by Wasson, Sam
In Washington, Nairn-Smith’s boyfriend found out about Fosse, and he threatened to kill him. According to stage manager Maxine Glorsky, there were detectives trailing Fosse. “I was working in the theater and these two guys in suits came looking for him. I said, ‘He’s not here. It’s the lunch hour.’ But they’d come back and Fosse would slip past them. It kept happening. It was like some kind of funny movie.” Ostrow did not think so. He put the Kennedy Center on red alert, and Fosse shifted into defense. “Bob protected me from all the creeps,” Nairn-Smith said. “And he did try to get to know me but I was ice.”
Candy Brown stayed at the Howard Johnson with the rest of the chorus. One night, she was standing in the elevator of the Watergate Hotel, where Fosse and the higher-ups had rooms, and the doors opened to reveal Ann Reinking waiting to leave Fosse’s floor.
“Annie!”
“Candy?”
They tried smiles to buy time. Fosse had quite openly flirted with both of them, so it was possible that Reinking was coming from whence Brown was going. If so, had they betrayed each other, or had Fosse betrayed both of them? Neither could tell.
“I’m sorry,” Reinking said.
“What?”
“You and Bob. I’m sorry.”
“No, no!” Brown threw a hand to keep the elevator door open. “It’s not like that.”
A certain amount of nighttime overlap was inevitable, even intentional. (“Jennifer and Ann came in one day wearing matching jackets,” one dancer said, “and we thought, Oh Lord, Bob!”) All that crossing in the halls nicely precipitated threesomes. So did Quaaludes. “There were lots of poppers backstage on Pippin,” one dancer said. “A couple of stagehands were handing out PCP. Lots of stuff was going on.” The drugs cut both ways, building the togetherness Fosse aimed for, and sometimes shaking it apart. “Someone dropped a lude in my Seven-Up,” another dancer said. “I remember a bunch of us were walking a St. Bernard through a cemetery in DC one night and I fell asleep on a tombstone.”
While the company was still in Washington, Fosse called Reinking to formally and properly ask her out. She had asked him to wait and he had waited. “I talked so much on the phone that night,” she said. “He made me nervous and relaxed, if that makes any sense.” Reinking had told him she wanted to keep their thing outside of the show, and now that the show was up on its feet, they were as outside as they were ever going to be.
“Don’t you think it’s a little unfair to ask a girl out when she’s still auditioning for you?” she asked him on their first date.
“Yes,” he said. “But I admired you for turning me down.”
Her admiration for Fosse pulled and pushed her, toward him and away. “It was like being with someone I had known forever, someone I could embrace, and also somebody I couldn’t touch because he was that good.” Several dinners later, she was pulled only toward him, and harder the more she saw him. Fosse recognized the feelings, hers, his. They were as good as producer’s promises. “I know enough about emotions to know that nothing is permanent,” he would say. But already he loved her.
Fosse kept his idea for Pippin’s finale a secret as long as he could, up until a day or so before the first preview. Saving it allowed him to rethink the sequence for as long as possible, and it kept the company abuzz, leaving them to wonder, from one run-through to the next, how dark Pippin would get, how far it would really go into existential limbo. (“You mean you want me to get into that box and set myself on fire?” Pippin asks.) “When Bob finally told us what we were going to do, we talked about it in detail,” Doby said. “After Pippin decides not to kill himself, we [the players] were supposed to get audience members to come up onto the stage for the ultimate fulfillment. It became a tribal frenzy.” Here the family atmosphere would pay off. Dancer Gene Foote said, “We didn’t realize that at the end of this show we were going to ask someone to set themselves on fire, and kill themselves, so we could orgasm. That was the end of the show. But we didn’t know anything about any of this, we just kept doing the steps.”
When Pippin rejects their offer, the players push themselves into an orgiastic death collective, writhing to the lip of the stage and stretching their hands into the crowd. “I know that there are many of you out there,” the Leading Player says, “extraordinary people—exceptional people—who would gladly trade your ordinary lives for the opportunity to perform one perfect act, our grand finale.”
Death.
“Bob would remind us,” Candy Brown said, “that we would want to get them to think committing suicide was the best deal ever.” Was there a better finale?
