by Wasson, Sam
L. B. Mayer’s 167 Culver City acres of offices, sound stages, prop shops, projection rooms, bungalows, recording studios, and rehearsal halls once teemed with six thousand workers, two dozen directors, thirty stars, and one dentist; it had never spelled efficiency, but Mayer, the grand benefactor of the great American movie musical, hadn’t built his reputation by being cheap.
“If I start up another studio,” he said to Esther Williams one night at Chasen’s, “would you come with me?”
“Thanks, Mr. Mayer,” she said. “But where are you going to find a pool like the one on Stage 30? How can I go with you if you don’t have a pool?”
“I’ll build one.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “But call me if you do.”
He never did.
Now Dore Schary, the pipe-smoking crusader Mayer installed to get MGM back on its feet, had the place to himself. Gone was the man who approved a five-hundred-thousand-dollar budget for a single number (the ballet from An American in Paris), and in came a former screenwriter, an intellectual, angling for “important” pictures. Schary’s unofficial credo—Nobler and Cheaper—didn’t go over well with Metro’s older artists and technicians, but few were more irritated and creatively hindered than Arthur Freed, the producer Mayer had hired in 1939 to oversee every aspect of musical production at MGM, starting with The Wizard of Oz. Economic mandates did not work for the Freed unit. They didn’t create fast, like television people did. Musicals took time. They took talent.
Before Schary, Freed had reinvented a genre that was slipping into decadence; more than simply rich in resources and luxury, his musicals, conceived holistically, were the most carefully and thoughtfully constructed productions in Hollywood history. Prior to Freed, a great many movie musicals were diminished by unintegrated musical asides, song-and-dance episodes that interrupted—rather than enhanced—the story line (story line being a generous term for the hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show! scenario). Mostly, these numbers were shot head-on in long airless takes meant to simulate the natural theatrical relationship of audience and performer. The pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein dearth of resonant material didn’t help. Add to that the Fred and Ginger movies, Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic floorshows, the many miscellaneous backstagers that seemed to vanish on the take-up reel, and one could see that the Hollywood musical was doomed to vapor. Freed changed that; he made vapor into liquid. Elsewhere, escapist fare might escape reason, but in the glory years of Arthur Freed, entertainment was not a euphemism; it was a dream made real. But by 1952, when Bob Fosse sublet Buddy Hackett’s place in West Hollywood, MGM was ending its tenure as American pop culture’s primary producer.
Ghosts of a golden time ambled around the sound stages as if they were living people. Judy Garland. Gene Kelly making Brigadoon. Donald O’Connor. The Donald O’Connor knockoffs. The guileless Bob Fosse fit somewhere in there, though exactly where, no one knew for sure. He didn’t have Kelly’s hardy build or expansive spirit. He didn’t score high on the O’Connor scale of personality. Never mind that he was one of the best dancers on the lot. Close-ups didn’t care about that. Bob Fosse was mild of voice, limited of expression, and small onscreen. What did they need him for?
Fosse endured many screen tests, innumerable changes of clothes, hairstyles, poses, and expressions, until the studio finally decided who he was. They would accent the trait Fosse’s women called his most compelling: his boyishness. They gave him a toupee. “That was a trauma for me,” Fosse said; at twenty-five, he was certain his thinning hair predicted a lifetime of impotence.
Orders were always changing. MGM moved Fosse from the Donald O’Connor part in Stanley Donen’s Jumbo, which had been postponed, to the Gene Kelly part in Stanley Donen’s Give a Girl a Break; that is, the part Kelly was supposed to play before the picture was downgraded—thanks to the Schary regime—to a smaller-budget film. From there, more was compromised. Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich knew they had a turkey on their hands. The last-minute casting (to Fosse’s awe and consternation) of Marge and Gower Champion gave them only ten days to rewrite what years could not have improved. Unceasing revisions put a strain on a cast that now included Debbie Reynolds, fresh off Singin’ in the Rain, who quickly and accurately determined that Bob Fosse, a dancer nobody had ever heard of, was her director’s primary interest; she shared this gripe with the Champions, who also felt shortchanged. “They were Mr. Show Biz, and we were no talent,” Reynolds said. To be fair, Donen had to think fast. With the script in a shambles, he saw Fosse as a lifeboat on the horizon. “In my opinion,” Donen said, “he was going to be as good of a song-and-dance man, for lack of a better word, as any of the others—the only other two—as Kelly and Astaire. I thought, ‘This guy is going to be it.’”
