Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Roxie, Velma, Billy Flynn, and the rest aren’t literally the entertainers whose styles they co-opt, but they are literally American showmen, using a good act to cover their bad deeds, and the joke’s on us: we in the audience are the schmoes who paid the pennies, loving every dumb minute of our own swindling. That was bound to offend someone, or a lot of someones, if Fosse got his wish. But Chicago isn’t all jeremiad. “At first Fosse seems to be saying that America treats criminals like superstars,” Stephen Farber wrote after the critics weighed in, but “he ends up saying something subtly different; that entertainers are like killers.” Lie, cheat, kill, die. Whatever keeps you in the act.

  Turned off by Fosse’s vitriol and unmoved by the praise of some critics, audiences stayed away from Chicago for some time. Here Fosse could feel misunderstood. Where once he would have blamed himself, he now blamed them. “For a while,” Tony Stevens said, “it looked like we weren’t going anywhere.” Then Gwen sucked down some of the confetti they threw at her in “My Own Best Friend” and blistered her vocal cords. She had to leave the show, temporarily, for surgery. And Liza Minnelli stepped in, but covertly. Fosse decreed there was to be no promotional fanfare in advance of the change, and hence no new reviews. If Liza got better press, it could kill Verdon and very likely kill Chicago when she returned. They would treat the substitution as they would any other understudy, like Liza Minnelli was no big deal, which actually made the switch a bigger deal, an inside secret everyone wanted to know.

  “Liza learned the show in a week,” said Tony Stevens. “All of a sudden,” he said, “I was teaching her Roxie. Dialogue, staging, steps, everything.” They stayed up until four every night the week of the show, switching from the stage (when it was vacant, in the afternoons), to the studio, to Liza’s house, working in side trips to the show to see Lenora Nemetz in the part so Minnelli could have a better grasp of the bigger picture when her time came. Stevens said, “We would get in the limousine, run lines, arrive at the theater, watch the show, go back to Liza’s, and rehearse. It was crazy.” There weren’t many changes. Fosse would cut Velma from “My Own Best Friend” to make it a solo for Minnelli, and he’d strip some of the ballet from “Me and My Baby.” Fosse and Minnelli were in heaven. “What you have to understand is Bob and Gwen and Liza were show-business animals,” Stevens said. “They lived in that rehearsal room, they came to life on that stage.” Rehearsing the second half of “All That Jazz,” Minnelli jumped on the bed, threw up her arms, and called out, “I love show business, Bobby!”

  Minnelli’s name would not be listed in the program or written in lights above the theater. Only a five-foot billboard placed discreetly outside the entrance noted the change: “At this performance of CHICAGO the role of ROXIE HART usually played by GWEN VERDON will be played by LIZA MINNELLI.” A simple announcement was made before every performance. “When they heard Liza’s name,” Stevens said, “the audience just lost control of itself.” In an era predating that of the obligatory standing ovation, they were on their feet for Minnelli every night she was in the show. “It was a rock show,” Stevens said. “People weren’t sitting in a Broadway theater anymore, but an intimate stadium.” They stationed security guards on the street and security guards at the lip of the stage.

  “That was terrific,” Fosse said to Tony Stevens after the show one night. “But what about Gwen?”

  “She’ll be happy for her. She’s a pro.”

  “Pros are happy for each other?”

  Fosse tried his best to keep the critics away, but Clive Barnes threatened a New York Times boycott of Fryer and Cresson’s future shows if he was kept from writing about the new Chicago, and the embargo was lifted. He wrote, “The cast seems altogether tighter and tauter, and although the far weaker second half of the show remains a problem, this Walpurgisnacht of Chicago in the nineteen-twenties, with its cynicism, irony, and biting wit, has some beautifully decadent charms.” The show that had both disappointed and impressed Barnes now dazzled him. And the ticket buying began: seats were so scarce, producer Martin Richards, who had given his ticket to Julie Styne (who had given his to some high-ranking diplomat), had to stand in the back of his own show.

  New York mayor Abraham Beame took the stage and presented Minnelli with a key to the city. “Never before,” he declared, “has one great star stepped in for another on such short notice for so brief a period a time, with no advance publicity and, most incredibly, without any billing throughout the entire five weeks.” It was the night of her final performance—so those people lining up around the Forty-Sixth Street Theater the next day couldn’t have been buying tickets for Liza Minnelli. They were there for Chicago. For Gwen.

