by Wasson, Sam
Arthur, the most exciting new club in New York, had opened only months earlier at Fifty-Fourth Street. Proprietress Sybil Burton, recently separated from Richard Burton, had invited her friends, many of them from Broadway, to invest in her idea—novel at the time—to transfer Mod from London to New York. It was a big hit. Everyone from Warhol to John Wayne was seen against the frosted mirrors in blue-yellow-green lights. Sometimes Paddy joined Bob. Gwen said, “[Arthur] was supposed to be a disco—rock ’n’ roll. Well, it was so gentle. We went there and we saw all of these people—Mrs. Kennedy, Sybil Burton—this funky music was playing, but they were so elegant. They really thought they were swingin’ it around like the kids did. Well, Bob thought that was funny.” A caricature of their snooty groove would go into the Aloof section of “Rich Man’s Frug,” a number quite like Little Me’s “Rich Kid’s Rag” about upper-class hipsters besotted with the latest dance craze. “That’s how Bob really developed his style,” said Tony Stevens. “He kept reusing and improving on what he had already done. Charity was the pinnacle of that. Dances he had been working on since Pajama Game and probably before were taken to their musical-comedy height.”
Facing Gwen now at Variety Arts, seeing his steps on her body, Fosse discovered afresh how it felt to watch Gwen Verdon, his wife, become Gwen Verdon, his dancer. “When he and Gwen were working on Sweet Charity,” Ann Reinking said, “Bob said, ‘It was like our love was rekindled.’ He just couldn’t believe how talented she was.” Watching her dance was admiring a spinning zoetrope of all they had achieved together. Lola, Redhead, Nicole. Now Charity. His eyes lit and she saw he wasn’t grinning at her work but at her. And yes, her work too. She saw he was proud of her, and pleasing him was more stimulating than rousing an entire audience.
They worked after work. Over a sandwich at Dinty Moore’s, as waiters stacked the chairs on empty tables, they talked through steps in a fevered ping-pong of what-ifs and maybes. Then something would ignite and they would have to move. Having only half finished their food, they would stride hand in hand into the kitchen, spread out over a fresh patch of floor, and finesse those what-ifs and maybes into movement while the cooks and busboys mopped the tiles around their feet. And then it would get late, later than late, and remembering life, Bob and Gwen would return home.
In those days, Sweet Charity was new and every discovery was an aphrodisiac. Waking with ideas or images, they’d throw off their blankets and dance out the solution on the mattress, bouncing together, high above the darkened studios of Robbins and de Mille. Gwen was tired, but it didn’t matter. She was a Bob addict and always would be.
“I don’t know if this is any good,” she would say.
“On you, everything looks good.”
Even what didn’t look good. They decided Charity would be pigeon-toed and knock-kneed, like the young Verdon in orthopedic braces. It would give her a broken look that said: resilience.
Fosse was learning to choreograph people instead of patterns. Character had always been essential to his dances, but on Sweet Charity, whose broken types he knew more intimately than those of any other show, conveying personality took on added importance. He gave his dancers images to help them feel. He said, “It can be as pedestrian as toothpaste coming out of a tube, or you’re a snake here, or your arm isn’t an arm, it’s a whip.” Each “Big Spender” dancer had her imaginary circumstances, her wants and backstory. Each was different. “Bob never treated us like a chorus,” Kathryn Doby said. “To Bob, we were all actors.” The dancers loved it. “He didn’t just want to put something on top of us,” one said, “he wanted to bring something out of us. That’s a great feeling for a performer.” He found isolating inner characteristics was like isolating body parts: the right choice, the right abstraction, and a whole life came forth. In “Rich Man’s Frug,” each of the girls had to extend a foot while leaning back and shooting her arms down at her sides. Fosse’s image helped them see exactly how. “Ladies,” he said, “it’s like a man is holding out a fur coat for you and you have to drop your arms in.” There was a shoulder roll at the top of “Big Spender” when the girls came downstage. “Ladies,” he said, “it’s like when your hands aren’t free and you have to use your shoulder to get your bra strap up.” Other directors might give their dancers images for every scene; Bob and Gwen had one for just about every step. These were the lines the dancers’ bodies had to speak.
