Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  After the screening, Pan broke “From This Moment On” into sections in need of choreography, and he paired off his dancers—Ann Miller with Tommy Rall, Bobby Van with Jeanne Coyne, and Fosse with Carol Haney. Formerly Gene Kelly’s assistant and before that Jack Cole’s, Haney fit Fosse like a pair of old shoes. At five and a half feet with a punky Beat-girl haircut and whiplash spark, she looked like jazz sounded. “You just have a way of dancing,” Pan said to Fosse and Haney. “Why don’t you choreograph your own piece?”

  Fosse’s section was short, only forty-five seconds, but it showed, for the first time, what happened when Bob Fosse danced on film in what would become known as the Fosse style.

  The score, which until their entrance is an ebullient, MGM-friendly bouquet of bells and strings, is trounced by a fat swagger of brass—a stripper’s vamp, to be precise—and then a leg swings up (all the way up) from camera right. It’s Carol Haney’s leg. Dashing to the center of the frame, she snaps her arms in the air—a burst of red-hot ecstasy contorted by gnarled charges of pain. And then, from off camera right, Bob Fosse leaps and lands in a baseball slide. There’s a scream, and Fosse and Haney, a duet now, spin forward together and freeze. The music stops. A beat later, the music starts up again, slower, smoother this time, and the pair slither in syncopation, shoulders hunched and knees bent, boy and girl Fosses. They look sad. They look broken. Then—out of nowhere—a shot of music throws them in the air. Haney bolts around a pole, and Fosse—more like Gene Kelly than Bob Fosse—flies to the very top of it and opens up like a flag. The music dies again. Trancelike, the two snap to a laid-back beat, their faces down like bum junkies, and then he leaps over her, lands on his downstage knee, and begins a bizarre (and quite funny) slide camera right. Is he supposed to be a bird? His head on his shoulder and his shoulders tucked to his sides, Fosse moves his fingers like hummingbird wings and they flutter him forward as Carol Haney, in a fetal crouch beside him, crawls—with a touch of desperation—in his direction. He jumps up, lifting her off her feet, and together they take a cheery musical-comedy turn around the stage. Until the music chills and they each hit what looks like a scarecrow pose—left arm parallel to the ground, right arm at a forty-five-degree angle—and sidestep; then Fosse performs a perfect backflip, slides out with wide-open arms, and he and Haney, left arms raised as if to say Ta-da!, shuffle off camera in the direction they came from. (How like Fosse—who hated his backflip, who struggled to make his imperfect version Donen-ready for Give a Girl a Break—to insist on inserting a backflip-from-a-standing-position here and to insist on going all the way to New York to work with Joe Price, the country’s foremost acrobatic teacher, not once but three times during filming.)

  The Fosse influence is unmistakable to the modern viewer. One can discern his taste for showbiz symbolism and convention in the burlesque vamp, Astaire-tilted hat, and outstretched Al Jolson arms. Face-open palms, inherited from the minstrelsy tradition Fosse had seen passed through vaudeville, hang coolly on his wrists and even flicker for a moment—razzle-dazzle. Tiny pantomimes seem closer to clowning than to choreography; single joints hiccup; appendages engage, then drop. There’s also an element of acting, as if he and Haney aren’t merely dancing but dancing about something. They have wants. He grins; she’s desperate, crawling after him. This is not de Mille–fluid, nor Robbins-robust; it’s not American ballet and it’s not American colloquial. It’s Fosse.

  And he didn’t think much of the job. He said, “I thought choreographers were all rock bottom.” Astaire was a star, not Hermes Pan. As for Broadway, de Mille and Robbins transcended. They were artists. At best, Fosse was an entertainer.

  Kiss Me Kate was the last straw. With a full six years remaining on his contract, Bob Fosse saw no future for himself or for the movie musical. “Bob knew what was happening,” Rall said. “He saw that they weren’t making musicals the way they used to and he was tired of hanging around Culver City, waiting for another disappointment.” MGM didn’t stop him from going. In August, the studio granted Fosse a six-month leave of absence, and he flew back to New York, to Joan.

