Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  The side of Fosse that needed struggle in order to create may have been relieved to learn producer Ross Hunter had soft-focus ideas in store for Sweet Charity. “There was quite a fight,” Fosse said, “about whether Charity could say ‘Up yours.’ I felt that if she couldn’t, then we might as well make Mary Poppins all the way.” Encouraged by Shirley MacLaine, Wasserman allied with Fosse and took Hunter off the picture, freeing the virgin filmmaker to fly solo and indulge his whims, good or bad, happy musical or sad. Other than Wasserman himself, no one could stop Sweet Charity from becoming a Bob Fosse picture through and through—whatever that meant.

  What did that mean? The slate clean, Fosse set out, quite consciously, to find a film style. “He wanted to be an artist,” Bruce Surtees said. “He wasn’t pretentious about it; he was exploratory.” He imagined the fringe elements of Charity’s milieu demanded a fringe aesthetic, something outside the purview of straight-ahead musical comedy. Fosse talked to Surtees about McCracken, about ideas she had. “If there were people,” McCracken had written for Dance Magazine in 1946, “to take full advantage of the opportunities the camera offers and the stage does not, the back would not only be photographed, but the front, side, top, and bottom all at once. Think of how nice that would be in the case of a pirouette. How lovely an arabesque turn done three times as slow would be. How amusing fast jeté done four times as fast would be. How interesting to see the different mood and rhythm of one dancer expressing the conflict of two driving energies, and dancing them both at the same time. Dancing is movement and the movies could make it move even more if the stage were forgotten.”

  They discussed John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, one of Fosse’s favorite movie musicals. “Moulin Rouge was the first time I saw the shot of a leg or the quick flash of a face in a pirouette,” he said. “It was very exciting.” Rather than approximate, as Astaire’s films did, the perspective of a Broadway audience, Huston shattered his numbers with cuts and close-ups to create the frenzied effect of the Moulin Rouge. It was a style that suited Fosse’s shattered dances, so often montages themselves.

  Fosse began wearing a viewfinder around his neck like a membership badge. On their own in a Universal screening room, he and Surtees ordered up print after print—for two months of study. What had impressed Fosse most about West Side Story was Robbins’s (and codirector Robert Wise’s) willingness to depart from the theatrical version and his use of real locations and highly stylized film techniques to break the show free from the Broadway stage. Process shots captivated Fosse. He made note of West Side Story’s extreme choices, like the expressionist use of color in the gym dance and the selective blurring of actors in the background that Wise and Robbins utilized to indicate the intensity of Tony and Maria’s attraction. He watched Stanley Donen’s movies Charade, Arabesque, and Two for the Road, admiring their reflection shots, mirrors, glossy objects, jump cuts, rack focuses. Fosse didn’t know the names for certain elements, so he asked Surtees and then made flashcards: establishing shot, master shot, blue screen, rear projection. His screening-room notes spawned shot lists and crude little bird’s-eye diagrams, and those diagrams became the basis for further questions and possibilities. He would consider every hand on every dancer, every dancer in every shot, every shot from every angle.

  Obsessively attuned to the micro, Fosse’s mind was a natural for movie gadgets, which broke down sight and sound as Dexedrine broke down his dances. Macro was more of a challenge. But that’s where Paddy Chayefsky came in. Along with Verdon, Paddy was in the unofficial production outfit Fosse had assembled. Sometimes it seemed that was the closest Bob Fosse came to purebred, real love—doing good work, enjoying collaboration with those he could trust. Perhaps that’s why he felt closest to Gwen in rehearsal, at Variety Arts, where he couldn’t be unfaithful to her.

  “How do you feel about it?” he asked Gwen when Shirley MacLaine was cast.

  “Fine.”

  What else could she say? The studio wasn’t going to make this movie without a movie star. “It’s your property,” she said. “You instigated it. See it through.”

  When Charity closed on Broadway, she agreed to join him in LA to help Shirley. To help him.

