by Wasson, Sam
“Who was it last night?” Ship asked him one morning.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “But amyl nitrite helped.”
One night Fosse invited Kim and Ann to 1600 Broadway, led them to seats at the Moviola, and then settled into a deep armchair. Trudy Ship cued up the reel. He gave the word and the lights went off. A few flickers in, Fosse’s audience knew why they were there—it was the threesome scene. He wanted to watch them watch it.
At home, Fosse found Kim had written a man’s name and number on a pad by the phone. Though she assured Fosse he was only her scene partner in acting class, he didn’t care. Kim was not to see other men. It didn’t have to make sense; it just was.
“If you can’t go by the rules,” he said, “then I guess we can’t see each other.”
“Well, I guess we can’t, then.” And that was it.
In the cutting room, Fosse could finally win his battle with Hoffman. The performance, Fosse decreed, lacked the sour edge of the real Lenny Bruce. “It was the racial monologue,” Heim said. “Dustin had backed off on it, made it softer.” Though Fosse, as director, had cocreated the performance, allowing Hoffman to make the choices Fosse now found distasteful, Fosse refused to assume his share of the responsibility. Hoffman became yet another Cy Feuer; this time, though, his opponent couldn’t defend himself. Ship said, “[Fosse] was frequently demeaning him. Dustin would do something, or not do something, or ad lib something, and Fosse would [see it on the screen and] say, ‘That little shit.’” To save Fosse from his emotionality, Ship mediated from behind the Moviola, defying the code of cautious silence to save good takes, or good moments in middling takes, for the sake of the picture. One particular five-second reaction struck her as one of Hoffman’s best.
“Throw it out,” Fosse said.
“No, no . . .”
Bob turned around.
“Oh, please save it,” she begged.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the best thing he does in the scene.”
Fosse turned back to the Moviola. “But I can’t stand this guy.”
Ship was right, of course. And what Fosse hadn’t caught in the masters, he uncovered in fragments, details he could muscle into a movie mosaic. Fosse had experimented with fragmentation on Sweet Charity and Cabaret, but cutting Lenny, Fosse and Heim freed themselves more fully from linearity. Heim said, “We discovered that by fragmenting Hoffman’s performance, even more than it had been in the script, we were able to make him seem tougher, to make the film move better.” There is no time in Lenny, at least not in the sense of chronological time; for Fosse and Heim, time was a jazz standard, there to be riffed on. The result: a network of asynchronous pieces of picture and sound that orchestrator Ralph Burns called “Fosse time.”
Just as Fosse’s dance style had risen from his own perceived inadequacies, Fosse time came from what Fosse perceived as a deficiency of usable film. Cutting up and around Hoffman’s performance, he and Heim learned they could excavate an aspect of Lenny’s personality through a chosen tempo, the speedy feeling of being everywhere at once. Intermixing past with present and the stage with the real world, they fashioned a zippy associative style closer to cogitation than reality, as if Lenny were thinking itself to life. It was so much about rhythm. “Film is just like music,” Fosse said, “and acting is dancing. The rhythms . . . the appeal to the unconscious.” Tossing the script aside, Heim and Fosse finished each other’s sentences on film, like Ginger leading Fred leading Ginger.
But the script belonged to Julian Barry. Early in June 1974, Fosse wrote him asking for co-credit. Fosse’s tone was patient and respectful and he made it clear to Barry that if Barry decided against co-authorship, it would in no way affect their friendship. Barry owed him nothing, but after all those story meetings, Fosse felt he deserved the credit. “I wrote back and told him no,” Barry said. “I said the guy who goes home with the stomachache and brings in the pages the next morning is the writer.” Fosse said he’d never bring it up again, and he never did.
