You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (6 page)

Coleman’s first outing for Decca proper came in November 1951. It featured George and Ira Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (from
Porgy and Bess
) on the A side and “Lullaby of the Leaves” (by the long-forgotten team of Bernice Petkere and Joe Young) on the B side. To ensure the record did not sound as if it had come from a staid or old-fashioned performer, the disc’s label was emblazoned not with “The Cy Coleman Trio,” but with “Cy Coleman His Piano and The Cytones.”

Unlike Coleman’s previous recording, on which he worked in a strictly instrumental and predominantly classical vein (albeit one souped up with jazz and Latin rhythms), this later release reveals an artist who is beginning to incorporate more pop elements into his work. Not only are there taut harmonies from a group of studio singers on both sides, but also they, along with Coleman, navigate some tricky, jagged syncopations and intricate melodic progressions that give both sides a pretty cool feel. If Decca wanted someone who sounded “fresh,” Coleman certainly delivered with the two cuts, particularly the Gershwin, in which a tune that was already over a quarter of a century old began to surge with a new sort of modernity.

Critics, however, gave the disc mixed reviews. Regarding Coleman’s take on “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” Mike Gross, in the November 7, 1951 issue of
Variety
, wrote that it “offers a good sampling of his impressionistic and imaginative keyboard-arranging techniques” but also complained that the rendition “deviates too often from the tune’s original rhythmic flow to make it more than just an esoteric interpretation.” The
Billboard
assessment on November 17 echoed these sentiments, calling the work “an experiment of some sort which just is too cluttered up in conception to come across.”

At this juncture in Coleman’s career, though, this kind of negative press had little effect on his forward momentum. He had become a celebrity in his own right through his regular television, radio, and club work. In September 1950 he added movies to his résumé when he got a contract for an RKO short,
Package of Rhythm
.

Released in theaters around the country in early 1951 alongside features ranging from the Victorian-era drama
The Mudlark
to the film adaptation of the Broadway revue
Call Me Mister
, it’s the earliest surviving video of Coleman in performance. The film chronicles his audition for a pair of stereotypical agents, playing an arrangement of “La Campanella” that he’s done for bass and drums (played by Mundell Lowe). It impresses the guys, and the group is hired. Before the film has ended, Cy and his bandmates have donned tuxes and are backing a female singer (played by Margaret Phelan) in a swanky club.

What shines through in the film is the young pianist’s charisma, making it entirely understandable why, in late 1950, there was even a push to turn him into a bandleader in the tradition of Tommy Dorsey or Benny Goodman.

That idea surfaced in a November 25, 1950
Billboard
article about how the Music Corporation of America (MCA) was looking to reenter the arena of promoting big bands and orchestras: “The agency also is trying to talk keyboardist Cy Coleman into converting into a band leader. Coleman, a lad of some twenty-two years, has developed into a prime cocktail piano fave in the smart supper club set here.”

Coleman eventually opted to move away from MCA and the idea of becoming an orchestra leader, preferring instead to traverse the vagaries of being a nightclub entertainer and television personality. In all this he even found some time to write a classical composition, the Sonatine in Seven Flats, for his mentor Adele Marcus, who, even as she instructed artists like Coleman, Stephen Hough, Byron Janis, and Horacio Gutiérrez, had maintained an active life as a piano recitalist.

While Coleman’s sonatine has not survived, one photo from Coleman’s scrapbooks captures how closely and collegially the two worked on the piece in preparation for its debut. A program for a concert that Marcus gave at Town Hall on January 25, 1952, labeled her performance of Coleman’s work its “First New York Performance,” but that had actually come a little over a month before, when, according to a listing in the
New York Times
for a recital Marcus gave in Brooklyn on December 16, 1951, she included Coleman’s piece on her program.

Coleman most likely would not have been able to attend this latter event because of his own work. During the last part of 1951 he and the trio were appearing at LaDelfa’s Hotel in Mount Morris, where they were touted in advertisements as “stars of radio, movies and Decca Recording artists.” During Coleman’s time in Mount Morris, the RKO short played alongside the celebrity-laden cavalcade
Starlift
for a couple of nights, and the trio even appeared at the movie house alongside the film.

