You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (42 page)

The show also featured a pair of specialty acts from beyond the realm of Broadway, including a whimsically named dog act, “The Mad Cap Mutts.” And though Carradine learned and performed some rope tricks, Vince Bruce, who had been touring Europe since he was a child, was hired to offer a dazzling series of feats with a rope.

And there was one other central performer, although he was unseen. Screen icon Gregory Peck was hired to provide the voice of Florenz Ziegfeld, the man who would steer the musical—and thereby the arc of Rogers’s life—to suit his own objectives as showman and artist.

The conceit of having Ziegfeld shape a seemingly amorphous evening from his office high above the theater gave book writer Stone the ability to have the details of Rogers’s life unfold in a nonlinear manner, which countered one of his concerns about doing any sort of biography onstage. Ziegfeld’s desire to have each segment be one of his signature production numbers also meant that Tune could give free rein to his inventiveness for stage pictures and choreography.

A quintessential moment in which audiences would see the men’s sensibilities fused came early in the show: Just as a nineteen-year-old Will was about to head off to South America to begin his life as a cowboy, Ziegfeld interrupted the performance, announcing it was time for the romantic story line to be set in motion. When he learned of how Will and Betty met—at a post office in Ooologah, Oklahoma—he would have none of it. Such a place was far too ordinary for one of his shows. In short order, he decided that a more romantic and impressive locale would be the surface of the moon, and, thus Hoty, after arriving nestled in the arc of a crescent moon, delivered her first big ballad, “My Big Mistake,” amid a sea of midnight blue.

Stone’s conceit for the show also meant that Coleman had the latitude to create a broad spectrum of songs that would fit into the various archetypes of
Follies
performers. For Latessa this meant a ditty reminiscent of the broad comedy performed by the likes of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Hoty got a couple of torch songs, and there were a pair of gentle country songs for Carradine. Coleman also wrote big production numbers that sounded like they might have been composed during the first decades of the twentieth century; but they were not mere pastiche, which, as Coleman remarked once, “is for kids.”
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Tune described Coleman’s contribution: “There weren’t a lot of dramatic events in Will Rogers’s life, so we really depended on Cy to give us the contrasts of scenes and numbers. And he did.”
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But even though the show’s concept proved freeing for the writers, it placed incredible demands on Tune. “I didn’t want to do a pastiche and I didn’t want to do a period piece. I wanted it to be more vibrant than that,” he told John Harris for a feature that ran in the May 13–19, 1991 issue of
Theater Week
. Tune described the show’s mixture of production numbers, sketches, monologues, and vaudeville acts and added: “We’ve never used all of these things and fused them into telling about one man’s life on this earth. We’re really making it up as we go along, with nothing to fall back on. The rules that I’ve built up in my little warehouse of ammunition—information—on building a book show somehow did not apply.” In 2013 Tune looked back on assembling this show, which was meant to appear as if it were being conceptualized on the spot, and said, “We had to keep effervescing it, because there wasn’t a lot to hold on to.”
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As a result, the musical was in a state of flux until just before the critics arrived to review it at the end of April; indeed, the song list in the opening-night program did not match what theatergoers saw onstage. Among the songs not listed in the program was one of Carradine’s biggest numbers, the ecologically minded “Look Around.”

