by Wasson, Sam
The show was pivotal for Fosse. Teeming with stylized fourth-wall-breaking touches—the silent film–like titles, zippy scene changes, and iris-in techniques to create close-up effects—Fosse’s grand concept, his directorial style, was a fractured thing, in pieces. It was edited. “The proscenium is all broken up, jagged, like a child made it,” Reinking said. “Gwen told me that’s how she thinks. That’s her mind. And that’s how Bob’s brain worked too.” Sweet Charity was made of defects, built on them. Charity herself was damaged; Oscar was neurotic. The story unfolded quickly, in narrative isolations, and the stage was obscured in pools of black. They all combined to give Sweet Charity the feel of a “Big Spender” girl—fast, dark, empty, broken.
Late in 1966, Cy Feuer called Fosse in to help on Walking Happy, his musical adaptation of Hobson’s Choice. “Bob was there from the first day of rehearsal until we opened on Broadway,” said dancer Dan Siretta. “He was the overall supervisor of the show.” Sitting six or seven rows from the stage, Fosse saw Feuer and choreographer Danny Daniels through Detroit and Toronto. He gave his opinion only when Feuer asked for it, and he did it privately, in the back of the house at the end of the day or in the hotel lobby that evening or at breakfast the following morning. “The only time he spoke directly to us was out of town on a number called ‘Think of Something Else,’” Siretta said. “Think of Something Else,” a comic song about hanging around the pub, Fosse turned into a cartoon strip, playing up his dancers’ character types and extreme behaviors. “He did come up with the one idea of the clog number [‘Clog and Grog’],” Verdon said, “where the men did wear clogs and where they did, again, a lot of tricks with hat passing. Where it would go back along the line and come forward on the line this way.”
Nights alone were murder on Fosse. “Bob would get so lonely,” Siretta said. “He’d call up girls at two, three in the morning and say, ‘Hey, I want you to come down here to my room.’ He hated the night. It wasn’t just about the sex with Bobby. He was looking for kindness, tenderness. He was looking for support. He wanted to be held and treasured. He just wanted to be told he was good.” The amphetamines kept him up, freaked out. “Fosse would call me at night when we were out of town,” Walking Happy dancer Ellen Graff recalled, “and I remember being very flattered. Of course I knew he was trying to date me, but he made me feel good talking about what he was there to do. I believe he was interested in what I had to say. We talked about how he was trying to get the performances down from caricature. I’m not sure if he succeeded.” In the dressing room, girls traded stories, some jealously. (“Did Bobby call you last night?” “Did you . . . ?”) Some wished they had gotten a call; others wished they hadn’t. He was so hard to say no to—or, rather, he made it so hard to say no. “Bobby was so much a little boy,” Siretta said, “but it could get pathetic.” Walking Happy opened and closed.
And Sweet Charity was a terrific hit. The credit—most of it, at least—went to Gwen. “You are the strangest actor I have ever watched,” Cary Grant confessed to her one night after the show.
“Why?”
“Because when you play a scene where you’re just so happy, I cry. And when you play a scene where it’s very sad, I laugh.”
Fosse would have snorted at this. “Whose performance do you think she gave anyhow?” he grumbled to a friend. “Do they think a performance comes out of the air? She didn’t make it up. A performance has to be directed.”
For years Fosse had kept his anger to himself. Since Damn Yankees, it often seemed that Gwen, the star, stole his accolades. Didn’t anyone see how his talent amplified hers? With Sweet Charity, Fosse’s sense of injustice increased. On this show, his effort and influence had overwhelmed, he thought, the talent of any other single contributor. From book to stage, this one was Fosse’s. A longtime friend, designer Tony Walton, said, “During much of their joint professional career, whenever they did a show together, Gwen was very much the critics’ darling, and if there was any blame to be placed, Bob was always the recipient even though who knew how much of her performance was his creation.”
Despite Fosse’s gloom, Gwen remained her husband’s personal press secretary, standing at the door of their new East Hampton home, waving in dancers by the busload. “If Fosse did anything generous or lovely,” said Sweet Charity dancer Marie Wallace, “I somehow thought Gwen was behind it.” The all-day cast parties, the silver dishes from Tiffany that said Christmas ’66 Gwen and Bob. “She loved being with us,” Wallace said. “I don’t know if Bob was that way. My sense was Gwen did it for him.” Gwen was certainly the more outgoing of the two, but there was no doubt Fosse enjoyed having friends over, especially his growing crop of writer pals, which now included his East Hampton neighbor Robert Alan Aurthur, an old comrade of Chayefsky’s from the golden days of TV drama. Croquet, champagne, steaks on the grill—Gwen liked to show her family home was thriving. “Those were fabulous parties,” one dancer said. “But knowing what we all knew about Bob and Gwen, it felt a little strange, like, Were they putting on a show?”
