You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman by Andy Propst Read Free Book Online

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