Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  On the street, Fosse ran into Carl Reiner. They hadn’t seen each other since Call Me Mister, several years earlier.

  “Bobby!” Reiner threw out his arms. “How are you? You look great.”

  “Well,” he said. “Okay. I got my first job as choreographer.”

  “That’s wonderful!”

  Fosse shrugged, looked down.

  “You’ve got to be very proud of that.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe.” Bob tried a laugh. “I don’t know.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I called my dad and I told him, I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to choreograph the dances for a new show, an Abbott show.’ He said, ‘What’s choreograph?’ I said, ‘I’m going to be making up the steps for other dancers.’ Then he got upset and said, ‘You mean you’re gonna give away your steps?’”

  Thirty-Three Years

  EARLY IN 1954, Fosse locked himself in a studio and tried not to panic. He had given himself eight weeks alone to come up with what he was going to show Abbott, Robbins, and the kids of The Pajama Game, figuring the more time he spent perfecting the steps in private, the more humiliation he would spare himself in public. Ideas did not ever simply come to him; he had to force them out. Wrestling his tricks and gimmicks, Fosse quivered around the floor with only piano music to help him, trying to see himself in that wide blank mirror without hating every reflection or blaming the failed MGM star who put it there. That way lay total paralysis. If he could simply give himself permission to see, to scavenge without penalty, he would at least have something to start with, a ball of clay to mold discerningly on his way to—best case—mediocrity. “[I] let everything that can come out, come out,” he said, “even though it may seem ridiculous and as though I’ll never use it, I kind of spill out.” The clock ticking, the money slipping, he looked for ideas, half ideas, things, anything. “I go through each number and try to get a combination—or just a general feeling of what I want. Just eight bars of movement and I can build from that, with variations.” Then, once he saw, he thought. He added and subtracted until the feeling of embarrassment waned. Mostly, it didn’t wane. Eight weeks of this. Visualizing the horror of facing the producers and cast with nothing or, worse, with dozens of somethings and no more studio time. What would he do then? Add a knee slide? A hat trick? How many hat tricks could he stick in before they caught on?

  “I need to have a sense of insecurity,” Fosse said. “The feeling that I’m in over my head makes me sweat. I get up earlier and stay later.” He had to fight, to stay in the swamp of certain failure long enough to see the black hole become the light at the end of the tunnel. He said, “I finally [get] to the point where I’d say to myself: ‘I’m the only person here. I’m alone. And I’m just going to stand here until something comes to me.’” He worked through the nights and napped in the days, burning through cigarettes—as many as six or seven packs a day—and something always did come to him. Fosse worked out every part of every dance all on his own.

  When rehearsals began in the Winter Garden Theater in March 1954, the production was still thirty thousand dollars short of the two hundred fifty thousand dollars it needed. With the specter of Joseph McCarthy looming, the theory that the regular backers had been scared away from a comedy about strikes and unions drove producers Hal Prince and Robert Griffith from Upper East Side parlor to Upper East Side parlor, glad-handing, drinking scotch, eating potato chips, and—with their spin—selling a Romeo and Juliet story with a peppy score. To make up the (considerable) shortfall, they offered the cast of Abbott’s Me and Juliet buy-ins at thirty-five dollars each, and, after that, they deferred their own salaries. It wasn’t enough. Prince and Griffith then hired themselves as stage managers and prayed that George Abbott would move through rehearsals with his legendary speed and thrifty, no-nonsense precision.

  According to Abbott, the musical comedy was all about timing. The timing and placement of the numbers, the rhythm of the jokes, the length of the beats, the order of the love plots (secondary and primary). To his mathematical mind, timing was a matter of proven formula and so of higher importance than fancy flashes in the pan like “motivation” and “character.” “Abbott would give you line readings,” said actress Rae Allen. “He’d say, ‘Do that but do it real,’ and then he’d walk away.” If someone started getting arty, he’d politely invite him into the lobby, fire him, and return to rehearsal. It was never personal with Abbott; there simply wasn’t the time for that. He even moved fast. “His legs were so long,” Allen recalled, “he could climb over the orchestra pit to get onstage. He was a greyhound.” Comedy was a wild beast and he was there to tame it. Prince said, “He was the most disciplined man in the theater. Don’t suffer fools, learn your lines, say your lines, and don’t get hysterical. He didn’t like crises, he didn’t like contention, and he never hesitated. The theater is a breeding ground for jealousy and insecurity, but Abbott never bothered with that. Presumably, he’d already been through it. By the time we did Pajama Game, he was sixty-seven years old and had pretty much seen everything.” He asked the kids to call him George, but they couldn’t. He was that imposing. The best they could manage was an “Excuse me, George, Mr. Abbott, sir.”

