by Wasson, Sam
“I’m afraid this show is my image of America right now,” he said. “It’s about the lack of justice in our legal procedure: how justice and law hardly function at all. It makes some interesting comments on the press, about the way they make celebrities out of killers, exploiting and glamorizing criminals. When you think of people like Charlie Manson, or see Mafia killers publishing their autobiographies, you can see that Chicago isn’t just about the 20s. It says some things that are pertinent for today, for now.” The poor reviews he regarded as vendettas against him. “I’m a target now,” he said, “because of the success I’ve had in the past few years. People tend to want to knock a target down.” They said the show didn’t have heart; he said, Heart? In 1975? “Chicago was theater and politics,” Verdon said, “Bob’s response to Watergate.”
Further marginalizing Fred Ebb, Fosse asked Gardner, Chayefsky, and Neil Simon to have a look at troublesome book scenes and contribute jokes. Herb and Paddy did their share, writing between them new material for Roxie and the “Cell Block Tango,” but Simon refused to help. Ebb asked Fosse why. “Neil hated it,” Fosse told him. “But don’t feel bad.” How could Ebb not feel bad? The funniest man on Broadway saw no hope for his musical comedy. “And by the way,” Fosse said to Ebb a little while later, “why didn’t you ever give me the rewrite on the ‘Roxie’ number?”
What rewrite? Fosse had never asked for a rewrite.
“We were in Philadelphia for twelve years,” Kander said. “It never ended.”
After each of the many previews, Tony Stevens and Kathryn Doby would work for an hour, collating Fosse’s notes: notes for Gwen, notes for Chita, notes for the boy dancers, the girl dancers, the conductor, and Jerry Orbach. Stevens would take the dancing notes and Doby the directing notes, type them up, and the following morning, they would go door to door at the Bellevue-Stratford, delivering Fosse’s feedback as if it were room service. But the inevitable morning knock rarely brought pleasure. It meant there were to be more changes tonight, changes different from last night, which had been different from the night before, and not always totally different, but generally slightly different, a matter of inches or seconds. “They were the tiniest things,” Rivera said. “Bobby wants you to do this, Bobby wants you to do that . . .” Keeping notes up to the moment is part of any performer’s job, but for Chicago’s company, finding their way was like finding the door in a house of mirrors. Knock knock knock.
“Come in, honey.”
Chita opened the door. Stevens had painted black bags under his eyes and wrinkle lines on his face, like an old man. They’d been in Philadelphia that long.
“Just one . . . more . . . note . . .”
Most of the dancers were sharing rooms, two to a room, which cut down on Stevens’s and Doby’s travel time but presented the awkward problem of how a girl was supposed to handle Fosse’s nighttime phone calls without offending the roommate whom he hadn’t picked (assuming she had wanted to be picked). This midnight tension Fosse naturally used to his advantage. Asking to speak with one dancer and not the other, he sparked an arterial fuse of jealousy that snaked from the switchboard through the twenty-some floors of the hotel, often circling back to the first spark for the other girl, upping the temperature from jealousy to anger (“He called me first”; “He likes me better”), which he could direct—now that the air was hot and emotions malleable—into a threesome, either with him and them, or him, one of them, and another girl a phone call away.
The phone rang in Cheryl Clark’s room around eleven. Her roommate, who had been with Fosse, picked it up.
“Hi, it’s Bob. Can I talk to Cheryl?”
This was typical. No hello. No hi, how are you? She handed Cheryl the phone and withdrew to the other side of the room.
“Bob?”
“Can you come to my room and we can talk?”
Cheryl couldn’t say she wasn’t flattered. That afternoon, in rehearsal, he had put his hand on her leotard (“That’s good, Cheryl”), and that night, at the Variety Club, they looked at each other differently. It was a look she understood, a pressure she recognized. Though relatively naïve, Clark had seen all the big girls go through this on Pippin. Now it was her turn.
“I’m ready for bed,” Cheryl said on the phone, “but I’ll see you in the morning for rehearsal.” After the third night of phone calls, she went.
