Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  There was a pause. “I think I can make a good movie out of it.”

  The meeting inched along, neither side engaged. Finally, Fosse squeezed out a goodbye and left.

  Baum turned to Clark. “We’re going into the toilet with this.”

  A meeting of the Cabaret production team was set for January 20. Fosse joined Kander and Ebb and Jay Allen in Feuer’s office for the customary get-acquainted exchange of big ideas, held mostly for Fosse’s benefit. He needed to be filled in. But Fosse didn’t like being filled in. Cabaret was his movie; he’d fill them in. “I didn’t find him the happiest collaborator I ever had,” Allen said. “For a man who dealt with women as much as he was obliged to, let’s say he had an extremely parochial view of women.” Fosse summoned his opinion panel for backup. Opposing Allen’s approach to the script, both Neil Simon and Bob Aurthur gave Fosse the writerly ammo he needed to convince Feuer to spring for additional revisions. But Feuer wasn’t dissatisfied with Allen’s work, which dissatisfied Fosse even more, and so began—a full year before the first day of shooting—the old battle of “All you care about is money” versus “You do your job and I’ll do mine.” Wisely, the men tabled the tension, and in February, Wolf sent Feuer and Fosse on a research trip to Germany.

  Munich, Hamburg, Berlin. Fosse was the bloodhound, sniffing here and there for locations, and Feuer held the leash. Too many yanks and the dog would growl; too few and Feuer would hear Emanuel Wolf growling all the way from New York. So it was that producer and director pulled each other around Germany in search of just the right castle, forest, and cobblestone street, acting like friends throughout.

  Though hiring a European camera crew would have been the most cost-effective way to film the movie, Fosse was dead set on working with Robert Surtees, his Charity cameraman. Here Feuer tightened the leash. The issue of expenses aside, the producer felt Surtees had gone overboard on Charity, complicating the film with needless tricks and arty moonshine, and he asked Fosse to please consider some equally talented European cameramen, like Geoffrey Unsworth and Sven Nykvist. Fosse promised to keep an open mind, and Feuer agreed to do the same. “I lied,” Feuer admitted later. “I firmly believe that there are show-business promises that have to be made—for the sake of a fragile ego or to prop up an unsteady state of mind—but that do not have to be kept.” Again, they tabled the tension and returned to New York.

  The time had come for Fosse to meet his star. Liza Minnelli was working the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria, and she was working very hard. Wearing a fringed red-and-orange dress, she looked like she sounded, loud (too loud, the New York Times thought) and a touch desperate, like Judy Garland, her mother. At twenty-three, Liza Minnelli was already a strange, spastic showbiz animal, a volcano of nerdy confidence. She wasn’t beautiful and she moved a little crazy, like a drunken elfin girl kept up past her bedtime to sing for her parents’ guests. “Hi, everyone!”—Liza had a big voice, one that conveyed the punishing truth about making entertainment: It was mean. It was messy. It was a C-section and she was both mother and baby. “It’s a long, hard battle,” the Times wrote of her Empire act, “but she finally comes out ahead.” Every night was a massacre she didn’t always survive.

  Fosse met Minnelli in the Waldorf coffee shop after the show. “How do you feel about going topless?” he asked.

  “I won’t do it.”

  “What if the scene calls for it?”

  “It can call another way. There’s always another way around, isn’t there?”

  “All right,” he said. “I was just wondering.”

  So there was the line. “I knew what he was doing and he knew what I was doing,” Minnelli said. She was not the sort of actress he could power into a corner.

  Later that year, Fosse and Feuer returned to Europe to tie up Cabaret’s remaining loose ends. In London they met and cast Michael York; in Munich, Fosse oversaw sundry screen tests and dance auditions and dove deeper into research. He read the memoir of Albert Speer, a first-person account of life in the Third Reich, and studied the German expressionist George Grosz, carrying a catalog of his artwork with him from meeting to meeting and guarding it like the answers to a final exam. If Fosse had a cinematographer, he would use Grosz’s paintings to help him settle on some kind of lighting scheme, but the Surtees issue had stalled the process. Over dinner one night at Fosse and Feuer’s hotel, Munich’s lavish Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, Feuer, worn down, sincerely vowed to fight Marty Baum for Surtees, reiterating his allegiance to Fosse. On that note, they said good night and made for their rooms, separated, Fosse soon discovered, by a very thin wall.

