Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  The next week was terrific. Glorying in the attention satiated Fosse. But then the accolades passed, and he came down. “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Instead of jumping down the street and being all smiles, I’d find I was badly depressed.” Once a drug, the thrill of winning was starting to feel merely good; in a way, it didn’t feel like winning anymore.

  Then the Emmys came around. Fosse flew back to LA and won the best director award, his third, for Liza with a Z. He was now the only person in history to win the Tony, the Oscar, and the Emmy—the Triple Crown—in a single year. Which made him the only person in history to follow that victory with the most terrible depression of his life.

  There was no achievement that could be better than winning everything, which he had just done. Here he was, a record-breaker, again: He was here. Where was he? He was alone. Public triumph brought Fosse a magic wand with a surprise curse—against him. Whenever he decided to tap it on a project or a person, to make a dream come true, there appeared from somewhere else—poof—a rejected individual furious at Fosse for not alchemizing him. There were just too many against him now, more every day. The pressure to please everyone, to share his freshly notarized genius and personally return every phone call (and happily) and weather everyone’s retaliatory anger without absorbing that blame into blame against himself led Ann Reinking to observe that success for Bob Fosse was harder than failure. “He didn’t understand why people seemed to be trying to tear him down,” she said. “It confused him. He’d ask, ‘Why am I so miserable when everything’s going right?’”

  He knew he couldn’t complain. Discussing this sort of high-level heartache with anyone outside of Reinking (or Paddy and Herb) would further estrange him from his friends and his “friends” and those aspirants in between, so Fosse, at the pinnacle, called off the parade. He withdrew. And withdrawing, he drew more criticism. Now, they said, he thought he was too good for them. “Bob couldn’t win that one,” Reinking said. “He lost a lot of friends.”

  “His pain was extreme,” Lynde said. Was this supposed to be as good as he ever felt? Was this the dream? Because if it was—and it was, or at least it had been—then his whole life was behind him. Except for decline.

  Decline was still ahead.

  “He was afraid he would not be able to figure out what to do next,” Lynde said. “Nothing would ever be as good again.” It would seem he had given all he had to give. Creating a new dance vocabulary, reinventing the television special, reinventing the movie musical, and dragging all those genres to hell, both onscreen and onstage, Fosse had raised the bar on blackness impossibly high. And now he would have to raise it higher. But how? What human truth was darker than Nazism or suicide? What was darker than pitch-black? “There’s this Looney Tunes cartoon,” Ann Reinking said, “called Show Biz Bugs, with Daffy and Bugs Bunny in competing acts. The audience loves Bugs, and Daffy keeps trying to outdo him and he can’t. Daffy figures out the only way he can upstage him is to blow himself up. When he finally does, the audience goes wild. Bugs loves it and claps for an encore. Daffy, his ghost floating up, says, ‘I know, I know. But I can only do it once.’ That’s Bob.” At the end of May, he checked in to the Payne Whitney psychiatry clinic.

  Fourteen Years

  HE WAS NO LONGER interested in therapy, not for himself. Since getting off Seconal, Fosse had stopped trying to solve his problems; he now just accepted them. Infidelity, addiction, depression, and the zero he held inside himself were, like his baldness, permanent. Like everyone else in New York, he had his theories about why he was what he was: there was the negligent mom, the loserish dad—old masks of the Freudian commedia dell’arte—and being the smallest and youngest boy in a very full house during the Depression. They were only theories. “It was too early to be Bob Fosse,” Reinking said. “His doctors didn’t always know how to help him. Psychiatric medicine was not what it is now.” Someone, Fosse used to say, must have scared him when he was little. That boy, Dr. Sager told him, was trying to get back at someone. He was enraged, betrayed, although by whom, Dr. Sager didn’t know. That was about as far as they got. Fosse hurt someplace too far down for Sager to reach. Did that make the doctor the failure, or the patient? Fosse thought both. Checking into Payne Whitney, Weill Cornell’s renowned psychiatric hospital on the East River, he could have some time away, sober up, maybe, a little.

  He lasted only a few days. More than his depression, Fosse hated the lithium they prescribed to combat it; the drug flatlined him, killing his sex drive, and he was happier to be unhappy and fucking than not unhappy, dull-witted, and not fucking. “I knew it was time to check out,” he said to Janice Lynde one day and Ann Reinking another, “when I started to put on shows with the other inmates.” It was a great line, whether or not it was true, and coming up with a great line was reason enough to get back to work. Anyway, that was the only thing that really seemed to help—that and sex—and he wasn’t getting either in his white hotel.

