Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  The irony Pippin attained through exaggeration, Chicago was achieving through absence. One was filtered through commedia, the other through Brecht, whose epic theater had fascinated Fosse since he saw Tony Richardson’s short-lived production of Arturo Ui in 1963, which Richardson set in 1930s Chicago. The Know was an appropriation of a Brechtian alienation technique. “The performer portrays incidents of utmost passion,” Brecht wrote, “but without his delivery becoming heated.” Positing a style of performance he termed gest, Brecht could have been describing Fosse’s Chicago dances. “‘Gest’ is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes.” The opposite of imitative, the gest is representative. It’s showbiz.

  Chicago days, Lenny nights.

  For a while, Fosse had practically cut off communication with Julian Barry. “The reason I haven’t called you,” he said on the phone, “is because I wanted you to have a completely fresh eye when you saw the movie. Could you come down to the screening room today?”

  Before he left his home in Connecticut that day, Barry stopped at his mailbox and found a letter from his wife. She had only recently taken off for Atlanta to “discover” herself (with a redneck, in a trailer), leaving Barry, miserable and alone, to care for their kids. Her latest letter said she wasn’t coming back and that the redneck was not a redneck but the man of her dreams. “I went into a complete daze,” Barry said, “but I got in the car and drove to New York, didn’t remember how I got there, not one bridge, not one turn.” He arrived at the screening room and Fosse ran the movie, and the lights came up.

  “So,” Fosse said. “What did you think?”

  “Bob, I gotta be honest with you.”

  Fosse nodded for him to continue.

  “I don’t remember any of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t see it.”

  “What does that mean? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it—”

  “Come on, Julian. Goddamn it.”

  “Bob, I got a letter from Pat . . . Just before I left . . .”

  Barry held out the letter. Fosse scanned it and threw it on the floor. “I don’t give a fuck about that bitch,” he said. “I need to know what you thought of the fucking movie.”

  The recutting was endless. “People would walk into the editing room, see there was a black cloud in the room, and walk out,” Heim said. Fosse would shred scenes down to nothing, just to see if he needed them. Heim wouldn’t stop him—he knew Bob was cutting the diamond—but he’d have to stay alert. The longer they worked, the greater the chances of Bob mistaking a flaw in the stone for a flaw in himself, or someone else. “You were a better cutter before you were a father,” Fosse told Heim.

  At home one night with Reinking, he had a seizure, a petit mal. “He was on his back,” Reinking said, “on the bed. His eyes were rolled up and his lids were fluttering.” Unsure of what to do, Reinking froze in the doorway; she had never seen a seizure before. When he stopped trembling, she rushed to the bed and held him. Helping himself up, Fosse explained what had happened, that stress was likely to blame, and he calmed them both with a slow walk to the medicine cabinet for a dose of Dilantin. “He was embarrassed,” she said. “I could see him thinking it was a show of weakness. Predators would see blood and come in for the attack.”

  While driving back from Quogue, Fosse felt his hand cramp up, which it had been doing a lot. Reinking didn’t know why it kept happening. “I just don’t feel good,” he would say. “I just—I don’t know . . .”

  She had suggested they see a doctor.

  “No, no, no, it’s all right,” he would say.

  Now, as he drove, he looked nauseated, maybe carsick.

  She felt his forehead. It was a little cold.

  “It’s okay, really. I feel okay now.”

  The first week of dance rehearsals began October 26 at Broadway Arts. Fosse gave them “All That Jazz,” Chicago’s opening number, while Gwen worked on her own in another part of the studio. “All That Jazz” belonged to Velma Kelly, the star that Roxie Hart, only a showgirl, desperately wants to be. “The number started with me, Velma, coming up on this huge lift,” Chita Rivera said. “It was practically half the size of the stage. When the elevator came up, I was in the center of the platform with my back to the audience in one of my Fosse poses and this shaft of light shot down from out of nowhere. First you saw the light, then you saw the finger, then the hand, then the arm. Then there I was. Then the vamp started. It was so slow. I turned around slowly and stopped for a second and I went all the way down the stage and placed myself, and I just look. I have the whole stage to myself. The vamp is the only friend you’ve got at that moment. And then I start to sing.” The company joins in behind her.

