by Wasson, Sam
On that tenuous note, Fosse dove into the book. He scribbled notes, took down song ideas, and sent off suggestions to writer Isobel Lennart (who seemed amenable to his input). Midway through the overture, Fosse thought, they should have the curtain rise on a pair of electricians at work on the bare stage. Checking the lights would prompt certain sparks and flashes timed to the music. A few beats later, Fanny’s dressing room would roll on and Streisand would make her entrance, moving across the stage to her dressing-room door. Less inspired was Fosse’s suggestion to cut the song “People.” The lyrics, he said, made no sense for Fanny Brice. She was a star and stars did not “need people.” They needed the stage, the audience—no more.
His brainstorming halted when Fosse heard Stark had placed a worried call to Feuer and Martin. Stark questioning Fosse’s competence was a breach of good faith—Fosse identified it immediately, and he decided to quit the show. In September 1963 he wrote a six-page letter explaining how he reached his decision, sent it to the full company, and left for Feuer and Martin’s I Picked a Daisy. When Stark found out, he fired off a telegram threatening Fosse with legal action. But it didn’t take: they never had a contract in the first place.
I Picked a Daisy became On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, and Fosse settled into a comfortable routine of story conferences with Feuer and Martin, producers he knew too well to distrust. As writer and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner worked (very slowly) on revisions, Fosse turned his attention to his Gwen show, to writer Hugh Wheeler and their adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s; he auditioned and rehearsed touring productions of How to Succeed and Little Me, for which he hired dancers Kathryn Doby and Leland Palmer, the latter a Broadway newcomer with a great deal of talent but, at twenty-four, without a full sense of herself.
Soon after rehearsals began, Fosse pulled her aside.
“Leland,” he said, “I want to tell you something very honestly. May I?”
“Yes . . . okay.” She feared the worst. He was going to fire her.
“You’re not the most beautiful woman in the usual terms of beautiful,” he said softly, “but you have something very unusual and very special and I don’t want you to forget that.”
A few nights later, Palmer’s hotel-room phone rang. It was around ten o’clock.
“Hello?”
“Leland. It’s Bob Fosse.”
She had been deeply touched by what he had said to her in rehearsal. Never before had anyone of Fosse’s stature addressed her with such conviction and grace.
“Will you come to my room?” he asked. “I want to talk to you.”
A minute later, Palmer opened the door to Fosse’s room. He was in bed, under the covers. She was surprised: he hadn’t seemed sick that day in rehearsal.
“The light is so bright,” he said to her. “Would you put a towel over the lamp?”
She did.
“I want you. Come here.”
She sat beside him on the bed.
“I would like to sleep with you.”
“Bob,” she said, unsure of what she would, or should, say. “I respect and admire you and I respect and admire Gwen, but I won’t, not tonight, not ever . . .”
“But will you kiss me?”
She thought for a moment, then kissed him on the forehead. A stranger walking in would not have known who was the grownup and who was the kid.
Palmer got up from the bed and crossed to the door. “Would you like me to take the towel off the lamp?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to turn out the light?”
“No, thank you.”
“Okay.” She opened the door. “Good night, Bob.”
“Good night.”
Palmer left with a new sensation, one that, years later, she would understand to be the beginnings of sophistication and deepening self-respect. She billowed back to her room feeling fuller and new, as if a sound foundation had been slipped under the kid in her, raising her up from innocence to peek at adulthood. Fosse hadn’t changed Palmer; he had seen in her what she had not yet become. And that night, for the first time, Palmer saw it too. Getting into bed, she felt special.
Sex was a medium for Fosse. It was as much a physical act as it was an opportunity to learn about and merge with his female collaborators, a way of giving to them so they could give back more and better—that is, if they didn’t break under the pressure or retreat in anger. As a means of communication, sex was an exclamation point, far better than the periods of regular life. Sex improved on respect and trust—for the dancers and for him. Sex brought him closer to the epicenter of talent, as if by dipping a hand to the geyser, he could steal back a drop for himself. And all his effort brought him applause too. Fit, built, and endlessly attentive to detail, Fosse was a terrific lover, some said the best they ever had, and in bed, he worked as hard as he did in Variety Arts, giving to get. In bed he owned the spotlight, Fred Astaire performing for an audience of one (or sometimes two) night after happy night—and they really were happy—laughing, sweating, talking together. Sex was better than being up late and trying to drink the amphetamines to sleep on his own, without anyone there to hold back his dread.
