by Wasson, Sam
Fosse kept his envy in check throughout. “I’d do anything to be up there,” he said to Stone. “Even be down here.”
“You’re the director. Give yourself a part.”
“I did,” Fosse said. “Yours.”
“Mine?”
“Don’t worry. They talked me out of it.” Fosse would hold out for a role in the London production.
Rehearsals began in October of 1958 with dancers in one room and actors in another at the Variety Arts Studios, 225 West Forty-Sixth Street. A gray building like any other, Variety Arts housed fifteen individual studio spaces and one switchboard operator—Edith, who answered the phone in her thick New York accent, collected the dollar-per-hour rehearsal-room fee, and stood guard over a massive blackboard schedule of rehearsals and auditions listed by show name and producer as she responded to the very standard but very nervous questions of what time and how many and in which room on which of the building’s four floors. “Edith knew absolutely everything that was going on in town,” dancer Dan Siretta said. “She knew who was looking for what and who was doing what to who.” To divide and conquer, Fosse brought on Donald McKayle, an assistant on Copper and Brass, and charged him with choreographing the “Uncle Sam Rag,” which Fosse intended to parody Englishmen trying to dance to a low-down American rag. For two nights, McKayle struggled to cull humor from gesture. Fosse, checking in, felt his heart sink. He’d wanted to see personalities in culture clash, but instead he saw plain mincing, silliness instead of satire. The following day, his fears worsened. The time period was most definitely off; Redhead was set in the 1880s, but the steps were crowded with 1920s clichés. Testing his artillery, Fosse instructed McKayle to redo the choreography. They should be dancing throughout, Fosse said, even when they were singing. For the next three weeks, the dancers groaned through McKayle’s innumerable variations on the “Uncle Sam Rag,” none of them in keeping with Fosse’s mandates. In a last-ditch effort, Fosse presented McKayle with certain poses and postures to use, small hand gestures and limb extensions, but they never seemed to survive all the bouncing around.
With only a few days until the company set out for New Haven, Fryer, Carr, Fields, Hague, Shaw, Fosse, and Verdon gathered once more at Variety Arts to see the rag’s progress, and once more they were let down. Where were the touches, the little details Fosse’s own numbers had? A raised hat, a limp wrist, a cocked shoulder, a carefully chosen pantomime—each gesture put a point on a dancer’s character, like a colored handkerchief in a tuxedo pocket. More than that, the isolated move’s cool negation of big Broadway dance could be very funny, ironic even; it was as if the dancers were playing at dancing more than actually dancing. McKayle’s choreography didn’t have that. As Redhead’s co-author David Shaw noticed, he simply didn’t have the—what was the word for it?
Style. He didn’t have the style.
With no other recourse, Fosse took back the number in early December 1958 and led his team to New Haven, where, to the shock of the dancers he loved and who loved him, the company was drilled to death. “He had changed,” Harvey Evans said. “It wasn’t as fun as New Girl in Town or the movie of Pajama Game. He was feeling the pressure like he never had before. He was a director now. He even started looking harder.” Fosse replaced his boyish sweater vests and slacks with skinny dance pants and suede desert boots. He looked like a stripe, “a slick dandy,” Leonard Stone said. Fosse’s all-black uniform was as lean, as precise, as the emerging style he struggled to describe to McKayle. “He was getting scary,” said dancer Margery Beddow, who also had known Fosse since The Pajama Game. “He was a slave driver,” Stone added. “He wouldn’t let us mark any of the steps. ‘Una más!’ he’d say. ‘Una más! Una más! Get on your toes! Get up! Up! Up!’ We didn’t know why he was going at us so hard. He had fixed the ‘Uncle Sam Rag’ and the show was starting to look pretty good.” But pretty good wasn’t good enough. Fosse made them rehearse on Sunday, their day off, and on a slippery floor unsafe for his new order: they were to do grand jetés around the room. Scared and angry, one of the dancers approached producer Larry Carr. “You’ve got to give the dancers a break,” Carr then said to Fosse, “or they’re going to die here.” A break was not what the amphetamines had in mind. A break would not guard him from the critics; it would not hurry up perfection.
