by Wasson, Sam
On the day of the contested monologue, they would shoot long (in duration) and wide (in angle) until they literally ran out of film. “We would just run the whole magazine and reload,” Greenhut said. Though Fosse had no intention of breaking up the scene, he told David Picker very clearly that his decision to shoot Lenny’s collapse with three cameras was purely defensive, for emergency use only. Of course he wouldn’t tell Hoffman that; he’d want him to feel the pressure of having to get it all in one take. If Hoffman went up on his lines or Fosse didn’t like what he saw, Hoffman—and the rest of the crew—would have to reset and take it all from the top. The shot film would be wasted and the clock would tick on—and Lenny was already behind schedule.
They shot the final monologue twice, and the second take Fosse loved.
Already aggravated by the incessant filming, Greenhut was on his way to becoming Fosse’s next Cy Feuer. But Greenhut’s job required him to keep the production on course. “You’re worse than your father,” Fosse said, referring to an incident that had taken place thirty years prior. “Your father bought me a one-way ticket to Florida and I had to pay my way back at the end of a job.” And there was a girl. Each had seen the other prowling around her. “There was this undercurrent of competition between us,” Greenhut said. It caught him completely off-guard.
The eruption came after local judges reversed their decision to let the production shoot one of the film’s big scenes—Lenny’s climactic plea for mercy—at Miami’s Dade County Courthouse. Greenhut and Neil Machlis turned Miami upside down, checking out every possibility (and a few desperate impossibilities) for a substitute location, ever aware of the pressures of time and money. “We looked at all sorts of courtrooms,” Greenhut said, “and Bob hated every one of them. Every single one. We pulled out all the stops. The only people that wanted to help was the local mafia. He thought that I was doing it to save money, that I did know about other courtrooms, but come on, I wasn’t telling him because I’m trying to save a few hundred grand.”
Fosse refused every suggestion. “Why are you doing this?” he yelled at Machlis. “Why can’t you get it? Get somebody who can get it.” But Machlis had done all he could do. There simply was not another option. “Who would ever dream of not showing Bob Fosse a location because it was too expensive?” Machlis said. “Nothing was ever good enough. Maybe the other side of that is perfectionism. I don’t know. We busted our ass on that film but in his mind, he was the victim. We were trying to fuck him.”
At three in the morning, Greenhut’s phone rang. “Hello?”
“It’s Bob.” He sounded relaxed.
“Bob, what’s going on? What happened?”
“I just wanted to know what shots we’re starting with tomorrow.”
“You know what shots we’re starting with tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I remember. Well, there’s somebody here who wants to talk to you.”
“Hi . . .”
It was the girl they had both been flirting with. She was breathing hard into the phone and giggling. So Bob had wanted Greenhut to know who got her—an eye for an eye, a fuck for a fucking over. Greenhut hung up the phone and went back to sleep.
The whole crew loved Valerie Perrine. So did Fosse. She was his favorite kind of actress: talented, gorgeous, and eagerly compliant. Before shooting, she had promised Fosse she wouldn’t do any research and would rely entirely on him for her information. Sally Marr, Lenny’s actual mother, and the real Honey Bruce paid occasional visits to the set, but Perrine stayed clear of them. “I had complete trust in Bobby,” Perrine said. “He said I was his sponge.” An acting robot, he used to say; push a button and out came the emotion. And she could do it again and again, just like he liked. “He spent more time rehearsing Valerie’s striptease,” Fosse’s assistant Larry Mark said, “than anything else in the movie.” Ironically, Perrine was too good a stripper to give the effect Fosse wanted. To un-refine her technique, they rehearsed the number for a full week, breaking down each pulse and grind, down to the sparkles on her G-string.
On Valentine’s Day, the day before they were to shoot the strip, Perrine asked Larry Mark to bring Fosse to her trailer.
“Hi, Bobby.”
She was wearing a long terrycloth robe and had her hair up.
“Hi, Valerie.”
“You know what?” she said.
“What?”
“I have a heart-on for you.” Parting her robe, she showed him she had shaved her pubic hair into a heart.
Fosse cried out in laughter.
