by Wasson, Sam
But he could not force himself to move; he had to be moved. That’s what they were waiting for.
“Wait!” Fosse said. “Go back. Play me that section. Do it again.”
His body answered with a reflex, a snap—good. That was something.
“Okay, try that again.”
To the snap, a flicker was added, to the reflex a wink.
“Okay, if she’s gonna do that, then he’s—” He pointed at the piano. “Gordon, one more time.”
Taking it from the top, he worked on the mirror image. He’d keep switching invisible partners until the pieces fit together, then he’d call in Kathryn Doby and others, teach them, see it whole for the first time, and make the necessary improvements. His grandmother glasses dangling from a chain around his neck, his ash collecting on the lenses, Fosse would jimmy up the kneepads from his ankles and demonstrate what he couldn’t say, in gesture to his dancers, in badda-dums to Harrell at the piano. “In a way, I was like a tailor,” Harrell said. “‘Take the coat out a little bit here. Hem that cuff there.’”
Harrell hauled in a trunk of percussion instruments to keep Fosse in the mood. Next to the piano, he kept a vertical stand of bells, a ratchet, and woodblocks in a half a dozen pitches. “Most choreographers would not be able to hear the difference between a piccolo woodblock and a bass woodblock, but Bob would know every time.” When Fosse connected to the rhythm, he could achieve a musical clarity uncommon to many professionals. Harrell was floored. “He’d say, ‘Put a wrist flick on the sixth count of the seven-eight of section C. I want a little ting right there.’” Micromanaging bodies and frames of film had been his prerogative for years, but excising the composer from the process, he could sweat the caesuras and sixteenth notes without objection.
Dancin’ was a playground without a chaperone. Reinking said, “He was moving closer to absolute control.”
In the old days, before Nicole could dance or think, the love they had stayed at home, in the slivered hours Fosse carved off work. But when she was old enough to have an opinion, he unlocked the studio door and treated her to his most vulnerable self. Looking to her face after a number, he got the truth no child could hide. At that age, Nicole was too young to tiptoe around his feelings and not yet old enough to know Balanchine or Robbins or what people wrote about him in the New York Times. She saw only good and bad. Fosse could count on that. As she grew older and prettier and stayed out later, they would cross paths in the elevator on the way home and walk their conversation into the living room. He would reach for a drink and put on a record and tell her about his day in the studio working on Dancin’.
“Hey,” he said once. “You know what?”
She looked up—a teenage girl, admiring and faraway.
“Would you stand there, behind those glass doors, and do the ballet version of what I do?”
At night, with the lights turned down, figures on the other side of the glass doors looked out of focus, like memories.
The ballerina took her position behind the glass, and the hoofer changed the record to Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles.” At this point, it was just an idea his feet had: humble little taps. Toe-toe, heel-heel. Simple and depleted but crystal clear. Like an old-timer returning to the fundamentals. But the step did not take Fosse back to Bill Bojangles Robinson, the tap-dancing clown of vaudeville; Fosse’s Bojangles was not flashy; he was delicate, almost ghostly. “Don’t dance,” he would tell one Bojangles, by which he meant, Don’t dance well. Bojangles is too tired for the precise angles and splayed fingers of showbiz Fosse. He’s a faded pair of slacks run through the washing machine too many times, the gutter soul of entertainment remembering all he was, which is all he has left. “I don’t want a caricature,” Fosse would say. “You’ve got to feel this. This is sacred. This is me.” His memory—Nicole behind the glass doors—dances the same steps, but better, and with the glow of ballet to incarnate the grace he either had lost or had never had to lose. “The character of Bojangles never danced well, no matter what his age,” Gordon Harrell said. “I’ve always thought the piece was about a phenomenon that exists in the dance world that every dancer faces—their time in the spotlight being very limited. Their bodies cannot sustain for very long the pressure and the pounding that dance requires. So, just as in the opera world, as the voice goes, the singer morphs (should he or she want to) into an extension of his career as a character opera singer.” At the end of his career, Fosse’s Bojangles is reduced to type: he dances in blackface, a panderer.
