by Wasson, Sam
Aurthur got Dustin Hoffman. “What do you think?” Aurthur asked. “Do you think Bob’s queer?”
“Bob?” Dustin had never considered it. “They called him Mr. Multiples.” Girls.
“Do you think he’s covering up?”
“I would not say he was queer. But I wouldn’t say Bob didn’t have any . . . characteristics.” It went right into the script.
Fred Ebb got a call in California. Fosse asked, “Can I use the song title ‘All That Jazz’ for the movie? Because it’s yours.”
“Actually, it’s not. I was reading one of the Time-Life book series, and there was a chapter entitled ‘All That Jazz.’ I took it from there. I didn’t really invent it, Bob.”
This impressed Fosse. “If there is a line that you take from somebody,” he said, “you acknowledge it. I never do. The sincerest form of flattery is to steal.” Clicking on the tape recorder, he asked, “When I had my heart attack during Chicago, when you knew that I wasn’t going to be back for rehearsals for a while, and that it might have meant closing down the show, what was your reaction?”
“I was horrified, Bob. I was disappointed and sad.”
“What about the rest of the people who were involved with the show? Was anybody happy?”
“No, nobody was happy.”
“I thought people were happy. Gwen told me a couple of people were happy.”
“Nobody was happy. It was the loss of a job if nothing else, and a concern for you, who we all clearly idolized.”
“What about Hal Prince?”
“What about Hal Prince?”
“When you and Kander went to Hal Prince to have him take over the show . . . You apparently thought I was going to die.”
The more Ebb denied, the harder Fosse pushed.
All through the summer of 1976, each of Fosse’s comrades got a phone call. Each was told to speak fearless truths about Bob Fosse; no matter how hurtful the revelations, he wanted everyone’s best shot. Herb Gardner said when Fosse openly condemned himself, it was not to repent but to be absolved, to be forgiven by someone who then says, You’re wonderful, don’t be so hard on yourself, I love you. Gardner said the pity play was Fosse’s biggest con of all. Nicole confessed she knew all about the girls, going back to Mary-Ann Niles. She confessed she knew he’d married Niles because she was pregnant. Verdon, interviewed by Aurthur, remembered how Fosse, jealous of her talent, had hated her when they first met. Wasn’t she jealous of all his girls? Not really. She knew Death was the only real affair of his life. Ann admitted that he’d changed after his operation. Chayefsky said he was punishing Ann for making him fall in love with her. It’s the same story with every girl, Hoffman said. Fosse starts as their gay best friend; that’s how he gets them. He loses them, Paddy said, when things get serious and he knows he’s going to fail them. Then Fosse turns against them. Then, as he expected, he loses and—the slingshot draws back—Fosse is himself once again. He couldn’t have anyone love him. But, Dr. Sager explained, he let himself be adored. For some reason, probably having to do with something that had happened to him as a kid in burlesque, he had to prove every woman was a whore. Those with self-respect would and should leave him. His only chance for love, Sager said, for a future, was Nicole.
As Fosse swam through these unvarnished opinions, in Quogue that summer, an idea for a ballet began to take shape. He imagined a company of boring businessmen aboard a cross-country flight from LA to New York, or vice versa. In midair, to the spoken music of a Richard Pryor or Bob Newhart monologue, an orgy breaks out aboard the plane, and as more suits are sucked in, the aircraft expands, opening up, pulling apart to clear space for the action, leaving only the movie screen and the seats to dance around. When the plane lands at the end of the ballet, the businessmen reach for their briefcases and walk off as they came on, as if nothing had happened. He wrote to Robert Joffrey in June 1976, accepting an invitation he had been putting off answering for over a year, since his release from New York Hospital, an offer to give him an original Bob Fosse ballet. To at last measure his choreographic worth against ballet—perhaps the only true metric—was, at his age and in his condition, beginning to look like a now-or-never proposition.