  Two scripts needed his attention. The first was Lenny, half completed. Marvin Worth, one of the film’s producers, had notes for Barry and Fosse. He was concerned their hero was losing “hugability” and that the threesome scene Fosse had given Lenny and his ex-wife, Honey (a scene Fosse and Barry had completely invented), could get them into a libel situation. Also, Worth said all the chronological jumpings-around in space and time, from Lenny’s nightclub act to his past, present, and future, threw off the story. He wanted to see Lenny streamlined and cleaned up. Fosse tossed Worth’s notes aside and proceeded instead to revise Lenny with Barry in the mornings and to work with Fred Ebb on the Chicago book in the afternoons. Fosse had made history with Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret and Liza, and so far, Chicago was coming along nicely, a genuine collaboration. They were having fun. At clutch intervals, Kander would join them at Fosse’s office for a little volley. “We’d be talking about the form and sharing ideas,” Kander said. “It was totally open, a total joy. We were all on the same page.”

  That Fred Ebb feared and revered Fosse made for a smoother partnership, at least from Fosse’s point of view. “I was malleable,” Ebb said. “I never stood up to him. I never argued with him.” Fosse set the rules. As he had with Julian Barry, Fosse would spend the afternoon talking through scenes with Ebb, and then Ebb would go home to the typewriter and write, alone. In no time, Fosse had a map of Ebb’s pressure points, could hover a finger over the bruise. “He would say, ‘Oh, this is all right,’ but he was never very wholehearted in his praise,” Ebb recalled. “The mere fact that he accepted [the scenes] was terrific as far as I was concerned.” The collaboration got tense. Ebb was anxious.

  At the deli one day, Ebb found a moment alone with Chayefsky and Gardner. He wanted their opinion. Having respect for both sides, they encouraged Ebb to do as they would and fight Fosse. “He’s an arrogant son of a bitch,” they said, “but he knows what he’s doing. Don’t let him bully you.” Ebb nodded in agreement but lost his conviction upstairs, ultimately agreeing to give Fosse what none of Fosse’s other writers had: credit. No matter the division of labor, Chicago was going to have a book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse.

  Meanwhile, with Pippin sales flagging, Fosse and Ostrow hit upon a wholly novel idea: a commercial. Experts believed TV audiences were uninterested in Broadway musicals, and the expense of producing commercials confined low-budget productions like Pippin to the more affordable print ads. But shooting on the cheap, in a studio in Princeton, Ostrow could save on major production fees. He picked a small number, “The Manson Trio,” and had it filmed quickly, with one camera, on June 7, 1973. Preoccupied with Lenny, Fosse left the directing to William Fucci and the dancing to Vereen, Pam Sousa, and Candy Brown, who were by now more than equipped to handle the old-time Suzie Qs and flirty finger wags without him. “This cameraman was just shooting us head-on,” said Sousa. “I didn’t know much about film but I kept thinking, ‘This can’t be that interesting.’ Then Bobby showed up—we never expected him to—and he ha
d this cameraman going all over the place.” In the cutting room, Fosse laid a droll voice-over on the sixty-second spot: “Here’s a free minute from Pippin, Broadway’s musical-comedy sensation, directed by Bob Fosse. You can see the other one hundred and nineteen minutes of Pippin live, at the Imperial Theater. Without commercial interruption.” It worked. Ticket sales soared, and continued to soar, through Pippin’s five-year run. Henceforth, the commercial would be an essential part of Fosse’s promotional outreach, and it soon became a cornerstone of Broadway musical advertising. But unlike the cut-and-paste TV spots of his contemporaries, Fosse’s commercials were as much short films as sales pitches, and they would grow artistically from show to show. They too were Bob Fosse productions.

  Like a seesaw, winning the Triple Crown lifted Fosse up and threw him down to hell. Up, he was the king—dancing, choreographing, and directing huge movies and musicals; down, it wouldn’t last. Cut with the Dexamyl, the extremes were changing him, changing the air around him. Bolstered by a fresh, substantiated arrogance and a deeper fear of failure, the new Fosse was asking for more and settling less often. Most of his dancers, writers, and editors would agree that his higher standards produced better work—and for many, his double-barreled intensity wouldn’t be a problem—but post–Triple Crown Fosse was losing his patience with others. Where once he had had to cohabitate, now he had the muscle to insist on carte blanche ad infinitum. Who would stop him? This Fosse pushed hard and regularly, lodging dynamite indiscriminately, like a prospector without a lead. Though Fosse acted with stubborn assurance, many sensed he was lost. Anger and conviction seemed his way of imposing order on the turmoil. Meticulousness became compulsion. His associates asked themselves not whom but what they were trying to satisfy.