There were no excuses now, no Abbotts to blame if the show went awry. There were dozens of ready dancers looking his way, waiting for Bob Fosse to be brilliant, again, a hundred times a day. Each person had one head, two legs, two arms, two hands. Each hand had five fingers. Each finger had a position. But only one choice was brilliant. “He would spend three hours on two counts of eight,” one dancer said. “He would fix the height of the leg, the height of the fingers. Are they spread? Are they together? Is your hand at shoulder level; is it at ear level? He would fix the foot. Don’t point with the toe; point with the heel. You’re not lifting together. Don’t turn out, turn in. Keep the knee forward to the audience. You want to punch the balcony rail with your knee.” Sometimes Fosse had two cigarettes going, one in his hand and the other, the one he forgot about, in his mouth.
Fosse could be incredibly hard on his dancers, extensions of his own talent. “He was so influenced by all the stories about Jack Cole, Jerry Robbins, and how they used to pick on one dancer,” Harvey Evans said, “and he did that in Redhead. The change in him was astounding.” It was an unfair, but effective, approach: he found scapegoating a single dancer ignited the entire company. “I saw Bob get really mean with people,” said another dancer. “It was degrading. Sometimes it was to get what he wanted from people and sometimes it was just because he was in a mood. It was painful to watch.” Shouting, swearing, insults, demands. Often it was the smallest errors, like a leg not high enough, that set Fosse off. And in public, in front of everyone, he yelled. It was humiliating. “Yes, he could be cruel,” one cast member said, “but only superficially. You knew behind whatever was going on, Bob was probably doing it for the good of the show. There was a plan.” That his scapegoats were often women and often beautiful encouraged the sort of gossip the truth couldn’t always undo. Was Fosse hardest on the girls he slept with? Or was he hardest on the ones he wanted to sleep with? The dressing room was a greenhouse for speculation and Bob Fosse the midnight sun. His persuasive combination of charisma, looks, and reputation made him the perfect target for good and bad, a theory that proved itself. “There were rumors he had a big dick,” Harvey Evans remembered. “Even then, in the fifties.”
Redhead changed every night of its ten-night run in New Haven. Jokes were the problem—they weren’t working. New ones had to be written in the hours after the performance so they could be tested in the next day’s rehearsal before they were put into the show that night. The script was significantly revised multiple times. “It got so we used a different color binder for each script that was changed,” said David Shaw. “Four times we ran out of colors and had to use numbers.” New songs, continually being written, had to be rewritten, arranged, scored, copied, distributed to the orchestra, rehearsed, and then revised, costing whole days of rehearsal time and upwards of $2,500 a number, and then the songs were often discarded. Scrambling, Hague and Fields wrote two new numbers—“Look Who’s in Love” and “Back in Circulation”—in a day and a half. They both made it to Washington—a relief to all—but in Philadelphia, the truth became frighteningly clear: what Redhead needed was a new book.
To compensate for the script, Gwen Verdon—Fosse’s best defense—shot into overdrive. “Essie’s Dream” was by far the most challenging dance of her life. A ballet of thirty minutes that consisted of five parts—jazz, cancan, gypsy, military march, and music hall—was held together by some of the fastest costume changes Fosse had yet devised, and, of course, Gwen Verdon appeared in every section, twirling, kicking, clowning, and, once, flying. “She had an entrance in that ballet that was the best thing I’ve ever seen,” said dancer Margery Beddow. “She was in the wings on top of a table an
d she jumped off the table and onto a trampoline and dove out on the stage absolutely horizontal.” Thirty minutes. One night, in the middle of the ballet, Verdon turned to Harvey Evans, who was gasping for breath—they both were—and said, “I’m having the time of my life.” He would never forget it. “We don’t know how Gwen did it,” Evans said. “The boys would come offstage almost vomiting from working so hard, and Gwen would run back out, with no break, and keep going.” To keep her weight up, she guzzled root-beer floats, hot chocolate, and milk shakes, and she drank honey from the bottle as Fosse looked on in awe. She was a machine, his machine. Unchecked freedom terrified Fosse, but it invigorated her. “This is the first time in my life I haven’t been scared,” she said. Gwen had stolen Can-Can and Damn Yankees; Redhead, Fosse gave to her. Every night, she gave it back. To him, to them.
