Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Two red flags for Fosse. The first: In keeping with the seriousness of the subject, Abbott designed the show to be more sung than danced. Hence the second red flag: Abbott intended to give the part of Anna—a former prostitute trying to hide her past and make a new life—to an actress with a strong Rodgers and Hammerstein voice; not, he said, to Gwen Verdon. But Gwen wanted the part, and very badly. “I thought, ‘What an extraordinary opportunity to show that musical theater acting is acting,’” she explained. “It’s not different from doing just straight Anna Christie. It’s the same.” Abbott made Verdon audition—an affront to her stardom. It irritated her. Unconvinced by what he heard, he gave Verdon three weeks to rehearse and try again. In that time, Verdon, at Fosse’s suggestion, had begun to work on the part with Sanford Meisner, a small threat to Abbott’s control. But he gave her the part anyway; she was the biggest star on Broadway.

  To maximize Verdon’s time with Meisner, Fosse sketched out movement around her, ever mindful that he had to keep New Girl in Town a predominantly nondancing show. For weeks, he and his dance assistant Patricia Ferrier built stylized gestures and poses to mesh with New Girl’s darker, erotic milieu. Between those gestures, ligatures developed and evolved, and glints of actual dance appeared, almost accidentally. Out came a lyrical bump-and-grind ballet, far from family-friendly. But George Abbott was nothing if not reasonable. He decided to reserve judgment until this clump of spurts and undulations—whatever it was—congealed in context, and out of town. From mud, he knew, a garden could grow. “There’s a lot of serious material on the musical stage today,” Abbott told the Herald Tribune. “Pal Joey is serious material. Carousel is. American musicals have progressed far beyond the musical comedy stage; a musical comedy implies a kind of Follies atmosphere. The trend of our musicals is to try to give honest characters and an honest story and have the musical development come out of that story.” But was Abbott up to grown-up fare? Late in 1956, it was a question Fosse’s dancers—for they were, body and mind, completely Fosse’s—asked aloud. “Right away we assumed George Abbott didn’t know what to do with this show,” said Harvey Evans, “because it was so dark, about a prostitute.”

  “They live in their own world,” Abbott wrote of his dancers. “They talk to the rest of us, they sometimes marry us, but at the same time they shut us out.” He marveled half admiringly at their tattered slacks and sweaters, winced at their omnisexual pairings- and re-pairings-off. They thought differently, weirdly. Living on a diet of carrot sticks and coffee, these were hard-working aliens unfamiliar with the laws of reality. “Their life,” Abbott wrote, “is an unending struggle against the body”—in most cases, a struggle magnified by a dictatorial choreographer. A vicious Jack Cole or a nasty Jerome Robbins spewed invective that the dancers readily accepted, rarely thinking of revolt, for the choreographer was the genius, the father, the way to success, and they themselves were disposable. “The school of choreography before Fosse was you didn’t question,” said Tony Stevens. “You were a slave to the dance. It was murder. They killed you and you let them. You thanked them for it.”

  Fosse was intimate with the dancer’s drama, with its unremitting rejections and hundred-to-one-shot ambitions, and he led them all with kindness and understanding, ever aware of their suffering, which hurt him as much as his own suffering—rather, it was his own. Fosse’s two Tonys didn’t change a thing; he was still a hoofer, still a gypsy, politically and pathologically devoted to the little guy. Even when Fosse yelled or pushed too hard, his anger was all protein, no fat: fuel for them, so they could give back to him. The growing schism between the old fogy Abbott on one side and Fosse and Gwen, the hip uncle and aunt, on the other only amplified the dancers’ allegiance—maybe even love—for the eternally apologetic urchin who never thought he gave them enough. “He was so tight with us on New Girl,” Harvey Evans said, “he would have parties just for the dancers. Gwen would be there too, telling stories about Jack Cole. She could be tough and you didn’t mess around with her,” Evans continued, “but on New Girl, Gwen was one of us. And she loved Bobby so much, and he loved her, and they loved us. We all loved each other, like a family.” A kind of family.

