by Wasson, Sam
Bob Fosse took it all personally. “Long,” “noisy,” “dim,” “literal.” If words were spoken against his movie, they were spoken against him. He accepted the blame, encouraged it even. “That was my fault,” he said. “Entirely.” Screenwriter Peter Stone would indict Universal’s promotional strategy; others would lament the immaturity of MCA’s movie division. But these were standard snipes, transparent to any seasoned executive. Bob Fosse was through. The entirety of his filmmaking career had been a one hundred percent failure.
And he had no agent, nobody to leverage him some kind of recovery work. In 1962, midway into Fosse’s Little Me deal, MCA, Fosse’s agency of fifteen successful years, had sent him—and every other client—a formal breakup letter. By acquiring Universal Pictures, MCA had broken federal antitrust laws, so the conglomerate had to choose between the agency business and the production business. As the breakup letter stated, MCA chose production, abandoning Fosse midnegotiation and forcing him to seek representation elsewhere. A squabble over unpaid commissions ensued; cases were argued and settlements reached, and Fosse walked off with broken trust in agents. Since then—six years before the film of Sweet Charity—Fosse’s lawyer Jack Perlman had done his negotiating. With a direct line to any Broadway producer in town, Fosse had decided his reputation would work for him, and he chose not to sign with another agency. But now that Sweet Charity had failed, no one called. And without formal representation, Fosse had no one to call on his behalf. A five-time Tony winner, he had never had to beg before. Of course, he had important friends. He could arrange a meeting with Cy Feuer or Fryer and Carr, but they were Broadway friends, and returning to the stage, Fosse knew, would underline his defeat. He wanted to be in movies. In movies, the director was the king. Maybe even the star.
Despite his circumstances, he was being courted by David Begelman of Creative Management Associates, an agency Begelman and Freddie Fields had opened with the help of certain VIP clients (Streisand, Judy Garland, Peter Sellers) they had brought over from MCA. William Morris had come up by playing the odds, signing clients big and small on the grounds that 10 percent of a dollar was still ten cents more than nothing, but CMA, a boutique agency, kept itself exclusive to haute Hollywood. The B-list need not apply. Young and slick and charming, Fields and Begelman made the movie business look fun, exchanging the Old Testament techniques of Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner for the honey-baby mode of the hotshot generation. You wanted to be with them. Sometimes, on a call, one would pretend to be the other, carry on negotiations for a while, and then switch midstream to his real self, confounding whoever was on the other end of the phone and maybe getting a little foothold on the deal.
Fosse signed with CMA on April 9, a week after the film of Charity opened.
Back in New York, he kept his head down and worked on the screenplay of Big Deal on Madonna Street, and he lived in terror of running into a concerned friend or associate on the street or at a party and having to watch that person try to console him with the glass-half-full showings of the usual bullshit. There was a time when he would have thought of killing himself, or at least savored the fantasy (“So young!” he imagined them saying. “Such a promising career!”), but now, at forty-two, he was too old to die a tragic prodigy, and there was Nicole. Nicole: for her, he vowed to control his death wish.
When Fosse fell victim to self-pity, Paddy and Herb Gardner got him out of his office and hurried him downstairs to the Carnegie Deli, their clubhouse, where Herb Schlein, permanently concerned Jewish mother and deli maître d’, lived in eager anticipation of the Bobby/Paddy/Herb lunch-hour invasion. It was the best part of his day, every day. He saved them white linen napkins. An undiscriminating collector of Playbills, cast albums, and signed memorabilia, Schlein was the ultimate fan, two hundred and fifty smiling pounds of “What can I do for you great men of Broadway?” (And “How is Nicole?” And “How is your infection?”) “He knows every cockamamie show,” Chayefsky said. “It’s his totally untarnished illusions about show business, which is the way I’d like to think of it but can’t.” Schlein made no secret of hating the deli. His dream was to work on a show. Acting, writing—anything. Pulling back a chair (“Do you mind if I sit?”), he’d tell about the time Kazan told him not to become an actor. Schlein knew he had a one-in-ten-billion shot, working his three-hundred-dollar-a-week job, living with his mother in Jersey, waiting for his SAG membership to come through. Fosse adored him. He identified with him.
