Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Most of what they had been rehearsing was old stuff in new clothing, ballroom-type numbers with a youthful touch. Where he could, Fosse threw in a little taste of vaudeville, but nothing too crass; he and Niles were going for the uptown crowd, the Marge and Gower Champion set. Elegant and smiling, the Champions—she had her first tutu before she turned one; he signed with MCA before he graduated high school—had mastered the look of class and good breeding that Fosse feared he couldn’t even fake. But he tried. With no money for studio space, the newlyweds rehearsed their act in the tiny one-room they rented above Times Square, careful not to twirl into the furniture or leap into a wall.

  When they weren’t rehearsing, which was rarely, they traveled with packs of other dancers, musicians, and novelty acts, hopeful that someone with an ear to the ground would bring them news of an audition before it hit the papers or they lost the job to another agent’s dancers. The jobless assembled at Hansen’s drugstore and the nearby Charlie’s Tavern, a convenient few paces from Roseland. Those with money for a meal could find seats at the bar or in booths under the headshots Charlie hung on the peeling paint. If the place needed a little work, Charlie could turn to the young and hungry, to Fosse and Niles and the legions of unemployed comics and jazzmen of New York who stood in that patch of turf like it was their office, waiting all day (and, if they didn’t have gigs, all night) for some guy who some other guy knew to show up with a lead.

  In a business of lucky breaks, where the revolving door of chance turns for jerk and genius alike, patience, not talent, would get Fosse and Niles where they wanted to be. Dancing was the easy part. Sitting by the phone took work. It took cigarettes and cheap wine and skipping meals. Talking about it made it worse, but not talking about it gave them nothing to do but think about what wasn’t working, and Fosse blamed himself. Never mind what was good for their feet; they should be going through the routine again. Somewhere some team was doing just that, getting better. “Bob likened show business to boxing,” said Ann Reinking. “He said, ‘If you can stay in the ring it will turn your way again.’” Or: What doesn’t kill you will kill you later.

  Winter hit. Waiting outside the theaters for their names to be called, Fosse and Niles huddled close, massaging each other’s muscles to stay loose.

  She couldn’t leave him. They needed money, and Fosse was the closest thing she had to a chance.

  He couldn’t tell his mother and father what he’d told Mr. Weaver, that he’d spent all their money. “He had a drug problem,” Charlie Grass said, “and Mr. Weaver helped carry him through.” The maestro put tens and twenties in an envelope and directed his best and favorite student to spend the money on doctors and drug counselors. Weaver knew the signs. He had seen the top talents in vaudeville waste their lives circling the drain, and he sensed that Fosse watched them with a kind of envy. He had the jazzman’s crush on burning out. “I always thought I’d be dead by twenty-five,” he said. “I wanted to be. I thought it was romantic. I thought people would mourn me: ‘Oh, that young career.’”

  Then one day the phone rang. Lapue had booked them into the Samovar—in Montreal. In a flash, Marian changed her name to the much tonier Mary-Ann; they got on a bus and played the club on March 23, 1948, where they were, according to a local paper, “the most promising young dancers . . . in many months.” A week later, they were at the Boulevard in Elmhurst, Long Island. Niles recalled, “When we got off the floor someone said, ‘Did your husband hurt himself?’ I said, ‘What d’you mean?’ She said, ‘Well, he fell.’ . . . He fell and got up and never knew it. Literally fell and got up.” Rest was unthinkable. “They would do their nightclub act somewhere,” said dancer Eileen Casey, a friend of Niles’s, “and then, that night, go back and rehearse parts of the act that weren’t working.”

  “I get terribly involved in my work,” Fosse later said, “and everything else goes.” Nothing was ever good enough because it came from him, and when he wasn’t fooling them, he was no good. “He thought he was the best and he thought he was terrible,” Ann Reinking said.

  In May, Fosse and Niles played Miami’s Clover Club. Onward to the Dominican Republic, to the Hotel Jaragua, where they appeared for the first time as top-liners. Then north to the Embassy Club in Jacksonville and, finally, back to New York on September 15, 1948, for Bob Fosse’s first appearance on a Manhattan stage: the Belmont Hotel’s Glass Hat. Then October: one night at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. November: a week in Norfolk, Virginia. Come December, they were back in New York for their first TV appearance. Kobb’s Korner was a hillbilly jamboree as stupid as it sounds, but it was also CBS and free advertising for their upcoming tenure at the Pierre Hotel’s Cotillion Room, one of the most romantically appointed nightclubs in the city.