The LaDelfa’s gig was just an extension of the group’s itinerancy during this busy two-year period. From the Shelburne, Coleman’s engagements had included a couple of weeks at Bop City, playing sets alongside ones by the Illinois Jacquet Orchestra and Ella Fitzgerald, who, as he recalled years later, gave him sage advice about his performing: “She said, ‘Cy, calm down. You’re never going to play louder than me and Illinois doing “Flying Home.” Why don’t you just cool it, do your thing? They’ll come to you eventually.’”
11

Coleman followed this stint with a long stretch at Monte Posner’s La Vie en Rose, after which he got a new gig at the Park Sheraton, where he returned as the venue’s headliner, and once again his performances were broadcast live several nights a week.

But as 1951 drew to a close, Coleman was performing not in Manhattan but at the Circus Lounge in Brooklyn, where he was the star attraction for New Year’s Eve. And when he played “Auld Lang Syne” at the stroke of midnight, he probably could have not have foreseen the directions in which his career would take him in 1952.

5.
“It’s Not Where You Start . . .”

Some of the new directions in which Coleman found himself moving in 1952 were tied to a short paragraph in a theater column that ran in the
New York Times
in the middle of 1951: “In the works is a musical fantasy by Cy Coleman and Joseph McCarthy Jr., based on the famous novel by James Branch Cabell called ‘Jurgen.’”
1
The squib marked the first time Coleman was linked with McCarthy, a lyricist whom publisher Jack Robbins had suggested as a possible collaborator for the composer and a man who would become a significant force in Coleman’s early career.

Unlike Coleman’s, McCarthy’s family life was filled with music and artistry. His father, also a lyricist, had started his Broadway career contributing lyrics to the 1912 tuner
The Wall Street Girl
. And while his efforts for that show have been all but forgotten, his work on subsequent hits, such as
Kid Boots
,
Rio Rita
, and perhaps most notably
Irene
, lives on. Among his best-known songs are “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” and “You Made Me Love You.”

McCarthy Jr. made a name for himself not on Broadway but through his work on pop tunes in the 1940s. He wrote several songs with John Benson Brooks, notably “A Boy from Texas, a Girl from Tennessee,” which had been performed by the likes of the King Cole Trio, Vic Damone, and Rosemary Clooney. McCarthy, with Joseph Meyer, had also written a tune called “Meadows of Heaven” that was recorded by Perry Como, Bing Crosby, and Mel Tormé.

Whether or not Coleman and McCarthy ever began work on the adaptation of
Jurgen
—a fantastical tale about a man’s journeys through a vaguely medieval world after he’s wished himself to be single once again—remains a mystery. There are no records of it in Coleman’s files, and the only other mention of it in the press came a few weeks after the initial report of the project, when the
Times
reported that Saul Richman would serve as the show’s general manager. After that, however, the possible tuner disappeared from the public eye, even though, in the original story about the show, Coleman had indicated that “a good portion of the necessary backing was on hand.”
2

Nevertheless, Coleman and McCarthy did begin collaborating, and two undated tunes bearing their names could very well represent their initial efforts together. One, “Whippoorwill,” sounds as if it might have been taken from the elder McCarthy’s trunk: it’s a syrupy waltz for a lovelorn soul pining to know whether or not a loved one reciprocates his or her affection. And while its title might make it sound as if it came from the same trunk, there’s a fascinating jazz syncopation to the team’s “An Old-Fashioned Christmas” that makes a pretty standard holiday ballad sound so new that Helen Reddy recorded it several decades later on a seasonal album.

McCarthy and Coleman would continue to write together for several years, but in the interim Coleman had another new prospect on the horizon: his Broadway debut.

Word of Coleman’s arrival on Broadway came in January 1952, when first the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
and later the
New York Times
announced that he and the trio would be providing music for a new comedy-drama,
Dear Barbarians
, by Lexford Richards. Coleman wouldn’t be composing songs; rather, he would be providing incidental music for the production.

The play centers on an aspiring composer whose well-heeled parents disapprove of the young woman he has been dating. To forestall their son’s further involvement with his girlfriend, they conspire to have him connect with an up-and-coming chanteuse, the younger sister of another woman he once dated. They select this woman not because she and the son share a love of music, but because she’s from the same social echelon as their family.

