Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Crouched behind the bleachers brought in for Gideon’s audience, Peppino and Lynn Lovett flipped through a Fellini coffee-table book, one of several Fosse and the cinematographer used to complement their hand gestures. Deferential to his magnificent oeuvre, Fosse gave Peppino very little feedback, which Peppino, taking Fosse’s quiet to mean he was disappointed, returned with more silence. Sometimes they wouldn’t speak, each wondering what he had done to the other. And they were always together. Harpo trailing Chico, Peppino followed his director wherever he went, at the ready to receive the budding ideas from his brain, but Fosse was mostly too deep in Fosse to notice him there. “Where’s Peppino?” he’d ask, and from two paces back would come “I am here, Fosse!,” and both would laugh. “Peppino was a gentleman, a man of light to Fosse’s dark,” David Ray said. “He had a calm personality the process needed.” Looking at a still from Fellini’s Casanova, Peppino and Lovett admired an entombed Venetian opera house dripping with chandeliers. “That’s the same shot,” Peppino said, his face warming. “But this time I’m going to do it right.”

  While Fosse built “Bye Bye Life,” his actors waited. A few got together in their motel rooms for games, charades, and the kind of truth-telling marathons Fosse might have enjoyed if he weren’t confined to the SUNY Purchase black box. The incarcerated dubbed themselves Prisoners of the Performing Arts—POPA for short. “We just sort of occupied ourselves,” John Lithgow said. “It was just constant laughter and fun. Even when we went to the bathroom, we would do it together and call it POPA pisses.” Actor Anthony Holland brought in his play, and POPA gave a reading of it; Barbara Cook performed somewhere, and POPA organized a field trip.

  Meanwhile, delays continued. Fosse built.

  The number’s two lead dancers—one tall, one short—weren’t working well together, a dilemma Fosse was contemplating up until to the very night before the shoot, at dinner with Doby, weighing the pros and cons of their next move. Do they replace one? Both? Proceed as planned? Doby advocated for replacements and additional delays; Fosse had no answer. They ended the evening on a low note and said good night.

  Hours later, Doby’s phone rang. It was two in the morning on the day of the shoot.

  “You’re right,” he said. “We better change it.”

  “To who?”

  “You and Annie.”

  Doby and Reinking, just in from New York, were in a rehearsal hall hours later. Albert Wolsky put a rush on their costumes—a pair of full-body leotards with red and blue veins appliquéd onto the fabric, custom-made to represent two halves of a beating heart. That created more delays, and it wasn’t until the following Tuesday that Wolsky’s order came in, and “Bye Bye Life” was, at last, ready to shoot.

  But Fosse wasn’t. Once all the pieces had been assembled on set, he had to break down the number into shots. All that had passed was merely preparation for this moment. “Bob started changing things from shot to shot,” Doby said, “so we had to keep changing the dance to try to keep up.” And when they changed the dance, he changed the shot, which changed the dance, which . . .

  All in all, “Bye Bye Life” took them two weeks. “Fifteen days,” Glattes said, “for seven minutes of music.”

  Rehearsing the number, perfecting its climactic baseball slide, Roy Scheider messed up his leg. He said, “It was the hardest physical thing I’d ever had to do.” He developed a lump. It made sliding, already a challenge, even harder, and every night, as he lathered himself in Tiger Balm, he refused to think he might not make it through the shoot. He loved this number too much. He loved this man, and he knew what “Bye Bye Life” meant to him. “I think he knew that his death was not going to be as wonderful as this,” Scheider concluded, “so that’s why he spent so much time thinking about making it wonderful in the movie.” Exultant, showy, funky, odd, euphorically mournful, “Bye Bye Life” generated the operatic spirit of a showbiz addict’s absolution by death and entertainment—to Bob Fosse, a happy ending. Imagining the real thing, he said, “Maybe somebody will say, ‘He was a good showman; he gave us good shows. You could always count on him for an evening’s entertainment.’” Maybe for that they would forgive him.

