Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  It was one of the reasons Fosse loved to be quiet in a crowd. From party to party, Fosse took in the human spectacular, watching people’s bodies for personalities, auditioning them for a show he had yet to write, and all from behind his drink across the room, where he could study them without their knowing. During the day, he could spend an hour or an afternoon on the street doing the same. Could a single blip of movement reveal a deeper meaning? Fosse loved catching it, the secret synecdoche. One afternoon, he cut through a busy slice of Fifth Avenue to stop a young woman who clearly stood out from the herd, at least to him. There’s no way he could have seen the expression on her face; it was her cadence that caught his eye; it was her movement. “The way you’re bounding ahead,” he said to Sherri Kandell, “it looks like you’re ten feet taller than everyone around you.” Amazed at his perspicuity, Kandell explained she had recently given birth to her first child, a boy, and she was so happy to be in New York on her own, temporarily free, ecstatic with abandon, and full of love for her new son back home. “I was just blown away,” she said years later, “that he could pick me out of rush-hour traffic and could actually see I was having the time of my life.”

  He was fascinated with interrogation, now more than ever. The hours of interview material he and Barry used for Lenny research combined with Bruce’s native (and brutal) candor inspired Fosse to try some digging of his own. “Lenny Bruce would push people’s buttons,” Verdon said. “Bob thought that was very important.” He liked to play what he called the truth game. “Why do you love your wife?” he would ask a friend in front of that friend’s wife. Or “Have you ever thought of killing yourself?” He would not tolerate cop-outs and he would not stop until he touched bottom. He could be merciless about excavating the truth, or what he decided was the truth. It could kill the room. “He could get so mean about it,” said Bob Aurthur’s wife, Jane. “I didn’t think it was fun.” He would drive a wedge into the smallest admission and—snap!—crack a person wide open. Was he emceeing a party or tempting a breakdown? “He’d love to set up some kind of conflict,” said Arlene Donovan. “If he asked you who your favorite singer was and you said Ella Fitzgerald he would give you a look and make you feel your singer should be somebody else. It wasn’t mean. It was fun.” Some would call it sadism, but for Fosse, pain was research, a means to an end. “What I really want to do is find out how much I really know about people,” he said, “whether I can express something about them in terms that are both dramatic and valid. That’s why Lenny.” Taking characters (or, in this case, actual people) to the moment of total hurt before the tears—that was revealing them. Directors and writers both did that job. Choreographers too. They were revealers.

  “You know, Julian,” Fosse said one workday. “When you’re on the set, it’s just different than you thought it was going to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At that point, the director really becomes the writer.”

  “That’s just a bunch of French bullshit, Bob.”

  “No, think about it. It’s really true.”

  Barry took five pieces of blank paper from his pile on the desk and handed them to Fosse. “Here,” he said. “Shoot this.”

  They’d be sure to take lunch down at the deli. Once, Herb Schlein had caught them casually and heartlessly walking past the Carnegie on their way to a new lunch spot, one of those places where big-titted waitresses in tiny outfits served chili and hot dogs. “Herb had this look on his face that was so hurt,” Barry said. “I turned to Fosse and said, ‘If he finds out where we’re going, he’s going to start wearing bras just to keep us in there.’” Since then they had made a point of eating downstairs, often with Chayefsky and Gardner. Both were still fighting through hard times in the theater. Paddy hadn’t had a new play on Broadway in almost ten years, not since the eleven-day run of The Passion of Josef D. in 1964, and Herb had been away since The Goodbye People closed after seven performances, in 1968, which was the same year Chayefsky’s The Latent Heterosexual opened to mild reviews in Dallas (it never reached Broadway). Both men had turned to movies to recover. Gardner was trying to scrounge up funds to write and maybe direct The Goodbye People; Chayefsky was writing The Hospital (which would ultimately win him his second Academy Award—not bad for a plan B).

  “How can you do this?” Chayefsky shouted at Barry in the deli one day.

  “What? Do what?”

