Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Strolling up Fifth Avenue, he won waves and handshakes from passersby. “The seas parted for him,” Rundle said. “They loved him. They ran over to him.” Wall Street types stopped midsentence and curled forward, pinching teacup fingers to invisible bowlers. Laughing with them, Fosse answered with a salute or two-second soft-shoe. Being recognized—it was like he had made it.

  They came to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Rundle said she wanted to go inside for Mass. Fosse did too. “I think he would say he was an agnostic,” Reinking said. “There is a God and he abandoned Bob.” He and Rundle made their way up the grand stairway, and at the large doors he stopped short.

  “Wait. I can’t go in.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid God might just strike me dead.”

  He reached into his pocket for a handful of bills. “Here,” he said, opening the door for her, “light as many for me as you can.”

  Award shows or openings had been his only reasons to leave Quogue. Since Paddy died, Fosse had given up 850 Seventh, and his core group, like Cohn, Doctorow, and Schulberg, had homes not too far from his on Long Island. But in the fall of 1986, Sweet Charity drew him back to Manhattan, to rehearsal and to his dance captain Gwen Verdon. When Debbie Allen left the show, they returned to Minskoff Studios, where no Times critics could touch him, with Ann Reinking their new Charity. Fluent in Reinking for fifteen years, Fosse knew her limits and how to exceed them. Though she had Pippin’d, and Roxie’d, and Trumpet Soloed, Charity, the most demanding role in Fosse’s canon, required sustained and unmatched levels of performance, technique, and endurance. Reinking called it the Swan Lake of Broadway. And now was her time. Sliding Reinking’s body into Charity’s heart, Fosse drew from her a Fosse dancer in full flower.

  “Isn’t it funny,” she said, “that our dreams almost come true?”

  He smiled. “Quit being so smart.”

  Was he an artist? The question always embarrassed Fosse. Calling oneself an artist was like calling oneself beautiful; it was for others to decide. But still he wondered. Was he an artist? Did his having to ask the question mean he wasn’t? Orson Welles was an artist. He was the Mercury Theater, whose billowing silks Fosse reused in Pippin and All That Jazz, whose black velour drop he raised up—feet, legs, waist, torso, face, fingers—in Liza with a Z. Welles was an artist; Bob Fosse was a craftsman. At his best, he said, a very good craftsman, the number one butcher on the block. Ann Reinking scrunched her nose at this. “Well, okay,” he admitted, smiling a little. “Maybe I’m a master craftsman.”

  Gwen watched Fosse watch Reinking. Fosse watched Reinking watch Gwen. No matter how successfully each had moved on—Fosse to Phoebe, Verdon to Jerry Lanning, Reinking to Herb Allen—they interfaced daily with might-have-beens. Some said Fosse drove Reinking especially hard to make her pay for her happiness, and that Gwen, so often the disciplinarian, eased off to settle the balance, as if keeping Reinking strong against Fosse was her way of looking after him. Gwen always would.

  Pianist Don Rebic came early to the Minskoff one morning to find Fosse alone in the studio, looking out the window. Without turning, he asked, “How you doing?”

  “I’m getting a divorce.”

  “How’s your professional life?”

  “My professional life’s great.”

  Fosse took a long pause. “Well, I think there’s a certain balance in that.”

  By now, cutting his own commercials had become an essential part of Fosse’s promotional outreach. Though his approach to the Pippin spot had been straightforward and theatrical, a single-number amuse-bouche, his concepts for Dancin’ and Big Deal grew progressively unconventional. These were no longer commercials but thirty-second short films, expressly cinematic. On Dancin’, for instance, he couldn’t resist shooting at two hundred frames per second (eight times more than the standard twenty-four) for a slow-motion effect. Rather than appropriate a whole number in full as he had on Pippin, he flew and twisted his Dancin’ dancers before a black drape, as if in limbo. Laying the images on top of one another, Fosse and Heim built a single body of mutant elegance, a new, abstract piece of choreography as startling as the Pippin commercial was cheeky, and just for TV.

  Heim was busy on another project when the time came to do the spot for Ann Reinking’s Sweet Charity, so Fosse called Rick Shaine, his editor on The Goodbye People. But Shaine was cutting Dead of Winter for Arthur Penn. “That’s okay,” Fosse said. “We’ll work at night.”

