Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Forty-One Years

  LIKE VAUDEVILLE, NEW YORK CITY had something for everyone. Discharged from service in August 1946, Fosse ran toward it. He sat front row at the Lower East Side’s scrappy circus of Jewish, Italian, and Russian routines; uptown, he passed the pinball machines and two-cent scams of Forty-Second Street; he swallowed up Third Avenue lying in the shadows of the El, waiting on the edge of town like a bum looking for a fight. They were all waiting for a fight. The Germans of Yorkville hated the Irish of Yorkville, and the Irish hated the Poles. They all hated the blacks. You’d hear stories about guys getting on the 2 train instead of the 1 train and ending up in Harlem with no taxi to get them back. Things were safer below Eighty-Sixth Street, near the old ladies of the West Side. All day they sat on benches in the median along Broadway. But only along Broadway. Columbus was too far in the wrong direction. Before white flight—highways ushering the rich into the suburbs—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, fat bankers, and politicians poured in together, climbing the crumbling walls along the Hudson, fighting for space, watching the other guys’ acts, learning them, absorbing them, topping them. The whole town was a mongrel work in progress.

  All that cohabitation, all that bumping around, and it was only a matter of time before the right bumps begat a new species, only a matter of time before Richard Rodgers bumped Oscar Hammerstein II, who bumped Agnes de Mille, who bumped Rouben Mamoulian, and out came Oklahoma!, the first great musical. “In a great musical,” wrote Richard Rodgers, “the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look. That’s what made Oklahoma! work. All the components dovetailed.” The reason for dovetailing music with lyrics with dance with story seems obvious today, but by 1943, it happened only piecemeal—a little in Show Boat, a little more in Pal Joey, and even more in Lady in the Dark—because a musical didn’t have to be good to be fun, and before Oklahoma!, fun was really all a show needed to be.

  At long last, the musical was no longer a bauble; it was an art form. Prescient, focused, and seriously assembled, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! brought content to the routinely replagiarized flapper vaudevilles of the twenties and thirties. Most of those shows’ songs, many of them lovely Porter and Gershwin numbers, were unrelated to what was going on onstage, which wasn’t much to begin with (mistaken identities, rags-to-riches stories), and had even less to do with what was going on in real life. Oklahoma! and Carousel put a stop to that; they made singing about the world a very serious, very dramatic thing, and they turned choreography—once just a fancy word for dancing around—into an integral part of the story. Witness the Oklahoma! dream ballet, “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.” Make that Agnes de Mille’s dream ballet; fusing character and movement, traditional ballet and colloquial ease, it could have been no one else’s. The choreographer had a point of view: her own. And it was about something. As the ballet’s title implies, Laurey makes up her mind in the dance, so the number is, like any good dramatic scene, an essential and revelatory part of the musical. “Many a somber problem play,” wrote New York Times dance critic John Martin, “has been built on just such a question of emotional compulsions and has failed to illuminate it half so clearly after several hours of grim dialogue. Yet this is a ‘dance number’ in a ‘musical show’!”

  In those days, there was a theater with a big Broadway musical on every corner, and on every corner, there was a bevy of chorus girls looking for fun—good odds for a twenty-one-year-old sailor back from the war, and better odds for a sweet and sexy one like Bob Fosse, who could pivot between a “Geez, I dunno . . .” and a “Whaddaya doing later?” in a single motion. He was that good. “When he talked to you, you just felt, Oh my God. He’s in love with me,” said casting director Lynne Carrow. “He had a personality that drew you in. He could just click with you and pull you into his world. The touching, the looking, the little smiles as he’s talking to you. I don’t want to call it flirting because I think that’s just how he naturally was, but maybe that’s why he was such a good flirt. Just talking to him was a sensual experience.”