One night in Philadelphia, during “The Pickpocket Tango,” the row of metal bars—as long as the stage and just as high—that was supposed to be slowly lowered from above landed hard on Gwen’s feet. She cried out and fell backward. The audience gasped.
“Pull the curtain!” yelled a dancer. “Somebody pull the curtain!”
Fosse ran down the center aisle, literally leaped over the orchestra pit, and scooped her in his arms. “Pull the goddamned curtain!” he screamed, and the curtain fell.
Verdon claimed to be well enough to go on, but Fosse refused to let her. Someone asked after her understudy, and the answer came back: she was out sick. Would this mean someone else would go on for Gwen? The question rippled through the chorus.
“I think it’s okay,” Verdon said, lying. “I don’t think it’s broken.”
“Thank the Lord it didn’t fall on your head,” Fosse said.
“I wish it had. I’m a dancer.”
When Redhead opened at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater on February 5, 1959, New York saw a full evening of Fosse for the first time. The book problems had not been resolved, but the story of Essie Whimple, an innocent girl in a ghoulish world, suited his style as no story had before, showcasing his penchants for both menace and fun. As the wag of Verdon’s finger could be played for either ohhs or awws, Fosse’s isolations—his adjectives—could be tender or naughty, satirical or sincere. They showed finesse. Writing in The New Yorker, Kenneth Tynan observed, “The amount of physical activity in which this frail-seeming creature indulges is perfectly flabbergasting; spinning, prancing, leaping, curvetting, she is seldom out of sight and never out of breath. Yet beneath the athletic ebullience is something more rarified—an unfailing delicacy of spirit.”
And Redhead’s milieu suited Fosse’s fascinations. The daughter of a vaudeville father (who abandoned her), Essie runs from death: there’s a murderer on the loose. She creates wax models for a “New and Blood Curdling Exhibit—the Strangler and the Dancing Girl,” selling filth for entertainment. In other words, Essie’s in showbiz—and so is Redhead. Her dancehall history allowed Fosse to fashion the show into a medley of variety acts, each one a parody. “Uncle Sam Rag” was a gavotte burlesque, “Two Faces in the Dark” a hypersentimental Victorian duet, and, in the end, the chase for the killer was played à la Keystone Cops. The whole of Redhead had an air of performance, as if the show were about putting on a show. One day, that conceit would attain ontological significance—the performances we take for real life. For now, Fosse was just browsing his strengths. “Perhaps in the future,” Brooks Atkinson concluded his review, “all musical comedies should be written by choreographers.”
A short time later, on April 12, 1959, Bob Fosse won his third Tony for best choreography (beating Agnes de Mille), Gwen won her fourth, and Redhead was named outstanding musical of the year. True to form, Fosse would not accept the show’s triumph as his own, though everyone else on Broadway noted his promotion from wunderkind choreographer to major director. The discrepancy between his outward success and his inward “failings” further alienated Fosse from the exciting changes around him. “By the time I got to New York, in the early sixties,” said one dancer, “everyone wanted to be in a Bob Fosse show. If you were in a Fosse show, you knew you had arrived.”
Bob and Gwen lived in a penthouse apartment at 91 Central Park West, a beige fifteen-story prewar building on the corner of Sixty-Ninth Street. From their terrace, vast enough to hold a vegetable garden, a Ping-Pong table, and dog run for Gwen’s pets, they could watch the park below, and on fair-weather days they could entertain their small group of friends, most of them carryovers from their Long Island summers and weekends. On those afternoons, Gwen had trees and potted plants moved out to the balustrade and set up a tent and awning for shade. With high vaulted ceilings and large mirrors, the apartment itself was fairly majestic but Gwen did her best to simplify, stationing little found objects about the floor, and antiques around the living room. They loved crafts. As Fosse and McCracken had, Fosse and Verdon spent weekend time combing junkyards, beaches, and secondhand stores in search of the perfect old lamp, which they would then rehabilitate for that handmade look ex-beatniks of the Upper West Side had begun to favor. Their Tonys were not on display.
