Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  It began with Chayefsky. In his rabbinical way, he declared he wasn’t going to sign any document without reading it first. Snatching the will from Fosse’s hand, he crossed to a chair in the corner of the room and read every word of the entire thirty-page document.

  “Hey,” Chayefsky mumbled. “I’m not in here.” He flipped back to the beginning, just to make sure.

  “Paddy,” Fosse said, with a certain amount of feeling. “You’re in good shape. You can take care of yourself. I’ve got Nicole and Gwen to plan for.”

  “I’m your oldest and best friend, and I’m not in your will?”

  Fosse hesitated. This was not the response he expected. “There are people who really need taking care of,” he said. “This has nothing to do with my love for you.”

  “You left me out of your will?”

  “Yes, Paddy. I did.”

  Chayefsky took a portentous beat and then spoke. “Fuck you!” he said. “Live!”

  Fosse exploded laughing. The wires hooked into him started flapping like fish on a boat, and one of the lawyers had to brace the heart monitor to make sure it didn’t go down with the food tray that had been kicked off the bed, which got Chayefsky laughing, which started Gardner laughing, and the harder they laughed, the more embarrassed the lawyers got, until finally Chayefsky took pity on them and signed the will. It said, in part, “I give and bequest the sum of $25,000 to be distributed to the friends of mine listed . . . so that when my friends receive this bequest they will go out and have dinner on me. They have all at one time or another during my life been very kind to me. I thank them.”

  After the signing, the sedation kicked in and Fosse fell asleep, leaving Chayefsky and Gardner to small-talk with the suits. It must have been one or two o’clock in the morning when one of the lawyers, endeavoring to fill the silence, said he heard the director Joshua Logan had put a similar clause in his will.

  Fosse opened one eye. “For how much?”

  The lawyer told him.

  “Make mine ten grand more,” he said and closed his eye.

  So now Chayefsky and Gardner fell down laughing, which actually got the lawyers laughing, and then the surgeon came in, and just seeing them all laughing, he started to laugh. Trying to pull himself together, the doctor put on a solemn face and approached Fosse’s bedside. This was serious, he said, and he led the patient through the steps of the next day’s operation—the whole number, from top to bottom. The surgeon took out a pen and pointed it at a diagram of Fosse’s heart. Highlighting the damaged tissue, he showed Fosse exactly how they’d be taking a vein from his chest and putting it into his heart, which—

  The surgeon dropped his pen.

  “Whoops,” the surgeon said.

  Everyone froze. Whoops?

  “Operation canceled,” Fosse murmured. They all started laughing again, harder than before, laughing as if they weren’t in New York Hospital but at their table at the Carnegie Deli. “Doc,” Fosse said to the surgeon, a man by the name of William Gay, “Doc, I won’t let you operate unless you promise one thing, okay?”

  “Well, okay,” Gay said. “What’s that?”

  Fosse cleared his throat. “You gotta promise not to kiss me during the operation.”

  That killed them.

  A half hour before the operation, Robert Alan Aurthur called Fosse. They talked a little about Aurthur’s progress on Ending.

  “We sure picked the right subject, didn’t we?” Fosse said. “I’m getting a lot of material here.”

  “Maybe you’d rather do a comedy.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t given it a lot of thought.”

  Fosse mentioned the party clause in his new will.

  Aurthur told him he’d done the same.

  Deadpanning, Fosse said that between him, Aurthur, and Logan, maybe everyone was doing it. But how well were they doing it? If Fosse got Stuart Ostrow to produce his memorial party, he could probably do it for a thousand dollars less than anyone else.

  On November 15, 1974, the doctors wheeled Fosse out of the ICU and into the operating theater. They put him under, hooked him up to a massive heart-lung machine, and stopped the beat.

  Thirteen Years

  BY THE 1970s, America had become a showbiz nation, obsessed with image, depressed by its own fraudulence and failure. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the unceasing devastation in Vietnam, and waves upon waves of Watergate lies and cover-ups ended the long-running musical comedy of the 1950s and early 1960s, a period when the nation agreed on what was good and what was bad. They were years of stunning credulity. America bought what it sold.