  In his cupcake way he mastered the art of not taking no for an answer. Even the girls who saw it coming were caught off-guard. That’s how good he was; he could sell without selling. The girl would be upstairs with him, not knowing how she got there, and downstairs the next day, hoping to see him again. His competition didn’t get it. “I had always wondered why he was always able to get all these girls,” said producer Robert Greenhut. “So I asked this one stripper I knew he slept with, ‘What is it about Fosse that he’s always able to . . . you know. Why is he like flypaper to you guys?’ She says, ‘He is the greatest lay I have ever had in my life. There is absolutely no one more sexually competent than this man.’ And she said his shyness was the thing that gets you to begin with. And I said, ‘Well, okay. At least now I know.’”

  And more girls were always around the corner. This was New York, after all, a city of corners. This was Broadway, land of the chorus girl. The streets were ablaze with talent, and there were more than enough to go around. But the girls didn’t go around; they all went back to Fosse. “I think everyone was attracted to him,” said sound mixer Christopher Newman. “Man, woman, piano. It didn’t matter. He was insanely attractive.” The preponderance of gay men in the dance world elevated Fosse to the role of high satyr almost instantly; he was more than just cute, fun, and a whiz on two feet; he was, to the fervent girls of Broadway, at the top of a very short list. The way he looked at you, you knew you were on the top of his list too. “It was like you were in a tunnel,” recalled Trudy Ship, assistant editor on Lenny and Liza with a Z. “He made incredible eye contact and asked you questions. Who were your parents? Where were you born? He oozed sexuality and he was so sweet about it too.”

  Fosse’s bed at the YMCA on Thirty-Fourth and Ninth wasn’t easy to get girls to, but it was a convenient walk to Broadway and, at thirty-five cents a day, ideal for a jobless ex-sailor with only a few hundred bucks in his wallet. Full of servicemen, the Thirty-Fourth Street Y, an imposing brick tower with a red neon sign buzzing Sloane House, was the largest YMCA in the city. The building had over a thousand rooms, not all of them equipped with private bathrooms, so Sloane’s communal showers turned social, and Sloane House, also known as the French Embassy, became one of Manhattan’s most popular gay spots. Were it not for some uncomfortable bathroom attention, Fosse might have actually gotten a kick out of the place, where guests were known by their room numbers, and their keys passed through a complicit concierge. Citing the C in YMCA, scandalized members of the management hired security guards to patrol the showers, but the joke was on them: most of the guards joined in the fun.

  Fosse didn’t have to hang around Sloane House for long. One of his navy buddies had introduced him to MCA agent Maurice Lapue, formerly of the adagio dance team Maurice and Cordoba, and Lapue signed Fosse right away. Days later, sporting his freshly pressed sailor suit and a discharge button on his lapel, he appeared before composer Lehman Engel to audition for a part in Call Me Mister.

  “Sing first,” Engel said.

  “I better dance first.”

  It was only his second audition, but Fosse got the job—and a pretty good one too. As the dance lead in the national production of Call Me Mister, he’d tap and sing (in his thinner-than-Chet-Baker’s voice), touring the country’s biggest second-tier theaters, finally a full-time show-business professional. A homecoming revue with songs by Harold Rome and sketches by Arnold Auerbach, Mister was basically for laughs: half sketches, half song and dance, and featuring an eclectic company of unknowns, from bass-baritone William Warfield to tap dancer Marian Niles to comics Buddy Hackett and Carl Reiner. The singers sang, the dancers danced, and the comics told jokes. In those days, no single person had everything.

  Buddy Hackett was a trenchant wiseguy, Damon Runyon with a Catskills twang. One of his favorite bits, “The Farting Contest,” pitted two guys against each other in a kind of boxing match with farts for punches. It was a sketch he liked to follow with
his Peter Lorre impression. Like the hippo he resembled, he could charge an innocent passerby if the spirit moved him, barking expletives like a stripper at a speakeasy raid, then laugh and do it again. City born and raised, Hackett introduced Fosse to another side of all-night New York, leading him to underground clubs and dancehalls, tutoring him in the unwritten history of hipster comics and the wide world of Jewish shtick. Best friends, they hung out every night; by day, they rehearsed the show.

