Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (17 page)
Authors: Greg Lawrence,John Kander,Fred Ebb
BOOK: Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz
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EBB:
[laughing]
You are the real cynic, and I write the lyrics. In that case, Frank did kill the rhyme.
[laughing]
You are the real cynic, and I write the lyrics. In that case, Frank did kill the rhyme.
KANDER: That was a huge hit, God knows, and we’re very lucky to have had it. But he was not singing what you wrote.
EBB: Yes, I never wrote the line, “I’m A-number-one.”
KANDER: It was something he had to make up on the spot when he couldn’t remember the lyric. Then he became accustomed to singing it that way.
EBB: It stayed in his rendition of the number, and I never mentioned it. Frank called me when the song looked like it was going to break, and he said, “Well, we really did it, didn’t we?” I almost said, “Well, now that you’re my co-writer!” But you have to forbear with all of that — it doesn’t do you any good. As you say, we’re just very grateful for the exposure he gave that song.
KANDER: I’ve known major talents who are very straightforward and objective about what they are doing in their work. But there are others who buy into their own images.
EBB: It’s an abuse of power, and it happens.
KANDER: I don’t think they get better artistically during those periods in their lives. Imagine a serious singer—an opera singer or a lieder singer—saying, “Well, I just made this mistake in Brahms, so clearly it’s an improvement.” Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein wrote a cabaret piece called “The Girl with Two Left Feet” that illustrates that type of attitude. The premise of the piece was that in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater there is an empty sidewalk block waiting for a star to put footprints in it, and one morning two left footprints are discovered in the block. Then there is a nationwide search for the girl with two left feet, because only stars have their footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, so obviously the girl who left the footprints must be a star. That’s the same mentality you tend to see when a star comes to believe anything he or she does in performance, even a mistake, must be an improvement.
EBB: Interestingly enough, Liza also has that huge star status, but when she makes a mistake, she is contrition itself. She comes off the stage and says, “Oh, my God, I didn’t get that right!” By the way, I don’t understand that two-left-feet story.
KANDER: Forget it. But that’s true about Liza. Even with all her problems, she is never abusive to anyone.
EBB: There’s not a mean bone in her body.
KANDER: But some of her competitors are mean about her.
EBB: Even today the press is mean about her.
KANDER: The thing about Liza is this: the only person she is mean to is herself. I’ve never seen her deliberately want to hurt somebody.
EBB: I’ve never seen her lash out or anything like that.
KANDER: And she’s had occasions where she could have.
EBB: Where she had cause. For all the problems she has had, she has managed to maintain her dignity and she is, after all, a very gracious woman. We wrote a lot of songs for her, and it was great to have a voice we could always count on. Other people perform songs of ours that Liza introduced, but Liza is Liza and nobody ever sang them like her. I think that about “New York, New York.” As grateful as you are to Frank, it’s Liza that you want to hear sing it. Not only as opposed to Frank but as opposed to anybody.
KANDER: I always felt it was a much more elegant song with her.
EBB: I think that derives from the respect that she has for music. Maybe she got that from her mother. Liza probably has more innate respect for songwriting and lyrics than anybody else.
KANDER: That’s true.
EBB: Frank seemed to feel free to do what he did, which was to screw around, not only with Kander and Ebb, but with Cole Porter, with Irving Berlin. He murdered everybody’s lyrics. Apparently, he sang whatever came into his head. Liza doesn’t do that.
KANDER: If she has a change or something to suggest, she literally raises her hand: “Can I say something?” With Liza, it’s about the music. She loves music. She loves jazz.
EBB: She loves words.
KANDER: She hears wonderfully.
EBB: I think that comes from what she heard her whole life with her mother.
KANDER: At a recording session, listening to an orchestra, she will hear things sometimes that I hadn’t heard, and she will say in the most polite way, “Can we bring up the oboe?” It’s never a frivolous suggestion. It’s never a star suggestion. It’s always really musical. She has real ears.
EBB: Whatever it is, you’re grateful it’s there and you get to hear your music sung by someone like that.
KANDER: Both Liza and Hal have played large parts in our careers, but in entirely different ways. Hal, besides giving us opportunities, was similar to Mr. Abbott in the sense of being an instructor and influencing our way of looking at the theater. He didn’t intend it that way, but we watched how he directed and the way his mind worked.
EBB: In many ways, Hal invented us.
KANDER: Liza, to a certain extent for a long period of time, was our voice more than anything else. But I don’t think Liza influenced us per se as songwriters.