  The Cotillion. Fosse and Niles could take a deep breath. They’d made it, almost.

  Well located at Sixty-First and Fifth Avenue, the Cotillion was only a few steps—and, for the lucky ones, a few bookings—away from the Plaza’s Persian Room, where the Champions cut the parquet for the city’s most fashionable grownups. Fosse and Niles were ready. Refined over the past year, their mélange of tap, ballroom, and East Indian styles had been universally well received. It had spunk. While most café performers built their acts on a kind of pop ballet, Fosse and Niles moved fast, with a Broadway feeling of something for everyone—at least, everyone so far.

  The evening of December 7, 1948, they arrived early at the Cotillion Room to scrub the glossy patches from the dance floor; too much shine, and they’d be slipping around like the Keystone Cops. Then a run-through and a quick bite in the upstairs bedroom the Pierre gave them to change in (a double-breasted business suit for him, a tasteful dress for her), after which they stubbed out their cigarettes and flurried back downstairs to wait, as they had so many times, for their introduction music.

  Standing for the first time before a savvy New York audience, Fosse and Niles were about to learn how strong their act really was. This time there would be no sketch to blame for whatever bad press befell them, no dimwitted director to complain about at Hansen’s after the show. There would be only failure—and all of it Fosse’s. He was the choreographer.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome . . .”

  To the sound of applause, two silhouettes strode into the ballroom and took their starting positions under the chandelier. The room—lined in floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park—fell silent. Then a fork clinked. Three hundred hidden faces at one hundred tiny tables, and none of them belonged to Mr. Weaver or Miss Comerford.

  This was it. There was no more rehearsal.

  “You’ve heard of Marge and Gower Champion?” Fosse asked into the darkness. “Well, we’re the runner-ups.”

  They laughed. Good. At least he’d nailed that: knocking oneself for entertainment.

  They danced two twelve-minute shows that night, an early and a late; they were fast and clean and, by the end of their final number, beat. But how were they? The act that worked so well out of town was by then old news in New York. “If they looked good they didn’t have an act that showed much originality,” opined Billboard. “Most of their steps were the same. Only their music was different for each number. An East Indian satirical dance was overplayed, and their Eddie Leonard thing with heavy taps, tho [sic] flashy, meant little.” Neither Fosse nor Billboard’s critic could have known that the act, with its flash references to the early days of American entertainment, would one day emerge as a style, accrue an ideology, and change the face of dance, film, theater, and television—for good. “With more imaginative routines,” concluded Billboard, “they can go places.”

  They needed a signature, an angle.

  They took dancing roles in the national company of Make Mine Manhattan, a musical revue starring Bert Lahr in a part Sid Caesar originated on Broadway. The show opened in Boston on January 11, 1949, moved to Philadelphia two weeks later, and then went on to Baltimore, where a local critic, delighted by Fosse and Niles’s big ballet number,
wrote, “What faith a wife must have in her husband to allow him to lift her so high above his head, also to swing her around through space with such abandon! Suppose hubby should be angry with wifey some night—and decide to administer a bit of punishment?”

  Those were dark days for Mary-Ann Niles. Fosse’s infidelities humiliated her, and in the hours after the applause died down, her suffering was splintered by loneliness, the feeling that no matter how incensed those who consoled her appeared to be, no one was terribly shocked or outraged by his behavior. It was, after all, that way for all of them. That was life on the road: a hundred hotel-room doors guarded a hundred unknowns, and everyone had something on someone. Except Niles. No one had anything on Mary-Ann. She was the party on two feet, openly adored by the entire company, Fosse included. So he said.