  “Good,” Fosse said. “But I could have done better for her.” He might not have been talking about the show. “I could have done better.”

  To keep Nicole’s heart unmarried to show business, Fosse deliberately led his daughter to all sorts of sports and literature (she was named, he liked to say, for Nicole in Tender Is the Night), but dance kept pulling her back. Ballet in particular. It was the basis for all movement, she told her father, as her mother had told her many times before. Tendues and pliés, he agreed, were pennies in the bank; they seem small, but with practice, each becomes a fortune. Talking like this, Fosse and the young Nicole, the Dalton School girl, seemed to be meeting now for the first time. He knew they had only a short window. Soon she would be gone from him, lost to her teen years, too embarrassed to dance impromptu with Reinking on the backyard deck at Quogue or to giggle openly. The day would come when she wouldn’t let him push her around in shopping carts, which she used to love, he dancing down the aisle, goofing on fake ballet to the supermarket Muzak, she screaming out for more, Do it again, Daddy, again. Those laughs were blood transfusions. “No matter how hard the work, or how depressed he would get over something, there was always an element of humor,” she said. “I could get him to laugh about things.” Soon he’d be lecturing her about drinking (with a drink in hand) and warning her to pick her boyfriends carefully (as girls cycled in and out of his bedroom). Soon he’d be telling her about the casting couch. But first, seventh grade.

  Exhausted, he tried not to think too much about future projects, about Ending, but Aurthur’s script needed his attention. They sent pages back and forth through the fall of 1975, rewriting and interviewing doctors about medicine, hospital culture, and grief. Then, suddenly, a shift occurred. Researching Ending, speaking with health-care professionals about his own hospital experience, remembering his symptoms and the emotions of his recent history, Fosse began to give body to his own story, adding to Ending pieces of primary evidence he knew to be true.

  Aurthur’s adaptation was terrific, doggedly attuned to the quotidian trials of deaths, and grim. A little too grim. To lighten the mood without compromising the principle, they took a cue from Lenny, weaving into the hospital drama a series of into-the-camera interviews, all scripted, with various “doctors,” “patients,” and “researchers.” Like musical numbers, the interviews commented on aspects of the story, adding and shading and offering a kind of relief—that was good—but Fosse and Aurthur still hadn’t found their big idea. How would they make this movie entertaining? (Should they?) Caught between death and Hollywood, they set Ending aside and turned their attention to other matters.

  With Chicago going strong and Pippin still bringing in royalties, Fosse wrote urgently to Lennie Strauss, his accountant, suggesting that since his earning capacity was at its highest, they should invest a part of his savings now, before the inevitable decline set in. Unsurprisingly, Fosse viewed his financial good fortune as he did his professional success—with suspicion. “The black attaché case Fosse carried with him was always overflowing with bank savings-account books,” Julian Barry said, “and I remember asking him why. He told me he had put his money into a variety of savings accounts as he felt that was the best way to protect his assets. He said he didn’t trust the usual route.” As a boy, Fosse had personally defende
d his pennies, storing them safely in a shoebox he kept close at all times. Now that shoebox was diversified—perhaps too diversified. “I’d come home and he’d have yet another bankbook,” Reinking said. “He had coins and dollar bills stashed all over the place. And when he felt frightened, he’d count it. Some of it was in socks, some of it was in a paper bag. ‘Just in case,’ he said.” How much of it was there? “Bob was not a multimillionaire, but he had money,” said Fosse’s friend and financial adviser Kenny Laub. “When Bob came to me to ask me to manage his money, I thought it was a joke at first until he called me a second and third time. He came and told me how much he had and it wasn’t an earthshattering amount.”

  Progress on Ending was briefly and pleasantly interrupted by a call from Herb Gardner offering Fosse a cameo (one scene, a few lines) in John Berry’s film of Thieves, which Gardner adapted from his own 1974 play. Gardner cast Fosse as Mr. Day, a junkie who tries to rob strait-laced Martin Cramer, played by Charles Grodin, in an alley behind a Broadway theater. Regular members of Gardner’s inner circle, Fosse and Grodin had hung out many times before, mostly at Herb’s. “We had this jokingly competitive relationship,” Grodin said. “At a party in LA, I asked Bob’s date to dance very close with me just to see what it would do to him. When he saw it, he leaped off the sofa and cut in.”

