Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Amid the highs and lows of his separation, the black-and-blues of seeing Nicole, the neither-here-nor-there of his thing with Janice, Fosse sent Ilse back home, moved into a one-bedroom apartment formerly occupied by Begelman on West Fifty-Eighth Street, and threw himself into Cabaret for the final stretch. “Fellas, this is much too long,” Wolf said after the lights came up on a rough cut one hot day in July. “I need a picture of two hours.” But Fosse was reluctant to cut anything, not because he thought he had a masterpiece, but because the longer he was in the cage with a movie, the more he convinced himself he had already failed. “There’s a certain amount of self-delusion that has to go on,” he said. “You think you did this scene very well and you think you got the most out of the actor and you think you shot it well and three months later you see you really messed it up.” Thus Bob Fosse would follow movie with show, Broadway with Hollywood. “Bob would do a movie,” his assistant director Wolfgang Glattes said, “get disappointed and scared, then go back to the theater.” Nothing was a sure thing, but the record showed he had far more success on the stage than on the screen, making Broadway a sort of safety net under Fosse’s Hollywood tightrope, insuring him against the likelihood of oncoming failure. Following Cabaret with Liza with a Z, and then Liza with a Z with a new Broadway musical, he would buy himself insurance across three media. But what, he asked Cohn and company, should that new musical be?

  In the years since the 1966–1967 Broadway season—the last time a new Fosse work had been onstage—Broadway had begun to show signs of a nervous breakdown. The late 1960s crises of race, war, sex, and national pride put traditional ideas of entertainment out to pasture, leaving Broadway to crawl, and sometimes plummet, toward new meaning and purpose. The year of Cabaret was also the year of The Homecoming, A Delicate Balance, The Killing of Sister George, and Little Murders; that year, comedy—ashamed of having a good time in a bad world—commingled so successfully with horror, it seemed inappropriate to laugh out loud. And everything seemed to mean something. Even in the most grotesque comedies, the suggestion of allegory kept the misery relatable. The breakdown cranked up a notch the following season, as After the Rain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (as well as the American premiere of Exit the King) added meta-theatricality to the hysterical pitch-blackness. “Now, serious theater must accomplish two things,” Edward Albee said in 1966. “The serious play has got to say something about the nature of the play as an art form itself; it has got to try to advance, to change that art form. It must also try to change the spectator in some fashion; alter his point of view, his view of reality, his view of the theater.” So actors ran down aisles, characters marched to the lip of the stage and harassed real-life people in the front row, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern realized they were fictional. Putting on a “show,” the Broadway play of the late sixties confronted audiences with the conceptual illusions at large in the real world.

  But what did that mean for the musical, obligated to contain song and dance and too expensive to shrug off popular tastes completely? The legit Broadway revolution arrived late (with the notable exception of Hal Prince’s Cabaret) to George Abbott country. Before Fosse was offered the film of Sweet Charity, he momentarily considered Promises, Promises, a musical made from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, and an adaptation of Fellini’s La Strada, perhaps with Juliet Prowse in the Giulietta Masina part. For both projects, he would have been too late. Case in point: his film of Sweet Charity, which opened a year after—though it seemed a generation before—Hair.

  Hair was a landmark musical, Fosse thought, third in a triumvirate that began for him with Oklahoma! and West Side Story. Sex, drugs, and soft rock and roll, Hair was a counterculture parade of kid id—either chic or radical chic, depending on where one had drinks after the show. Containing none of the formal ingenuity of Oklahoma! or West Side Story, Hair came complete with full-frontal nudity, a racially expansive cast, and an open invitation to a be-in at the show’s end. Maybe these were all tricks, but who else was doing them? (Soon, everyone.) “I took somebody to an experimental play recently,” said Sondheim in 1970, “and at the end of the first act we had witnessed about six rapes, seven murders, and a good deal of homosexuality and matricide. . . . And I said to my friend, ‘Why is it so dull?’ He said, ‘Because there’s no surprise.’” Even the giants had run out of good bad ideas. While Albee, the Ernst Lubitsch of bad feelings, did to happy families what Oh! Calcutta! did to pants, Neil Simon, Broadway comedy’s Babe Ruth, fell fast and far, tumbling from Plaza Suite and Last of the Red Hot Lovers to the alcoholism of The Gingerbread Lady and the literal nervous breakdown of The Prisoner of Second Avenue. The musical tried rock, and stagnated. To really evolve, a form needs more time, or a genius.

