Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  With Gwen on or off his arm, Fosse was fodder for Louella Parsons’s column and high up on every producer’s call sheet. Agents dropped scripts at his feet for him to read whenever he could find the time. He began talks to oversee Viva!, a Pancho Villa musical, and briefly considered a musical of The Farmer’s Daughter, by Redhead’s producers, Fryer and Carr, before switching to Saturday Night, a show with songs by Stephen Sondheim. An old work predating his West Side Story and Gypsy streak, Saturday Night was to be Sondheim’s debut as composer-lyricist—prior to this, it had been lyrics only. Set in Brooklyn in the late twenties, the small-scale show followed the romantic and get-rich-quick schemes of a group of working-class kids on the eve of the stock-market crash. Acting as producer, Jule Styne knew the project would appeal to Fosse; he delivered the material to him, and talks progressed through the summer of 1959. “Bobby wanted to both direct and star in it,” said Sondheim. “Though I had only seen him in movies, I had every reason to believe he’d be fine in the part. So we started having auditions for other actors and I think we had maybe one or two audition sessions and I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I didn’t want to go back to old work and so I stopped it. And that was that.”

  By September, the director was directing again, this time for NBC as part of a package put together by Fosse’s agents at MCA, the biggest, most powerful agency in the world (and soon to be investigated for antitrust violations). Stocked with MCA talent and produced by MCA executives, Ford Startime was a vaudeville-style anthology series of sketches, dramatic scenes, and star-filled musical numbers. Fosse’s episode, “The Wonderful World of Entertainment,” he codirected with Kirk Browning. Fosse and Browning split rehearsal duty, Browning focusing on the scenes and Fosse on the numbers, which he populated with a handful of dancers from Redhead sure to know his style and produce results fast. He drove them on for as much as eleven hours at a stretch but never went later than 7:15, when the caravan of limousines appeared to rush his dancers back to Broadway for their half-hour calls. The pressure was worse than anything he had known in the theater. “A TV show is put together so quickly,” said dancer Sharon Shore, who was in the production, “there just isn’t time for dances as intricate as those in the theater.” At rehearsal’s end, Fosse would, on occasion, drop by Redhead to see that its screws were tightly turned, but only on occasion. Tampering with an old show was walking across quicksand; at any moment, he could be sucked into a bottomless hole of self-doubt and lose faith in the entire enterprise. Fosse’s assistants were a tremendous help in this respect, keeping an eye on the show, catching its accidental shifts—missed beats, slack cues—and reversing them before they got serious. Every morning, Fosse would be back at NBC’s studios in Brooklyn.

  As its title indicates, “The Wonderful World of Entertainment” gave Fosse an excuse to showcase his facility for performance styles, from vaudeville (“Ain’t We Got Fun?” was a favorite) to flapper to ballet, all under the protective cover of spoof—a strategy Fosse had been refining for years and had finally perfected in Redhead. But it was Fosse’s growing interest in eerie sensuality and in an all-black jazz look he borrowed from “Essie’s Dream” that made the special momentous.

  The first filmed ensemble in Fosse’s signature style, “Let Me Entertain You,” featured a clump of scarecrow-looking dancers in clown makeup, each in full-body black topped off with a black porkpie hat. They slunk in coagulated discontinuity, squirming en masse like a can of horny worms. The formation that would come to be known as an amoeba came to Fosse by way of coffee-table books—a great deal of his work did. Verdon said, “He was intrigued by the surrealist painters. Not just Dalí, but Hieronymus Bosch. I don’t know if you’re familiar with, you know, people being born out of big eggs with eight arms and legs . . . I mean having flowers for tails and a lot more than that. And people all joined together and freaks.”

