by Wasson, Sam
Fosse was late the day of the screening. His wingman Dan Melnick took the floor and smiled at the silence. “Bob’s in the bathroom,” he announced, “throwing up.”
By the end of the picture, Lansing was in tears, “probably the only studio president ever,” she would say, “to sob at a screening.” She declared All That Jazz an absolute masterpiece, said she thought it was one of the best pictures she had ever seen and one of the greatest in the history of film. (“I still do. It still is.”)
With nothing to do but wait, Fosse’s pre-release terror turned to depression. “I really think Bob Fosse thought he was going to die after All That Jazz,” Lynn Lovett said. “I think afterward he was sort of like, ‘I already died. I wrapped it up.’ I’m sure he enjoyed the rest of his life, but I think he was almost embarrassed to still be alive.” He disappeared to his apartment, then turned on the TV and disappeared again. “I guess I’m very tired,” he told a visiting reporter. “I sit in there like some brainless thing watching game shows. People win prizes and jump on each other and kiss, and it makes me sad that they’re so happy. I get all weepy. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. It suddenly breaks my heart, like there’s something I’m missing out on.” He wasn’t with Annie, he wasn’t with Jessica, he wasn’t with Julie. “You always think, this will be the one—the one who’ll alter your life. With [Julie Hagerty], I tried harder than I used to.” He was fifty-two. That was too old. “Julie seemed depressed and hopelessly in love,” Lynn Lovett observed. “Fosse would say, ‘You need someone younger. Someone who isn’t going to die on you.’ But she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.”
While Janice Lynde was in town for a TV show, Fosse let her (and her dog) use his office as a temporary apartment. To make her early call in Brooklyn, Janice had to get up at 4:30, hours before anyone at 850 Seventh even thought about coming in. One morning, she heard a scratching at the door.
“Hello?”
“Janice, are you awake?” It was Fosse.
She opened the door to find him leaning against the frame, smoking and crying.
“I’ve done the worst thing in the world,” he said, referring to All That Jazz. “They’re going to call it Fosse’s ego trip. Why did I do this?” The film was opening the following day.
“It may get mixed reviews, but it’s brilliant.”
“They’re gonna kill me, they’re gonna kill me, they’re gonna kill me . . .”
Janice looked at the clock. “Come on,” she said. “You’re going to Brooklyn with me.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re not going to sit here and drink all day. Come on.”
She packed him in the limousine, and together they drove down to the studio. While Janice filmed, he waited in her dressing room, his cap pulled over his eyes.
As expected, the critical response to All That Jazz verged on manic depression. But it made headlines. Listening to his advisers, Fosse toured talk shows with uncommon compliance (Today, Dick Cavett, Tomorrow with Tom Snyder) and granted bashful interviews to almost any journalist, fearing the exposure but savoring the attention. (One interviewer, disturbed by young Joe Gideon and the strippers, asked about the effects of burlesque on Fosse’s life. “Tragic,” he replied. “Absolutely tragic . . . I haven’t recovered since.”) The publicity worked. The controversy around All That Jazz built the film an unexpectedly strong box office and elevated Bob Fosse from famous director to pop-culture personality. The picture couldn’t make him a star but it did bring Fosse’s life and likeness increased visibility, perhaps even infamy. Joe Gideon and his absorbing mix of vice and self-disclosure would forever be mistaken for the complete Bob Fosse.
No one, not even the film’s admirers, expected any Academy Award nominations for All That Jazz, let alone the nine it received, including best screenplay, best director, and best picture. Most would go to Kramer vs. Kramer, but Fosse’s team of Alan Heim, Albert Wolsky, and Ralph Burns, as well as his art directors Phil Rosenberg and Tony Walton (with set decorators Edward Stewart and Gary Brink) all won. If the academy gave Oscars for most defiant musical of the year, All That Jazz, enriched by avant-garde techniques and odious subjects uncommon to the form, would have been a sure thing. At a time when revisionist nostalgia and parody set the standard for musical innovation, Fosse imbued his film with the physical and ontological ordeals of contemporary reality, naturalizing the most unnatural of entertainment forms: Meet Me in St. Louis meets Citizen Kane.