  In the case of Stephen Sondheim, the form had a genius. In the case of Company—music and lyrics by Sondheim, directed by Hal Prince, set design by Boris Aronson, choreography by Michael Bennett—a coven of geniuses. Described by Sondheim as a show about “the challenge of maintaining relationships in a society becoming increasingly depersonalized,” Company reconfigured what had been the musical’s basic DNA: advancing story through songs. This show went for theme. Given that it had virtually no plot—audiences watched as Bobby talked to friends, pondered his relationships, and so forth—Company’s episodic structure, fractured in spiritual accord with the theme of depersonalization, tossed out another musical gene: linearity. Yes, time; broken by loose chronology and Aronson’s cubist designs (where are we?), one had to wonder: Was Company unfolding in Bobby’s brain?

  Follies was—well, not in Bobby’s brain, but certainly in someone’s, or in something’s, unconscious, though precisely how much was difficult to say. The point was the breakdown of the American musical was finally happening. On April 4, 1971, at the Winter Garden Theater, its subconscious was revealed: the curtain falls on two couples at the end of their neurotic tether and comes up again on “Loveland”—“a metaphoric explosion!” Sondheim once said—a happy place, we’re told, “where everybody loves to live” and “where everybody lives to love” (in other words, musical comedy is a delusion). In races a pastiche of musical forms—vaudeville, Ziegfeld, and Gershwin—each belonging to a neurotic impulse of love, each one its own folly and (in a great big pop-historical masterstroke) all of them follies of musicals gone by. “I was looking at the past with affection, respect and delight,” Sondheim said. “In no way am I pointing out how silly the songs were because I don’t think they’re silly. What they are is innocent.” And so, in the dawn of 1971, Sondheim, Prince, Aronson, and Bennett eased the musical out of its cocoon, and it flew away.

  Even though Follies wasn’t to his taste (or so he claimed), Fosse liked it and asked Sondheim if he would be interested in reading Big Deal, his Big Deal on Madonna Street musical, now set in Mexico, with an eye to, maybe, contributing music and lyrics. “Out of politeness I said I would read it,” Sondheim said. “You know, playwrights have enough trouble writing librettos, what am I going to expect from a choreographer? So I read it and to my surprise I thought it was really good. But there was a problem and an insurmountable one. There are only two kinds of music in the world I don’t like: Mexican and Hawaiian. I said, ‘Bobby, you’re not going to believe me. You’re going to think I’m copping out. You’re going to think this is my polite way of saying your book stinks, but I think the book is really good but I can’t write it. If I have to write twelve bars of mariachi music . . .’”

  Fosse moved on. With music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Roger Hirson, Pippin was a musical inspired by tales of Pippin, son of Charlemagne. It was slight, but Schwartz had written some lovely songs, and his Godspell was performing sensationally well off Broadway.

  In LA, finishing postproduction on Cabaret, Fosse thought of John Rubinstein, an actor who’d auditioned for the part Fosse eventually gave to Michael York. “He called me up out of the blue,” Rubinstein said, “and asked me if I’d be interested i
n the title role of Pippin.” Of course he was interested: the leading part in a new Bob Fosse musical? A short time later, Fosse arrived at Rubinstein’s house on Beverly Glen to go through the entire script, Rubinstein reading his part and Fosse all the others.

  When they finished, Rubinstein looked up.

  “What do you think?” Fosse asked.

  The question needed a delicate answer. The story was thin, the characters thinner. As spirited as it was, Pippin felt naïve, part of another era’s Broadway. One had to wonder, what—other than the fact that it was a follow-up to Godspell—did Fosse see in it?

