by Wasson, Sam
McCracken was the one to urge him to talk to someone. Her analyst made a recommendation, and Fosse, at first opposed, finally acquiesced. Mostly he talked about work, the stifling insecurity he felt creating for the public, for people he suspected were waiting for him to fail. He craved the privacy of a writer or composer, artists with the luxury to fail behind closed doors. He talked about women, about not being a good husband, about failing his first and maybe now his second marriage. He wanted to do better, to be better. He talked of his dreams, swollen with anxieties he couldn’t name, and began to sense a profound thematic undercurrent. “In my own case these were things like the fear of not being liked,” he said. “I was always very eager to please other people.” He remembered the occasion, after his brothers had gotten into trouble, when he decided he would be his parents’ good boy, the child they depended on. Still, he regularly found himself cheating compulsively, hurting girls, hurting Joan, especially when he worked. “I’m a pretty good husband when I’m not working,” he said, “but as soon as I start a project, it’s like I don’t know anything else exists.” It was a sinister loop, the need to win; disappointing himself in work was a virus that only more work could treat. His doctor prescribed Seconal.
Should he leave Joan? Would that be bad? Was he bad? He had certainly done bad things. He told his analyst about the strippers. He talked about “a rather bizarre sexual experience” when he was thirteen, something that had been done to him that made Fosse want to prove all women could be gotten, and easily. “I think he felt a sense of betrayal with women,” Ann Reinking explained, “a sense of loss and betrayal early on in his life. I don’t think he felt safe. I just remember him saying that his mother shouldn’t have let him do burlesque and his father was always gone. He would talk about that a lot. It didn’t matter that Bob’s father had to go out and make a living. To a young Bob, left alone in those places, that didn’t matter.”
Fosse said, “I didn’t realize until I got into analysis that I really hated going away from home and was scared to death, that I was in an atmosphere, with all those naked ladies running around, way over my head.”
Imagination, Joyce said, is memory. Trauma, the psychologists say, compulsively seeks expression. Like a criminal, the unconscious mind obsessively returns to the scene of the crime to gain mastery over the pain, putting itself in environments and circumstances, professional and emotional, conducive to reenactment. Trauma specialist Dr. Charles Rousell: “If an adult has experienced repetitive trauma as a child at the hands of people he trusts, he might find that the residual effects become engraved into the narrative of his life. So it is not surprising that if that person had endured trauma at the hands of trusted adults in the theater world he would devote his life to the theater. Working on shows may release some of that pain and creatively forge it into constructive action.” But when that pain is intimately involved with feelings of pleasure—as in sex or entertainment—untangling good from bad can be ceaselessly dissatisfying and difficult to do. “Whatever Lola Wants,” a continuation of a burlesque-haunted trajectory Fosse initiated with “That Old Black Magic” in 1943, refers back to that pain.
George Abbott, who understood Gwen’s power, kept growing the part of Lola. Who else could pull off the satanic Betty Boop? (Barbara Cook? Carol Channing? Ethel Merman? Mary Martin? Doubtful.) It took Verdon, a comedienne, to make sex safe for the American musical; it took a Cole dancer to read Fosse, and an actress to legitimize Lola’s humanity. Beginning March 7, 1955, she zipped among the show’s separate rehearsal spaces, each on a different floor of the warehouse where Fosse and Verdon created Lola. A service elevator wheezed from one windowless studio to the next, delivering wholesale talent to Abbott’s room for scene work, to Adler and Ross’s floor for voice, and to Fosse’s for dance. Two weeks later, the eighty-three-person company assembled for the first run-through of Damn Yankees.
It ran long. Prince suggested cutting the big end-of-act-one ballet, a round of musical chairs emceed by the Yankee’s mascot, a gorilla. Desperate to save the number (and seize a spotlight opportunity), Fosse suggested he play the gorilla. Performance wasn’t the issue, Prince explained, pace was. The number had to go. But Fosse pushed back; he didn’t trust Hal Prince. He didn’t trust producers. He assumed they were fundamentally unsympathetic to creation, their expenses and bottom lines against his requests for more time to improve. Fosse had to fail his way to success and feel safe and unpressured while he did. “We were very different minds, Bobby and me,” Prince said. “He was quintessential showbiz,” and Prince was a New York college boy—to Fosse, irreconcilable differences. Prince said, “Bobby was not a happy fellow. Not ever. Not with me.” But in the spirit of collaboration, the producer agreed to let the first preview audience in New Haven cast the tiebreaking vote. Would the number stay or go?