With afternoon rehearsals and evening performances, theirs or others, Fosse and Verdon didn’t have much free time. Anyway, they weren’t the scene type. They preferred to spend a night off at home, if not alone, then visiting with the Jule Stynes, the Sydney Chaplins, the Neil Simons, or, when he was in New York, Buddy Hackett (for dinner at Rao’s). Though he enjoyed his fame, Fosse shied away from large gatherings. They were performances, too much like work. Instead, he had the guys over for poker or joined a game at Cy Coleman’s, at his apartment nearby. They talked sports. To Fosse, a lifelong fan, football and baseball were essential television. He loved the Mets, the losers. “He admired the difficulty of being an athlete,” Ann Reinking said. “The training, the discipline, the talent.” Gwen didn’t care about sports, but she loved having him home. Going back and forth from the kitchen to the TV, her shoes off to exercise the muscles in her toes, she kept the beer and pretzels flowing, occasionally attempting and failing to interest him in an eggplant or zucchini from the terrace garden. An avowed progressive in health matters, Gwen was on the nutrition train fairly early, cooking (instead of red meat) spaghetti and clam sauce and interrupting stirs with pliés. Rather than keeping the spices close by, she put them high up in a cupboard that was most easily reachable by an arabesque.
She was also early on the brain train. An active and outspoken proponent of psychoanalysis, Verdon regularly donated time and resources to the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, the oldest low-cost psychiatric clinic in New York City. The Gwen Verdon that longed for a complete family, that lived to serve Jack Cole and then Bob Fosse, was devoted to helping children with physical disabilities, teaching them, as little Gwen in her orthopedic boots had been taught, how to get better through exercise and movement. To raise awareness, Fosse and Verdon gave premiere benefits and hosted fundraising dinner parties on their long panoramic terrace. One Postgraduate Center affair, luau themed, “made Bob such a nervous wreck,” said a friend, “buzzing around worrying about the tent and the food.” These were brain people, some of them from Gwen’s group therapy, some of them mental-health professionals, likely to put Fosse on the defensive. “Come and get your food!” he announced at the event, and the whole party moved outside to see the tent blow off the terrace and spin down over the park. “Well,” Fosse said, “there goes our fucking dinner.”
Everything was two things; their collaboration crossed with love, and they danced a paradox. “You could see they really cared about each other,” Leonard Stone said, “but Bob played the husband. He did it for her.” Signs of the arrangement shadowed the place. “Most of it was hers,” Stone said. “The paintings, the furniture.” Gypsy life trained Fosse to live out of a suitcase, a lifestyle marriage did not reform. New York was his apartment. He still stayed out late, rehearsing. He went for drinks with the cast after the show; Gwen, exhausted, went home. When Fosse girled around, he girled around, b
ut mostly at a discreet distance from Gwen, respectful of her star status, her invaluable assistance, and her emotional support, the years she’d spent darning the holes in his ego, threading her patient needle through his every burst of panic. Verdon was his night seamstress, on the nights he came home. How many women were there? “How d’you do it?” hairdresser Vidal Sassoon asked Fosse one night at dinner. “Showers,” Fosse replied. “Hot showers.” Some nights it seemed silly to follow Gwen uptown. His mind on tomorrow, he’d take a room at the Edison Hotel next door to Variety Arts. “All I need,” Fosse said, “is a rehearsal studio and bedroom—preferably attached. I could spend all my time going from one to the other.” And he did.
For dinner parties, Fosse and Verdon appeared together. At David Shaw’s house in Amagansett, they met Paddy Chayefsky, Bronx-born mensch of the proletariat, playwright lion of television’s golden age, and Oscar-winning screenwriter of Marty. His titanic intellect triggered Fosse’s clam mechanism, and Fosse retreated to the back row of his personality, a bit scared of the fiery, funny, rabbinical grizzly bear holding court across the table, like Tevye by way of Sky Masterson. Chayefsky was a thought dancer, and his brain was his stage. Bursting with ideas and controversy, and as informed as a newsstand on Monday morning, he could argue either side of any debate, social or cultural, political or religious, pastrami or corned beef. He could beat himself and still win. Paddy Chayefsky was an artist, Fosse decided, maybe an entertainer on the side, but a writer first and last, a generator of stories, not lucky or slick but a real talent. Was Fosse?