by Wasson, Sam
Fosse administered general notes around noon and the company split into groups to rehearse individual pieces of the show. Book scenes in the lobby, dance scenes onstage. Though he moved between venues, Fosse stayed mostly in the house, first working one-on-one with McKechnie before he moved to the ensemble. With curtain time only hours away, Fosse and McKechnie rehearsed the bite Charity gives Charlie’s arm in “You Should See Yourself,” her first number. He hurried her delivery of “provolone sandwich and a bottle of beer” and slowed her rendition of “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” Charity’s joy blast, which needed savoring. (“Talk about emotion during the entire number,” Fosse wrote to himself. “It’s rushed.”) The orchestra needed to clean up “Friends” too, but that would come later, at the end of the day, with whatever time remained.
“How much time is left?” he asked stage manager Craig Jacobs. “How much stuff is left to get done?”
At around three o’clock, Fosse led the whole company through “Rhythm of Life,” which he had intended to run the day earlier (he had run out of time) and which had been needling him since he’d first started working with the LA company. “Dance like you’re on your way to percussion heaven!” he called out. “Dance like you’re in church on your way to heaven!” Walking down the line, he made serious, sustained eye contact with each dancer in “Rhythm,” personalizing their relationships to this moment now. They were to remember it tonight. “The energy in the room was so incredibly high,” dancer Mamie Duncan-Gibbs said. “There was a lot of joy in the room, a sense of accomplishment. I remember even Bob smiling about it.”
“He rehearsed us so hard that day,” McKechnie said. “Hard even for Bob. He couldn’t direct us enough that day.”
He called for a break. With his back to the orchestra, Fosse faced the empty seats and watched as they filled one by one with tired dancers. They knew to expect Fosse’s opening-night rally speech, his “just do the show, no more, no less,” push of customary encouragement. But that particular afternoon they got more. Fosse told them he had done everything he could to save the show. “He said it more like a father than a director,” McKechnie recalled. If he could, he said, he would go out there, put on a sandwich board, and sell tickets on the sidewalk. “Your business is to do the best you can,” he said. Then his tone changed. Fosse seemed to crumple. He grew philosophical:
“When you get up in the morning, don’t compete with anybody.
“Ask yourself, how can I be a better person?
“Save your money.
“I’m so sorry this isn’t going well.”
Usually a man of few words, he spoke for twenty minutes. The curtains, hanging behind Fosse, framed him perfectly, as if he had planned the shot and put himself in it.
“As Bob was talking to us that day, I remember thinking it was like he was reciting his last will and testament,” Lisa Embs said. “He was talking about how difficult our lives are in terms of the life of an artist, in terms of trying to take care of daily things like rent and family, and where’s our next job, our self-esteem, and that even though it didn’t always feel like it, what we’re doing is worth something.”
He said, “I would do anything to make this show a success.”
One Hour and Fifty-Three Minutes
AROUND FIVE THIRTY, Fosse ended his speech. With a final apology and a Thank you, all, he excused the dancers to their dressing rooms and hotels to eat, change, and ready themselves for six thirty, the half-hour call. Fosse devoted the next hour exclusively to his orchestra. Onstage, Chet Walker stood in for McKechnie, Verdon at his side; on the floor, glued to the podium for maximum control, Fosse and Cy Coleman flanked conductor Wayne Green, watching him closely. Green didn’t need the extra pressure, but as they came to “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” time did not allow for anyone’s needs, least of all his. Fosse’s mood was changing. He had been up all day, dutifully caressing them once more unto the breach, but now the clock had gotten the better of him, the better of everyone; the whiplash-inducing collision of slow-down-the-song-and-hurry-up-and-fix-it was twisting the orchestra inside out. “Don’t rush this section,” he implored Green, and Green tried not to rush, but with less than an hour left to rehearse, rushing seemed the only way out.
It was percussion. It was the cowbell, the pitch of the cowbell. Diggadiggadum: five burlesquey notes on Charity’s little shimmy. She turns her ass to the audience and wobbles it to diggadiggadum; beats that are beat out, in theory, by drummer Allen Herman, Fosse’s original drummer on Dancin’. But Charity had left Herman in a hospital in Philadelphia, being treated for an infected cyst. The show’s percussionist, Larry “Spoosh” Spivack, took over cowbell duty. Diggadiggadum.