“It wasn’t that we drifted apart,” Reinking said, “it was that we got too close. It scared the hell out of him.” Their old arguments, once fought at surprise intervals, took permanent seats in the front rows of conversation. They knew every word. She wouldn’t live with the double standards and the jealousy. Yes, years ago she had said she could, and she’d tried to, but she couldn’t. She loved him too much for that. Maybe that was her failing (they both said), wanting to change him. Maybe it meant she didn’t love him enough. But she didn’t think so. Grievance begot grievance until blame engulfed their whole history, shared and apart, going back to their parents and their parents’ failures, until all they had left to condemn was fate, their shrinks, and DNA. That’s where the truth game always ended. But not fighting seemed like not talking, which was like not loving. “You only love me because I’m Bob Fosse,” Bob Fosse said to her. “You wouldn’t love me if I was a butcher.” That almost amused her. “Yes, I would,” she said, laughing, “because you’d be the best butcher on the block.” Hurt, he would try anything. “You know nobody loves me.” “Bob, that’s not true. You know that’s not true.” Then he would smile. “Yes, yes”—looking away—“I know that’s not true.” It was always going to be his mistake. Not just with her, with everyone. “Nobody’s wrong here,” Ann concluded. “Our dreams jibe but our reality doesn’t.”
It was a contagious theme that summer. Chayefsky had been working on a story about alternate consciousnesses and the primal origins of human impulse, improbably inspired by Boredom, Whimsy, and Flash’s aborted King Kong jam many Wally’s dinners ago. Somehow the old Jekyll/Hyde dialectic had stuck in his brain’s craw. What, really, was “self”? What lived at the very bottom, and how do we get there? Chayefsky began with Freud, and the rest poured in behind him. Genetics, anthropology, biology, meditation, and isolation tanks chain-reacted a detailed outline for Altered States, a science-fiction postulate about a doctor, both Frankenstein and his monster, that devolves himself to an animal state. Dan Melnick convinced Chayefsky to make the outline a novel, sell the novel, sell him (that is, Columbia) the rights, then write the screenplay for the film, collecting a paycheck at every stop along the way. Chayefsky did—with troublesome side effects. Writing Altered States, his first (and only) novel, Chayefsky pushed through and peeled back so many skins upon skins of tender self-delusion and so pitilessly whipped his brain down to new and still newer depths on his way up to epiphany, he had a heart attack before completing the final chapter and woke up in the hospital. His doctors wouldn’t let him near a typewriter, so he smuggled in a notebook and scribbled away when no one was looking, at last finishing Altered States. He was discharged. As he and Fosse yin-yanged across their table at the Carnegie—where both ordered the pastrami, though they weren’t supposed to—so did Altered States and All That Jazz; the two works traded chromosomes, as Chicago and Network had years before. The razzle-dazzle of American media culture became the condition of modern consciousness. Showbiz wasn’t just on TV and in the White House; it was in Americans’ brains.
In that spirit, Chayefsky rolled a fresh page into his Olympia manual and, with the haiku economy of a master screenwriter, put down a few words about his funeral. “Our family has never taken death all that seriously, and the main point of this testament is I don’t want my death taken all that seriously either,” he wrote. “Do what has to be done to maintain tradition and then back to the comfort of somebody’s home where I honestly wish everybod
y a good time.”
Chicago closed on August 27, 1977, after nearly a thousand performances, and the very next day, rehearsals for the national tour began, Bob Fosse presiding. For five weeks, he overlooked no detail. After years of modification and careful realignment, his visuals hit his dancers with perfect accuracy. “In ‘All That Jazz,’ there’s a movement where people have their palms flat downstage,” explained Susan Stroman, then a dancer in the tour, “and they sort of wipe their palms back and forth, and Fosse always told us to make believe we had blood all over our hands and like we were trying to wipe it off on a wall, kind of like the way the Manson family did.” After a tech run at Boston’s Colonial Theater, Fosse appeared onstage wholly dissatisfied with the state of “All I Care About Is Love.” Hovering above the near-naked girls—on their backs, their crotches raised—he whispered, smoothly, “I wanna smell you girls from the back row.” It was shocking, unforgettable, and persistently effective. “You could see his joy and sexuality about what they were doing,” said Maxine Glorsky. Touching a microphone to his lower lip, Fosse would purr and moan through the numbers, as if turning him on turned them on, which turned him on even more. “It was like applause,” Glorsky said. “He gave so they gave back.”