A full cart of liquor waited for her inside Fosse’s suite. There was no need to pretend they didn’t know what was about to happen. He poured Cheryl a screwdriver and they started dancing, closer, to Harry Nilsson, to Neil Diamond, and then slower. Another drink and they were touching more than moving; another drink and they weren’t moving. The record ended. There was no intent in his embrace, no innuendo. He held her, not to take her, but to feel her, because feeling felt good. “He was so happy,” she recalled. “I mean, like a kid. I’ve never seen anybody happier. He was in heaven and I felt fabulous.” It rested him.
The attraction she had never known was there was suddenly there. “He was a beautifully built man,” she said, “a gorgeous guy.” Three hours later, around three in the morning, she fell to the bed, exhausted. “It was such a beautiful, intimate encounter, the whole evening.” But Fosse—nearly fifty years old and just four months out of open-heart surgery—still had more to give and take. “We felt such serenity,” Clark said. He begged her to stay.
“Bob, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’ve got rehearsal. At ten in the morning.”
“Okay,” he said. “Come on.”
He insisted on walking her back to her bedroom, though she begged him not to.
“We’ll take the stairs,” he said. “No one will see us.”
“That’s a lot of stairs.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, Bob, this is crazy. You just got out of the hospital.”
“I’m fine.”
“You have a death wish.”
“No, no, no. Let’s go.”
More than three flights of stairs later, she was afraid he was going to have another heart attack. “Come on,” she insisted. “I’m taking you back.”
Fosse shook his head no. Taking Cheryl’s hand, he walked her to her door and said good night.
Weeks later, they were still in Philadelphia.
They needed a new ending. What they had was, at last, Roxie and Velma’s club act, their happy ending, and celebrity’s victory over justice. They might be criminals, but what a show! Consisting of two numbers, “It” and “Loopin’ the Loop,” the finale began with Gwen playing the saxophone and Chita the drums. They would dance triumphantly, and then face their audience to thank them for everything.
VELMA: A lot of people have lost faith in America—
ROXIE: And what America stands for—
VELMA: But we’re the living examples of what a wonderful country it is.
It wasn’t working, Tony Stevens thought, for the reasons Gwen said: Roxie needed her big moment. “She was screaming and crying and hollering in the lobby of the theater downstairs,” Stevens said, “and Bob knew he was in trouble. She had had it with him.” Stevens understood Gwen wasn’t just out for her own solo. She knew ending Chicago on the cynical note that began it wasn’t ending the show at all. The story needed to take the audience somewhere else; Roxie needed to change. But even that posed a problem. Roxie couldn’t simply reform. It was too late in the 1970s for that sort of hokum. What Chicago needed was to have it both ways. If they ended the show with something sincere, even ironically sincere—whatever that meant—they would amend, slightly, the cynical pose that opened Chicago and allow the audience to leave the theater feeling good about feeling bad. “We had to toe a line,” Stevens said, “between a happy ending and a hard one. This was a musical comedy!”
Fosse went to Kander and Ebb and asked them to ditch the two bouncy numbers for a single sophisticated one. After a bitter evening, there could be a kind of pathos in class. “Bobby
was almost embarrassed when he came to us,” Kander said. “He wanted to know if we’d be upset. Freddy and I didn’t even look at each other. We looked at our shoes and said, ‘Oh, gosh . . .’ And we turned and walked out of the hotel ballroom. And the minute we hit the street we started skipping because we were so happy to be out of there.” They returned to their hotel piano and wrote “Nowadays” in half an hour. To make their effort seem more effortful, they took the rest of the day off.
The next morning, while Stevens and Doby worked the dancers on the stage, Gwen, Rivera, and Fosse met downstairs, in the Forrest Theater’s lounge, to hear what Kander and Ebb had taken “all day” to write.
“Nowadays” is a beautiful song—resilient, not tart; wistful, not saccharine—and it’s composed of such rich romance, one could even believe, against the obvious truth, that Roxie and Velma really were as classy as they were pretending to be. What else could pass for good? Where there is no absolute, panache may be all we have—sadly, gladly, trapped but happy—and “Nowadays” is the perfect resolution, ending a show about the dangers of razzle-dazzle with a soaring display of classic showmanship: top hat, white tie, and tails.
