You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (43 page)

Finally the show that had begun life in the mid-1980s opened on May 1, 1991. When the reviews started coming in, the reaction was decidedly mixed. In the
New York Times
, Frank Rich called it “the most disjointed musical of this or any other season,” adding, “What the inspirational Rogers story and the blissfully campy Tune numbers are doing on the same stage is hard to explain and harder to justify, for they fight each other all evening.” Jan Stuart in
Newsday
opined, “At its best, the fractured chronology generates some good-natured chuckles. At its worst, it feels stillborn.”

Better notices could be found, particularly in the
New York Post
, where Clive Barnes stated simply and unequivocally, “It works,” going so far as to say that Coleman had written “his best Broadway music in years. This is top-drawer Coleman with no apologies.” Similarly, Howard Kissel in the
Daily News
concluded his review with “Gorgeous to look at, winningly performed, ‘Will Rogers’ is the homegrown musical Broadway has been awaiting a long, long time.”

A couple of weeks after opening, Jack Kroll appeared to be giving the show another out-and-out rave when he said, “[The creators] have chosen a format so retro it’s positively daring. They call it ‘A Life in Revue,’ which works out to be a kind of ‘This Is Your Life’ with songs and showgirls. These Broadway veterans, gambling that audiences are starved for simplicity, sweetness and sex, have supplied all that.” But then, Kroll added, “It’s not enough.”

Theatergoers, however, were satisfied.
Will Rogers
settled into a run that would last for over two years.

A slew of Tony Award nominations did not hurt the musical, which picked up eleven, including best musical and one for Coleman, Comden, and Green for the score. The show won in both of these categories, making Coleman the only composer to win back-to-back Tony Awards for best score. Tune picked up a pair of prizes for his direction and choreography, and designers Willa Kim (costumes) and Jules Fisher (lighting) were also winners that year. Scenic designer Tony Walton failed to win for his sumptuous settings, including a grand staircase that spanned the stage and changed colors, syncing with Coleman’s music and Tune’s dances, but he didn’t lose to John Napier, who put a helicopter onstage for
Miss Saigon
. Instead, the prize went to Heidi Landesman for her fanciful settings for the musical version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s tale,
The Secret Garden
.

When the cast recording came out, once again from Columbia Records, it bore the hallmarks of Coleman’s fastidiousness as a producer, garnering new accolades for his work with Comden and Green. David Patrick Stearns wrote in
USA Today
, “It’s some of the most effervescent fluff you’ll ever hear,” adding, “Most of this breezy score by Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green has an addictive combination of wit and uncloying cheerfulness.”
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The review from Gerald Nachman in the
San Francisco Chronicle
on December 5 had a similar glow: “It’s clear to me that Cy Coleman has never written so many effortlessly catchy tunes, and while they’re not the urbane Coleman of ‘City of Angels,’ they’re not meant to be.” He concluded by paraphrasing Rogers, saying, “I never met a song here I didn’t like.”

At Grammy Awards time in early 1992, the voters felt the same way. Coleman picked up an award for the cast album, recognized as both the composer and the disc’s producer.

As
The Will Rogers Follies
continued on Broadway, celebrity casting helped to keep it in the public eye, starting with country singer Mac Davis, Carradine’s replacement when he left to perform the show in Los Angeles. It was an ironic turn of events for producer Cossette. Davis had turned down the role when Cossette offered it to him in the show’s earliest days. After Davis, the Broadway company boasted another country singing star, Larry Gatlin.

Big names weren’t limited to the title role; they were also recruited to play the bombshell beauty Ziegfeld’s Favorite. The first person to step into the role was Marla Maples, who was making headlines as Donald Trump’s girlfriend and would eventually become his wife.

Casting the high-profile Maples was not, in Cossette’s mind, merely a stunt. He believed that she had the talent necessary for the part. But he knew that casting Maples would be perceived as a publicity gimmick by the creators, so to ensure that she was well prepared for her audition for them, he had her work privately with both the show’s assistant director and assistant choreographer.

