You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (9 page)

Carol Haney, who had wowed audiences with her dancing in
The Pajama Game
on Broadway, was cast. So were blues singer Mae Barnes and Broadway vet Joan Diener, who had won raves for her work as an original star of
Kismet
and would later become forever associated with the role of Aldonza in
Man of La Mancha
, which she took on ten years later.

The producers also convinced Irving Berlin to let them use the song “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” first performed in the
Ziegfeld Follies of 1919
, for just $1.00. Furthermore, they lured Christopher Hewett away from the cast of the just-opened hit
My Fair Lady
to direct the
Follies
sketches, and for its dance numbers the producers hired red-hot choreographer Jack Cole, who in the years just preceding the show had created the dances for
Kismet
on both stage and screen and choreographed the movie version of the musical
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

The show’s company was also studded with an array of future stars, including Larry Kert, who had been in the
Almanac
ensemble; Beatrice Arthur, who would carve a name for herself first on Broadway in shows like
Mame
and later on television in
Maude
and
The Golden Girls
; and Julie Newmar, who left the Cole Porter musical
Silk Stockings
to be in the show and would go on to play Stupefyin’ Jones in
Li’l Abner
on stage and screen, but who may be best remembered for her work as Catwoman on the 1960s
Batman
TV series.

The production was to be lavish. Earl Wilson reported that the show’s total cost would be $400,000 (twice as much as the reported expense for
Almanac
just three years earlier), and to design it they turned to Raoul Pène Du Bois, who had served in the same capacity for John Murray Anderson and garnered uniformly glowing reviews.

Julie Newmar remembered how audiences were stunned by the show’s opulence from the opening moment when “the fountain number was revealed. I remember distinctly when that curtain rose, it went straight up; it didn’t part from side to side. . . . And there I was standing in this tall fountain with almost nothing on, but I was weighed down with beads, and I had this very long piece of chiffon draped around me that went from one side of the stage to another.”
11

When the show opened in April in Boston for the first of its two out-of-town tryouts,
Boston Daily Globe
critic Marjory Adams was quick to praise the show’s visuals, writing in her April 17 review: “It lives up to all expectations of lavishness, glitter, and glamour.” Her praise wasn’t limited to the production’s look; it also extended to the material and the performers. She concluded the piece by remarking that all that was necessary was for the creators to keep “all of the plums in their pudding and throw out the few prunes.”

The trade papers, however, were less generous. The
Variety
review on April 18 reported that the show “failed to impress the anxious-to-enthuse first-night tryout audience.” This critic also took pains to note that some theatergoers had failed to stay through to the final curtain. Cameron Dewar, in the May 5 edition of
Billboard
, described the production as having “[a] legion of unutilized talent, so-so dances, songs and sketches that don’t quite come off.”

The Coleman and McCarthy contribution to the production was a song called “The Lady Is Indisposed.” It was a gentle comic tune delivered in the second act by Barnes, playing a jaded society type, from her extravagant bath while attended by her maid (Newmar) as well as several “Gentlemen of the Bath.” This number, as well as Barnes’s own song “Go Bravely On,” were two that
Variety
singled out as being among the show’s attractions.

The negative critical response did nothing to dissuade theatergoers in Boston, where the revue played to capacity houses. After completing its engagement, the show traveled to its second tryout city, Philadelphia. There it received “unanimous disapproval,”
12
fueling speculation that the show would close on the road. Indeed, this is what happened, and Sam Zolotow’s May 11 theater column in the
New York Times
carried the news that the production would not make it into New York, closing in Philadelphia “a week earlier than expected.”

Although he had contributed the one song (other contributors were Floyd Huddleston, Albert Hague, and Jerry Bock), Coleman would not have been present for the show’s tryout engagements, as he was continuing his stint at the Waldorf, where he and the trio played through October.