EBB: I think of it as a liquid. In a way, Hal filled the container, but the liquid was Liza. It was sort of like a coffee maker. Hal was the grounds, Liza was the water, and out came us.
Liza Minnelli on Kander, Ebb, and Prince:
I might look at it differently. Hal may have been the grounds, but Fred and John were the blended coffee, and I just came out as what people liked to drink.
EBB: Hal certainly shaped our sensibilities, and Liza was the vehicle for how we expressed ourselves.
KANDER: Except Liza is not a Hal Prince kind of product in any way.
EBB: Oh no.
KANDER: The things that Hal represents in our lives are not the things that went into our relationship with Liza. Initially, you were her Pygmalion in the sense that you were most responsible for shaping her performance style. We did a television show with Liza once, and before she came on, I remember you sang “Liza with a Z.” I realized watching you then that virtually every mannerism that people associated with Liza had come from you. I think her feelings for you in spite of the complications with the relationship are the best part of Liza. I don’t know how to say this right. It’s a healthy side of Liza that makes sense.
Liza Minnelli on Fred Ebb’s influence:
Freddy was an amazing performer. He taught me what to say, he taught me how to move my hands, he taught me my delivery—he taught me everything. Where do you think I get these hands from? I bit my nails when I first started, and I couldn’t do what everybody else did with their hands. I hated all of that. But when Fred performed, he was right up there and out front in a way that I thought,
Oh, I don’t have to show my nails if I do it that way
.
Oh, I don’t have to show my nails if I do it that way
.
EBB: She loved to have me perform things for her full out, and I loved doing that for her.
KANDER: She once said, “Sometimes I think I’m a figment of Fred Ebb’s imagination.” I think that is in a way absolutely true.
EBB: I loved her, and what came out of our relationship with
her was a terrific rendition of what we did, one that was absolutely true to what we intended because she did it the way we wrote it and performed it the way we hoped to see it performed.
her was a terrific rendition of what we did, one that was absolutely true to what we intended because she did it the way we wrote it and performed it the way we hoped to see it performed.
KANDER: Barbra Streisand was one who would change the music of a song.
EBB: But she didn’t change lyrics. I think in order to really like Barbra, you have to diligently remind yourself of the humble background from which she sprang, how difficult it must have been for her, how needy she was of the stardom that she attained. I looked at her with enormous sympathy with the particular experience that we had doing the movie
Funny Lady
. I heard a funny story about Barbra and the producer of
Funny Lady
, whose name was Ray Stark. It went like this. Ray presented Barbra with a horse. She recently had bought a ranch, and he gave her a horse. About two days later, she came in
wild
because her horse died, and it seemed to be her unshakable conviction that Ray had given her a sick horse on purpose. And now she had to bear the pain of losing the animal. There was something else I remember. As you know, when I’m fortunate enough to get them, I collect Egon Schiele’s work. I saw a gorgeous Schiele on Barbra’s wall and coveted it at once. I said, “My God, what a great painting! I’ll write this movie for nothing but the painting.” But she said, “Nothing doing! Stark gave it to me.” Apparently, Ray was in the habit of giving her lavish presents. Imagine, a Schiele and a horse!
Funny Lady
. I heard a funny story about Barbra and the producer of
Funny Lady
, whose name was Ray Stark. It went like this. Ray presented Barbra with a horse. She recently had bought a ranch, and he gave her a horse. About two days later, she came in
wild
because her horse died, and it seemed to be her unshakable conviction that Ray had given her a sick horse on purpose. And now she had to bear the pain of losing the animal. There was something else I remember. As you know, when I’m fortunate enough to get them, I collect Egon Schiele’s work. I saw a gorgeous Schiele on Barbra’s wall and coveted it at once. I said, “My God, what a great painting! I’ll write this movie for nothing but the painting.” But she said, “Nothing doing! Stark gave it to me.” Apparently, Ray was in the habit of giving her lavish presents. Imagine, a Schiele and a horse!
KANDER: I’ll always remember that other story. Remember the white rug?
EBB: On the white rug under her piano, there was doggydoo the night when we played the score at her house. She had a house at the time near mine in Holmby Hills.