Carradine recalled the last-minute addition: “They needed a song for me that would address the idea of humankind’s relationship with nature and the subject of ecology. Will Rogers was quite dedicated to the preservation of our environment, and, having grown up on a ranch in Oklahoma, he was always very in tune with nature, the land, and the rhythms of nature.”
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The day after the creators decided to include a number like this, Coleman, Comden, and Green called Carradine, Tune, and Hoty into a small space that they were using as a workroom at the Palace Theatre. Hoty said that it actually was “in a closet—it’s where they sell merchandise now—into which an upright piano had been shoved.” She continued, “And there’s Betty and Adolph and they call out ‘Keith, Keith, come here.’ And they played the ecology song. Betty sang it, and I started to cry. And I said to Keith, ‘There’s your Tony.’”
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Carradine remembered being stunned that it appeared so easy for Coleman to write “a song for an actor to sit down and play on the guitar. That seemed to be out of his bailiwick, and yet what he came up with was something that was so playable. It was like perfectly designed for me to sit and do. What he knew was my strong suit, something with which I was very comfortable. And the song that he gave me to play, it’s still something that I incorporate into my repertoire if I’m playing a gig somewhere.”
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What Carradine didn’t know was that Coleman had raided his trunk for the song. It was a melody he had started working on with Comden and Green for the
Magic Me
benefit about ten years before. As with anything that Coleman revisited, it had new flourishes and soon had a few more. According to Carradine, “I said to him after I had learned to play it, ‘Cy, this is so beautiful; I just wish there was more.’ He looked at me with this kind of twinkle in his eye, and he said, ‘Really? You’d like more?’ And I said, ‘Yeah! It just feels as though it’s two-thirds of the song that it could be. I would really love to have a full-on song.’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ And he came back later that afternoon with what he referred to: ‘Here. I’ve written an extension.’ That was the word he used. Here’s the ‘extension.’”
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Other musical additions and embellishments that Coleman provided as the show rehearsed and previewed did not meet with similar levels of success. Hoty remembered one number Coleman had written that helped propel Will and Betty through their early years of marriage and the births of their children. “One day Cy wrote this vaudeville ditty for me. And while I was singing, I was supposed to catch the babies. There were four kids, and each baby was supposed to come at me from a different place. Well, I had trouble catching the babies, which kind of surprised me each time.” The number lasted only a day or two, and, Hoty insisted, “It wasn’t the music.”
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Rather, it was the ungainliness of having to field the prop children that were flying onto the stage.

While Hoty admitted that she didn’t mind losing the number, she regretted the decision to cut a “beautiful verse” that Coleman wrote for “My Big Mistake.” “I asked him, ‘Did I not do it well enough? Is there something I can do?,’ and Cy said, ‘It doesn’t match. It tips the song. We need something happy. It’s too much of the same thing.’” When Hoty asked if he’d save the melody, she says his response was, “Yeah, I’ll put it in my trunk for you, Dee.”
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Beyond the new music, Coleman was also helping Tune shape the show through refinements to what had already been written. Originally the first act closed with two solos—Hoty delivered “Once in a While,” and Carradine performed “Without You,” the countermelody to Hoty’s number. The two pieces converged, but as Tune said, “It was too late in the first act to have the whole song sung, then the whole counterpoint sung, and then put the two together. It was just too long, and I didn’t know how to solve it because I loved it. But Cy figured it out. How to have both of them, where you didn’t know we had chopped them. He made it happen. He always had a save. He saved me over and over.”
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At times, though, it was the other way around. Just as Coleman was delivering “Look Around,” Tune was attempting to tighten the show’s opening number, which featured Carradine arriving on a rope from the flies after the company performed the production number “Will-a-Mania.” After stepping onto the stage, he would begin his opening monologue. Tune recalled telling the songwriters, “I would like for him to start singing ‘Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like’ and then let the music go under and have Keith start talking to the audience.”
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Tune’s idea was greeted with raised eyebrows, and he knew why: “That song was the finale of the show. The whole show led to him deciding that he never met a man he didn’t like, and then visiting his whole life before he went up to heaven, and they were shocked about my idea.”
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The director-choreographer strenuously pushed his collaborators and finally likened the tune to a theme song, such as Bob Hope’s “Thanks for the Memory.” “Then they got it, and it was just great. . . . It made the ‘us’ and ‘them’ evaporate, and we were just in a big room together. And it was a ‘Follies’ and not a theater piece. I think that was probably the best thing I did in the show.”
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And though Coleman’s facility with a melody was instrumental in the show’s evolution, some of his work habits, which were by now deeply ingrained, made things difficult, particularly for music director and conductor Eric Stern, whom the composer had specifically invited to work on the show, from its workshop period forward.