  At the show’s end, Fosse and Niles returned to New York, jobless yet again. To juice up their act, they gathered what was left of their money and Mary-Ann’s fortitude and enrolled in dance class with Frances Cole at her studio in the CBS building. “There were about fifteen of us in that class,” said dancer Phyllis Sherwood. “In those days, you did more ballet than you did jazz, and Bobby would like to stay in the back, almost like he was embarrassed.” He probably was. Ballet was Fosse’s weakness, or so he believed, and for the duration, he laid low, covering up, apologizing as he sponged. “Unless he knew everything perfect,” Sherwood said, “he would stand in the back there behind Mary-Ann or he would watch, like he was sucking everything in.” He watched the technique, yes, but he watched the people too, inculcating in himself their emotions, imagined histories, and idiosyncrasies. They were characters, all of them richly detailed. Everyone had a walk. Everyone had a tell.

  In that very same CBS building, at Broadway and Fifty-Fourth Street, Ed Sullivan taped his shows, and the network broadcast The Fifty-Fourth Street Revue, a live variety program with regular spots for Fosse and Niles and fellow Lapue client Carl Reiner. They made several appearances (once with Bojangles Robinson) through May and June of 1949, Fosse rising to the post of dance director and attracting the attention of twenty-six-year-old Sid Caesar. He brought them on a show of his, The Admiral Broadway Revue, and made Fosse and Niles his opening act at Chicago’s Empire Room, where Variety caught them, by then a full-blown dance-comedy double. Comedy—Fosse loved to mess around; Niles lived for a laugh—that was the angle they needed. “Little bit of comedy in ‘showoff’ stint garners chuckles but duo really starts selling with their East Indian hoke tap, sharp travesty on the Jack Cole imitators. Satire on the old vaude days at the Palace is close to the original with youngsters getting nifty reception for cakewalk finale.” Showbiz; Fosse had let it in again. Maybe that’s what Caesar saw in them. Showbiz and satire.

  They toured again, briefly, through the fall of 1949, and then returned to New York, where it was back to Charlie’s or Hansen’s and a few weeks of waiting by the phone, which soon rang with news of Alive and Kicking, a harebrained revue to be choreographed by Jack Cole, the slithering id of American exotica, and off they went. (The day of their audition, Gwen Verdon, Fosse’s future wife and lifelong partner, was in the audience serving as Cole’s right-hand dance assistant and keeper of his style.) Fosse and Niles did not get the job; in November, they signed on instead to Dance Me a Song, another revue, also harebrained. But it hardly mattered. The once-popular revue format was dying or dead (the Oklahoma! revolution already seven years in the past) and Fosse’s marriage was a corpse duet, but in Dance Me a Song, Fosse found himself, at long last, on Broadway. On Broadway and in love.

  Thirty-Seven Years

  HER NAME WAS Joan McCracken. She was a ballet dancer.

  Barely five feet and broad across the shoulders, she looked more like an acrobat than a swan princess, but when a soft light beamed across her eyes, a more than melancholy romance shone, and Joan became the moon. Glancing at those big, silent eyes, one might have guessed—and guessed correctly—she was in love with Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” “Her eyes, in particular, often looked as if she were about to cry, or had been crying,” a friend observed. And yet when Joan McCracken danced, nothing like sadness came through. Laughter did. The New York Times once called her “practically a musical comedy in herself.”

  McCracken—like Fosse, like Verdon—had learned to offset her clumsy figure and irregular technique with levity. By way of splits, straddles, back bends, and contortions, she added to ballet the plucky air of a knockabout, a clown. “There are lots of ballerinas,” Agnes de Mille said of McCracken, “but comediennes who can dance are rare.” De Mille thought Joan’s lower extremities resembled piano legs, but she had a balletic grace that tangled with something wilder, more American. “McCracken was exactly the right kind of dancer to embody the choreographic innovations de Mille was bringing to Broadway,” wrote biographer Lisa Jo Sagolla, “the melding of acting and movement in a balletic yet nonclassical vein that reflected and spoke to mid-twentieth-century American sensibilities.”

  She was pure personality. With a quick wink to the second balcony, McCracken could smack a guy in the groin, cross his eyes, and take his heart for payment. As one of the original members of the Actors Studio, she could dance a dance as if it were a scene in a play. She was an actress. “I can fall down and make it look real,” McCracken said to de Mille during an Oklahoma! rehearsal one afternoon—and on opening night, the whole world saw she wasn’t kidding. They went nuts. “You could have sopped the audience up with a piece of bread,” de Mille said. Playbill changed her billing to read The Girl Who Falls Down: Joan McCracken.