  In other words, Abbott knew exactly what he wanted and Bob Fosse had no idea.

  Fosse’s mid-1950s look, a tattered trench coat and beat-up dance clothes, declared him a hipster vagrant, alternately oddball and down-to-earth. “Bobby was deeply serious,” said Allen, “but he was adorable too. There was something very ‘baby’ about him during Pajama Game; he was like a scrappy kid.” “He was mostly quiet,” said actor Janis Paige, “watching us with a sort of timid focus, but when he wanted to make you laugh, he really could.” On those occasions he would come to work with a Mickey Mouse lunch box and a Donald Duck baseball hat, as if he were auditioning for them. Struggling dancers he’d approach apologetically, as if he were the source of their errors. Shirley MacLaine, in the chorus, explained that Fosse was the king of “Forgive me, but once more from the top.” Without Robbins’s clout or self-assurance, Fosse had to ask nicely. At least for the moment.

  Harnessing his nightclub and TV experience, Fosse found he could mount solos and duos easier than group and full-company numbers. Here his specialty worked against him; he had to change his point of view to suit the vantage of a packed house on Broadway. A bigger canvas meant bigger, more confident movements, a strategy at odds with the little inward jerks and isolations—illustrative of his own shyness—that gave a number like “From This Moment On” its louche sizzle. Furthermore, staging those numbers flummoxed Fosse. For groups big or small, he found that simply arranging the actors onstage—not to dance but to sing—presented him with challenges utterly outside his experience.

  For instance: “7½ Cents,” the first group vocal number in the show.

  “Just stage it,” Abbott decreed.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just have them stand there and sing.”

  Which is just what Fosse did. Then he turned to Abbott for his reaction.

  “We better have Jerry do this one,” he said.

  Robbins’s coat was off by the time he reached the stage. “Okay, everybody,” he said, clapping at the dancers. “Offstage. Let’s do it.”

  Fosse was awed by what followed. As he said later, “In an hour and a half, [Robbins] had this thing staged and it was brilliant.” It was a lesson Fosse would never forget. He said, “You keep the actors moving—you try to get the sense of a lyric over—you never let the gesture interfere, and, at the same time, you make an interesting picture. But it’s important that the lyric of a song is heard.” Likewise, “Small Talk,” a patter song, didn’t need full-out dance but stylized movement suited to its halfway place between dialogue and duet. “In five minutes, Jerry had it solved,” Rae Allen said. He gave Janis Paige a newspaper to cover her face, which gave John Raitt a reason to fight for her attention, and “Small Talk” became a chase with the potential for movement built into the
conflict. “That’s where Jerry Robbins came in,” said actress Sara Dillon. “To help Bobby to incorporate his numbers, his little group of dancers, into what was going on around them.” Jerome Robbins: a master of staging, integration, idiom, and character.

  There was, however, one problem. Abbott didn’t like the big ballet that opened act two. “It was a big egg,” Dillon remembered. “They had about six or eight singers sort of standing around, looking silly, and about six or eight dancers behind them.”

  “Why don’t you do something simple,” Abbott suggested to Fosse. “Something with two or three people.” In other words, what you do best. “Make it a pep song, a rally song. Make it a selling-to-the-union type of song. Just two or three people.”

  To the guy who had spent eight weeks preparing his every dancer’s every move and glance, this was not a welcome suggestion.

  He had the dancers for the big number to open act two; now he needed music. Fosse went to composer Richard Adler. “What else do you have? Do you have something that would fit?”

  “No.”

  On flashed the charm. “Come on.”