Cossette remembered what followed after Maples, with six weeks of training, auditioned: “Cy Coleman was the first to speak. He said, ‘Marla, would you be willing to work with me on the music for a couple of weeks and then come back and audition again?’”
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She agreed, and after working with Coleman, Maples got the part. Another high-profile performer, actress-singer Susan Anton, eventually followed in the role.

The Will Rogers Follies
continued at the Palace until just after Labor Day in 1993, playing 981 performances and becoming the longest-running show Coleman ever had on the Main Stem. The production’s success led to the sixty-two-year-old assuming the role of Broadway elder statesman, but this didn’t mean he was content to simply do what was expected of him . . . professionally or personally.

29.
“If My Friends Could See Me Now”

The Tony and Grammy awards for
The Will Rogers Follies
put Coleman in a unique position: He became an artist who had been recognized for his music for five decades running, with nominations for the Tony dating back to 1962’s
Little Me
and for the Grammy to 1958, when “Witchcraft” was nominated for both “Record of the Year” and “Song of the Year.”

In 1992 Coleman’s list of prizes became longer: he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, housed at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre (formerly the Uris, where
Seesaw
premiered). Among Coleman’s fellow inductees were composer Harold Rome, acting teacher extraordinaire Stella Adler, and song-and-dance legend Gene Kelly. A similar honor came four years later from the Songwriters Hall of Fame (where Coleman was a 1980 inductee), which presented him with the Johnny Mercer Award in recognition of his body of work.

It was the beginning of a series of tributes and concerts that would continue through the next decade. Some would be small, private affairs, such as his induction into the famed Friars Club in 1996, while others, like a gala concert at Royal Albert Hall in London 1999 and a concert with Skitch Henderson at Carnegie Hall in 2002, were starry public events.

But Coleman wasn’t simply basking in the spotlight. He was also using this time to toast the successes of his peers. For the first half of the 1990s Coleman took part in festivities honoring collaborators like Comden and Green and interpreters of his songs like Rosemary Clooney. He was among the artists who celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the first half of 1996, where, rather than performing his own hits, he joined with other pianists such as Peter Nero, Alicia Witt, and Christina Zacharias for renditions of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Less than a month later, Coleman was back in the limelight at the Kennedy Center when he was its guest of honor during a one-night-only salute to Broadway, and his presence in the nation’s capital wasn’t going unnoticed. At the end of the year, when the arts journalists for the
Washington Post
drew up a short list of artists who they believed should be recognized with the annual Kennedy Center Honor, Coleman’s name featured prominently.

Another retrospective—of sorts—on Coleman’s career came when he created a gentle cartoon of his own biography, a brief musical that was part of a twentieth-anniversary special for PBS’s
Great Performances
, a program comprised short films that the network commissioned from artists ranging from playwright Wendy Wasserstein to photographer Annie Leibovitz. In each, the artists created work that, as the show’s narrator, Meryl Streep, explained, would reveal something “about their lives in art that show us the art in life.” Coleman’s contribution was
A Simple Melody
, which puts an intriguing spin on his life story as it follows Arnold, a piano prodigy during his preschool days, through adulthood. Along the way Arnold earns plaudits for his accomplishments first as a pianist and later as a composer.

The parallels—and differences—between Coleman’s own life and Arnold’s are simultaneously significant and amusing. Initially, the boy, unlike Coleman, has the full support of his parents, who start him on piano lessons. The family’s finances fail while Arnold is in college, so he has to support himself. Once the movie starts to follow him on his path through a series of weddings, where he becomes the star of a small combo, Coleman (as well as screenwriter Alan Zweibel) has some fun with his earliest days as a performer, when he would hop between “classy affairs that require tux,” as Coleman wrote in his scrapbook.

By the movie’s end, Arnold, like Coleman, becomes a celebrity, not because of a wide body of work but because of the one “simple melody” that he’s reimagined in a variety of ways. Coleman’s also on hand in the film, playing the trombone and winking at Arnold during the final scene at the character’s luxe mansion.