  Fosse was obsessed. “He was always there early,” Carl Reiner said, “warming up and doing his steps over and over again, and he was always making up new steps, always inventing. When the rest of us were resting, there was Bobby, getting there early to invent.” He was inventing himself a little too. Fosse’s Call Me Mister bio, which cited his tour of “fashionable bistros of the middle-west,” was less actual than aspirational, obliquely disclosing a deep-down, never-to-be-resolved affliction of class—as in, he thought he had none. If they liked his act, he fooled them. “Bobby had the first-act finale number,” Reiner said. “It was the signature song, ‘Call Me Mister,’ and he had a very big dance specialty in it, a solo. I was a floorwalker in the number, he was a customer, and he was dancing around getting clothes for this soldier coming out of the army. And he was just brilliant—so flashy—and he wasn’t going to let anyone get in his way. Even then he had that kind of ambition. One very funny thing I’ll always remember is, at one point he had leaped offstage—stage right—and my entrance was timed to his leap-off. So one day I took a head-start run before I leaped onto the stage just as he was leaping off and as we crossed in the air—I’ll never forget—he said to me, ‘Carl, I’m the lead dancer and you’re outjumping me!’ It was fantastic! Later, he said, ‘Why don’t you land over there, in that third of the stage?’ And I said, ‘But all I can do is jump! You dance. My thing is I jump!’ Anyway, we laughed about that, I remember.”

  No one was more committed. “At the end of that number,” dancer Jeanna Belkin said, “Fosse, who was featured, had to do à la seconde turns and very quickly in a two-four tempo. When the curtain started coming down, Marian Niles and I, watching from the wings, would rush downstage at just the right time to stop him from spinning into the curtain. He was that involved in the dance. He was that passionate.” This happened every night. And every night, Niles reached out to save him.

  Call Me Mister opened in New Haven, after which it moved on to Philadelphia and then Boston; it played to loving audiences and solid reviews for five months—a long time. “We had a pretty crazy company,” said Reiner. “People were fighting, people were falling in love.”

  Fosse had one eye on Niles, a peppy chorus dancer with the face of a girl and the mouth of a hooker, Debbie Reynolds after a night with Mae West. They called her Spooky. She was up for anything. “Marian was a spitfire,” said dancer Harvey Evans. “She was just dynamite.” “I wanted to walk behind her with a tape recorder,” said dancer Margery Beddow. “Everything she said was hysterical.” In addition to being a career smoker, drinker, and all-night partier, Niles had what none of Fosse’s former girlfriends did: talent and experience. “Spooky was a wonderful tap dancer,” said Belkin. “The show called for her to do a mixture of ballet and tap, and she could move smoothly between them. There were others who were stronger in the chorus, others with longer legs, but Spooky was the best tap dancer in the bunch.” Like Fosse, she had been dancing for money since she was a kid, but unlike Fosse, Niles really had played some of the most fashionable bistros, and some of them in New York. She was a real pro. “Bobby liked beauty but he loved talent,” said dancer Deborah Geffner. “That’s what he wanted to sleep with. He wanted to get as far into it as he could.” Craving solace from his sense of inadequacy and adding value to his gifts, Fosse, for the rest of his life, would surround himself with an army of talent—talent of all kinds—using all means possible, including sex, to mine their value for his own. Niles was the first of many. He may even have loved her too.

  They decided to team up. As a double act, Fosse and Niles were twice as appealing to club agents, and with a lot of hard work, they could move up from night holes outside Newark all the way to the Plaza Hotel. Or so they dreamed. “No matter where the show took us,” Belkin said, “whether New Haven or Boston or Los Angeles, in the afternoons and on their nights off Bobby and Spooky rehearsed their tap routines.” Niles was more than a great partner; she gave Fosse a foretaste of a big future, the feeling of shared ambition easily confused with love. And she had something more tangible to offer him—a repertoire. “Limehouse Blues,” the jewel of her solo act, Fosse remade into a duet, heavy on drums, part tap, part Jack Cole–Oriental. It would be a Fosse-and-Niles staple. “She was a not too educated girl,” Belkin said. “Too in love to see how much she was giving him.”