Soon thereafter Lansing, Melnick, Scheider, and Fosse took off for the Cannes Film Festival. Before the film premiered, Fosse met network news personality David Sheehan for a drink at the Carlton Hotel.
“Of all the shows you’ve done,” Sheehan asked, “what’s the nearest and dearest to your heart?”
“My heart?” He laughed. It was such a reporter’s question. “I love them all, but Pippin’s in a coma.”
“A coma?”
“It only exists in the minds of people who saw it. It’s on life support.”
Dancin’ was running strong and Chicago was playing London’s West End, but Pippin had closed, after an incredible five-year run, in 1977.
“Well,” Sheehan said, “why don’t we put it on tape?”
These were the fledgling years of VHS. “You can’t do that,” Fosse said.
“I’ll talk to pay-TV.”
That was new too. “People aren’t going to put quarters in slots in their TVs . . .”
Familiar with the technology, Sheehan explained the details, and Fosse’s interest was piqued. Resistant to regression but interested in the investment, he could cast and rehearse the show himself, hand it over to Doby, and oversee the project from afar.
The Cannes screening of All That Jazz got a standing ovation, but Lansing, Melnick, Scheider, and Fosse returned home before the awards presentation. Fosse knew he wouldn’t win and, after the Oscars, didn’t want to attend his second consecutive loss. And he caught flak for it too. Sore loser, they called him.
Back in New York, at two thirty in the morning, the phone rang in Sherry Lansing’s suite at the Carlyle Hotel.
“Hello?”
Fosse was screaming. “We won! We won! We won!”
“What?”
“The Palme d’Or!”
“Oh my God . . .”
“We tied! With Kurosawa, with Kagemusha! You’ve got to get up! We’ve got to celebrate!”
“Okay, okay, give me a second.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
They went around the corner to 3 Guys Restaurant. Too happy to keep it to himself, Fosse told the waiter his terrific news. He left Lansing at the table so he could go tell the cashier. He came back and told the loner at the next booth. Lansing thought, It’s like he’s never won anything before, like he isn’t Bob Fosse. They celebrated for hours, until the sun came up over Madison Avenue.
“You know, I’ve got to get ready for my day,” she said.
“Just stay with me a little longer please, please, please.”
He was irresistible.
They paid the bill and Fosse led her to a building nearby. Inside, he opened a door to a psychiatrist’s foyer, where a patient waited to go in.
Dr. Clifford Sager was surprised to see him.
“I won,” Fosse said.
Sager beamed. “That’s really great. That’s really, really great.”
Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Pippin, Dancin’—they won for Fosse the director, the entertainer, but All That Jazz, directed, choreographed, this time cowritten, and practically starring Bob Fosse represented at last a holistic triumph of authorship, innovation, and personal expression. This time, the success was authentic, undeniably his own.
After he walked Lansing back to the Carlyle, he appeared across town at Ann Reinking’s ballet class and strolled right in, unapologetic about the brazen interruption. He found her at the barre. He told her, and she danced all through their rejoicing.