Gwen was always there, watching by his side. “She wasn’t the star,” said dancer Lee Roy Reams. “She was part of the company as much as she was part of Bob.” There was no set delineation of responsibility, but certain natural tendencies emerged. Where Fosse, the director, kept watch over the bigger picture, Verdon, the dancer, homed in on the details. “Gwen would break the steps down in a way Bob couldn’t always,” one dancer said. “Having done Bob’s shows for so long, she had an eye on how to do the steps technically.” He was captain and she navigator—he knew what he wanted; she knew how to get there.
How to get him there, to Hollywood. He wanted to direct movies. Broadway belonged to New York alone, but Hollywood was for everyone. Fosse knew a well-publicized effort as choreographer on a major movie would launch him to a higher plane, and in August 1965, he entertained an offer from George Cukor, the hottest film director of the summer. In April, Cukor’s My Fair Lady had swept the Oscars, and his proposed follow-up, Bloomer Girl, would be a big-budget costume musical in the same tradition, prestigious and highly visible. Shirley MacLaine, a friend of Fosse’s since The Pajama Game, had signed on to star—a good hook for Fosse, Cukor thought. But Fosse didn’t need the hook. He was interested and would be available in February, a few weeks after the opening of Sweet Charity.
Privately, though, Fosse worried about the offer. Accepting it meant leaving Gwen and Nicole in New York. The excitement around Charity and the creative efficacy of rehearsals had made home life a joy he could not bear to disrupt. What’s more, Fosse worried that taking the job would offend Agnes de Mille, whose ballets for the original production of Bloomer Girl he felt he could not improve upon. As ever, he overidentified with the loser’s position. Had Warner Brothers passed him over for the films of Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, he would have been devastated, and he refused to subject de Mille to the same disappointment. And yet, bearing all that in mind, the undying gypsy in Fosse was ready to accept whatever they offered: If Sweet Charity was not a success, he would have to do Bloomer Girl for the money.
All this Fosse confessed to Fox executive Robert Linden at a lunch meeting in New York. That Gwen Verdon attended the meeting surely surprised Linden, but it was Fosse’s open emotionality and pleas to remove himself from every advantageous opportunity that shocked him. So disarming was Fosse’s vulnerability, Linden actually found himself arguing against Fosse’s choreographing Bloomer Girl, assuring the man he was trying to hire that money was no reason for him to take the job. A professional of his stature would easily get work elsewhere. Fosse wasn’t as sure, and with Gwen’s nod of approval, he stuck to his original plan. They’d wait on Charity.
In the fall of 1965, Charity moved to Philadelphia for tryouts. As the first preview drew near, rumors began that Gwen—who hadn’t led a show since Redhead, more than six years earlier; who was approaching forty-one; and who, as Charity, was on stage singing and dancing and acting virtually the entire evening—wouldn’t be able to get through the night. “It was one of the hardest shows,” she said, “because you never had a chance to get offstage and sit down. So the stage became the stage and the dressing room. [At] the dressing table for the girls who were in the ‘Big Spender’ number I used to put on real makeup for the next number.”
The company knew Gwen was insecure about her singing. She didn’t have Merman’s belt or Barbara Cook’s range; she had more of a novelty voice, quivery and dear. “Gwen hated singing ‘Where Am I Going?’” Lee Roy Reams said of Charity’s soaring cri de coeur late in the second act. “One day she started crying and said, ‘Bobby, please, please c
ut the song.’” Cy Coleman wrote, “I think the true reason was that she didn’t like the idea that Barbra Streisand had already recorded it before the show opened, and people might make comparisons.” It was Fosse’s job to differentiate between Gwen’s needs and the show’s, to know when she was seriously unable to sing or just afraid to, and it was Gwen’s duty to take all of it, at least publicly. Privately, Fosse knew his show was hers to commandeer.