The Colonial’s stage-door exit opened into an alley behind the theater. One night, walking out with dancer Carolyn Kirsch, Fosse looked up from his conversation to see some kind of commotion in the darkness up ahead. Drawn in, Fosse and Kirsch pushed through the crowd and saw it: a lifeless man propped up against the theater wall.
“Is he dead?” Fosse was urgent, in need of an answer. None came, and he kept asking it to no one in particular. “Is he dead? Is he dead?” “It scared him,” Kirsch said. “He wasn’t fascinated, he wasn’t worried, he was scared.”
It was decided that Richard Dreyfuss could probably play Joe Gideon. Released only two weeks apart, The Goodbye Girl and Close Encounters of the Third Kind lifted Dreyfuss’s star and showed his mastery of the manic yet likable intensity that Gideon needed. A dancing Dreyfuss wouldn’t be a problem—Fosse could cheat that—if the performance was strong enough, which it probably would be. So they met: Dreyfuss was noodgy and nervous; Fosse was remote. “As soon as we got together, you could smell disaster,” Fosse said. But he didn’t have a better option, and the production was running out of time. When Dreyfuss expressed his doubts to Dan Melnick, Melnick nailed him to the wall. “Sign this or I’ll kill you,” he half joked. Dreyfuss signed.
Finding exactly the right dancers was difficult on any show, but Dancin’ had no parts, at least not yet. Without a book, freed from the cumbersome dictates of story and character, Fosse could hire dancers exclusively on talent and personality. There was no composer to fight for his favorite singer, no writer to point out the best actor. Dancin’ was his, and the dancers were there to dance. Who blew him away? “So what do you think of that one?” he’d whisper to assistants Gail Benedict and Kathryn Doby. “Do you see anything there?” He was on a shopping spree with a blank check. “Eh,” he said to Benedict, “that one looks like she has dirty fingernails.” (What did that mean?) They roared in from outside—people waited in a line around the theater for two hours—and danced for Fosse all afternoon, for as many as six hours, and in all styles, from ballet to jazz to Fosse. What did he have in mind? He didn’t know. Impress him. “He didn’t want to see your technique,” said dancer Christine Colby. “He wanted to see you.” He wanted a full company of yous, principal dancers every one. No chorus, all thoroughbreds; white contracts, not pink. That too hadn’t been done before. “We were afraid the show was not going to work,” Benedict admitted. “We were without a book, without new music, without stars. What was that? It was just a dance concert.” A talent show of the top talent in New York, a ballet company minus ballet.
He held callbacks.
Then he held callbacks again, this time to really see them, to audition the qualities in them he couldn’t see. He had them improvise. They talked. Who were they?
“What’s this show about?” they asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What are you doing?”
“I really don’t know.”
Jill Cook brought a snake to her audition. At the final callback, Fosse warned Sandahl Bergman to think twice about leaving A Chorus Line for him. “That show’s a huge hit,” he muttered, “and I have no idea what I’m doing, so I’m telling you, you have the job, but don’t take it.” This was, she suspected, the final combination she had to perform. She could twirl, but could she leap? Could she trust? (She said yes.) What about Ann Reinking? Despite their problems, could she trust? (She said yes.)
Dancin’ rehearsals took place toward the wintry end of 1977. Sixteen dancers as diverse in look and personality as Fosse’s musical selections met in a large studio above the Minskoff Theater with little or no sense of what was coming. Both a trampoline and a black hole, their ignorance precipitated as much imagination as worry and—to Fosse’s advantage—competition. “We all wanted Bob’s approval,” Benedict said. “There were a lot of high emotions and people on edge. The air was hot.” Perfect: where brains melt, bodies follow.