  Before he took Redhead on the road, Fosse joined The Girls Against the Boys in Philadelphia, a few weeks before it was to open and, most likely, close. A goofball revue starring Bert Lahr, Nancy Walker, and Dick Van Dyke, the show needed a full overhaul, and fast. Unlike his Copper and Brass agreement, which forced Fosse to retain Sokolow’s work, Fosse’s present contract granted him complete approval of all artistic elements. “Fosse told us he was going to be assigning new things every day,” said dancer Buzz Halliday. “And from there, it was total lunacy. I couldn’t believe how quickly the ideas came. We were working so fast, I slept at the theater literally every night. Equity never knew.” To inject some semblance of continuity into the sketches and the numbers, Fosse devised a series of fourth-wall-breaking, vaudeville-inspired, “Ya ready for the next number, folks?” segues. It made for cheap ligature, but Fosse loved showing the seams; it was chintzy, but unveiling desperate artistic straits struck him as real showbiz, clumsy and honest. And real showbiz it was: During the actual run, before actual audiences, Fosse would pass messages to the stage manager, who would shout them to the actors in the split seconds before they went on. “What a rush!” Halliday said. “So much had to be improvised and so much of it was about what was actually going on and going wrong. The curtain would come down between a number and a sketch and I would get the word from the stage manager to call out to Dick [Van Dyke], ‘Hey, Dick, get ready for the next sketch! These people are waiting!’” Given all that metatheatrical hoofing, maybe the audience wouldn’t see the dud they were seeing. (They did. The Girls Against the Boys played sixteen performances and died.)

  What happened to the show didn’t matter. Whether the production was a hit or a miss, Fosse’s name would stay off the playbill, sparing him public embarrassment. He did The Girls Against the Boys for the work. Work: it wasn’t like living, but not doing it was a lot like being dead. “Part of the work ethic,” he said, “is probably a way of saying, ‘You forgot me, folks. I want to remind you I’m here.’” Why stop? So Robbins could do another West Side Story? Hal Prince said, “I told him, ‘I care as much about the theater as you do, but there’s always another musical. Life, however, is not a show. Life is life. This is the only one you’ve got.’ Bobby could never quite believe it. I thought, Jesus, this guy is not going to live a long life.”

  One night in April 1960, Fosse called Joan McCracken. He told her where he was—in Chicago, on the road with Redhead and Gwen—and asked her if she ever thought about getting back together with him. Her answer was no.

  The following day, on April 2, 1960, Fosse and Verdon took out a license and wed in a secret ceremony in Oak Park, Illinois. “We married because we were going to have a child,” she would explain years later. “And a child needs that protection.” To be a mother again, to have a complete family; it was what she had always wanted. After Redhead—the incessant gruel of it, the joy of it—she would take a few years off to raise the baby. Fosse? “I finally decided that I was as grown up as I’d ever be.”

  He had been running away from fatherhood his whole life. Surprise pregnancy and subsequent abortion had trailed him as far back as his teenage years, his time spent on the road, blackened by burlesque rim shots and human sludge. Though Fosse kept trying for clarity, healing still largely evaded him. Five years earlier, he had begun psychotherapy with the intention of breaking, or at least examining, his ruinous relationships with women. But the longer he tried to understand why he couldn’t trust intimacy, the closer he came to understanding he never would, until he saw isolation as a fact of his constitution, as much a part of him as his talent, or his hopelessness.

  Now that Fosse had finally remarried, he wondered if it would be appropriate to end his therapy with Dr. Sager. It had been helpful in many ways, mostly work-related; for everything the analysis did not accomplish, Fosse naturally blamed himself. But when he realized his dependency on Seconal was more of an addiction, he turned his anger on Sager and stopped both the drug and his analyst cold turkey. Despairing, he resigned himself to accepting that the pitch-blackest part of him—the remembered child in the dark of the
Silver Cloud—might never be illuminated.

  The search continued for a meaningful follow-up to Redhead, something important, a musical comedy of real substance. He knew that by turning humanity’s most profound dilemmas into sources of amusement, he might prove himself to be, maybe, deeper than a mere song-and-dance man. Reinking said, “He knew that in order to be a great artist on Broadway, he’d have to have the dark as much as the light.” But how? Searching with Fosse was producer Robert Whitehead, recently appointed, with Elia Kazan, to establish a repertory theater at Lincoln Center. The combination of Whitehead and Kazan, who flooded Broadway with O’Neill, Odets, Williams, Inge, and Miller, made any project an artistic behemoth, resplendent with good taste and intelligence; without question, this new concern would be no exception. It was instantly proclaimed the most exciting development in American theater in a long time. Whitehead’s call must have surprised Bob Fosse.