  While Fosse veteran Eddie Gasper ran the ensemble through countless details of “The Rich Man’s Frug,” Sonja Haney rehearsed Shirley MacLaine for months of preproduction, in the fall of 1967, in advance of Verdon’s arrival. “I loved rehearsing with Shirley,” Haney said, “because she never made the same mistake twice and she always had ideas. Fosse wanted the dances to be done his way, but he was open to her suggestions. Shirley added a hat trick from ‘Steam Heat’ to ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now.’ That wasn’t in the original choreography.”

  With special permission from the studio, Fosse would bring Haney to their sound stage before the studio opened on weekends and plug in a pot of coffee, and the two of them would work until five in the afternoon, without breaking, blocking out every number for the camera. “Bob would start with the top of each number,” Haney said, “and I would be everybody and make notes about movement, camera, and when he wanted to zoom on which bar of music.” Using Haney as both model and secretary, Fosse remembered each dancer’s position and pose down to the smallest unit of personality. He would isolate quirks—big eyes, long noses—for special close-ups, tailoring every shot to each dancer’s signature look, and he always referred to the dancers by their names, so as to be as clear and specific as possible. “He would say, ‘Have Adele here . . . and make sure we have her hair coming down over her face when she flips over . . .’” Dance was more than choreography; it was character. These weren’t anonymous Ziegfeld girls but individuals, each with her own face, problem, and unfulfilled heart. Fosse and Haney covered about one number per weekend. They rehearsed the dancers during the week.

  Having finished her run of Charity in New York, Gwen was a distant presence during the rehearsal period, careful to hover without meddling, like a mother at the school dance. Occasionally she would go in to do some barre work in an empty studio, but most days, she was there in street clothes, slacks and a scarf and a pair of nice shoes.

  “How the hell do you do ‘Something Better Than This’?” an exhausted Haney asked one day.

  “Oh, honey.” Gwen laughed. “I know when to breathe.”

  Few understood how Gwen, the real Charity, could keep up what appeared to be such a genuinely congenial attitude. “It had to be one of the worst things for her,” said John McMartin, reprising his role for the film. “Her heart had to be broken that Shirley got the part. These were her moves. But you’d never know with Gwen. She was stoic.” “The fact that she was there at all blew me away,” said Chita Rivera, playing Nickie. “But dancers do what they have to do. Gwen did it for Jack Cole and she did it for Bobby. I felt no resentment coming from her. She just did her job. That was Gwen’s point of view in work and in love.” One would glimpse her whispering in Fosse’s ear, standing over him on the ladder Fosse climbed to see the number from above. “They literally finished each other’s sentences,” Suzanne Charney said. “‘That dancer—’ ‘—should get there earlier.’” Gwen turned down the title role in a Broadway play, Tennessee Williams’s The Seven Descents of Myrtle, just to be there.

  When Fosse wasn’t conferring with Verdon or Surtees, he was pacing. (“If I’d known how he worked,” prop man Sol Martino said, “I’d never have gotten him a chair with his name on it.”) Sunk under his own intensity, with his cigarette pointed downward like a rudder, Fosse was lost to the surface world of quotidian concerns and feelings, consigned to an isolation so extreme the slightest wrong turn could lock him into depression, and fast, at the ruthless speed of amphetamines. To the dancers, it didn’t look like mania; it looked like focus. It looked romantic: there in the shadows, the artist. “One of the reasons you wanted to work so hard for Bobby,” Lee Roy Reams said, “was because he was so obviously working so hard for you.”

  Word of Fosse’s inscrutability made its way into
the papers. “His anxieties and indecisions have everyone on edge,” one columnist wrote a tad dramatically. “I knew that he felt he was under an unbelievable amount of pressure,” Haney said, “but he was always quiet. He never yelled. He was too busy concentrating, trying to make a choice.” Choreographing the dances offered more than enough possibilities for failure, but the number of possibilities for filming those possibilities was infinity times infinity, like looking through one kaleidoscope into another: a quarter-inch turn, and the whole vista shifted. “He missed nothing,” MacLaine said. “As a result, he saw too much. Being the repository of all he saw rendered him indecisive.” Thinking was quicksand. “Everything about films is so mammoth . . . so much money . . . every moment costing X-number of dollars . . . so many people on the sets . . . that it tends to overwhelm a fellow with a middle-class background,” Fosse said. “But if the pressure gets to you, your talent can’t function. If you let yourself be hurried, you lose your inventiveness. You have to forget those other things, lower your head and go ahead.” He was constipated, and sent out for Preparation H before filming began.