But the ballet he imagined for Joffrey never got to Joffrey. It went instead to the movie Fosse was bringing to life with Bob Aurthur. Secluded in Quogue, the two Bobs took the best of their transcripts (almost a hundred, Fosse claimed ), and began to discuss All That Jazz, their unwritten movie about a director-choreographer tired of mounting the same old irrelevant musical comedies and striving to make a piece of meaningful entertainment before he dies. What scenes from Fosse’s life would make good scenes in Fosse’s movie? Using actual names, an early scene at Wally’s would have Bob, Herbie, Paddy, and Sam discussing NY to LA, Bob’s next musical, which he’s dreading (“the thought of one more time step . . .”) but that he owes to Gwen, his estranged wife. There would be scenes from his past: strippers, an alcoholic mother, an absent father. The heart attack, the hospital. A hallucination. Coming to, Bob would tell Paddy and Herbie he has an idea: a movie of his life, strippers, mother, father, hospital, hallucination. Then a second heart attack, one he doesn’t survive. He’s dead. We cut to his memorial at Wally’s. Bob’s ghost is there, watching. He tries to get his guests’ attention. They don’t hear him. Why don’t they hear him? Someone has to hear him. Returning to the hospital, his spirit implores the sick and dying to enjoy their lives while they can, to live while they’re alive, and then in some middle-reality limbo apart from life and death, he sings a farewell number, maybe “Bye Bye Life,” borrowed from “Bye Bye Love.” Then his spirit expires. Hard cut: Bob’s time on earth is summed up in “interviews” with characters from the film, and All That Jazz ends on opening night of his last show, NY to LA. And it’s a hit. Hal Prince gets the credit.
Aurthur wrote a first draft quickly, in a week, Fosse said. But the new story idea had changed their working relationship. Returning to the city, the Bobs were unsure of each other. Fosse’s idea for a limbo world between death and life worried the other Bob. It was too arty. Arty? Fosse countered. It’s my brain. As in: Not yours, mine. “Bob Aurthur said that I was crazy, that it was far out, pretentious,” Fosse said. “But I saw a big room with cobwebs, junk, old scenery and costumes, theatrical memorabilia; the scene was in the character’s head and his head was a mess.” They were a long way from Ending and Paramount had let their option lapse, so Sam Cohn, in search of new funds, sent All That Jazz to Dan Melnick at Columbia. Cohn admired Melnick. He knew his boss, studio president David Begelman, had a solid history with Fosse and would be open to teaming again. And he was right. Columbia picked up All That Jazz, and Fosse signed on as director, coproducer, cowriter, and (though he denied it) subject of his autobiography. Emotionally and artistically, the project was without question the most ambitious work of his career and, judging by his constant cough, very likely his last. “I’ve only got one more film in me,” he said to editor Craig McKay during Thieves, “and this is it.” McKay knew Fosse wasn’t talking about retiring. “He knew he was going,” the editor said, “there was no question about that.”
Fosse flew to LA to meet with Melnick and begin casting. Like most executives, Melnick dressed his Beverly Hills home with impeccable works of art and a kind of standard-issue modernism that told artists he was arty and his bosses that he wasn’t. Despite his house and shiny car, Melnick was New York all the way; Fosse liked that. His reputation tended toward the kinky, and his dark and wily appearance—he looked like a Jewish Cassavetes—did little to contradict it. Melnick wasn’t afraid of leveling with you; he was afraid of you thinking he was afraid to. So he leveled with you all the time, compulsively, sometimes on subjects he wasn’t quite prepared to level with you on, and if you asked for more, asked him to elaborate, he’d tell you, on the level, he wasn’t quite prepared to, probably relieved to finally be on the level with the level. He was a truth junkie; Fosse liked that too.
It was
time to talk stars. Who would play the character they now called—borrowing from Chayefsky’s play Gideon—Joe Gideon? The studio encouraged Melnick to encourage Fosse into casting an actor likable enough to undercut Gideon’s distasteful qualities. Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were obvious choices. But Beatty (after his customary period of intense deliberation) asked Fosse to let Gideon live at the end, and Nicholson, who took Fosse to a Laker game, wasn’t quite the dancing type—but that didn’t stop Jack from trying. When Fosse arrived at his house for a meeting, Nicholson came to the door in a pair of tap shoes. Fosse approached Dustin Hoffman, and Hoffman, an admirer of Bob Aurthur’s, read the script and found it surprisingly moving, but he declined. Once with Fosse was enough. Keith Carradine?
