You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (15 page)

For Feuer and Martin, shifting
Little Me
meant they were no longer facing the possibility of having a second show opening that could potentially compete for audiences and awards with their gargantuan hit
How to Succeed
. Shrewd businessmen that they were, they most likely also counted on being able to take full advantage of the publicity that the book itself was generating as it climbed the
New York Times
best-seller list alongside works like Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
and J. D. Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey
.

Publicity for the gestating musical could also be had from the search for the show’s leading lady—or, as it turned out, leading ladies. Because expectations were that the heroine of the book would become a plum role by the time
Little Me
hit the stage, politicking and auditioning for the part began even before the novel was published. Caesar reportedly wanted Patricia Barry, with whom he had worked on
GE Theater
, to play the woman his characters would marry or almost marry.

By the end of 1961 Earl Wilson reported that Feuer had “tested 150 gals for ‘Belle Poitrine’ in ‘Little Me,’”
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including risqué singer Belle Barth. But he still he hadn’t found the right actress. In short order columnists, along with performers themselves, began their own campaigns for the role. In a Christmas wish list in
Back Stage
, Michael Sean O’Shea asked the producers to cast Tony winner Dolores Gray, who had most recently starred in
Destry Rides Again
opposite Andy Griffith. Early in 1962 Wilson informed his readers that “Julie Wilson, in a blonde wig, auditioned for ‘Little Me.’”
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A few days later Dorothy Kilgallen chimed in on the casting process, writing, “Patrick Dennis wants Annie Ross (the delectable girl interest in the Lambert-Hendricks-Ross trio) to audition for the role of Bell [
sic
] Poitrine in the Broadway musical version of ‘Little Me.’”
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Neither Wilson nor Ross was mentioned again in the columns, and as spring rolled around, two other actresses—Edie Adams and Dorothy Provine—were reportedly being considered for the role. Adams seemed to be a natural choice. She had started on Broadway in shows like
Wonderful Town
and
Li’l Abner
before finding wider fame in movies and on television, where she appeared most notably with her husband, Ernie Kovacs. As for Provine, she would have been making her Broadway debut in the role, but in a relatively short period of time in the 1950s she had earned a substantial string of television and film credits.

Adams, recently widowed after Kovacs’s death in a car accident, eventually pulled out of the running for the role, opting instead for a more lucrative engagement in Las Vegas. By the end of the year Provine would tell reporters that she had turned the producers down because of the role that she had accepted in the movie Caesar—and Adams—had made over the summer,
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
.

Other actresses whose names were mentioned during the spring and summer as being candidates for the role included Barbara Harris (still a few years away from her starring roles in
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
and
The Apple Tree
but soon to costar with Caesar on his series of specials); singer Jane Morgan; Angie Dickinson, who had already begun her several-decades-long career as a television performer; and even Florence Henderson, who was then touring in the national company of
The Sound of Music
. According to
Chicago Tribune
columnist Herb Lyon, Henderson had even received a full week of coaching from Coleman.

The role ultimately went to Virginia Martin, who had delivered a breakout performance as the shrewdly vapid Hedy La Rue in
How to Succeed
. In his
New York Times
review of the show, Howard Taubman described Martin in this role as “looking like come-hither alabaster poured into garments that cling and caress.”
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In other words, she was a visual ideal for the curvaceous Belle Poitrine.

As the summer of 1962 drew to a close, the producers gave a steady rollout of names for the other principals in the show. Nancy Andrews, who was Ethel Merman’s standby and eventual replacement in
Call Me Madam
and who created roles in the short-lived musicals
Plain and Fancy
and
Juno
, was cast as the older incarnation of Belle. Mickey Deems, who had been playing the role of Moon in an Off-Broadway revival of
Anything Goes
, came on board for a heavy-duty assignment: not only would he play a host of secondary characters—he would also serve as Caesar’s understudy. As for the other important man in Belle’s life, her childhood friend George Musgrove, the role went to dancer Swen Swenson, who was in Coleman and Leigh’s
Wildcat
.

Rounding out the cast were Broadway vets Joey Faye (
High Button Shoes
and
Top Banana
) and Mort Marshall (
Gypsy
’s original Mr. Goldstone), who played the Buchsbaum Brothers, a couple of producers who catapult Belle into vaudeville; and Claiborne Cary and Mitzi McCall, who played Polly and Penny Potter, a pair of sisters with their own act. Cary, Cloris Leachman’s younger sister, had been in a previous Fosse show,
New Girl in Town
, and would go on to a healthy career in television and cabaret. McCall, who was just starting out, eventually settled into a career that included stints on
Laugh-In
and
The Twilight Zone
, among others.

The
Little Me
ensemble also included a number of future boldface names. Gretchen Cryer, who went on to a career as a performer-songwriter and is perhaps best known for her musical
I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road
; Barbara Sharma, who would move on to a featured dancer spot in another Fosse-Coleman collaboration,
Sweet Charity
, before making a name for herself on television; and Michael Smuin, who would eventually found an influential dance company bearing his name.

Beyond the cast, the production boasted scenic and lighting design by Robert Randolph and costume design by Robert Fletcher, both of whom designed
How to Succeed
. Many expected that show’s orchestrator, Robert Ginzler, to provide his services as well, but instead the job of creating the total sound for
Little Me
went to Ralph Burns, who began his career in the world of big-band jazz before he gradually shifted to musicals. Burns had had a few gigs orchestrating musicals before taking on Richard Rodgers’s
No Strings
, which immediately preceded
Little Me
, but it was only with this score, so informed by Coleman’s own jazz sensibilities, that the vernacular of jazz began to take full root in the Broadway pit.