Kander and Ebb had done it: the ending was, amazingly, ironic and sincere.
Gwen said, “I want this song, Bobby,” in front of everyone. “Chita and I are very close, so this is going to be fine with her. I want that song.”
Standing up to Fosse was clearly a struggle for Gwen. Though she had been a star for twenty years and his wife for fifteen, she was not accustomed to contradicting him in public, and it showed; her intensity embarrassed everyone. Kander and Ebb looked down, away from Chita. No one spoke.
Fosse asked to hear the song again, this time with Gwen singing.
She began. “She was standing at the end of the piano,” Rivera remembered, “and there were tears in her voice and an unhappy feeling in the room. But she never stopped singing.”
Sensing Kander’s embarrassment at having to hear Gwen sing through such unhappiness—and why she was unhappy, they could not say for sure, but maybe it was because she had come so close to the big moment she wanted and Fosse, dangling it, still hadn’t given it all to her—Chita spoke up. “Bobby, can we do this another time, maybe?”
“She’ll do as I say.”
As Gwen sang, Chita, her frustration mounting, scribbled a note on a piece of paper and slipped it to John Kander. “I was sitting at the piano,” he said, “slumping, so I didn’t have to see the blood that was about to spill.” When he was sure Fosse couldn’t see him, he opened Chita’s note. Give her the song, it said. She just wanted peace.
Of course who sang what was Fosse’s call to make. Ultimately, he had them split the number, a strategy he may have intended to provoke backstage tension that Verdon and Rivera could transfer onstage, to Roxie and Velma. “Bobby, I know what you’re doing,” Gwen was overheard saying, “and I want you to stop. Chita and I won’t go for any of that.” Or perhaps by splitting “Nowadays,” Fosse was doing his best to delegate, giving his stars equal time. “Sharing the wealth is a difficult thing to do,” Ann Reinking said, “and Bob had to make them all equal and equally good. He had to be Henry Kissinger and Sigmund Freud and Bob Fosse.” That evening—on the day he first heard “Nowadays”—Fosse told Reinking the song had the perfect melody, haunting, beautiful, simple, and true, and what he witnessed in the bathroom lounge reached the highest level of artistry and professionalism. “Annie,” he said, “I just saw magnificent talent in front of me.”
Chicago moved back to New York, to the Forty-Sixth Street Theater, for more previews. The former home of Damn Yankees, New Girl in Town, Redhead, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the Forty-Sixth Street Theater was the closest Fosse and Verdon came to a good-luck charm, which was something they needed, now more than ever. On May 21, just over a week ahead of Chicago’s New York opening, A Chorus Line premiered at the Public Theater to once-in-a-generation sensational reviews. Bennett’s “choreography and direction burn up superlatives as if they were inflammable,” wrote Clive Barnes in the Times. “In no way could it have been better done.” It was a landmark, respectful of its progenitors and brazenly innovative, opening with an audition number that Bennett realized with exacting and naturalistic attention to the most granular detail. As in life, some learn the routine faster than others, some wander, some tic nervously in a corner trying to will their bodies to move. None behave as if they’re in a musical—and yet, A Chorus Line is half fantasy. Bennett whirls dream dances from his characters’ confessionals, curling reality and hope in an infinite loop of objective and subjective time. His show is always moving, and his control of the moving parts appears seamless to the point of being innate. It’s masterful.
“A Chorus Line is a great concept for a musical,” Fosse told the Times, “but if you see it again, watch how much they sing and talk about dancing and how little they do.” They do talk, and most of the time like they’re in a TV movie, but behind Bennett’s schmaltz is a real and intense passion for the entire theatrical enterprise, for wanting it, making it, living it, and, most meaningfully, loving it. Abundant with joy, the musical laid bare what Fosse made a career prestidigitating: a big Broadway heart.
A Chorus Line, he knew, would erase Chicago. “They can only buy one hit a season,” Fosse told Ebb.
