Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  He returned to Los Angeles in June. With his final script revision complete, he rehearsed Hemingway and Roberts for six weeks—unprecedented for a Fosse film—in a vacant studio space at Hollywood United Methodist Church. Each “room” marked off on the floor with tape, they ran through the script, first in chunks, then in full runs, like a play. Only necessary props, blowups of actual locations, and occasional mood music disrupted the totality of their immersion. Midway through the process, Fosse asked second AD Tony Gittelson to put them on the clock. “Start the movie,” he would say, and click—Gittelson hit the stopwatch. Before long, Hemingway realized that her director was choreographing an entire movie. “It was all choreographed,” she explained, “every movement. ‘You’ll pick up this, he’ll play the guitar and sing this . . .’” Fosse had never made a movie this way before, but with all he had on the line, staging Star 80 in full allowed him some kind of insurance, as if by isolating every detail in advance, he could watch a rough cut of the movie before he made it. But the final scene he kept to himself. Fosse hadn’t rehearsed that. He did not reveal how he planned to stage the murder-rape-suicide, if he had a plan at all. And so it loomed over the production, a conspicuous and horrific inevitability waiting for everyone.

  Filming began in July 1982. “It was so painful to work on,” Albert Wolsky said. “Not just in subject matter, but we shot [mostly] in sequence, so the whole shoot was building closer and closer to it. Sometimes on movies you do the worst thing first, to get it out of the way. Not this one.”

  In Los Angeles, removed from his connection, Fosse had difficulty getting amphetamines. “Cis,” he said to Rundle, who was fast becoming a friend, “if you are the actress you think you are, who can you convince you need Dexies?” At night, away from the movie, they laughed, took trips to the Improv, and hung out at the bus stop, people watching. But the dark was always there. Some nights, Rundle just held him. He asked her to and she wanted to help. “Make these last,” she warned when she handed Fosse the pills.

  A mix of tantrums, charm, and withdrawn silence, Fosse’s moods fluctuated throughout the shoot. “It was like sounds were too loud,” Hemingway said. What set him off? Was it personal? Not knowing kept the crew on edge. One day he angrily cleared the set, only to look up hours later and ask, “Why isn’t anyone here?” Casting director Lynne Carrow thought his moods a function of broken concentration (“I’d say, ‘Hey, Bob,’ and he’d look at me blankly”). Others had different theories, mostly guesses. They said he was trying to quit smoking; he was taking too many pills; he was quitting pills. Eric Roberts saw a man under impossible pressure. “Everyone was all over him about, ‘You can’t badmouth Hollywood, you can’t badmouth Dorothy, you can’t badmouth Bogdanovich, you can’t badmouth Hef or we’ll lose the Playboy logo.’ Dorothy’s family, people in Hollywood, his lawyers—they were on him about accuracy and morality and the ‘real’ story.” Dorothy’s sister Louise sent Fosse a letter, handwritten in her tenth-grade cursive, telling him he didn’t know the truth, that he was hurting her and her family. After reading the letter, Fosse professed to be overcome with guilt. He did not want to hurt her. He did not want to hurt anyone.

  He called Ann Reinking. “I’m living in a world where nobody wants to live,” he told her. “I’m living in this world, and now we got to get to this spot. We’ve got to get to murder. And I really like these people. I don’t want to see them die.” He regularly placed a rose bouquet on the craft-service table with a note that said To Dorothy.

  “He’s going to do it,” Fosse said to Cliff Robertson, his Hefner. “He’s going to kill her, and I don’t know how to stop him.”

  The actor didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t be sure if this was some kind of Method trick, or the pills.

  “We have to do something,” Fosse said. “Watch him. Help her.”