  As Fosse was filming the very end of “Bye Bye Life,” in which Gideon rushes into his audience of enemies and loved ones for the final goodbye, he called cut and peered out from behind the camera. He wanted to look at them, the people he knew. There were hundreds. Annie, Leland Palmer, NY to LA’s “producers,” the strippers in the scene with Keith Gordon . . . The way they looked at Gideon seemed a lot like love. Love for him.

  He pulled Scheider aside. “You know, that must be kind of exhilarating.”

  “Yeah, Bobby, it is.” Scheider smiled. “Why don’t you try it?”

  “Naahhhh.”

  “Come on . . . You’ll love it.”

  Scheider cued the band, the music started, and Fosse dashed from the stage into his people, hugging and kissing, thanking and touching. When it ended, they applauded him—a standing ovation—as he headed back to Scheider, back to the stage, trying to catch his breath.

  “Jesus Christ! That’s terrific!”

  “Yeah, Bobby. It is.”

  “And you know, Roy,” he was said to have whispered, “the best part of it is that they forgive me too.”

  Scheider saw tears in Fosse’s eyes. “Yeah, Bobby. We do.”

  Eight Years

  ASIDE FROM THE PIROUETTES in the audition sequence, which Fosse had Heim cut immediately, the day they were shot at the Palace, the majority of All That Jazz was cut after shooting had been completed. “This was highly, highly unusual,” said assistant editor Wende Phifer. “Bob didn’t even want to think about cutting the movie until he had shot everything. And when he had, we cut in chronological order, taking boxes off the shelf one scene after the next.” Editing took more than a year, a colossal amount of time for a feature film. “It was a life,” Heim said, “a whole life.” Alan’s mother died while they cut “Bye Bye Life,” and David Ray’s marriage collapsed. “It wasn’t the movie’s fault,” Ray explained, “it was probably going to end anyway, but I was there for a good six months working until one in the morning.” Alan Heim, on the picture for fourteen months, recalled, “The set dresser [Phil Rosenberg] had a heart attack on the first attempt of the film, and then came back in time for the second one.” Of course, Bob Aurthur was dead. Danny Ruvolo was dead. Christopher Newman’s wife had a baby.

  In need of more space, the team moved from their enclosure in the Brill Building to the Directors Guild of America building on West Fifty-Seventh, one block from Fosse’s apartment, where he kept his production office. Through one window he could see up to Fifty-Fifth Street to where he had lived with Joan McCracken. “All those years and all that work,” he told a reporter, “and all I did was move a couple of blocks.” Going out to dinner or on his way home from a show, Fosse would drop in on the editors with an idea, sometimes with his girlfriend model-actress Julie Hagerty. “I just want to run through a couple of things,” he’d say, and Wende Phifer would cue up a reel. As late as two in the morning, David Ray would leave the DGA building with Fosse and a handful of assistants. Rounding Fifty-Fourth Street, Fosse would light up at the sight of kids crowding into Studio 54. “He would make small talk with these young people,” Ray said, “until we realized he wanted us to leave so he could go in and party.”

  “I still have one artery partially clogged,” Fosse admitted in November 1979. “I may get a slight chest pain. Then I just sit down and take a pill.”

  Heim got most of his work done during the day, not cutting on the beat. “If you stay on the beat,” he said, “it becomes too rhythmic. But if you go by the motions of the dancers or the dancers’ body parts, it becomes a different experience.” Their task was to find and refine visual rhythms and layer them on the eye like phyllo dough. Though confined by the script, Heim cut with New Wave curiosity, dodging time frames and mind frames and circumventing the linearity of the Hollywood musica
l so skillfully, one couldn’t be sure the whole of All That Jazz wasn’t a flashback confessed to Death in Gideon’s final moments or if the Angel of Death was merely another piece of hallucinatory razzle-dazzle he invented to comfort himself.

  As they neared a rough cut, Fosse helped Gwen get the first national tour of Dancin’ on the road. With Gail Benedict, Gwen had been overseeing the Broadway production since Kathryn Doby left for All That Jazz, and not always, Doby thought, with perfect results. “Gwen was trying to make it a little easier on the national company,” Doby said, “and we came into a little conflict on that. She was practical. She wanted the shortcut. But I wanted it the way Bob wanted it.” Intent on derivations unknown to others, Gwen asserted, often correctly, her expert authority. “That’s not how we used to do that step,” she said to Benedict on “Percussion III,” a number she said came from “Who’s Got the Pain?” Who could argue with her? In the absence of Fosse, Verdon was the law. “Gwen was obviously territorial with her knowledge, which was considerable,” one dancer said. “That cut both ways.” She could share Fosse with other women, but she wasn’t prepared to cede his style; it was her bloodline. It was her legacy.

