Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  There was a game Fosse liked to play. Out of nowhere, he would walk up to Ship and speak the lyrics of a song.

  “‘When you see.’”

  “Guys and Dolls.”

  “Yeah. Good.”

  There was another game called Would You Trust.

  “Hey, Trudy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you trust . . . Tony Perkins?”

  An easy one. “Not if I was taking a shower. Would you trust Timothy Carey?”

  “Not if I was a racehorse.” (Carey shoots a racehorse in The Killing.)

  Sitting next to Fosse, Ship grew accustomed to his scent, Revlon’s Wild Lemon cologne. She liked it so much she went out and bought a bottle for herself. Before long, the entire suite smelled of summer lemon and cigarettes and, on the days Fred Ebb stopped by with lunch, hot pastrami too. But Fosse didn’t eat much. Amphetamines kept his appetite down to sandwiches and wine—“the Fosse diet,” Heim called it—which worried the Carnegie Deli’s Herb Schlein so much he once turned up at 1600 Broadway with a large aluminum tray and a furrowed brow. “Is Bobby around?”

  “He’s somewhere,” Heim said.

  “Has he been eating?”

  “Sandwiches.”

  “Well, I saw him not too long ago and thought he didn’t look right. Here.” Peeling back the aluminum, Schlein revealed the biggest turkey Alan Heim had ever seen. With it was apple pie. “I made it myself,” he said. “Make sure Bobby eats it, okay?”

  Heim was amazed and a little saddened by Fosse’s tenacity. “He was never sure he’d actually done it,” he said. “He would always say to me, ‘Get your next job before the film comes out.’” One of the hottest filmmakers in the country, well on his way to finishing a television special that would likely take him even higher, and still Fosse was looking for more to do, in sickness and in health—though telling one from the other with him was near impossible. The amphetamines gave him constant energy, so Fosse could look bad, like a figure out of Munch, and feel just fine. No one knew.

  Not even Heim. “How you feeling, Bob?” he asked one day.

  “Fine. Did you read it?” Fosse was talking about Lenny, a script by Julian Barry based on his play about the life and death of Lenny Bruce. He had had a copy sent to Heim’s apartment days earlier. “What do you think?”

  “I read it after my wife went to sleep,” Heim said, “then I woke her up and I said, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ This was the middle of the night. She said, ‘I’ll read it in the morning,’ and I said, ‘No, no, you’ve gotta read this now.’”

  “You liked it.”

  “I think it’s the greatest script I’ve ever read.”

  In every way, Lenny Bruce was a perfect fit for Fosse: self-immolating, filthy, funny, and drug addicted, a man who had a short life and a pathetic demise and whose crusade against bullshit broke entertainment taboos and drove him to his death—the passion of the showbiz Christ. A no-punches-pulled First Amendment drama, Lenny was an opportunity for Fosse to break his own entertainment taboos, to leave singing and dancing for the sort of hard, ruthless truths Bruce himself would have respected, and to exchange razzle-dazzle for capital-A Art. Here also was the possibility for autobiography in biography, a chance for Fosse to continue his ongoing effort to tell his own story, from strip clubs to self-destruction. No more Mr. Musical: this film he’d shoot in black-and-white.

  At Pippin’s first read-through, at Broadway Arts, a ten-minute walk away from 1600 Broadway, Ben Vereen faced Fosse, trying to keep the faith. His agent had told him not to do the show, that his part, the Old Man, a sort of narrator/chorus leader, would not do for him what Jesus Christ Superstar had. But Vereen had loved working with Fosse on Sweet Charity, both in the Vegas edition and in the movie, and knowing that most Broadway directors didn’t generally give white roles to black actors, Vereen wanted in. Reading through the script, however, he found the character did a lot of waiting. “Enter Fastrada!” the Old Man says. (Wait.) “Enter Louis!” (Longer wait.) Whenever Vereen looked across the table hoping for a wordless answer to his unspoken What is this?, he saw Fosse laughing to himself.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he whispered to Vereen after the read-through. “Go to the library. Go look at cats like Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson and Jimmy Slyde.”

