Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Later that evening, good-natured marriage jokes flew around the room and Fosse took offense. “He got pissed,” Doctorow said. “We weren’t taking the occasion seriously enough. He thought we should be a little more respectful of the achievement. It turned out he had almost religious respect for the institution.” Writing and marriage both. “He actually interrogated my parents,” actress Deborah Geffner remembered. “Here’s the hippest person maybe ever, and he wants to know how my mom and dad managed to stay together so long. It was like anthropological research.” The Geffners weren’t the only ones he interviewed. Fosse regularly opened up his Quogue parties to his friends’ parents, and the longer their marriages the better. Commitment was too exotic a blossom to treat casually.

  “He was the ultimate host,” Laurent Giroux said, “and a worrywart too. He threw those parties like they were Bob Fosse shows. He was going to make sure you were entertained!” He put out cigarettes, and when the cigarettes were smoked, he passed around cigars; he kept the fireplace burning and the booze flowing; dashing from kitchen to deck, he hand-delivered shrimp cocktails and bites of buttered lobster; when it got dark and cooled down, he set up tables for dinner and passed around sweaters; and if he ran out of propane, he could call Gwen a few towns over to bring reinforcements. She always did.

  And after dinner, he might scrounge up some entertainment.

  After the meal one night, he said, “Come on, we’re going to do an old vaudeville number. You do this”—a quick step—“then I’ll do—wait, we need a third!” He yanked a body from the couch, gave the steps, and then he asked to see it. “Good, good, good . . .” He looked up. “Larry,” he said to Giroux, “why are you dancing so slinky and mushy?”

  “You’re giving me notes at your own fucking party?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Fosse wouldn’t go to New York, so he brought New York to Quogue.

  His current girlfriend, Phoebe Ungerer, was by his side throughout. As Verdon well knew, she had to accept her, or seem to. Blocking his libido would block Gwen from Fosse, so when the crowd looked for her reaction, Gwen shifted into high doyenne, taking Phoebe by the arm and introducing her to guests around the grounds like Fosse’s place in Quogue was Gwen’s second home. But it was Phoebe’s now.

  Bob and Phoebe met at one of Doctorow’s garden parties, in East Hampton, the summer of 1984. Phoebe came with her mother, Miriam, and stepfather, the writer Wilfrid Sheed. They were old friends of the Doctorows, old friends of everyone’s, really, from Kurt Vonnegut down to Truman Capote. At ease with the big time, Phoebe looked like a girl Truman would have written about. She had the warmth of a country morning and a face so pretty it practically pinged. Fosse heard the ping from across the Doctorows’ back lawn and turned to look. She was an actress, but she could have been a dancer, or at least Fosse thought so as he cut through the crowd and interrupted her conversation to introduce himself.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Bob Fosse.”

  She had heard of him. “Phoebe Ungerer.”

  They shook hands. She was twenty-three; he was fifty-seven.

  Looking behind Fosse, Phoebe could see the faces, many she’d known her whole life, turn toward them to watch. They looked concerned, like they knew more about what was happening, or going to happen, than she did. And they did. By then, the major plot points of a Bob Fosse affair were a sad sitcom most Page Six readers had been following for years. They knew it always began like this, with a pretty young girl at the beginning of her career. They knew it always ended. Phoebe was too green to see any of it, but she saw that others could, and it gave her a chill.

  One night later, Fosse was serving her lobster and Cristal, his favorite champagne. Quogue brought out the romantic in him. Bustling about the kitchen, lighting tall candles around the table, and dishing out the meal, he was at his best, onstage at home, high on a cozy buzz. Phoebe too.

  Six months later, she moved in.

  At first, there were few surprises. Off amphetamines (he promised), Fosse watched his days in wide shots and long takes. They took it easy. “I’ve spent my whole life working on holidays,” he explained. Now he had the time to relax.

  Quogue lent itself to the comforts of habitual living, to walks with Phoebe, bicycle rides into town to collect ingredients for the evening meal, then the meal. They ate at the Laundry with Sam Cohn and his girlfriend, Dianne Wiest. They watched movies, whatever was on TV. He told her about Kubrick, more of an idol now than Fellini, and together they swooned over The Shining, the Steadicam work in particular. “Bob would teach me about movies and how they were made,” Phoebe said. “He thought so much about editing. And where the light comes from. He would always get annoyed when the whole room was lit, or when he saw an establishing shot. He hated that! Who needs that?” When it came time for the Oscars, he let her choose his votes.