Not to Pippin, but to a career?
Was there a better finale to a life?
Yes, you, in seat K116. “Some people came up,” said Ken Urmston, who appeared in a later production. “You’d ask the blue-haired ladies and they didn’t know what was going on but I remember asking a ten-year-old-girl and she said, ‘Oh no, I like my life.’ And I remember once there was a sixteen-year-old boy who was shaking—I don’t know what he thought, but he came up on stage unsettled, he was very serious—and Ben Vereen took him into the wings and said, ‘Look, this is just a show.’”
Ultimately, Pippin’s players get no volunteers, and the fabulous finale idea is dropped. Infuriated, the Leading Player strips the stage of all its scenery and commands the orchestra to shut up. Just before exiting, he says to Pippin, “You try singing without music, sweetheart.” You try to make meaning without show business.
It gets quiet.
Pippin sings. Catherine, who loves him, stands with him, holding her little boy.
Then the song ends. It’s quiet again.
“Pippin,” she asks. “Do you feel that you’ve compromised?”
“No.”
Quiet.
“Do you feel like a coward?”
“No.”
“Well, then, how do you feel?”
His answer would be the last moment in the show. John Rubinstein said, “The audience is expecting me to say something sentimental and wrap it up. But I don’t. I just stand there and I say, ‘Trapped.’ That first night in Washington, the audience screamed with laughter. Then the laughter dies down and Pippin feels he can’t say that to this woman. He loves her. So I say, ‘But happy. Which isn’t too bad for the end of a musical comedy.’ And I discover it for the first time as I say it. And the audience goes, Ahhh. It’s not a laugh. It’s yes. Because that’s how we all feel. We have all this dissatisfaction. We are trapped, just like Pippin, but we’re happy. We’re okay. I love my kids, I love my wife, even though she’s a pain in the ass. The audience was let off the cynical hook. After that audible sigh of relief in the Kennedy Center Opera House, I would then take their little hands—Jill [Clayburgh] and the boy—and pick them up over my head and go ‘Ta-da!’ very softly. Then the curtain would go down.”
Jaundiced, sultry, satirical, Pippin opened September 20 at the Kennedy Center and met with sensational reviews. The show bettered the Fosse brand. It pushed more buttons harder and refined his style in staging and dance; that is, Pippin amplified Fosse by simplifying Fosse. He was a minimalist now. Minutiae matched his smallness of stature and self-worth; it seasoned earnest displays of aerobic grandeur with irony, inviting the audience to look beyond the surface burn to the ice beneath. Or vice versa. Fosse’s temperature could be hot or cool depending on any number of tiny, closely watched variables, and when those variables took the form of pantomime, running the gamut from parody (hot) to innuendo (cool), they could be quite funny too. “I used to be more involved in patterns and complex steps,” he said after the show opened. “Now I try for the simplest thing that will say what I want it to say.”
His ideas clarified too. In the context of the Leading Player’s final entreaty, we, the audience, understand that Pippin’s opening number, “Magic to Do,” in which the players were directed to seduce the audience to join them for the show, was actually a pretty invitation to go out with a bang. “We did not work with each ot
her,” said Gene Foote, “we worked out front [to the audience]. The whole show was out front.” The show was a front—Pippin was only a pretense, a piece of entertainment there to disguise a cruel reality: our lives have no meaning. All we have (if we want it) is a good finale, the gift of our own destruction, and—ha-cha!—we might as well make the most of it. (So how destructive is entertainment, after all?)
Fosse’s style seemed to degenerate as it developed. His Pippin was neater, wittier, and darker than Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and Liza with a Z; it showed a deathlike anti-vigor on the one hand and a clarification of his show-business vocabulary on the other. Those open-faced palms in “Magic to Do,” Walter Kerr wrote, were “Jolson’s, Martha Graham’s, Alla Nazimova’s, the theater’s.” The burlesque bumps and Suzie Qs of “The Manson Trio,” and of course Ben Vereen as the devil in Bojangles, made a definitive statement on entertainment’s power of perversion and destruction, on Fosse’s own downfall, which he saw hurrying toward him, coming faster and closer the harder he worked.