  He did. The most esteemed black tapper of vaudeville, Bill Robinson made a name for himself in nightclubs and on Broadway before reaching stardom beside Shirley Temple in movies like The Little Colonel, where he performed his virtuosic stair dance. Some traced the nickname Bojangles back to the French beau jongleur, meaning “juggler” or “trickster,” suggesting audiences may have cast Robinson as a kind of devil—Fosse would have loved that. Jimmy Slyde, Vereen read, had a slide step so smooth, when he danced he made the stage look like it was made of cream. Like Bojangles, one of his idols, Slyde slid with the utmost upper-body control, enhancing the illusion of effortlessness as he skimmed across the stage, his derby lifted high in the air. All of it would go into the Old Man. “On the page,” Vereen said, “he doesn’t read as evil. He reads as [Pippin’s] best friend. He was the devil on his shoulder, the cat who was gonna show you everything, but inside he was a killer. He had his band of killers [the players] with him. His whole thing was to devour this young man.” The Old Man became the Leading Player, a black-magic killer with the charm of an entertainer.

  Schwartz and Hirson liked the idea and agreed to revise Pippin with the Leading Player’s malevolent purpose in mind. “The show was being discovered as we went along,” Schwartz said. “But then [the Leading Player] began to take over the show so much that it began to diminish Pippin. The character became basically passive and reactive and didn’t have the same kind of drive, energy, and intelligence that Roger [Hirson] and I were trying to achieve with him. Yes, he was an innocent, and yes, he was naïve about things, but a lot of specific lines he had got taken away—either given away to the Leading Player or just cut—lines that showed he had a sharp sense of humor or an awareness of what was going on.” Rubinstein sensed the shift right away. He said, “I realized [Fosse] was having me sit on the stage and watch these numbers, one after another after another after another. I was just the observer.”

  The vaudeville concept was burning up the show. Fosse’s inclusion of nasty contemporary language and references to the modern day undercut the out-of-time setting Schwartz thought they had agreed on. New digs and asides at Pippin’s expense clunked hard, like a bad comic’s bad jokes, curdling the show’s innate tenderness and naïveté. But that seemed to be Fosse’s intention. “I didn’t feel Bob’s dominance was out of ego,” Schwartz said, “but at the same time it wasn’t purely artistic. It felt megalomaniacal. He was working with his gut.” It seemed Fosse’s Pippin was sending up Schwartz’s, as if Fosse were the Leading Player, laughing at Pippin, or Schwartz, on his way to the flames.

  In fact, Fosse was as much Pippin as he was Leading Player, as much victim as invader. “He wanted to be good,” Ann Reinking said. “More than anything, he wanted people to see that that’s what he truly was, even if he felt he didn’t deserve it, or didn’t behave that way.”

  Angrily annotated scripts—scribbled on hard enough to rip through the pages—shuttled back and forth from director to writer. Fosse’s suggestions were x’ed by Schwartz, and then Schwartz’s x’s were crossed out. Fosse wanted Pippin to say, “Oh, I know this is a musical comedy, but I want my life to mean something,” and Schwartz and Hirson countered with “I’m getting old. Very old. And I still haven’t done anything with my life.” Fosse wrote Terrible next to that suggestion and Up yours, Schwartz beside another. “There’s a theory,” Harvey Evans said, “that Fosse picked weaker material so the critics would say, ‘Oh, it’s not much of a show, but what Bob Fosse did with it!’” A second theory suggests that Fosse could produce only when behind the eight ball; another that the only way he could write was by manipulating a writer; and yet another that in order to tell his story, he had to br
eak through the stories of others.

  Fosse would intrude on Schwartz’s songs. In the case of “War Is a Science”—a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan that descends into minstrelsy—he corrupted the number with an occasional “Doo-dah!” from the chorus. “Pippin is classic vaudeville with something wrong,” Ann Reinking said. “When they say ‘Ta-da!’ at the end of the number, it could be ironic and mean war is not good or it could mean war is an incredible show. Bob knew there were some people who saw war as beautiful. He was playing to both of them.” Yet another point of contention with Schwartz were Fosse’s ha-chas, yuk-yuks, yeahs, and skiddoos—the verbal equivalent of Fosse’s pet percussion sounds. It was an interesting idea, Schwartz thought, one that was (once again) taken too far. The Leading Player’s “Nyaa”—as in Jolson’s “Nyaa, folks, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”—is a reminder that everything is entertainment, even death. It was a continuation of a philosophy Fosse had been working on since The Conquering Hero. He’d work on it for the rest of his life.