The audience backed Prince. Now what? Clumped in a small bedroom of New Haven’s Taft Hotel, Abbott, Prince, and Griffith shrugged and what-ifed their way through the whys and why-nots of the performance.
“Fellas,” Prince began, “I think we all know what we need to do. The gorilla number has to go. I know we put a lot into this but you saw what—”
The telephone rang.
“Excuse me,” Prince said, reaching for the phone. “Hello?”
“Hal, it’s Bob Fosse.” (He always used his full name, afraid they’d say, “Bob who?”)
“Bobby, listen,” Prince said, “we’re all here and we—”
“I’m in the room next door,” he said. “I heard everything you said, Hal.”
“Bobby . . .”
“Why don’t you tell me these things to my face?”
“I’m coming right now,” Prince said, and he hung up.
Seconds later, a very embarrassed, very confused Hal Prince stepped into Fosse’s room and sat down in an armchair a neutral distance away. Fosse cursed at Prince, spitting smoke in the air like an angry train. Joan McCracken, waiting on the little bed, said nothing.
“Bobby,” Prince muttered. “It’s terrible that you heard me, just terrible. I’m so terribly sorry you did. But please understand I’m doing what I think is best for the show here, we all are—”
“You’re doing it behind my back.”
“We were in a meeting. No one’s doing anything behind your back.”
“Bullshit. I heard what you said.”
“Bobby, I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean. You know what I think of the number—”
“I know what was going on in there!”
Joan glanced at Hal. She was embarrassed.
“It’s the number,” Prince pleaded. “It’s not you, Bobby, believe me. You’re great, but the show needs work.”
“You’re scheming!”
Joan cut in. “Enough. Stop it.”
“Joanie, please.”
“He apologized, Bobby—”
But Fosse didn’t stop. Raging, he ripped into Prince, ripped into all producers, bashing their intelligence and supposed artistic sensitivity.
Long after Prince left the room, Fosse was still glowering. If they were against his work, they were against him. Even if they didn’t say it, he knew they thought it.
The gorilla number went. In came “Who’s Got the Pain?,” a bite-size mambo for Eddie Phillips and Gwen. “Bob and I put the number together in about two hours,” she said. But speed was no consolation, not to Fosse. Being directed by a producer—that he could not tolerate. Prince said, “I begged him to see that what I felt about him in life had nothing to do with what he did onstage. I begged him as long as I knew him.”
Onward to Boston, where a new version of Damn Yankees was performed almost every night. “We were tossing out score all the time,” said Prince, “writing new material for Gwen to beef up her part.” They gave her a new number, “A Little Brains, a Little Talent.” But rather than show appreciation for an expanded Lola, Verdon turned cold, as if in allegiance to Fosse. “She was very loyal, Gwen,” Prince explained, “and afte
r all that Jack Cole, so accustomed to trusting, to not questioning, especially guys.”
Gwen’s part continued to expand—as Lola and as Fosse’s girl—as late as May 5, 1955, the night of the Damn Yankees Broadway opening. Before the show, McCracken went backstage to congratulate a friend, actor Ray Walston. Her hands, he noticed, were drenched in sweat. “I put it all together later,” Walston said, “but it was obviously the result of what was happening between her and Bob.”
She had a heart attack, then another. Then pneumonia. Though Fosse blamed himself for her decline, it was in the hospital that he left her, or began to. “Joan was in critical condition on an oxygen tank,” Reinking said, “and she told him that everything was all right, that he shouldn’t worry, that she understood. She was trying to tell him it’s okay. Forgive yourself. You did not have a hand in this. You did not bring this on.” He did not agree. Something was wrong with him. He saw his psychiatrist as often as five times a week in double sessions, back to back. Why couldn’t he feel the good others felt in love? Beset with terrible guilt, he could not leave Joan completely, though he practically had, appearing only at odd hours to soothe both of them, or just himself, visits that became less frequent, then finally stopped.