  Therein lay the beauty of United Artists, Lenny’s financiers. Founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford “to protect the great motion picture public from threatening combinations and trusts that would force upon them mediocre productions and machine-made entertainment,” UA was premised on privileging, as its name suggested, the rights of the artist. Taking charge of the studio in 1951, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, two gifted New York lawyers with appropriate amounts of creative ambition (none), restricted their business to business matters and evolved UA from a movie studio into a partner. The company flourished. Sharing profits with free agents like the Mirisch Brothers and Hecht-Hill-Lancaster (producers of Chayefsky’s Marty), UA drew, under Krim and Benjamin, the sort of independently minded producers who were themselves drawn to the sort of independently minded talent that movie audiences of the seventies (and sixties and fifties) were hungry for. “The thing about UA was we didn’t look at dailies,” said UA producer and former CEO David Picker. “We approved the budget and off they went.” Freedom and trust, anathema to old-school studio executives, would crown UA with the greatest postwar record of any Hollywood backer. Its films with Altman, Ashby, Coppola, Kubrick, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (and James Bond and the Pink Panther) say all. Fosse was home.

  At UA, there would be no Cy Feuer. Under Picker, a tall, young veteran of show business, Fosse would have his wishes pre-granted. “I’d do anything to make it possible for Bobby to do whatever he needed to do,” Picker said. “And I knew being satisfied was not his goal. He wanted to get everything he could until there was no more to get.” It was love—and they were already talking honeymoon. After Lenny, Fosse and Picker planned to make a film of Herb Gardner’s play The Goodbye People.

  But right now they needed a star.

  “I want you to play Lenny,” Fosse said to Dustin Hoffman.

  “Why don’t you get Cliff Gorman? He did it on Broadway and he was brilliant.”

  “He was my first choice but the studio wouldn’t finance it. So I’m coming to you.”

  This kind of maneuver had not been necessary before, but Fosse had never been scared of his leading actor before. On Sweet Charity, Shirley MacLaine subordinated herself to his (and Verdon’s) expertise and had wisely kept from playing the star card, and Liza Minnelli, on Cabaret, was not yet star enough to cross the line of Fosse’s authority. Casting his Broadway musicals in much the same way, Fosse had been very lucky, or very clever, in the diva department. Hero, Pleasures, Pippin: no big stars. For marquee names, he mostly kept to Verdon, his wife. (There had also been Sid Caesar in Little Me. And look how that turned out.) Then came Lenny and Dustin Hoffman, perhaps the biggest star in Hollywood. By putting Hoffman on the defensive, Fosse was trying to take his power back—even before he lost it. “It was not the right way to begin a collaboration,” Hoffman said. “I worried if I was going to be his second choice through the whole picture.” He took the part.

  Before he could cast Honey, Bruce’s wife, Fosse had to feel out each contender, looking for a way in. He tried Raquel Welch. He tried to get Janice Lynde comfortable with stripping. He considered his sometime girlfriend Joey Heatherton, and then he found Valerie Perrine. Her mother had been a showgirl in Earl Carroll’s Vanities and George White’s Scandals, and Valerie had been the lead nude dancer of the Lido de Paris Extravaganza at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas. “That was,” she said, “two shows a night, three shows a Saturday night, and you never got a night off. You went to work at seven and got home at two in the morning. You had to be dying not to go to work. I’ve worked when I had stomach flu. I had buckets waiting for me in the wings so I could throw up into them.” What Fosse would give her, he knew she could take.

  “We read two hundred and fifty actresses for Honey,” David Picker said. “Then we reduced them to six and screen-tested them at the Warwick Hotel.” Fosse set up in a room big enough to accommodate a small crew, and over the course of several afternoons, he narrowed the six actresses down to two: dreamy Jill Robinson and fun, sexy, Valerie Perrine. On camera, they each ran the love scenes a couple of times with Hoffman, with some ad libs around the outside. Lenny’s every word was scripted—there would be no improvisation on Fosse’s set—but hearing what the actors came up with in auditions gave Fosse and Hoffman a sense of their natural state. It was a version of the truth game.