  Roberts had virtually transformed himself into Snider, furthering the illusion and taking the whole production down with him. “He lied about everything,” one actor said. He screamed. He locked himself in his trailer. He appeared in the production office in his underwear. “Eric was so volatile,” another said, “Fosse had to handle him carefully. He’d have these infuriating moments of I want to fire him, he drives me fucking crazy.” He would deny it, but Fosse enabled Roberts, reaching raw steaks through his cage, feeding him with friendship and understanding. Without warning, Fosse would show up at Roberts’s house, banging loudly on the door in the middle of the night as if to say, Watch and repeat; this is you. Before he shot Roberts’s sex scene with Hemingway, Fosse asked him to remove the protective dance belt he had used in rehearsal to cover his genitals. Fosse gave Hemingway a feeble explanation for Roberts’s sudden nudity, and they proceeded with the shot; her discomfort, which Fosse wanted for Dorothy, showed up on film. On separate occasions, when Roberts went too far, Fosse would take the crew’s side against him. “[Roberts] got so into it,” Fosse said, “that he began alienating everybody around the set. Costume people and hairdressers would come to me and complain about how horrendously he was behaving. I went to him and was in the middle of reprimanding him when I realized what he was doing. He was trying to feel what it’s like to say the wrong things and have people reject you and what that does to you and how it sours you.” Fosse nurtured all of it. Playing one side against the other, he introduced Roberts into an atmosphere of exile and estrangement, the kind that drove Snider.

  Shooting on a sound stage at Zoetrope Studios, Roberts flubbed a scene.

  Fosse’s head shot out from behind the camera. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I messed up.”

  “Get over here.”

  Fosse got up from the crate he used as a director’s chair and took him to the other side of the stage, away from the rest of the crew. “Look at me.”

  Roberts looked at him.

  “Look at me.”

  “I’m looking at you.”

  “Look at me!”

  “I’m looking at you!”

  “You’re playing me if I wasn’t successful.” Fosse got in his face. “Do you understand?”

  Do you understand? He asked the question, Roberts remembered, “like, Can you do this for me? For me. It was so moving and so gritty and unexpected. By the time we got back to the set, I was copying his every move. I didn’t drop one mannerism he had for the rest of the movie. I became Bob Fosse.”

  Fosse asked Roberts to spend the night in the house on Clarkson Road.

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yeah, I can do it.”

  “We’re doing it together.”

  They stayed up, discussed the ending, and Fosse fell asleep on furniture he had brought in to make the house look as it did on August 14, 1980, the day of the killings. Roberts, however, couldn’t fall asleep. Freeway traffic kept him up all night. “Playing Snider made me sad,” he said. “I was pathetically unhappy during the whole shooting of that movie.”

  It was the weekend before they were scheduled to shoot the murder. “We were all afraid of it,” Alan Heim said. “The actors, Bob. It was inexorable.” When Hemingway and Roberts gathered to rehearse the scene, they discovered Fosse had it all prepared, choreographed to the smallest detail, like a dance. To the music of Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, he had broken their movements down, from A to B to C. “It was ballet,” said Tony Gittelson, “choreographed down to the hands.” Fosse talked them through every gesture, whispering direction over their dialogue when necessary. He spoke smoothly, caressingly, interrupting himself with explosive coughing sprees so distressing that factions of the crew actually placed bets on whether he was going to survive the movie.

  They wrapped.

  Eric Roberts broke into Cis Rundle’s house. He trashed the furniture. On more than one occasion, she found him waiting for her on the street, his eyes like empty holes. Once she came home to find him watching TV in her living room. Fosse told Rundle to get a restraining order, but she never did. Somehow she felt sorry for him. Was
it her proximity to Hef, and to Dorothy, that drew Roberts to her? Or was it that he didn’t know what else to do with what he had left of Snider? He asked Rundle to take him to Dorothy’s grave at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, hidden famously behind a multiscreen cineplex on Wilshire Boulevard. She did, and watched him from a distance. Across the grass from Marilyn Monroe, he knelt crying at Dorothy’s headstone, a simple red plaque near the center of the green. “And then,” Rundle said, “I don’t know why, Eric ripped up his SAG card and left.”

