by Wasson, Sam
Fosse accepted the job. But only if Feuer and Martin, leading members of the League of New York Theaters, formally recognized the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, now backed by Harold Clurman, Agnes de Mille, and Elia Kazan. Fearing an SSDC strike, Feuer and Martin wisely accepted Fosse’s terms, and Fosse, now a hero to the SSDC, looked like even more of a producer’s headache than he had before, which, in light of the Conquering Hero scandal, was a considerable feat. Paranoid dealings lay ahead, but in the meantime, signing the Little Me contract was worth more than a few bottles of champagne.
Little Me was a healthy challenge for Fosse. The book, however hilarious, didn’t make room for dance numbers, and the sprawling story, shifting mercilessly across decades and from place to place and never looking back (there were no repeated sets in the show), put a crimp in continuity. The whole affair was resistant to cohesion, and so was Fosse: he had his own weakness in the conceptual-unity department. “You know, I never can find an overall idea for a show,” he said to a reporter covering Little Me. “It comes to me piece by piece, and then, if I’m lucky, the pieces fit together and style emerges. But it happens by trial and error.”
As was their custom, Fosse and Verdon spent several weeks working out the steps at Variety Arts, and every night, Edith, the receptionist, closed up, shutting down the switchboard and locking the iron gate on the stairway leading up to the studios. Just beyond Edith’s desk, the Variety Recording Studio stayed open for business, cutting acetate records and LPs into the quiet hours. It was soon after Edith left one evening that Fernando Vargas, the studio’s co-owner, heard a rattling on the iron gate down the hall. Shouting up the stairs, Vargas demanded the rattler identify himself. He did, but Vargas didn’t recognize the name that came back. When he threatened to call the police, the intruder lost his cool and blurted out, “I’m Gwen Verdon’s husband!” Vargas unlocked the gate and Bob Fosse, his head down, apologized for the confusion. He’d lost his key. Fosse laughed, but Mr. Gwen Verdon was humiliated.
“Fosse loved the front room on the top floor,” dancer Dan Siretta said. He and Gwen worked in a low-ceilinged space—the biggest studio in the building—with mirrors on one side and smudged windows on the other. Throughout rehearsal, Fosse kept his dance notes close at hand. He had one composition book for every show, and he filled each one with all manner of miscellany pertaining, or potentially pertaining, to dances formed or in formation, all of it scribbled in messy cursive. Uneasy with proper dance notation, Fosse relied heavily on stick-figure images and pop-culture shorthand. His Little Me ideas were, more than usual, bound to ghosts of showbiz past and present. Jerry Lewis’s knees slid into “Rich Kid’s Rag,” bits of Red Buttons into “Deep Down Inside,” Chaplin into “Dimples,” and Jolson into “Lafayette.” The picaresque show was well suited to pastiche, and pastiche was an ideal format for satire—a good fit for Fosse. Little Me showed the choreographer in tune with his strengths and sensibility and practicing his own language, consciously drawing from “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” and taking jumps he liked from Redhead.
In “The Rich Kid’s Rag,” a dig at the bratty rich, Fosse wasn’t merely parodying popular ragtime dance but satirizing personality, and in his own style. He kept increasing and changing the tempo (a favorite technique), pushing the kids faster and faster, as if trying to break their stiff upper lips, but not a single one balked. Fosse gave a toylike quality to their jerks and snaps, their knocked knees and turned-in toes. At first it was fun and funny, but by the number’s end, one couldn’t help but sense that, even at play, these automatons were more like figures in a Victorian music box than real live kids. Their snootiness—a performance like any other—practically embalmed them.
“I would pass Variety Arts every night and look up,” Siretta said, “and there he was. You could see him in silhouette through the windows. There was only one man on Broadway with that silhouette. There was only one man that obsessed.”
In the midst of rehearsals, Barrie Chase returned to New York. How Fosse found out, she had no idea.
“Can we meet?”
“I don’t think so, Bobby.”
“Why not?”
As if he didn’t know. “Gwen,” she said. “I adore Gwen . . . I would never—”
He called Chase almost every night she was in New York, which was about a month. In time she came to expect his calls—then look forward to them. Their conversations grew longer, more personal. “We’d talk for maybe an hour,” Chase said, “and about everything. We had a great time on the phone. I found him interesting and very funny. I don’t know, maybe he thought he’d break me down and I’d give in. At some point in the conversation, he’d always try, he’d always slip it in.”