It can be difficult to hear the innovative sound at work in
Little Me
more than half a century after its debut, because so much of what was new has become part of the aural experience of a musical. But there is one still-startling moment in Burns’s work, and it comes in the entr’acte, when “On the Other Side of the Tracks” is played with a bossa nova beat.

Rehearsals for the show commenced in September, and Simon recalled the period as having “endless day-to-day rewrites.”
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It wasn’t just the book that was being revised. Dancer Sharma recalled, “You’d come in every day and there would be changes and, of course, with Fosse you might do a very new show in the evening.”
12
One number that proved particularly troubling for Coleman was “The Truth,” which opened the show. According to copyist Emile Charlap, it “went through twenty-five revisions” before the musical bowed officially.

The process of revising
Little Me
was complicated even further by the need to craft certain aspects of the show to meet Caesar’s demands. Fosse had to find ways of staging numbers that did not make him get up and dance; so in one, Caesar lay in bed and the production number unfolded around him. In another, Caesar’s character was confined to a wheelchair, which the ensemble pushed as they danced.

And then there were Caesar’s rage issues and the politic ways in which he had to be approached regarding notes. For his part, Simon “always followed the dictum, ‘Let sleeping large angry comedians lie.’”
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Another hurdle was the comedian’s problem with addiction, which he referenced subsequently in both his autobiography and in interviews.

Eventually, it came time for the company to move to Philadelphia for the tryout at the Erlanger Theatre (where Coleman and Leigh had also been with
Wildcat
), and
Little Me
opened to the press on October 8. In the
Philadelphia Inquirer
the following day, Henry T. Murdock offered the most effusive of the write-ups the production received, proclaiming it was “the one we’ve been waiting for, that elusive, big one designed to restore the faltering pulse and make us screaming addicts of show business again.” In a follow-up piece about the production on October 14, Murdock wrote that Feuer and Martin had offered theatergoers a show that “displayed more opening night potential than even their ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.’”

Other reviews were more muted, and the October 10
Variety
assessment of the show initially deemed Coleman and Leigh’s score merely “suitable”; but before the piece concluded, the reviewer added, “The songs seem to be spotted more for continuity values than their hit potential”—high praise indeed, since it meant that the team had written a integrated score for the picaresque tale of Belle’s life.

Murdock’s second story alluded to the fact that producers were concerned about shoring up the second act, and his information was correct. Over the next five weeks
Little Me
would boast a variety of numbers at the top of act 2, including “Smart People,” performed by the Buchsbaum Brothers and the Potter Sisters. It was a clever comedy song for two couples about the fights they have had, but it was cut, as were the women’s roles, before early November.

Then the creators tried “Don’t Let It Getcha,” a tune also performed by the Buchsbaums, along with Otto Schnitzler, one of Caesar’s most gleefully crafted characters: a tyrannical German film director making a comeback on a feature film starring Belle. When this number went into the show, Caesar was well over the limit of three songs that he had agreed to perform when he first met with Feuer, Martin, and Simon. Eventually it was pulled and replaced with a pungent solo for Martin, “Poor Little Hollywood Star.”

Coleman and Leigh weren’t the only ones having to recraft their work now that it was in front of an audience. Simon, too, was making revisions, some big and some small. Two examples of the latter involve single lines that had to be changed. At one point, a character came onstage and announced, “War has been declared.” Unfortunately, just after the tryout began, so did the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone feared that such a blunt proclamation could cause a panic, so the line was changed to “World War I has been declared.”

Another tweak was to a line that worked too well. When Prince Cherney thanked the prosperous Belle for the money that had saved his country from bankruptcy, he did so by saying, as copyist Charlap recalled, “‘I crown you Queen Nafka.’ The audience broke up. ‘Nafka’ is ‘a whore’ in Yiddish. You know what happened after that? They didn’t have one joke that got a laugh. And they had to take it out of the show. The biggest laugh they had, they had to take it out.
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Simon ultimately replaced the title with the still funny but less disruptive “Countess Zoftic” (a play on the word
zaftig
, which describes a curvy, full-figured woman).

Such concerns, however, were minor compared to a bigger challenge the entire creative team faced. The show’s act 1 finale, “Lafayette, We Are Here,” wasn’t getting the response they had hoped for. In this number Belle, along with the female chorus, arrived on the front lines of France during World War I to entertain American troops. According to Feuer, “It was a very nice song, everyone liked it, but like so many of these things that defy explanation, we just couldn’t get it to work.”
15

Dance arranger Fred Werner recalled the number in a less flattering light: “‘Lafayette’ was just a disaster and nightmare, and Carolyn kept rewriting lyrics for it.”
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Despite Leigh’s ministrations and Fosse’s own attempts at restaging it, the number simply did not enthuse or entertain. Soon word circulated through the company that the difficult number would be cut, but what the replacement might be was unknown. Sharma said, “It was a number with very heavy, skirted costumes, and it was a can-can number that you killed yourself in . . . and then nothing much happened at the end of it. And you knew it was going to be cut, and you had to keep doing it until it was.”
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Indeed, the decision had been made. Feuer delivered the news that the song would be cut when “I called a meeting onstage after the show. Fosse, Doc [Simon’s nickname], Cy Coleman, Carolyn, and myself. I said, ‘I’m making the decision to cut the number.’”
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It was a declaration that exacerbated what had already become a very tense situation for the team. Coleman once bluntly recalled: “Caesar was going through a bad time in terms of his health and his habits. Director Bob Fosse and he were not getting along, and book writer Neil Simon and Fosse were barely getting along. Carolyn Leigh did not get along with any of them. It was one big fight all the time.”
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From most accounts, Leigh heard Feuer’s announcement and promptly made one of her own. She would not allow the number to be cut, insisting that her Dramatists Guild contract ensured that changes could be made to her material only with her consent. She and Feuer argued, and finally she stormed out of the theater.