by Wasson, Sam
Ann Reinking was sitting beside him when the pain came back.
“I don’t feel good,” he said. “Get the nurse.”
She took one look at his ashen face and called for help. She knew the symptoms.
“I don’t feel good,” he repeated.
“They’re coming.”
They weren’t. Still recovering from her own injury, Reinking, moving as quickly as she could, skidded into the hall to call again for help. Finding no one, she limped back into Bob’s room to make sure. He looked worse; his lips had turned that bluish color.
“Annie . . .”
“I’m coming right back.”
She went out again, hauling herself down the empty corridors, yelling for help, but no one answered. Where was everyone? For a moment, she considered bursting into patients’ rooms, just throwing the doors open, hoping to find an ally, someone—and then a nurse appeared.
“You have to help me. I think he’s having another heart attack.”
The old woman turned up an eyebrow. “We just gave him his shot.”
“He’s in pain! He needs another one!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I—”
Shaking, Reinking raced, limping, down the hall to Fosse’s room.
“I’m just going to stand here until they come,” she said to him. “I’m just going to stand here with you.”
He was breathing hard. Like he was drowning, very slowly.
“I’m right here,” she said.
She called out again for help, but she wouldn’t scream—that would scare him. She would just hold his hand, calling out with gentle forcefulness, and wait.
He was sweating. “Annie . . .”
Two nurses arrived, took a look at Fosse, and knew right away it was real. He was having another heart attack.
He was someplace else, in the heart of his brain, dreaming, crying, singing Nicole a rhythmic song called “Every Time My Heart Beats,” which he didn’t know but sang perfectly, and nuns appeared, and as the nuns danced, Nicole listened and he explained to her what it felt like to die. And she understood. They both did. The dream’s rhythm told him so.
Shirley MacLaine was holding his hand when he woke up. Gwen had caught her up on everything, and MacLaine had expected to see him coming back to life. Instead she saw, in his eyes, something like the Know.
“I had a strange dream under the anesthetic,” he said. “More like a vision or a real picture.”
“What was it?”
“I was dying,” he said. He described everything he could remember: the rhythm; Nicole; how the number about dying came to him, not in fragments, but all at once, complete from beginning to end.
Fosse said, “I thought to myself, Even as I’m dying, I’m working.”
But he didn’t die. He was discharged on December 10, 1974. Leaving the hospital, Fosse and Reinking must have made quite a pair—she in her back brace and he, like someone’s grandmother, being wheeled to the curb. The New York freeze stung their bodies, but these two were dancers; pain was negotiable. Shredded by the stage, unsure of their future as show people or the real-life prospects of their love, the twenty-five-year-old ballerina and her shrunken forty-seven-year-old boyfriend ducked into a cab, huddled close, and headed home for the first time in six weeks, trapped but happy.
Fosse quit smoking. Gwen threw a Christmas party, reuniting him with the company of Chicago. On New Year’s Eve, at Herb Gardner’s party, he got drunk.
He had to get out of town. Being in New York and not working was like being in bed with Jennifer Nairn-Smith and not touching. He called Janice.
“Can you get me some Dexies?”
“No, Bob.”
“Please.”
“That will kill you. You’ll be dead.”
“Well, so what?”
“I won’t. No.”
“But it’s the only thing. I will not work if I don’t have it.”
“Then maybe you need to take a break from work.”
He took off for Palm Desert, and then Los Angeles, to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he ran into Emanuel Wolf. “Bob looked terrible,” Wolf said, “as limp as a rag. I wanted to pick him up and carry him to his room.” Three days later, Wolf ran into Fosse again, this time at a Beverly Hills disco, where Bob was partying like crazy. Wolf could not believe he had the stamina.
“Manny! Manny!” Fosse shouted from across the room. “I want you to meet the most beautiful, wonderful woman I’ve ever met.”
Fosse introduced him to Raquel Welch, who looked every inch the most beautiful, wonderful woman he had ever met. Wolf and Welch said their hellos and their goodbyes, and Wolf left.