From this gig the group moved on to a new venue, one of which Coleman himself was proprietor: the Playroom, located at 130 West Fifty-eighth Street. The spot opened on November 8, and in addition to the trio the bill included pianist Don Abney and bassist Aaron Bell. As Coleman recalled, he became involved with the Playroom when “the guy who ran the Italian restaurant downstairs gave me a deal. [He said,] ‘If you open up in this little club, I’ll give you half of it.’ So I moved up the block from the Composer. Little did I know I was working for cheaper than at the Composer.”
13

Coleman nevertheless did pack the place with a first-rate group of musicians. In addition to himself, he remembered, “I had a lot of people come in there. I had Randy Weston, Don Elliott, Billy Taylor, and Don Shirley.” The bill was enough to prompt the
New Yorker
to call it a “conservatory of futurism” and “the littlest room of them all and devoted mainly to the proposition that the old order is dead.”
14

The clientele at the Playroom ranged from average jazz aficionados to celebrities with an interest in the form. Among the place’s patrons were
Follies
star Bankhead, as well as Steve Allen, Arlene Francis, Jackie Gleason, and Martha Raye, who had all become Coleman fans. Another face in the crowd was Hugh Hefner, who, like Coleman, was exploring what the future might look like, in his case with the magazine
Playboy
, which he had launched in 1953. The publisher’s exposure to Coleman’s work at the Playroom would pay dividends as the 1960s dawned.

As for the music Coleman was playing, Douglas Watt said in his December 8
New Yorker
“Tables for Two” review that Coleman was offering a “brilliant” series of variations on Cole Porter’s songs from
Anything Goes
and a “richly figured interpretation” of DuBose Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” from
Porgy and Bess
. Watt’s review also noted that Coleman had begun singing in addition to playing the piano, meaning that overall he had “developed into a skillful and attractive entertainer.”

It’s possible to get a sense of what Coleman and company’s work at the Playroom might have sounded like by listening to the eponymous LP that SEECO Records released just as the club was opening. The second side of the album recycles tracks from Coleman’s previous
Piano Patterns
LP, but the first showcases how the Cy Coleman Trio was making songs like Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” surprisingly modern, with variations that create conversations with the original melody and then expand on it as well as the song’s central emotional core.

But Coleman wasn’t just the main attraction onstage at the Playroom. He was also the place’s host, and his drummer Ray Mosca described the way Coleman would table-hop between sets: “He had all of these different people he knew, so when we would take a break, he’d go to this corner and then he’d go to the other side. He had this whole entourage.”
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The space and activity seem to have rejuvenated Coleman, because even as he and the trio were performing there they spent several weeks scurrying to the Versailles, over a mile away on East Fiftieth Street, to play backup for singer Dick Haymes. The inclusion of Coleman’s group, which in addition to Mosca at this point also boasted bassist Nabil Totah, helped to give crooner Haymes a new jazz sound.

But even as Coleman was showing this entrepreneurial spirit, he wasn’t losing sight of his desire to compose. During the year he wrote “Alley Cats” to pay farewell to Peacock Alley, and he also began to look for possible lyric-writing partners other than McCarthy.

In an interview with Robert Viagas for the book
The Alchemy of Theatre
, Coleman described McCarthy as being “a very slow worker. He would sweat every ‘the,’ ‘and,’ and ‘but.’ In those days, we didn’t use tape recorders, which meant I had to sit at the piano and play the melody over and over again while he went through the labor pains of writing the lyric. Complicating the procedure was the fact that Joe developed something of a drinking problem and would sometimes become morose and work became more and more difficult.”

One of the first people Coleman hooked up with was Bob Hilliard, who had written the lyrics to Jule Styne’s music for the short-lived tuner
Hazel Flagg
. Hilliard had also provided the words for a number of pop hits, including two for Frank Sinatra, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” (music by David Mann) and “The Coffee Song” (music by Dick Miles), and he had recently worked with composer Sammy Fain on songs for the Disney animated feature
Alice in Wonderland
.

The first outing from the team of Coleman and Hilliard was “The Autumn Waltz,” which was released in October 1956 as the B side to Tony Bennett’s recording of “Just in Time,” a song with music by Styne and a lyric by Betty Comden and Adolph Green that was part of the score for the forthcoming Broadway show
Bells Are Ringing
.

Coleman and Hilliard’s song, labeled “a fine seasonal ballad” in the October 17 issue of
Variety
and “a leisurely three-quarter time thing of striking beauty” in
Billboard
on October 27, immediately caught on. It hit the
Billboard
Top 100 for the week ending November 14, when Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” and “Don’t Be Cruel” were sitting, respectively, in the first and fifth positions on the list. “Autumn Waltz” remained on the list, peaking at number 41, until after the beginning of 1957.