  “Okay, maybe.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “‘Steam Heat,’” Adler said. “But I hate it.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  Adler sat down at the piano and played the song he had written one day as a sort of exercise. He had held himself hostage in the bathroom, vowing not to leave until he had turned out a composition about sinks or toilets or faucets. Or radiators. The cling-clang-psssssst of the radiator. Once he got that, Adler had “Steam Heat” written in about ten minutes.

  “That’s it,” Fosse said. He grabbed the sheet music off the piano and disappeared into the studio for a few weeks. Bells, bangs, honks, blocks, buzzers—Fosse was wild about novelty sounds, the accents of clowns and vaudeville comics. “Steam Heat,” with its cling-clangs and boink-boinks, was a fastball down the center of the plate. And because “Steam Heat” was a nonintegrated number and so outside the story—that is, a performance within The Pajama Game—Fosse could run with the vaudeville concept, unencumbered by setting and character. He could fly. The original ensemble configuration still in his mind, he began thinking of the dance in two trios—three dancers and three singers. Then he cut the singers and was left with Buzz Miller, Peter Gennaro, and the dancer he had called in from Hollywood, Carol Haney. “He threw about a million steps at us,” said Miller, also a former Jack Cole dancer, “and Carol, who was Bob’s link, would pick them up like a magnet. He’d show us something and Carol would go ‘uh-uh’ meaning she hated it, or ‘ah-ha!’—it works!” Haney, Miller, and Gennaro loved what Fosse did to their bodies. Cheering as he demonstrated, calling out for more, they learned the piece in only a few hours.

  He knew what he was doing. “If you want to make a reputation as a choreographer,” Fosse explained, “you don’t do solos; you do group dances—[for] three or more [people]. If the audience sees that solo number, they come away saying, ‘Ah! Wasn’t he a great dancer?’ With [three or] four people they say, ‘Wasn’t that great choreography!’” It was like starring. In a way.

  Outfitting his trio like little Chaplins in matching pipe-stem pants, white gloves, and derbies, he tiny-stepped them along the footlights in the Durante manner with pelvises out, knees bent, and arms dangling behind them. “Steam Heat” was a Fred Weaver special, a deep-tissue recall of the eccentric dancers of Fosse’s youth. “The actual choreography comes out of most of the stuff I’d been doing in my own act,” Fosse said, “and a strong affection for a dancer . . . called Joe Frisco.” The ultimate flash dancer, Joe Frisco would execute jaw-dropping feats of flimflammery with virtuosic calm. It was the manner Fosse loved as much as the moves. To achieve that cool, that ease, Fosse had his trio practice and repractice hat tricks (also à la Frisco) for hours on end, sometimes until two or three in the morning. “The tricks,” wrote Shirley MacLaine, who came later to “Steam Heat,” “must be effortless so that the attitude of their execution could bleed through.” Accenting steps with a slouch or soft wrist, Fosse’s dancers showed a tantalizing synchronicity of hot and cool, like slow-curling steam.

  The first night The Pajama Game previewed for a real, ticket-buying audience, April 12, 1954, at New Haven’s Shubert Theater, “Steam Heat” got a standing ovation. Even so, Abbott cut it. The show had to keep moving, he explained; the number was fabulous, but it meant nothing to the story. Robbins couldn’t disagree with Abbott’s sober evaluation, but standing ovations were standing ovations—they justified themselves. “Bob never forgot how hard Jerry fought for the number,” Ann Reinking later said. “He was really touched.” Before The Pajama Game reached Boston, Abbott put “Steam Heat” back in the show.

  By the time they returned to New York, Abbott’s company had reason to feel confident—but guardedly. Uncertain were the prospects for a labor comedy without stars and created by unknowns. Plus, there was still the issue of funds. “They needed money,” Sara Dillon said, “because they couldn’t make their production overcall. When we got back to New York, they asked everyone to give a week’s salary, even the wardrobe lady. And everyone gave—except for me and Eddie Foy.”