  “Well,” Rubinstein said, “I like that song ‘Corner of the Sky’ . . .” Wanting the job, the actor was in no position to challenge Fosse’s taste, but not acknowledging Pippin’s problems could make him look foolish, especially if this was some kind of a test. Rubinstein sighed. “I’m not crazy about it.”

  “Yeah,” Fosse said. “Neither am I.”

  If Rubinstein was surprised before, he was baffled now. Why had Fosse, who could direct just about anything he wanted, picked a show he didn’t like?

  “I need you to come to New York,” Fosse said, and he left.

  With a final cut of Cabaret behind him, Fosse returned to New York and met with Schwartz, who at twenty-four was new to Broadway and had certainly never collaborated with such a powerful director. But his talent was apparent and his success phenomenal. “Fosse told me of his enthusiasm for Godspell, how buoyant he had found it,” Schwartz recalled. He had been working on Pippin since college, he told Fosse, impressing him, and they seemed to grow more excited as the meeting progressed. When Fosse left, Schwartz called up book writer Roger Hirson to celebrate.

  “Isn’t this terrific? We have Bob Fosse!”

  “Yes, that’s terrific,” Hirson admitted. “I just want to tell you this is our last happy day on the show.”

  In the months that followed, Fosse and producer Stuart Ostrow met regularly to discuss what Ostrow described as “the earnestness of the book” (Fosse told him he considered the book “a piece of shit”). They had known each other socially, from poker games, as far back as the Mary-Ann Niles years (Fosse “could bluff you with a pair of deuces,” Ostrow wrote), but they remained at a friendly distance professionally. None of the Feuer stuff here. Ostrow worried about producing and Fosse worried about the show, which is just how Fosse liked it. Whenever Fosse brought up financial matters—Pippin was budgeted at around $750,000, a figure Fosse thought far too high—Ostrow told him not to worry. “Stu Ostrow trusted Bob and that made Bob trust him,” Wolfgang Glattes said. Out of trust came a respectful exchange of suggestions. Their subject was Pippin’s perhaps too-gleeful outlook and how to profane it. Strolling through the woods around the producer’s home in Pound Ridge, they decided that lampooning the show with anachronistic dialogue and modern attitudes could bring it down to earth, though how they could do it without violating Dramatists Guild regulations, which granted authors script approval, wasn’t certain.

  Fosse offered the part of Catherine, Pippin’s pure and decent love, to Janice Lynde. That she turned it down surprised them both; that turning it down drew them closer surprised them even more. With Fosse’s professional interest in her confirmed, Janice felt her caution begin to erode. They touched more. He asked her to be with him.

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “I know what will happen.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “That’s how it always starts. Someone says, ‘You don’t know. You can’t know.’ But I know.”

  “You think being with me will hurt you in some way?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” They’d been here before. “I don’t know.”

  “Look at the women I’ve been with. Look at the women I married. We were partners, Janice. Look at me and Gwen. It was good for us.”

  Janice knew that being with him meant being with death. “Bob had an absolute obsession with death,” Lynde said. “He would always say he didn’t want to live past sixty.” Sixty seemed an arbitrary age, but it came up so often, she felt it had to be meaningful. Sixty sounded like a mantra, the way he would repeat it, as if it soothed him. I’ll go when I’m sixty, he would say. Just wait until I’m sixty.

  He’d call at night or in the afternoons when he wasn’t working. They lived only a few buildings apart.

  “Bob?”

  “Oh God,” he’d say. “It’s a really blue day.”

  She would go to him. The nights she couldn’t get to his place, she’d stay with him on the phone. “No matter where I was,” she said, “he would call at three or four in the morning, which was fine with me because I would go back to sleep or I was up anyway or I would be with friends. They’d say, ‘There’s this crazy man on the phone who wants to speak to you,’ and I’d say, ‘I know that man. Give me the phone.’” He would talk about dying in musical terms. It helped, sometimes. On the phone with Janice, he described death as a dance with a snake. “One sting,” he said, “and you’ll be in a place you want to be where you can do what you want to do without the angst and the depression and the doubt and the insecurities.”