  “Lenny Bruce. His mouth, his language. It’s bad for the Jews.”

  It would be a tough table for anyone, but for the unsuspecting writer, Chayefsky’s corner could be hell. Whether people asked for it or not, Chayefsky refused to soft-pedal the truth; the aim was to improve the work, not be nicer at lunch. Fuck bullshit. “Paddy was blatant,” Barry said, “glowering at me.” Chayefsky’s fervor made it difficult to distinguish those he respected from those he didn’t—as if Barry needed more feedback! First Fosse upstairs, then Paddy downstairs! Did these guys ever stop?

  Fosse looked up from his sandwich. “Oh shit.”

  Barry and Chayefsky looked where he was looking—to the door.

  “It’s that guy from the newspaper.”

  A journalist type had spotted Fosse and was coming their way.

  “I gotta get out of here,” Fosse said.

  “Where you going?”

  “I don’t know. The bathroom.”

  He flew off. Since the triple nomination, the record-breaker had grown tired of interviews. And he knew the more good press he got now, the more they’d want to tear him down later, when this was all done.

  He was laughing to himself as he returned to the table. “This is hysterical,” he said. “You spend your whole life trying to get known and then you spend the rest of it hiding in the toilet.”

  Awards season officially began for Bob Fosse on March 25, 1973. At the Imperial Theater, Pippin’s home turf, the Tony Awards opened very much in Fosse’s spirit with a Broadway medley from Fosse veterans Helen Gallagher, Paula Kelly, Donna McKechnie, and Gwen Verdon. But this was not an omen in his favor. Neither was the welcome by Richard Barr, president of the League of New York Theaters, who proudly declared to the fifteen hundred in attendance and the millions watching on ABC that half of Times Square’s thirty porno palaces had been shut down to make room for family-friendlier theatergoing. The first Tonys were then presented, to Jules Fisher for best lighting design and Tony Walton for best scenic design, both from Team Pippin, which engendered an early surge of confidence for the show. From there, it was a fair fight with A Little Night Music for best musical. The tides turned with every envelope. Fosse picked up two Tonys, for best choreographer and best director. “I confess I thought I had a shot at the choreography,” he said in his second acceptance speech, the one for best director, “. . . but this one . . . I have a loser’s good sportsmanship–type speech I was going to give to the winner at the ball later . . . but let me just say thank you to all the marvelous people who helped with the show and say that they could not have done it without me. Thank you.” Best book and best score went to Hugh Wheeler and Sondheim, respectively, for Night Music, and Pippin’s momentum vanished. The quarrel between dazzle and genuine eloquence—on view for the crème de la crème of Broadway—would have stirred Fosse’s oldest doubts. The verdict: Hal Prince and A Little Night Music for best musical. He hadn’t fooled them after all.

  The very next day, with no time to rationalize his partial triumph, he flew to the Beverly Hills Hotel, his home base for the week ahead. It was Oscar time and he was in Los Angeles—two distinct reasons to move uncomfortably from party to party. But he had backup: Paddy, Herb, and Herb’s girlfriend, Marlo Thomas. They’d all flown out, checked in to the Beverly Hills Hotel in rooms a few doors down from Fosse’s, and stood by, champagne on ice, ready to convince their friend of his victory if he won or rage with him if he lost (and they knew he was going to lose—to Coppola). The list of night-before-Oscar parties was as long and dull as a tax return and offered multiple opportunities for a
wkward run-ins between Fosse and the executive element he despised, but producer Edgar Scherick’s cocktail gathering at the Hotel Bel-Air, thick with the New York vibe of Elaine May and the cast of The Heartbreak Kid, was the kind of evening Fosse and the Carnegie bunch (and, as it turned out, Groucho Marx) could get behind.