He was coughing all the time now. Hacking fits would overtake him in the middle of a conversation. Then he would recover, light another cigarette, and return to work. “He was coughing and coughing and coughing,” Ship said, “and the whole room was tense. Oh my God, I thought, his lungs are going to come out.” Fosse wouldn’t speak about it. There was little use in discussing what seemed obvious to all. “The nerve-racking thing,” Robert Greenhut said, “was he would leave the cigarette between his lips and kind of forget about it. And it would burn down so much he would only remember it because his lip would get too hot. Sometimes he would burn himself. There were lots of times where people had to actually help him get it out because he couldn’t take it out with his fingers. They had to swat it out of his mouth.” They could miss and end up hitting him in the face or, worse, on the mouth, which was blistered up from forgotten butts he’d let burn too long. But he never ran out of lip. After singeing one side of his mouth, he would put his next cigarette on the other, burn that one, and cover the burn with a foul-tasting ointment before lighting his next and putting it on the same spot.
He was smoking and coughing when he and Paddy and Herb met to discuss, with an air of spoof seriousness, Dino De Laurentiis’s proposed remake of King Kong. “Although we had worked on each other’s stuff for years,” Gardner said, “some animal instinct had kept us from working with each other.” But this notion was too funny to pass up. Meeting at the Russian Tea Room, a place of real business, they could pretend like they were giving King Kong a real shot. Watching one another’s eyes for signs of laughter, they slid into one of the Russian Tea Room’s red-leather booths, and Fosse, the director, ordered chicken Kiev and started delegating.
“Paddy,” he said. “You will handle the dignified, philosophical part of the script; that is, the boredom. Herb, you will do your usual semicomic lyrical bullshit. You’ll do the whimsy. And then I’ll shine it up so maybe someone will come and see it. I’ll do the flash.” They decided to call their King Kong company Boredom, Whimsy, and Flash (“It was how we referred to each other for the next fifteen years or so,” Gardner said), and they agreed the movie would open at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Kong—a coked-up Hollywood has-been—being paged over the loudspeaker. Lighting a tree-size joint, Kong rises from his lounge chair and stomps through the pool on his way to the phone. He listens carefully to his agent. “Okay, Sam,” he says. “I’ll do the series.” If only.
They had real projects to work on. Paddy’s was Network, a movie idea he had been considering off and on since the late sixties. Now Chayefsky and his producing partner Howard Gottfried were shopping it to the studios, fishing for interest. It would not be an easy sell. Network drew on ugly facts of the TV nation: the perversion of truth and integrity by razzle-dazzle, the crude selling of everything, no matter how sacred, and the American appetite for entertainment that keeps it looking benign. “We used to turn on the radio,” Chayefsky said, “and hear the speech [of a presidential candidate]. Today we get ten seconds of an anchorman, fifteen seconds of the reporter on the spot, and fifteen seconds of the high points of that speech. That’s the speech we get. That’s not true.” But people still buy it.
Fosse was intimately invested in every nut and bolt of Chayefsky’s preoccupation with the show-business-ization of network news. It meshed with his own obsession with razzle-dazzle, which he and Fred Ebb had been putting into Chicago, turning the show into a wicked satire of American jurisprudence, an entertainment consisting of performing lawyers, “innocent” criminals, and “impartial” journalists writing about justice. “It’s all show business, kid,” says Chicago’s lawyer Billy Flynn. “These trials, the whole world, show business.” He sings “Razzle Dazzle,” which could qualify as Fosse’s theme song. (“Throw ’em a fake and a finagle / They’ll never know you’re just a bagel.”)
Fosse edited Lenny and worked with Fred Ebb on Chicago’s book, and Ebb continued to meet with John Kand
er, every day, to write the show’s music and lyrics. They lived four blocks from each other on the Upper West Side. Around ten every morning, John Kander (who liked to go out) would walk over to the apartment of Ebb (who didn’t), and the coffee would be poured and the cigarettes lit. They hung about the kitchen gossiping like the old friends they were, catching up on all they’d missed since they’d seen each other the day before. Together, Ebb, an angsty, witty, waggish New Yorker, and Kander, a sweet midwestern guy, were the dialectical heart of the Broadway musical. They got off on each other’s enthusiasm. “We were pregnant a lot in those days,” Ebb said. “I would look at him and a song would come out.” One would shine on something that would glint in the other, and the conversation would turn to a moment in the show or a troubling phrase in a song and they would walk their glint into the small room overlooking the park, sit before the spinet piano, and try it. It wouldn’t always work, but they wrote fast and tore up fast, which gave Kander and Ebb permission to dislike just about anything they wrote. After a decade together, there was no need for argument. If one mustered the confidence to assert himself, the other would nod his head okay and the thing would die, or live, for the moment.