“I don’t like that cowbell,” Fosse said. But he did like that cowbell; it was the cowbell they used in Philadelphia, Toronto, Los Angeles; it was the cowbell they used for “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” diggadiggadum; it was the Sweet Charity cowbell. “Fix that cowbell!”
Diggadiggadum.
“Fix it! Fix it!” He was yelling now at Spivack, who was unsure of what else to try. There was no time to get another cowbell that night, so Green suggested getting one the next day. Fosse shook him off. Tomorrow? The show went on in under two hours: they had to fix this one, now. But what else could they do? Hit it under, over? Lighter, softer? Quicker—
“Don’t rush it!”
Diggadiggadum.
“No!”
They passed the cowbell to the percussionist hired to replace Spoosh to see if he could do something with it. He couldn’t. The cowbell then went to the assistant conductor. Diggadiggadum. They passed it back to Spoosh.
Spoosh, Diggadiggadum. No no no.
“Later I asked [Spoosh] to show me how he was hitting it,” Herman said. “He picks up the stick in the proper position and he hit the way any percussionist would hit it—the way he’s supposed to. I said, ‘Aw, man. Aw, shit.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘You gotta turn the stick around and hit it with the fat end!’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘That’s the way Bob wanted it. He wanted a fatter sound!’”
Spivack couldn’t know he was hitting the cowbell with the wrong side of the stick. “Fosse was angry,” he recalled, “he was getting angrier, and I was freaking out. The whole theater was waiting for the next twenty minutes of rehearsal, waiting on me, as I tried to fix the cowbell. I must have tried fifteen or twenty times, every combination I could. I was sure I was going to get fired. I was frazzled. All the dancers, all the actors, all the lighting, all the sound people were just waiting for me to get this right. Sixty, seventy people just waiting around. The pressure! The local guys in Washington thought this was very entertaining for them. The trombone player put down his horn, crossed his hands, and said, ‘Oh boy, now we’re getting the show.’ I thought my fucking career was over.” Fosse was responding to the difference of a quarter-inch of wood.
It was six o’clock. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Craig Jacobs announced, “we’re out of time.”
That was it. There was nothing he could do now.
Fosse picked his hat up off the seat and left the theater to change into his opening-night tux. Gwen was with him.
They went out through the front of the house, passing theater manager Harry Teeter in the business office (“Show’s going good,” Fosse murmured), and went down a hallway, headed to the street. Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, on her way in to warm up, passed Bob and Gwen (“Have a good show!” Gwen said) as they stepped out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, which was whooshing with rush-hour traffic, the fall air dropping a touch below seventy degrees. Together, they strolled toward the Willard Hotel, where Fosse was staying that night, alone; Phoebe was in New York.
A shady green parkway on their left, Bob and Gwen crossed Fourteenth Street a block from the theater and went up to the great gilded doors of the Willard. Fosse nodded at Steve Blum, the hotel’s doorman, as they entered, and a short time later, he and Gwen reappeared, looking their best. “Theater thataway,” Fosse said,
pointing ahead. Blum tipped his hat.
Inside the Willard’s Round Robin Bar, folks had gathered for a quick dinner before the show. A cluster of people at the window stood up.
“Hey!” someone said.
Bartender Jim Hewes turned to face the commotion. The place grew quiet, then suddenly noisy again.
“Hey, someone fell down in the street.”
“What?”
“He better get up.”
Through the window, Hewes could see the intersection of Pennsylvania and Fourteenth Street. A man had collapsed toward the far side of the crosswalk, a few steps away from the curb. Outside, a crowd gathered, shouting for the paramedics, for an ambulance.
It took twenty minutes for the paramedics to arrive, and by the time they got there, traffic had completely clogged up the intersection. It was chaos, car horns blaring against sirens, but from behind her windshield, Patricia Baughman could see into the swarm. Rush-hour businesspeople grappled with medical personnel, pedestrians hovered for a look, and a shock of orange-red hair flashed by. “She was running around,” Baughman said, “pushing people out of the way and screaming.”
Thinking Fosse’s heart attack was a seizure, Gwen dropped to her knees and held his head in her lap.
He had loved and not loved many women, but the one with him on the pavement, the last one to see him, had been letting go of him the longest.
“I’m very nervous,” he had said to her, Lola, at their first rehearsal in 1954.