Mission accomplished, Perrine sauntered past him on her way to show her Valentine’s Day present to the rest of the crew.
After hours, she was just as fun, lounging by the pool, going to the movies with Julian Barry, playing tennis with Hoffman. “Dustin treated me like a big brother,” Perrine said. “He always wanted to make sure I had someone to hang out with.” She looked out for him too. “Dustin got this horrible flu that was going around,” she said. “He had a temperature of a hundred and four with a sore throat and all that the day we were supposed to shoot the scene when he pulls the covers down off of me and you can see my breasts and he’s supposed to have this big ‘Oh boy!’ reaction but he just couldn’t quite get to it because he was so sick. So I got props to get me a rubber dildo. And when he pulled the covers down . . . boioioioiinggg!”
For months prior to the shoot, Perrine worried about the threesome scene. Hoping to relax her, Fosse asked Perrine to cast the other girl herself. That helped somewhat. She flipped through a book of headshots and watched auditions, ultimately picking an actress with small breasts, which she imagined would make touching her more like touching a man. Still she worried, and Fosse delayed the scene to give her more time. Plus, he had an idea: he would choreograph the entire encounter, not like a dance but as a dance. With an arm on her shoulder, Fosse explained to Perrine precisely how he would shoot it, in half-lit close-ups, like a sex ballet with fingers for feet and a body for the stage. Perrine would simply follow the steps, stroking breast on one, touching face on two. “It wasn’t sexual,” Hoffman said. “It was surgery.” The night before, Perrine tried fantasizing about women, figuring she might force herself to feel something, but it didn’t work. On the day of the shoot she woke up crying. “Bobby, I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t, I can’t . . .” He kept telling her not to worry, she should trust him, and he had her go back to her trailer and rest just a little more before they tried a take. A rose, a joint, and a bottle of champagne were there, along with a note that said Don’t come to set until you’ve finished these. She drank the champagne. “Once we started, I kept thinking about camera angles and things,” she said. “I had no sexual feelings at all while we were doing it.”
Harder still was Perrine’s big scene in court, in which Honey was sentenced to jail for drug possession. This was Honey’s absolute lowest point; Fosse needed Perrine to break down. “That’s why he got to know you,” Perrine said, “to know how to push you.” With the cameras rolling, he crouched out of frame and told her that the boyfriend she had told him all about at the Plaza had died in a plane crash. “I knew it wasn’t true,” she said, “but as an actress, it helped to make it real.” Remember how much you loved him? What was he wearing the last time you saw him? Don’t you wish you could have stopped him? Don’t you wish you could have one more day together? Don’t you wish— “The thought of him being dead was too much for me,” Perrine said. “But Bobby didn’t do it in a mean way. It wasn’t vicious. The problem was I couldn’t turn it off. He got too much. I didn’t need that heavy of a direction.” After the take, he put his arms around her. “He could not have been more comforting,” she said. “I’m embarrassed by that story,” Fosse would confess, yet it was not the only one of its kind. Needing another outburst from Perrine later in the shoot, he had Surtees roll camera and told Perrine to think of her Great Dane being hit by a truck. Though she later credited her Oscar nomination to Fosse’s cruelty, the cr
ew, whose mutinous impulse grew by the hour, was quick to come to her defense.
Their gripe was that he’d lost the movie, if indeed he’d ever had it. His coarse manner, they said, was a cover for what he didn’t know, and since he was shooting upwards of twenty-five takes per scene, he obviously didn’t know what he wanted. Was he guessing? “In the beginning, we were going to shoot the movie in eight weeks or forty days or something like that,” Machlis said. “A short amount of time. But the shoot turned into something like a hundred days. And if we would have shot another hundred days, Bobby wouldn’t have cared.” “We were burning film,” Greenhut said. “The guy is overrated and he knows it,” said another. “He’ll do a master shot and thirty different angles with thirty different takes per angle. He wants it all.” Kodak literally couldn’t keep up. It had assembled a high-contrast black-and-white stock specifically for Lenny, but the corporation simply couldn’t make and ship the film fast enough. “There came a point late in the shoot when we were waiting for shipments to arrive,” Surtees said. The cinematographer gave Larry Mark a coconut to commemorate the day they reached a million feet of film. Hoffman said, “It was like [Fosse] was trying to get even at God for not being the genius he wanted to be. I’m going to prove it! I’ll show you!”
