by Wasson, Sam
Then Fosse stepped out. “He paced like a panther outside the editing room door,” Bretherton said, “and wouldn’t come in, even when invited.” What now?
For three weeks, Fosse stayed out there in the hall. Bretherton, who had no idea what was happening, pressed on as best he could, but a week later he finally had to beg Fosse to join him. “I’m fiddling with three or four pieces of film,” he said, “and I need you to make a quick decision.”
Fosse paused outside the door. “Can I tell you something?”
Bretherton swallowed.
“I can’t sit.”
“What?”
“I have the worst case of hemorrhoids anyone ever had.”
That got them both laughing and Fosse came back in.
Watching his director learn to edit, Bretherton was simply amazed at what he saw. Where many worked cut to cut, one deliberate piece at a time, Fosse had an automatic feel for movement and rhythm that gave him mental flickers of whole sequences, like a chess master sees checkmate long before it comes. And having shot certain numbers from as many as five angles, Fosse had provided them with a wealth of variations on every turn. Most musicals favored cuts continuous with the number, staying inside the performance as if the world outside had vanished, but Fosse and Bretherton began to see they could cut away from the number, keeping the outside reality alive, and then jump back into the number without disrupting the flow. This technique, they found, tripled the impact, made the numbers seem more natural, as if they were really happening; it allowed them to embellish the rhythm with a turn of a head or the wink of an eye and provided them with a means of commenting, by way of juxtaposition, on the number, the outside world, or both.
They caught fire. First they would cut the number the classical way, straight through, without interruption. Then they would go back and look for creative opportunities, the sort Fosse could see coming. “Every cut you make changes another cut,” Bretherton said. “Then all of a sudden this opens up a new way of doing something. [Working with Fosse] I learned that nothing is impossible.” Dancers’ bones broke, but celluloid did not protest. It only performed. Here in the cutting room, Fosse could realize his dream of total and precise control of every stage element, toe tap, and facial expression. Nothing fought him. The world of machines rendered thought and action nearly identical, and Fosse could finally move at the perfect speed of amphetamines. He was free.
Elsewhere in his life, he was trapped. Moving into the Hyde Park Hotel with Ilse, across the park from his old home, where his daughter lived (without him), had backed Fosse into a familiar corner. How to keep his women—for their protection and for his—separate and content? Ordinarily, he’d have the number all worked out in advance, but this time was different. This time one of those women was Nicole. She was only eight.
Fosse was lying to her about Ilse. He asked Ilse never to answer the phone, just in case it was Nicole calling. Nicole, he told Ilse, was the most important thing in his life. Then he added, “With work,” and then, smiling, “and you—maybe.” But the few afternoons Fosse had with his daughter brought him more pain than relief. Where once he had auditioned for the role of good father, a lead, now he would take anything, a place in her chorus even, just to be near her.
Janice Lynde soothed him. A twenty-two-year-old Texas beauty with the wholesome look Fosse couldn’t resist, Janice was understudying the role of Eve Harrington in Applause, her first Broadway show. They had met before he took off for Germany, backstage at the Palace after her opening night.
“You’re so tall,” he said.
“Well, you’re so short.”
She had a pillow voice. It said I can take care of you tonight.
Fosse told her he wanted to put her in a movie, something he was working on with Herb Gardner. Friends who knew Fosse advised Janice to be careful, that he was not on the market, that he would say lovely things and then he would hurt her; Janice assured them she could take care of herself. “I wanted a career and work,” she said, “so getting involved with Bob was no problem for me. I wasn’t going to be his girlfriend.”
That was fine for Fosse; in fact, it was better. “Unfortunately,” he confessed, “and I’ll never know why, I can’t be a faithful husband or lover, but I can be a helpful one.”
They would stick to show business.
Out at night, she could feel him looking at her hands. “Sometimes he’d watch me,” she said, “and later he’d say, ‘That was interesting, the way you put your hand on the table.’ Or we’d go for a drink and he’d say, ‘What if you lean your body and you put one leg up over here?’ I’d start laughing and he’d go, ‘What’s so funny?’ It was all work. I was work. He was looking at me through the lens, picking shots like he was directing.” It was his only consistent indication of love, the attention he paid her in the form of work.