They improvised their way to certainty. Enough good guesses about words and music eventually brought them the answers; then, their destination in mind, they’d turn around and smooth their guesswork into the beginnings of a song. But slowly, each leaving small openings in the composition for the other guy to fill in. “I would never write a completed lyric,” Ebb said, “because then I would confine him to a form, which is not fair to Johnny.” And Kander never handed Ebb a completed melody. They asked each other questions. An important one was “What are these characters feeling?” Or “What are these characters thinking and not saying?” “Are you with me?” “Yes, I’m with you, keep going, keep going.”
“Put in two finger snaps,” Ebb said on “Razzle Dazzle.”
“Where?”
“Here. In the vamp.”
“Oh . . . yeah, yeah . . .”
“Bobby’s gonna love that.”
Suddenly one would realize he was hungry, the other would remember they hadn’t had anything to eat since ten o’clock, and they’d order up from the deli downstairs. Still working when the food arrived, they’d talk with bread in their mouths, one putting a mug on the spinet to free up a hand for a pencil (“Our copy was so messy,” Kander said, “our copyist, the Jewish mother of copyists, would berate us for our poor notation”), the other putting on one of those old vaudeville recordings Fosse loved so they could find themselves another glint. To underline the American vaudeville of jurisprudence, they and Fosse decided Chicago would be a musical vaudeville too. Ebb and Fosse’s book scenes were broken up by “acts”—the show’s numbers—performed out to the audience in a vaudeville style suited to each character. On most days, good days, they wrote a song.
With their help, Chicago would be Fosse’s penitent thank-you to Gwen. After all she had given him and all he had taken, Chicago was his way—his only way—of giving back. Perhaps he felt guilty for being a bad husband; perhaps he felt guilty for (finally) passing her on the rise to artistic renown—whatever his reasons, he told all who asked that he did it for her. Yet there was no denying that reteaming Fosse and Verdon for the first time since their separation would fuel gossip and sell tickets, and selling tickets would go a long way to ensuring Nicole’s security, which was the one responsibility they shared.
Verdon’s Chicago contract was a valentine of power. It granted her a nice piece of the profits; a strictly limited pre-Broadway run; and star billing, with her name as large and prominent as the show’s title on posters and promotional materials (all subject to her approval). She also had approval of all creative elements, including but not limited to Chicago’s principal cast; scenic, lighting, and costume designers; their designs; her own clothes; the show’s composer and compositions; orchestrator and orchestrations; librettist and libretto; dance music and dance orchestrations; and any of her understudies—whatever Lola wants.
Three years after Verdon and Fosse’s separation, the dust had settled somewhat. Verdon’s budding romance with actor Jerry Lanning helped them both a great deal. New love obliged Verdon to sequester the Fosse-hurt part of her heart, and her growing respect for Ann Reinking, as dancer, girlfriend to Fosse, and ally to Nicole, helped clear the debris between them. “Gwen knew a child needed both parents and was very giving in allowing us time with Nicole,” Reinking said. “But it was hard for Bob that he didn’t have the day-to-day of waking up every morning with his daughter and his wife. They had both gone forward since their separation and received happiness that way; it was amicable, but it was still painful.” Looking at Verdon, you could see she never stopped loving Fosse. “And she continued to love him, I think, in a way he never did her,” Reinking said. “I think that’s why she was so good to me. She knew what I was up against. I never talked to Gwen about this, but I think she understood. She understood Bob was Bob and if you were really in love with him there was going to be a good and a bad side.” Reinking clearly respected Verdon’s position as Fosse’s first and Nicole’s only, and Verdon understood she had to retreat if she wanted to stay close. All Fosse’s women did. Except Nicole.