Stern came to
Will Rogers
with considerable experience. He was a protégé of Jule Styne’s for about twelve years. In addition, he had served in the capacity of music director for shows ranging from Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz’s
Rags
to Peter Allen’s
Legs Diamond
. Stern also had deep admiration for Coleman, whom he had known casually through theatrical circles and social events where the composer could often be found entertaining at the keyboard: “Amongst the composers that I’ve worked with (and I’ve worked with a lot of them and many of them very capable, gifted musicians), Cy was, hands down, the best pianist of any of them. Always was.”
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As for the invitation to work on
Will Rogers
, Stern said, “I was so excited to do a Cy Coleman score.” He also understood that it was different from the other Coleman show that was already on Broadway. “The kind of material that
The Will Rogers Follies
is, by its very concept, is not
City of Angels
. It is very pageant-oriented.” As a result, Stern came to realize that “Cy was very—the word’s not ‘defensive’—protective of the score of
The Will Rogers Follies
, I think because he sensed its delicacy. It doesn’t hit one over the head. It doesn’t dazzle. It’s a difficult style to excel in, and I think that he realized that he was walking a tightrope, and as a result he was very difficult in rehearsal.”
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As an example, Stern pointed to the way in which Coleman developed some of the vocal arrangements. Rather than arriving with different parts notated, he would work with individual performers, creating them on the fly, in much the same way he might have quickly sketched out an arrangement with his jazz trio back in the 1950s. “He would get the four cowboys together in a group for like the top of act two or even a vocal background, and he would sit there and he would say, ‘You sing that’ and ‘You sing that,’ and it was all on his feet and he was never writing anything down. I was constantly scribbling with a pencil trying to keep up. . . . He’d be finished with the ‘arrangement’ at the end of the day, but unless someone went home and actually organized it and sewed the sections together and made sense of what he had done, there was no arrangement.”
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Furthermore, Stern witnessed the kind of disaster that could happen given Coleman’s disinclination to write music down and his predilection for improvisation as he worked. One afternoon, Stern said, the creative team gathered in Coleman’s offices and “Cy sat down at the piano, and he and Tommy were talking about how to introduce the element of this Indian princess into the opening number of ‘Will-a-Mania.’ And Cy said, ‘What about something like this?’ And he sat down at the piano, and without any warning he improvised this incredibly silky, gorgeous, Debussy-meets-the-Wild-West [number], six or seven minutes of absolutely sublime, gorgeous music. And all of our jaws hit the floor.”
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After Coleman finished, Stern recalled, “he whipped around and said, ‘Does anybody have a tape recorder, because I’m not going to remember that.’ And no one had known he was going to do it, and no one had turned on a tape recorder. No one caught it. And what he eventually wrote down on paper (or had written down) was a pale version of what he had improvised that day. I still wish to God that cell phones or smartphones had been invented then, just click the record button, because it was astounding. But what ended up in the show was pedestrian.”
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Stern nevertheless found much to admire in Coleman’s work and his attention to detail: “The elements of the steel pedal guitar and the harmonica, all of those elements in
The
Will Rogers Follies
were at Cy’s insistence. And they were wonderful flavors and he was right to insist on them. It really made the show worthwhile.”
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Beyond the issues relating to content, there was one other hurdle for the creators: the title, which five months before opening was still up in the air. Originally announced as
Ziegfeld Presents Will Rogers
, the musical became known as
Ziegfeld Presents the Will Rogers Follies
in early 1991; then, a few months later, it was officially rechristened
The Will Rogers Follies
.

As Tune recalled, “Peter’s original title just sounded so dry to me. I wanted to call it
At the Will Rogers Follies
, because I wanted it to be higher up in the ABCs [the theater listings in the
New York Times
that alphabetize based on the first letter of a show’s title]. I also liked it because it gave the title movement. And then Betty said, in that dry way of hers, ‘Why not
During the Will Rogers Follies
?’ I laughed so hard I gave it up. Adolph wanted to call it
Will-a-Mania
, and I just thought he was pushing his song title, but that wouldn’t have been a bad title for that show at all.”
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