“I felt sorry for Gwen,” Ruth Buzzi said. “She seemed so lonely, maybe because Bobby never ever came in [to her dressing room]. He never seemed to pay any attention to her backstage and he never went out with her after the show.” Sensing this, Buzzi and Nick Malekos, one of the stage managers, would visit Gwen in her dressing room whenever they could. It began casually enough, with a cracked door and a hello, but soon they found themselves staying for as much as an hour, gossiping about the show or sewing stuffed animals for Nicole’s birthday. “We were in there most nights of the week,” Buzzi said. “It became part of the day. I remember thinking I just want to make her laugh. Gwen seemed to need it. She needed to visit with people after the show who cared.” Gwen never mentioned Fosse, and Buzzi and Malekos never brought him up.
In her dressing room after a matinee one day, Gwen placed a frightened call to Robert Alan Aurthur. She needed help, fast. “Bobby called,” she said, sounding scared. “He told me he’s having chest pains.”
“Can he get to a doctor?”
“I don’t know. I called home just now and there was no answer—”
Aurthur finally reached Fosse the next morning. Was he okay? Did he see the doctor? Was he still having chest pains?
“Chest pains? There weren’t any chest pains,” he lied. “But I hear Gwen gave one hell of a performance last night.”
Twenty Years
“HAVE YOU FINISHED work yet, Daddy?”
Nicole would sit outside the room Fosse designated as his office slipping notes under his door, plying him with the trademark Fosse tenacity no one, not even another Fosse, could resist. At three, she already looked like the baby-girl version of her father, possibly cuter, with her little dimples, little nose, and dollop of bright blond hair. It was all too much for him. He needed to find another place to work.
Fosse had an idea for a musical version of Big Deal on Madonna Street, the Italian comedy about a bunch of lowlifes trying to pull off a big heist (a story, he would admit, with a certain personal resonance ), and he had decided this time he would make good on his private vow to write the book himself. As opposed to The Conquering Hero and Sweet Charity, this idea, he wouldn’t give up; he would be responsible for every element, top to bottom. The time had come to insist. Fosse had the clout, the financial security, and, with Paddy Chayefsky encouraging him, the blessing of a true artist.
To be closer to Paddy, he took an eleventh-floor office at 850 Seventh Avenue, a suite literally down the hall from Chayefsky, who may have been the only other man in New York who worked as hard as Fosse. Paddy was always around. His marriage by now a function of habit, an agreement more than a relationship, Paddy often spent nights at 850 Seventh, which seemed convenient for everyone—him, his wife, Susan, and especially Bob Fosse, whose beginning-writer questions could be answered most any hour, day or night, by one of the best in the business. All Fosse had to do was walk ten or twelve steps down the hallway and knock. Somet
imes Bob and Paddy would shut the place down or wake each other up the next morning, one leaving dinner or breakfast outside the other’s door before slipping back to his own office for yet another crack at the scene. “This is the manic-depressive floor,” Fosse joked. “‘I’m no good. I’m no good.’”
Fosse’s suite was nicely disheveled, walls plastered with posters from his shows, many of them from his former life as a performer, and adoring reviews, like a clipping from one of his Pal Joeys. On his desk, beside a framed picture of Nicole playing in Central Park, stood a photo of his nine-year-old self in Riff Brothers’ white tie and tails, as if he were trying to remind himself—as if he could ever forget—what he truly was: just a kid with a few tricks.
Down the hall from Fosse and Chayefsky, the agent Lionel Larner kept his office door open to whoever was inclined to put up his feet and browse through the day’s trades or hear a funny story or use Larner’s copying machine, the only one in the building. Looking more like a country home than a place of business, the offices of Lionel Larner Limited were a natural salon for the eleventh floor; Larner, at one time the agent with the highest client-renewal rate on Broadway, was convivial, witty, fluent in all dialects of industry tradecraft. He called 850 Seventh a magical place, “the Dakota of office buildings.” Former tenants included Elia Kazan and the actor Dickie Moore, who had starred as Dietrich’s baby in Blonde Venus. Larner, Fosse, and Chayefsky stuck together. They knew one another’s business. When Larner heard his dear friend and client Larry Blyden had died, Bob and Paddy sat with Larner in his office until the end of the day; 850 Seventh was like that.
