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And what if somebody else has written that song already? "I just tip my hat and move on." But he doesn't often bump into familiar stuff as an amateur might, because his tunes "come from a different place -- a very primitive place," his own private cellar, where the melodies are marked COLEMAN ONLY. And you don't have to be a professional to spot a vintage one. Witchcraft, The Best Is Yet to Come would simply never have got written at all if a certain musical milkman in the Bronx hadn't kept his ears open.
Yet it's also notable that some of his most characteristic songs were written with different lyricists. Unlike George and Ira, Gilbert and Sullivan, Cole and Porter, Coleman changes partners in song, because they all do different things well, which helps him do likewise. It is no accident that the lyrics for The Will Rogers Follies, the ultimate in brassy, knock-'em-dead show-biz shows, were contributed by the stage-wise troupers Adolph Green and Betty Comden, whereas the cerebral City of Angels was done with David Zippel. The result is two utterly different scores, held together only by the fact that nobody else could have written either of them.
You might land one Broadway hit by shooting arrows in the air, but never two. And Cy Coleman probably knows more about the mechanics of a Broadway musical than any other composer since Richard Rodgers. "The business, the politics, the script, the scenery, the transition" -- Ira Gasman, a young lyricist who has been working with Cy on his next show, ticks off a few of the things he has learned at Cy Coleman Academy. "Songs emerge from him like giggles coming out of a baby."
Obliged, for instance, to come up with something for a stage-frightened and vocally challenged Lucille Ball in Wildcat, he dashed off the almost singerproof Hey, Look Me Over, a number that really tears up the joint and did wonders for Lucy's nerves. For Sid Caesar in Little Me, he contrived a waltz (Real Live Girl) well within the minuscule range of that star and every bathtub basso in the land. Nevertheless, Coleman's greatest claim on the future remains, so far, the score for Sweet Charity, words by the immortal Dorothy Fields, choreography by the likewise Bob Fosse, which conveys in every swashbuckling note the vitality and glittering professionalism that not so long ago made the American musical the toast and envy of the outside world, like the American automobile. How does Coleman feel about his responsibilities as a species of one-man Big Three to the U.S. musicals industry? "I don't mind waving the flag a bit," he says, and adds, "I am not alone."
He continues to work like three songwriters in one, while apparently enjoying life enormously. Buzzing back and forth between New York and Southampton, he has never stopped writing long enough to get married but has picked up a lot of friends with whom to share the laughter that also comes pouring out of him -- easy, loud and often -- between songs.
And if that ever fails him, he can always turn on the radio in his head and listen to the world's finest music, including -- who knows? -- maybe the score to his next show.