  And they did. On the first night, they parsed Fosse’s thirty thousand feet of uncut film, basically all of it from “Big Spender”—nearly thirty hours of footage for a thirty-second spot. “Let’s make a bet,” Fosse purred. “How many cuts do you think we’ll end up with?” They made their guesses—Shaine bet on fifty-five, Fosse a few more—and put their twenty-dollar bills down. Four nights later, they reached the finish line, a commercial, but before Shaine could catch his breath, Fosse lit another cigarette and said, “Now let’s run through all the outtakes and make sure we didn’t miss anything.” It was three in the morning. Fading, Shaine climbed onto the daybed they kept nearby, and Fosse settled in at the flatbed for round two. “He watched every single one of those outtakes at high speed,” Shaine recalled, “and found a jump of Ann Reinking in slightly better position, her legs were straighter, more parallel to the floor.” He woke up Shaine, and they put in the new clip. It threw everything off. A few frames longer than its predecessor, the addition edged the picture off the music; they had to recut the whole thing. Three hours later, at six in the morning, Fosse reminded Shaine they had a bet. Shaine counted fifty-five cuts, right on the nose, and declared himself the winner. Fosse glared and made him recount. Shaine reached the same total, fifty-five. “You know, Rick,” Fosse said with a grin as he reached for his billfold, “on Big Deal, I think Alan had fifty-seven.”

  On October 19, 1986, Stanley Lebowsky, Fosse’s musical director of many years, suffered a heart attack and died. He was fifty-nine, one year younger than Fosse. When she heard, Verdon came to Sweet Charity rehearsal armed with a plan. She passed out copies of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting—a book Fosse had little respect for—explaining, “When Bob comes in, let’s all be sitting reading it.” It worked. When he saw them all lined up with books to their noses, Fosse laughed. She had been there in Cabaret, she had been there in the hospital, and she would be there for him now. “After Star 80,” orchestrator Ralph Burns said, “Bob ran back to her womb.”

  Fosse and Verdon were dressing the same now, coming to rehearsal, Dana Moore recalled, in button-down shirts and slacks—Gwen in navy blue and Fosse, of course, in black. Before he got to rehearsal, she’d come to the studio alone, to pick up the garbage. “Their relationship during Charity was very warm and supportive,” dancer Lisa Embs recalled. Beyond sharing and thus reading each other’s mind, as odd as it sounds, they were said to feel each other’s presence. Once, Gwen was working onstage with the company when, “in the middle of it,” Mimi Quillin said, “without taking a beat, she leaned into me and in that warbled voice said, ‘Bob’s here.’” Sure enough, when Quillin looked to the back of the house, he was leaning against the wall, watching.

  “You should have seen Gwen in her prime,” he said to Dana Moore. “She was one of the most beautiful women.”

  “But she still is beautiful.”

  “No, no. Not like she was.”

  As entertainers, they loved no one more than each other. The Fosse and Verdon legend gave new life to their old act, and they appeared together at public events to give and receive tributes. On May 5, 1987, Verdon took center stage at the Juilliard Theater to present Fosse with the Capezio Dance Award, which he shared that night with Astaire and Nureyev. (Fosse concluded his acceptance speech, “Before I die, I just want the New York Times to say one nice thing.”) On June 7, 1987, the night of the Tonys, they presented, together, awards for best choreography and best direction of a musical—to Trevor Nunn and John Caird for Les Misérables. On June 22
, Fosse and Verdon appeared at the Palace Theater to celebrate George Abbott’s one hundredth birthday with a gala evening of song and dance. It was a harrowing night for Fosse; earlier that day, he had gotten terrible news. Fred Astaire had died. Fosse’s grief, heightened by the insensitivity of journalists calling him for sound bites, turned to anger. In twenty-four hours, those journalists would be on to their next obituary, and the epochal magnitude of Astaire’s death would vanish with them. “His feeling was people just swoop in when people die,” Mimi Quillin said. “Then they go.”