  Thieves turned out to be a troubled shoot. Midway into production, Gardner replaced John Berry, and the obstacles only increased from there. A slow and stubborn collaborator, Gardner alienated people on both sides of the table, dragging Thieves many months behind schedule and forcing Sam Cohn into a tough spot with the studio. If Cohn could not keep his client in control, he knew, Paramount would take the picture away from him. But controlling Herb Gardner was even more difficult than controlling Bob Fosse. At least Fosse collaborated. Grodin said, “Herb said once he’d rather not do the whole thing if he had to cut two lines.” With a phone to each ear, the businessman-therapist in Cohn tried to talk Paramount off his back and Gardner off the ledge, but all he managed were reprieves. Thieves was going to bust.

  Sam called Chayefsky, Fosse, and Thieves’ editor Craig McKay to join him and Gardner for an emergency dinner at Wally’s. Thieves wasn’t Herb Gardner’s mess, it was their mess, and Cohn made sure they would clean it up, all of them together, with five brains and one heart. “We were Sam’s children,” said editor Cynthia Scheider. “He was like the king of New York and we were princes and princesses. He did not care if you were down and out. He didn’t care about money. If you had talent, Sam would stick by you no matter what. He just wanted us all working. We were a family.” Wally’s was the family’s dining room.

  Fosse, McKay, and Chayefsky joined Sam and Herb at a table in the back corner, specifically selected by Cohn so they would not turn heads at the outburst he expected from Gardner, which came right on schedule.

  “What do they want from me? I’m giving those schmucks everything I’ve got!”

  “Herbie,” Sam said. “In fairness—”

  “In fairness? I’m in there every day! What do they want from me?”

  “They have a budget, Herbie . . .”

  Chayefsky spoke up. “Sam,” he said. “Listen to him. Let him speak.”

  Cohn did as he was told and waited for Gardner, like one of the crazies in a Herb Gardner play, to run out of steam. He waited through several minutes of expletives, jokes, impassioned appeals—he was practically singing—romantic visions, political diatribes, calls to arms.

  Then Sam spoke. “Herbie, I love you,” he said, “but you’re not doing enough.”

  “I’m doing everything I can!”

  “You’re not doing enough to placate the studio.”

  “Placate the studio? I don’t want to placate the studio! Fuck them! Fuck them!”

  Diners’ heads turned.

  “Well, you’ve got to do something.”

  Gardner’s expression changed. “Well, fuck you too, Sam.”

  “Herbie, Jesus . . .” Paddy said.

  Cohn waited for a retraction. It didn’t come. “All right. If that’s the way you want it, I’m outta here.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way I want it. You’re outta here.”

  “Okay, guys,” Fosse said, “everyone calm down . . . calm down.”

  Days later, Herb’s back went out. “Herb was in agony,” said McKay. “He would drink Myers’s Rum with pineapple juice and painkillers. We even tried working in his apartment. Nothing worked. He couldn’t move.” Their snail’s pace came to a full stop, and Gardner asked Fosse to cut the picture for the interim. Baiting the hook by inviting Fosse to cut his own scene, Gardner hoped Fosse would stay on as long as Gardner was laid out on the floor of his apartment. Of course, Fosse agreed.

  When he arrived in the cutting room the first day, Fosse told McKay he did not want to override Gardner’s work, only add and subtract where needed. “Fosse never hesitated,” McKay said. “He knew what he wanted and when he didn’t; he’d say, ‘Craig, you know what it should be. Do it.’ But I have no idea how he saw anything with all that smoke in front of his face.” Soon Fosse settled in. “He was cutting in his style,” McKay said. “The way he went to certain places and how quickly he did it. He was always trying to get a lot of detail, cutting more than you would have normally, punctuating stuff with short cuts. He liked to get around a lot, image-wise. I think he got more humor out of it that way.”

  They were at it for three weeks, Fosse, McKay, and Fosse’s veteran assistant editor Trudy Ship. “Craig,” he announced one afternoon, “today I became a millionaire” (courtesy of Pippin and Chicago), and he took him out to lunch.