Moving from Miami to Brooklyn, Lenny fell even farther behind schedule. “Fosse showed no remorse for going over budget,” Surtees explained, “but it got to him. He’d been a middle-class kid. He knew what a dollar meant. But he was determined to find new ways to shoot. Even the close-ups, the most basic grammar of film, he wanted to be original. That takes money.” “Because there was no money,” costume designer Albert Wolsky said, “we had to work fast, we had to work alone, and we had to work late.” The crew, shooting all night, working six, sometimes seven days a week, up to sixteen hours a day in the acid New York cold, was overtaken by a general misery. Those awake enough at six in the morning or six at night, whenever they were waking up now, wherever they were (Brown’s, a resort in the Catskills), could catch Dustin Hoffman behind a baby grand in the hotel lobby playing an old jazz song. Too tired to utter more than titles (“Tenderly” or “Stars Fell on Alabama”), they could just sit, or sleep, while Hoffman played and the resort loudspeakers whined of an open buffet in the ballroom or a phone call for Mrs. Schwartz.
It was an atmosphere Lenny’s daughter Kitty Bruce called “eggshell-y, like walking on eggshells of iron. That came from Bob. He was an intense, gentle, fierce, kind soul, which was completely my dad’s vibe.” Along with her mother, Honey, and Lenny’s mother, Sally Marr, Kitty had come to Miami to watch the filming. Eschewing real life for the pictures in his head, Fosse rarely called upon Lenny’s family for technical advice, but the rest of the crew couldn’t resist. Marr in particular was too much fun. Paying no heed to the eggshells, she entertained them with outrageous tales, one in particular, a true story—forget Lenny for a moment—when, a few years back, some sicko broke into her apartment, raped her, and then, before leaving, helped himself to a pork chop. It was the pork chop, Marr said, that pushed her over the edge; she had really been looking forward to it. After he heard the story, Hoffman bought Marr a golden necklace—twinkling with a golden pork chop. She loved it.
Fosse wouldn’t be laughing with them, not during business hours. He would unwind later, at the end of the day, back in his room with a few bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé and a couple girls. Half dressed, they would pass the wine around the bed, savoring the sexy tension, then laughing at what they all knew was about to happen. “It was always like playing with Bob,” Kitty Bruce said. “Never weird or lecherous.”
Every day, Fosse awoke at dusk. “His cough would wake me up,” Hoffman said. “It was my alarm clock.” While the others slept, Fosse stalked the set alone, contemplating the arrangement of invisible actors as the sun was going down. “He just wanted to be there,” Picker said. “He just wanted to absorb it.” He’d pace, alone, thinking, smoking, a cup of coffee (black, sugar) in his hand. Larry Mark would stand by, waiting to exchange the empty cup for a full one, deliver the odd message, or slip him his lunch, a Swiss cheese sandwich with mustard on white, the exact same every day. Fosse would eat it in his trailer, usually alone. “He didn’t like to broaden his circle,” Mark said. “If it wasn’t Surtees, Alan Heim on the phone, Albert Wolsky, or [script supervisor] Nick Sgarro, he would keep to himself.” After lunch, he would nap, for one hour, and return to set for more pacing and thinking before the cast and crew arrived. Mark said, “Bruce Surtees would almost always say, ‘Oh, Bob, please stop looking at this.’ Because when he was alone, it invariably meant Bob would change something.” Fosse spoke very little, offering no more than “We got it” to indicate he was ready to move on. He liked it quiet. When he gave notes, he spoke with his actors privately, off in a corner, in whispers. “Can you make it smaller?” he would ask. “Even less,” he would say, then “even less.”
Once, in a hotel corridor with Julian Barry, Fosse dropped to his knees beside a door and pressed an ear to the keyhole.
“What are you doing?”
Fosse shushed him. It was Dustin’s room. He was in there with Valerie.