On her own now, Joan continued to keep her heart attacks a private matter, hoping to bounce back and dance again before word of her condition spread. But Walter Winchell discovered her secret, and everyone who might have hired her found out she was unemployable—and the dominoes fell. First she stopped dancing, then she stopped exercising. Then her blood sugar levels rose. Then her heart tightened. She put on a sporting face, but Walston saw her: She was a living corpse.
She retreated to Fire Island. Alone.
Meanwhile, Gwen Verdon appeared in eight shows a week at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater to overwhelming acclaim. More than anything else in the show, Lola—a character Walter Kerr called “everything undesirable made absolutely and forever desirable”—made Damn Yankees matter. Verdon’s smiling face appeared on the cover of Time, which called her “the most incendiary star on Broadway.”
A few dancers on their way to say good night heard the shouts coming from her dressing room. A brave one peeked her head around the door and saw Gwen crying and Fosse against the wall.
“Why can’t you do it?” she was overheard yelling at him. Gwen had finally left her boyfriend, actor Scott Brady. “Why can’t you leave her?”
In a sense, he never would. For the rest of Fosse’s life, he felt Joan following him, and once, he literally followed her, as she was walking down a busy avenue with a friend, dancer Doria Avila. “Look behind you,” Joan said. Avila looked, and Fosse ducked behind a parked car. At night, he called Joan at Fire Island—she had finally put a telephone in, for medical emergencies—and hung up as soon as she answered.
Thirty-Two Years
WITH VERDON COMMITTED to Damn Yankees, Fosse seemed to stall for time. He was both waiting for her release so they could begin work on the next show—theirs—and trying to decide if he, on his own, was a star choreographer or an up-and-coming star. Once again, the chance to play Pal Joey, this time in a Wallingford, Connecticut, production, decided the question for him. In June of 1955, he went off to the Oakdale Theater for a week’s run of the show he was determined to make his own. But audiences did not want him. Fosse might have rejected them for it and looked elsewhere for his applause, but he was trapped. “In this business,” a friend said, “you are driven by insecurity. You need more love than what you’re getting in life. But you’ll never, never get enough. The hole stays with you, no matter what you do, and can’t be fulfilled by another human being. Bob was a walking hole.” His Pal Joey dream only deepened that hole. “Show business is really important to my life,” Fosse said, “and I’m eternally grateful for all it’s given me, but there is an underlying hate that I have for it. I think it’s really hurt my life and I think I could have gotten more.” But where? A deli counter? Medical school? He said it many times: “I can’t do anything but show business.”
It was Stanley Donen who suggested Fosse might choreograph the dances for Funny Face, his new Audrey Hepburn/Fred Astaire musical. The job was virtually unbeatable, and Fosse accepted. Getting the green light from MGM producer Roger Edens, he jumped into a studio, and for ten hours a day, every day for four weeks, he played out ideas in the mirror, banishing from his mind the pending particulars of his salary, which he soon discovered were not all that favorable. He read the studio’s terms as a personal insult, and rather than seize the chance to work with his idol, Fosse fought Edens over the deal, as if it were not a negotiation but a score he needed to settle. Money, for Fosse, wasn’t about money in the bank—he was not greedy or materialistic—it was about value, his. “At the time the money seemed important,” Fosse said, “but in retrospect, it was one of the dumbest things that happened in my life.” The deal fell through. He’d never work with Fred Astaire.