  Fosse showed the company images of the sort of period steps he did not want them to emulate. The Charleston, the shimmy, and the black bottom were meant only to give them a context, forms to be deconstructed. Then he pointed to a black trunk in the corner of the studio. “Go over there,” he said, “and pick out anything you want and then spread out.” Dancers Graciela Daniele, Kathryn Doby, Cheryl Clark, Candy Brown, Pam Sousa, and a handful of others did as they were told, opening the trunk to find all sorts of vaudeville treasures (derbies, garters, canes, boas); they picked what appealed to them and spread out to different parts of the floor. “Okay,” Fosse said, pointing at one dancer, “now you do the shimmy in slow motion.” He pointed to another. “You do the black bottom in slow motion.” These weren’t to be flapper steps. They were streaks of blood. “In ‘All That Jazz,’” dancer Gene Foote said, “he said to us, ‘I want you to confront the audience with murder in your eyes and dare them to look at you.’” It was the Know in action.

  The dancers kept their straw hats and derbies in a pile, but Tony Stevens guarded Fosse’s bowler in a hatbox he kept with him at all times. It looked like the other bowlers with the exception of one detail: inside the brim, Expressly made for Bob Fosse was embroidered in gold thread. “It was the crown,” Stevens said. Whenever Fosse would get up to demonstrate a step, he would signal to Stevens for his hat. “He would just open his fingers, and I would know where to aim,” he said. It seemed to Stevens that Fosse couldn’t dance without it. “It got so that he wouldn’t put on the bowler without lighting a cigarette first,” Stevens said. “I remember thinking, Maybe it’s the bowler that’s killing him, not the smoke.”

  Heim said Fosse didn’t look so good, that he should go home and be confident about Lenny, but Fosse wasn’t ready to call it a day. The latest cut still wasn’t working, and the release date, November 11, 1974, was only days away. That was more than enough time to rescue the picture; more than enough time, Heim feared, for Fosse to second-guess and disassemble the whole thing. But he could not assuage Fosse’s doubts. After the two screened the picture (again), Fosse went (coughing) back into the editing room and cut three whole minutes from Lenny. No matter that his teeth ached and there was a tightening in his chest. No matter that Ann Reinking was worried about the purplish color of his lips. Every dancer learns to live with muscle aches, and what he had here, tingling aside, was routine discomfort. A pulled muscle, maybe. Nothing compared to the pain he would suffer, probably forever, if he didn’t get Lenny right, and fast. Stress? Who wasn’t stressed? They’d go until they got it.

  That night, sitting with Fosse at the Moviola, Heim caught him kneading his upper arm, repeatedly clenching and unclenching his fist. And his face was white.

  Bob looked away from the Moviola.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just tired. Went from rehearsal to see Annie.” Reinking was in the hospital. She had fractured her vertebrae in two places and had to leave Over Here. “Then I went back to rehearsal.”

  Heim said nothing.

  “Now here,” Fosse added.

  Finally, he had to stop. Heim helped him out of his chair, walked
him to the street, and put him in a cab.

  “You going home?”

  “Annie.”

  That was Saturday.

  Monday, Fosse and the cast of Chicago assembled at Broadway Arts for the first table read. Everyone was thrilled. They all seemed to agree they were working at the top of their game. Soaring in, Chita Rivera placed a big bouquet of red roses in the middle of the table; Tony Walton showed off a model of the sleek bare set, and Kander and Ebb played their songs, which were among their rousing, cheeky best. The tastefully sinister dances Fosse had sketched out over the first week of rehearsal captivated everyone, and to see him reunited with Gwen lent a sense of rightness to their delight. Gwen may have been the only one to worry. That morning, she sensed something different in Fosse. “I was shocked,” she said. “He was puffed up. He had a funny high voice. I’d never seen him like that.” This time, Fosse did not deny it. He asked stage manager Phil Friedman to make him an appointment with Dr. Leder for the lunch break.

  How exactly did he feel? Friedman asked.

  Like a truck was driving across his chest, Fosse said.