  By the 1970s, that changed; there seemed to be no sin greater than trust. Cynicism was the new enlightenment; nothing was what it appeared to be. Certain females—feminists—acted like men, and men acted like women, or were told to. The book Type A Behavior and Your Heart, published in 1974, warned against intense, competitive compulsions, saying “masculine” behaviors could lead to illness or even death. The new man had to be delicate. David Bowie was delicate. He changed his costume, and Bob Dylan changed his sound, both delighting, it seemed, in a radical new approach to identity: the performance of self. “We all have to put on to make it through the day,” Fosse said a year before his death. “One time I was going to do a film, a semidocumentary, about how everyone has to put on a show, how everybody wakes up and says, ‘It’s showtime!’”

  Nixon was no different. He too performed, only not well. Printing copies of copies, Warhol made a cult of fakes, but he was merely taking his cues from a nation that had made a religion of show business. “The 70s was the decade in which people put emphasis on the skin, on the surface, rather than on the root of things,” Norman Mailer wrote. “It was the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on.” In fact, there was something deeper—depression, disenchantment, the search for new meaning that Tom Wolfe saw in the Me Decade. If I’m not my image, my “self,” then what am I really? Thus would President Jimmy Carter—a figure dull on the surface but, many hoped, substantial inside—try to heal a nation he called “sick at heart.”

  So America had caught up to Bob Fosse.

  By the time of his open-heart surgery, Fosse was only one of many musical impresarios to use show business allegorically, to explicate the modern condition. Of course, Broadway had always been fair game for a Broadway musical, but the backstage setting of a traditional backstager like 42nd Street served not as a device to examine entertainment as metaphor but as a convenient pretext for songs and dances. The showbiz epidemic of the 1970s reversed all that, reviving and revising the backstage concept to fit America’s image crisis. Each visionary had his own slant. Alongside Fosse, there was Hal Prince’s Cabaret, and Prince and Sondheim’s Company and Follies. And there was Michael Bennett’s forthcoming A Chorus Line. But that show wasn’t rife with metaphor like the others; it was just about a chorus line. And unlike the corny backstagers of yore, it was not glamorized. A Chorus Line was the real chorus line, a documentary in musical form.

  Fosse had any number of reasons to dislike Michael Bennett, but the most immediate—that he was improving A Chorus Line every day that Fosse was in the hospital not improving Chicago—was nothing next to the headline, the critical consensus, the growing sense that Bennett’s work was omnivorous, absorbing more theatricality, more ways to dance, while Fosse’s work was narrow, confined to the limitations of his style. Or so Fosse feared. That made Fosse less of a shoo-in to inherit Robbins’s mantle—up for grabs since he’d left Broadway after Fiddler on the Roof—than the still-running Pippin’s success would suggest. Worse, Michael Bennett was a full sixteen years Fosse’s junior, with a splendid, Sondheim-rich résumé and a show-to-Tony ratio chillingly close to Fosse’s own.

  In public, they socialized around their enmity as best they could. “Bob took me to Patsy’s for dinner,” said dancer Deborah Geffner, “and Michael Bennett was sitting there with his back to us at a huge
round table full of people. And as we went past, Bob, in a gesture that was sort of like patting him on the shoulder, pushed his head almost all the way down into his plate. And Michael turned around, and Bob looked back and said, ‘Hey, Michael, how are you?’ And Michael said, ‘Fine.’ There was really no love lost between them.”

  “Young choreographers,” Fosse would growl to Alan Heim, “I wish they’d all die.” One in particular.

  “It was spy versus spy with those two,” Tony Stevens said. “The stories you’d hear about them working it behind the scenes.” Poaching Stevens, Chita Rivera’s longtime friend and collaborator, from the workshops of A Chorus Line to the rehearsals of Chicago, Fosse could enjoy the added bonus of hitting Bennett where it hurt. Bennett knew what hurt Fosse too, and (according to rumor) by titling his show A Chorus Line instead of Chorus Line, he made sure it would precede Chicago on any alphabetical listing. Catching on to their bosses’ feud, some of the shows’ dancers chose sides. Some were forced to. Donna McKechnie, who began as a Fosse dancer and became Bennett’s number one muse and collaborator, found herself caught in a high-school war of cliques. “I remember when I walked into a restaurant during Chorus Line,” she said, “and saw dancers from Chicago, people I knew, just snubbing me. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a bad dream.”