  Whitehead liked the idea of musicalizing The Madwoman of Chaillot with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Lunt and Fontanne didn’t, though, and Fosse presented his benefactor with another idea: a musical of Preston Sturges’s 1944 film Hail the Conquering Hero, about a milquetoast ex-Marine mistakenly believed to be a war hero. The coupling of fraudulence and fame had strong personal resonance for Fosse. Played in the film by Eddie Bracken, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith spends the bulk of the picture imploring his family and the community at large to understand that he isn’t a war hero but regular old Woodrow, a loser who was discharged because of his hay fever and who never saw any action. Of course, no one believes him. Woodrow’s honesty is taken for extreme modesty, further proof of his nobility, which puts the poor “hero” in the front of a Kafkaesque victory march.

  Whitehead got it. The story gave Fosse satirical opportunities from nearly every angle, and its attention to phoniness, to the idea of putting on a show, metaphorically speaking, was a handy entrée to song and dance. Music and lyrics went to Morris “Moose” Charlap and Norman Gimbel; book to comedy writer Larry Gelbart, who wrote Fosse’s episode of Ford Startime; and the lead to young TV star Tom Poston—all relatively new to their careers, the men would be easier for Fosse to command. Undoubtedly, Fosse’s star shone brightest. On Conquering Hero, only Whitehead stood above him.

  In October 1960, after Fosse’s usual period of studio isolation, the company gathered for the first read-through at a rehearsal space on the top floor of the New Amsterdam Theater. Abandoned for decades, the main stage—once home to Fanny Brice and George M. Cohan—had deteriorated, lush clump by lush clump, splashing green and gold pieces of art nouveau into the rainwater that filled the orchestra pit. Upstairs in the limbo of chipped porticoes and forgotten props, Fosse apologized for the cold and dust and led the company through Gelbart’s book.

  Gwen was there, watching them and watching Fosse. In the days leading up to rehearsal, he had been acting strangely. The amphetamines made him jumpy and impatient, and there were, of course, his dark, dark nights, but by now those were par for the course. This Fosse was scaring her. Certain days he refused to go to work. He wouldn’t leave the apartment. He stopped sleeping. He was paranoid. He hallucinated. Pacing about the room, he had screamed at a cheap Mexican statue of Jesus, imploring it to save him: “Why don’t You help me?”

  It was the amphetamines. Sitting in her seat close to the stage, Gwen watched, looking for signs of another outburst.

  That day, Larry Gelbart arrived halfway through rehearsals in time to hear Tom Poston reading lines—narration for a war ballet—that Gelbart, the writer, hadn’t written. Baffled, he approached Fosse the next chance he got and asked about the new stuff.

  “You were off fucking around somewhere,” Fosse hissed. “Somebody had to make the changes.”

  The Conquering Hero was Gelbart’s first Broadway show; he didn’t know how things worked exactly, but he knew rudeness when he saw it. “Well, now that I’m back,” he said, “I’d like to do it myself. I see what you want.”

  Slowly, Fosse turned away from the table of actors. Gelbart saw his skin was white and wet. Fosse looked possessed. As he opened his mouth to speak or yell, a sick-sounding gurgle ripped from his body and he tipped backward in his chair, gasping and twisting as if having a seizure. The company froze. There were screams. Gwen raced to his aid; she scooped Fosse into her arms the way he had scooped her up a year ago, after the Redhead set crushed her foot, and rushed him from the room. “She saw it coming,” said actor John McMartin. “Gwen could tell. I don’t know how.”

  It was a grand-mal seizure. Later, Fosse would attribute his epilepsy to a head injury he’d sustained in a horseback-riding accident many years earlier. The explanation wasn’t out of the question; he did love horses. He loved the way they moved. And it’s true he took Dilantin, an anticonvulsant. “It was always controlled by something,” Gwen explained. “Anyway, he had an allergy. He was on three different medications and apparently it didn’t mix.” In an unpublished interview, Fosse offered another explanation—barbiturate withdrawal. “I got hooked on Seconal and he [Dr. Sager, Fosse’s psychiatrist] didn’t realize it,” he said. “He had prescribed it and he wasn’t aware what was happening. When I went cold turkey after I stopped using it, I had an epileptic seizure.” At the time, 1960, rumors that an individual had epilepsy and drug addiction would provoke suspicious stares and put off producers, so Verdon and Fosse kept the truth to themselves and proceeded to New Haven in November, putting out fires as best they could.