  The “Red Light Ballet,” the erotic piece Fosse developed with Pat Ferrier, described Anna’s dream of whorehouse squalor in ways Abbott’s book hadn’t dared. Performed in front of a black backdrop on a bare black stage empty of everything but a few chairs and a simple staircase leading up into the wings, the ballet, in sharp contrast to the rest of the show—a colorful Victorian affair, heavy in naturalistic detail—shifted from objective reality to the unconscious. Evans said, “It was the first time that Fosse used chairs, and the girls—prostitutes dressed in corsets and garter belts and flesh-colored tights—actually laid back on the chairs and, you know, turned their feet in and out, and pumped their crotches in the air. Their skirts fell over their heads and they writhed. But it had a lot of comedy in it too. I played a kid they brought into the whorehouse, and Gwen flirts with me, and my foot starts shaking, then my leg starts shaking and shoots up like an erection.”

  The lonely boom of a double bass, like a heartbeat, drove the audience farther inward, into the mind of the dreamer, hurrying Verdon toward the climax, a backward dive off the top of the stairs into the arms of dancer John Aristides. A sexy pas de deux followed. “And then at the very end of it,” Evans recalled, “Aristides takes Gwen—in a back bend over his shoulder—and carries her up the stairs, we think to the bed.” Verdon was so involved in the number, she didn’t seem to notice when her corset loosened, partially exposing her breast. “Gwen went as far as she could,” Evans added. “She really wanted to be that prostitute.”

  The dancers loved the number and, in rehearsal, Abbott claimed he did too. But members of New Haven’s first preview audience averted their eyes and, by some accounts, shrieked in horror. When the curtain fell that night, not a single individual applauded. (“Now, I [had] never seen that,” Fosse said later.) In advance of Abbott’s verdict, Fosse collared a pianist and dashed to a nearby gymnasium to perform emergency surgery on the ballet. He worked for hours that night, toning and taming.

  Around one in the morning, Prince, Griffith, and George Abbott appeared at the gymnasium. Their edict: The whorehouse ballet had to go. Prince said, “I think the pornographic ballet was too vulgar and not skillful. It was just not a good dance, I thought. It wasn’t prudery at all. It was just—what is this? Why are we doing this? Because prostitution was not glamorous in the world of that show. It was seedy, sexless, and really grubby. Bob’s number was a Vegas, Crazy Horse in Paris number.” Abbott argued for narrative consistency. The character of Anna had nothing but contempt for her bordello past, so, vulgarity aside, casting prostitution in an erotic and even funny light made no sense. The whole conceit of a dream ballet, Abbott asserted, was passé. Oklahoma! and its dream ballet were history, fifteen years in the past.

  Fosse and Verdon fought back. “They replied that it was high art,” Abbott recalled, “that they didn’t care what the audience liked, and that people had thrown fruit at Stravinsky. We tried to point out that the act of throwing fruit at a project was not in the strictest logic an absolute proof of its [being] high art, but our argument was not able to pierce the emotional armor with which they had invested their creation.” The dancers stood with Fosse.

  Arriving at rehearsal the next morning, the company met yet another shock. The theater had been padlocked, which sent an enraging message the New Haven Police were on hand to enforce: New Girl in Town would not play until the “Red Light Ballet” was cut. Who called in the law? Gwen alleged an angry mother had complained to a crossing guard, but no one could be sure, and it didn’t matter. The ballet’s forty-thousand-dollar stairway, critical to the number’s most crucial innuendo, was discovered in the alley theater burned to ashes.

  Fosse had no choice but to throw together a stopgap riff on Agnes de Mille (ironically more passé than the original ballet) and New Girl trudged on to
Boston, where audiences wanted to see a dancing Gwen Verdon, which gave Abbott reason to reverse course. Ordering Fosse to add conventional dance numbers and cutting stretches of O’Neill to make room for them, he turned New Girl in Town, inch by inch, into an unfunny musical comedy.

  An employee without a union, Fosse had no leverage. But the star did. She demanded Hal Prince deliver George Abbott.

  “He’s too busy to talk right now.”

  “Then I’m too busy to go on.”

  It was the flu, she said. To replace her, the production had to split the part into four different sections for four different performers. One sang and played the book scenes, and the remaining three divided the dances among them—proof that Gwen Verdon, the most threatening of triple threats, could do what no other single person could.

  When she returned to the show, a week later, Verdon dove into character work. Irritating Abbott with actorly conflict, she would avenge the loss of the “Red Light Ballet.”

  “Just say the lines!”

  “I have no more lines to say!” (He had cut that many.)

  Retaliating, Abbott kept her waiting onstage all afternoon, refusing to bring on a stand-in when he rehearsed elements around her.

  “You cheap son of a bitch!” she called out. “Why don’t you hire someone here to stand for me?”