  Fosse awoke on the recovery floor after surgery. They had him on an ice mattress to keep his temperature down. He had a tube up his nose and another up his cock.

  As soon as he could talk, he called Annie. She was still at St. Clare’s Hospital, recovering from injuries sustained in Over Here. “Bob? How was it? How are you?”

  “For six hours,” he drawled, “I was dead.”

  His anger surprised her. “Bob, this is a really good operation.”

  “I was dead, Annie. My heart stopped.”

  “You were on the machine. You were fine.”

  “What if I spring a leak?”

  He sounded terrible, but Reinking was not alarmed. She had been told to expect this sort of hopelessness; depression was common after open-heart surgery. “You just have to trust this,” she said. “If you don’t trust this, the stress will get you, and then you’ll be right back where you started.”

  The recovery floor frightened him. The new nurses were less attentive, at times even distant. He tried humor, which, since the surgery, had fallen from dark to black. But they didn’t respond, and the antipathy isolated Fosse further. Soon, he was telling Annie—crying to her—that he felt unsafe, that something bad was going to happen. He told her a man in a bed directly across from him was dying. (The man was young, in his thirties or forties. It took two days.)

  They moved Fosse to a private room on the fifteenth floor.

  He thought. “There is this profound period of realization,” said nurse Nancy Bird, an associate of Fosse’s, “in recovery from open-heart surgery, when patients think about what they’ve gone through and what they’ve done in their lives. It’s not a happy time.” He thought, What’s the point of musical comedy? Of show business? It’s so much effort, so much agony, for what? How much is a good laugh really worth? He said later, “It is a little difficult to, you know, think that d-da-d-da-ta-dum is that important, you know, after you’ve been close to death. But of course, maybe it is. I don’t know. Maybe d-da-d-da-ta-dum is the most important thing I have in life.” But maybe was not good enough.

  He sank.

  Paddy and Herb, sitting in chairs by the patient’s bed, saw that telling Fosse a dirty joke or funny story could make the needle on his heart monitor jump into the red. So they made a game out of it. To win Can You Top This? you had to get the needle up higher than the other guy (extra points for cardiac arrest), but discreetly. If the nurses found out, the game would be shut down. So Paddy and Herb whispered their jokes, but they couldn’t whisper their hysterical laughter, and soon after the game began, one of the nurses appeared to tell them the heart monitor was not an applause-o-meter. Herb and Paddy respectfully disagreed.

  He got sentimental one night, about Gwen, about Nicole. “If I go . . .”

  Paddy frowned. “Awwww, who cares?”

  To get Fosse off the subject, Chayefsky promised Bob that if Bob died first, Chayefsky would deliver a tedious eulogy at his funeral. Fosse told Chayefsky that if Chayefsky died first, Fosse would do a tap dance at the memorial.

  Word of Fosse’s ordeal spread through Broadway, and to keep his spirits up (and the stress level down), his closest friends and collaborators prescribed a little postoperative party. In came Kander and Ebb and Stuart Ostrow and Sam Cohn and Tony Walton and a dozen others. Actor John McMartin called in the middle of it and could barely hear Bob over the cheering. The Pippin cast took up a collection and sent one of the girls to FAO Schwarz to buy him puzzles, one of which had a harem girl that looked like Ann. Garson Kanin sent a book called How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. Valerie Perrine sent a life-size naked poster of herself. Dustin sent zinnias. Shirley MacLaine wired, “How long has it been since you’ve had your blah-blah blahed?” (Not that long.) Others brought in books, cigarettes, movie posters, and friends of friends. Tony Walton came with his wife, Gen. “Tony,” Fosse said, “watch the heart monitor,” and pulled Gen in for a kiss. Paddy and Herb sneaked in sandwiches from the deli. Wolfgang Glattes saw someone smuggle in white wine. The music was loud, the laughter was louder, and the telephone—like the phone of a hit show’s producer—rang around the clock. Nurses unplugged it. He had to rest, they told him.

  Rest?