Coleman didn’t just write the music for
A Simple Melody
; he also arranged and orchestrated it. As the movie’s main tune goes through a seemingly endless array of variations—including different incarnations for the Jewish, Italian, and Greek weddings that Arnold plays, as well as a huge marching-band sequence straight out of
The Music Man
—Coleman’s facility with diverse styles is astonishing.

A Simple Melody
was directed and choreographed by Pat Birch, whose line of credits stretched back to the late 1950s, when she had appeared as a dancer in musicals like
Goldilocks
and a
Brigadoon
revival. In the early 1970s she began creating dances for shows like
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
and
Grease
and then went on to work with Harold Prince on such musicals as
A Little Night Music
, the 1974 revisal of
Candide
, and
Pacific Overtures
. Her credits also included film and television, notably the movie version of
Grease
and six seasons on NBC’s
Saturday Night Live
.

Coleman and Birch first worked together when she did the musical staging for
Welcome to the Club
and became fast friends. She was the one who was initially approached by PBS about creating something for the special, and when she broached the idea of working together to Coleman, he agreed. After all, as she recalled, “He was always up for fun.” Then, Birch said, “We sort of cooked it up.”
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Screenwriter Zweibel, who, like Birch, had a long history with
Saturday Night Live
and had gotten to know her there, came in after she and Coleman had developed the scenario for the movie. As he recalled, “They needed a writer, but my contribution to it was minimal. They had the idea. And I loved the idea. I loved the idea of you taking one little, simple melody that would have seven notes or whatever it was and putting it in all of these different ways. . . . [I was] honored to be there, happy to help. I did whatever I could to put in beats of different visuals of the different kinds of ways that this simple melody could be played.”
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Their work, along with that of Matthew Broderick, who played the adult incarnation of Arnold, and Jane Krakowski, who played Arnold’s wife at the end of the film, prompted Associated Press reviewer Frazier Moore to extol the “frothy mini-musical.”

Beyond having fun in this filmic manner, Coleman also found a way to express himself as a performer and have a good time by working with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut. Paul Newman and A. E. Hotchner founded this organization for seriously ill young people and their families as a place where healing could take place on multiple levels each summer.

Each year, Coleman would take part in the organization’s annual fund-raising events—sometimes as an actor, in shows like the one offered in 1994, “Snowy,” a modernized and irreverent version of the
Snow White
fairy tale directed by Birch. Coleman, looked anything but his dapper celebrity self when he played one of the seven dwarfs, “Doc,” with a cast that also featured Melanie Griffith and Ann Reinking, who shared the role of the Wicked Queen. Among the other dwarfs were Newman, Hotchner, James Naughton, Tony Randall, and Gene Shalit.

Coleman recruited other friends and colleagues to take part in special events for the camp, including Sally Mayes, who fondly remembered her time with Coleman and his coterie in a nontheatrical environment: “They were lovely. They’re all pals, and they all hang out and they all drink scotch. . . . It was very boys club. You could just feel that. . . . It felt like
Mad Men
.”
3

Coleman’s work with ASCAP also expanded during this time. In 1990 he went to Washington, D.C., to take part in the bicentennial celebration of U.S. Copyright and Patent Laws. His presence was both understandable and natural. After all, he had lobbied for the extension and expansion of copyright legislation in the late 1960s. He was also there to pay tribute to Peggy Lee, who was receiving the organization’s Pied Piper Award in recognition of her work as both a singer and a songwriter. At Coleman’s side for this event were Sammy Cahn, the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Marilyn and Alan Bergman, with whom Coleman would be working much more closely over the course of the coming decade. His relationship with Marilyn Bergman, individually, grew deeper in 1994, when ASCAP went through a series of leadership changes after Morton Gould stepped down as the organization’s president.