  Fosse loved Joan. In light of his habitual infidelity, it was difficult to understand that, but no more difficult than understanding why Joan would take him back every time. Though hurt, in public, she played a version of herself too bohemian to care about the strictures of total monogamy, and it’s true that her previous marriage to Jack Dunphy was strewn with affairs, hers with composer Rudi Revil and his, at the very end, with Truman Capote. They all tried hard to have fun. Though McCracken hadn’t made peace with Fosse’s indiscretions, she was certainly determined to do her best; upon his return from Hollywood, they bought waterfront land in the Pines area of Fire Island. She wanted a baby.

  In town, they lived in her tenth-floor penthouse on West Fifty-Fifth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Her eye for décor, like her conversation, was fashionably eclectic, a collage of Victorian wickerwork and Bauhaus modern. Seashore bric-a-brac dotted the shelves and tops of things, and when the wind blew through the open windows, her shells sang a round of ocean songs. On spring nights, her terrace, with its city views and salad-size garden, was home to writers, painters, and dancers invited to rehearse their work and catch up on one another’s headlines over a feast that McCracken nibbled in premeasured, diabetic-safe portions. When they asked her about Me and Juliet, she was careful to respond modestly, embarrassed by how much the critics loved her. Especially in front of Fosse. “She was often very upset because he was so unhappy,” said McCracken’s Me and Juliet costar Isabel Bigley. “Bob was in a terrible mood because he couldn’t find work.” When the attention came her way, McCracken was kind enough to redirect it to him. A nimble hostess, she helped everyone to his or her moment, culling from them all their best stories, like the conductor of a tiny talking orchestra. “There were three rehearsal rooms at MGM,” Fosse would begin his story. “Astaire would be in one, Kelly in the other, and I would be in the middle stealing from both.” On those buoyant nights, talk would invariably turn to movies, to Shane and From Here to Eternity; to the current Broadway season of William Inge’s Picnic, the adultery comedy The Seven Year Itch, Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s and Leonard Bernstein’s wonderful Wonderful Town, and Gwen Verdon, the breakout smash of Can-Can. Had anyone there seen it coming?

  Can-Can’s producers, Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin, certainly had. They first spotted Verdon months before, at Chicago’s Chez Paree, where they caught her dancing it like a lady athlete, doing the Jack Cole with Jack Cole. Others could sing or dance or act, but Verdon—a luscious lollipop person with a voice she said sounded like a 78 rpm record with a wobble in it—could do all three, sometimes all at once, and better than most could do only one. She was what they called a triple threat. McCracken had the big three as well, but she never managed to launch herself out of the soubrette department. An unfortunate combination of illness, bad timing, and (ironically) versatility held her career down. But Gwen Verdon’s road was clear: leading lady. She had opportunity and she had means. A baby-woman at the eye wall of Marilyn Monroe and Irene Dunne, she had a stage persona that was complex enough to be unique to her, but basic enough to be instantly understood. To see her sing and dance was to continually fight the urge to leap, arms outstretched, from your seat. One number, one swivel of hips, and you could feel yourself wanting to run up there and squeeze to pieces all five and a half feet of her—ivory-rocket legs, tiger thighs, surging bust, twinkle nose, and very red hair—and without any guilt. She was that sweet. After they saw her at the Chez Paree, Feuer and Martin offered Verdon a fully paid weekend in New York if she’d audition there for Can-Can, their new show.

  With Jack Cole’s permission, Gwen packed up her Siamese cat and her dog and left for the Warwick Hotel in New York. She was so scared of singing for Mr. Cole Porter that when she arrived at the theater, she asked him if she could please dance first and sing second. Mr. Porter said she could. Predictably, her dance killed. But she knew it would. It
was her voice, the song, that worried her. “I was so scared,” she said, “my legs wouldn’t hold me.” Verdon asked if she could sit for the number; permission was granted, and she sang “Pennies from Heaven.” Then she read a scene from the show. (“It probably sounded like, ‘Run, Spot, Run,’” she later said.) The whole thing lasted just under an hour—quite a long time for an audition—and then director Abe Burrows climbed onstage.

  “Well, Claudine,” he said, “I guess we’ll see you soon.”

  She looked up at him. “What?”

  “Darling, you’ve got the job.” Claudine: the character’s name.

  Gwen went to the Warwick Hotel alone and ordered room service. She didn’t know anyone in New York, and had always wondered what it would be like to order room service.

  On Sunday she went back to Hollywood, to Jack Cole. “How’d it go, honey?” he asked, blasé.