  New Girl’s trials only brought Fosse and Verdon closer. The high-pressure rush of opening night in New York, the feeling of unjust persecution, and their sense of righteous collaboration in the name of art electrified all channels of their relationship. “Gwen and Fosse were now so, so in love,” Prince said, “it was almost dangerous.” Conflict fired their work, work fired their romance, and romance fired the conflict. There was something conspiratorial about it. “I’d set my hair on fire if he asked me to,” Verdon said. But dancers had to wonder, as they watched him raid the dressing rooms for chorus girls, would he do the same for her?

  The exact parameters of their liaison did not concern Gwen’s son, Jimmy. Visiting New York, he found them mutually devoted and preparing for marriage. They were just waiting on Joan McCracken, Gwen told him. “She had had a breakdown,” Charlie Grass explained, “she’d been institutionalized, and Bob and Gwen helped. For years, they paid.” Fosse wouldn’t seek his divorce until Joan’s release, when she’d recovered and was able to start performing again. (When that day came, in April 1957, Fosse went to Winston County, Alabama, quickie-divorce mecca of the South.) In the meantime, Fosse and Verdon maintained separate residences: he on the West Side of midtown, she on Lexington and Sixty-Eighth. Most nights, after New Girl runs at Broadway’s Forty-Sixth Street Theater, Fosse and Jim would meet Gwen away from the mob, in the alley outside her dressing room, and they’d all follow it a hundred paces to Dinty Moore’s back door, enter the restaurant through the kitchen, and sit down at their table.

  Fosse never tried to father Jim or force a friendship. From early on, he maintained a policy of frankness and humor, with a tentative edge.

  “Bob had his demons,” Henaghan recalled, “but he was funny, really funny.” Walking down the street with Jim and Gwen one evening, Fosse spotted an old man clonking toward them with a wonky limp. Fosse stopped short, then turned to Jim and Gwen. “Everybody steals my steps.”

  At the peak of his clash with Abbott, Fosse got the most appealing offer of his life—at least, the most appealing so far—from Feuer and Martin, producers of Can-Can, Broadway’s best. From Where’s Charley? to Guys and Dolls to The Boy Friend to Silk Stockings, in pure box office, Feuer and Martin had a better record than Rodgers and Hammerstein. The envious chalked up their stunning success to good luck, but good luck didn’t account for the chutzpah it took to cut a whole number from Guys and Dolls less than twenty-four hours before its premiere; it didn’t give Feuer his Juilliard training or inborn musical charisma (his trumpet impression was a favorite of Cole Porter’s); and luck didn’t give Martin his show sense, an instinct so acute that he feared his actually going to the theater to see how the money was spent would disrupt it. “It’s a sounder way of appraising a show from the business end of things,” he said. Feuer, the more art-minded of the two, worked in the moment; Martin, account ledgers before him, figured the future. Feuer was short, pepped up, and smoked cigars; Martin, a pipe man, was tall and cool. They lived two blocks from each other—Feuer in a townhouse on East Sixty-Third, Martin in a townhouse on East Sixty-Second—and they worked in an apartment on East Fifty-Second.

  Feuer and Martin’s offer to Fosse—to choreograph and star in Stay Away, Joe, a new musical based on Dan Cushman’s novel—promised Fosse his biggest showcase yet. A gloss on Pal Joey’s Joey Evans, the part of girl-chasing, matron-swindling Joe Champlain was heaven-sent, an overdue escape from the house of Abbott and the next big break Fosse had been waiting for. In March 1957, all parties shook hands; lyricist Norman Gimbel and composer Moose Charlap signed on; and a theater was booked. A month later, MGM called Feuer and Martin. Dore Schary invited them to make Stay Away, Joe into a movie—needless to say, a movie that didn’t star the balding Bob Fosse. His hopes dashed, the choreographer was Abbott’s once again.

  New Girl in Town opened on Broadway on May 15, 1957, to, as Prince said, “the reviews it deserved.” The clashes of light and dark, of director and choreographer, remained unresolved, but once again, Verdon’s performance transcended the material. “It would be an affecting job on any stage,” rejoiced Brooks Atkinson in the Times. “Amid the familiar diversion of Broadway jamboree, it is sobering and admirable.”

  After opening, Fosse waved in the dancers. “Little by little,” Harvey Evans said, “Fosse got the ballet to where it was originally, without telling anybody. We’d go in once a week and we’d rehearse a little more.” On June 23, 1957, Fosse’s thirtieth birthday, the “Red Light Ballet” was restored, minus the grand staircase and plus one orchestral change. The slow, sensual drum of the double bass was thrown out for something lighter and faster, and the number brought the audience to its feet.