  On set, Gwen was the ideal antidote, the mother his dancers turned to for reassurance. If Daddy drifted too far off, she peeled back a smile that flashed Go, team! in blazing red lights. But at home, blaze was not her default setting. Over dinner with her old friend Pat Ferrier Kiley (Ferrier had recently married Richard Kiley), Gwen confessed she’d feared Sweet Charity, her comeback, might turn out to be her farewell tour. It nearly killed her. “If only all the fuses would blow,” she once said to a reporter backstage, “so I wouldn’t have to do this.” Actors were luckier. Most got better as they got older. Gwen, a dancer, was becoming obsolescent even in her prime. Many of Fosse’s new girls were teenagers.

  Though being Fosse’s dramaturge and ubiquitous assistant seemed to many a sad and selfless position for Gwen to take, Gwen herself thought that, considering the alternative, it was very much a good deal for her. In addition to being the director’s wife, she was now the guardian of his style—its oldest representative, its most expert practitioner. And having more of Fosse’s work in her brain-body than anyone else, Verdon was an unbeatable back catalog for him, poised to be essential to Fosse even after her dancer’s body gave out.

  “Both Gwen and I were watching every dancer to make sure their focus was right and they were looking in the right direction,” Haney said. “That freed Bob up to worry about the camera.” Almost oblivious to the dance, he watched the actors through his viewfinder, pushing himself to think cinematically. “Bob wasn’t really into the dancing when we were shooting,” said “Frug” dancer Larry Billman. “But he was right next to us or right under us, being rolled around on a little dolly cart, trying to find the perfect angle. He would only talk to us to say things like ‘Angle your face more that direction.’ We were literally stick figures in his frame.”

  “He was so involved,” Haney said. “He knew everything that was going on with everyone on the set and if he didn’t like the way something was going, he’d take care of it.” Filming “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” Fosse sat down at the lighting console and taught himself how to cross-fade at a precise speed, on the exact beat. “Bob was so focused on technique,” actor Lonnie Burr said, “he’d call us to the set and then forget we were all waiting for him to finish playing with the cameras.” This happened while shooting “The Rhythm of Life” number with Sammy Davis Jr. “Hey, Bob!” Sammy yelled between sips from his bourbon and Coke. “How much longer are you gonna keep me waiting? I’m a superstar, you know!” But from a technical standpoint, no number was more challenging than “Rich Man’s Frug”; it contained the most elaborate camera setups, the most dancers to synchronize, the most sight and sound elements to coordinate with hairsplitting precision. “That’s when Bob and I really had a hard time keeping track,” Haney said. “Once he asked me, ‘At what bar and what count was the crane at its furthest point back and its highest position up?’ Oh God, I thought.”

  “Big Spender” Fosse shot twice, the second time after he realized he hadn’t gotten in close enough. Fosse wanted to see the dancers’ faces—close-ups he couldn’t get onstage—but if he pushed into their faces, he would lose the painstakingly arranged composition he had in the wide shot. How to get both at once? Splitting the difference, he decided to cut two dancers from the line and move in tighter, and he reshot “Big Spender” through April 4, 1968, when the news came that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. That day he had to be told to wrap early; if it had been up to him, he would have kept shooting. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was shot. “Seeing how upset I was,” said MacLaine, “Fosse switched around the shooting schedule to include a new scene in which I had to cry.” What hurt in life could help in film. That’s what life was: fertilizer.

  The dailies were a sensation. So many thrilling pieces and jazzy angles. Fosse’s editors bounded into the cutting room drunk on possibilities. But the footage didn’t cut together; all that flash overwhelmed the story. But if he removed that flash, Fosse feared he’d lose his film’s style. Those zooms and whips—they were proof of his vision. They had to stay.