  He missed his friend. “Losing Paddy,” Phoebe said, “was the hardest thing he ever had to do.” When Paddy’s name came up, Fosse seemed to disappear from his body. “It was like he went to wax,” Phoebe said. He got the same look the night they turned on the TV and found that Truffaut had died, of a brain tumor, at fifty-two. Fosse was horrified; he didn’t even know Truffaut had been ill. Now there would never be another Truffaut movie. Not eventually, not possibly at some point—never.

  “Did you know,” Phoebe said, “that I grew up at the White House on Eighty-Sixth and Central Park West?”

  Fosse turned to face her.

  “On the twelfth floor, the same floor as Paddy. I grew up right across the hall from him.”

  “What?”

  “And it was just us and Paddy. There were only two apartments on each floor.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “I grew up there. I don’t think I ever spoke with him but I remember I’d see him coming home and leaving. I saw him so many times.”

  Two Years

  FOSSE REVISED HIS WILL for the last time on March 28, 1985. For a man who once carried around a pocket-sized notebook of famous last words, touching up bequests was as much a matter of closing his affairs, of bringing the record of his loves up to date and seeing them provided for, as it was the last shot of the movie. It had to be perfect. Like any memorable ending, it had to be poignant, amusing, revelatory, entertaining, and a touch eloquent. Poignant would be easy: he would be dead. For amusing, Fosse left his share in the Laundry, by then a flailing, irritating venture, to Sam Cohn, the man who had roped him into it in the first place. For revelatory, he left $100,000 to establish a theatrical scholarship in his name “for deserving students in the theatrical arts,” and he left $15,000—here everyone’s eyes would widen—to Mary-Ann Niles. Entertaining: As original a number as he’d ever choreographed, the big $25,000 dinner party Fosse had been imagining since his bypass surgery in 1974 would be his masterstroke, an evening people would remember until their own deaths. As for the rest of his money, pieces were scattered to the usual suspects (Herb Gardner, Phoebe, his sister Marianne), but the largest amount, an estate that totaled around four million dollars, Fosse left, naturally, to his wife and daughter. Everyone would see that one coming. But the direction he had in mind for his body—to be burned to ash in a Pippin-like immolation and the remains divided between earth and sea—had the surprise inevitability of real eloquence.

  His year of semiseclusion ended quietly as he paid a house call to Hal Prince’s Grind, a life-versus-showbiz musical about racial tension at a burlesque theater in Chicago in 1933. Choreographed by Lester Wilson, the show suffered from an overcomplicated story and false start sadly typical of the mid-1980s: too much money. Budgeted at five million and paid for in part by Texas oilmen, Grind needed a star to be fiscally secure. One of the Shuberts, Bernie Jacobs, eased Prince into casting Ben Vereen, precipitating an involved series of rewrites to turn an ensemble show into a star vehicle. Grind never recovered. “It became for me the most painful working experience of my life,” Prince said. Fosse went to Baltimore for a look.


  “Bob didn’t throw out the choreography,” recalled dancer Valarie Pettiford. “He finessed it.” Yet his touch was indubitable. In the usual Fosse way, he inflated “New Man,” Vereen’s solo, with novelty beats, adding percussion wherever he could.

  “Mike, do you think we have too many accents?” he asked drummer Mike Berkowitz.

  “Nah, there’s an eighth note in bar seven we haven’t used yet.”

  His wittiest save was “From the Ankles Down”: The curtain rises on act two, and up in an elevated corner of the stage, a knot of naked limbs curl through a lather of golden darkness. What is this? A bit of brass tells us they’re strippers—we’re in their changing room. But rather than stripping, they’re sliding up their stockings, gliding on gloves, dressing with the studied languor of a striptease in reverse. They’re getting dressed, sexy dressed, but there’s a bitter edge to it; even when they’re not working, they’re working. Frank Rich wrote, “The interlude gives rueful life—but only brief life—to the show’s subsidiary point that grind-show performers are never free of the brutal daily grind that they allow their Depression audiences to escape.” Grind closed on June 22 after seventy-one performances.

