by Wasson, Sam
Herb Gardner gave the opening eulogy.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. spoke of Chayefsky’s big theme, “the corrupt and lunatic energies secreted by our great modern organizations,” continuing, “No American in recent times had a more exact and stinging satirical gift, but he never used that gift for purely destructive purposes. He was sardonic, not cynical. He wanted to clear our minds of cant and our souls of hypocrisy. For all his relish in human folly, he never abandoned hope in humanity. His satire, like that of all great satirists, sprang from love—from his instinctive sweet understanding of the inarticulate Martys and Claras of the world, bravely living lives of quiet desperation.”
Fosse was the last speaker. “When his turn came,” remembered James Lipton, “he mounted the steps slowly, then turned to face us . . .”
He began. “As most of you know, Paddy and I were friends . . .”
Fosse stopped to breathe.
He said he had to audition for the role of Paddy’s friend, and it took him eight years to get the part. They laughed.
He explained the deal they had made when Paddy had come to visit him in the hospital six years earlier. At Fosse’s bedside, Paddy promised Bob that if Bob died first, he would deliver a tedious eulogy at his funeral. Laughing, Fosse had told Paddy that if he died first, he’d do a little tap dance at Paddy’s.
“I hope nobody will be offended.”
He performed a soft-shoe. “It was a very quiet dance for about thirty seconds,” Doctorow said. “There was nothing funny about it. Bob made it totally appropriate.”
Sobbing, Fosse said, “I can’t imagine my life without you.”
Chayefsky was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Westchester, a forty-minute drive from the chapel. At the graveside, during the first kaddish, Paddy’s friend Eddie White looked up from the casket to see Fosse had drifted from the circle to the far edge of the cemetery. He was bent forward, collapsed in grief.
Six Years
DAN MELNICK PASSED on Star 80. Dark was one thing, but rape, necrophilia, and murder (without catharsis), he didn’t want to see. Who did? Not Alan Ladd Jr., but he had so much faith in Fosse he would have agreed to anything. “Whatever he wanted to do, I would have done it because I thought he was a genius,” Ladd said. “I don’t know anyone more talented that I’ve ever worked with, and if you’re doing a picture you know doesn’t have to bring in vast sums of money, you’re happy as a movie studio. I never thought for a minute that Star 80 was going to be Star Wars.” Nor was he deterred by the poor commercial prospects of a film of such unrelenting gloom and with such a horrific final scene. That earned Laddie even more respect from Fosse. When the two met for dinner at Village cafés off the showbiz circuit, Fosse left his black armor at home. “On those occasions,” Laddie recalled, “when Fosse knew he wouldn’t be seen, he would wear color. And he’d only smoke once in a while. That was Bob the guy”—an exotic sighting—“the other was Fosse the showman. He’d come out for Wally’s.” Laddie saw both Fosses. A Hollywood executive unafraid of his director’s power, Ladd too was exotic.
If only Star 80 were a work of fiction, Fosse might have started casting right away. But the painstaking and (for Stratten’s family) painful back-and-forths of rights and releases hobbled his progress through the fall of 1981. With the Stratten tragedy only months in the past and her family beyond devastation, Star 80 screamed lawsuit. Scalpels in hand, attorneys, executives, and rightfully concerned insurance carriers examined each word of each draft of Fosse’s script, hemorrhaging fine print. Prevented from using actual names, Fosse was also required to provide documentation for objectionable dialogue and ordered to refrain from any implication that sodomy preceded the murder. He reluctantly agreed to use close-ups of Snider’s face in lieu of more incriminating wide shots, and he consented not to arrange dead bodies in such a way as to suggest consensual sex or rape had taken place. No matter how well intended, each smoothed truth affronted the sincerity of Fosse’s effort. But those were the terms.
As promised, David Sheehan kept in close communication with Fosse through the cutting of Pippin, dutifully sending him tapes, which Fosse flatly hated. He called Sheehan in the middle of the night, screaming, “You’re cutting off the feet! We don’t want to see their faces! We want to see their bodies!” Sheehan didn’t understand. This was TV, he explained, a faces medium. But, Fosse explained, this was Pippin, a dance show. You wanted to see the bodies. “He would send notes on a Thursday,” Sheehan said, “and he would want to see results by the weekend. But we didn’t work that fast.” Fosse didn’t understand why; he could. Railing against Sheehan’s dissolves and music-video-like cuts on the beat, Fosse demanded he cut Pippin like Liza with a Z, keeping its theatricality intact. “I don’t think I ever had his trust,” Sheehan said, “but he wanted that show immortalized.”