  “I got the job.”

  He punched her. It was not the most effective way to tell Gwen he needed her with him.

  Verdon returned to New York, and rehearsals went smoothly. In Philadelphia, Can-Can sold well and opened nicely (Cole Porter shows did that). Gwen wasn’t crazy about director Michael Kidd, but the real problem was with Lilo, the show’s bombshell française. Jealous of Verdon, Lilo insisted on restaging their numbers so Gwen ended up offstage for the applause (most of which was for Gwen); for the curtain call, Lilo arranged to hide Gwen behind a bench in far-off Siberia. Then Gwen’s numbers started to disappear. Her lines too. “I don’t really blame Lilo,” Verdon said years later. “She was the star and I was stealing the show. In the theater, that’s like another woman in a marriage triangle.”

  By opening night—May 7, 1953—the company was out of steam. Cramped in her phone-booth-size dressing room off of stage left, Gwen warmed up her kicks for the big Apache number, a comedy dance that had her, the spurned girl, going after her lover with a knife. “I don’t know how Michael [Kidd] did it,” said Cy Feuer, “but the whole thing was done in slow motion and a waiter passed with a big cheese and there was a knife in it—in the climax of the big dance—and she in slow motion grabbed the knife, turned around, and went to her lover and stabbed him in the stomach, and came back, turned around, put the knife back in the cheese, and she walked off.” It was big, juicy material and required tremendous control, which did not come easily to Verdon. “Sometimes I’m on stage,” she said, “and I’m so tired but I’ll kick and my legs go way up and I follow them. It’s almost like they’re separate from me.”

  On opening night, act one went well. Then came act two and the deadly Apache number.

  Mostly, when people say a number stopped a show, they don’t mean the show literally stopped. But when people speak of Gwen Verdon’s showstopping Apache number in Can-Can and of the standing ovation she got on opening night, in the middle of the show, they really do mean the actors stopped acting, the stage managers stopped stage-managing, and the producers stopped worrying. In fact, the response to Gwen’s Apache dance was so powerful, the ovation, lasting for seven minutes, became a theatrical happening of its own. No one knew quite how to react. A few stagehands beginning to move the next scene’s set into place were waved away by a cluster of dancers who were unable to leave the stage during the ovation but who were unsure of what they were supposed to do now that the show had stopped and the applause had taken over the theater.

  Gwen Verdon, meanwhile, was oblivious. Following the dance, as she had been directed to do, she returned to her phone booth to change quickly for her next number. Thanks to a recalcitrant zipper, she was too busy fighting her pants to realize the roar from inside was all for her. Michael Kidd figured as much. A couple minutes into the ovation, he dashed out of the Shubert Theater, through Shubert Alley, up to the stage door, and into Gwen’s dressing room. When the door opened, she heard them chanting from the house: “We want Verdon! We want Verdon!”

  “You have to go out there,” Kidd said.

  “But—”

  He grabbed her arm. The zipper would have to stay unzipped.

  With only a towel to cover her, Gwen returned to the stage and faced New York. “I could have walked into Tokyo,” she said of that moment. “It was just that strange to be suddenly out there.”

  Shubert Alley was so mobbed with fans and press after the show that to get to the Hotel Astor for the opening-night party, Gwen had to ride with a policeman on the back of his horse.

  “I remember the first time I saw her in Can-Can,” Fosse said. “People ask if I created Gwen, and I say, ‘She was hot when I met her.’ That alabaster skin, those eyes, that bantam rooster walk.”

  Across from the Shubert, at the Majestic, Fosse would wait for Joan. On Me and Juliet’s matinee days, she led a small acting class for chorus kids. She taught Mary Tarcai, a Stanislavskian. Sometimes, in the half darkness of the ghost light, Fosse could be seen pacing the distant back of the theater, filling the empty house with clouds of smoke. Joan’s students—including dancer Shirley MacLaine—wondered why he, whom they semi-recognized from TV and a couple lame movies, didn’t have anywhere else to be. They would not have known what Fosse knew, what McCracken had told Bill Hayes, her friend, student, and costar, during the run of Me and Juliet. “Joan was pregnant,” Hayes said, “and she was thrilled about it. We talked about how she was going to leave the show and have the baby.” But she never did. Before McCracken could change the size of her costume, she lost the baby. Hayes assumed a miscarriage. “Joan had hard numbers in that show,” he said, “and she danced with everything she had.” Biographer Lisa Jo Sagolla submits that McCracken’s diabetes, which she had to keep secret from the company, made a healthy pregnancy unlikely, even dangerous. Abortion may have been her only option. The property the Fosses bought on Fire Island, they never developed.