  As he worked on Grind, Fosse kept thinking about Big Deal, considering the rights and wrongs of a Depression-era race musical with an old-fashioned bent. At the height of the civil rights movement, when Fosse first thought of adapting Big Deal on Madonna Street, he imagined an all-black show set in Harlem—if it didn’t work in Tijuana. Omitting any cultural indicators, Fosse prepared Big Deal to go either way, New York or Mexico, film or stage. Now, fifteen years later, preparing to adapt a book from his adapted screenplay and musical book of 1969, Fosse decided to make Big Deal a predominantly black show. But not in Harlem; in Chicago. And instead of finding new songs, Fosse would build the story on period classics, like a revue. With no composer, songwriter, or co-author, Big Deal would be, like Star 80, pure Bob Fosse, a single-voiced entertainment unhindered by auxiliary influence. As with Dancin’, Fosse would answer to no one, not even stars. Big Deal, he said to Vereen during Grind, would be an ensemble piece. No leading parts, just one exquisite company. Vereen turned it down.

  While Fosse wrote, Sam Cohn dealt with Bernie Jacobs. Like an unhappy couple, Cohn and Jacobs were both interdependent and alone; Cohn had the talent, Jacobs had the theaters (seventeen Shuberts, to be exact, more theaters than anyone else on Broadway). Their negotiations were marked by irritation and the sort of squinting that made even the finest-print decisions, like where to eat, a matter of strenuous compromise. (On the issue of lunch, they each refused the other the comfort of his home turf, which disqualified the Russian Tea Room for Sam and Sardi’s for Bernie; splitting the difference, they ended up with Joe Allen’s.) Cohn hated deliberating. He liked to work fast (he sold the rights to Doctorow’s Ragtime to Dino De Laurentiis, who hadn’t read the book, in three minutes, and over the phone ); and described dealing with Jacobs as “the worst migraine you’ve had in your life.” Jacobs accused Cohn of demanding perilously high royalties for his clients, and Cohn asserted that shows like Annie made everyone a winner. But they both knew a good thing when they saw it. When Cohn offered him the chance, Jacobs invested in the Laundry.

  Big Deal was gestating while Joseph Harris, producer of Sweet Charity and Chicago, prepared a Sweet Charity revival for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera’s summer season. Fosse never liked going back, especially now that his mojo was pushing him forward again, so he shrugged off the revival and sent Gwen instead. “He knew there was never going to be any chance in the world, even if he put his imprimatur on it, [that the revival] ever could be the way it could be, the way it was,” said Gordon Harrell. But now that the Dancin’ tour had ended, Fosse’s bank statements had lost a certain something, and in the era of revivalist Broadway, a Sweet Charity with Debbie Allen (star of TV’s Fame) seemed a feasible replacement. In lieu of Fosse, director John Bowab was installed to work the book scenes, while Gwen coached Allen, as she had Shirley MacLaine, and supervised the choreography. Fosse’s credit read simply, and obscurely, production supervisor. While Charity got off the ground, he toiled over the Big Deal book.

  Reproducing the original dances down to the quickest twitch of the tiniest dancer in the farthest row, Fosse expert Christopher Chadman and Verdon kept 1985 looking like 1966. “Gwen had a photographic memory,” Ann Reinking said. “It was unreal. She could tell you all the cues. She knew everything.” She was a library. You’ll need to rest here; you’ll need to blow smoke up into the garment bag so it ricochets down here; you’ll need to breathe here. Why did they need Fosse? He flew to LA to supervise the transition and then returned to New York.

  Though Sweet Charity had done right by Fosse in the past, he had a great deal at stake in reviving it. He was thinking now as much about hits as he was about legacy, how—if—future generations of theatergoers would receive him. Of course, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and even Little Me had been revived, and How to Succeed in Business would forever be a touchstone of the American musical, but none of those claimed to be Fosse from the ankle up, inside and out, as Sweet Charity was. Classic status, if it could be conferred on Charity, would show Fosse razzle-dazzle to be, at last, more than razzle-dazzle—more than an extended fad. But no one could say for sure if Sweet Charity would work without Verdon in the leading role and twenty years later.