Herbie guarded the trio’s table—in the back, to the left and against the wall—like the Secret Service guarded the Oval Office. The men had no need for menus. Bob sat facing the entrance so he could keep an eye on the door (he had been known to hide when journalists came in), and Paddy sat facing the kitchen, waiting for his fruit and coffee (or, when Herbie wasn’t watching him, pastrami). Fosse completed his first draft of the Big Deal script in June 1969 and gave it to Paddy for notes. “You would look over,” Dan Siretta said, “and see pages being passed back and forth across the [deli] table.” Fosse would tell Paddy to take his best shot—and Paddy always took it. Where there was trust, they knew, bullshit had no power. “[Paddy’s] a very compassionate, understanding man,” Fosse said. “And I don’t sense that he’s going to turn on me and call me a weakling or a coward ever, even though I may relate some feelings that are rather cowardly.” How many women could give him that? How many men? How many writers, directors, producers, and dancers would use Fosse to move up, as Fosse would be the first to admit he had used them? Many. But Chayefsky—who had nothing to gain from Fosse’s success or failure—was simply the realest man Fosse knew.
So when Paddy told Fosse Big Deal didn’t work, Fosse knew Big Deal didn’t work. Armed with a revised step outline (written for him by Chayefsky) and further notes from David Shaw and Bob Aurthur, Fosse started to revamp Big Deal in the summer of 1969. He took his manuscript to Amagansett, where he grilled and Ping-Ponged (openly cheating) with Neil Simon, but he couldn’t stop his mind from revisiting the failure of Sweet Charity. Aurthur recalled a day of waterskiing that was “marred only by Fosse’s depression.” There was a time during the filming of Charity when Fosse had any number of offers. That time had passed.
It’s a great agent’s genius to see promise and then make opportunity where others would not even think to look, mixing ideas and personalities like a mad chemist hoping for a reaction. David Begelman was that kind of agent. By way of his CMA associate Sam Cohn, Begelman connected Fosse with playwright and screenwriter Steve Tesich and his script The Eagle of Naptown. Both won Fosse over. The script was about a working-class midwestern kid with Fosse’s ambition—although in this case that ambition was directed toward competitive bicycling instead of show business—and it could be financed, all told, for an amazing $800,000, a figure Begelman marched over to United Artists president David Picker, hoping for a yes. But Picker passed, a blow, Begelman said, that reopened Fosse’s Sweet Charity wound. Naptown was turned down because of him, wasn’t it? (Ten years later, renamed Breaking Away, it would win Tesich an Oscar for best screenplay.)
Fosse was in awe of Tesich, a wistful, world-weary teddy bear, another writer to add to Fosse’s merry band of clown-scholars. “It’s a strange relationship, friendship,” Tesich would say of their bond. “There is no ceremony that takes place which binds you. There are no vows taken. No birth certificate is issued when a friendship is born. There is nothing tangible. There is just a feeling that your life is different and that your capacity to love and care has miraculously been enlarged without any effort on your part.” No marriage would give Fosse that enlargement, that total acceptance. “It’s like having a tiny apartment and somebody moves in with you,” Tesich added, “but instead of it becoming cramped and crowded the space expands and you discover rooms you never knew you had.” Prematurely, Fosse sent Big Deal to David Picker and waited an anxious two weeks—a bad sign—for feedback, then politely excused Picker from the movie. Fosse was so desperate to work he even sent Big Dea
l to producer Ray Stark with a bury-the-hatchet note and assured him that if Stark didn’t see the script as a movie, it could easily be transferred to the stage. Nothing happened.
One night, Hal and Judy Prince invited the Simons and the Fosses for dinner—their ancient feuds were long in the past—but Fosse came alone. The unspoken consensus was that the marriage was in trouble, but no one challenged Fosse’s explanation that Gwen was under the weather, and the party stayed off the subject for the evening. For Fosse’s sake, Simon and Prince also stayed off the subject of their careers, which, as everyone in the Broadway-speaking world knew, had soared as high as Fosse’s had fallen. That left little to discuss. The Simons said they were going to rent a place in Majorca that summer. Hard up for meaningful chitchat, the quintet regrouped for coffee in the living room and Hal Prince confessed he was about to begin rehearsal on Company, the new Sondheim musical, so he wouldn’t be directing the film of Cabaret, which Emanuel Wolf—
“The movie of Cabaret?” Bob said.