Welch and Fosse were awed by each other: he by the complete package of her beauty and intelligence, she by how he used creativity to free himself from depression. He explained to Welch that when he had to contain his ideas, as he had in the hospital, it kept all that was potentially good about him from coming out. It kept him locked inside. If Fosse could share that good with the world, he might cross the bridge out of his isolation, but only if what he shared matched exactly what was in his brain—and there was so much of it to share, too much, more than he could get out. So he often felt stranded on the other side of his good ideas, kept from creative potential and convinced, again, of his failures. Explaining this to Welch helped; it was a little like crossing that bridge.
At three o’clock that morning, Emanuel Wolf’s hotel phone rang.
“Manny, I’ve never met a woman like this.”
“Bob . . . I’m sleeping.”
Fosse kept him on the phone for twenty minutes, exulting in Raquel Welch’s every detail. She was gorgeous, lovely, the most perfect, incredible . . .
“Bob, let’s talk tomorrow, okay? I gotta sleep.”
“Sure, sure, Manny. Sure.”
Two hours later the phone rang again.
“I have to finish telling you about Raquel Welch.”
“Bob—”
“You really can’t believe this woman.”
“I gotta go now, Bob.” Wolf hung up and turned over. As he drifted off, Wolf thought: She brought him back to life.
Twelve Years
IN MARCH 1975, Fosse returned to Broadway Arts, to Chicago, meaner than he left it. “After the heart attack, he was getting angry and scared,” Reinking said. “He was scared to go back. According to Bob, they would make more money if he died than if he lived. You have to be in a certain mood to find that funny.” The insurance policy legitimized a paranoia that later proved to be half true. Chicago’s producers had no intention of closing the show and collecting a profit, but they did discuss contingencies with Robbins and Prince. “Hal offered in the spirit of trying to help out,” producer Ira Bernstein said. “Naturally, the decision was made to wait for Bobby.”
Fosse’s body no longer worked as fast as his brain, and he wondered if they wondered if he was still the same Fosse, as if talent were the same thing as stamina. “He got winded; he got tired,” Pam Sousa said, “and it made him angry. He couldn’t be as alert and creative for eight hours.” As if Chicago were a part of Fosse’s body, its dances slowed almost to a stop, and the show’s tone began to change. “That will hold,” he would say, meaning slow to a freeze. Chicago had always been cynical; now it was sinister. Protracting the movement underscored the sense of suspense, of predatory intent, even death. Pippin’s chorus was wicked; these girls were zombies. “It got creepy,” Tony Stevens said. “When we first heard ‘They Both Reached for the Gun,’ we thought, What a fun number! But when Bob staged it, no one could believe how slow it was. It was like swimming underwater. There was this sinking feeling. I was like, Okay, this is the dance of a very depressed man.” Fred Ebb begged Stevens to pick up the tempo, but he didn’t. “You want me to tell Bob Fosse to go faster?” he replied. “I don’t think so!”
“I’m not sure he even wanted to be there,” said Cheryl Clark. He always said he undertook Chicago for Gwen, and through the early stages he wore his dut
y comfortably, but returning to rehearsal after surgery, he seemed to resent the obligation. He could be distant, almost apathetic, like he didn’t care, didn’t want to be there. On the waltz section of “They Both Reached for the Gun,” Fosse told the dancers to “treat this section like an E. E. Cummings poem.” This was bafflingly abstract, totally unlike Fosse’s famously specific directives. “Bobby doesn’t know how he wants to handle the jury scene,” stage manager Phil Friedman told Dick Korthaze, “but he wants you to go through that trunk and see what you come up with.” Picking a cloche hat, a red nose, a bad toupee, a flask, a pince-nez, and an ear horn (among other things), Korthaze created a half a dozen personalities, snapping different attitudes from jury chair to jury chair. Fosse’s sole remark after seeing Korthaze’s wondrous creation was “When you make the change, do it when the focus is on Gwen.”