  Fosse fell for McCracken and snapped Mary-Ann from his life like training wheels. It was obvious to everyone: Mary-Ann, poor thing, didn’t stand a chance. In ability, looks, class, fame, and achievement, McCracken was simply the next level, an artist and a star. A full decade older than Fosse, she had appeared onstage with Charles Laughton and John Garfield and had even danced in the movies, at MGM, no less, home to the greatest names in Hollywood. Lover and mentor, McCracken was the best parts of Mary-Ann and Mr. Weaver; her attention was as invigorating to Fosse as a headline in the New York Times. “He would give her a flower when she came off stage,” Bob Scheerer said. “It was very loving.”

  To Mary-Ann, Fosse gave a new washing machine, and he went out with Joan or his new friend comedian Wally Cox (who, along with Joan, was the show’s breakout star) while Niles stayed at home, drinking and wringing his clean pants dry. At least he was honest about lying—once, she could let it go. But this time was different. Joan McCracken was different. But feeling sorry for herself—that’s where Mary-Ann Niles drew the line. No matter who knew or how humiliating displays became, Niles would show them all that she was okay. She would laugh out loud for them to see. Ol’ Spooky (she wanted them to say), always game for a good time.

  That McCracken continued to upstage her onstage was a humiliation too perverse to bear. “Strange New Look” was widely considered one of the best numbers in the show, dramatic and just a touch poetic, tailor-made for McCracken’s talents. Worse, Dance Me a Song’s choreographer, Robert Sidney, seemed to give her everything she asked for—additional music here, creative freedom there, and he featured her, yet again, in “Paper,” a musical-comedy-style ballet that had McCracken, the very picture of beatnik grace, in a coquettish black velvet jacket and black tights. The number was ridiculous, but McCracken was impervious and shone all the brighter by comparison. Not Niles. Bourrées, arabesques, sissonnes; the curtain call came and went, and Mary-Ann split from the group and went back to her hotel window and her cigarettes. If she left Fosse, she’d be leaving her partner, her career, and if she left her career, she’d be back to zero, just another girl Bob Fosse loved once, without a dime to dance on. So she opened another bottle and hung his pants up to dry, jabbing them with clothespins.

  Dance Me a Song opened on Broadway at the Royale Theater on January 20, 1950, and it closed thirty-five performances later. But no matter: work was steady now. A few episodes of Toni T
win Time (Jack Lemmon, host) begat spots on Ford Star Revue and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. As the Lucky Strike Extra dancers on Your Hit Parade, Fosse and Niles appeared weekly, live, in front of studio cameras and danced in a variety of styles to the hit songs of the moment. Confined to chart-topping tunes, Fosse was forced to produce, and produce quickly, in styles not necessarily to his taste. But limitation was adaptation. Added dance modes increased Fosse’s ever-expanding choreographic vocabulary, and the fear of deadlines (and public failure) whipped him on. (Gwen Verdon: “Interviewers would say, ‘What is your motive? What drives you?’ He would say, ‘Fear.’ And everyone would laugh, but Bob was telling the truth.”) Flop sweat—one of Fosse’s favorite expressions—was the stick he beat against his own ass. It had to hurt; stress was his muse. “Take care of myself?” He would laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  With Joan McCracken appearing (not too far away) at Connecticut’s Westport Playhouse, her day- and nighttime assignations with Fosse slid easily into the cracks between rehearsals. They carried on as McCracken’s current show, Angel in the Pawnshop, toured New England for the rest of the year; it arrived, finally, on Broadway on January 18, 1951, only a day before Fosse and Niles returned to the Cotillion Room. With little left to call a marriage, they danced better than they ever had. “Since last caught,” Billboard said, “the kids have improved so much there’s hardly any comparison. Today they are one of the freshest acts to hit the classroom circuit in many a long month. The tow-headed, boyish Fosse is more than a hoofer, tho [sic] he’s excellent in that department; he’s now a comedian with a sly approach that builds, if not for yocks, then certainly for healthy enough laughs.” The place was so full, chairs had to be pushed against the walls. “The kids’ walk-off, a strawhatted old vaude exit, complete with sand-steps and deliberately corny chatter, almost stopped the show.” They were held over.