Bergman was elected to succeed him, leaving her post as writer vice president vacant. Coleman was chosen to succeed her, and with the new title came new responsibilities, both behind the scenes and in public. Just after assuming the title, he reflected on the reasons for devoting time to the organization: “It’s a cause I believe in and spend a lot of time on, because composers deserve to get paid for their copyrighted work. People think they’re having such a good time while listening to your music, they can’t believe they need to pay for it.”
4

Marilyn Bergman, while talking about her work for ASCAP with Coleman, similarly said, “It’s like the civil liberties union of songwriters and composers. Rights are rights, and when they’re threatened hackles get raised, and just as Cy had good politics, he understood that some of this—forget the money—was just a question of that’s just downright wrong. It’s just thievery and disrespectful.”
5

Beyond the new title at ASCAP and the heightened recognition he was receiving, there was one other new facet to Coleman’s life. There was a new woman at his side: Shelby Brown, whom he met on New Year’s Eve 1992.

Coleman and Brown met when he visited an old friend, visual artist Ron Mallory, in his home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. By this time Mallory and Coleman had been friends for some thirty years. The men met in 1962, when Mallory was working as a model on a shoot in St. Thomas. One day, Mallory recalled, some friends said, “We have to go pick up this composer. Do you want to join us?”
6

During their first few days together, the men discovered that they “got along beautifully”; furthermore, they realized that they were neighbors in Manhattan. “I lived on East Sixty-Eighth Street, and Cy lived on East 69th Street,” Mallory remembered.
7

Their acquaintance deepened and continued over the following decades, and the two men frequently traveled together: “Cy always invited me places.” Mallory recalled a summer in the late 1960s when they shared a house in Monte Carlo. Coleman had inadvertently invited two women to visit at the same time: “So Cy comes into my room one day. He says, ‘You’ve got to do me a favor.’ And I said, ‘What’s up?’ He said, ‘I forgot I invited this other girl, and she’s coming tomorrow. So can you pretend you’re with the other girl? So she won’t be angry?’ I remember looking at Cy and saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’”
8

A similar situation unfolded in 1992. Coleman had traveled to Mexico with a girlfriend, and one night he invited Mallory to join them for dinner. Mallory brought along Brown as his guest for the evening, and as he remembered: “Shelby started talking to Cy, and I guess they fell madly in love. Cy dropped the woman he was with. And then Shelby and Cy, that’s the whole story.”
9

She didn’t recall it happening that quickly, but Coleman made an impression that evening. Sometime in 1992 Brown, who was in Mexico to work on a book, found herself traveling to Manhattan. While she was there she decided to call Coleman, not knowing if he would remember her. He did and invited her to lunch. The meal went well, and a few days later, while out again, he kissed her for the first time, and she said, “What took you so long?”
10

Brown, who later admitted, “I don’t like dating. Never have. Never will,” moved in with Coleman not long after. “It was like being with the king of New York. I was living in Mexico in this crappy little house with my sister, and I moved to New York City. And it’s like I’m in love with this guy, but from another planet. Betty and Adolph—I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know musical theater. I’d been to a couple of shows in my life. It’s not what they did, but who they were. I was in the room with the smartest, funniest, most amazing human beings I’d ever met. I was, like, blown away.”
11

Brown adapted to Coleman’s world. “I stopped listening to my music, because he didn’t care for it. Basically, he just listened to classical. He taught me a lot.” As an example, she pointed to how, during a vacation in Spain, “we sat on the beach and he took me through every movement of [Beethoven’s] first four symphonies.”
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There were also differences in lifestyle. “I am a homebody; I like to be home all the time. Cy was used to being out all the time.” This also meant, not too surprisingly, that the couple had some varying ideas about food. “When I met Cy, I knew how to cook the way I learned from my mom, sort of Okie and real down-home stuff: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, etc. . . . He did not care for my food. He liked restaurant food. That’s what he was used to, restaurant food. So I had to learn to cook Cy style, and that was challenging and great. I really became more of a cook.”
13

Brown’s abilities in the kitchen proved to be a boon to him after a health scare in December 1995. “We were in Barbados with Hotch at Christmas. And Cy had a tiny heart attack. It was fine, but they said ‘You have to change your diet.’ And he said, ‘Okay, I can do that.’ And that’s when I became [a] health cook. And he really started liking my food. He lost a ton of weight and got healthier.”
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Less than two years later, on October 1, 1997, the couple married. “[They] hit upon the idea of marrying next to Niagara Falls, a plan they loved because it reminded them of old movies and musicals.”
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