Vinegar Tree
, by Paul Osborn (who is best known today from revivals of his play
Mornings at Seven
), and Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
, and it was adding premieres to its lineup—not just
Regatta
, but also what was billed as a pre-Broadway tryout of
The Proud Age
, a comedy by Stanley Richards, who would go on to have a notable career as an editor of theater-related anthologies.

For
You Got a Regatta
, Coleman worked with lyricist Lawrence Steiner and Savage herself, who penned the book. The show centered on a young man and woman who find themselves at odds with one another over a sailing race, much as their folks had done when they were young. As the musical unfolds, the boy’s wifeless father and the girl’s widowed mother step in to make sure that the young people don’t make the same mistake of allowing a competition to squash their budding romance.

According to Ruth Allan, who was a member of the show’s ensemble of young people and went on to become executive producer of the Gateway Playhouse, which evolved from the Bellport Summer Theatre, Coleman was present during preproduction. He taught the songs to the company and served as rehearsal pianist, all duties that he could have accomplished before heading to the Sherry-Netherland at night.

When the show did open, Dwight Schoeffler, in his August 18
Patchogue Advance
review, assessed it as “a frothy musical frill . . . which bounces merrily and unconcernedly through two fast acts producing a rather mellow glow on a happy late-summer crowd.” He didn’t feel it necessary to mention Coleman by name, but after describing the show’s story as being “uninteresting,” he did point out that “some pleasant music and rollicking dancing more than compensate for any shortcomings.”