She had power and she used it. “Gwen was out from time to time,” said actor Ruth Buzzi. “We would always hear that she maybe had a cold or something was wrong with her voice, but you never really know why someone’s missing a show.” There were theories. “I went on a hundred times for her,” said Helen Gallagher, Gwen’s standby. “Because she had a little girl. And if you know anything about Gwen’s life, she had a boy when she was very young, and she was a non-present mother. And she never forgave herself for that, and so with this baby, because she was so madly in love with Bob, she said, ‘I will be her mother.’ And she was.” How much motherhood would Sweet Charity allow? How much life would Fosse permit? Their negotiations took place in hotels out of town, where the plaited strands of work and marriage twisted untold resentments into new assertions of power. Fortunately, unfortunately, Verdon and Fosse needed each other.
They previewed well in Philadelphia.
On December 23, the morning after their first Detroit preview, an ebullient Neil Simon set out for the theater. The reviews had been good for both Simon and Fosse (perhaps slightly better for Simon), and though there was clearly more work to do, he anticipated a short celebration before they buckled down.
Fosse sneered at Simon when he appeared in the theater. “Let’s give a big hand to the star of the show, Neil Simon.” Missing the sarcasm completely, the dancers applauded.
Star of the show?
Was that Bert Lewis talking? A month earlier, before Simon completed the Sweet Charity revision—a revision that ultimately turned into a full rewrite—Bert Lewis (aka Robert Louis Fosse) was the credited author. Removing his pseudonym from the byline was a preemptive move, Fosse said, to protect himself from a possible backlash. “Directed, choreographed, and written by Bob Fosse?” people would say. Not even Jerome Robbins had dared. But now that Simon’s work had received such a warm critical response, Fosse considered the outcome an injustice. (So did Martin Charnin. When he awoke Sunday morning, October 31, 1965, to a full-page ad in the New York Times for a Bob Fosse musical based on Nights of Cabiria that did not have Charnin’s name anywhere on it, he called his lawyer. “He told me I had to wait and see what of mine—mine and Bob’s—was used in the show before I could claim anything. So all I could do was wait for opening night.”)
Sometime after New Year’s, Fosse asked Stanley Donen to come up and see the show in Detroit. A veteran collaborator and writers’-room hero, Neil Simon had a policy of welcoming outside opinion, but after Donen saw the show, he and Fosse went off to discuss it. Without Simon. The playwright returned to the hotel to wait and wonder what was going on. How could he, the writer, be excluded from his own rewrite? Had the good review cost Simon that much?
He didn’t hear from Fosse until the next morning.
“The ending,” Fosse said to him at breakfast. He thought it wasn’t tough enough.
Neil Simon tried to laugh. He knew Fosse often confused pain and profundity. In dress rehearsals, midway into a run of “Big Spender,” Fosse had decided Irene Sharaff’s costumes—elaborately sequined and tailored—were far too glamorous. He wanted degradation. Sharaff reminded him he had already approved the sketches, but Fosse didn’t care about the sketches; the effect was completely off. “They fought,” Lee Roy Reams said. “Bob took the Spender dresses backstage and sprayed paint on the sequins, and Gwen’s fishtail dress was replaced by a black slip, simple and a touch lower down.” Like Sharaff’s designs, Simon’s ending was too polite.
“It should be grittier, darker,” Fosse persisted. “Charity should be devastated and the audience should feel her pain. Now it’s just funny and kind of sweet.”
But how much darker could it get? The show already ended with Charity being left at the altar and then pushed into a lake and robbed. John McMartin, playing Oscar, her heartbreaker, agreed with Simon. “People in the audience would yell at me after the show,” McMartin said. “It was awkward.”
Look, Neil Simon said to Fosse: “To suddenly pull the rug out from under the show and make it darker and grimmer would be awkward and really pretentious.”
“Who made that rule?” Bob asked him.
“I didn’t.”
“I want it darker.”
But writers are not dancers. They can be hired and fired like dancers, but they are co-authors of the work. There are times when directors might try to blur the distinctions—indeed, that’s part of their talent; it’s how they get the job done—but they have to be able to restore those distinctions if they find they’ve gone too far. Did Fosse ever find he’d gone too far?
“I still think I’m right,” he said to Simon the next day. “But I’m not positive.”