  Editing Star 80 did not demand the same muscle Heim and company had needed to tame All That Jazz. Fosse had less footage to bring back to New York—a relief with its own set of problems. For one, Hemingway’s weaker points could not unweaken. In an unusual move, Fosse and Heim had her outtakes reprinted, and they gleaned what they could from the scraps, but in the end they found their initial instincts confirmed: they already had the very best of her. Then there was the film’s dreaded finale, which Heim had warned Fosse, in dailies, to tone down. He hadn’t. Now, in the cutting room, Heim suggested they try to ease off the rape and murder, just a little. He recognized the reality of the story called for horror, but there was such a thing as going too far. “We didn’t butt heads,” Heim said. “We discussed.” For his effort, Fosse dubbed Heim his conscience, but, again, they were stuck with what they had: Star 80 would end in a sickening display of misery and gore. And yet, despite all that was meant to hurt in his nightmare of showbiz psych, Fosse wanted his film to entertain. “I tried to make it like a musical with one slow scene then a staccato scene,” he said. “I put in moments of sheer entertainment just to break up the tension.” Only an audience could tell him if he had succeeded.

  Outside the cutting room, the musical tide was turning against Fosse. As of the previous June, Dancin’ had left the Ambassador Theater, making the fall of 1982 the first time since 1977 he had no show on Broadway—and back then, he’d had to wait only a short while to see his name on a marquee once again.

  New York wasn’t his town anymore.

  Breakthroughs in technology, politics, and society begin and end golden ages in the same swoop. One can see the story of Broadway either way, as a sequence of new lives or a series of deaths. Those partial to shows of the 1930s could blame those productions’ demise on the radio; in the 1940s, they could say it was the war; in the 1950s, TV; in the 1960s, it was the movies and hippies; and on and on. And yet each modification forced a change to the musical, stimulating an innovation in production, aesthetic ideology, or theme. Only innocence was lost. Each era matured the form, growing it upward from the mulch of shows past. Each generation could have had it both ways. “They don’t make ’em like they used to but look how they make ’em now!” One could have said that—then. Not now. “It’s just possible that the Broadway musical—like some species of the animal kingdom—may have perfected itself out of existence,” Frank Rich opined. The 1979–1980 season featured only three new American musicals. And the musical revival dominated 1981. What happened?

  A generation gap, for one thing. The shift of popular music from Broadway to rock drew new talents with it, leaving contemporary musical theater in the hands of old masters. Many seemed out of ideas. Then there were the prohibitively high costs of mounting a big show. Corporations had been investing in Broadway for decades—Coca-Cola put money in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Columbia Pictures bought into Dancin’—but in the early eighties, the Reagan era’s fetish for blockbuster spectaculars raised budgets to epic heights, and the corporate investor became an almost essential part of Broadway—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when the money tries to protect its investment—at around four million dollars, a considerable one—by getting involved with the creative content of the shows, unhealthy mutations occur. “There is not the same kind of intelligence and cultivation today,” Hal Prince told the New York Times. “Our times encourage another sort of people—people with new money who are essentially interested in more money, not the arts.” The wrong people make the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons. With so many irreducible tastes to fold into one, the likes of Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, and other entertainment giants, hoping to draw audiences from New York to Calexico, waved their unmagic wands over Broadway, and musical theater went pop, which is to say, mostly bland. And to turn a profit, these expensive shows needed to play longer and to more audiences. But the longer they played, the more new talent they blocked, and there we are again: the generation gap.

  That was the first tragedy. Here’s the second: big Broadway worked.

  People paid in record numbers. The summer of 1980 was Broadway’s biggest ever. And then, self-merchandizing, it got bigger. Strolling midtown in October 1982—just weeks before Fosse wrapped Star 80—many a Broadway rabbi had reason to pause before the Winter Garden, stroke his long beard, and ponder: “Does Cats sell the T-shirts, or do the T-shirts sell Cats?” To see Cats at the Winter Garden—where it ran for almost nineteen years, starting in 1982—was to ride giggling into a Disneyland happening as weird and sweet and thin as a Halloween-themed Miss America Pageant (with cats). High on aria and low on dance, Andrew Lloyd Webber set the pace for pop opera, showcasing big songs, big sets, and big voices. “I see shows having more special effects,” Fosse said, “more like Spielberg movies. Everybody’s into short-term concentration, like MTV, with hyped-up sound and lights.” The success of the Broadway spectacular showed that Robbins, de Mille, Michael Kidd, and Jack Cole were definitely dead in spirit, even if some of them weren’t actually dead. Fosse and Michael Bennett were all that remained of director-choreographers. From opposite sides of the same street, each watched the other guy, regarding him strangely, like the other survivor on his desert island. They had more in common than they once thought.