Twenty-Four Years
HE HAD TIME, still waiting on Lerner’s revisions, to get to know his daughter. “Nicole kept Bob in life,” Ann Reinking said. “She forced him to slow down, to be home.” Suddenly he was anchored to someone else’s physical and emotional well-being, and rather than resenting the responsibility or buckling under his fear of bungling it, he loved it. Fatherhood was bullshit repellent; it cut the fat out of Fosse’s brain; it organized him. All at once, the suicidal fantasies—the ones that weren’t for show—he vowed to put aside, for her. “When Nicole came along,” dancer Fred Mann III said, “it opened the heavens for Bob. She was the stars, the moon, the sun. Nicole was everything to him.” She was a dazzler of the most ingenious sort, and Gwen, beaming from across their living room, watched him fall for her. “He’s a fabulous father to Nicole,” she said. These were glorious days, rapturous days. “There was this point of great happiness,” Fosse said, “and I wanted to give Gwen something wonderful. I wanted to give her the best show she ever had.”
That show would not be Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In April of 1964, with several drafts of the musical already outlined, Truman Capote decided Verdon, at thirty-eight, was too old to play Holly Golightly, and ordered Fryer and Carr’s option money returned. Still itching to collaborate, the producers bounced back with another idea: What about a Fosse musical of Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, with Gwen as Sally Bowles? It was a compelling suggestion. Sally had qualities Bob and Gwen could work with: she was happy on the outside, sad on the inside, and, like Roxie and Holly, a party girl on the down and out. But Fosse and Verdon didn’t see Nazi Germany as the right setting for a musical and passed.
So they kept looking, since On a Clear Day wasn’t going anywhere either. What if, Fosse thought, they did an evening of musicals, two or three one-acts in a single night? With Fryer and Carr’s blessing, Fosse went down to Times Square to prowl the shelves of the Drama Book Shop and returned with a copy of Modern One-Act Plays. A Sunny Morning, an old Spanish comedy of 1914, stirred his interest. So did Passionella, a new work by Martin Charnin and Bob Kessler, which Fryer, Carr, Verdon, and Fosse heard at Gus Schirmer’s apartment before deciding against it. Moving on, Fosse thought back to the spring of 1962, when Vivian Shaw, ex-wife of writer David Shaw, told him to see Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria, which was then playing in repertory at the Bleecker Street Cinema. As predicted, the film enthralled Fosse, and the part of Cabiria was perfect for Gwen. A low-rent hooker desperate for love, she was in many respects a modern-day (and female) Harlequin, the sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte clown Verdon saw as her personal archetype. “Harlequin is a well rounded, sensitive person,” she explained. “His love for Columbine—especially when she breaks his heart—makes a man of him. He’s transformed by suffering. The twirl of blue paper in his eye represents te
ars. The flower on his nose is a symbol of unattainable beauty—like Columbine. He hunts for it everywhere, not realizing that it is right in front of him.” He was also her husband.
Without delay, Fosse screened Nights of Cabiria for Fryer and Carr and Gwen in Fryer and Carr’s offices at 445 Park Avenue. Everyone seemed to love the movie, but midway through, Fosse knew he had a tough sell on his hands. Cabiria had no happy romance, and it ended on a very sad note—a bad combination for a musical comedy. In the elevator going down, Fryer admitted he felt only so-so about Cabiria’s Broadway potential, and Gwen, to Fosse’s surprise, agreed. But Carr—driving Gwen and Bob back home to their apartment—privately encouraged Fosse to stay with it. Cabiria had a big little heart, he said. That had to be good for something.
That night Fosse could not sleep.