  There was a lull out there, one that had less to do with Fosse and McCracken than with musical comedy, which in those days, the early 1950s, had everything to do with George Abbott, the most prolific, successful writer and director of comedy on Broadway. Everybody’s grandfather, Mr. Abbott didn’t look like a musical wizard; he looked liked Abraham Lincoln. Tall, suave, and always correct, he was basically a producer with director’s responsibilities, a good man of dependable taste. Not great taste, but really, really good taste, safe and solid, just like the musical comedy of his safe and solid era. Few comedies dared what Oklahoma! had dared. One would have to go back to the year 1950, to Guys and Dolls, to find one with a head on its lovely shoulders. Other than that, the vestiges of the 1920s remained. Top Banana was all gags; Flahooley was a mess; and Kismet didn’t meet its Cole dances halfway. Abbott’s shows hewed closer to plot than character, nearer to frippery than to life. Revolution was not his strong suit.

  That’s why he didn’t warm to the wildcard in McCracken when he first directed her in Billion Dollar Baby in 1945. But “by the time they did Me and Juliet,” Hal Prince recalled, “he’d forgotten he’d ever objected to her in the first place.” Abbott and McCracken had grown closer since; before he went out dancing, which he did most every night after the show, Abbott liked to swing by her dressing room for a chat. In November 1953, he told Joan his new musical—based on the novel 7½ Cents, by Richard Bissell—was to be about a pajama-factory strike, an odd topic, he admitted, for a musical comedy. “Others seemed to be even more shy of the material than I was,” Abbott wrote. “They felt that a garment factory and a strike was too serious and controversial a subject for a jolly musical.” Was this why Jerome Robbins, whom Abbott had used on several occasions, most recently and successfully on Call Me Madam, had turned him down? (No: Robbins was aiming higher. He wanted to choreograph and direct.)

  Recognizing an opportunity for her husband, McCracken took Abbott to see Kiss Me Kate, then playing at Radio City Music Hall, where she hoped Fosse’s forty-five-second choreography debut would double as his life-changing audition, the big break he’d look back on and say, “That’s when it all really started for me.” McCracken’s faith i
n him was tremendous. “Joanie sounded off about Bob every time I went into her dressing room,” Abbott said. “To me, he seemed very unassuming, not very impressive at all. But she built him up to be like the next Great White Hope.” The Radio City proscenium lights dimmed, and McCracken sat back, fingers crossed under her seat. She watched her director through the entire picture.

  Abbott smiled. “Have you done much choreography?” he asked Fosse, days later.

  “Oh, yeah, a lot.”

  “Where?”

  (Lying.) “Canada.”

  That was enough for Abbott. His genius was for hiring genius. One could say he knew talent, or maybe he just knew business, because, being young and hungry, the talent he hired worked for almost nothing. Kids were good for comedy. But one of Mr. Abbott’s producers, twenty-five-year-old Hal Prince, suggested, wisely, they have some kind of insurance. “Do you think we can talk Robbins into standing in the wings?” he asked. “Just in case?”

  “You talk to him.”

  Prince called Robbins. If Robbins wouldn’t choreograph the show, would he at least look over Fosse’s shoulder, in case he got in trouble? Robbins, who had seen Kiss Me Kate and respected Fosse’s work, agreed to do it. But: “I’ll only do it if I can have codirecting credit.”

  Prince called Abbott. “He’ll only do it if he can share codirecting credit.”

  “Give it to him.”

  That was a surprise. “Doesn’t it seem offensive to you?” Prince asked.

  “Oh, give it to him, Hal. It’ll make you feel good. Everyone will know who directed the show.”

  Codirected by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins, based on a book by Abbott and Richard Bissell, and with songs by newcomers Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, the musical version of 7½ Cents was to be choreographed by Bob Fosse. Walking up Fifth Avenue after a long lunch with Abe Burrows, Abbott thought of a title for the show: The Pajama Game.