Late in 1956, he headed to Warner Brothers, where Donen was filming The Pajama Game, to ensure his dances made smooth transitions to the screen. “Bob was always there and was very involved,” dancer Harvey Evans recalled. “He designed some of the shots for the ‘Once-a-Year Day’ number, which was shot on location in a park, and he changed some of the choreography to fit the location.” A notch or two more ambitious than the “Alley Dance,” the “Once-a-Year Day” number favored the proscenium-style arrangements of classic Astaire, but this time, Fosse kept changing the proscenium, cutting throughout the location from one dance space to another, and rather than confine his dancers to the absolute foreground, he placed them in all corners of the frame and at all depths. Unlike the “Alley Dance,” the film version of “Once-a-Year Day” could not have taken place onstage; it was expressly for the movies, made to suit the magnitude of the exterior.
In August, Fosse took an apprentice-type position, regressing slightly in his career to co-choreograph Bells Are Ringing with Jerome Robbins, who was also directing. Robbins felt that splitting the workload would give him more time to focus on the bigger picture—his credit would read “Entire Production Directed by Jerome Robbins”—and he also didn’t think he could handle Judy Holliday, a nondancer. “Robbins would make her nervous,” Buzz Miller recalled. “It was her personality type. Robbins was fairly new in directing and he really didn’t know his acting that well and naturally he was defensive.” Fosse learned to adapt his ambitions to Holliday’s limitations. Rather than curbing his creativity, her personality actually enhanced the effects of his choreography—for no dancer, he found, no matter how grand his or her technique, could carry a number without that inner something Holliday had in superabundance. That actors couldn’t dance didn’t matter. Though Fosse had every step planned in advance, their natural or mundane behavior could be transformed into caricature. He would just have to watch closely and make the right choice. Once isolated, a tic or a twitch could give a whole character an inner life. Holliday’s own genius would carry the rest. “To Bob, the steps were dialogue,” Ann Reinking said. “He liked dancers who knew how to speak them, or even add something of themselves. Dance per se is only one part of a great dancer.” Fosse devised a simple audition for the nondancers, a box step to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” On certain words, he’d have them move their hands from their hips to their heads and back again so he could be sure they could at least move and sing at the same time.
By all accounts, Bells Are Ringing was only a minor achievement. Fosse’s stamp on “The Midas Touch,” a boob-bouncing nightclub affair, was highly evident, as was his influence on “Hello, Hello, There!” a funny fandango in a Brooklyn subway. “One terrible part of the show,” Robbins wrote, “is that Bob Fosse, who did most of the dances, managed to eke out a bad secondhand version of dances I’ve already done, so that it looks like I have just copied myself and repeated badly what I once did well.” Fosse would be the first to agree that Robbins’s dances weren’t the only rehashes in Bells Are Ringing. “Mu Cha Cha,” a cut
e-enough duet tailored to Holliday’s range, was partially recycled “Who’s Got the Pain?” “You develop a certain few tricks,” Fosse freely admitted, “a few steps, a gimmick or so, and then you use that for the rest of your life and you keep working off of that and you protect it as though national security depended upon it.”
It was working, anyway. With Damn Yankees still playing to happy crowds and the sensational one-thousand-show run of The Pajama Game only recently ended, Abbott’s boys had Broadway on a string, though you wouldn’t know it by the cramped offices they kept at 630 Fifth Avenue. Mr. Abbott in one room, scribbling in the margins of scripts notes like Keep, Terrible, or Fix, could hear Hal Prince and Robert Griffith on calls in another, each of them speaking on the phone and to the other simultaneously without losing the thread of either conversation. There was no desk for partner Frederick Brisson, husband of Rosalind Russell and negotiator extraordinaire, presumably because he was always at lunch someplace, negotiating extraordinarily. Nor was there a desk for Bob Fosse—their Tony winner for best choreography two years in a row—presumably because Fosse did his work standing up.
At last, the time had come for Abbott and company to discuss their next venture. With the recent death of Jerry Ross, half of the songwriting team of Adler and Ross, they couldn’t return to the well. On Doris Day’s recommendation—she and Abbott had met on the set of The Pajama Game—Abbott and his office mates listened to some wonderful songs Bob Merrill had written for a film MGM planned to make of O’Neill’s Anna Christie. The songs were lovely. “The score,” Prince said. “That’s why we did the show.” They bought the rights from Metro, and Abbott wrote the book in six weeks. He called it New Girl in Town.