  Friedman called Leder, as directed, and the reading progressed without difficulty. Rising from the table, Fosse thanked and dismissed the company and told Friedman he should go ahead and work on “All That Jazz” if Fosse didn’t make it back from Dr. Leder’s office in time to start the number himself. He was clutching his chest.

  On their way to lunch, producers Joe Harris and Ira Bernstein ran into Neil Simon crossing Broadway. Simon asked how the show was going; they told him the show was going great, and they all schmoozed for a moment and then parted ways. Bernstein and Harris ate their lunch and strolled back to their offices on East Forty-Eighth Street in time to pick up a ringing phone and hear a strange piece of news. Fosse had been taken to New York Hospital, and the doctors weren’t letting him out. Joe Harris got in a cab.

  In the hospital, Fosse—trying to keep calm—told Harris that Dr. Leder had sent him directly to the ER for further evaluation. Harris could see why. Fosse’s face was slick; his breathing labored. While Leder, engaged with his stethoscope, examined the patient’s chest, Fosse slipped Harris his attaché case. “The show is over,” he whispered, and he told Harris to get rid of it, then put on an innocent face for cardiologist Edwin Ettinger. The pain comes and goes, Fosse explained, it wasn’t serious. He’d been living with it for months; he’d just gone to Leder for a checkup, routine stuff, and now he had to get back to rehearsal. Ettinger held up a hand. Fosse was not going back to rehearsal. He was going to have a heart attack.

  Fosse explained, in the clearest terms possible: He was doing a show, a Kander and Ebb show. People were counting on him.

  Ettinger cut him off. Fosse needed an EKG.

  “What do you mean? I have to go back. You don’t understand show business.”

  Ettinger didn’t understand that shows were not just shows; they were domino lines of careers and paychecks, and if his domino tipped, lives would fall down around him. Maybe the producers were already trying to replace him. Were they calling Robbins? Gower Champion? Hal Prince? What if his show was a hit without him and the New York Times wrote Hal Prince was better at Fosse than Fosse? Or what if the producers decided to shut down the whole thing and walk away with the insurance? They had a legitimate case for abandonment (which would give them 1 to 2 percent on the value of the policy) and could board up the show right then and still rake in the money. If they did, Fosse’s premiums would skyrocket, and he’d be branded a liability, beholden to producers, possibly for the rest of his life. It was essential Ettinger understood this.

  At 3:30, Fosse’s doctors called Broadway Arts, gave the news to Phil Friedman, and asked him to get Gwen to the hospital, fast. Friedman found Verdon alone with Chita—a relief. This had to be kept private. Friedman apologized to Chita and led Gwen out of the studio and to a chair against the wall. Knitting needles in hand—she and Chita were practicing their knitting for Chicago’s big trial scene—Verdon seated herself where directed, and Friedman explained everything. Calmly, she changed her clothes and left the building. “[Gwen] really went through this like an actress,” Friedman said. She believed this was, in a way, what he wanted, not to die, but to come to the cliff’s edge of death, kiss it, and turn back. She thought it put him in touch with his talent, like fighting the producers, who in a sense were like heart attacks, like terminal illnesses, with their cruel and incessant reminders of time running out . . . last one . . . no more . . .

  “Please don’t let them keep me in this place,” Fosse said to Gwen when she appeared in the ER.

  “He’s staying.”

  She reached a hand out for the medical papers.

  “I’m his wife.”

  Meanwhile, Joe Harris called Ann Reinking, at her own hospital, and told her very little. No one could know anything. Razzle-dazzle damage control.

  “Alan,” Verdon said to Heim, “Bob won’t be in for a few days.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Big exhale. “He’s exhausted.”

  At 5:30 that evening, producers Fryer and Harris returned to Broadway Arts to tell the dancers, if not the exact truth, then something like it. “It’s exhaustion,” they said. Not to worry. Rehearsals would be off for a couple of days. Fosse would return Thursday. Really, there was no reason to worry. You know Bob. Overworked, overstressed, over-everything . . . Go home, we’ll know more tomorrow.

  Dr. Ettinger moved Fosse to a private room and recommended immediate surgery, a cardiac bypass. There was a 98 percent chance he’d survive.

  Fosse nodded. He asked if he could have a smoke and think it over.