  The scuffle over the “Red Light Ballet” showed how Fosse’s style and sensibility grew in the dark, and it hastened his thirst to control, to be the author of his own work and defend his artistic urges.

  Though the musical drama knew how to be funny (just look at Joan McCracken), the musical comedy had no idea how to be grown-up. It was the fifties; a binary time. Man was man; woman was woman; funny was light, not dark. In 1957, no less a personage than George S. Kaufman openly endorsed their segregation. “There were long years,” he wrote nostalgically, “when the outcome of the romance depended on which lad won the big football game, or the foot race, or the automobile race, or the boat race, or the airplane race. Naturally, the fellow who won the race was given permanent possession of the ingénue.” Musical comedy was about basic jubilation—singing in the rain, not dancing in the dark—which posed a problem for a show that wanted to get serious and still stay up; for that to work, someone had to jubilantly pull the rug out from under jubilation.

  That someone would be Fosse, but not yet. Even if Abbott had allowed it to flourish, Fosse’s New Girl in Town would likely have contained a healthy amount of old-fashioned fun anyway. For every “Steam Heat” or “Whatever Lola Wants,” Fosse seemed to stage two rousing group numbers, like The Pajama Game’s “Once-a-Year Day,” Damn Yankees’ “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.,” and New Girl’s “Roll Yer Socks Up.” “Bob’s choreography in the Abbott years was big and lusty,” recalled Tony Stevens, “not like the micromanaging detail work that would really come to define his style. He was always very specific, but at first it was more acrobatic, like Gene Kelly with flashes of Fosse.” As late as 1962, Fosse’s Abbott side still existed: “I think of dancing as sheer joy,” he would say, “as exhilaration, as running, as jumping, as athletic, like a trapeze artist, you know?”

  In September 1957, four months after New Girl opened at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater, the sheer joy of dance achieved a new and depressingly (for Fosse) high benc
hmark. Again, the genius was Jerry Robbins. Whereas other musicals, even the great ones, had had to slow down and switch gears to go from a song to a book scene, West Side Story spun every disparate ingredient into one cohesive burst of dance-song-story. Worse (for Fosse), it was culturally attuned to its here-and-now gang-life setting (which gave Robbins points for sociology too). Even worse than that, West Side Story was bold, ending act one with two dead bodies and act two with a third. It was like a dance opera, defining and expanding character more through movement than book scenes. De Mille had presented character through dance in one memorable Oklahoma! number, but this was character through dance from curtain-up—complete, the whole way through—and not in ballet but in a street-ballet vernacular that was part real, part too-wonderful-to-be-true, and (still worse) in comprehensive harmony with the show’s visual life, a swirl of free-floating fire escapes and carefully color-controlled costumes. Worst of all, from Fosse’s point of view, it was a terrific evening. Fosse sent those golden cuff links back to Robbins.

  He thought Jerome Robbins talked to God. “When I call God,” Fosse said, “he’s always out to lunch.”

  There was no denying it: After West Side Story, it was clear that the American musical wasn’t going to go gently. Now it was mammoth. It was defiant. It had something on its mind and needed to say it. What was Bob Fosse, the entertainer, doing at that very moment? What hoary nightclub shtick was he trying not to steal from?

  What Fosse was doing was Copper and Brass, a thin excuse to build a musical around comedienne Nancy Walker. It was such a mess, its director and second leads had withdrawn during the show’s Philadelphia tryout, and Fosse—too much the gypsy to turn down a job—did what he could, which, weeks before the show’s move to New York in October 1957, wasn’t much. In part, the problem resided with the original choreographer, Anna Sokolow, whose work did not play well with Fosse, her former student. “Fosse was doing the best he could trying to throw things in where she would let him,” said dancer Elmarie Wendel. “The poor guy was working so hard, pacing nervously around the stage, trying one thing, trying another, all scrunched up like a coiled wire. By the end of the day his little blond hair was sticking straight up.” Quite mysteriously, Sokolow had insisted on setting a ballet number on the Staten Island ferry. Half of the dancers couldn’t figure out why. “The dancers started to split. One side was for Sokolow and the other side was for Fosse,” Wendel said. “The Sokolow side thought Fosse had no class. The Fosse side thought Sokolow was rather rarefied. The ballet ended up awkwardly in between.”