“Come on . . . let’s meet . . . just for a little . . .”
“Bobby, I’m not going over that again.”
They talked of Joan McCracken. “He said he wasn’t very nice to her and regretted it,” Chase said. “He was much darker on the phone than in rehearsal.” They talked of Gwen Verdon. “He told me she was pregnant,” Chase said. “He said he told me before he told anyone else.”
He and Gwen had been trying for a long time. “It looked like we couldn’t have one,” Fosse said. “I went through all those embarrassing things of taking your sperm out of a tube and having it tested and then when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen, she was pregnant. So it was kind of a happy moment.”
Neil Simon was rewriting constantly. “You know at this point,” Caesar said, “nothing’s funny anymore. After four weeks of rehearsal it’s just a matter of logistics. It’s troop movements, deployment of forces, details.” This was Simon’s first musical. He had no yardstick to measure exactly how far he was from where he needed to be—where they needed to be, where he wasn’t getting them. Fosse, Feuer, Caesar, lyricist Carolyn Leigh, and composer Cy Coleman: six giants sharing a single bed. One couldn’t move without disrupting another. But of course one moved. It was always the same one.
“You mean I got to say it exactly this way?” an exasperated Caesar asked in the middle of a dress rehearsal. “Suppose I don’t think it’s funny.”
And so on. “He always seemed like he wanted to bite something,” Feuer noted. “Basically, Sid was a brilliant, funny, nervous wreck,” said one dancer. “He’d stand in the wings coughing and sweating and you’d think, Why in the world is he doing this show? And then he’d walk out onstage and be brilliant, absolutely brilliant.” No one knew what Caesar, drunk or sober, would do from show to show. “There was a joke,” a cast member recalled, “that this was going to be the only show in history with multiple-choice cues.”
Late in September, fourteen crates of costumes were shipped off to Philadelphia’s Erlanger Theater. (Twenty-one of the costumes were for Caesar; he had forty-eight costume changes over the course of the show, and some had to be made in under thirty-five seconds.) In October, the company said goodbye to New York. Neil Simon was uneasy about it. “It was during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he recalled, “and it really looked like the world might end.” As he rewrote for Caesar, around Caesar, Simon took calls from his pregnant wife, Joan, begging him to come home. She was in tears. “If we’re going to die,” she said, “I want all of us to die together.”
It was a funny thing, Little Me, a Chinese-food musical spun on a lazy Susan. On the one hand, the show was nothing, and on the other, it was nothing but a good time. Here, Fosse the director shone as never before. With artifice as his guide, he spun the lazy Susan at impossible speeds, changing scenes in a flash, sending his company in circles, calling attention to the sham of human motivation. But the show refuses to believe it’s a nihilistic show. A cannon blast of clichés, tropes, and devices, Little Me took great joy in fraudulence and exposed the director’s growing exasperation with the whole kit and caboodle of musical entertainment. “I don’t think there is any such thing as a realistic musical,” he said. “As soon as people start to sing to each other, you’ve already gone beyond
‘realism’ in the musical sense . . . A friend mentioned that, ‘Musicals always disturb me,’ he said. ‘If they’re singing about how they’re going to kill themselves, well, that’s a serious matter. And I’m sitting in the audience and wondering how, if they feel so bad, they can sing so well?’” They shared a certain kind of con, musicals and Fosse, masking reality with amusement.
But what would happen if that con was exposed? The question was Little Me. The answer was inconclusive—for Fosse aesthetically, for Cy Feuer commercially. “I’ve never been in this position before,” the producer said to Neil Simon the morning after the first preview. “We have a smash hit and I’m thinking maybe we should close it.”
On November 17, 1962, Feuer, Simon, and Fosse, standing in tuxedos at the back of New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater, braced themselves for what looked like the funniest, most brilliant flop of their careers and perhaps even in the history of American musical comedy. It began well—Caesar appeared to a roar of planned-for applause. But then he coughed through his first three jokes, ruining them completely. Considering this an omen, Feuer and Simon shared a pained look before turning to Fosse. He was staring straight ahead. Simon described what happened next: “Bob very simply put his arms down at his sides, closed his eyes, and fell backward, every part of his body hitting the floor simultaneously—a perfect ten at any Olympics.” On the floor, he moaned quietly.