It was agony. Late in November, Fosse watched the final cut, expecting to see his notes implemented, as Sheehan had assured him they would be. What he saw appalled him. Not only were his specific instructions ignored, but parts of the show had been outright deleted. After shutting off the television, he wrote to Pippin’s cast and crew apologizing for a “foolishly butchered version of the show . . . [that] was mysteriously kept from me.” It aired in January 1982 to awful reviews.
Mariel Hemingway, a Cohn client, was desperate to play Dorothy, a role wildly unlike the character she played in her previous film, Personal Best. Cohn encouraged Fosse to give her a shot, but Fosse didn’t see it. Hemingway had a tomboyish quality that wasn’t right for Dorothy. Dorothy was silk, sweet, womanly. He liked Melanie Griffith. But Hemingway persisted. She wrote him letters, begging him to see her. Finally, Cohn got them together on the phone.
“You must read me.”
“You’re not right for it.”
“Let me show you.”
“Listen, I like you. You’re just not right for this part.”
With no other recourse, Hemingway turned up in New York. He had to admit she had the right sort of unused quality, and her relentlessness brought to mind the sort of hunger Star 80 was about. But breast size was a problem. Hemingway’s wasn’t a Dorothy Stratten figure—a real concern for a movie about a Playboy playmate—but taking Cohn’s advice, Fosse let her read, and after the reading, they talked. Instinct told Hemingway this exchange was the real audition. “Fosse had to merge with the actor,” she said. “It was really more for him than the other person.” The trick was merging on her terms (“But I sleep with all my leading ladies,” he pleaded). Trying to facilitate intimacy but unwilling to sleep with him, Hemingway had to walk the tightrope of deep but guarded involvement. “How can I make it feel as though he is having a relationship with me without actually having one?” The question rarely left her mind. “It was a tough line,” she said, “because then he’d get mad at me and call me a cocktease, and then I’d be heartbroken.” Soon thereafter Hemingway got breast implants, and then she got the part.
For his Snider, Fosse needed an actor with a star’s good looks and charm but a character actor’s fearlessness—a tall order. Furthermore, he was casting autobiographically, looking for an alter ego, which narrowed the list yet more, and the question “Will anyone do it?” became “Is there anyone who can do it?” The studio answered with Richard Gere, hot off American Gigolo. Fosse read him with Hemingway, but Fosse’s heart was set on Robert De Niro, whom he couldn’t get to read the script. “That fucked him up,” Hemingway recalled. “He felt less than, like ‘De Niro won’t read my script. He doesn’t think I’m anybody.’” Fosse asked Hemingway, suspecting De Niro wanted to sleep with her, to finesse the transaction. She refused.
Sam Shepard came to his audition with his friend Cis Rundle, who happened to be Hugh Hefner’s social secretary. (The night of Dorothy’s murder, Rundle’s first on the job, she got the terrible phone call and told Hefner the news. She found him in the game room between a pinball machine and a girl. “It’s Dorothy,” Rundle said. “She’s dead.” The girl looked to Hef. “Do
es that mean we’re not going to the Jacuzzi?”)
“This is shit,” Rundle said, meaning the script, as Fosse emerged from Shepard’s audition.
“What’s shit?”
“All this about the mansion and Hef. It’s wrong.” She could see Fosse was listening. “Do you want to make a cartoon or a real movie?”
He made Rundle Star 80’s technical adviser and gave her a part in the film. She caught the slips (for example, Hef didn’t carry a can of soda, he carried a bottle) and wrote Fosse detailed descriptions of mansion parties and Hef’s famous movie nights. She introduced him to Hefner. They got on. Hefner gave Fosse permission to use the Playboy logo and allowed him limited access to the mansion for research, once to study the grounds and once to study the parties. They’d film elsewhere, but of course, their copy of the mansion had to be exact. (It was: when Fosse showed Hef a plan of the set, Hef thought he was looking at his own house.) Returning Hefner’s kindness, Fosse accepted his feedback on casting. “He asked Bob not to cast Harry Dean Stanton [in the Hefner role],” Rundle said, “and approved of Cliff Robertson.”