In Hollywood, Fosse met Jessica Lange. On the verge of her film debut—the King Kong remake Boredom, Whimsy, and Flash had turned down—Lange was by all standards a beauty, airy like Marilyn Monroe but serene and more relatable. Few in Hollywood had any faith in her talent. “I think you’re wonderful,” Fosse said. It was catnip to a young actress. “He befriended me in a very unfriendly town,” Lange said. “I mean, he really cared about me and how I did. He was a great friend. Nobody was ever more loyal and caring than Fosse and I knew he wanted to do something for me.” In other words, they were lovers. He had her in mind for All That Jazz, for Angelique, the Angel of Death who presides over limbo, flirting Gideon’s life away from him. That’s how Fosse had always described his fascination with death—a flirtation. “This is a man who did not want to die,” Reinking said. “But he did want to flirt.” Putting Lange in the role, he literalized the metaphor. “When you think something’s about to happen to you in a car,” he said, “or on an airplane, coming close to The End, this is a flash I’ll get—a woman dressed in various outfits, sometimes a nun’s habit, that whole hallucinatory thing. It’s like the Final Fuck.”
Angelique, Fosse said, was the one character Joe Gideon couldn’t bullshit. He expects her to be repulsed by the ugly, self-destructive aspects of his life, but in fact, destruction being her greatest achievement, the closer he comes to death, the more she loves him. Killing himself is wooing her. Fosse—the real Gideon—was practicing off camera. “He used to tell people how he was trying to woo me,” Lange said; that is, he knew she was seeing someone else and wanted her all to himself. In New York, she came to one of Fosse’s parties with Charles Grodin, her King Kong costar. “He assumed she was my girlfriend,” Grodin said, “and made a quick move on her, which I didn’t dispute. I guess he felt guilty [for trying to seduce her away] because he disappeared into another room and came back with a record from Evita, which hadn’t come to America yet.”
Still without a star, Fosse couldn’t move on All That Jazz, and he directed his attention to putting Ann Reinking into Chicago. After almost two years, Verdon was finally stepping out of Roxie; and in February of 1977, Reinking took off from A Chorus Line—she had taken over Cassie, the lead—to step in. Technique and personality made her, like Gwen, a Fosse dancer nonpareil, but their intimacy—unmatched by any other Fosse dancer—licensed both Svengali and Trilby to push her that much harder, and more than just her body.
“Is it good?” he asked about the show one night.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s good.”
“You think it’s mediocre.”
“No, I think it’s good.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“Yes, Bob . . .”
He refused to accept it, so she reached for a dictionary and took him through each definition of good. There was no mention of mediocrity. “See?” she said. “I said good and I meant good. If you think it isn’t good, stop taking it out on me.”
“He was hooked on his stress,” Reinking said. “He knew the stress was killing him and knew he couldn’t work without it. It was a drug like any other. I think that’s why he created his own bad guy, to push him. But then that persona which once helped him actually started to hurt him. It hurt his heart; it hurt his mind. It hurt me that people began to see him as so dark. But he wasn’t so dark. Not always.”
Dancer Laurent Giroux suspected Fosse didn’t want to be thought of as a nice guy. The two were at a party, standing in a corner, when Giroux decided to call him on it, to Fosse Bob Fosse.
“You know what?” he said.
“What, Larry?”
“You know, with all the black and the brooding and the women and all this stuff, you don’t fool me one fucking bit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you and I know that underneath that rough exterior, you’ve got a heart of gold”—Giroux pinched his thumb and forefinger together—“that big.”
Fosse loved that. “Jesus, Larry, that’s good,” he said, his laugh taking over. “That’s really, fucking good.”
In a life apart from Paddy and Herb, Fosse indulged in good-time friendships with guys’ guys, like real estate maven Kenny Laub. Chartering a boat for an island vacation, Fosse and Laub could skim off the top where the deli boys plumbed and plumbed the depths. He might escape—to the extent that he could—the panics of work and kick back al fresco for a hot week on the sea. Laub said, “If Bob had a free evening and didn’t have a broad he wanted to call, he wasn’t going to call Paddy. He was going to have some fun. I was his break and Bob took breaks as hard as he worked. He was an extremist, and fun was one extreme. Kindness was another.” Joining them on St. Martin might be Cy Coleman or Laub’s close friend the comedian Dick Shawn. There would be dancing, eating, and time enough for nothing at all. With girls. “On those trips,” Laub said, “I would occasionally see him reading on the beach. Occasionally.”