While the Champions worked with Reynolds, Donen and Fosse, in isolation from the company, began what would become a lifelong friendship. Like Joe Papp and Buddy Hackett, Donen shared Fosse’s hoofer ethic of hard work and good humor. At sixteen, Donen had been in the chorus of the original Pal Joey, a major feat, Fosse thought, as was Donen’s preternaturally fast transition from tap dancing to directing major MGM musicals—with Fred Astaire! Only a few years older than Fosse but with power and experience in the movie department, Donen rose quickly from friend to mentor/friend, as Papp had in the Pacific. All of Fosse’s relationships, erotic or platonic, generally began this way: a boy, eager to collaborate, seeking to learn from a master. These liaisons had a political benefit too: friending talent was never a bad idea. Especially when the friend was the director and the script was being rewritten daily.
“Fosse and Donen were wrapped up in each other,” Marge Champion remembered. “They really didn’t give us the time of day.” When the two weren’t working, they were clowning. Donen was seen creeping up behind Fosse to snatch a toupee from his balding head. Fosse was seen creeping up behind Debbie Reynolds, hoping for a kiss (he didn’t get one).
The bright light might have been stunning that California afternoon as Fosse shuffled across the lot with Stanley Donen, but he wouldn’t have known it; the world, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, was something he’d have to crane his neck to notice. Naturally hunched, he had an almost collaborative complicity with the pavement, a rehearsal space he could engage at any time. All he had to do was look down, and he disappeared.
And then, suddenly, walking across the lot, he reappeared.
He felt a rhythm he knew.
Fosse looked up.
There. Out of a distant sound stage sailed a human stripe that looked and moved alarmingly like Fred Astaire. The bounding figure appeared to recognize Donen, and he came toward them. Yes, Fosse saw it: that heedless stride. That merry pinch he gave his tie. Fosse watched a few more paces, and he was certain. It was him.
Donen made the introduction, and Astaire flung out a hand. “Hiya, Foss!”
Fosse was too thwacked to speak. Bashful under normal circumstances, he was practically unalive now. Fosse shot his hands into his pockets and looked down, zeroing in on a nail a few inches from the world’s greatest dancer’s shoe. Astaire toe-tapped the nail as thoughtlessly as he would flick a cigarette, but to Fosse, that nail was no cigarette—it was Ginger Rogers. And then, without warning, Astaire flicked his foot, and—ping!—the nail was in the air and then careening off the sound-stage wall with the force of a rifle shot. Nonplussed by Fosse’s silence, God said goodbye to Donen, tipped his hat to Fosse, and headed off to eat.
Fosse was horrified. He was nothing; Astaire danced even as he stood still. The precision of the swipe and offhanded elegance of the technique made Fosse feel like that sound-stage wall a thousand nails later. He told Donen to go to lunch without him.
When the coast was clear, Fosse approached the spot where the nail had been and practiced the swipe as best he could remember it. As much as he wanted to replicate the step, he wanted to duplicate the sound. He wanted to hear the exact right scuff of shoe on pavement, the precise ping of nail on w
all. He wanted to kick at the exact same angle in the identical time signature and recover, as Astaire did, with the cool look of having not performed a miracle. “You see it on the screen,” Fosse would later say of Astaire, “and it looks like he just made it up. I mean, he just happened to have some firecrackers in his hand, he just happened to be around a piano or a set of drums. ‘Well, I’ll fool around a bit.’”
As the rest of the MGM employees ate their sandwiches, Fosse kicked the nail around the lot, but he never got it flying as Astaire had. Dozens of kicks later, he was still Bob Fosse.
Give a Girl a Break wrapped in early December of 1952 and Fosse, energized by his first appearance on film, flew back to New York to be with Joan. His marriage to Niles officially ended, Fosse married McCracken on December 30 in a civil ceremony, a city clerk officiating. The diabetes McCracken had tried so hard to conceal—if people found out, she feared, they’d never let her dance—had whittled her doll-like limbs to sticks. She was a marionette, brittle, wan, seemingly too delicate to move. Still, she had been cast in Me and Juliet, a new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical directed by George Abbott, the Zeus of Broadway comedy. By the time rehearsals began, in March, Fosse was back in Hollywood.