Chicago opened on June 3 to an ecstatic audience. “Well, we fooled ’em again,” Fosse said to restaurateur Joe Allen as they partied afterward in the Rainbow Room. Gwen arrived in a sequined spaghetti-strap gown with a boa thrown around her neck, and Nicole came in an offhandedly glamorous floppy hat, a streak of blond hair bouncing down her back. Every day, it seemed, Nicole was showing more of her father’s lissome appeal. Now twelve, she needed a chaperone for the boy-girl parties Gwen allowed her (with one rule: no closed doors). Leading her to the dance floor, Fosse watched his daughter with a smile of perfect happiness, as if discovering, in her, in her joy of movement, a creation he could be unequivocally proud of. The only trouble was now she wanted to be a dancer. A ballerina, she said. How was he supposed to respond to that? “I would say it’s not a good life,” he said. “There are so many rejects in the field. It’s great when you’re winning, but boy, it sure isn’t when you’re not. It can toughen a person in the wrong way. It’s odd because the very thing that makes you good is the softness you bring to the work, the sensitivity. This business tends to make you callous because you get so many no’s. You have to develop a suit of armor on the outside to be tough and protect that little thing inside of you that makes you want to be an artist.” It would be hypocritical to discourage Nicole—after all, she had him for a father and Gwen Verdon for a mother—but what else could he say? He was a father. It was his life’s other job to protect her.
(He had said to her, at one point, “I’d rather you swallowed flaming swords in the circus.”
“But Daddy, why?”
“You get applause a lot longer.” Then: “If you really want to be a dancer then you need to go to class.”
She nodded. “I’ll go tomorrow.”
“You have to go today, every day.”
“It’s too late for the four o’clock class.”
“What about a five o’clock class?”)
In the Rainbow Room, word of Clive Barnes’s review spread. Chicago was old news, derivative of Pippin, “one of those shows,” Barnes wrote, “where a great deal has been done with very little.” Again, the show trumped the book; attitude prevailed. Fosse’s hostility was too thick a gravy for such a light dish. Where were the laughs? Chicago’s dud puns, yuks, and gags (all in the vaudeville spirit) had a way of making a gloomy evening gloomier. And then there was Cabaret. Hal Prince’s Cabaret. “It was a steal,” Prince said, “he unabashedly stole Cabaret.” Kerr saw it, Barnes saw it, Frank Rich saw it. And then there was Follies. Sondheim said, “What happened is [Fosse] saw Follies, he saw the last twenty minutes of Follies, and thought, Oh boy . . . and made a career out of it.
Simple as that. I saw what his work was pre-Follies and after Follies. If anything, I wouldn’t say he refined it, he just used it with great skill, like any idea, whether it’s been used before or not, if it’s wielded with skill is worth doing. If you look at the songs at the end of Follies and you look at the songs in Chicago and the way they’re treated, it’s the same thing.” Certainly both shows made good on a similar device, but to separate effect. Sondheim’s vaudeville is abstract, a metaphoric depiction of a nervous breakdown; Fosse’s is representational, a description of corrupt America in show-business terms.
Where Pippin borrowed liberally from diverse traditions of world entertainment to create an all-in language for an out-of-time fable—Esperanto in dance—Chicago excavated vaudeville, the Hebrew of our showbiz past, to satirize the pandemic of our showbiz present, in which everything, even truth and politics, is an act. Popular American amusement has been around since the first Americans paid two pennies to look at the Liberty Bell, but vaudeville, the first industrialized road show, was the original shared performance idiom, spreading and standardizing national tastes, giving Americans their initial looney salmagundi of entertainment personality. Chicago turns the founding fathers of the Palace into folklore, a Brechtian-American commedia dell’arte for the post-Watergate era. Fosse replaced commedia’s stock characters—Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine—with the changeable personae of our vaudeville heritage. Texas Guinan (Velma in “All That Jazz”), Helen Morgan (Roxie in “Funny Honey”), Sophie Tucker (Mama in “When You’re Good to Mama”), Ted Lewis (Billy Flynn in “All I Care About Is Love”), Eddie Cantor (Roxie in “Me and My Baby”), and Bert Williams (Amos in “Mr. Cellophane”)—they are America’s stock company, parts played by Chicago’s corrupt and powerful.