This rather traditional waltz ballad, which is set apart by—and feels more modern because of—its striking use of minor shifts in the melody accentuated in the orchestration for Percy Faith and His Orchestra, marked a promising start for the newly formed songwriting team, and they would follow it up with other songs in the year to come.

But during the fall Coleman also turned to another new collaborator, one who would be at his side on and off for nearly twenty-five years. Their work was to swiftly eclipse anything he would write with Hilliard.

8.
“Witchcraft”

Bob Hilliard wasn’t the only one Coleman turned to during the course of 1956 as a possible substitute or adjunct to his writing partner Joseph McCarthy Jr. The composer also initiated a professional relationship with a woman who was enjoying a wave of success of her own: Carolyn Leigh.

Leigh, born in 1926 in the Bronx, had come to the music business later than Coleman. She had always been interested in writing and had begun penning poetry before she was a teenager. Her interest in being a wordsmith continued through her years at Queens College and New York University, and after graduation she worked in a variety of jobs that utilized her love of language, including one as a copywriter at an ad agency.

In 1950 the Memphis-based Armo Music Corporation, a subsidiary of King Records, took notice of a verse she had written and offered her a one-year contract. During that time she penned several songs with Nacio Porter Brown, the son of songwriter Nacio Herb Brown, known for his collaborations on songs like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “You Were Meant for Me.” One of Leigh’s songs with the younger Brown, “Just Because You’re You,” was recorded by Jo Stafford, and another, “Our Future Has Only Begun,” made a minor splash for singer Denise Lor.

More important was another of Leigh’s collaborators during her early years: Henry Bernard Glover, a composer who also happened to be a producer at King Records. Just as she was starting her contract, the two wrote “I’m Waiting Just for You,” which, as recorded by bandleader Lucky Millinder, with vocals by Annisteen Allen and John Carol, finished as one of the top R&B songs of 1951, even making a brief crossover onto the pop charts. The tune received a couple of additional recordings, including one by Rosemary Clooney, who was then riding a crest of popularity. Other songs followed, but none gave Leigh a mainstream hit.

Then, in 1953, Leigh and Johnny Richard wrote “Young at Heart.” Frank Sinatra recorded it, and it became a hit, going on to inspire a movie of the same title. The song also led to her first Broadway outing.

Another composer with whom Leigh had been working was Mark “Moose” Charlap, and shortly after “Young at Heart” was released the team was hired to write a few numbers for a new version of J. M. Barrie’s play
Peter Pan
that was to star Mary Martin. When the producers decided that Martin deserved a full-blown musical rather than just a play with music, they commissioned additional numbers from composer Jule Styne and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, but much of what Leigh and Charlap had written remained, including the enduring classics “I’ve Gotta Crow,” “I’m Flying,” and “I Won’t Grow Up.”

The success of the musical onstage, and later on television, led to other work for Leigh, including a 1955 television musical based on the children’s book
Heidi
that featured melodies by Clay Warnick. But by 1956, despite some other collaborations and gigs, she, like Coleman, was looking for inspiration from a new collaborator.

There are a number of different stories about how Leigh and Coleman came to work together. Sometimes the two would say that an agent-manager, Abe Newborn, brought them together. More often they claimed that their partnership had started with a casual conversation in the Brill Building, in the heart of Tin Pan Alley.

Leigh once said, “I remember that first meeting with Cy. We were walking through a building, which was one of the headquarters for publishing on Tin Pan Alley, and Cy said to me, ‘When are we going to write a song together?’”
1

Coleman remembered it slightly differently. He believed that they struck up a conversation in the Turf, the casual restaurant in the Brill Building, which famously featured lines of telephone booths that aspiring songwriters, unable to afford actual office space, could use for their business calls. He even thought that it might have been Leigh who raised the idea of working together.

Despite the varying reports, there is a consistency to what happened after they first thought of working together. Coleman and Leigh decided to take a stab at it on the spot, and within the next twenty-four hours they had written their first song, one inspired by their hasty decision to collaborate: “A Moment of Madness.”