Gwen. More than ever, his resentment tangoed with his reverence. “Their love was reinitiated in the rehearsal room,” Stevens said. “It was a true love affair in the sense that there were arguments, pushing and pulling, passive-aggression, misunderstandings, and total trust.” One could say he was trying to get her to dance her best, but one could also say he was breaking her down. One could say he wasn’t yet completely fluent in Verdon’s new, older body, but one could also say he was as fluent as he needed to be in the terms of her contract, which held him to the wall. “They were having a difficult time,” Kander said. “I remember once she said, ‘They can pack his heart in a sawdust box for all I care.’” The show’s ending was a source of consistent disagreement. If everyone runs out on Roxie, Verdon argued, then Roxie needs to have a triumphant moment, like “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy, to take back power and win the day. “She asked Fosse for it,” Stevens said, “she begged him for it, but he wouldn’t give it to her.” One could say he wanted Roxie to wind up wounded, like Pippin. One could say he wanted to wound Gwen, either to keep her from walking away with the show (“She knew,” Stevens said, “that it would be her show if she had that moment”) or to keep her fighting, fighting as Roxie Hart fought, for her own moment. One could say he was directing.
“I thought Bob was like the Emcee from Cabaret,” Stevens said. “The observer, the manipulator. He would do things to get a reaction. He’d say something to someone, give them a note, and he knew it was going to just raise their ire. He just knew it. He’d say, ‘Watch what I’m going to do to so-and-so,’ and I’d say, ‘Don’t tell me that. I don’t want to know that.’ He would do it to create competition, to bring people closer to their parts, or to make an example of someone for the company. Sometimes his dancers were a bit full of themselves—they knew they were the best, they were Fosse dancers—and he would use that to get them to go even farther, which is what he was always doing with himself.” There were two ways to get results, Fosse told Reinking: one positive, one negative. Negative is when you force it out of them. Positive is when you draw it out of them. “If you ever want anything from anybody,” he once said to Laurent Giroux, “the first thing you do is you put your hand on their shoulder and you give them a compliment, like ‘You’re really fantastic . . .’ And just as they’re going, ‘Oh, really?,’ you slip in what you want and you’ll always get it.”
On “Funny Honey,” Roxie’s phony love song to her fall-guy husband, Fosse seemed to be using the negative. “He made Gwen unattractive,” Stevens said. “Some of the poses, the way she sat on the piano, Roxie was supposed to be drinking and he wanted her to get more and more drunk as it went on. Some people thought he wanted to destroy her there. Bob would say it was appropriate for the piece, but not everyone was sure. You see, you’re dealing with very clever people here. Bob knew Gwen would salvage herself no matter what he gave her. Maybe that’s why he was doing it, to give her something to outshine, to showcase how far her talent would go.” Similarly, Fosse’s original idea for “Razzle Dazzle,” lawyer Billy Flynn’s courtroom number, was a circus-like orgy ruder than the erotic spectaculars of New Girl in Town and Pippin, and less artful. Whatever satire Fosse intended, he lost to the gut punch of gnarled, self-humping globs of groans and limbs. He lost Verdon in it too. “That’s the great Gwen Verdon up there,” Chita Rivera protested to Ebb, “and look what they’re doing!”
“Chicago was always cynical but there was supposed to be something joyous about it too,” John Kander said. “There was this feeling that sex was bad. I don’t know where that came from. It was ugly.” It was vengeful, like a retaliation. But against whom? The producers, for banking on his early death; the dancers, for dancing freely, as if they weren’t wrecked from bypass surgery; Gwen, for roping him into it; Fred Ebb, for questioning Fosse’s story instincts; or the New York critics for handing Fosse—he could only imagine—the same old razzle-dazzle rap? Or was Chicago railing against the audience, soon to fill the Forty-Sixth Street Theater, for buying its own bullshit? Was Fosse preemptively hating them before they could hate him? “There was a feeling of tension all the time,” John Kander said. “We didn’t know what to do.”