Benedict came to one rehearsal in a tight, formfitting body suit. “Gail,” Doby said, “if you wore that the first day of rehearsal, you’d have a solo right now.”
“Oh,” she said, “you mean I’m still auditioning?”
Fosse’s thoroughbreds were all stars, but who would be the star? Who would take the front spot in the big number? (What was the big number?) Who would have the most numbers? The hardest numbers? The best numbers? “Everyone was fighting for fucking everything,” said dancer Wayne Cilento. “People were killing each other to try to get parts, and he knew it. He used a lot of that with a lot of the girls. He played them against each other.” It fed the show. “He definitely used all that to get the best performances he could,” Cilento said.
With no story to maintain, Fosse could recast and “rewrite” on a whim, making moves rational and impulsive to better his show and, as was his prerogative, to protect his favorites and punish his betrayers. The dancers’ best bet was to err on the side of increase, to dance harder and flirt more, with him and one another. The sparks between Sandahl Bergman and Blane Savage flipped Fosse’s idea switches, permitting him new access to real offstage emotions. “He really liked Sandahl,” said Savage. “There was a lot of giving her special attention, always choreographing with her, always demonstrating with her. And all of this stuff was very sexy, so he’d be rolling around with her. And when Bob Fosse was focused on someone, it was a total focus. He looked at you like he was having a relationship with you. Other people would see that, and they’d want it.” Savage reasoned that Fosse thought his open flirtation with Savage’s girlfriend would provoke jealousy and that Savage would use that, perhaps against Bergman, perhaps against Fosse, in their number together on the floor. But Bergman didn’t take Fosse to be flirtatious, not seriously; rather, she sensed he wanted to bring out the two dancers’ passion for each other. Their heat could help him through a block. “You know,” Fosse said, standing over their tangled bodies, “you guys do this every night, so why don’t you just figure it out?” And he walked away.
Fosse watched all from above, on a stepladder he brought into the Minskoff. He would sit up there all day—Ahab with an ashtray—admiring, editing, calculating, “looking like a raptor, ready to dive down,” Savage said. “He was the most compelling guy to watch doing nothing.” But he was never doing nothing. Looking down on them, he was looking down on himself, trying to erase the defects he called limitations. “I’ve really tried to vary my choices to try to get rid of whatever it is that people call my style,” he said. Dancin’ was the fire; he was the phoenix. “One valve is still partially clogged,” he told a visiting reporter, “and I still have angina, but I take medication daily.” He would run out of the room in the middle of a coughing fit.
He was almost written off as uninsurable. The Shubert Organizat
ion’s first attempts to insure Fosse were outright denied, forcing the producers into an expensive and highly provisional agreement with Lloyd’s of London. Rightfully concerned, the producers asked the dancers to monitor Fosse as best they could. But the dancers didn’t need to be told. Dancin’ was their show too, but unlike Chicago, unlike any musical (was this a musical?), there could be no replacement if Fosse went under. So if he said he was going out for a slice, two or three dancers would get hungry for pizza. Socializing en masse became the norm. “We were always together on that show,” Bergman said. “We’d dance together, then we’d hang out together.” That worked for Fosse; togetherness gave him new insight into his materials.
The baroque emotional atmosphere took a turn for the rococo as Ann Reinking fell in love with Charles Ward, a singularly gifted dancer who had come to Dancin’ by way of the American Ballet Theater, making him an object of Fosse’s envy and admiration well before Ward’s romance with Reinking—who may or may not have still been seeing Fosse—went public. “Everyone was talking about it,” said Savage. “Bob was clearly getting off watching Charles with Annie just like he was getting off watching me with Sandahl. That’s when Bob started to get a little bit competitive. He would say things to try to get her jealous; she would say things to try to get him jealous. It got a little crazy and a little complex.” It was painful. It was an opportunity.