For months, they walked the goose-bumpy line between closeness and intimacy, work and more than work, occasionally crossing over and then stepping back. Was it a ploy, his little-boy look when she turned him down, or did he actually feel that small? He must have known what he was doing to her, having done this kind of thing so many times before. He must have known she wanted him to keep trying, that when she held her hand out to stop him, she hoped he’d take it. “I always knew, we both knew, it could never be a just-you-just-me commitment,” Lynde said. “But there were spurts of things.” It would be difficult to say who was leading.
“Good night, Bobby.”
“Janice . . . come on, Janice . . .”
“I’m sorry, Bobby, no. I can’t.” She kissed him and walked off toward her building. “Good night, Bobby.”
“You know,” he called after her, “you seem very sophisticated but really you’re very middle-class.”
He had made this sort of remark before. It was meant to hurt.
Inside her apartment, she cried. There was no way for her to know that Bob Fosse, who seemed to her the apex of sophistication, with his black uniform and Tony Awards, was himself uncomfortable, even afraid, of the sexual excesses he was so drawn to. “I remember him saying it was wrong that in Europe men and women could be naked together on the beach,” Ann Reinking said. “I thought, for him, that was an odd thing to say.” He could be middle-class too.
Covetous of virtue but obsessed with corruption, Fosse was unsure where to place Janice or even himself on the sin spectrum, wanting so much to test her “goodness” against his “badness” and discover, definitively, what color they shone in the dark. “He took me to these strip clubs,” Janice said. “Some of them were still doing the old-fashioned striptease he liked, some of them were becoming more go-go kind of places. I was afraid, but he was fascinated. He said the strippers he grew up with could be very motherly to him, and a couple of them really took him under their wing sexually and taught him a lot, how to be a good lover. But he also said they teased him and hurt him before he went up onstage.” The contamination of innocence had obsessed Fosse since “Whatever Lola Wants,” when first he stained Gwen Verdon with his touch of vice that he then spread through Sweet Charity and Cabaret.
Fosse and Janice were both night people, both talkers. “Mostly, he worried about Nicole,” she said. “He worried that he was going to give her a cynical view of men, and that it would hurt her.” He seemed more and more breakable every hour they stayed awake. “When he was working, when he was passionate, the adrenaline would kick in and he’d be fine,” she said, “he’d be naturally up. But at nights the darkness would take him. You know how in movies when they put dark contacts over people’s whole eye? That’s how Bob would look to me. Like there was no one out front.”
Sex and work, Lynde found, could restore him. “A lot of the time sexuality would relieve some of that darkness. It was like medication for him. Talking about working and working helped him to feel okay too, but he had a hard time following through. The Dexedrine made him feel like he could put his ideas into action. He would say, ‘I have to be totally passionate or I don’t
want to go to work.’ That’s why he envied Sidney Lumet. He said Lumet was a real craftsman, that he could do every film they offered him whether he felt he could do it or not. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t, but [Lumet] would always do it. Bob wanted to be that way. He wanted to be a craftsman for whom the work was easy and who could fly from project to project without too much worry of flop or hit, bad or good.”
The more they saw of each other, the more anguished she became about their relationship, whatever it was. Janice knew about Ilse; he had volunteered all that. But had he told her to protect her, or to absolve himself?
“Dance for me,” he said. “I want to see you dance.”
They were up late again, drinking too much.
“If you choreograph it, then I’ll dance it.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I want to see how you move without being told anything.”
Having learned from Sweet Charity that no career, no matter how good it looked, was ever secure and no production was a sure thing, Fosse scoured New York for his next project—or, rather, projects. He cast as wide a net as possible, spread himself all over the map, reading film scripts, TV scripts, and new musicals with the preemptive urgency of a nervous creature busily hoarding for winter. It was both inauspiciously timed, then, and very interesting that David Begelman told Fosse he was leaving CMA’s New York office for the LA bureau. It was inauspiciously timed because trusting new agents was among the few talents Fosse did not possess. It was very interesting because stepping in for Begelman was Sam Cohn.