  The next day Fosse turned sixty. He threw himself a party in Quogue, and his life’s full company attended: Reinking, Heim, Phoebe, Budd Schulberg, Janice Lynde . . . “He seemed to be taking great care of himself,” Lynde recalled, “like he’d found some sort of peace. He was off the booze, off the drugs, and smoking a little bit, but not like he used to.” That day they revisited their whole story, from their first meeting at the opening night of Applause (“You’re so tall”; “You’re so short”) to the very hard nights. Fosse apologized for calling her middle-class—which he had, hurting her terribly—fifteen years before. “We talked about things,” Lynde said. “The ins and outs of our whole friendship. The whole thing.”

  “You always used to say you didn’t want to live past sixty,” she teased him. “Why did you pick sixty?”

  “Because then I’d be too old to choreograph.” He leaned in with a secret. “But sixty is young these days. It’s the new fifty.”

  That evening Fosse’s mood fluctuated between euphoria and solemnity. Here he was, older than he had ever intended to be, walled in by six decades of loving friends but closer than ever to the other side of that wall. If he did it right, this scene—the food, the sea air, Gwen, the girls—really could make a good ending to the film. It had everything: resolution, emotion, full-company power, visual plenitude. It just needed some kind of dramatic incident to catalyze the movie. Of course, he had an idea; it was one he had used before, but since when had Fosse claimed to be original? Drawing folks from their conversations, the director respectfully ordered his guests into one room and asked them each to stand up, one after the next, and say something nice about him. They did.

  “Didn’t the tributes sound like eulogies?” asked one who’d missed the party.

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “He was staging his own funeral!”

  “I guess he didn’t want to miss it.”

  Now that Sweet Charity had closed on Broadway, and the tour, with Donna McKechnie, loomed, Fosse and cigarettes picked up where they’d left off. “By the time we were working,” McKechnie said, “he was smoking all the time.” After her final performance of A Chorus Line, McKechnie joined Verdon and Mimi Quillin at the Minskoff for a month of rehearsals, where Fosse, in a neighboring studio, worked mysteriously and privately. “But I feel I really haven’t fulfilled what I started out to do,” he said in 1986. “I think I should have done more classical dancing. If I had my life to live over again, I would have gone the route of Jerry [Robbins], would have gone into ballet, choreographed ballets.” Was he planning a new show in there? Or was it nothing, just sketches for his personal amusement? The details were unclear. But Fosse couldn’t keep all of his Minskoff sessions a secret—McKechnie snuck by, and so did Valarie Pettiford. And Reinking knew. “He wanted to do a full ballet for the first time in his life,” she said. “He thought he was ready.”

  Before Fosse was scheduled to appear at McKechnie’s Minskoff studio, he would show up unannounced, waving her on with an “Oh, don’t mind me” or “Pay no attention to this man sitting here.” Each day, he returned, and each day he sat a little closer to his newest Charity, until finally she looked down one afternoon to find him smoking at her feet. By then, no ice needed rebreaking. The two, who had first worked together on How to Succeed, had been fully and seamlessly reacquainted, but what McKechnie didn’t know (until later) was that Fosse had been studying her long before those Minskoff sneak-ins. Slithering by incognito to watch her audition as Cassie and, unknowingly, as Donna, he went to see her in A Chorus Line—six times. That she had been Bennett’s muse and offstage partner (his favorite instrument, he called her) as far back as 1968’s Promises, Promises did not keep Fosse from hiring her. By then, his thing with Bennett had simmered down to a good-humored game, and putting all questions of trust behind him, he knew McKechnie would be a great Charity—naïve in spirit, but airy where Gwen had guts. The power she got from Bennett, McKechnie brought to Fosse’s style, packing very big into very small. “Bennett is up and out,” she explained, “Fosse is down and in.”

  “Can you do that better?” Fosse would ask flatly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do it.”

  He wanted to teach her she was in control of her performance, to show her she owned her talent and that achievement wasn’t a muse but a muscle. Knowing how high she could go and getting there each time—that was pro.