  Janice Lynde was Fosse’s date. Weeks earlier, she had accompanied him to the Directors Guild Awards (Fosse was nominated for best director of a feature film, but Coppola won, as expected). The night of the Oscars, she met Fosse for a pre-awards party at Emanuel Wolf’s pink and green suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. All of the Cabaret people were there: Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, David Bretherton, Geoffrey Unsworth, and forty others. Lynde said, “He was really, really nervous then, shifty and scared.” Shoring himself up with booze and tranquilizers, Fosse got sweaty cold as Wolf took the floor for one last go-get-’em-don’t-worry-have-fun speech. Both The Godfather and Cabaret were tied at ten nominations each, but their little film had started with so much less: in Munich, with a tiny budget, a dilapidated genre (the movie musical), and a director on artistic parole. And yet here they were, about to go to the Academy Awards; that in itself, Wolf reminded them, was a victory. In the limo to the ceremony, Fosse repeated a discouraging statistic about how reliably the Directors Guild Awards predicted the Oscar winners. It was always best to expect the worst.

  They pulled up to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—sitting in downtown LA, like a beached whale doing a Lincoln Center impression—and out stepped Janice in a Greek goddess dress, cut flowingly to the navel, followed by Bob Fosse in a three-piece tuxedo, his tight vest cinching him smaller than ever.

  Paddy had already delivered his wisdom, and Sam Cohn, having seen many more clients lose than win, had already telegrammed a pat on the back. Variations on the good-luck theme, most of them chips off the old bullshit Fosse had heard his whole life, passed his ears; familiar and semifamiliar faces he knew (or claimed to know) claimed to know him. Hollywood people were different. Whether it was the product of more money or more sun, their alien cheer made them, like a certain kind of musical comedy, easy to write off as phony, which of course many of them were. There, Fosse’s cynicism had its advantages. Broadway’s gripe against the film capital of the world—based on decades of failed migrations as far back as Dorothy Parker’s—made LA the voodoo doll for Fosse’s pins, and it kept him at a steely distance from the in crowd he always wanted to join. And LA was clean. He didn’t trust clean. The people of Broadway had a worn-in quality. They were troupers. They sweated and they stuck together. Their many weeks of rehearsal, their eight shows a week, the restrictive parameters of midtown, the small talent pool and reteamings of favorite collaborators, and the ancient rites of old theaters and restaurants made Broadway a place of tradition and familiarity. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion conveyed an unused quality—all sparkles and high ceilings.

  Ten minutes before showtime the bell sounded; every cigarette was extinguished, and the slow flood into the auditorium began.

  The stage was spare. Gaunt stairways twisted behind the podium, hiding in shadow like fire escapes with stage fright. Red, orange, and blue lights peeked out from around them, as if curious to get a look at the presenters or the black lacquered runway over the orchestra and into the center aisle. The curtain bell sounded again, and the Cabaret company found their section near the front of the stage, Liza with boyfriend Desi Arnaz Jr. and her father, Vincente Minnelli; Joel Grey with his wife; and Bob with Janice. Soon every seat was taken, none of them in the smoking section. A man on the God mic kindly asked for silence; silence was calmly granted; there was a countdown from five; and the house lights, instead of going down, went up for the cameras. Should Janice hold Bob’s hand? Was this a good time to say something? Janice decided to say nothing; she would simply be there with him.

  Now things would get bad for almost everyone. The pre-show charge that people and their dates felt in the lobby was the happiest most of them were going to feel all night. Rather than picking up momentum, the Academy Awards invariably cool down as they progress, leaving behind each winner four bodies, and then four more and four more, so by the end of the evening, the dead so outnumber the living that most people are happy to flee. That evening was no different.

  Except Cabaret was winning. Joel Grey heard his name and got up. One of the show’s hosts, Charlton Heston, got a flat tire and missed his entrance, so Clint Eastwood, pulled from the audience, got up. The editor David Bretherton heard his name and got up, and Geoffrey Unsworth, who took Fosse’s side in the darkness, got up. It was happening, and with each win, the next win seemed more likely; the next loss more humiliating. But they didn’t lose; they kept sweeping: best score, best art direction, and best sound, which made it difficult to completely discount the possibility that Fosse might win, although he wouldn’t. Coppola would. “He was very still,” Emanuel Wolf said. “He was somewhere else.” They had lost best adapted screenplay to Coppola, but the tally showed Cabaret was quietly, and strangely, ahead of The Godfather. As the bodies piled up and the ceremony approached its end, The Godfather had only two wins to Cabaret’s seven.