As the summer of 1974 wore on, Fosse flew from Kander and Ebb to the cutting room and back, getting light only through the windows in his office or, after midnight, from the white flashes on the Moviola. Actual weather—that was a rumor. Actual life he lived on the side. “If you want to make something good,” he said, “like a movie, it matters more than your health. So you trade a couple of years.” Lenny nights, Chicago days; Chicago days, Lenny nights. Fosse said, “I’d wake up in the morning, and pop a pill. After lunch, when I couldn’t get going, I’d pop another one. There was a certain romanticism about that stuff. There was Bob drinking and smoking and turning out good work. Still popping and screwing around with the girls. ‘Isn’t it terrific macho behavior?’ they said. I probably thought I was indestructible.” Fosse had his next show but he didn’t have his next movie, which, whatever its subject, would have to somehow upstage Lenny the way Lenny, in its fervor and audacity, had upstaged Cabaret, which had upstaged Sweet Charity. He put Sam Cohn on the case. Together with Stuart Ostrow, who joined on as producer, they shuffled through galleys and scanned book reviews, finally touching down on Ending, a novel by Hilma Wolitzer about dying. “In American writing now,” the Times review of her book began, “the romance of death seems to be challenging the romance of love. The sexual revolution has so redefined love that many of us are no longer sure what it is, while a growing existential awareness has brought death out of the funeral parlor.” The review was a rave. “Above all, Ending made me feel how suicidally we waste our allotted time, how we often try to ‘kill it,’ as if it were something else and not ourselves that was being defeated.” Ostrow was drawn to Ending’s smallness of scope, likening it to a string-quartet reprieve from Fosse’s regular symphonies, and the book was optioned right away.
Ending is the story of a man’s death but it is also the story of his wife’s grief and the everyday ways they try to hold on and let go. With no showbiz connection, it was an odd match for Fosse. “My characters were as far from Bob Fosse as possible,” Wolitzer said. “Their lives are very ordinary, very middle class.” In the novel, Jay Kaufman’s death is not Nazi-related or drug-induced but the result of multiple myeloma, tumors in the marrow of his bones. Which in a way makes it worse, far more arbitrary, rivaling even Hitler in the horror department. Everyone dies.
Fosse assigned Robert Alan Aurthur to the adaptation, likely anticipating the chance to pull rank if push came to shove. Aurthur had studied medicine before turning to writing and would surely be handy to have around for the script’s technical elements. His first step was to try to talk Fosse out of building the story around terminal illness. No one wanted to see that in a movie; it was dramatically uninteresting and just too depressing. Instead, Aurthur
suggested, they should turn the script away from the husband and toward the wife. Exploring her choices, Aurthur could open a tunnel under the narrative cul-de-sac of the husband’s inevitable death and ask how a loved one’s passing changes the living. Fosse talked Aurthur into inventing a new character, a dying patient who wants to go out big, who keeps rehearsing memorable death speeches for his final close-up but who dies unceremoniously, without a word. The character manifested one of Fosse’s greatest fears—not death, but an ordinary death. He said, “What’ll happen is I’ll probably die in some hospital with no glory at all. No theatrics.”
Fosse bade Aurthur good luck with Ending and returned, with Verdon, to Broadway Arts, where they began to step through Chicago. They were at work for a month before Fosse summoned Kathryn Doby and Tony Stevens, his new assistant. “Don’t let me do anything I’ve done before,” Fosse told Stevens on their first day. “Keep me away from the Charleston. I want to do a twenties musical without all that flapper stuff.” Stevens soon realized exactly what Fosse meant. Far from the slaphappy antics of the Prohibition age, Fosse’s Chicago movements seemed closer to group sculpture than dance. He was draining the color. These were not people but bodies, automatons. Their eyes were still and mean. Ann Reinking called it “the Know.” “You have to have the magnificent stare that bores a hole at the other end of the theater,” she said. Glazed eyes give a character an air of humanless evil. Soul is missing.