“I don’t hesitate to lift from every form of American show business,” he said. “I love the old minstrel shows.” The timeless, spaceless black that surrounded the Pippin stage enabled him to draw from all corners of entertainment, and not just through dance, but with classic vaudeville sound effects and lighting cues. “The follow spots for Fosse were choreographed,” said Maxine Glorsky. “I mean, they were really choreographed to be like old vaudeville. He was evoking a piece of America’s folk-art history in light.” With love, he underscored the show’s deceit, which did not fall far from his own. As a collage artist who was never certain of his own worth, whose influences were obvious as far back as “Steam Heat”—which showed his roots in Jack Cole—the question of originality was constant, nagging Fosse to ceaseless work and self-recrimination. Those who viewed his low opinion of himself as false modesty or as an invitation for others to contradict him with love and praise—a handy mirror for the narcissist—knew him only from the press or in passing. The view from close up was much different. He was empty; the slouching, knock-kneed, burlesque kid whose own mother hadn’t protected him from the fiendish strippers in the backstage of his unconscious. “I kept telling him he was a good person,” Reinking said, “but I don’t know if he ever believed me.” It was never enough, because he was never enough.
He never could take care of himself. “I understand why you love him,” Reinking’s mother told her daughter when she first met Fosse.
“Why?”
“Because there’s a lot of boy in that man.”
He had to be bad to be good. That would safeguard him from critics who were hip to Pippin’s every move, “stolen” or otherwise: he had to add grief and depression. The more the merrier. “We now get to New York [with Pippin],” Rubinstein recounted, “and Bob gets nervous about the New York critics accusing him of sentimentality. That’s when he starts putting in more lines about assholes and fucks and things like that. We started cutting some corny stuff too, all of which was fun, until Bob came to me before the premiere and said, Cut ‘But happy.’”
Rubinstein had protested. “But that’s the whole thing!”
“Nah, it’s sentimental bullshit. It’s crap. I hate it.”
“Now Pippin’s defeated—it changes the whole character—”
“Do it,” Fosse said. “The line is ‘Trapped—which isn’t too bad for the end of a musical comedy. Ta-da.’”
Schwartz, who, despite everything, had come to love much of what Fosse did with the show, was equally opposed to cutting “But happy,” but he told Rubinstein they didn’t have a choice; he had already tried, unsuccessfully, to invoke the Dramatists Guild. Fosse had the clout to overrule him.
On opening night, Fosse sent each of his dancers a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a personal note. He hated his handwriting, which was as bumpy and twisted as his dances, so he typed. “Candy, Candy, Candy, the Amazing Candy: The face of a cherub, the smile of summer. She moves with the sensuality of a panther, talent spilling out all around her. She could turn on all the boys in the band. Always with that humor that can salvage the most tense situations, always with that demanding self-knowledge. Always huggable, always lovable, always, always—what’s your name again?—oh, yeah, Candy. I . . . LOVE . . . You . . . And . . . I don’t care . . . who knows it. Doo-dah. Love, Bob.”
Late on October 23, 1972, after the final moments of Pippin’s Broadway premiere at the Imperial Theater, the curtain came down, and John Rubinstein felt the audience recoil at the new ending. “Part of the problem,” Schwartz said later, “was that Bob was imposing his own psychological demons on a story that in many ways couldn’t support that. To have the final line be ‘Trapped. Which isn’t too bad for a musical comedy,’ I felt, well, actually it is too bad for a musical comedy.”
Fosse certainly had imposed his demons on Pippin, but he had also done his research. Earlier that year, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about the rise of depression in the United States. One paragraph in particular caught Fosse’s attention: “For those who cannot find a cure, suicide is often the result. The suicide rate of known depressives is 36 times that of the general population.” That hardly meant “Trapped” would be a sure thing with critics, but Fosse knew malaise was out there, all over America, and musical comedy, to be meaningful, had a responsibility to address it. “The statement of [Pippin],” he told the New York Times, “is that life is pretty crumby but, in the end, there stands the family—pretty ugly, stripped of costumes and magic, but holding hands.”