  “No,” Fosse heard around midnight. “I don’t want him. Marty, I don’t want to open that up again. I do not want Surtees on the picture.” Then: “Don’t worry. I can control him.”

  Fosse listened to the entire phone call, transcribing as much as he could onto hotel stationery before calling Gwen in a fit of rage. What did she think? What should he do? She replied, simply, that he should do whatever he wanted.

  Want? Fosse was persona non grata in the movie business. He needed the work.

  He called Chayefsky in New York. Paddy told him, reasonably, “If you quit, you don’t get paid, and they’ll give you a bad name. Stay and if they fire you you’ll be paid and they’ll call it ‘creative differences.’”

  The next morning Fosse was still seething. He banged on Feuer’s hotel-room door, and when the door opened, Fosse raged at him. “I heard your whole fucking conversation with Baum last night. I heard it through the wall. You no-good son of a bitch.”

  Feuer was in his bathrobe. He could see Fosse hadn’t slept. His face was brittle white. “I never promised Surtees.”

  “That’s a fucking lie. You’re a two-faced shit.”

  Fosse accused Feuer of undermining him from the start, of betraying their years of friendship, of trying to use him for his choreography and then throwing him out as a director. It was hopeless. Feuer could do nothing but wait for Fosse to exhaust himself. “What do you want to do about it, Bob?”

  “If you want me off the picture,” Fosse said, “you’re going to have to fire me.” Fosse held the beat, watching Feuer’s face show signs of pain.

  Frederic Weaver, managing director of the Chicago Academy of Theater Arts and Fosse’s first mentor. Preaching discipline, versatility, and kindness, he elevated show business from a pastime to an ethic. Fosse thought of him as a kind of father.Courtesy of Charles Grass

  The Riff Brothers, Charles and Bob, on the Morris B. Sachs Amateur Hour, 1940.Courtesy of Charles Grass

  Bob Fosse—professional, but not yet ready for sex—around the time he started playing Chicago’s strip circuit. “I think Bob protected his mother from the fact that she hadn’t been able to protect him,” Ann Reinking said. “He didn’t want to risk hurting her, but he needed to tell it, to talk about it, so it kept creeping out in his work.”Photofest

  Weaver’s class of 1944. Charles Grass on left; Fosse on right; Beth Kellough, a crush, to Fosse’s immediate right.Courtesy of Beth Kellough

  Fosse and Mary-Ann Niles in the national tour of Call Me Mister, 1946. They met shortly before this picture was taken and married shortly thereafter.Photofest

  Joan McCracken in Dance Me a Song, where she met and fell in love with Fosse in January 1950.Historic Images

  Fosse, Stanley Donen, and Debbie Reynolds rehearsing Give a Girl a Break. “During rehearsals,” Reynolds wrote, “Bobby, who was so in love with his own well-endowed self, would come up behind me and press his ‘gift’ into my backside to tease me.” Reynolds bought him a jockstrap.MGM

  The “Alley Dance” from My Sister Eileen, danced, choreographed, and directed by Bob Fosse, waged jazzy pointillism against Broadway-big, inwardness against exuberance, Bob Fosse against Tommy Rall, for Fosse’s greatest performance on film until “Snake in the Grass” in The Little Prince.Columbia Pictures

  Gwen Verdon acing “Whatever Lola Wants” from Damn Yankees, simultaneously dan
cing, acting, and singing where most could only hope to alternate between them.Photofest

  Fosse as Joey Evans in Pal Joey, City Center, 1958, with Billie Mahoney.Courtesy of Billie Mahoney

  A precious glimpse of Pleasures and Palaces, which closed out of town in 1965.Corbis/Bettmann

  Gwen Verdon in the “Pickpocket Tango” from Redhead, her favorite show and Fosse’s first as director/choreographer. His thing for bad girls on a line would rear up five years later in Sweet Charity’s “Big Spender,” and then again, behind bars once more, in Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango.”Photofest

  This is how it looks when Paddy Chayefsky has something to say. (With Gwen and Bob.)Photofest

  The firsttime film director rehearses Shirley MacLaine in “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity. (He loved those desert boots.)Photofest

  Gwen and Bob, setting up “Big Spender” for cameras, 1968.Getty Images/Lawrence Schiller, Polaris Communications

  Michael Jackson took note: “Snake in the Grass” was hip-hop before there was hip-hop.Paramount

  Sixteen Years

  MARTY BAUM HAD to fly out from Los Angeles to smooth things over. Though Fosse and Feuer had at long last settled on cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, Baum couldn’t get Fosse to bury the hatchet. “You were either a friend or an enemy,” Feuer said. “And he moved me from friend to enemy.” Openly ignoring Feuer, Fosse barred him from discussions at every opportunity, forcing crew members to pick sides or at least make shows of their allegiance whenever Fosse tested them.