Rehearsal.Fred Mann III
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RIGHT: Dustin Hoffman as der Führer, goofing on one of Lenny’s Hitler bits, on location with Valerie Perrine in Miami.Valerie Perrine
When Hoffman pulled back the covers, he found a giant dildo standing up on Perrine’s crotch. He’d been suffering from the flu and she’d planned the stunt to cheer him up.Valerie Perrine
Reinking and Fosse during the filming of Lenny in Miami, 1974.Courtesy of Ann Reinking
Fosse makes a slight adjustment (is it perfect yet?) on Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon in All That Jazz, a 100 percent accurate rendering of about 70 percent of Bob Fosse.Photofest
Filming All That Jazz.Fox/Josh Weiner
New Year’s Eve, early 1980s. The woman with Fosse is Liz Canney, Star 80 apprentice editor and girlfriend.Courtesy of Kenny Laub
A stolen shot of Fosse, in his office at the DGA building, felled by Star 80 preproduction blues. The film terrified him—morally, artistically, professionally, personally. “Bob did not seem to be in a mood that indicated he would be receptive to picture taking that day,” said Wende Phifer. “Those moods were palpable. So I took it while pretending to take the picture of someone else in the front office, hence the telephoto shot.”Wende Phifer Mate
Smoking under a no smoking sign, Fosse gives notes to the ladies of Sweet Charity. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, summer 1985.Christine Colby Jacques
Father, daughter, mother.Getty Images/Ron Galella, WireImage
Collaborators, spouses, ex-lovers, friends—Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, East Hampton, 1981. Eva Rubinstein
Seven Years
NICOLE GREW UP. Years of training had given her a ballerina’s credentials, but her body showed the biology of a Fosse dancer. The boys caught on. She had burlesquey curves, and a little Know cut behind her smile. Gwen, seeing all, went on red alert. She dug into the mother role and Fosse found himself playing good cop—a honey of a chance if he didn’t bungle it. “Gwen was careful with her,” he said, “a little more strict than I am. I said, ‘I don’t have time to watch you. I have to go to work. So I just have to trust you. So if you’re anything like your father, you’re a pretty good liar, so you could fool me, but I don’t want a lot of dope in the house or anything like that.’” She moved in with him for a short span of high school, long enough to see his girlfriends, rapidly approaching her own age, close up. It gave her a new vantage point. They had certain things in common now; namely, her father. Taking their side, Nicole cross-examined him on ancient double standards and refused to let him off the hook. He told her what he told them: He had never claimed to be fair. A woman of the seventies, she cited him for chauvinism and won. She was the joy of his life.
“That’s the future,” Dr. Sager had said, “and that’s where love is.”
On weekends, they drove out to Quogue. Nicole running around Manhattan on her own challenged both sides, but by opening the beach house to Nicole and friends for some supervised messing around, Fosse could make her a kind of rehearsal space in which to grow up. One such weekend, he turned them all loose, whipped up a batch of margaritas, and receded into the background. Fosse watched her, drink in hand. If anyone asked how a guy like him had raised a girl like her, he would respond plainly, quietly, he hadn’t. Gwen Verdon had. He would say he had been there at the right times and did his best when he could, but the winning moves belonged to her mother. Nicole was only seven when they split up. “Do you want her for the weekend?” Gwen had asked, early in their separation. “I’m not a babysitter” was his reply. In those days, he was a guest in their home. He had to ring the doorbell. Now, sidestepping the girl talk on the back patio, he felt like a guest in his own home, and he was maybe a little drunk too. At least, Nicole thought so. “You shouldn’t drink,” she said. “You’re with minors.” She stopped him on his way to the car. “And you’re not driving.” With her friend to help her, she led Fosse back inside. There they discovered the pitcher of margaritas waiting for them, half full. Nicole’s mother heard about it the next day. “These two teenage kids started drinking his margaritas,” Gwen said. “They wound up drunk, sick all over the bathroom floor.”
He considered, again, doing a full ballet for the Joffrey. There was still Big Deal, his musical adaptation of Big Deal on Madonna Street, a sentimental favorite for fifteen years. He could do it either for film or on Broadway. Then there was Atlantic City, Cy Coleman’s idea for a panoramic lowlife musical. That could be for him. And Marty Richards and Alan Carr had Chicago’s film rights and interest from Liza Minnelli and Goldie Hawn. But Fosse had made a resolution after Sweet Charity never to do onscreen what he’d already done onstage. “Besides,” he said, “I can’t get it up again for that material. It’s like trying to go back to an old girlfriend.” But how could the new girlfriend out-gorgeous Jessica Lange? He had already topped Lenny with All That Jazz, Chicago with Dancin’, and truth with self-laceration. What else was there?
There was something, an idea, maybe more of a theme, about the need for the spotlight, within him, within those who must act or entertain. It’s the primeval hunger. Where does it come from? (Starvation early on?) Do doctors, teachers, and painters have it? Was theirs bottomless, like his? Put to the test, how far could it push someone? How far would it push him? Fosse understood Sally Bowles, Lenny Bruce, and Joe Gideon all ended badly—but why? Beyond All That Jazz, he knew, there was a still darker fathom of the performer’s consciousness. At their bottom-most floor, a lost harpoon stuck out of the sand. Fosse couldn’t know who or what shot it, only that it was in him too, and it hurt. A week after he appeared in Sager’s office to announce his win at Cannes, he asked him for psychological intel on the subject of entertainers; research, Fosse said, for a project he had in mind about “the need for attention.” Perhaps this would take him past self-laceration into outright despair.