Prince had directed the show on Broadway in 1966. Fosse would not admit to liking Cabaret, but judging from Fosse’s later shows, and none more than Chicago, Prince’s Cabaret—from theme to music to stage sense—had made an impression on him. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera, an earlier adaptation of Isherwood, Cabaret was a good-time, bad-time Nazi vaudeville. A daring crossbreed of the twentieth century’s darkest hour and its lightest form of theater, musical comedy, the show’s ingenious conceit was largely an accident. After weeks of rehearsal, director Hal Prince found his intended musical—the story of Sally Bowles—seemed more like a musical within the vaudeville world established by the introductory “this is Berlin” songs (“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!”). “There were two musicals onstage,” Prince said. “One took place in real rooms, one in limbo. And in limbo were these numbers which directly commented on the real book show happening upstage.” The limbo, overseen by Joel Grey’s Emcee, permitted Cabaret to be a musical comedy. Because he was removed from the story, the Emcee could lighten the mood with jokey up-tempo numbers without compromising the seriousness of the Nazi drama unfolding “outside,” in Berlin—or, for that matter, the real-life drama unfolding outside the Broadhurst Theater. “The first day of rehearsal,” composer John Kander said, “Hal brought in a double-page spread from Life of a black couple entering a white housing development. The white crowd around them was jeering at them. He put it up on a bulletin board in the front of the room and said, ‘That’s what our show is about.’” It was also about the dangers of entertainment, show business as a metaphor for mass delusion. That Emcee was a kind of Hitler, and Sally Bowles, when she crossed the Mylar curtain that separated Berlin from the cabaret, chose show business instead of life. This Fosse could relate to.
After dinner that night, Prince told Fosse what he knew of the Cabaret movie plans. Emanuel L. Wolf at Allied Artists owned the rights and had partnered with Marty Baum at ABC Pictures. To produce, they brought on Cy Feuer, Fosse’s friend of many years. Liza Minnelli would star and Jay Presson Allen would write the script, but as of yet, no one had been signed to direct.
Fosse started calling, pushing to meet with Feuer, which, oddly, Feuer seemed reluctant to do. Finally he agreed to meet Fosse for lunch.
Feuer had pasta; Fosse had cigarettes.
I have to do it, Fosse told him.
“I have to see the other guys,” Feuer said. Big box-office names like Billy Wilder and Gene Kelly. “They expect it. If I don’t see them, I’ll seem unreasonable.
“But,” Feuer added, sounding sincere, “after I see them, I’ll tell Marty that I’ve talked to everyone and I want Fosse.”
Fosse kept looking for work.
He got a call from Sue Mengers at CMA. A dumpling-shaped yenta in love with the underdog, Mengers had survived the Holocaust and the Bronx to become the funniest, toughest young agent in Hollywood. She called Larry Turman, an open-minded producer with a nice deal at Fox, and let him know Fosse was on the market. Turman didn’t need to be sold. “I always, always wanted to work with Fosse,” he said. “Even after Sweet Charity when he was persona non grata in Hollywood.” Turman had taken a chance on The Graduate; he had taken a chance on Noel Black, director of Pretty Poison; and he had taken a chance on Robert Marasco’s first screenplay, a wonky thriller called Burnt Offerings—he sent that script on to Fosse in New York. Fosse agreed to direct the movie and flew to LA as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Turman and Fosse worked in Turman’s office eight hours a day, every day, for two weeks. “Fosse was tenacious with the story,” Turman said. “He had steel in his backbone, but he actually had a soft demeanor. I used to kid him and say, ‘You’re a tough guy, huh?’ and he would sort of giggle like a kid.” Burnt Offerings—a nonmusical about a happy family and the haunted house that destroys them—was dark even for dark material. But the contrast to Sweet Charity enticed Fosse, as did the (low) proposed budget and Burnt Offerings’ central question: How much of a beating can a family withstand? On breaks, Fosse taught Turman how to skull, raising his hat with both hands and wiggling himself underneath it—an old burlesque trick used for comic emphasis, like a rim shot. “I loved the guy,” Turman said. “Everyone said he was dark, but I thought he was fun.” They settled on a summer 1970 shoot date, and Fosse took a trip up the California coast to look for his haunted mansion. When Fosse returned to New York, he expected to meet with Marasco for daily script discussions, but Marasco was devoted to his new play and slow to rewrite. Dissatisfied, Fosse let things fizzle from there.