  They needed extras. But running a call notice in the paper wouldn’t do. “For six weeks,” said assistant director Wolfgang Glattes, “I went to the red-light district looking for extras. Some days I wouldn’t get to the production office until one o’clock in the afternoon because I had been up until five [in the morning] the night before.” Nearly impossible to satisfy, Fosse tested like mad, and not just actors and locations; every last detail had to audition. “Bob was obsessed with blood,” said Glattes. “He tested three or four weeks of blood on the pavement. Just blood! ‘Mixture 13C!’ We did ten or fifteen tests just to get the right color and the right density. Then we’d examine it the next day in dailies. If Bob wasn’t happy, we’d go back for more.”

  Rather than depressing the crew, Fosse’s ruthless perfectionism bolstered the collaborative spirit. His team wanted to help him. With money scarce, everyone did whatever he or she could to match his efforts, many of them living together under one roof at a residential hotel in Schwabing. With the right people always on hand to help Fosse try out new ideas—and Fosse was always coming up with new ideas—the boundary between production time and play time evaporated. Cabaret grew around the clock. That the script was still being rewritten—this time, with Fosse’s blessing, by Hugh Wheeler—only enhanced the sense of communal authorship. Fosse would hear any idea.

  Michael York finally mustered the courage to address the problem of his underwritten character, but he wanted to do it without seeming high maintenance. “Bob,” he said, “I just reread the script on my way over and I don’t know how to play this. There’s nobody there!”

  “Don’t worry,” Fosse said. “We still have two weeks.”

  After Fosse finished rehearsing the dancers, he, Wheeler, Minnelli, and York locked themselves in a room in Bavaria Studios and started talking about the script, beginning at page 1. “That two weeks,” York said, “was one of the most creative times I have ever spent working with a director. We were all boiling, going at all cylinders.”

  Trailed by her dog Ocho, named for the Puerto Rican bar where she found him, Liza Minnelli came to rehearsal fully prepared. A connoisseur of Kander and Ebb, she had sung their songs (many written exclusively for her) for the better part of her singing life. Taking her father’s advice, she had studied Louise Brooks and Louise Glaum, the flapper sirens Sally Bowles would have idolized. And she had already isolated the most important aspect of her character: The main act of a trashy, rundown nightclub, Sally “needed to be special.” So she spotlit herself with press-on eyelashes and green-painted fingernails. Fosse understood why: failure was the province of glitz.

  Minnelli cut her bangs down to a point à la Louise Brooks. “Well?” she asked, modeling the hairstyle for her director. “You like it?”

  “What if I hadn’t?” he asked.

  In rehearsal, Fosse found that Minnelli, still a young actress, cried too quickly, too easily. Almost as soon as the scene began, streaks of black mascara spilled down her face. It was startling, but Minnelli’s gift for instant vulnerability, which worked so well in her act, ran counter to a certain inauthenticity in Sally Bowles. Fosse wanted Minnelli to clarify the tension before the tears, to work at restraining what came to her so naturally. “If you feel like crying,” he told her, “I want you to fight like an animal trying not to cry.” When Fosse gave her that note, she cried. But she heard him and made the adjustment permanent, and the two never stumbled again.

  The night before the first day of filming, Emanuel Wolf flew in for an enormous kickoff party. Jammed into an expensive biergarten for an all-night bacchanal of schnitzel and beer, hundreds of crew members and their spouses enjoyed a rare night out on the production’s dime. The only scowl in the room was Fosse’s.

  “What’s wrong?” Wolf asked.

  “Am I paying for this party?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did this cost?”

  Wolf sat down beside him. “I want you to relax. Okay, Bob? Enjoy the party. Enjoy it.”