Returning to MGM, Fosse discovered Give a Girl a Break, his star-making breakthrough, now belonged to the Champions. “After they previewed it for MGM,” Marge Champion said, “Stanley was told to reshoot it closer to the original script and make it as much our movie as Bob’s.” Donen did as he was told, but MGM was still unhappy with the picture. It was released to bland reviews.
Though it was Gower Champion who shared dance credit with Donen, Fosse had managed to slip in enough of his own material to get Mr. Weaver and Charlie Grass, watching back home, to sit straight up in their seats. “Charlie,” Bob explained to his friend later, “I showed them a couple of Riff Brothers tricks”—wings and toe stands, hammed up for the camera. Dancing “In Our United State,” Fosse pulled out the old vaudeville stops, Ray Bolgering around on his heels, Chaplining at the knees, shooting up his hands as Miss Comerford had told him not to, throwing his limbs wide then snapping them shut, like a starfish going sardine. Fosse was clearly the best dancer in the movie. His articulation—sharp, fast, and exact—is the visual equivalent of Olivier’s diction. The dancer can’t act, but he (almost) doesn’t need to; his innate gee-shucks-ness suits the part—so much so that Charlie Grass thought that Fosse, playing Bob Dowdy, was really playing himself. “That’s the teenaged Bob Fosse,” he said.
The picture fizzled. “I was living in a one-room apartment in Culver City, with a Murphy bed, believing in my own stardom,” Fosse said. “But then, within a year I realized those people who told me I’d be a movie star weren’t telling me the truth.” Stopping by one of choreographer Michael Kidd’s parties, he ran into Gwen Verdon, who was about to head, with Kidd, to Broadway to start rehearsing Can-Can, the new Cole Porter show. They recognized each other from around the MGM lot, where Gwen had been working on The Merry Widow as Jack Cole’s assistant and lead cancan dancer (“Dance it like a lady athlete,” Cole had told her). Beginning enthusiastically with discussions of Cole and Astaire, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon had a lot to talk about that night. Joan McCracken, Mrs. Bob Fosse, had been one of Verdon’s early role models. Her performance in Joseph Losey’s production of Galileo had made an immediate and lasting impression on the teenage Gwen. It was the first time she understood a dancer could act (this was Brecht!), that a musical-theater comedienne could be an artist, and Verdon—who at that age had danced mostly in girlie shows around Hollywood—immediately signed up for acting classes. Fosse’s proximity to McCracken and Verdon’s to Cole raised their esteem for each other, inflaming the flirty lure of mutual curiosity and the snug air of a second date, which, in a way, Kidd’s party was. They had met before, when Fosse and Niles auditioned for Alive and Kicking.
They talked into the night, agreeing that movies weren’t showing them at their best. Hollywood’s Production Code Administration censors, frowning at every wink, had had their shears out for Verdon since her honky-tonk twist in The I Don’t Care Girl—a dance they cut. It set a precedent. “Then came David and Bathsheba,” she said. “David wanted to go to war but he was supposed to go home to Bathsheba, and my dance was supposed to put him in the mood to go home to her. Well, I guess it was too much, because everybody who saw it got the same idea . . .” The same thing happened to Verdon in The Mississippi Gambler, in Meet Me After the Show, in The Farmer Takes a Wife, and, again, as she expected, in The Merry Widow.
“One more body on the cutting room floor,” she would say with a laugh. “So what’s new?”
It gave Verdon a lift knowing someone thought she was too hot to be onscreen, even if she herself didn’t really believe it. “I never think of myself as sexy,” she said. “Most of the time I’m just-kidding sex, you know.”
She could get away with more onstage than on film. There were no censors on Broadway.
In Los Angeles, Fosse was far from McCracken and the grimy New York streets he trusted; his disappointment over Give a Girl a Break turned into loneliness, and his loneliness, compounded by his worst fears, turned into despair. The despair shattered him. He blamed Hollywood, the crimes it committed in the name of creativity. He obsessed over the injustice, wondering why he looked better onstage than onscreen, why lesser talents fared better. This time, he was not just being too hard on himself. No one could tell him that his failure lived only in his fears. In Give a Girl a Break, he finally had the proof he needed, and his new role, in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, was just as flabby. “My parts were getting smaller,” Fosse said, looking back. “I knew what that meant.”