He began smoking again, Hav-A-Tampas and cigarillos, putting the dancers in the awkward position of wondering how and if they should ask him to stop. “I’m walking off the stage unless you put that cigarette out,” Chita would say, and Fosse would oblige. When she went away, he’d light another. Once, Chayefsky bounded across the room and, in front of the entire cast, slapped the cigarette out of his mouth. “I felt pretty bad about it,” Fosse said later, “and then I realized it was an act of love.” Love—he could accept it only from Paddy.
After he left the relative security of the New York studio for tryouts in Philadelphia, Fosse’s depression met Fosse’s fear. “Going out of town was a sad time for Bob,” Pam Sousa said, “because he had to let go. He really felt, leaving the studio, eighty percent [of the show] had to work. Once you’re up and running, there’s the added expense of changing the show and of course it’s hard on the company, rehearsing at day and performing at night. In Philly he told us, ‘I’m going to make this darker and meaner.’” Neon set pieces, part of the older, brighter Chicago, were discovered in the alleyway.
Rewriting the book, or getting Ebb to, Fosse could exorcise his desperation at little cost to the producers. But at great cost to Ebb; as Fosse’s scapegoat, and a natural sufferer, he agonized through every rewrite. “Their angsts were not well matched,” Stevens said, “and neither were their ideas for the show. Fred missed its pizzazz, and out of town he realized he wasn’t going to get it back.” Fosse snapped at him publicly, but Fred Ebb admired his director too much to deny him and was, by nature, too gentle to fight. During rehearsal, Candy Brown found Ebb in the bathroom, crying alone. “Why don’t we get on a train and go back to New York?” John Kander offered one night. “This isn’t worth it. No show is worth dying for.” One afternoon, after a particularly dark episode, Kander, Ebb, and Chita Rivera met in the back of the theater to weigh their options. “We made a pact,” she said. “We agreed that if one of us goes, we all go.”
They were staying at the Bellevue-Stratford, a five-minute walk from the theater, and unwinding as a group at the local Variety Club, where an Equity card bought you drinks at reduced “theatrical” rates and where there was a little dance floor in the back to release tension. Fosse was drinking more than usual, putting Stevens in the tricky position of having to monitor him. On a few occasions, Stevens literally had to carry Bob to his hotel room and slip him into bed. “His suite was so clean,” Stevens said. “I expected to see the place a debauched nightmare, with pills on the bathroom floor and cigarette holes in the pillows, but it was like no one was living there.” One night, hanging up Fosse’s jacket, Stevens discovered a closet full of black—shirts, pants, jackets—all nearly identical, one after the next. He asked Fosse where he shopped. “Gwen bought them,” Fosse said. In the suite again, stumbling to bed, he said, “They don’t like me, do they?”
“What do you care?”
Fosse laughed. “I’m not a bad guy, you know.”
“I don’t know,” Stevens teased. “You might be.”
“I hear Michael Bennett’s a really nice guy.”
“Oh, he is—nice, talented, good-looking . . .”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
(Fosse called Stevens Mary Sunshine, and Stevens called Fosse the Prince of Darkness.)
“Is there a Hershey bar in there?” Fosse asked next, pointing to a jacket.
Stevens dug through the pockets, past a folded-up picture Nicole had drawn, found the candy, and tossed it across the room.
“My dad,” Fosse said, “he used to work for Hershey.”
No matter how late they stayed up or how drunk he was at bedtime, Fosse was never anything less than completely prepared for the next day’s rehearsal. Turning to Stevens, who was Fosse’s inside line to Michael Bennett (or so he hoped), he would ask, with increasing regularity and decreasing irony, “Is this better than A Chorus Line?” “Bobby, it’s totally different.” “Do you think Michael Bennett could do this?” “It’s apples and oranges.” “But what do you think?”
Chicago’s first preview was a disaster, a sign many took to mean the show was too nasty, but to Fosse it meant Chicago was not nasty enough. The anger he once turned inward, against himself, he now turned outward. Critics, dancers, writers—they were Fosse’s postoperative antagonists. Seeking vengeance, he scoured preview audiences for signs of discomfort; when people walked out in the middle of the show, he would say, “We got ’em!” Their laughter meant they missed the point; Fosse did not intend Chicago to be a comedy.