  They would take a vein from Fosse’s leg, Ettinger explained, and move it to his heart. Fosse stopped him right there. Better if they didn’t touch his leg; as a dancer, he’d be happier if they cut the artery out of his chest. Ettinger made the deal.

  The following day, the Chicago company was told there would be a delay; for how long, no one knew. Maybe four months. “Do not worry,” the producers said. “We will look out for you.” They promised to call around for work and encouraged the dancers to be in touch if they needed money. If they needed anything. But money was not the issue for some. Having moved across the country, having said tired and fighting goodbyes to their boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives, having decided, as if they had a choice, to give up, again, their lives for the barre, the dancers had put much of everything on hold to be in Chicago, and now that hold was being put on hold. They were in nothing, limbo. Pam Sousa booked a couple commercials and extra work in Three Days of the Condor.

  As the company mother, Verdon held them close. She threw parties to keep spirits up. Losing one dancer to the world might inspire another to go, and then another, and though Verdon wanted them to shore themselves up with pickup gigs, she knew if the company disintegrated, schedules would fly away, and Chicago would be put back even farther, maybe too far, and she’d be too old.

  The doctors instructed Fosse to relax. But he couldn’t relax if he relaxed, so he called the theater to check up on Pippin, wanting to know about every dancer. How were they? How was the show? How was Lenny? Heim came to the hospital with a report. There were lines, he told him, all the way around the block; it was Cinema One’s best opening day in twelve years. “Fosse has learned a phenomenal amount about film technique in a short time,” Pauline Kael wrote. “Lenny is only his third movie . . . and it’s a handsome piece of work. I don’t know any other movie director who entered moviemaking so late in life and developed such technical proficiency; Fosse is a true prodigy.”

  But lying in intensive care, awaiting the surgery that was to increase blood flow to the heart they said would attack him if he didn’t get real, Fosse continued to worry. He worried about his cock. Drugged out, he called Annie in her hospital room, terrified the operation would make him impotent. The idea obsessed him. He blamed her. He said she hadn’t taken care of him. Reinking knew it was t
he drugs talking; his words were slow to come and he drifted from subject to subject. He wondered whether he should have the open-heart surgery at all (“I’m going to a real opening,” he joked). He wondered how he would live if he couldn’t fuck; how he would work if he couldn’t move; how he would live if he couldn’t work. He could die. He would die. Maybe not here, but somewhere. Then again, maybe here. Maybe tomorrow.

  The big yank, the end without end.

  There was only one thing he could do about dying now: fuck as much as he could. In anticipation of an unsuccessful “opening night,” Fosse made a pass at almost every nurse who came in to see him. The one who took his blood pressure got a hand on her hips. Another had her chest examined by a toy stethoscope. The nurse assigned to massage duty arrived to find lemon oils on his bedside. Some didn’t mind; others were less amenable. Outside his door, the ICU nurses held a private conference to discuss the sex-and-comedy routine they termed Fosse’s defense mechanism.

  He called Janice in LA.

  “Bob, are you smoking?”

  “Yeah. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Are you on oxygen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bob, if you don’t put that out right now, I’m calling the hospital!”

  “You’re not my mother.”

  “You could blow the whole place up!”

  “Sometimes you act like my mother . . .”

  “I’m calling them right now. I’ll tell them to turn off the oxygen, Bob!”

  “Okay”—chuckling—“okay.”

  At nine o’clock the evening before the operation, he called Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner into his hospital room to witness the signing of his new, revised will. They arrived moments after the lawyers and hung over Fosse’s bed, staring. It was depressing. To see this life-hungry maniac lying there semiconscious weighing next to nothing and hooked into tubes and drips and beeping screens was to behold a baffling and tragic ridiculousness. To the lawyers’ shock, Paddy and Herb actually started laughing. Then Fosse started laughing. “We were lifetime friends,” Gardner said at Fosse’s memorial, “and we knew it and reveled in the security of it and attacked each other’s weakness and laughed every day at each other’s expense knowing there was plenty to spend. Paddy hunched over with his evil little cackle, and Bobby with his head thrown back laughed till he cried, one of us having just led a search-and-destroy mission to a weakness in the other.”