Fifteen minutes later, when Fosse was on his feet again, something around the orchestra pit caught his attention. A drunk had left the second or third row and was stumbling to the back of the house, chatting to folks he had quite obviously never met before as he made his way up the aisle. As if Caesar weren’t wildcard enough. Planting himself before Feuer, Simon, and Fosse, the man patted his brow with a handkerchief and declared, “This is the worst goddamned show I’ve seen since My Fair Lady,” and then stormed off. Fosse fell to the floor again, this time laughing himself to tears. There were still two hours to go.
“If all the theatrical platitudes of the last half-century could be turned into playing cards,” Walter Kerr wrote, “and the pack scattered wildly from portal to portal, you would arrive at something like Little Me, luckily.” Flip the coin—it’s a wooden nickel. “I have the feeling,” wrote another critic, “that this is a pressure show, a show in which pressures are applied to blind you to its weaknesses. There is nothing wrong with that tactic if it isn’t too visible a tactic. There is, indeed, a word for it, a word not used often these days but still valid—showmanship. It takes skill and showmanship in combination to razzle-dazzle you into believing you are seeing a whizzer of a show when factually you are not.” But was that such a bad thing? It often seemed being a good fake was not so different from being good.
Fatherhood: the realest thing of all. Fatherhood and death.
But would he be a good father?
What about names? Have you thought about names? people asked.
“If it’s a boy, Nicholas,” Fosse said. “Nick. It’s so unphony.”
Nicole Providence Fosse was born on March 24, 1963. “I can’t explain it,” Fosse said, “but she’s the perfect love of my life.”
It was a good time to be Bob Fosse, at least in theory. In theory, he could stand in the middle of Forty-Sixth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and gaze up at the marquees—his. He could see, to one side of the street, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, winner of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Looking directly across, at the Lunt-Fontanne, he could smile up at the lights that spelled Little Me, which in April 1963 was the source of two more Tony nominations for Fosse: best director of a musical (which he’d lose to George Abbott) and best choreography (which he’d win).
That month he won yet another honor. “I’ve been dancing since I was nine,” he said, accepting his Dance Magazine award, “and that’s almost twenty-seven years. In that twenty-seven years I’ve been plagued and harassed with a fear, a doubt that I was really not very good, that I didn’t have too much to offer. This feeling was—you might think it was in my imagination, and it might have been—but I can remember reviews and criticisms that seemed to add to this feeling of self-doubt. And of course I worked hard. As a matter of fact, that feeling of being a little insecure I think made me work a little harder. And I achieved some success, so much so that the people on the outside of the dance world treated me as if I knew my business. But the people on the in, the people in the dance world, always seemed to look at me as though I were sort of a commercial curiosity that occurs every so often.” (If he called himself a phony, would that make him less of a phony?) He closed the speech by telling a story—one of his standards, which he told over and over, like a creation myth—of the time he broke the news of his career to his father. “Well, he asked me what a choreographer was—that’s not good—and he said, ‘Do you mean you’re going to give away all your steps?’ He then kind of threw up his arms in exasperation. Of course later on when I began to send more money home, his arms lowered and went into a gesture resembling a shrug, you know. And I think if he were here today, he might raise his arms again and hug me or pat me on the back and say, ‘Do you think I could get one of those choreography jobs they’re passing out?’” That last part, about the hug and the passing out, was the two-bits! after shave-and-a-haircut—compulsory, for the crowd. His father had passed away two weeks earlier.
After Fosse and Verdon married, Verdon deliberately removed herself from Broadway to live life as Mrs. Fosse, wife of Bob, mother of baby Nicole, the Fosse triangle’s tallest point. If in a few years she wanted to return to the theater—and she did—Verdon knew she would have to move quickly. Nearing forty, she was far too old to be a young dancer; soon she would be too old to be an old dancer. So Gwen decided when Nicole turned three she would come back to Broadway for one giant victory lap, a Fosse-Verdon show to top Redhead, but this time, one they would build for themselves, from the ground up. Until then, they would search for the ideal material, something new and challenging and personal to both, with dance potential for him and a honey of a leading role for her.