The show, which at one point was also known by the coyly poetic title
O Perfect Love
, came to Broadway under the auspices of Gant Gaither, who had previously produced several plays, including tepidly received revivals of George Kelly’s
Craig’s Wife
and St. John Ervine’s
The First Mrs. Fraser
, along with two new works—
The Shop at Sly Corner
and
Gayden
—both of which lasted a mere seven performances.

Gaither’s lack of success as a producer and the fact that
Dear Barbarians
would be marking his Broadway debut as a director did not stop him from attracting a first-rate cast. For the young man’s parents he turned to a pair of highly experienced performers: Violet Hemming and Nicholas Joy. Donald Murphy, who was cast as the young lover, came to the production with a healthy résumé; he would follow
Dear Barbarians
with Arthur Laurents’s
The Time of the Cuckoo
.

As the principal woman in the young man’s life, Gaither cast Cloris Leachman, who would go on to win an Oscar for
The Last Picture Show
and multiple Emmys for her work on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and
Malcolm in the Middle
. At the time of
Dear Barbarians
, Leachman had just made a splash in a play called
A Story for a Sunday Evening
, winning a Theatre World Award (to honor an outstanding bow in a major role), and in a photo feature in the July 1951 issue of
Theatre Arts
she had been described as “one of the most promising Broadway actresses.”

The fifth member of the company was Betsy von Furstenberg, who played the young woman brought in to destroy the hero’s romance. It’s the smallest of the roles, and yet von Furstenberg’s was the first casting decision Gaither announced. Anyone with a cynical bent might have considered the choice of von Furstenberg a mere stunt. Of all of the company members, she had the least experience, with only one Broadway credit; but her presence guaranteed press, because even as the show was finalizing casting and scheduling, an offstage drama involving von Furstenberg was brewing that ensured the production would be covered in gossip columns around the country.

During the latter portion of 1951 von Furstenberg was often seen on the arm of Conrad Hilton Jr.—the heir to the hotel fortune, Paris Hilton’s great-uncle, and the man who had the distinction of having been, for a grand total of 205 days, Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband. There were even reports that von Furstenberg and Hilton had gotten engaged in late September after a whirlwind two-week courtship, but no wedding date was announced. And even before her casting in
Dear Barbarians
, wags were wondering why she wasn’t sporting a ring from her supposed fiancé, fueling rumors about a possible reconciliation between Hilton and Taylor.

The gossip mill ground on into early 1952 as rehearsals began, with Dorothy Kilgallen reporting: “Betsy Von Furstenberg’s much-publicized engagement to hotel heir Nicky Hilton hasn’t depressed the New York swains to the point where they’ve given up. Current rehearsals of ‘Dear Barbarians’ at the John Golden Theatre are interrupted most often by the backstage telephone—it rings all day, and the voices on the other end all belong to optimistic young men trying to arrange dates with Betsy.”
3

Kilgallen’s fascination with von Furstenberg continued after the show had begun its tryout run in Philadelphia, when she wrote: “Betsy von Furstenberg juggling more beaux than any girl her age in town. Presumably engaged to Nicky Hilton, she’s wearing a costly sparkler from Peter Howard, who still takes her places, and another—a white sapphire surrounded by diamonds from John Reynolds, Jr. of the real estate clan. And then, there’s pianist Cy Coleman, etc. etc.”
4

Von Furstenberg rebutted reports that she and Coleman might have been more than friends, saying that there never was any sort of affair, although she admitted that “he was irresistible” and continued, “I think both Cloris and I had crushes on him.”
5
She found herself working with him during rehearsals, however, because his responsibilities extended beyond simply arriving to provide music in between the acts.

Von Furstenberg said that Coleman was there to “ghost play” for Taylor when his character was demonstrating his compositions and to help her with her singing, principally to train her how to perform a number badly. As she later recalled, “He must have done it well. I got good reviews.”
6

Indeed, von Furstenberg, her fellow performers, and the play all got terrific notices in Philadelphia. Maurice Orodenker, reviewing for
Billboard
on February 16, 1952, predicted that the play, after some “polishing . . . should have a long and hilarious run when it reaches Broadway.” The
Washington Post
’s critic Richard L. Coe, after catching the show in Philadelphia, asserted in his February 21 review that “a pleasant surprise” was on its way to New York. And a critic for
Variety
echoed this sentiment in a February 13 review, saying that the show had “amusing dialog, a sophisticated plot, and an engaging cast,” meaning that it could “stand a chance in the Broadway competition.”