Their collaboration was a dance of exploitation and recovery, anger and apology. Fosse, who wanted to control every element of his work, didn’t want to need writers. He wanted to be one.
Sweet Charity would open at the Palace Theater, and—in a brilliant feat of cross-promotion—the Palace Theater would reopen with Sweet Charity. Once the center of the Keith-Albee circuit, home to the likes of Chaplin and Jolson and Fanny Brice, the Palace had long since fallen from its vaudeville heyday into neglect. The last movie ever to screen where Citizen Kane premiered was Harlow, in 1965. That summer, the film and the theater went down together, and the theater stayed down until the Nederlanders began renovating it. It would be ready in time for the premiere of Sweet Charity, the first legit production in the Palace’s storied fifty-year history.
The date was January 29, 1966. Hundreds of elegantly attired guests, including Mayor Lindsay, Ethel Merman, and Paddy Chayefsky, jammed the restored lobby, hung with portraits of the Palace’s most famous acts. The curtain bells rang, and they tiptoed into the auditorium and took a final look around the Palace’s insides—placenta red from seats to ceiling and paneled in baroque curls of creamy gold—before the room went completely dark, and quiet, at almost seven thirty.
A level under the stage, behind a door with her name in gold letters, Gwen calmed herself in the dressing room she had designed for maximum comfort. Here was a small Victorian chair; here was a chaise longue. A knock came on her door. It was time. Gwen said, Okay, thank you, and, leaning into her reflection, drew a little black dot under each eye. No one beyond the third row would be able to see them, but she didn’t do it for them, she did it for Chaplin; it was his idea. “It opens up the eye,” she said. She kept his photo by her mirror. She dreamed about him.
In the first-row balcony, Martin Charnin, Martin’s agent, and their wives sat with a lawyer and a court stenographer. From the moment the curtain went up on Sweet Charity to the moment it fell (to joyful applause), the steno typed every sung or spoken word into her machine. By the end of the night, Charnin had a script he could compare with his own mimeographed first draft. But he didn’t need to. He already knew. “There was material on that stage I had nothing to do with,” Charnin said, “because they had fleshed it out from a one-act into an entire musical, but most of what Fosse and I had written was up there.”
He felt sick. But what could he say? He was a kid; Fosse was a prince. “The last thing I wanted to do as I was rising in the community was to reveal myself as a sore loser,” Charnin said. “It was definitely loaded against me, but that’s why Fosse picked me, a young guy, because he knew a young guy needed the opportunity and he could rule them better. It was deliberate. I think everything that Fosse did was deliberate. If you look at his choreography you’ll see there isn’t a movement that wasn’t deliberate. Every pinkie move, every pointed toe is deliberate. I don’t think he behaved in a manne
r outside of how he choreographed. I don’t believe he knew how to be a human being.”
Sweet Charity is an exuberant, brilliant dance show. “If My Friends Could See Me Now”—a piñata of twitches and merry distortions—plays as if Chaplin had been broken into pieces and thrown out like confetti; “Rich Man’s Frug,” drawn from the dance clubs of New York, stretched bodies to Giacomettis, long in every direction, and the longer the funnier. And then there was “Big Spender,” Fosse’s black cartoon of female credentials and his most personal number to date. “Talented Bob Fosse,” Harold Clurman wrote, “has created dizzying patterns of movement out of ugliness. The rest is a kind of brilliant and ingenious hideousness which is a style—a style wrought from the streets and manners we observe as we enter and leave the theater.” Anguish, depravity, scarcity, showmanship, seduction—it was his story in style.
But there are book problems. (Walter Kerr: “Where, for heaven’s sake, did bittersweet come from?”) As with many of Fosse’s shows, Charity’s struggle to reconcile musical comedy with musical depression reveals more about Fosse’s own drama than the dramas of its characters. In that mysterious ending, Charity pulls herself out of the orchestra pit dripping with lake water, and a good fairy—making her first appearance in the show—waves her wand and promises Charity all her dreams will come true. Then the good fairy turns and walks away, revealing a sign on her back: Watch The Good Fairy tonight—8:00 on CBS. She’s a fake.