KANDER: It wouldn’t be funny except for the fact that her house was so immaculate, and every once in a while as you walked from room to room you almost expected there to be a price tag on some objet d’art. She was actually for the most part
never unkind to us. My experience in the recording studio was just terribly frustrating. There was a song called “Isn’t This Better?” that we wrote for her Fanny Brice character in the movie. What Barbra was singing with that number and what they were arranging were so far away from the song that I could hardly believe it. It soon became clear that I was unhappy, and I remember the musical director, Peter Matz, trying to calm me down. Finally, it boiled down to an exasperated Barbra saying, “Well, what did you write in the first place?” So I said, “This is what we wrote,” and I played her the song. She said, “Oh, well, that’s nice.” Then she recorded the song the way we wrote it.
never unkind to us. My experience in the recording studio was just terribly frustrating. There was a song called “Isn’t This Better?” that we wrote for her Fanny Brice character in the movie. What Barbra was singing with that number and what they were arranging were so far away from the song that I could hardly believe it. It soon became clear that I was unhappy, and I remember the musical director, Peter Matz, trying to calm me down. Finally, it boiled down to an exasperated Barbra saying, “Well, what did you write in the first place?” So I said, “This is what we wrote,” and I played her the song. She said, “Oh, well, that’s nice.” Then she recorded the song the way we wrote it.
EBB: “Let’s Hear It for Me” — wasn’t that song another issue?
KANDER: That was an arrangement.
EBB: The accompaniment that they had invented was exactly the same as—
KANDER: The Jule Styne song—
EBB: “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” compounded by the fact that “Let’s Hear It for Me” was staged in exactly the same way that “Don’t Rain on My Parade” had been. There was Barbra on her way somewhere.
KANDER: I was so embarrassed by that. It amazed me that they let it happen. Later I ran into Jule Styne backstage at a show, and I said, “Jule, about that song.” I started to explain, but he said, “I know you didn’t do that.” He knew exactly what had happened. There was only one time I remember Barbra saying something mean, and that wasn’t directed at us. She had recorded our early songs “My Coloring Book” and “I Don’t Care Much” on the same album. Later, Tommy Valando had us take a couple of new songs that we had written to her. She was backstage someplace.
EBB: At
Funny Girl.
Funny Girl.
KANDER: We played the songs for her. We had, after all, known her before she was Funny Girl. She listened while she was
making up, and she said basically that she wasn’t interested. But she also said rather pointedly, “Why don’t you give them to that Minnelli girl!”
making up, and she said basically that she wasn’t interested. But she also said rather pointedly, “Why don’t you give them to that Minnelli girl!”
EBB: Oh, I remember that. How nice that we remember the same thing. She did say that, and yet whenever she came to see Liza, she was always quite gracious.
KANDER: She was usually very gracious with us, too.
EBB: I thought so. Barbra never said or did anything unpleasant to me. Again, it was just my observation about her regard for the music, as it was with Frank.
KANDER: By way of observation, I don’t think I’m very good with movies in general unless I am working with a director who is very encouraging. I’ve done some film work, both with you and on my own, and when it’s fun, it’s fun. But when it’s part of a big corporation breathing down your neck, it’s not fun, which is why I do so few movies. Years ago I started writing background music on a film, and the music director at the studio was overseeing the project. I backed out because I knew that he told one young composer, “If you’re going to live here in Hollywood, I’ll help you, but if you’re going to live in New York, I’ll see to it as much as I can that you don’t work in this business.”
EBB: With the movie of
Cabaret,
we wrote “Mein Herr” and “Money” in New York, and also added “Maybe This Time,” which we had written earlier. Fosse took those songs with him when he went over to Europe to make the movie. You and I weren’t invited. In movies, that’s the way it works—we just write them and hope for the best.
Cabaret,
we wrote “Mein Herr” and “Money” in New York, and also added “Maybe This Time,” which we had written earlier. Fosse took those songs with him when he went over to Europe to make the movie. You and I weren’t invited. In movies, that’s the way it works—we just write them and hope for the best.
KANDER: Very often when we work on a movie that way—when somebody says, “Would you write a song for us?”—we have almost no connection with the project.
EBB: It’s like making a deposit at a bank. You just walk away and hope that they credit it to your account.
KANDER: With
Lucky Lady,
we just wrote the songs.
Lucky Lady,
we just wrote the songs.
EBB: We didn’t even have the script. Stanley Donen was the director and he told us on the phone what he wanted. “I would like a number for Liza, who plays a character in a seedy Mexican nightclub. What kind of number would she sing? I’d like a title song.” Did we write one other song for that?
KANDER: Sure.
EBB: I remember “Get While the Gettin’ Is Good.”
KANDER: You and Liza and I performed “Lucky Lady” once, as a matter of fact, on some afternoon television show. I think it was the
Dinah Shore Show
.
Dinah Shore Show
.
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