Sam Cohn was on his way to being the best agent in New York. The funny thing about Cohn—one of the funny things—was that he didn’t think-Yiddish-dress-British, like Begelman, who reportedly kept a closet full of one hundred identical (numbered) black ties. He was more like a schlepster librarian in his old khakis, oversize sweaters (often stained, often torn), white gym socks, and loafers, their gold buckles sliced off so no one would know they were from Gucci. The whole package said I don’t bullshit; I’m not one of them. “The shibboleth,” Cohn explained, in his Princeton-and-Yale accent, “the image of agents, is something that frankly bothers me.” He despised Los Angeles. When he had to go, he flew there and back in the same day.
At his peak, Sam Cohn saw at least five hundred movies and seventy-five plays a year. He had three assistants (phone, schedule, filing). He had a private bathroom so when he was forced to leave his desk, he didn’t have to lose time mingling with others on his way to the “people other than Sam” bathroom out there in the office. Time was a problem. Cohn was rarely on time. “Sam,” his client Herb Gardner said to him, “you’re doomed to live in the present.” Cohn’s present could last a long time. His day started late, with the papers, as many as his short attention span would allow. He read them on his way to morning therapy and on his way from therapy to ICM at 40 West Fifty-Seventh Street, where he tossed them away to free up his hands—one to pitch his jacket to an assistant, the other to take the box-office figures she handed him, which he read on his way to his office, an organized mess with a view of Central Park he never had time to enjoy. By then it was almost lunch.
Lunch was generally at the Russian Tea Room, a short walk from his office, where the management kept a booth for him: the first one on the right, just beyond the bar, visible to all who walked in. And everyone walked in, many with the intention of “accidentally” running into Sam, which slowed him down even more. But he made up for lost time in the deal, whose terms he laid out as plainly as a menu (“Take it or leave it, but you really should take it”—and they took it). Eating at the Russian Tea Room was like speed-dating. In a short time, in a small space, Cohn got everyone in, and then he got out in time to get back to his desk as the West Coast woke up. He’d sit there talking on the phone with one arm slung over his head and both eyes closed, as if inspired. He’d be there all day. On the phone.
Sam Cohn’s phone was legend. It rang as often as 200 times a day. On his record-breaking busiest day, Cohn hit 353. The intercom slowed him down, so Cohn shouted for his messages.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Woody!”
“Put him on!”
Cohn didn’t take all the calls; with that kind of volume, he simply couldn’t. Many clients joked they needed an agent to get in touch with their agent. (“I would call up pretending to be Fosse,” Cohn’s client Paul Mazursky said, “just to get Cohn on the phone.”) Thus the widespread “running into” Sam at the Russian Tea Room. Some would attempt to bribe the maître d’ to be seated beside him. Once, a client sent a dime to Cohn’s booth with the note reading Please call me. Another wrote his own obituary and sent it to the office just to get a reaction. “I have a neurotic response to some people,” Cohn admitted, “and I find it very hard to call.”
Most nights Cohn stayed at the office until curtain time. He decried the weakness of people who ate dinner at six, so he ate after the show—and there was always a show (Dirty Harry, or an oboe concerto, or, most often, the play or movie of a client). Dinner was most often at Wally’s (steak, wine), where Cohn’s photo hung above the coatroom doorway. Around midnight, he would return home to 25 Central Park West, where he lived, a fifteen-minute walk from the office. There he read—his clients’ work. “Unless it was extremely urgent,” said his associate Arlene Donovan, “Sam would never read in the office.” There wasn’t time.
Also, he ate paper. Script corners, napkins, checks, matchbooks, menus. Black carbon got all over his teeth. “He was supposed to meet me [once],” Donovan said, “but he got lost because he ate the directions.” He ate paper absent-mindedly, as a smoker might reach for a cigarette. It didn’t matter who saw him. “He seemed totally oblivious to the fact that someone might find it strange,” writer Teresa Carpenter said.
“You remember that deal we made?” Cohn once asked producer Alan Ladd Jr. an hour after their lunch.
“Of course I do.”
“What was it?”
Ladd paused. “You ate the deal?”
“I’m sorry.”