But first: temptation. City Center was dedicating its spring season to Richard Rodgers with a short May-to-June cycle of Oklahoma!, Pal Joey, and The King and I. Gus Schirmer, who had directed Fosse at City Center in 1961, would direct Joey once more, this time with Viveca Lindfors in the part of Vera. Fosse couldn’t resist the offer to reprise Joey; it was a propulsive B12 boost to his fading Riff Brother dream. He could shop for his next musical as he danced.
Lindfors kept her nine-year-old son, Kristoffer Tabori, backstage. He was enchanted by Fosse. “He was so charming and sweet and available,” Tabori said. “I was amazed he could do Joey—dance and sing and act—with that cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. It never dropped, it never moved. It did exactly what he wanted.” One day Fosse let Tabori in on the secret. “After his number, he came over, threw his arms around me, and tousled my hair. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, and told me that you had to keep your lip extremely dry so the cigarette adhered, so you had a kind of cementing. Then he said ‘Here,’ and put a cigarette on my lip to show me how.” It worked.
If Fosse worried about his performance or the production or sidestepping George and Ethel Martin, the show’s credited choreographers, he didn’t let it show. “I adored him,” said actress Rita Gardner. “I remember there were so many dances in the show, we ran out of time before we could rehearse my number, ‘I Could Write a Book,’ so Bobby cut out his rehearsal so we could go over that number for me. He knew the show backwards and forwards, but he knew I didn’t. He was there for me.” And he was there for Lindfors as he had been there for Heckart in 1961. “I could see him really helping her through it,” Tabori said, “really helping her in her limitations. He flirted with my mother, who was a tough woman, and even she loved him. They all did. He was always surrounded by the most beautiful chorines, killing them with kindness. It was a massacre! He was so sweet to them, so dear to them, and they
towered over him! I’d look up and just see Fosse in the midst of so much leg.”
With several productions of the show comfortably behind him and his own personal and professional successes at an all-time high, Fosse’s 1963 Joey seemed softer, with a natural confidence new to him and suitable to the part. “Fosse had an incredible sense of relaxation,” Tabori said. “His Joey wasn’t about finesse or cool, like Sinatra, and he wasn’t as shiny-good-looking as Gene Kelly, but still we understood how he was so attractive to people. He was a performer, completely comfortable in his skin.” To some, the metaphor was clear: Joey’s con is his feet. The reviews were mixed.
Gwen Verdon, the star of the family, suggested the possibility of adapting Maurine Watkins’s play Chicago. The part of Roxie had interested her for years, since she first saw Ginger Rogers in Roxie Hart, the 1942 film adaptation, during the run of Can-Can a decade earlier. She could remember flipping between the McCarthy hearings and a broadcast of the movie, thinking Watkins’s flapper murderess would be a terrific part for her: sweetly criminal, sexy, and somehow innocent. Fosse and Verdon inquired after the rights but came up with nothing: Watkins, a born-again Christian, did not want her moralistic tale of sin and corruption turned into a musical comedy.
Next idea: a musical of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Redhead’s producers, Fryer and Carr, went for it. They optioned Capote’s book and tempted Fosse (and writer Hugh Wheeler) with the adaptation. Holly could be a lot like Roxie—a bitter part for a sweet-tasting girl—and, from Fosse’s perspective, a way to look sex in the eye and wink at the same time. He said yes.
About that time, producers Ray Stark and David Merrick, having lost Jerome Robbins to script disputes, approached Fosse to direct their as-yet-untitled show about Fanny Brice. The combination of backstage musical, underdog story, and vaudeville comedy meant it came fully equipped for Fosse—and, he thought, for Gwen—and Fosse, after expressing interest, approached Stark and Merrick with the idea of replacing Barbra Streisand, who had already been cast, with Verdon. Wisely, they turned him down. As if in retaliation, Fosse had Jack Perlman draw up a rider to the proposed contract. He would not make the same mistake twice: if Stark and Merrick ordered changes to Fosse’s work without his consent, the rider stated, all rights to his dances would automatically revert to Fosse. The burn of Hero still with him, he refused to budge on this point, and the negotiation continued far longer than schedules permitted. Meanwhile, time was wasting. If Fosse was going to go ahead with the Fanny Brice show, he needed to get to work immediately, and for the sake of expedience, he budged slightly on the rider dispute and agreed to work on spec, for the moment, until Stark and Merrick saw some work and presumably felt more comfortable. They tabled the rights discussion in good faith.