The search for Snider continued. At his callback, Eric Roberts fielded Fosse’s interview questions. Where was he educated? What did he do for fun? (Could they merge? Yes, they could.) For Roberts’s second callback, they read through the entire script, and two weeks later, choosing now between Roberts and Gere, Fosse called Roberts back again. “We read the scene he was always rewriting,” Roberts said. “The scene where Snider’s at the mansion for the first time, a hard scene.” It required tremendous control to cover Snider’s desperation with charm. But Roberts could do it. He got the part.
What his actors couldn’t possibly know about the sex industry, Fosse gave them. While scouting Los Angeles for locations, he personally toured Roberts through the traumatized fringe, its people and pathology. “He educated me on the life of the strip clubs,” Roberts said. “He wanted me to know it wasn’t about fucking, that every stripper who was a ‘lifer’—that’s what he called them—has the same issues as children who were molested. Bob believed that. He wanted me to know that this guy [Snider] had expertise, that this guy, if he weren’t a psychopath, would have been hugely successful.” When they arrived at each club, Fosse would vanish, allowing Roberts to mingle with the strippers on his own.
By contrast, Fosse barred Hemingway from doing her own research. As with Valerie Perrine, he wanted to control everything his leading lady knew about her subject. “He gave me everything,” she recalled. “He’d give me tapes to watch, he’d talk about being damaged goods, he taught me how to walk in high heels. He put on my high heels and showed me. Once he said, ‘You’re so innocent and all-American but you’re not. You come from this sick family.’” He wasn’t talking about Stratten’s family. He was talking about the Hemingways.
His whole life, Fosse had courted despair. He affected it, savored it, feared it, and fled it, but working on Star 80, in Los Angeles—Despairsville, USA—reabsorbing the desperate borders of show business (“I’m going to die in one of these places,” Fosse said, scouting shitholes with Tony Walton), despair flattened him. Paddy was dead. All That Jazz had used up everything he had (he feared), and having surrounded himself with allies, from the laissez-faire Laddie to Wolfgang Glattes and Kenneth Utt, Fosse had no scapegoat to condemn. “On Star 80 he was just impossible,” Glattes said. “It was very frustrating for Bob to not have anyone to blame.” Starting fights helped him redirect the anger. So did insisting on the impossible, like getting inside the actual house where Snider lived and killed Dorothy. But Glattes didn’t have a permit.
“You have to get in.”
“It’s trespassing.”
“Just do it.”
“Bob—”
“Get in.”
At dusk, the Santa Monica Freeway clogged over the pale box at 10881 Clarkson Road, and Glattes and his son Michael broke in through the garage.
“Look,” Michael said, pointing up.
Cartridges. Still there on the shelf.
Snapping pictures of walls, carpeting, furniture—whatever he could—Glattes moved through the house and into the little bedroom where it happened. Thin coats of new paint didn’t cover everything. Glattes found traces of shotgun damage and crusted spurts of blood. “We got the hell out of there,” he said.
In Vancouver, Fosse and casting director Lynne Carrow turned a hotel room into a makeshift office and spent days reading and interviewing extras. Though some would appear only in the background of the shot, Fosse auditioned them as if they were potential leads, devoting as much as fifteen minutes to each individual—a long time for a tiny part—to connect to them. “He had this incredible ability to focus so totally on each actor,” Carrow recalled. “Bob would sit there a foot away from the actor, pulling a performance out of them, while I read. I never worked with a director who physically sat knee to knee with the actors, coaching them and then turning to me and putting his hand on my shoulder to give me direction, and then turning back to them. It was very intimate. He would touch the women in a way to let them know he was there. But male or female, it didn’t matter. He’d be talking to them very gently, very softly, with a cigarette in his mouth. You could see the actor realize they were in the presence of someone who totally understood them. I remember one actress who was having a hard time pulling her performance down and when she got too big he would lean forward and gently touch her knee and say, gently, ‘Start that again.’ It was sensual.”
Fosse scouted Vancouver in a fifteen-passenger van big enough for every department head. He rode up front, smoking far more than his usual too much, his eyes fixed on the window. They couldn’t get Dorothy’s actual family home so they got one nearby, but they did get the real Dairy Queen, the one where Snider first saw Dorothy, and drove onward to the Penthouse, a strip club perfect for the part of Snider’s hangout. There was a lot of downtime in the van, and conversation came easy. Master cinematographer Sven Nykvist took the opportunity to bring up his director’s love life. “Bob,” he asked, “why all the young girls?” To the window, Fosse replied, “Their stories are shorter.”