  Student nurse Kathy Zappola took his blood pressure, and he slid a hand up her thigh. When she came in to massage Fosse’s legs, she saw he had his stash of erotic oils already waiting for her. She lathered up and got to work.

  “Oh, that feels good . . .” he cooed, “but I might have an erection.”

  “Don’t do that!”

  As soon as Fosse could walk, he brought flowers to the old ladies on his floor. Some died on his watch.

  At all hours, girlfriends crossed in the hallway. There were fights. While Fosse slept, Gwen appeared to negotiate the peace, ushering crying dancers from his door, giving motherly understanding as she walked them to the waiting room. Her sensitivity amazed Dr. Ettinger. It confused him. As wife, she had legal say-so in certain medical matters, and she presided over Fosse’s paperwork with the full force of her authority, but exactly which one of her husband’s girlfriends had spiritual and emotional jurisdiction, which ones loved him, which he loved back, and how to include them, Ettinger couldn’t say. No one could. “The hospital staff didn’t know who to relate to,” the doctor recalled. “They didn’t know who was the person to be given important information. I would make my rounds and see Gwen and Ann—as if they were sisters. It was unbelievable.”

  They didn’t allow children on the recovery floor so Gwen had to disguise Nicole and sneak her in. There were so many dancers, their bodies so small, coming in and out of Fosse’s room, Gwen knew she could squeeze in one more if she painted her daughter’s eleven-year-old face with a thick coat of makeup and put chunky platform shoes on her feet. This Verdon did (although the shoes were three sizes too big for Nicole, so Gwen had to strap them on with heavy-duty rubber bands she stole from the hospital supply closet), capping the whole look with a wide-brimmed floppy hat before sending Nicole teetering to Fosse’s room.

  They were both shocked to see each other. Tangled in beeps and wires, he looked to her more like a machine than a person, and she looked to him more like a girlfriend than a girl. He asked her if she had bust pads in. It embarrassed her. She couldn’t understand why his mood had darkened; he was supposed to be relieved. There was a lot Nicole didn’t understand about this. Though she had asked her mother questions, most of them had not been answered to Nicole’s satisfaction. Everyone changed the subject around her. Even if the biological how of death had been clearly and expertly explained to her with charts and graphs and box-office figures, she could not know the why of any of it, and so she tes
ted what she saw, prodding the scene for answers. She prodded Fosse. As Gwen looked on, Nicole put his heart through an obstacle course, going silent to get him to notice her and telling him he looked like a machine, as if by drawing his attention, and maybe love, she could guarantee his permanence. He would be her father, and fathers didn’t die. Long after she left, his mind was still sutured to her face.

  Being in the hospital was starting to do weird things to his head. Fosse churned under the influence of medication and the erratic postoperative depression they warned him about, and his sense of reality took a turn for the kaleidoscopic. He had too much time to think and rethink, and his regrets lined up at the foot of his bed like Ziegfeld girls and pointed angry fingers in his face. They admonished him for working too hard, for not taking care of his body. When his room wasn’t occupied by friends or lovers or the hopeful types in between, when he wasn’t making quiet, shaky love to Ann Reinking or another girlfriend, it became a white-walled cage where he was made to wait—like an actor auditioning for the role of himself—for a doctor to come in and tell him he was still a person, or at least that, with the right treatment, he stood a good chance of becoming one. “It didn’t bother me that Bob’s girlfriends came to the hospital,” Reinking said. “Bob was sick. I worried about him. That’s all that mattered.” Having sex with Reinking, he wept with relief that impotence hadn’t set in. She had never seen him cry before.

  As afternoon became night, the doctors got younger and the nurses got uglier. The get-well flowers gave the place a funereal look, and all the books and posters that had been brought in were not enough to color the anemic white of his empty room. He was losing his memory. Cue the Ziegfeld girls, the pointed fingers. Someone, they said, scared Bob Fosse out of loving. But who? When? Or was Bob Fosse’s heart mechanism actually perfectly calibrated—to love Bob Fosse forever and ever? Narcissist, they said. Egomaniac. Selfish. Heartless. But if he was so in love with himself, why did he sometimes want to die? Which was it? It couldn’t be both. (Could it?)