Hastening the dissolution of Fosse’s interest in Burnt Offerings, the news came that Emanuel Wolf, Cabaret’s top-line producer, wanted to meet with Fosse. It looked like Feuer, true to his word, had indeed fought for him.
Cabaret was Wolf’s second production as president and chairman of Allied Artists, a hand-to-mouth outfit with temporary office space in New York. When he heard Wolf had bought the Cabaret rights (for $1.5 million, the cost split with Marty Baum at ABC), Lew Wasserman told Wolf he was committing suicide. The failure of Sweet Charity, he explained, was not an isolated incident but part of a pattern that continued with Paint Your Wagon and Star!, flop musicals that spelled the end of the genre. And the end of Fosse. Wolf shrugged. “I knew the best time to get a talented director,” he said, “was after a failure. Frank Perry [director of Last Summer, Allied’s first film] couldn’t get arrested when I hired him, but that’s how I knew he was going to give me everything, and he did.”
Fosse walked into Wolf’s office, his eyes on the floor, and extended his fingers for a limp handshake. He seemed angry. “We were Hollywood,” Wolf said, “and after what he had been through, I knew he must have hated Hollywood.” They got to talking, taking shots at Lew Wasserman, and soon Fosse warmed. “He told me Wasserman misled him on Sweet Charity,” Wolf said. “When he met Lew, Lew told him that he should spend as much as he needed, that he’d give Fosse everything. So Fosse thought when his time ran out he was following Lew’s directions.” They spoke for an hour and a half, each watching the other guy for tells. “I knew this is a guy with a major distrust of people,” Wolf said. “But I also knew he would go to any length he could to seek victory. I could see this was his life, and after Sweet Charity he was in a life-or-death situation.”
To ease his worry as he waited, Fosse choreographed a number for Gwen to do on The Ed Sullivan Show. Through January 1970, he worked the way he usually did: at first, in three-hour shifts, from eleven to two or twelve to three, and then, as the air date drew near, every day from ten to six, a short break for dinner, and back to work from eight o’clock on into the night. To an observer, he would have appeared in a state of perfect and complete immersion, all parts of his body communing with each flash of his brain. Only Gwen, leading a group of six male dancers, could sense that his heart wasn’t in the room. He was a hamster on a wheel, rehearsing only to rehearse. “The worst tra
gedy can befall me while I am rehearsing,” he said, “and I’ll still go on rehearsing.” And so “A Fine, Fine Day” became imitation Fosse, a soft assemblage of bowlers, back bumps, and snaps. There was no character observation, no satire, no invention, only a literal pantomiming of lyrics. But the indefatigable Gwen played along, smiling big.
They were in trouble. “I was living like a wife and a mother,” she later said, “which was really what I wanted to be, but I was the wrong kind of wife for him. I think Bob outgrew me. Bob started writing and he was involved in all kinds of things, and I was so involved with Nicole I didn’t really care if I worked or not. I guess the hardest thing was I was honest with Bob and I admired him. I got sick of not being able to admire him. He began to think, ‘Oh, you’re my wife.’ I hated that.”
Soon thereafter, Fosse heard from Emanuel Wolf: Fosse would direct Cabaret. Production would begin the spring of the following year on location in Germany, and the money would be tight. Cabaret was to be a three-million-dollar picture, full stop. Fosse would get $125,000 for directing, $50,000 for choreography, and, to encourage a certain budgetary mindfulness, 7.5 percent of the profits. Wolf would stay in New York, but Feuer would accompany the production to Germany. To watch Fosse. To watch the money. “They all thought I could be controlled,” Fosse said, “figuring I’d be too anxious after the failure of Sweet Charity, too scared to give anybody trouble. And I was scared.”
Sitting across from Sam Clark and Marty Baum in the ABC offices, Fosse was as remote as he’d been at first with Wolf. “I’m here,” he mumbled to the floor. “What do you want?”
Though Wolf had spoken, the ABC executives wanted to hold their own interview. “I understand you want to do Cabaret,” one of the men said. “Why?”