Located in midtown only slightly north of the theater district, the building had considerable Broadway appeal, but its secret ingredient was its landlord, Herbert Tuttle. Tuttle loved show business. He thought of himself as a patron of the arts. Every year, he renegotiated each tenant’s lease, the renter’s box-office figures in hand, charging only what the gross percentages promised he or she could afford. If lessees were hot, their rents would go up or stay the same; cold, and Herb would cut them a break. “The world of show business was smaller then,” Larner said. “There was money to be made, of course, but there was more money elsewhere. The people of 850 Seventh were in show business because they loved show business, and Herb Tuttle was one of those people. He looked after us. We looked after each other.”
On the very same hall as Fosse and Chayefsky, Herb Gardner—cartoonist, playwright of A Thousand Clowns, and the building’s unofficial monologist—worked in blessed agony. Erupting with the spirit of quixotic Jews, Gardner was a firework rambler, discoursing in all directions at once and always—like Fosse danced and Chayefsky reasoned—on the jolly side of madness. He’d grown up at his father’s Canal Street saloon, listening to nutjobs fight about cantaloupe and politics and rhapsodize about fat old girlfriends. Now Gardner was nuts. He wrote about nuts. “A man who is not touched by the earthy lyricism of hot pastrami, the pungent fantasy of corned beef, pickles, frankfurters, the great lusty impertinence of good mustard . . . is a man of stone and without heart,” he wrote in one play. He wrote about people caught up in the ageless clash between trying to act like grownups on the one hand and running naked through the Lower East Side with pretty girls on the other. In Gardner’s plays, the nicest thing someone could say to someone else was “You’re the craziest person I’ve ever met.” “I’d like you to fall madly in love with me and think I’m wonderful and throw yourself at my feet,” says Sally in Thieves, “and I’d like you to do it on the phone.” That was Herb Gardner. He was the ukulele type.
Masters of the hangout, Bobby, Paddy, and Herbie became best friends. Paddy was in awe of Bobby’s charm; Bobby was captivated by Paddy’s warmth and intellect; and they were both enthralled by Herb’s lunatic whimsy. “That was a marriage between three men,” said producer David Picker. “They were there for each other in any way possible. So if Herb had a play, Paddy had a play, Bobby had a [show], they were there. It was ‘What can we do?’ ‘How can we help?’” No matter how gruesome the Variety headlines or the show problems or the women problems, they would be together, laughing in their ugly elevator down to lunch.
Lunch was the same every day. Thirty steps from the lobby of 850 Seventh Avenue was the Carnegie Deli, their downstairs dining room. Compared to the venerable Stage Deli only a block south, the Carnegie was a cluttered, cranky hole in the wall. Both delis had begun at the starting line with an equal shot, but the Stage, originally at Broadway and Forty-Eighth, was closer to the theaters and the first to go showbiz. It caught on. Stage Deli founder Max Asnas was so quotable, Fred Allen called him the “Corned Beef Confucius.” Once Walter Winchell started writing about the restaurant and Asnas got on TV and radio, there was no way any other deli could keep up. In 1943, the Stage moved uptown, into Carnegie turf. Asnas opened a sidewalk conservatory, put in a bar, and became the sort of assimilated fancy-shmancy deli the Carnegie types loved to kvetch about. Theirs was a real deli, the Carnegie folks would say, hoping to be asked why. Why? Well, for one thing, at the Carnegie they do the same sandwich better and for less. At the Carnegie, you have to chase down a waiter to get some service and fight the kitchen noise to hear yourself complain, and you also have to eat every bite on your plate so the owner won’t be insulted if he passes by, which he will, and he’ll probably sit down and complain too, if not about his business, then about the Yankees, even if they’re winning. This was Chayefsky’s kind of place. If you left feeling more on edge than you arrived, all the better; you’d had some life for lunch.