  “I have seven and a half percent of this movie, Manny. Am I paying for this?”

  Wolf smiled. Fosse’s concern was a good omen. “I will put it in writing that the cost of this party does not go against your profit percentage, okay?”

  Fosse reached for a napkin. “Here.”

  “I’ll send you a letter in the morning.”

  “Fine.”

  That night, Fosse couldn’t sleep. He called Wolf.

  “I got a problem.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Can I come see you?”

  Moments later, Fosse was seated in an armchair across from Wolf’s bed. “I have a big problem directing this movie.”

  Wolf felt a tightening in his throat. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not Jewish.”

  Of all the reasons to worry, and there were many, real and imagined, Fosse’s religious background seemed an odd one for him to pick, especially at one in the morning. But he had been through all the others.

  “I don’t understand being Jewish,” Fosse explained, “and I don’t have a feel for it.”

  Fosse questioned Wolf about Jewish life, and Wolf, who wasn’t religious, tried his best to answer. “I didn’t know,” Wolf said, “if he was addressing the real problem here or he was using it to try to get close to me.” Three hours later, they were still talking.

  “Manny,” Fosse said, “there’s this thing with Cy . . .”

  He explained everything. On a certain level, Wolf was not surprised. Early on, Wolf sensed Feuer had advocated for Fosse because, as a desperate director coming off a flop, Fosse would submit himself to Feuer more willingly than a celebrated director high on his own success would.

  “Bob, from here on in, Cabaret is your picture,” Wolf said. “Your picture and my picture. Cy and Marty Baum were brought on by me, you got me? ABC put up half the money, but I have final cut, final script, final everything, and I’m telling you, Bob, if you’ve got any problem, any question, you come to me, okay? Not Cy.”

  The next morning, filming began. Separated from his American Camels, Fosse smoked Gitanes without the filters. “His concentration was so intense,” Glattes said, “we’d all have to watch his cigarettes to make sure he wasn’t going to burn his mouth.” Glattes had met and fallen in love with Kathryn Doby, who was playing one of the Kit Kat dancers. “Because we knew him, Kathryn and I would slip by Bob, pick the cigarette out of his mouth, and throw it to
the ground before it got too short. And he would go on as if nothing happened! That’s how focused he was.” A great respecter of focus, Geoffrey Unsworth earned Fosse’s appreciation simply by working quietly. “When he was ready to go,” Glattes said, “he would wait to catch my eye and just raise his hand. I knew then to get the actors ready. Geoffrey never had to speak.” Calm coming down from the top pervaded the entire set. “It was always very comfortable,” York said, “very friendly.”

  Filming began with the cabaret numbers, danced on a tiny stage only ten by fourteen feet, compelling Fosse to work within authentic restrictions. “I tried to make the dances look like the period,” he said, “not as if they were done by me, Bob Fosse, but by some guy who is down and out. I tried to keep this in mind, but it’s so difficult. You think, ‘Oh, I can’t really have them do that. That’s embarrassing; it’s so bad, so cheap.’ But you think, ‘But if I were the kind of guy who only works with cheap cabarets and clubs, what else would I do?’” And Fosse was that kind of guy, at least in part. From the wings of half-forgotten nightclubs, an emotional analogy to fascism grazed his memory, waiting to be mastered. Fosse didn’t know Hitler’s audience, but he knew how they must have watched their lousy cabaret acts, with excitement, horror, and lust.

  The dances Fosse saw, but how exactly to film them was not clear. It wasn’t like Sweet Charity, whose steps he had lived with for years before filming them. On that movie, anticipating what angles he needed was easy; he could close his eyes and turn around the 3-D model in his memory. But on Cabaret, whose multitudes of images were only beginning to flood over him, whose details and variations on details would be impossible to foresee, Fosse opted out of storyboarding to shoot somewhat on the fly. “I basically try to get an overall shot covering the choreography,” he said. “Then I go in and start playing.” And so, with the crew waiting and money burning, Fosse would circle the dancers, examining each one’s every angle from every conceivable vantage point. “Every time I do that,” he said, “I say, ‘Oh my god, it’s incredible to see this leg from this angle. No one’s ever seen a dance from here.’” He didn’t know what he wanted until he saw it; until then, he kept looking. “I keep my options open as long as possible,” he said. “It’s a definite problem in collaborating with me.”