There was so much for him in Nights of Cabiria: the sort of crummy feelings musical comedy never touched; Fellini’s hooker underground of ugly-beautiful women Fosse recognized from the clubs he did not discuss; Giulietta Masina’s masterly evocation of Chaplin, that touch of vaudeville he couldn’t resist; and his own ties to Cabiria, who, despite her hard shell, was sweet inside, like him. Most didn’t see it but she was there, behind the black and the cigarettes and the suicide monologues and all Fosse did to imitate a brooding and far-off artist (which, ironically, he didn’t have to pretend to be). But when Fosse was at home, relaxing with his friends, his stylin’ desert boots kicked up on the coffee table, he let his natural state—Cabiria gamin—take over. (“Bob would be furious if I called him a nice guy,” dancer Laurent Giroux said.) As much a strategy as a defense, Fosse made “cool” work for him, like a billboard or a great review in the New York Times. It was part of his show.
He got out of bed.
In nine pages, Fosse outlined a one-act musical of Nights of Cabiria and showed it to Gwen the next morning. Still, she was unconvinced. The character and milieu were stridently unglamorous, seedy even. Hadn’t they learned their lesson after New Girl in Town’s whorehouse ballet?
Fosse got a similar response from Fryer and Carr: depressing wasn’t Broadway. Which was depressing.
But what was Broadway? Rodgers and Hammerstein?
Not anymore: The Sound of Music, their last show, had climbed its last mountain on June 15, 1963. As if in reaction, the whole of musical theater scrambled for their crown, denting it somewhat on the way to high seriousness and literary good taste. The cotton-candy days of The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees had given way to “important” subjects, dutifully making good on the musical’s long-term plan to sophisticate itself, like Henry Higgins did for Eliza Doolittle. In that respect, its evolution may have been natural; the Broadway musical was not a kid anymore but a college freshman, falling in love with fancy culture and the classics, like Camelot, as if that made him smarter. The upside was My Fair Lady. The downside was that “important” subjects deserved “important” productions, and shows got bigger and more expensive. With all that money onstage, producers were apt to shift their focus away from book, music, and lyrics. Musical comedy, the college freshman’s kid brother, was particularly vulnerable. What important books should he read for fun? Or: How could an essentially antic form match Gypsy and West Side Story for guts and impact without forfeiting the silliness essential to its very being? It was an old question with many answers (Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed, and so on), but now that Shaw was fair game, the lure of bourgeois soft-core pulled even harder. Bye Bye Birdie, Do Re Mi, Fade Out—Fade In: under pressure to mature or escape maturity, comedies either sank or went puff and floated away. The old masters, meanwhile, kept getting older. In 1962, Irving Berlin opened Mr. President, his final show. No one knew it then, but How to Succeed would be Frank Loesser’s last on Broadway. The great ones were dying. Hammerstein, Cole Porter; 1960, 1964, respectively. A Camelot was ending.
And another golden age was beginning. Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was built (with Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove) on sound, self-aware characterization, and airtight farce—Sondheim meets the best of George Abbott. And, in contrast to many of its forebears, the 1962 comedy was as conscientiously engineered as a Russian novel, written and rewritten well in advance of the rehearsal process with the intention of grounding its silliness on the soundest possible foundations. This was a new concept—workshopping. New shows of the Abbott era had flown into rehearsal relatively quickly, relegating (somewhat counterintuitively) hard questions about the bigger picture to trials out of town (at which point, in many cases, it was too late to do anything). The post-Forum handling of musical books as a kind of literature was yet another facet of the new seriousness on Broadway. Seriousness of the best kind.
So, no, a musical of Nights of Cabiria didn’t look to Verdon, Fryer, or Carr like a Broadway comedy of the early sixties. Fosse tried to move on to another project, but automatic instinct, like gravity, brought him—and then Cabiria—back down to the dancehall. He thought of the dime-a-dance places of his teenage years, the sort his brother Buddy took him to. He thought of the Times Square entrance to the Tango Palace, a narrow, paint-chipped artery clogged with girls’ headshots: browse the dance hostesses available in every flavor, some sixteen, some forty-two, some with Louise Brooks haircuts years out of date, some from before the war, none with talent. The smart ones knew to forget about Broadway. Any soldier or college kid could buy himself a dance for a fifty-cent ticket; two tickets, and the girl would talk to him between songs. At the end of the night, each hostess turned in her tickets for a commission—half of ticket sales plus a piece of the bar. (What the girls did after that was their business.) But the ticket was a metaphor: Who could claim never to have sold one?