However, the reception that came in New York following the play’s opening on February 21, reportedly attended by both Hilton and Howard, was exactly the opposite of what had come while the show was out of town. In his
New York Times
review the next day, Brooks Atkinson dismissed the piece: “If ‘Dear Barbarians’ were produced as the senior class play in a dramatic school, the faculty, as well as the fathers and mothers, would beam with pleasure and hope.”

Richard Watts Jr.’s review in the
New York Post
took a stronger view, describing it as “a wan and wistful striving after bright and youthful sex comedy that is dismally lacking in the required qualities of charm, humor and dexterity.”

Although they disliked the play, critics could all find merit in the performances. The
Times
’s Atkinson noted that Leachman and von Furstenberg “can act with subtlety and charm,” while the
Post
’s Watts wrote that von Furstenberg “possesses a fresh, engaging and original approach to light comedy.”

Coleman’s presence and work were generally received glowingly in both cities.
Billboard
’s Orodenker wrote that Coleman’s group inserted a “novel note” as they played, and the
Washington Post
’s Coe cited “Coleman’s smart quartet playing tinkly cocktail tunes from a box” as one of the assets of Gaither’s “smart” production.

The best sense of what Coleman did during the production came from Robert Coleman’s February 22
Daily Mirror
review, which concluded: “Incidentally, Gaither provided something of a novelty via a gaily caparisoned instrumental quartet, which set the mood for the three cantos. Perched in boxes they proved startling at first, but wore well as the evening progressed.” And Coleman’s most admiring review came from John McClain, who exclaimed in the
Journal-American
, “But that Cy Coleman and Trio in the box—they’re solid!”

Such praise wasn’t enough to give
Dear Barbarians
any sort of run, and it folded ignominiously on February 24 after four performances. The company banded together in the face of disaster, as companies often do, and von Furstenberg remembered nights on the town with Coleman and Leachman: “None of us had money, so the three of us—mostly—would end up after the shows someplace on the West Side or in small clubs in the Village, and when the show finally closed the three of us went out on a terrific bender.”
7

On this last spree she quipped, “It was the only show I ever did when all of the flowers I got for opening night were still alive when we closed.”
8

With
Dear Barbarians
shuttered and no evening work at hand (he wasn’t able to schedule bookings at clubs while contracted to do a Broadway show), Coleman had to look for other sorts of employment.

The first opportunity presented itself just two weeks after the show’s closing, and on March 7 he was performing in Brooklyn—not at a posh supper club or nightspot, but at the opening of a new appliance store, where he played the toy piano as part of the “Kiddie Carnival.” Also on the bill for this portion of the event were Robert Penn, who was then starring in Lerner and Loewe’s
Paint Your Wagon
, and radio personality Eileen O’Connell, who served as the hostess for the kids’ entertainment. It was a blip on Coleman’s career path, but a telling one that showed exactly how far he would go to simply perform and keep a roof over his head.

However, he didn’t need to wait for things to begin shifting back to normal. That started in April, when Decca released his newest recording, a single with a pair of tunes that turned the clock back to the 1920s: “In a Little Spanish Town (’Twas on a Night Like This),” with music by Mabel Lewis and lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, on the A side, and “South,” by Bennie Moten and Thamon Hayes, on the B side.

Coleman, working solo on this disc, sounds as though he’s channeling his inner saloon piano player, delivering the two pieces with virtuoso rapid-fire key work that has the tremulous, silvery sound that brings to mind the sort of music heard in old westerns. The recording is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Coleman’s previous outing with Decca, and it garnered more praise than its predecessor.
Billboard
, in a review on April 19, carried praise for Coleman’s work, particularly the B side, where it was noted that the Moten-Hayes tune was “expertly played” and had a “clever gimmickly [
sic
] sound.”

The release would be Coleman’s last with Decca. By October he had left the label to join MGM, where he was to begin working immediately on a full album. At the same time he was returning to New York, having played a monthlong gig at Chicago’s Towne Room, to start a stint at the prestigious Café Society in Greenwich Village, where he was part of a bill that also included a number of other members of the MGM recording stable, including Virginia O’Brien and Gene Baylos.