  As planned, Fosse returned to LA early in June 1985 to put the finishing touches on the show. The day he arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, site of Cabaret’s Oscar sweep, his dancers bubbled like red-carpet movie fans watching the door of the longest limo as it begins to open. To this current crop of dancers, many of whom had grown up sleeping under Charity posters, Fosse was Elvis. And his name was synonymous with the kind of good, hard choreography that the Broadway of late, overrun by spectacle and expensive scenery, had almost abandoned. In 1985, for the first time in its thirty-nine-year history, the Tony nominating committee actually scrapped the award for best choreography (as well as the awards for best actor and best actress in a musical), leaving one to surmise that when Fosse and Bennett took off from Broadway, Broadway took off from dance.

  Excitement was very high. Fosse took his seat beside Gwen, and the Charity run-through started. But Verdon and Fosse were the real show that afternoon, drawing more attention, and more concern, than anything onstage. Watching them from the wings, dancer Jane Lanier remembered that Gwen seemed to experience the run-through as Charity, practically dancing the part in her seat. “She was going through everything Charity was going through,” Lanier said. But Fosse didn’t move. In a matter of moments, word of his dissatisfaction filled the theater. Dancer Dana Moore recalled, “Fosse just sort of sat there, his chin down, looking at us over the tops of his eyes, kind of nodding his head, sinking lower in his seat.” All the steps were there, the characters were there, but the burn was missing. Director John Bowab had missed the show’s innermost core, which gave Charity the air of nothing but an expert routine.

  Act one ended. Fosse asked the stage manager to call for lunch—a break that went on a little too long to quell the worry. When the company returned to the theater, Fosse made no speeches, offered no explanations or pronouncements; he merely asked to see Sweet Charity from the top, and then proceeded to break it down, from scratch, one moment at a time. “After that day,” Moore said, “we never saw John Bowab again.”

  It would take a Fosse, with his encyclopedic archive of erotic buttons, to push his dancers to the burn. “He followed me around as I was rehearsing [the Frug] and he would whisper suggestive or provocative questions in my ear while I was dancing,” Moore said. “It was to get me thinking about who I was and where I was and what my life was at that moment, [a reference to] something he learned about me the evening before.” As Gwen watched from the house, Fosse slid next to Mimi Quillin, one of the “Big Spender” girls, and whispered, “Pick me, pick me, pick me,” in her ear. Then he turned her and made her say it, and mean it
, back to his face. “I know that people think it’s strange that I thought it was fun to watch Bob flirt with other women,” Gwen said, “but he would get so jaunty and he would do such funny things and—I mean, he could be fascinating and you could see the women going for it hook, line, and sinker. I mean, sometimes it was because they wanted a part in a movie, but in spite of that, they would start to be absolutely charmed by him . . .” His kind of sexy had to be got at indirectly; he didn’t tell them to seduce but to expect the seduction. He would say, “Don’t go to them, make them come to you.” It’s in the eyes, not the groin, and it doesn’t ask to be wanted. It knows—it’s the Know. (“Bob is more sensual than sexual,” Reinking said. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes I see when people do Bob’s work.”)

  Rebuilding the ensemble was only half of what Fosse needed to accomplish before he could open the show, two weeks after his arrival, on July 16, 1985. The other half—Debbie Allen’s performance—Fosse and Gwen revised in relative isolation. Her “If My Friends Could See Me Now” tested Allen and Fosse both; it had from the beginning and would to the very end. When he first saw the number on Allen, Fosse snapped. “It’s awful!” he said. “I didn’t choreograph that!” Verdon responded defensively, and, Quillin remembered, “It was like a fight was going to break out.” But Fosse was reacting more to his work than hers. It had been twenty years since he’d taken the tweezers to Charity. Gwen might have predicted this sort of reaction, for large selections of his 1960s trunk occupied that transitional halfway between apprenticeship and maturity, before the watershed years of 1971 and 1972, when Fosse’s influences shone brightest. Showing both seed and bloom, “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This” (borrowed partially from West Side Story’s “America”), sections of “The Rich Man’s Frug” (thick with 1960s dance vogues), and the particularly frustrating “Rhythm of Life” (classic ensemble choreography by the yard), which had never satisfied him, described both how far he had come and how he’d gotten there. But “If My Friends Could See Me Now” was especially vexing. The number’s dense marriage of speed and emotional nuance—a sure thing for Verdon in her heyday—would be hard work for almost everyone else.