This time Fryer, Carr, and Verdon got it. Setting Cabiria in a dancehall lent theatricality to the piece, livening up the atmosphere and blurring the prostitution angle. And of course, Fosse wanted to write it. To provide himself and Gwen with the absolute best opportunities, Fosse knew he needed to man the show’s conceptual entryway and keep collaboration, and therefore dissent, to a minimum. He needed control.
But he also needed a co-writer, ideally someone he could overrule in a pinch. Fryer and Carr suggested Martin Charnin, author of Passionella; they had recently produced his first show, Hot Spot, on Broadway. Fosse knew Charnin, sort of, from The Girls Against the Boys. As a kid of twenty-five, Charnin had been called in for last-minute revisions, and he impressed Fosse with “Love Is,” a made-to-order composition with dance possibilities galore. Young, Fosse-compatible, gifted, uncelebrated, Charnin fit the job description perfectly. What up-and-comer would turn down a shot at working with one of Broadway’s biggest names?
“The first day I met Fosse, at his apartment on Central Park West,” Charnin said, “we watched Nights of Cabiria.” The film would be the basis for the first act of a two-act musical called Hearts and Flowers, Fosse explained. They discussed at length how to fit the piece to Gwen’s strengths. “That was his first priority,” Charnin said. “The other priority was that he wanted to be the controlling force of every single aspect of the piece.” For the next three weeks, they worked—either at Fryer and Carr’s office, where they would order up deli and rewatch Cabiria, or chez Fosse, in the big room that had been converted into an office. Throughout, Fosse stayed remote. “He was mind-bogglingly private,” Charnin said. “Any time I attempted to ingratiate myself to him, my collaborator, the subject was dropped entirely.” With Fellini’s script and Fosse’s outline in hand, they sat at a dining room table, tossing lines and situations back and forth. Charnin typed. “Fosse was a terrific idea man,” he explained, “but not a good writer. One would have to take his disconnected thoughts and try to structure them so that they made sense.” The precision Fosse wanted from his dancers, he himself could not sustain in conversation. “He didn’t always know how to make language work for him,” Charnin said, “and he would get impatient.”
In June, they submitted the first draft of sixty pages to
Fryer and Carr. “And I never heard from Fosse again,” Charnin said. “Not a phone call, not a letter, nothing. My agent, Abe Newborn, chased down Fryer and Carr, but he couldn’t get them on the phone. They disappeared.” It would be years before Charnin knew why.
Shopping for a composer, Fosse reached out to Burton Lane. He showed Hearts and Flowers to Frank Loesser, who suggested turning it into a ballet. Cy Coleman had some interest, but only if he could have Dorothy Fields on lyrics. Fields was interested, but without Hearts and Flowers’s second-act musical decided—or even assigned—she couldn’t be sure, so Fosse put his composer search aside to shop for act-two book writers, beginning a long process that ultimately broke everyone’s schedule. By the time Elaine May came on, Fosse had dropped out of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever—still delayed—to direct and choreograph the new Loesser show Pleasures and Palaces, and he disappeared into the studio.
Adapted by Sam Spewack from his comedy Once There Was a Russian (which opened and closed in one night; you’d think they would have known), Pleasures and Palaces was a titanic show typical of the bigger-and-older craze, crammed with sex and jokes and political double-dealing, nobly set in the age of Catherine the Great. Fosse had been looking over Spewack’s shoulder since the idea had first crossed Spewack’s desk a year earlier and had helped nurse the failed play into a musical farce. He was curious about Slavic dance, and with the Cold War toying with American minds, all things Russian were in a kind of hazardous vogue. But mostly, Fosse just needed to work.