  George Stevens and Julie Andrews, at the podium, announced the nominees for best director.

  “Bob Fosse for Cabaret.”

  His head was down. Janice was not with him. The show’s directors had removed the pretty girl from the edge of the frame to make for a better, more intense close-up of Fosse. Surrounded by men, seat fillers he hadn’t met before, Fosse looked much more alone.

  “John Boorman,” Andrews said, “for Deliverance.”

  “Jan Troell for The Emigrants.”

  “Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather.”

  “Joseph Mankiewicz for Sleuth.”

  Then the envelope and Bob Fosse heard his name again, and he was onstage, taking a cold statue from George Stevens. “My legs were like cooked spaghetti,” he recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I going to say? I should be bright, how am I going to look on TV? I wonder if Nicole is watching? Don’t make an ass of yourself. Show enough emotion. But don’t slobber.’”

  “Thank you,” he said at the podium. “Thank you very much. Thank you. I must say I feel a little like Clint Eastwood, that you’re letting me stand up here because Coppola or Mankiewicz hasn’t shown up yet.”

  Unsteady laughter from the house.

  “But being characteristically a pessimist and cynic, this and some of the other nice things that have happened to me the last couple days may turn me into some sort of hopeful optimist and ruin my whole life.”

  Steady laughter.

  “There’s so many people to thank. You’ve heard a lot of the names, but it’s important for me to say them, and I’m sure I’m gonna miss some of the ones and regret it tomorrow. Of course Liza, and Joel, Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Marty Baum, Manny Wolf, Kander and Ebb. A terrific guy by the name of Doug Green. A dear friend of mine by the name of Gwen Verdon. And I’d also like to mention Cy Feuer, the producer, with whom I had a lot of disputes. But on a night like this, you start having affection for everybody. Thank you.”

  Fosse was escorted backstage for the hailstorm of press and photographs, and then he returned to his seat, woozy, for the rest of the show. Liza Minnelli heard her name, squeezed her father’s arm, and got up. Then Marlon Brando’s name was read and Sacheen Littlefeather, new to show business, got up. When the best-picture envelope was opened, Cy Feuer got up. Then he heard that The Godfather won and he sat down.

  As soon as he could, Fosse called home; that is, he called Nicole at Gwen’s in East Hampton.

  “Hi, Dad.” She was distant.

  “What did you think of the show?”

  “Nice.”

  He asked her about her new bicycle; she answered about her new bicycle; and she handed the phone to Gwen. “You should have been here,” Gwen said. “When you won it, she screamed so loud she said, ‘I think I broke something in my throat.’”

  Somewhere around mi
dnight, Fosse and Janice and the Academy Award for best director returned to the quiet of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Paddy, Herb, and Marlo were waiting up for them. They convened in Fosse’s suite and opened bottles and windows and looked over the one or two swimmers flying over the pool below. The occasional clink of crystal on crystal or sound of a pretty girl’s laugh curled its long way up through the palms to Fosse’s balcony, where he sat, smoking, laughing, unbelieving, with his friends. It was a cool evening. Nothing lasts, but Fosse knew these stubborn wisecracking maniacs belonged to him for life. “I’ll walk you one more block,” he had said to Herb and Paddy after lunch one afternoon, “and then I have to go back to work.” “Don’t you remember,” Paddy shot back. “You have no work. You’re finished in this business.” Fosse nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “I forgot.” They had loved him before he won and they would love him after he won and with a fervency no critic, not even him, could ever corrupt.

  The next morning, Fosse ordered room service and climbed into the shower. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Janice standing before the mirror, looking at herself holding the Oscar as if she’d won it. “Would you do anything to win one?” he asked.