  Fosse stormed into rehearsal late one afternoon. “There was a cloud over his head,” Candy Brown recalled. “We were all kind of backing away because we didn’t know what the hell was going on.” They knew he lived in doubt, even fed on it, but going from Liza to Pippin, Pippin to Liza, Fosse doubled his stress, and on little sleep, doubled his exhaustion. There was no telling what, or who, had pushed him over the edge, whether that edge was real or imagined, whether he was sober or drugged. “All we could do,” Brown said, “was wait.”

  Finally, he looked up from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.” He slouched forward. “I was editing Liza today and my editor dropped a piece of ash onto the film. I’m sorry.”

  There was an uncertain silence.

  Then Brown said, “Well, he didn’t ruin any of my stuff, did he?”

  Fosse burst out laughing, walked over to Brown, and took her in his arms. “He smelled like lemon,” she said later, “and his body was almost kind of vibrating when we hugged. I know now that it was probably some kind of drug. I could feel it literally on the inner parts that his body was all vibrating, shaking like a scared animal.”

  Liza with a Z aired on September 10, 1972, to terrific reviews. Combining his stage sense and choreographic skill with his cinematic technique and packaging them for television, Fosse reinvented the televised concert special and mastered it in a single effort—his first. Of all the definitions of genius, fluency in the midst of discovery—grace where no artist has been graceful before—seems the most incontestable. As with Orson Welles and Noël Coward, two of stage and screen’s most expansive and fluent discoverers, Fosse had a chameleonic intuition for both performance and presentation. His cross-pollination of entertainment media, beginning with Cabaret and continuing with Liza with a Z, elevated him to the exclusive plane of absolute conqueror, the Mozart of show business.

  Translation: he had a long way to fall.

  Before Pippin left New York for tryouts in Washington, DC, Schwartz may have spoken a little too candidly to Newsday. “I sort of aired some of the dirty laundry, which did not endear me to Bob or Stuart Ostrow,” he said. “Then Bob retaliated.” “I think he’s very talented,” Fosse said to the New York Times. “But not as talented as he thinks he is.” Their relationship deteriorated from there. There were outbursts in Washington, some of them public, and all of them useful. Though Schwartz’s “ingratitude” genuinely angered Fosse, controversy was too fortifying to waste. As Fosse had discovered many times over, learning whom he couldn’t trust helped him reach those he did. Whether defeating Abbott or banishing Schwartz, these battles paid artistic and social dividends, harnessing Fosse a muse, goading him to go deeper and darker while also drawing his company closer, strengthening their allegiance to himself and one another.

  Pippin’s social climate was the perfect complement to Fosse’s aesthetic ambitions for the show. “Bob wanted no chorus in Pippin,” said dancer Pam Sousa. “He wanted everyone to have a personal role. It really bonded us together. It made us feel a part of something.” Bringing the company together offstage, Fosse enhanced their chemistry onstage, increasing their collaborative power to lure Pippin to his demise. The girls would have poker nights at Kathryn Doby’s. “We called Kathryn Mother,” Cheryl Clark said. “She’d put our little shoes out for us.” They would play tricks on stage manager Phil Friedman, piling into his tiny bathroom, waiting there, and pouncing on him when he opened the door. They’d hide in the shower when he called, “Places.” “We were a family on Pippin,” Candy Brown said. “Bob made us a family.” Fosse would join the dancers on break and tell them stories of his MGM days, about working not too far from Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and about the nail that couldn’t be kicked beautifully enough.

  Entertainment organisms are vulnerable at every turn, to new audiences, new critics, and new personnel, and they can completely transform at the slightest provocation, like going out of town. Anxiety, jealousy, ego—functions of any collaborative environment—are roller-coastered by the very public nature of performing, quadrupled by the God-given temperament of show people, and raised to the nth degree by the lifespan of a company, which, no matter how successful the production, is brief. Writer Julian Barry said, “People in plays and in movies, when they are a community, and they’re in danger as a community, which is what they are, they get very, very close. Then they go out of town and the danger is even greater. They fall in love with one another and they fuck one another and they vow that this is the person for me, and my wife back in New York is second rate.” Even if a show is extended, an end is always looming. Time is condensed. Emotions are high. In a vinous swirl of sugared feeling, liaisons are quickly formed and quickly broken, and the other lives resume.