He confided in Peggy King, a young singer he’d met in his first few days at the studio when they were both supposed to be in Jumbo. “He was depressed,” she said. “There was no doubt about that. We would comfort each other. I remember telling him I couldn’t get in to see Arthur Freed. I remember saying to Bobby, ‘At least you’re making a film!’ We both knew if we did something wrong, we were out of there. Bobby would say, ‘I feel like they’re watching me.’ Well, of course they were. It was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer! We were all treated like serfs.” Fosse could break his contract and try again in New York, but movie stars weren’t born on Broadway. The money and fame was here, where Astaire lived. Where Fosse waited for his next lackluster assignment. “Every day was the same,” King said. “We got there at nine and started our lessons. Or, if we were lucky enough to be shooting, we’d start shooting. On Saturday we were expected to be doing benefits to ballyhoo new pictures. I was doing so many benefits I had benefits coming out my ears. Or they would give us walk-ons in pictures. Otherwise, they didn’t tell us anything. There was no information, just days of waiting. Why didn’t they get in touch with us? We were all worried—even the big stars were worried. They thought we were going to replace them. We thought they were going to block us. Bobby and I didn’t know what in the world was going on. So we hung on to each other.”
He withdrew. “He lived like a monk,” recalled journalist Ken Geist, “because he wanted to save all his energy for his dances.” His every free hour was spent in the Eleanor Powell bungalow, rehearsing. He missed lunch. He rarely went out. “I loved him, I would have done anything for him, but he could be remote,” King said. “None of us knew where Bobby lived, and we were his friends.”
He nursed his loneliness with girls. The actress Pier Angeli was so beautiful, so subtle, like Garbo with a tan, her face seemingly lifted from one of those tender, timid, sinless handmaidens of mythology. Anna, as her friends called her, was said to be kind to those in the ranks, and she spoke with a sincerity unusual to the famous—or perhaps that was her native Italian translated into English. Universally beloved, Anna drew the big time; producer Arthur Loew, Kirk Douglas, and James Dean fought for her Saturday nights. Fosse had to get in line. “Anna was moving up very, very fast,” said King. “Bobby would not have had a chance.” Fosse blamed hi
s broken heart on the studio. Had he shown more promise, had MGM seen his promise, he knew studio executives might have intervened on his behalf, setting him and Anna up on dates so they could be photographed together canoodling in little bistros, the way the studio had done with Anna and Vic Damone.
When The Affairs of Dobie Gillis was completed, in early February 1953, the very same Arthur Loew screened the film for Dore Schary in a projection room underneath the Thalberg Building. A meager seventy-two minutes later, Schary had seen all he needed to of Bob Fosse. “I think it would have been better if you had been in it and he had produced it,” he said to Loew. Schary’s mood worsened several months later, when, in the same projection room, he beheld the muddled furor of Arena, MGM’s first—and, he hoped, last—3-D movie. But before he could sign its death certificate, a high-ranking executive (who had invested a half a million of MGM’s dollars in 3-D glasses) suggested he might let stereoscopic cinema live five hundred thousand dollars longer. Schary gave in and made Kiss Me Kate, MGM’s final 3-D picture. Bob Fosse was cast in March 1953.
He recoiled when he saw the sound stage. “When I saw the sets for Kate, I thought, ‘No, they’re wrong . . . that’s not backstage.’ Everything was beautiful, glossy. The real backstage that I knew was a jungle.” There was one saving grace, however. Choreographer Hermes Pan asked Kiss Me Kate’s top dancers—which included Fosse, Ann Miller, Bobby Van, and Tommy Rall—to look at a section of a Gene Kelly film, Invitation to the Dance. He was hoping it could help them to devise something wonderful for their movie. “I met Bobby for the first time in that projection room,” said Rall. “My impression of him was he wasn’t too happy I had the bigger part. There was that side of him, the tough side, sometimes even mean. He hated people who didn’t know what they were talking about and he would bait them to make them say more and more about things they didn’t know anything about. This would amuse Bob.”