Atlantic City wasn’t it, but Fosse met with writer Jack Heifner through the summer, trying to fit into narrative shape the songs Coleman and lyricist Christopher Gore had given them. “Bob and I stared at each other for hours trying to make this work,” Heifner said, “but he seemed isolated, like his heart wasn’t in it.” They worked at Fosse’s apartment and sat on his deck at Quogue, tossing story possibilities back and forth. A decaying playpen of failed hopes, Atlantic City was turning out to be a loser’s Chicago, emceed by a couple that crawled up from under the boardwalk. “They were supposed to be like Pied Pipers,” Heifner said, “like the Leading Player in Pippin.” They sing “Toyland,” about how the Boardwalk’s funhouse became a sex shop; they sing about a dead-end chanteuse, who sang one song, year after year, her whole life; and how the Miss America pageants turn girls into automatons. Heifner said, “I finally put together something Fosse-esque, but more like a musical revue, a Grand Hotel in hell.” It fizzled soon thereafter, while still in the planning stage.
It was a busy summer. Fosse and Sam Cohn invested in the Laundry, an East Hampton restaurant of the grilled-meat-and-fish variety. To the original brick (the Laundry began as an actual laundry), architect Norman Jaffe added sleek cypress ceilings, skylights, and a bar—said to be the longest in the Hamptons—of strawberry travertine marble. With its wooden chairs and see-through fireplace, the restaurant was informal chic, an Elaine’s from the future. It opened on July 12, 1980, with a big, small gathering that included Liza Minnelli, Lauren Bacall, Brooke Shields, Louis Malle, and, of course, Fosse and Cohn.
As he agented deals to clients, Cohn agented his clients to each other, packaging them socially and professionally in town or country. On summer Saturdays, he made a habit of inviting the select to his house on Lily Pond Lane, where he ruled the grill and the tomato and onion salad (inspired by the same at Peter Luger’s) while his wife, actor-producer Julia Miles, poured the wine. Fosse was a table regular. So were Roy and Cynthia Scheider and the writers Peter Maas, Steve Tesich, and E. L. Doctorow, all clients Cohn had introduced to one another. “Bob always needed to be around writers,” Doctorow said. “I took that as a need to be around people with a formal education.�
� One evening after dinner, Fosse initiated a lightning round of the truth game. When did you lose your virginity? The question circled the group and at Doctorow’s response—“I was eighteen”—Fosse’s jaw dropped. “He began to get hysterical that it happened so late,” Doctorow said. “He took off on that.”
The Scheiders were often in Quogue for a weekend with Fosse. Lunches consisted of big bowls of tuna fish (mixed with grapes, raisins, and onions) served with lettuce and Jack cheese on buttery baguettes. They’d talk movies, actors, women, dancers. Dinners ran long and late. “I didn’t buy Bobby’s dark-guy thing,” Cynthia Scheider said. “I really believe he was a sweet, kind, gentle man.”
Though the American musical had been sparring with pop since rock ’n’ roll, the rise of Michael Jackson made clearer the coming defeat of Broadway. It happened by way of MTV, an up-to-the-minute feed of dance and music far more sophisticated than American Bandstand or any concert television that had come before it. Combining the best of Broadway and Hollywood with the newest in pop, MTV held the young spirit of musical theater, and all at home, available most any time, for free. It aged the whole business. By 1980, few Broadway trusts seemed more passé than Gower Champion, former king of the Persian Room. Weaned on the sixties ethic of musical gargantuas, Champion made his reputation as a director-choreographer of sober spectaculars, Busby Berkeley the morning after. From Bye Bye Birdie to Hello, Dolly!, his old-fashioned extravaganzas were half a great thing, hardly new, simply classic, ideally suited to 42nd Street, which Champion revived that year under the aegis of legendary producer David Merrick.