  “He was a star director,” one dancer said, “and we were so young, most of us virgins on Broadway. Many of us would have done anything he said.” Washington was a heady time for all. “Most of us got those calls in the middle of the night,” Brown said. “These conversations went on for about half an hour. I guess it sounds bizarre, but at the time it was—I don’t know, I loved him, so if he was in pain I would try to talk to him. There was always some kind of angst about something. Just general angst.” He was the best topic of discussion, the single most powerful something they all had in common. If one slept with him, they all slept with him; if one deflected his passes, they deflected him together. “I get involved in the material and the people,” he said once, with spectacular cool. They were, after all, the same thing.

  The extent to which Fosse reused the same dancers, drawing them so consistently into his home life, and his nightlife, meant Fosse’s productions occasioned more than the standard amount of company intimacy. Adding sex complicated matters enormously, but rarely did it hurt the work. It could hurt a dancer, maybe, but never the dance. “It made me nervous and I did whatever I could do to get away,” Brown said. “He was an old man to me, you know? I was nineteen or twenty. We were at a party during Pippin and he kept asking me to come home with him but I kept saying—I didn’t know what to say—‘I gotta go home and feed my dogs!’ I kept saying it over and over. He wouldn’t let up.” Even when Fosse was persistent, his manner could be so childlike that almost all forgave it. “I think it’s fair to say Bob came on to all of us,” dancer Pam Sousa said. “But it was never to a place that affected us. Some women were flattered. That was Bob being Bob.” The net result of Fosse’s sexual involvement was mostly positive. That many dancers described their Pippin relationships as familial can be attributed to Fosse’s urge—creative, like the others—to build a strong family of his own. The same urge led him to Paddy and Herb and the coterie of Cohn’s writers he knew would not betray him; it was the impulse that drove him to distrust. To never know sustained intimacy in love.

  Jennifer Nairn-Smith, however, was not flattered by Fosse’s attentions. Before coming to Washington, she’d reluctantly accepted his invitation to dinner, fearing, as many women had before
her, that she would lose the job if she didn’t put out. “I was never attracted to him,” she said, “but he kept hounding me and hounding me, pushing and pushing.” They discussed ballet, her training with Balanchine. Nairn-Smith was tough, a self-proclaimed ballet diva, suspicious of Fosse’s style and suspicious of him. But as a ballet dancer, she was of interest to Fosse, as imposing sexually as she was artistically. Ballet was the real thing; the club Fosse could never be a part of, one of the many chasms separating him from the likes of Jerry Robbins. It wasn’t just ballet technique that scared him; Fosse didn’t think he could sustain a dance for more than four or five minutes, the length of a Broadway musical number. He could see Big Deal (if he ever did it) ending with a big robbery sequence all in dance, but a full hour of uninterrupted choreography—not to mention classical choreography—was Mount Everest, simply beyond the clouds.

  “Jennifer, the Joffrey wants me to do a ballet for them,” he admitted one night. “But I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know the vernacular.”

  “They don’t want the vernacular. They want your style.”

  When he made his move, Jennifer tried to flee. When he attempted to stop her, she kicked him in the groin. He made such a flagrant example of her shortcomings in rehearsals, most could guess what had (or hadn’t) gone on the nights before. Fosse would do that, zero in on a girl. “There was always one person that he picked on,” Candy Brown said. “But that wasn’t uncommon. I saw that behavior in other choreographers. One person they yelled at constantly. ‘That was sloppy! What are you doing? Get your head in it!’ It’s awful, especially when you know you’re the person making the mistake and Bob should be berating you.” Nairn-Smith could take it, for a while; a certain amount of punishment was part of the game. “She would be in tears, sobbing,” Rubinstein said, “and two hours later they would be going out to lunch.” Nairn-Smith thought Fosse’s cruelty came mixed with jealousy, sexual and artistic. A ballerina with a boyfriend, she represented a double rejection to him, even when she let him have her. That’s why, some thought, he made her hold a flag in Pippin, like a girl in the school play. “He was a director,” Nairn-Smith said, “a manipulator. He knew the button to make you feel great and he knew the button to make you feel like shit.”