Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz by Greg Lawrence, John Kander, Fred Ebb Read Free Book Online

don’t know if that exists anywhere else. I can’t even imagine what I might be doing if we had not become partners. I might have found a soul mate in Cy Coleman, but I don’t think that would have been very likely.
    KANDER: The truth is that neither of us ever contemplates doing a real project, a whole piece, with somebody else. Of course, we’ve each done other kinds of projects on the side in television and movies. But it’s like a marriage in which the wife says, “You can go have dinner with this girl but you better not sleep with her.”
    EBB: The friendship triumphs. I wonder why that seems so incredible to some people. Why would we not want to hang on to that relationship?
    KANDER: It seems to me that you’re dealing with what is most comfortable in your life. It depends on what your ambitions are.
    EBB: I don’t understand what could be so troubling that anyone could not go on with a successful collaboration. I’m thinking of Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock. They were so great together as a partnership.
    KANDER: Jerry and Sheldon were always my idols, and now that they have been separated for so long, perhaps some people tend to forget who they were. I thought their work was breathtaking. She Loves Me. Fiddler on the Roof They inspired me.
    EBB: But why would they stop? How terrible could it have been? I don’t think anyone really knows. When you hear their work today, it’s even more remarkable and you have to ask why either would let the other leave. How could you let a talent like Sheldon leave you? And Jerry is fantastic, so why wouldn’t Sheldon have said, “Nobody can write music better than this guy!”
    KANDER: What went down between the two of them we may never know, and I wonder if they will ever really know either.
    EBB: Sad.
    KANDER: I think one of the blessings of our collaboration and one of the reasons we have survived is that our way of working has always precluded conflict. If we’re working and you make a suggestion, I really know what you mean, and it’s not so difficult to try to put my head there. We’re pretty good at switching into each other’s territory. If I have an enthusiasm for something or if you have a particular enthusiasm, even if we don’t share that inclination, both of us will usually jump in and say, “All right. Let’s try this!”
    EBB: Or I’ll be stuck for a word and you will come up with it. I might write something and you may say, “My God, that’s really crappy.” If somebody else said that to me, I would feel hurt. But with you I understand what you mean and it’s acceptable because I know you have respect for my work and I don’t take your criticism as a personal attack. Nobody can talk me out of anything quicker than you. If you say that line or that lyric doesn’t seem right to you, I’m off it in a minute and I’ll change my direction.
    KANDER: There is very little self-examination that goes on
in our work. We’re always focused on what we’re doing. I don’t think there has ever been much conversation between us until now about why we do anything.
    EBB: We have known each other so long and never had this conversation. I remember once I saw an interview with Nancy Walker on a television show called The Hot Seat . It had a terrific impact on me. The interviewer read her Walter Kerr’s analysis of how she performed, and Kerr had called her a “Cassandra.” Nancy Walker sat there so bewildered by how the critic characterized her performance style and how he put it into words. She was confounded because she never started out intending to be a Cassandra or thinking of herself that way. I thought of Nancy sitting there and thinking, Who the hell is Cassandra? I don’t think we started out intending to be anything or with the intention of pursuing a particular style in our work.
    KANDER: I have a similar story that I may have told you. It’s my favorite story about people who analyze the works of others. Years ago Stanley Kauffman was doing