Holding hands. It wasn’t the sort of magic Fosse had in mind, or even believed in. Gwen Verdon, who believed in him, who still held out a hand to Fosse, knew he needed far more than what he had. “He never seems to enjoy achieving success or love or friendship or whatever it is children give you, all the things most people aspire to and feel make up a life,” she said. “Maybe he can feel the warmth of those things momentarily, but he can’t retain it. Do you know what the only thing Bob can retain is? Sorrow.”
“There’s something deflating in that,” Kerr wrote of Pippin’s ending, “as though we’d all gone through a lot for very little.” Despite its impact, the ending was only an ending, almost literally tacked on. A comprehensive existential statement had been merely suggested.
Style over substance.
Ticket sales were mild.
Thanksgiving came around and Fosse tried to take time off. He hung out for a couple of days. Then he flew to Germany to catch up with some old Cabaret friends; flew to Vegas to see Liza and Joel Grey’s act at the Riviera; was the guest of honor at a party Sue Mengers threw for him in Los Angeles; and took Nicole to Disneyland. Until then, the two had had the usual father-daughter dinners and crossed paths at Gwen’s on Long Island, but they hadn’t spent that much time together since the split. “I never use my name to get tickets or reservations,” he said, “afraid someone will say, ‘Bob who?’ But I’ve pulled every string I can think of to get her to Disneyland.” The day he came to get Nicole at Gwen’s apartment, Fosse trembled with worry about the trip and confessed all to her at the door. “Don’t worry about it, pal,” Nicole said. She touched her tiny hand to his. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Nicole at nine years old was too young to have seen her father dance in the movies, but she was old enough to know The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Stanley Donen planned to adapt it into a musical film and had offered Fosse a small dancing part as the Snake. They’d shoot in Tunisia. For the longest time, Fosse brooded on the offer, first deferring, then saying no, then reconsidering and deferring again. As much as he loved performing, he knew a dancer in his midforties would never look better than he felt, which wasn’t that great. It had been a long time since Fosse danced in public, let alone on film for the whole world to see. To sweeten the deal, Donen offered Fosse complete control of the number, from preproduction to post- (“You can even wear a bowler,” Donen said), but still Fosse said no. “Nicole was crazy ab
out that book,” Gwen said, “so she said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to do it!’ and Bob always said, ‘The next thing I knew I was in Africa.’”
The Snake: It’s how he’d imagined death. “One sting,” he had told Janice Lynde, “and all your worries . . .” They disappear.
Fosse bought his Snake costume—a pair of shoes from LaRay and white gloves from Bergdorf’s—and rehearsed with Louise Quick at Broadway Arts. Breaking up his slow, limb-laden slither, careful turns of wrist, and vainglorious undulations of arm with kicks, sharp fingers, and staccato back bumps, Fosse made his snake appear to be both the object of his own erotic amusement and a sexual hunter, seducing outward and inward, like a proud matador. With attention on each twitch, which he overenunciated, as if rippling his scales in a full-size mirror, the Snake’s showoffy air and rhythmic irregularity foreshadowed Michael Jackson, and its freezes and stutters on and through the beat presaged the pops and locks of hip-hop, a revolution still very much underground. Dazzled, Herb Gardner thought it the most incredible number Fosse had ever danced. For that honor, “Snake in the Grass” stands neck and neck with Fosse’s “Alley Dance” from My Sister Eileen—his two greatest performances on film—but where the latter shows a Gene Kelly–type arrangement seasoned with Fosse (the tricks of “Steam Heat” in particular), “Snake” rings with his mature style.
En route to film The Little Prince, he flew to Madeira, a tiny island off the coast of North Africa, for a short rest. Meeting him was Ilse. They had broken up and made up more times than they could say, but considering they had never been exclusive, how could they ever really break up? With no clear starting line, there was no need to agree on a finish, and because his romances rarely ended badly—the director in him, handling them—those on the in always stayed in, and Fosse’s stable, rather than narrowing with time, actually deepened. Still, there were shifts in rank and preference. His love for Ann Reinking, his growing fondness for Janice Lynde, and the occasional hot thing with Jennifer Nairn-Smith edged Ilse farther into the outer ring, where she had once been willing to wait. But now she had grown tired of waiting. Strolling the Madeira coastline, they were literally on the rocks, cliffs black and yellow and red from the giant shield volcano beneath them.