Partying with Fosse, Laub played among the beauty and beauties of show business, and Fosse, with Laub as his guide, reveled in New York’s other high life: money. Laub knew money. Fosse did not. At dinner at Elaine’s one night, Laub grinned across the table. “Bob,” he said, “we’re a bunch of chauvinist pigs.”
“Showbiz and women.” Fosse lit a cigarette. “Assholes and vaginas.”
Meanwhile, All That Jazz had no star, Columbia kept ordering changes to the script, and Fosse, getting less young every day, had to do something, anything, before Michael Bennett made his next move, before the clock ran out on Fosse’s knees, his back, his ventricles. He didn’t have much of an idea, but he had ideas—plural—for an all-dance show with no book and no story, a Broadway musical written the way Bob Fosse wrote, in dance. “I think he wanted to prove to himself that just dancing was enough,” Reinking said. “That he could make a great show without the other elements.” In July 1977, a month after his fiftieth birthday, he stepped into Broadway Arts with no book, half a century of unsettled scores, and one question: How much did he know about dance?
Before it was too late, he wanted to see if he could carry a show, alone, on the strength of his own talents. He wanted to show those talents to be diverse, richer, and more expansive than his own style, having touched its bottom in Chicago. He wanted to escape the strictures of the musical for a paradise of free movement where no writer, designer, actor, or formal convention could stop him from checking off the ideas he had left to check off on his dream list. Refusing to be refused, he wanted to push the body farther than was healthy. He wanted to show that A Chorus Line had nothing to do with dance. He wanted to do a show about love, which is to say about dance, and he wanted to star. As All That Jazz was his life in death, Dancin’ would be his life in dance, an autobiography of style. And it had to push him; merely too far was not far enough. For the project to interest Fosse, Dancin’ would have to ask more of him, emotionally and artistically, than Redhead, The Conquering Hero, Pippin, or Chicago had and take him through a deeper pit to a deeper triumph.
Selecting the music was the closest he came to writing an actual book. To begin, Fosse delivered music director Gordon Harrell a list of potential songs twenty pages long. “I don’t know what I want to do with these,” Fosse said, handing him the document, “but I circled s
even or eight I know I want to use.” One of them was Benny Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing,” a piece Jack Cole had used in his club act. Another was Neil Diamond’s “Crunchy Granola Suite.”
Language had a ceiling. With Harrell as interpreter, Fosse spoke pre-verbally, in images and rhythms, groping through the air for a melody he could bring down to earth. “I want to do a number for two boys and two girls,” he might say, “and it needs to be Latin.” Then Harrell would fly off to the library or to his own record collection, spread samples before Fosse, and match music to notion. Once the piece had been selected, Harrell would break the score down into danceable phrases and counts and render it on piano for Fosse to test his body against. It didn’t always work out. Fosse took a Cat Stevens song to the mirrors and poked at it from all sides before turning back to Harrell with the verdict: “There’s nothing here for me.”
But it wasn’t always that clear. Often, as if he were auditioning a dancer he didn’t want to turn down, Fosse would have to exhaust his brain exhausting a song before he could permit himself to accept it had no life for him. But rather than fail the song, Fosse would fail himself. “I saw him in major black holes,” Harrell said. “He was paralyzed. Nothing happened. He was staring at the floor with his head between his hands. Not saying anything, not sharing anything, not emoting. He would go over to the window and look out and sort of like leave the room for a little while. Or he’d get on the phone and call Annie. I remember one day he put the stool into the middle of the room and sat there staring at himself in the mirror for a good thirty minutes. [Sometimes] this could go on for five minutes. Sometimes for half an hour. Sometimes all day and I would just sit there, stone-cold silent. I don’t get up, I don’t get a cup of coffee, I don’t play anything, I don’t even go to the bathroom. Only he could pull himself up from this bottom. The room was full of depression. You could feel his machinery had stopped working. Nothing could happen. At those points, no person—no Annie, no Sam Cohn, no Kathy Doby—could even get near Bob. People understood that without it being discussed. There were occasions when I would arrive at ten o’clock in the morning, and he would be looking like this, like Bob was caught out there looking for a clue or a stargate.”