Pleased with their effort, they took the tune to a publisher in the building, former bandleader George Paxton, and played it for him. Coleman recalled what happened next during a 1980 interview with Paul Lazarus on
Anything Goes
on New York’s WBAI radio: “[Paxton] said, ‘That’s a great song! I think Sammy Davis is coming up for a date.’ And we said, ‘Wonderful!’ and signed the song over to him.”

A typed copy of the lyric from Leigh’s files is notated with the date September 27, 1956, and other notes indicate that Davis received it five days later. Coleman remembered that Davis recorded the song the week he received it, but the result wasn’t released until late 1957. When it did hit the market, a November 4
Billboard
review described it as being “a smart, sultry ballad with fine lyrics.”

But “A Moment of Madness” wasn’t the first Coleman-Leigh tune to hit record store shelves. That distinction belongs to “In Pursuit of Happiness,” which they wrote while still feeling the exhilaration from their first outing together. Heard on the B side of a Louis Armstrong 45, the song hit the shelves just as Coleman and Hilliard’s “The Autumn Waltz” was ending its stint on
Billboard
’s Top 100, and even though a January 12
Billboard
review deemed “Happiness” “pretty,” with “more on-the-air interest indicated here,” the song didn’t have the staying power of “The Autumn Waltz.”

As 1956 progressed, other songs and recordings followed. Anthony Roma released a pair of Coleman-Leigh songs in July, “Good Intentions” and “Too Good to Talk About Now,” and in September Patti Page recorded their song “My How the Time Goes By,” putting it on the B side of “I’ll Remember Today.”

Both writers were also busy elsewhere as they fulfilled commitments to projects they had agreed to before their September 1956 meeting. Ironically, one of Leigh’s tasks was to finish the lyrics for
The Ziegfeld Follies of 1957
, the reconstituted, refinanced version of the show that Coleman had been a part of one year earlier. As for Coleman, he started 1957 not just as a songwriter but also as the proprietor and star attraction at the Playroom. But it was a responsibility that he only held for the first half of the year. The club shuttered in June, though not before Coleman had had the chance to offer a few live radio broadcasts from the home he had created for himself.

According to drummer Ray Mosca, the decision to close the club had to do with Coleman’s increasing focus on his collaboration with Leigh. But Coleman never saw the relationship with Leigh as the cause of the club’s demise. It was there, he said, “I found out about having somebody from your own family behind the cash register,” adding that throughout his time there he “was working for cheaper than at the Composer, because I never saw any of the profits.”
2

Nevertheless, years later Coleman could find humor in his outing as a club owner: “I put on weight at that club. We had a terrific cook there. He used to cook six-course meals, but nobody came in and ate because the tables were too small for the plates.”
3

With the closing of the Playroom Coleman found himself free to concentrate on other projects, chief of which was writing music for
Compulsion
, a much-anticipated Broadway play based on Meyer Levin’s book of the same name about the infamous 1920s Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which two University of Chicago students were convicted of the brutal and random killing of a young boy.

The road to getting this play to the boards was a bumpy one. Before rehearsals began, Levin and producer Michael Myerberg (whom Coleman had known since the mid-1940s and the days of
If the Shoe Fits
) wrangled over the script, leading to suits and countersuits. Eventually the play opened with the intriguing credit of “Dramatization by (Producer’s Version) Meyer Levin.” Further complicating matters before the show’s October 24, 1957 opening at the Ambassador Theatre was an illness that forced Frank Conroy, who was playing the character based on attorney Clarence Darrow, to withdraw from the cast. He was replaced by future screen star Michael Constantine.

Nevertheless, the show did reach its opening night, and for a portion of it Coleman’s music was quite literally center stage of a Broadway theater as an onstage band played four 1920s-style pastiches he had written. The music was heard in a scene unfolding in a speakeasy, where the killers spend an evening after they have committed their crime.

Unlike
Dear Barbarians
five years before, when Coleman was part of the evening’s entertainment,
Compulsion
did not feature the composer as one of its musicians. Instead, the band comprised four men whom Coleman had personally picked, including two of his frequent collaborators, drummer Mosca and bass player Aaron Bell, as well as trumpet player Harry Goodwin and pianist Warren B. Meyers. Mosca remembered how easy it was to perform in
Compulsion
: “It was big for us, because we only worked on the stage for twenty minutes.” In addition, he recalled that the group used to interact with the actors: “I used to do a drum bit with Roddy McDowall [who played one of the killers].”
4

Music publisher E. H. Morris certainly had high hopes for the jaunty tunes Coleman had written. The four pieces were collected in an eight-page folio that went to print before the show opened, bearing an unadulterated authorship credit for Levin and Conroy’s name as one of the show’s principals.