  Virtuoso in every detail, Michael Bennett’s Dreamgirls did what few could have imagined—it outclassed A Chorus Line. From the first note—a single beat—a flood of music continuously transformed Dreamgirls’ fluid network of cultures, personalities, and pop trends, evolving a panoramic picture of the show-business life, of show business across many lives, many eras. Long, tall light towers moved the air like tai chi masters, imperiously reinventing the stage space, transporting the drama through time at the speed of a chord change or a cut. Sweet Charity was cinematic; Dreamgirls was practically a movie onstage. “I think he felt like that victory should have been his,” Tony Stevens said. “Fosse was a film genius but Michael Bennett wasn’t. But on Dreamgirls, Michael was saying, ‘Look, I can do movies too, and I can do it onstage.’” The hardest part was that Fosse couldn’t tell Paddy about Dreamgirls; he couldn’t follow him to a corner booth and figure out a way to laugh about it over a drink. Some nights, after leaving the cutting room, instead of heading home, Fosse would walk south to West Fifty-Fifth Street to visit Paddy’s old friend Eddie White. An ex-prizefighter, he had Paddy’s build, and when the lights were low his silhouette could pass for Chayefsky’s. White may even have loved Paddy as much as Fosse did. In the old days, after dinner, Fosse would say good night to Paddy and move on to the female part of his evening, and Paddy, who didn’t want to go home to his wife and didn’t want to troll the streets for company, would galumph his way to White’s, to the big black recliner his pal kept waiting for him, and pass a few hours talking about the fights, about Rocky Graziano, about show business (which was a fight too), until he got tired enough to go home. Now, on those nights that Fosse left the cutting room and didn’t go home, he would go to White’s and settle into Paddy’s big black recliner, sometimes staying until morning. White stayed up with him. Though he was tired, he let Fosse talk on about girls and the movie. “Eddie,” he would say, “tell me about Paddy.”

  He saw Ann Reinking for lunch. Fueled perhaps by the implications of her relationship with Herb Allen, president of Allen and Company and Columbia Pictures (among other subsidiaries), Fosse asked Reinking to marry him. They were in his apartment. “If we’d had a child,” he said to her, “he’d
be eleven by now.” Confused by her emotion, moved by her confusion, she entertained a home movie of what it would look like and skipped to the last scene. “I felt he really wanted to marry me,” she said, “but I also felt he knew that he really couldn’t. There was no saving him. He knew he was dying, not literally, but that there was something dying in him. You know that something’s so wrong and you know that it is killing you but you don’t know what it is and you don’t know how to stop it. That was Bob. I just loved him so much that if it didn’t work out, it would break my heart beyond repair. I don’t think I could have survived it.”

  Four Years

  FOSSE CUT STAR 80 through spring of 1983 and set his sights on relief. A little vacation first, and then, if he could machete his way through the corporate tangle of Broadway, a fun musical; nothing cynical, just a sturdy piece of entertainment, a few laughs and good numbers. The thought of an old-time musical comedy, maybe the kind Abbott used to make—a notion Fosse had spent most of his career resisting—took him back twenty years to Big Deal on Madonna Street. “It was about fumblers trying to do something bigger than they were capable of doing and never giving up,” he said. “That thread appealed to me—that desire to keep trying all the time.” The details were vague—maybe Peter Allen would do the songs and he’d do the book. At this early, early stage, Big Deal was a placeholder, Fosse’s preemptive retaliation to the post-postproduction blues he saw coming.