Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz by Greg Lawrence, John Kander, Fred Ebb
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have anybody to play for her, but she said, “I’ll sing for you in here.” She stood at the front of the church and started to sing. I was at the back of the church and couldn’t hear her. I kept moving closer and closer without realizing it until I was practically in her face and still couldn’t hear her. I had to report back to Hal that she was not a singer. But he was willing to sacrifice a lot in order to have an English girl play that part.
EBB : With that show we had a lot to prove coming off a bomb like Flora .
KANDER: We wrote many Berlin songs before Joel Grey came into it, but we wrote more after he was involved. It helped me enormously to have people like Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford in the back of my mind. As you know, Jack was a great buddy of Zero Mostel’s. I had done stock with Zero back in the fifties when there were many places he couldn’t work because of the blacklist. I was conducting, and I’ll never forget this. He was in Kismet playing a scene with Bill Johnson, and Zero had a piece of business that was hilarious. It got a huge laugh that lasted fifteen seconds. By the end of the week, it lasted ten minutes, and he went on and on ad-libbing to the point that Bill Johnson knocked him to the floor of the stage. I mean, Bill really hit him. Zero went down with a thud, then got right up, and the scene went on as if nothing had happened. There are two comic geniuses I’ve worked with in my life. Zero was one, and Beatrice Lillie was the other. It was awful for the writer, but they could take any piece of business and invent and invent.
EBB: I imagine some writers consider themselves lucky to get those laughs that they haven’t really earned themselves, that are delivered for them by another personality.
KANDER: Zero was very hard on Jack Gilford, wasn’t he?
EBB: In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum . But Jack never complained about anything. He once told me,
“There’s no controlling Zero. He actually took me by the shoulders at one point and turned my back to the audience so he could do a piece of business. I couldn’t even see what Zero was doing. I only knew I was facing scenery when I should have been facing an audience.” He did that time after time. The trouble with Zero was that very few people stood up to him.
KANDER: He was an awesome physical presence.
EBB: People were afraid of him.
KANDER: You know how he was controllable? He was very controllable musically. He had a great respect for music, and in my dealings with him if I said anything to correct him, he would do it instantly. Working in stock, there was a director who was nasty to one of the kids in the chorus. One time when he was being especially unpleasant, Zero stopped the rehearsal and picked him up by his necktie. Zero said, “I don’t ever want to hear you talking to a member of this company like that again.” That was all there was to it. Zero did have a sense of justice.
EBB: When he lived in my building, the San Remo, we had an elevator strike once, and the tenants had to sign up for doorman duty. I signed up to be a doorman, and Zero signed underneath me and put an arrow next to my name with the line, “When he works, I’ll work.” We were on one night together, and he was just darling. Humble and sweet. A great conversationalist. When he came to see Chicago in premiere, I remember how gracious he was about praising us for our work. He was almost teary about it. That was a Zero very few people got to see because when he was up on the stage he was just a buffoon, but when he was off he was a gentle, funny man.
KANDER: Zero said something memorable when we were doing stock together. Before the last show, he threw his great, beefy arm around my shoulder and said, “Kander, I want you to do me a favor. Every morning when you get up, I want you to look in the mirror and say, ‘My name is John Kander and I’m a
talented man, and fuck ’em all.’” I was pretty timid in those days and I
EBB : With that show we had a lot to prove coming off a bomb like Flora .
KANDER: We wrote many Berlin songs before Joel Grey came into it, but we wrote more after he was involved. It helped me enormously to have people like Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford in the back of my mind. As you know, Jack was a great buddy of Zero Mostel’s. I had done stock with Zero back in the fifties when there were many places he couldn’t work because of the blacklist. I was conducting, and I’ll never forget this. He was in Kismet playing a scene with Bill Johnson, and Zero had a piece of business that was hilarious. It got a huge laugh that lasted fifteen seconds. By the end of the week, it lasted ten minutes, and he went on and on ad-libbing to the point that Bill Johnson knocked him to the floor of the stage. I mean, Bill really hit him. Zero went down with a thud, then got right up, and the scene went on as if nothing had happened. There are two comic geniuses I’ve worked with in my life. Zero was one, and Beatrice Lillie was the other. It was awful for the writer, but they could take any piece of business and invent and invent.
EBB: I imagine some writers consider themselves lucky to get those laughs that they haven’t really earned themselves, that are delivered for them by another personality.
KANDER: Zero was very hard on Jack Gilford, wasn’t he?
EBB: In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum . But Jack never complained about anything. He once told me,
“There’s no controlling Zero. He actually took me by the shoulders at one point and turned my back to the audience so he could do a piece of business. I couldn’t even see what Zero was doing. I only knew I was facing scenery when I should have been facing an audience.” He did that time after time. The trouble with Zero was that very few people stood up to him.
KANDER: He was an awesome physical presence.
EBB: People were afraid of him.
KANDER: You know how he was controllable? He was very controllable musically. He had a great respect for music, and in my dealings with him if I said anything to correct him, he would do it instantly. Working in stock, there was a director who was nasty to one of the kids in the chorus. One time when he was being especially unpleasant, Zero stopped the rehearsal and picked him up by his necktie. Zero said, “I don’t ever want to hear you talking to a member of this company like that again.” That was all there was to it. Zero did have a sense of justice.
EBB: When he lived in my building, the San Remo, we had an elevator strike once, and the tenants had to sign up for doorman duty. I signed up to be a doorman, and Zero signed underneath me and put an arrow next to my name with the line, “When he works, I’ll work.” We were on one night together, and he was just darling. Humble and sweet. A great conversationalist. When he came to see Chicago in premiere, I remember how gracious he was about praising us for our work. He was almost teary about it. That was a Zero very few people got to see because when he was up on the stage he was just a buffoon, but when he was off he was a gentle, funny man.
KANDER: Zero said something memorable when we were doing stock together. Before the last show, he threw his great, beefy arm around my shoulder and said, “Kander, I want you to do me a favor. Every morning when you get up, I want you to look in the mirror and say, ‘My name is John Kander and I’m a
talented man, and fuck ’em all.’” I was pretty timid in those days and I
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