Critical reaction to
Compulsion
was respectable. The play enjoyed a four-month run and was turned into a movie, in which Dean Stockwell reprised his acclaimed performance as one of young killers.

Coleman also took on a new recording project during the second half of 1957—an album of jazz covers of Harold Arlen and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg’s songs for the musical
Jamaica
, which starred Lena Horne and Ricardo Montalban.

Cover albums like this were becoming all the rage in 1957, thanks to a disc that had been released at the end of 1956. Officially it was called
Shelly Manne and His Friends, Volume II
, but the cover read: “Shelly Manne & His Friends: modern jazz performances of songs from Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s
My Fair Lady
,” and it stayed in a top position on jazz charts for a year and a half. The disc’s success prompted record companies to issue myriad albums filled with jazz versions of songs from musicals, ranging from Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man
to Lerner and Loewe’s film
Gigi
.

Given that
Jamaica
was a reunion for the men who penned such hits as “Over the Rainbow,” expectations for the show, both onstage and as a trove of great songwriting in general, were high. And alongside Coleman’s album, released by Jubilee, three other labels—MGM, RCA Victor, and ABC-Paramount—recorded LPs with jazz versions of the
Jamaica
score.

Coleman’s recording was made before the show officially opened on October 31 and was in stores almost concurrently with the musical’s cast album. The LP contains a combination of piano solos, some instrumental ensembles, and perhaps most interestingly (and delightfully surprising) the first commercially available recordings of Coleman himself singing.

When reviewing not just the original cast recording for the show but also several of the covers in the December 15
New York Times
, John S. Wilson gave Coleman’s piano work high praise, calling it “easy and flowing.” Wilson’s praise of the album also contained a telling swipe at the show overall and its star: “Even in [Coleman’s] jazz variations, he seems able to find more melodic meat in a tune such as ‘Cocoanut Sweet’ than Miss Horne does.”

This assessment of the cast album versus the recording isn’t far off the mark, but it is a little less than generous, simply because of the difference between the worlds of Broadway and jazz. In a full musical production, certain things, such as brash orchestrations and choral work, are expected. Coleman, working in a nontheatrical context, had more of an opportunity to explore the essences of the Arlen-Harburg songs, so his interpretations were better able to spotlight the gentle shifts in Arlen’s melodies and the utter whimsy of Harburg’s lyrics. It’s much easier to sell a song like “I Don’t Think I’ll End It All Today” when one isn’t pushing it as a monstrous production number.

Both
Compulsion
and the
Jamaica
album, coinciding with the closing of the Playroom, point to a career shift for Coleman: he was moving away from the cabaret scene toward a life in the theater. It was a change that publisher Morris, known familiarly as “Buddy,” was actively promoting. He wanted Coleman to sign a publishing contract and start writing more music for the theater.

The idea inspired mixed feelings in Coleman; he did not want to completely abandon his work as a performer. After all, it had been providing him with an income and was something that he enjoyed. But Morris persisted, and as Coleman recalled, “Buddy came and took me out on a yacht and he told me, ‘You can still play the piano in clubs and you can do this too. So why don’t sign up and write?’” Coleman eventually acquiesced, and as he put it, “So Carolyn and I started doing a lot of show scores.”
5

On June 13, 1957 it looked as though Coleman and Leigh had their first assignment when Louis Calta’s theater column in the
New York Times
announced that Myerberg had acquired the rights to a musical that had been a hit in Hawaii—
13 Daughters
, about a Chinese merchant who marries a Hawaiian princess and finds that he becomes a father to thirteen girls—and planned to bring the show to Broadway.

When it premiered, the show featured book, music, and lyrics by Eaton Magoon, but for its Main Stem outing Myerberg confirmed to the
New York Times
that
13 Daughters
was to have a score by Coleman and Leigh. A few days later
Billboard
reported that E. H. Morris would be publishing their songs for the show.