  Before the opening-night curtain went up at the St. James Theater, Hal Prince—half producer, half stage manager—changed into dinner clothes, stuffed a flashlight into his pocket, and stationed himself backstage. Robert Griffith did the same. Abbott lowered himself into his usual opening-night seat in the middle of the house, where he could best experience the audience’s experience of the show—then relaxed. George Abbott could do that. Sure that he had done his best, on opening nights, he affably resigned himself to the democracy of popular taste; it was in the jury’s hands now. Fosse, however, kept moving. Eating smoke, he prowled nervously around the theater, going from the mob outside to Haney backstage, where he could hide, momentarily. He had not dreamed of this moment his whole life long. He was a dancer.

  That night, May 13, 1954, every number played beautifully. Afterward, Richard Adler looked through the clamor to see Marlene Dietrich taking people in her arms and laughing. Carol Haney said, “I don’t think any of us touched the ground the whole evening.”

  Prince was standing in the wings. “What do you think?” he asked Griffith.

  “Don’t count your chickens,” he cautioned.

  But they were hatching already, one by one. “That night, Carol and Buzz and Peter came out after ‘Steam Heat’ to take a bow,” Janis Paige recalled, “and [after ‘There Once Was a Man’], they applauded so much for John [Raitt] and I that we had to come out and take a bow. And we were all in a daze because deep down we thought maybe the rumors were right and doing a show about a pajama factory was a bad idea.” Prince said, “They were screaming from the rafters. We were stunned.”

  Looking back, Gwen Verdon said, “I think ‘Steam Heat’ was the first number on a Broadway stage that was pure Fosse, the way Fosse would do it. He could have been any of the three because they looked like Bob, danced like Bob, and it’s exactly the way Bob would have jumped up at a party and danced.” Breaking from de Mille’s hegemony over Broadway ballet, “Steam Heat” announced a new, jazzy vernacular, American based, with a sly sense of humor that was indisputably Fosse’s.

  For the final time on opening night, May 13, the curtain came down (ten minutes late, because of the applause). The crowd filed out, work lights came on, and Prince and Griffith, first-time producers, walked across the empty stage. Saying nothing, they just looked at each other and knew. Life would be different now.

  But the reviews? There were about ten papers in those days, and there was no telling what was what until Fosse had read every last one. He faked it through the requisite party chatter, his actual self clenched as he waited for the decrees of Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times and Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune—they might grant him a stay of execution or, more likely, hang him by his neck for all New York to see. It was not until around five in the morning
that the newspapers began to appear. Brooks Atkinson: “The last new musical of the season is the best . . . Bob Fosse’s ballets and improvised dance turns seem to come so spontaneously out of the story.” Walter Kerr: “The bright, brassy, and jubilantly sassy show that opened at the St. James Thursday is not just the best new musical of the season. That would be fairly easy. It’s a show that takes a whole barrelful of gleaming new talents, and a handful of stimulating ideas as well, and sends them tumbling in happy profusion over the footlights.”

  Yes, they were a hit. “By 9 A.M.,” Richard Adler said, “the lines had started forming, and by 10 there was a long one down the block.”

  Robbins gave Fosse a pair of golden cuff links, a gift to Robbins from his father. When Robbins opened his next show, Fosse returned them, but only temporarily. For the rest of their lives, they would pass the cuff links back and forth, an opening-night gift. They were in a chest of drawers by Fosse’s bed on the day he died.

  Weeks later, Fosse and McCracken celebrated The Pajama Game’s smash opening with a return to Fire Island. After selling their previous lot, they bought two adjoining spaces deeper in, against a hillside and away from the shore, where they built a cloud-gray cottage perched high over the dunes. It had a brick fireplace and two small bedrooms. Their hideaway had no phone and no electricity, which was a relief—Fosse needed the rest. He needed to think. Success had thrown him. “I’m confused,” he said in May. “I really want to dance or act myself.” And yet here he was, a star choreographer.

  Hollywood called. He could not ignore the offer from Columbia Pictures’ president Harry Cohn to stage a new round of musicals, including, maybe, Cohn’s long-delayed Pal Joey. Reluctant to agree but unwilling to walk away—once hungry, always hungry—Fosse turned down the package (as Jerome Robbins had), opting instead to choreograph just one picture, Columbia’s My Sister Eileen, and see what happened.