  For the newcomer, the thin line between influence and plagiarism is difficult to see. For Fosse, who had spent more time watching than inventing, who was ashamed of his showbiz instincts—the vaudeville, the burlesque—that line was almost invisible. Fearing he had nothing of his own, he drew regularly, and reluctantly, from the offerings around him. (A year earlier, in Ziegfeld Follies, Astaire had also danced “Limehouse Blues” as a duet.) Fosse did not consider his chameleonism or the inventions it would spawn anything but a life jacket for a drowning man, which is how he danced. Despite his flash, when he danced with Niles, Fosse moved with an inwardness comparable to shame. She “had a lot of clarity as a dancer,” one dancer said, “with wonderful changes of rhythm. Bob just seemed detached as a dancer, as though he was choreographing himself out of the number.” How to open up, how to play off an audience—she gave him that too.

  During Call Me Mister’s five-week run in Boston, the company stayed at the Bradford Hotel, a few doors from the Shubert Theater. The weekend the Ice Capades came to town, the Bradford’s every square foot was filled with smoke and the chatter of show folk. It was pandemonium, a cageless zoo. Instant lifelong friends threw their arms around each other, and all of them flooded strangers’ suites until the sun came up or a wife walked in. Buddy Hackett turned his room into an open bar, and girls peeled off the wallpaper. Marian Niles didn’t stand a chance. “Could you imagine,” Hackett said, “being twenty-one years old and you’re out with a musical and there’s sixteen girl dancers and sixteen girl singers plus the leads and semi-leads? What a candy store!” Late in the evening, Hackett’s room was mostly empty, so there wasn’t much of a need for Fosse to close the bathroom door behind him, which is how Hackett, looking up from his girl, caught Bob’s reflection in the medicine-chest mirror, jauntily fucking another reflection. Before Hackett had time to wonder how Fosse could have left the door open or how it was anatomically possible to achieve such an angle, Marian Niles walked in, burst into tears, and tore out of the room. (“We all knew about Bobby,” Belkin said. “But we kept our mouths shut.”) Hackett ran after her.

  Fosse and Niles married in Chicago. The tour brought them to town, so the time seemed right for Fosse to command center stage, a professional entertainer in full view of his high-school friends and family. On the morning of July 8, the wedding party arrived at St. Chrysostom’s Church, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Reiner appeared with an 8-millimeter camera and pointed it at ushers Hackett and William Warfield, a beaming Sadie Fosse, and the happy couple. Backstage, Fosse pouffed his ascot, and Niles, on the opposite end of the church, slipped taps onto her wedding shoes. “She was just a very sweet girl,” Reiner said. “Really very in love with Bobby.” When the organ sounded, she made her entrance, shuffling down the aisle.

  Frederic Weaver was not in attendance. Days earlier, he warned Charlie Grass he had no intention of standing by as one of his best pupils destroyed the career he had been working toward for a decade. “Mr. Weaver was a hundred percent against marriage if you’re in show business,” Grass said. “It was somebody pulling you back. And family too. Bob knew how he felt about that. He’d made it very clear to us early on that you’ve got to be comp
letely dedicated to show business. You’re married to show business.” Hackett was certain Niles was pregnant—either again or for the first time—and that the groom, wanting to do right by her, had no choice but to make it official. “He was very, very nervous and not cool at all,” Hackett recalled. “That was not a guy who wanted to get married.”

  There was a reception that afternoon at the Fosse family home. But Fosse and Niles couldn’t stay long. That night they had a show.

  Call Me Mister closed in San Francisco in October 1947 and Fosse posted his final review in the scrapbook he had been keeping since the show opened. He underlined (with the help of a ruler) in red pen every mention of his name, whether good or bad, clipped every article out, and attached it to the page with long strips of tape he laid down at perfect right angles. Even duplicates were included, as though Fosse had to prove not once but twice that it had actually happened. Beside the final review (which heralded Fosse as “awfully good”) he wrote, “End of ‘Call Me Mister.’ Also end of Bob Fosse.”

  Fosse and Niles arrived in New York with an agent but no money and no job. In the uneasy months to follow, which Fosse and Niles spent glaring at the phone and imploring it to ring, Maurice Lapue reached out to nightclubs as near as Long Island and as far as the Dominican Republic. But no one was buying.