Screwing the other guy held no appeal for Cohn. Moreover, it was bad business in those days. “It’s a very small group of people,” Cohn said of his kingdom, “and we can’t afford to euchre each other too badly.” A certain geographical intimacy (midtown, mostly) channeled the competition into close quarters, forcing show-business professionals to embrace neighborliness and even fraternity, like immigrants in steerage. “The different disciplines exist within twelve blocks of one another,” he said. “One can literally go in a direct line almost from my office to Bantam Books, to United Artists, to the Shubert Theater. And, if you wanted to, you could stop by CBS or ABC on the way and you wouldn’t even have to take a cab.” That didn’t shake the dirt off every rat, but it did encourage respect, and on both sides of the table. The goal was not the big deal (as it would be in the 1980s) but the right deal, and in Cohn’s case, very little dealing was necessary; Liza, Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet—his clients sold themselves. “Sam loved talent so much,” Ladd said, “he would be pushing clients he didn’t even represent anymore.”
“His clients,” said Cohn’s daughter, Marya. “They were his family.” And none more so than Steve Tesich, screenwriter of Breaking Away. He was with Cohn at the theater or at Wally’s almost every night of the week. Fosse was there too. “Sam was just overwhelmed by Fosse’s talent,” Donovan said. “He thought Fosse was one of the most talented people he had ever come across. He worshipped him.” The feeling was mutual. Cohn’s professorial manner and vehement anti-Hollywoodism earned him Fosse’s respect, but it was Cohn’s spectacular faith in Fosse that won him his client’s devotion. “Those guys had a true guy-code friendship,” assistant Susan Anderson said. Cohn introduced Fosse to the writers Peter Maas and E. L. Doctorow, and, along with Tesich and Peter Stone (all Cohn clients), they joined Fosse’s buddy brigade with Paddy and Herb, Falstaffs every one, with heavy undertones of Hamlet. Fosse put them—his (mostly Jewish) intellectuals—on a
pedestal. “But Bobby is an extremely intelligent man,” Cohn said, “though his pose is to be non-intellectual. He claims he doesn’t know some of the big words Paddy uses, but I think that’s a pretense. Bob would like you to think, for some obscure reason, that he’s still a gypsy, a vaudeville hoofer.” Cohn hung all their photos on his office wall. There were no pictures of his children. “Family dinners?” Cohn once asked a friend. “Who wants to go to that?” (Then, reconsidering: “What’s that like?”)
For the select few, Cohn’s office couch was always open. Clients Robert Altman and John Guare came by for backgammon, Tesich to talk through an idea. Most called in advance. Fosse just appeared. “At any time of day,” Anderson said, “Bobby would walk in laughing.” If Cohn was on a call, Fosse would let himself in, get comfortable on the couch, and try to get Sam to break up. He’d mimic the way he sat, mimic his voice. “Susaaaaaaaan, would you get me—” “Susaaaaaaaan, would you get me—” He gave Cohn a telescope to put by his window, the joke being that Sam Cohn had no use for it. What did he care about the outside? One evening, with her boss away, Susan Anderson peeked through the lens, which had been turned north, toward Fosse’s apartment a few blocks away. She caught Fosse standing behind his own telescope looking back at her. Then the phone rang in Cohn’s office.
“Hello?”
“This is Bob Fosse. I’m a client of Mr. Cohn’s. Is he in?”
Anderson laughed. “Mr. Cohn is out right now. May I have him call you in a bit?”
In the midst of cutting Cabaret, Fosse told Sam about an idea he had had in Germany. Watching Liza work, hard, Fosse thought of filming the making and performance of a Liza Minnelli concert for television. It would not be a canned, airless affair in the manner of most television specials (which were usually filmed at a private studio, with a limited audience, with time for retakes) but a cinematic stage performance, perhaps supported by interstitial interviews with Minnelli herself, backstage and in the wings, as she prepared for and recovered from her big night. As he wrote in his proposal, Fosse imagined an entertainment about the “joy, fear, anxiety, and eventual gratification” of making entertainment, a show about putting on a show. The results would be both a concert film and a documentary look at the nerve and exertion of one of the world’s most entrenched representatives of show business, a fusion of razzle-dazzle and (razzle-dazzle’s sometime opposite) live truth. Fosse would direct and choreograph; Kander and Ebb would oversee the production and contribute songs; and NBC would air the one-hour special the following year, in September 1972. If Cabaret, scheduled to open months prior, made Minnelli a movie star (as Cohn, Chayefsky, Gardner, and Fosse suspected it might), then Liza with a Z—a singing, dancing, confessional close-up—could promote her to phenomenon.