  Despite mixed reviews, Dancin’ was a smash hit on Broadway (and would run through 1982), an achievement Fosse attributed partially to discomania. Thinking franchise, he considered making a documentary about the show, a hybrid half-performance, half-backstage account of the complete Dancin’ experience. “I’d want to see your quick changes and everything else backstage,” he said to Blane Savage, “the show behind the show.” And down to the smallest detail. “When I film the section when Charles Ward is doing his solo,” he said to Wayne Cilento, “I’m going to film you in the bathroom taking a pee.” Fosse entertained the notion of doing Dancin’ Too, but got only as far as the studio before he concluded, “I’d never do that to a dancer again.” Keeping the national and Broadway outfits at their best would be enough. He’d occasionally appear at the Broadhurst unannounced. Shows, like people, were capable of lying, but observing incognito, Fosse could catch them with their guard down. From their place onstage, dancers could see his ropey silhouette passing the exit signs. “That put the fear of God in us,” dancer Bill Hastings said.

  Fosse watched “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man,” a full-company number inspired by a classic Astaire dance in The Belle of New York, fall flat with the audience. Aggrieved to see his life’s motto in critical condition, he called a rehearsal for the next day.

  Fosse began the rehearsal sharpening the company’s coordination, drilling the exact tilt of their heads into the neuronal grooves he’d designed for their safekeeping. But repeating the steps changed little; their “Dancin’ Man” was uninhabited. They weren’t dancing from anywhere, and clearly they had no idea what they were singing. Fosse swore aloud and stormed to the back of the studio. “How do I get you people to dance?” he yelled, and then, “Just play the song again. Just listen.” With piano:

  I wanna be a dancin’ man

  While I can

  Gonna leave my footsteps on the sands of time

  If I never leave a dime

  Never be a millionaire

  I don’t care

  I’ll be rich as old King Midas might have been

  Least until the tide rolls in.

  “‘While I can,’” he insisted.

  They didn’t speak.

  “‘While I can.’”

  Still nothing.

  “Do you understand? The sand, the tide. Then what? Sand. It’s gone. The tide always comes in, okay?” He looked around the room to see if he was connecting. “This is your story, our story.”

  They gathered with him at the piano. “He went through the song line by line,” Bill Hastings remembered, “and reminded us of how much we give up to dance. We give up family. We give up wealth. We take a brutal beating daily, physically, emotionally, and in the business. And the world thinks we’re crazy for doing it. Our time to do what we love is very short. Bankers do what they do until they’re eighty, ninety, a hundred. They get rich. Our legacy is the sand.” Beginning with the original company, dancers spoke of the verse containing the lyrics “the sands of time” as the prayer section. “He got introverted when he was showing me those steps,” said John Sowinski. “It was a personal, almost private thing he was doing with his body. He was relating to himself.”

  At the show that night, as the orchestra played the entr’acte, the “Dancin’ Man” dancers took their marks behind the curtain. Hastings said, “Normally, we’d be relaxed, some of us talking softly to one another. That night we were perfectly still. Then the curtain went up.” This time it was from the inside.

  “In the end,” Reinking said, “no matter what it does to us, we’re lucky to have passion.”

  A glass of white wine in his hand, Fosse presided over All That Jazz’s sound mix. He was in the booth with music editor Michael Tronick, who was seated at the console just above Fosse, awaiting the next take, his gaze fixed to the screen. They were working on a particularly challenging Trumpet passage in “Bye Bye Life.” If Tronick missed the cue by a quarter of an inch, Fosse would catch it. His hand would shoot up from below, signaling too loud with a friendly wave. “There’s a section,” Tronick recalled, “when Ben [Vereen] is saying, ‘More! Give it to me! More! Give it to me,’ with a repeat of the brass. If I was off by one perf—and there are four perfs per frame and twenty-four frames per second, so there are ninety-six perfs a second—so if you’re off one-ninety-sixth of a second, Bob would hear it.”