“When you’re on the road with actors,” he whispered, “you can learn a lot if you do this.”
Barry waited.
There were literally not enough hours in the day to shoot and then analyze the dailies, but Fosse did not respect the concept of day. There was only work broken by naps. Sitting in the dark, most directors will lean over to their assistants or designers to make general comments like “I prefer take one” or “I liked her look in take three, but I liked her reading in take two.” Fosse, however, would lean into Trudy Ship in the middle of a take with a remark like “Her finger, left hand” or “Make a note: the way she drapes her arm,” or he’d ask her to note a single word of dialogue. Hoffman wanted to join, but Fosse could not expect an actor to be the film’s advocate and asked him to stay away. He needed the time to work with set and costume designers. “He was never totally specific,” Albert Wolsky said. “He gave you puffs of smoke, ideas. Then you worked on those.” Dailies helped him communicate those puffs and turn them into actual choices. Seeing something work or fail on the screen, Fosse could figure out what he wanted and have Wolsky get him there.
“I’m so depressed,” he said to Wolsky after that year’s Oscar nominations were announced.
“Why?”
He was looking away. “I’m not nominated.”
“Bob, you didn’t make a movie last year.”
“That’s why I’m depressed.”
Toward the end of production, Fosse told Wolsky he’d seen a big, bearded man, maybe Coppola, wandering around the set. He’d seen him a few times. Fosse would follow the stranger around trailers, planning to jump him and demand to know what he was doing there, on his location. Had they fired Fosse? He’d make Coppola tell him everything. He’d get back at them somehow: Fosse’s innate paranoia conjured the fantasy, and his pills made it so. But it wasn’t so. There was no Coppola on Lenny, no secret meetings to take the movie away from Fosse. Only Fosse, Job without God, sinned against, but by whom he didn’t know. “He fought everything so hard,” Hoffman said, “like he was going to prove—I don’t know to who—that he was an artist. This guy wanted so desperately to be an artist—and that was his tragedy—because he already was.”
Filming ended in the spring of 1974, and full-time editing began. The task: getting about 360,000 feet of printed film to a releasable 11,000. Fosse could get impatient while he cut, so Heim, relaxed, would set him up on the flatbed editing machine with a reel of reaction shots or one of Hoffman’s long monologues—something to keep him busy. With bigger screens and reels, the flatbed Kem, which could take as much as a thousand feet of film, was better for screening, while the upright Moviolas—loud green monsters Heim stood before and spliced down hard into—were nimbler and better for cutting. They spent the day floating between the machines; their collaboration rarely go
t heated. The heat was between Fosse and Lenny. “He taught me how to be hard on material,” Heim said. “But he was so unrelenting, sometimes I had to rescue him from his own dislike.” But there was peace in postproduction. A face, an arm, an upper lip—things he spotted in dailies—they were now his to control, full stop.
Sometimes lunch would be personally delivered by Chayefsky, Gardner, or David Picker, and often for the whole family. “There were times in the cutting room,” said assistant editor Jonathan Pontell, “when Fosse was very jovial, full of stories, almost literally dancing. Then there were dark times.” He made no effort to hide the attaché case Heim called “the pharmacy,” leaving it open by the Moviola in full view of all who passed by. “I’m positive that Bob did this intentionally,” Heim said. “He didn’t want to tell me that he was having these moods, but he did want me to know that it wasn’t personal.” Fosse did not discuss his bottom-most fears with male associates outside of his immediate circle, not even Heim, whom he had known and respected for years. Women were another matter. Whether owing to sex or friendship, in female company, Fosse opened up almost involuntarily. “Bob would talk to me about the tremendous guilt he felt not being able to stay faithful to his girlfriends,” Trudy Ship said. “He was still thinking about Gwen. He said he loved her very much but that his unfaithfulness became too much for her.” He would laugh at himself for dating girls closer and closer to Nicole’s age, like Kim St. Leon, the nineteen-year-old extra he picked up on the set in Miami. She had followed him back to New York, and though she got a place of her own in the city, St. Leon had some accidental run-ins with Ann Reinking, one heading toward Fosse’s apartment as the other headed away.