  Ordinarily Fosse’s stage managers and dance captains would lead the show from town to town, but on this production, he and Gwen (and Cy Coleman) flew in to personally rehearse the company before every opening night. Going the extra extra mile was well advised. With Fosse’s reputation in decline and Charity’s presales disconcertingly low, morale took a hit. “People had given up their homes and their lives for what was going to be an extended tour,” Chet Walker said, “and things weren’t going well. People were worried. I think Fosse felt responsible.” The company turned inward with blame and hostility. “It was like the dancers versus the production,” one dancer explained. “I heard a lot of negativity in the dressing room.” Traveling with Charity, Fosse and Verdon could present a united front. “Whatever’s going on out there,” Fosse announced to the factions, “you have to believe in this little black box.” Nothing else concerned them. “He wanted us to know he was on it,” Mimi Quillin said, “that he was ahead of what wasn’t working, that we were being taken care of.”

  Verdon and Fosse were there in Toronto on July 2, 1987, before Charity opened at the Royal Alexandra Theater. As she readied her dance bag for the first dress rehearsal, Donna McKechnie flipped on the radio and scanned the room for the items on her checklist. Then she heard it: Michael Bennett had died that morning.

  AIDS.

  The Times obituary called him “the most influential theater director and choreographer of his generation.”

  Later that month, Hugh Wheeler died. Hal Prince hosted his memorial at Sardi’s. Both Fosse and Prince shared a long history with Wheeler—book writer of A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, co-screenwriter of Cabaret—and judging by the crowd, so did most of Broadway. Between greetings and nervous stares (one at Sondheim), Fosse circled the idea of approaching Prince to inquire about his progress casting The Phantom of the Opera. Nicole was still waiting, fingers crossed, to hear if she had made it into the ballet chorus. If she got it, Phantom would be her first appearance on Broadway; if she didn’t, her chances of ever dancing on Broadway would decrease considerably. Time was against her. Nicole was twenty-four, and her days of being the youngest, strongest dancer in a given company were already years in the past.

  Fosse knew Phantom had stumbled into delays out of Prince’s control, so it was possible certain casting decisions had been unofficially determined, and Prince, as he stood there, had the answer to Nicole’s future. All Fosse had to do was ask him. But asking a director, even director to director, to show his hand, even a little, was to apply unfair pressure, and though they went back to Pajama Game—debuted with Pajama Game—and the air was warm with Wheeler’s legacy, talking business felt like an amateur’s transgression. But Fosse, to Fosse, was an amateur.

  “I’ve been a performer,” he explained to Marty Richards. “You know what it is to wait.”

  Richards understood Fosse’s predicament, but he had no compunction about approaching Prince that very moment and asking the question himself.

  “Don’t you dare!”

  Richards mad
e straight for Prince, and Prince, seeming to comprehend the situation, excused himself from Richards and walked over to Fosse, who, comprehending Prince’s comprehension, blushed as he saw him approach. There was an exchange of embarrassments, and Prince immediately assured Fosse he was the embarrassed one; the production, he said, should have called Nicole long ago. She had the part, a good part, and Fosse was right to wonder. “This is ridiculous,” Prince said to him. “We’re both fathers.”

  Now that Phantom had arrived, Cats seemed less a one-off than a visitor from the future. And there were more on the way. The yuppie appetite for gargantuan feats of staging—Phantom’s chandelier, Saigon’s helicopter, Les Mis’s turntable barricade—had most certainly brought to visceral life what a Company or Chicago never could; that was the upside. But with all that stuff onstage, there was almost literally no room to dance and even less reason to. Broadway choreographers could blame the British. “For the New York theater,” Frank Rich wrote, “the rise of London as a musical-theater capital is as sobering a specter as the awakening of the Japanese automobile industry was for Detroit.” The anti-dance rage did not make the world safe for a Fosse revival.

  On September 23, 1987, Fosse and Verdon were on hand at the National Theater to run the last cleanup rehearsal before Sweet Charity’s Washington opening, which was scheduled for 7:30 that evening. The day’s work began with a production meeting, held in the theater’s second-floor lobby, where Fosse and Verdon, assisted by Mimi Quillin and Chet Walker, walked the various department heads through the morning agenda. Fosse hacked through the entire meeting. He asked Walker about the morale of the company. Walker was tentative. Worry prevailed, he said. There was concern they were underprepared, that the tour was rushed, that management was guarding the real truth from the company, and that the show, rather than bumping along, would close before moving on to Boston and Los Angeles.