  On bad nights, the nights of no music, Janice would hear a flatness in his voice, and she’d panic. She would call a doctor and run over to his apartment. “What have you taken? Are you drinking?” She wasn’t sure if the Dexedrine was helping or hurting (he said it was helping), and she called a psychiatrist to lead her through the contents of his medicine cabinet, just to be sure, or try to be. On the hardest nights, Janice insisted on staying with him. “Come on,” she said, “I’m going to make you dinner at my place and you’re going to have to put up with my dog you hate.” If she got him to laugh, she thought, she could get him back. “Humor,” Lynde said, “made the colors change.” So she kept watching his eyes. They were small eyes. When he couldn’t laugh, the smallest sparkle would show her what she needed to see—Bob, in there, a sparkle.

  Before getting in bed one blue night Bob spent with her, she locked her dog in the bathroom. Then the howling began.

  It lasted all night.

  “I’m gonna kill that thing,” Bob said to her.

  “You want me to let him out?”

  “No!”

  “I’m gonna let him out!”

  “No! No! Janice!”

  She got up and opened the bathroom door. A fur ball flew through the air and landed on the bed.

  “Fine,” Bob said. “But he’s sleeping on that side.” There—the sparkle.

  She’d play him music. He loved Satie and Billy Joel. Fosse said Joel played the piano like he had a rhythm section on the keyboard—rhythm, he needed rhythm; she saw how cleanly it separated his body from the dark part of his brain. So did sex. “His darkness would often precede his sexual impulse,” she said, “like he was trying to climb out of it.” And she would be there for him—that worried her. “Bob knew I had very strong caretaker instincts,” she said, “and I was afraid that would take over my ambition.” To love too much and love Bob Fosse would be loving alone. Janice knew not to ask for a solo.

  “I want to,” he volunteered. “Be with just you.”

  “You’re going to try?”

  He didn’t answer that.

  “Bobby? Can you?”

  Fosse couldn’t lie about love. He could cheat and steal, but he couldn’t tell a dancer she could make it if she couldn’t, and he couldn’t profane the trust of someone he cared for. The loneliness he could live with; the bullshit he refused to accept. He told Janice if they were together, he could not allow her to do what he did—see other people. Of course it wasn’t fair, but it was the truth. He’d been Bob Fosse long enough to know jealousy shredded him. “He never agreed to anything he couldn’t do,” Lynde said. “I was amazed because I’d never been with anyone so honest.” Somehow, his spirit of full disclosure, even at its harshest, drew her in. This too was dazzling. To a woman preparing to leave him, it was the most seductive twist of
all.

  “This is who I am,” he said. “I don’t like it, I wish it wasn’t this way, but . . .”

  “But what? Don’t you love? If you love someone, then you want to be with just them.”

  They’d been here before too.

  “I go out with them,” he said. “But I’d come home to you.”

  Fifteen Years

  FOR THREE CONSECUTIVE DAYS before Cabaret opened at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, on February 13, 1972, Fosse adjusted the house lights and levels, honing the ambience for optimum viewing. He could not be too careful, even now. An exhibition atmosphere anything less than immaculate could undo all the efforts of the past year, his work from Jay Allen to David Bretherton, from Berlin to LA. Emanuel Wolf tried to calm him, and Vincente Minnelli’s response to a preview screening—he called Cabaret the perfect movie—was touching praise, but Fosse knew the Ziegfeld was his last line of defense against the likes of Pauline Kael and the critics from the New York Times, whose reviews had the power to send audiences away, taking with them Fosse’s long hoped-for chances of stardom. Directors could be stars now. In the wake of Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, and the auteur-minded critics of the late sixties, Hollywood’s new filmmakers had acquired highbrow cultural prominence and, for some, even celebrity. As never before, Fosse (and others) could become an Astaire behind the camera, where every square inch of the frame was his to master and take credit for. “Bob and I were standing in the back of the Ziegfeld the night Cabaret opened,” Wolf said, “and I could see his mind working, spinning and spinning, and I said to him, ‘Bob, stop cutting the picture! It’s over! It’s over!’”