  Meanwhile, Fosse fought Universal over Charity’s (still) problematic ending. The studio had let him shoot two, and now the brass couldn’t make up their minds over which one to use. In the unhappy ending, Oscar leaves Charity. In the happy, he stops her before she jumps in the lake. (Him: “The odds against us are a hundred to one.” Her: “Those are the best odds I ever had.”) On the one hand, Universal knew a musical comedy had to end on an up note; on the other, both Funny Girl and Finian’s Rainbow went out bittersweet. Was the new musical reality realer? It was a Hollywood question true to the late 1960s: the old-fashioned happy ending looked a little too easy, but these were comedies (right?). “That last minute in Finian’s Rainbow,” Fosse said, “where [Astaire] says he’s off to Glocca Morra—I wept so . . . It was like . . . his whole career . . . suddenly . . .”

  Fosse vacillated up to the very last minute. So did Universal. Both endings tested to mixed results: the sad was stronger; the happy fit better. Universal delayed the final decision for weeks, the studio executives changing their minds through the previews. “When I saw the movie for the first time,” Sonja Haney said, “I didn’t know how it was going to end.” This was Fosse’s chance. He knew the director had more power in Hollywood than on Broadway, but as a first-time filmmaker, he didn’t know how to wield it. “If a director overuses it,” he said, “he can start indulging his every whim—and so can the cast. On the other hand, if you underuse that power, you lose control. The picture can be taken away from you by the actors, the cameraman, or the studio itself.” Ultimately, Universal went with the sadder version.

  “If it’s a flop,” Fosse said to Shirley MacLaine, “I’ll want to put my head in the oven. If it’s a hit, I’ll want to keep it there.”

  In October 1968, with the bulk of editing behind him, Fosse took a moment to repay Gwen the only way he knew how. He choreographed two pieces for her appearance on The Bob Hope Show, “Cool Hand Luke” and “Tijuana Brass.” Each betrayed the softness he tried so hard to conceal. “Cool Hand Luke,” especially—Fosse’s most warm-hearted creation, a matador’s lullaby devoid of ironic comment. Accompanied by Lee Roy Reams and Buddy Vest, Gwen strutted and snapped through “Luke” with elegant machismo, receiving in wide welcoming arms Fosse’s plaintive offering to her sensuality. “Every moment of creating this dance,” Reams said, “was a pleasure and a joy.”

  Fosse had reason to feel the closest he ever came to calm. On January 29, 1969, Variety wrote, “[Sweet Charity] will become one of the memorable artistic and commercial successes of this generation.” He received unmitigated raves on all fronts. “Bob Fosse,” the entertainment world read, “has become a major film director.” The Hollywood Reporter followed suit, predicting Charity would become Universal’s all-time box-office champion—and the press ride began. Sweet Charity’s world premiere in Boston
was preceded by lavish previews in Chicago, where Fosse returned a conquering hero, and New York. Perhaps he would do Big Deal on Madonna Street next, as a movie musical. Keeping track of his progress in a little red pocket diary, he thought of setting the heist in Tijuana for that cool, weary Herb Alpert sound that was so popular, the style he’d used for Gwen’s dance on The Bob Hope Show—or maybe he’d change Mexico to Harlem and make Big Deal an all-black show. As the Broadway success of Cabaret had demonstrated, the time was certainly right for a socially conscious musical.

  But on April 1, 1969, his plans vaporized. Sweet Charity opened—and bombed at the box office. The next day, Fosse took out his red journal and wrote, “Didn’t do anything except feel sorry for myself.” Over the course of the next week, the box-office numbers got worse.

  An autopsy of a movie gives the bereaved a feeling of power, consoling them with the cold comfort of pseudo-theories and the remote possibility of finding an explanation in the carnage. But show business is bad science. There is never a clear explanation. There is only the yes or no of an unfeeling box office, and one impossible commandment that sometimes passes for wisdom: Don’t take it personally.