  “I’m Leonard Albert Schneider,” Hoffman said, in character.

  Perrine paused. “Is that Jewish or something?”

  “Yes. Do you like Jewish men?”

  “They have large noses and I like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they give good head.”

  Fosse and the crew cracked up.

  Perrine got the part. Fosse asked her to dinner and over drinks at the Plaza started coming on to her.

  “Does this mean”—she began to cry—“I’m not going to get the part?”

  Fosse laughed. “No, no, no. You’ve got the part.”

  “Really?”

  “You don’t have to do anything.”

  “Oh, good . . . thank you. That’s good.”

  In lieu of carnal knowledge, he interrogated her, but gently, so it didn’t seem like an interrogation. Of course she opened up. Fosse’s interest was flattering, genuinely, and his voice was small and the Plaza was grand and she told him about her family, her boyfriend, her background—she told him everything, even more than she thought she had to tell. By the end of the night, she said, “He knew more about me than he would have if I slept with him.” The data he filed away, and Perrine went back to her hotel brimming with the zing of a great new job but having learned nothing about her director.

  There was a time when Fosse could summer with Gwen and Nicole without leaving too much life behind, but with Ann Reinking’s ascension to girlfriend of girlfriends, he respectfully rented his own summer home in Quogue, a village not too far away from Gwen’s place in East Hampton. “I remember how Gwen suffered through the early Ann Reinking days,” said John Rubinstein. “During those summers out on the island, it was very painful for her. She knew that it was going to be serious with Bob and Annie.” In the months after Payne Whitney, Fosse turned much of his depression into anger
—against Gwen, against “them,” whoever “they” were. “He suddenly allowed a lot of this submerged rage to emerge,” set designer Tony Walton said. “The anger Bob felt toward Gwen was violent.” It was all those shows where the critics gave him second billing to her star status, status she owed mostly to him; all those years he spent extolling her boundless gifts, hiding the envy that grew in him the more love she took. In Sweet Charity, Gwen Verdon stole the show—his—but he let her, he needed her to, because without her blush and quiver, he could not show his heart onstage. She was the cure to a Bob Fosse production.

  And his cure was Quogue. Tucked behind a wall of bayberries a short distance from the sand stood a white cypress castle built by architect Jay Sears, modern and mysterious. Fosse would rent it summer after summer. A multilevel maze of decks, balconies, indoor bridges, and see-through stairways, the house was a hide-and-seeker’s paradise, redolent of unplanned-for kisses and secret games. Chunky bay windows gave the structure a Rubik’s Cube quality, as if sky giants, frustrated with the puzzle, had thrown it down to Earth. The whole place seemed to be in constant motion. There were rolling greens and long decks for big parties on Sundays; there were jagged, sharp-cornered culs-de-sac too small to fit more than three people and a joint. It was fun.

  When Fosse entertained, he did it big, inviting dozens to stay all day and into the night. When he was working, he’d eat anything or nothing, whatever was brought to him, but when he partied, he opted for rich foods, lobster especially, and Chinese spare ribs, with French or Italian wine and after dinner, warm Courvoisier. “I would have made a terrific waiter,” he said. “Sometimes I really like making people feel good, like they had a good time. I’m a good host at a party; I knock myself out. Most people clean house when they give a party. I paint the house. I want everything right. I rehearse the whole dinner—music, napkins. It takes me days.” Brahms, Chopin, or (his favorite) Satie during the meal; something folky like Carly Simon after; then maybe show music, and if the evening went late enough, harder rock. No one got drunk at these gatherings, just loose. Too much scotch could take Fosse down the rabbit hole, but the right amount of wine or rum got him where he wanted to be, high and happy. “I love big parties,” he said. “I enjoy all the flirtatiousness—that slightly reckless attitude.” Fosse liked seeing people without their masks debating sensitive subjects with raw nerves exposed, and food, wine, and music broke down the barriers. There was something else too. Seeing people’s real selves in their relaxed state, he could better grasp their up and down levers. As a dancer and choreographer, he knew that body language was personal history. “Most nondancers don’t understand this,” Fred Mann III said, “but we’re constantly reading each other. Just the way a person walks can tell you the difference in their training. You can see their Balanchine, their forced turn-out. That kind of a thing. We’re constantly reading each other.” The auditioning never stopped.