It was the Carnegie in Chayefsky that Fosse had no trouble getting next to. Over lunch, he came to see Paddy wasn’t just the brains behind Marty, he was Marty, and wasn’t Marty with girls a lot like Fosse was with Fosse? Intellect aside, these were two hard-working satirists from the same metaphysical deli, not the “Broadway” one with the conservatory and fresh-squeezed orange juice, but the one with guts and loss and laughs. The deli of truths: merciless and lacerating, at all costs and on all subjects. Not many had the chutzpah to give the famous director Bob Fosse direction, especially not the kind nobody likes to get, but Paddy did. “That’s bullshit, Fosse!” he would say, and Fosse would thank him. That’s who they were. They hated bullshit more than they hated their own misery; they hated it together. “Paddy could tell Bob everything,” Ann Reinking said, “and in such a loving way that Bob couldn’t get defensive.” When he was with Paddy, phoniness died on sight. “You’d see them at their table against the wall,” Karen Hassett said, “the big bear and the dancing elf, debating and laughing.” They loved each other. It was just Fosse’s goyishe sandwich order—corned beef with mayo on white—that drove Paddy crazy.
In those years, the mid- to late sixties, movie-musical intelligence—taking a cue from The Sound of Music, a gargantuan hit—said bigger was better. To compete with the smallness of TV, which had gained on movies only in the decade since Dore Schary tried to squash it with 3-D, Hollywood bet on the extravaganza, spending more, casting more, and stretching aspect ratios ever wider to take in more of the stunning locations no TV camera could fully capture. So it hardly seemed unreasonable that Universal Pictures, now one with MCA under Lew Wasserman, poured millions into Thoroughly Modern Millie, an elephantine folly held up by the highly bankable promise of Julie Andrews. It would not have surprised Paddy, himself writing Paramount’s twenty-million-dollar Paint Your Wagon, that Wasserman, looking down from his black tower in Burbank, had his sights set on Sweet Charity next.
But before Universal could buy the film rights from Fryer, Carr, and Joe Harris, Charnin’s arbitration suit over Sweet Charity authorship had to be resolved. With a movie deal hanging in the balance, suddenly, after years of delays and evasions, a settlement was reached. “Fryer and Carr had to admit to it,” Charnin said; that was his victory. The producers stipulated Charnin could not discuss the terms of the settlement; that was theirs.
Wasserman set Ross Hunter, producer of Thoroughly Modern M
illie, to oversee the production of Sweet Charity, and signed Shirley MacLaine to star. MacLaine, who had loved Fosse since her chorus-girl days in The Pajama Game, considered him a life-changing influence. Fosse was one of the first to recognize her talent, the way Joan McCracken had seen his. Now a Hollywood star, MacLaine was prepared to wield her influence and make sure Fosse got to direct the movie. She reminded Wasserman there was precedent—first-time directors could make successful films of their own musicals; think of Jerome Robbins’s stage-to-film transfer of West Side Story. According to MacLaine, Wasserman didn’t counter with the obvious Yes, but Robbins drew on the vast experience of his codirector, Robert Wise; he said nothing but “Okay, kid. Let’s get him.”
“I remember feeling tentative, to say the least,” Fosse said of his first movie deal, “but not wanting to communicate it. You can’t express self-doubt in Hollywood; it’s fatal.” Instead, he led with a touch of bullshit—what little he knew of production from MGM and the television specials on his résumé—and clung to tales of his forebears Jerry Robbins and Stanley Donen.
Fosse hated Hollywood. He had a fifteen-year-old grudge against the industry that had failed him; it represented everything that was wrong with the business he loved. “I hate show business and I love it,” Fosse would say. “I love working with actors and dancers and writers and designers. I think they’re the most beautiful, talented, and witty people in the world. But I hate the bullshit, the Beverly Hills homes with swimming pools. I hate Mercedes. I hate Gucci bags, I hate all of that shit.”
In Los Angeles, Universal paired Fosse with Robert Surtees, three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer of My Fair Lady and The Graduate, a pro at home in styles both classical and carefully avant-garde and a man well suited to Fosse’s sense of humor. Surtees liked to joke that one day he would become a producer so that he could double-cross all his friends. “Bobby was fascinated with Surtees’s technical expertise,” said Sonja Haney, dance assistant on the film. “He wasn’t afraid to ask him anything. If there was something he didn’t know the answer to, he’d say, ‘That’s a Robert Surtees question.’” Surtees’s son Bruce, an uncredited camera operator on Sweet Charity, remembered Fosse as glued to his father’s side. “Anyone less charming than Bob could never have gotten away with so many interruptions, so many questions,” Surtees said. “Even if he didn’t say it, his demeanor was ‘I’m just a schmuck dancer. I don’t know anything about the camera.’ But of course he did. He just didn’t know as much as he wanted to, which was everything.”