Currently, Liz Canney headed the pack. (He had met her at a Westhampton Beach bar. She was a waitress.) A pretty, dollhouse brunette, Canney was young (in her early twenties) and seriously interested in editing. Fosse gave her a job working for Alan Heim, effective as soon as production began. In the meantime, back in New York, they spent New Year’s Eve together and went to dinners with Doctorow and his wife, Helen; Sam Cohn; and Steve Tesich. One evening, Fosse’s Star 80 script came up, and Doctorow hedged. He didn’t think it worked; the plodding inevitability of Snider’s course could make for a tiresome movie. But this close to production, Doctorow felt it would be inappropriate to suggest major revisions. Fosse was already worried enough. Though Star 80 was his fifth feature film, Fosse approached it like it was his first, with debilitating dread. He told Doctorow he had no idea what he was going to do once he got back to Vancouver. “I’m going to go out there,” he lamented, “and they’re going to ask me where to put the camera.”
Five Years
BEFORE LEAVING FOR VANCOUVER, Fosse choreographed “The Magic Bird of Fire,” a rock-disco reimagining of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, for Nicole. It would be one part of a benefit evening for Ballet Today, Brett Raphael’s fledgling dance company, and took the efforts of all the Fosses to mount. While Bob helped Nicole through the pointe solo he tailored to her strengths and weakness, Gwen busied herself with Nicole’s feathery unitard and acted as intermediary between father and daughter and Raphael. The afternoon of May 24, Fosse arrived at FIT’s Haft Auditorium for a dress rehearsal, gave only a few notes, and left before the one-night-only performance. Verdon and Reinking came instead.
The piece gave Fosse an opportunity to try a kind of ballet without suffering the consequences of a highly visible failure. But if “The Magic Bird of Fire” got a positive response, he might find the courage to finally accept the Joffrey�
��s offer and put on his first full Fosse ballet. After Dancin’, it still seemed to him a kind of finish line. Maybe even a relief. “It was fierce,” Raphael said of the ballet, “with a lot of jumps. Not a subtle piece.” Critic Mindy Aloff wrote, “This piece is dressed and lit in flame, and features a few singed remnants of dancing: pointe tendu, retiré, and the ever popular pectoral twitch. . . . Nicole Fosse is a pretty teenager; this, however, makes her look as if she’s pushing retirement.” “The Magic Bird of Fire” was never performed again. Any plans for the Joffrey Fosse sidelined.
With Fosse in Vancouver, Glattes took charge of screen tests in LA. Merely doing the scenes as written rarely gave Fosse as much as he got from getting them laughing or having them tell jokes, so he urged Glattes toward interview-auditions, recommending he interrupt the conversation with a continuous stream of comments and questions. Throwing them off balance could show a glint of real character. To gauge their appearances, Fosse requested close-ups, left and right profile shots, and, of course, full figure (in T-shirt). Glattes knew the drill, but never before had he seen Fosse so blindly adamant about detail. Trivia consumed him.
“We have to use the same carpet, Snider’s real carpet.”
“Bob, you can’t show blood on a brown carpet.”
Fosse held his ground and Glattes tested blood for months, a different shade of red every day. As if compensating for being a first-time writer and a longtime success, Fosse indulged his every hypervigilant concern. On Lenny he was desperate; on All That Jazz, obsessed; on Star 80, Fosse was a bottomless wound of insatiability. “It was like none of his successes had ever happened,” Doctorow said. In advance of his arrival, Fosse insisted every bookcase on their Playboy Mansion set match every bookcase in the real thing and that every book on those bookcases fit Hefner’s personality, whether it was in the shot or not. “It was just a movie,” Reinking said, “but it had to be real.” Now with a permit to shoot in the actual house where the killing took place, Fosse had the crew dress Snider’s former garage with the metalworking equipment he had used to build his sex-torture machine, and he instructed set decorator Mel Cooper to study explicit crime scene photos to assemble the contraption with total and horrendous fidelity. (In the weeds behind the house, Cooper found a Canadian license plate, presumably the one he had ditched to make room for his STAR 80.) The envelopes on the desk that doubled for Hefner’s contained letters from Dorothy to her mother—“real” outgoing mail Cooper stayed up nights writing, in Dorothy’s hand, in case Fosse decided to open one. “I didn’t try to copy her signature,” Cooper said, “but it had to be in a woman’s writing.” Some thought it overkill, but the effect was so lifelike, one could not step on set without feeling a ghostly chill, a premonition. It gradually dawned on cast and crew that Fosse wasn’t filming a tragedy—he was re-creating it.