  The show itself was another matter. Fosse’s idea for a grand antiwar ballet laden with satire (and with narration Gelbart hadn’t written) disgusted Whitehead. Musical comedy, he believed, was no place for commentary about, let alone critiques of, the American military or its policy of spinning truth. “That ballet frightened the management,” dancer Dick Korthaze said. “It was heavily satirical with an underlying darkness.” Girl dancers played the Japanese soldiers; boys played the Americans. Dancer Margery Beddow remembered the antiwar ballet to contain “some of the most innovative work Fosse ever did.” As they danced—the Japanese soldiers with knives in their teeth, the U.S. soldiers with gold glitter in their hair—Truesmith’s mother, almost offstage, bragged into the phone (in Fosse’s prose) about what she thought her son was doing in the South Pacific, as perhaps Fosse’s mother might have bragged about what she thought Fosse was doing in late-night dives decades before. With overt theatricality and broadly pantomimed stereotypes, the ballet gave voice to an uncomfortable irony: that wishful thinking, like propaganda, was in its own way a form of show business, a myth of virtue that the nation—personified by Truesmith’s mother—told itself. Whitehead rightly glimpsed, buried in the critique, a certain hostility toward the audience members who wanted to enjoy their entertainment guilt-free. Now Fosse was telling them they, like the rest of America, were fools to be duped so easily. Nor was Whitehead pleased with Fosse’s parody of a political rally, a number danced to a campaign speech written in political gibberish. “Every time a word [of Truesmith’s] was emphasized,” Beddow said, “we’d take up the cry and start a different kind of dance to it. Even when he sneezed, we began a Spanish heel dance as we chanted, ‘Ah-choo, ah-choo, ah-choo.’”

  Here was Fosse’s opportunity to make a meaningful statement and become a serious director, to show that war, media, and political personas were nothing more than show, an arrangement between foolers and fooled. Televisions in every home blurred the lines between news and entertainment, content and image; the censuring of Joseph McCarthy and the recent quiz-show infractions of NBC precipitated concerns over what really is. Fosse would have agreed with Daniel J. Boorstin, whose book The Image appeared that very year and bore out the national taste for razzle-dazzle and flimflam or, as Boorstin put it, “the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.” The Conquering Hero shouted out its cynical assent; razzle-dazzle was its medium and its message. “I’m not bothered when people refer to the razzle-dazzle aspects of my work,” Fosse sa
id, “though I think sometimes I put so many coats of paint on a thing that nobody looks to find out what I’ve painted. I mean, I stick on bugle beads and sequins until people don’t see what I’m saying.”

  Joining Whitehead against Fosse, Gelbart shrugged off Hero’s quote-unquote big ideas. “Bobby was getting ideas for the first time,” he said. “Ideas that had been around a long time . . . but he was very enamored of them because they were new to him.” Yet in musical comedy, there was no precedent for protest in choreography or for Fosse’s antiwar, anti-razzle-dazzle view of national procedure. In the early sixties, dissent was not yet the fashion.

  Meanwhile, Tom Poston was falling flat. “Tom wasn’t right for the part,” said Patricia Ferrier. “There was a weakness about him, a kind of vanilla thing. He was a good second banana, but this required more.” Fosse grew furious at his leading man. (John McMartin said, “I thought, watching him, Is he going to have another seizure?”) As if to compensate for what wasn’t happening, which was everything, Fosse—already at the brink—pushed his company even harder, right over the edge, almost losing them completely. For he had not only the power to make incredible demands but also, with the Dexedrine, the physical strength and mania to shout anyone with opposing views out of the theater. “His behavior became so erratic and energetic,” Beddow said, “that nobody could keep up with him.” They went to war. Fosse argued that rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing ad infinitum even the smallest detail, like a twitch or the tiniest back bump, improved the dance; dancers saw diminishing returns. “If you watch what happens to rats when they’re given stimulants,” said Dr. Robert Bilder, professor of psychiatry and psychology at UCLA, “you can see as you increase the dose, they become more and more active, but in a reduced number of categories of behavior. So at low doses they may run more on the wheel or check out the water bottle or groom themselves, but when the dose gets higher, they spend all their time just licking their forepaws, licking and licking and licking and licking, over and over and over again. They don’t do anything else. So it’s not that they’re being more productive, it’s that they’re spending more of their time engaged in a reduced subset of all the possible things they could be doing.” Whitehead, Gelbart, Charlap, and many of the dancers who would ordinarily jump to Fosse’s aid were mowed down by his oblique and tireless intractability.