  Through twelve-hour days, he never flagged. Still dissatisfied with Scheider’s cough, which he had revised all through rehearsal and filming, Fosse announced, finally, he was going to record it himself. Ditto the foley work on Keith Gordon’s tap dance and the finger snaps in “Airotica.” His savage engagement with the subatomic captured their devotion. “Here I am surrounded by all these creative people,” he mused aloud, “why can’t we figure it out?” It was a genuine question, plainly expressed. Really, why can’t it be perfect? Does anybody here know?

  Fosse’s early cast and crew screening of All That Jazz was an uncomfortable, revelatory experience for many, rife with pity and anger, for him and for themselves. Few saw it for what it was; they analyzed the picture as if it were Fosse. He/it was egomaniacal, narcissistic (an old favorite), courageous, immature, brilliant, fake Fellini—4¼! It/he was announcing suicide, crying out for attention, apologizing, pleading to be understood, asking to be crowned a genius. It was a Rorschach. “It gave him pleasure to feel that he was being betrayed. He wanted to be the victim,” Fred Ebb reasoned. “It was all about Bobby pretending to be honest,” Kander said. “He was saying, ‘I’m not worth much, but everyone around me is worth even less.’” “When I saw it, I was devastated,” said Gordon Harrell, “I thought, My God, I’ve been working for a madman. But at the same time I suddenly understood his moody moments.” Harrell was too overcome to face Fosse after the screening. As the lights came up over the closing credits, he left through a side exit and ran into the street.

  Fosse leaned in to Ben Vereen. “What do you think?”

  Vereen said, “I have to go for a walk.”

  Fosse anticipated extreme reactions, even backlash. Not just from the critics; from the people he worked with. Fred Ebb, Stephen Schwartz, Hal Prince, countless producers. “He felt guilty about some of the putdowns he put into the movie,” Reinking said. “He knew Joe was going to be tough, and he didn’t want people to misread him.”

  He implored Reinking to believe he didn’t intend it to hurt anyone. “I really am a nice guy,” he insisted. “I really, really am.”

  She had seen him cry before, but never had she seen him break down. “I know you’re not that mean. Why didn’t you make him more like you?”

  “I couldn’t make them like Joe Gideon because otherwise they wouldn’t get the moral of the story.”

  Reinking did not need this explained. “All That Jazz is about show business ca
n kill you,” she would say. “Devoting yourself exclusively to your craft is like an all-protein diet. You may not be hungry, but you’re going to starve to death. You need other things. And Bob knew it was killing him, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He was hooked. That’s why I think All That Jazz is very moral, because it says don’t do this. You’ll lose yourself.”

  A private screening for Gwen, Nicole, Paddy, Herb, and Sam amounted to a mixed reaction. Fosse was desperate for their feedback, but they were slow to offer it. Nicole hedged longest. She was seventeen now, old enough to have a serious opinion, to hurt and be hurt like an adult. Fosse waited for her reaction in the theater lobby after the screening, but she and Gwen evaded him that night. Overcome with feeling, they walked in silence all the way to Gwen’s apartment, unsure of what to think or say. Then Nicole stopped. She looked straight ahead. “You know,” she said, “the daughter was the only one who cared whether he lived or died.”

  Gwen called Bob to tell him that.

  The most trying screening of all still lay ahead of him. That summer, Fosse flew to California to watch the film with the executives at Fox. By then Laddie had resigned, leaving a new team in charge. “I can’t walk into one of those offices without feeling twelve years old,” Fosse said. “Those guys intimidate me, they all have Gucci shoes.” Fox’s most powerful “guy” turned out to be Sherry Lansing, Melnick’s protégée, and they got on instantly. “Bobby had this boyish charm and enthusiasm,” she said, “and his pain and vulnerability were right out there for you to see.” Sharp, accomplished, humble—a math teacher before she became a model—Lansing was now the president of 20th Century Fox, which made her the first female head of production at a Hollywood studio.