  Another day, he was standing behind the Moviola, behind Ship, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a copy of Kübler-Ross’s blockbuster On Death and Dying tucked under his arm. “You’re carrying that book and smoking?” she asked. His reply was flat: “Uh-huh.”

  He’d heard about the book from Stuart Ostrow, who had borrowed its five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—to frame his first play, Stages, then still in process. Though Ostrow had left Ending, Fosse considered borrowing what Ostrow had borrowed for Aurthur’s script, which in the spring of 1976 still needed work. The same questions remained. Chayefsky had weighed in with notes and the latest was out to Gardner, but it was Fosse’s pal Pete Hamill who came back with the most inspired feedback of all. Ending was relentless, Hamill explained, more like journalism than a work of art. Fosse’s problem wasn’t dying-related but form-related. What if he, for instance, took those Lenny-style documentary interludes and turned them into musical sequences? They could be illustrative of the Kübler-Ross phases. If Jay, the dying man, could somehow visualize these concepts, then Fosse could maybe give denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance a sort of grandeur that would make them cinematic and emotionally relatable to all. And making Jay a dancer or choreographer would justify that kind of dreamlike maneuver. After all, one could not make a straight documentary-like film about dying, as Ending endeavored to be. It was impossible. There were no reports from the deceased, no primary-source accounts of life’s final moments. The only way to show it was to imagine it, to dance it. To dance what it felt like to die? Did that make sense to Fosse? Yes—yes, it did—to be truthful about the unknowable, one had to invent. To know death, Bob Fosse had to turn to fantasy, to entertainment. Reality: That was the bullshit. But show business—singing and dancing and all that jazz—held the absolute truth.

  Eleven Years

  ANN REINKING WAS his date to the Tonys, held that year at Broadway’s Shubert Theater, where A Chorus Line had moved from the Public and would remain for the next fifteen years. There’s no such thing as home-court advantage for the Tonys, but nonetheless, A Chorus Line had it. Velocity and industry support—it had those too. “We were pretty sure they were going to win everything,” Reinking said, “but you always hope.” The nomination breakdown gave no hint of the outcome. A Chorus Line had twelve and Chica
go had eleven. Bob Fosse had three and Michael Bennett (without book credit) had two, and their respective partners (muses? Best friends?), Gwen Verdon and Donna McKechnie, stars of each show, were up against each other. “It was hell,” Tony Stevens said. “Bob was in hell.”

  Category by category, Chicago lost. “It was like you start disappearing,” Reinking said. “You watch as you’re slowly being erased.” The Tonys were going to A Chorus Line, first in trickles, then in waves. “Every time they cut back to Bob,” said Alan Heim, who was watching on TV, “he sunk a little deeper in his chair.” Best score went to Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban (cynical remark: “conventional”), best book to James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante (cynical remark: “sentimental”), best actress to McKechnie (“You know she can’t act,” Gwen said. “She was just playing her own story”), Michael Bennett for choreography (cynical remark: “unimaginative”), and Michael Bennett for direction (cynical remark . . . none). By the time the envelope for best musical of the year appeared onstage, all suspense was gone—the audience actually laughed as it was opened. The Tony went to Fosse’s old friend Joe Papp, producer of A Chorus Line. They had known each other since they were kids in the navy, doing drag shows on Pacific island shores, and Fosse barely acknowledged him on his way out. Chicago lost everything.

  If winning defeated Bob Fosse, then losing was actually a running start. “Being depressed is not a bad thing,” he would say, looking back. “It makes you think. It makes you say, what’s wrong? Why am I feeling this way?”

  “He put himself down,” Reinking said, “then he defended himself.”

  Quogue: his parry-riposte to New York. There he worked on Ending with Bob Aurthur. Taking Hamill’s notes, Fosse decided to turn the movie into a story of his own death, that is, how he imagined his death would have been if instead of checking out of New York Hospital, he’d never left. Tape recorders in hand, Fosse and Bob Aurthur interviewed everyone, friend and foe, who had been around for the Lenny/heart attack/Chicago episode. Fosse wanted to know the truth about that period, the mean truth, and started asking questions, which some took to be a pretext for persecution, as if by interrogating the witnesses under the auspices of Art, he could finally get them to open up about what they really thought of him. Aurthur and Fosse divided up the list.