“So am I.”
The ambulance took off for George Washington University hospital, a mile and a half from where Fosse collapsed, and arrived at the emergency room at 6:48. At 7:23, he was pronounced dead.
When I got home, there was a phone message on my machine. It was Bobby. He said he was looking forward to talking to me about this script I sent him about homelessness. He said he didn’t think it was for him, but he wanted to help me get it made. By then I knew he was dead, but he was right there on my machine still talking about show business.
—David Picker
Acknowledgments
I’VE ALWAYS REVERED the movie musical, its mandate for hard and irrefutable talent, for harmonizing all performing arts into a single expression of pure feeling—every stage at Lincoln Center meshed eloquently into one. But no matter how much Lubitsch and Minnelli thrill me, watching One Hour with You and The Band Wagon, I can only sometimes escape the sense of having only escaped, of breathing pink helium and no oxygen. Emotions of lasting reverberation are almost irrelevant to those movies; the point seems to be to have a beautiful time, and I do. But a part of me always wished I could inject boiling blood into Astaire’s veins. What would happen if Maurice Chevalier lost his cool? What would happen if Cassavetes came back to life and watched nothing but The Pirate? That movie would blow my mind.
When Jeanine Basinger, Wesleyan’s renowned film professor, brought us, her class, to Cukor’s A Star Is Born, I could feel, for the first time, real life creeping into the show. When she brought us to All That Jazz, I felt something harder and stranger, like depressive exhilaration, which felt real but better, A Star Is Born multiplied by all those MGM dream ballets that suddenly made sense. I loved the movie, probably too much. It ate my imagination. I’d had some version of that feeling before, of being consumed by a great work, but it had always registered more like catharsis. It felt good. All That Jazz I loved with an intensity that erased me.
That was 2001. Since then I’ve wanted to do something for Bob Fosse. I did not know what; that seemed to erase me more.
Three years ago, my friend and agent David Halpern suggested a biography. The idea excited me, but I told him I didn’t know how to put a whole life into one book—not to mention Fosse’s kind of life—that I was sure no one would want it, and even if people did, I’d mess it up. But over one dinner, Halpern delivered the sort of end-of-act-two locker-room sermon that (though I can’t remember it) was so heartfelt and fortifying, I’ll always think of it as the Agent’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech. I wrote this book, but David Halpern made it. He invented it, guarded it, cheered it. Then George Hodgman, this book’s first editor, acquired it. With a general’s conviction, he pointed me toward its future. Scribbling on menus and receipts, underlining big ideas, we debated our Fosse onto the horizon, like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Eamon Dolan, this book’s second editor, reeled that figure toward us. When I lost sight of him, or it, he held my frustrations. When ideas died, he let me release them with uncommon grace, at my own speed, and he sat shivah with me until I got pregnant again.
Halpern, Hodgman, and Dolan are Fosse’s Paddy, Herb, and Sam, the studio against the studio. My team.
Every biographer is Dr. Frankenstein and research is the lightning bolt. The single greatest pleasure of writing this book was harvesting that lightning person to person, from Fosse’s dancers, friends, family, lovers, collaborators, and enemies. I interviewed over three hundred. The common theme was love: Fosse’s for them, theirs for him. Every day since my first interview (Laddie, June 7, 2010), I’ve been hoping I could take that love they entrusted to me and use it to lightning Fosse back to life, but without obliterating the anguish, anger, and isolation that so often edged his playful spirit out of view. If I did not succeed, I hope you all know my effort was sincere. For your time and compassion, thank you: Joe Allen, Rae Allen, Carol Alt, Susan Anderson, Eric Angelson, Jane Aurthur, Scott Barnes, Julian Barry, Patricia Baughman, Dwight Baxter, Jeanna Belkin, Gail Benedict, Sandahl Bergman, Mike Berkowitz, Ira Bernstein, Dr. Robert Bilder, Larry Billman, Nancy Bird, Grace Blake, Steve Blum, Shannon Bolin, Michael Bolton, Denice Pence Boockvor, Susan Braudy, Melissa Bretherton, Sandra Brewer, Richard Brick, Candy Brown, Kitty Bruce, Lonnie Burr, Ruth Buzzi, Stephanie Pope Caffey, Kevin Carlisle, Teresa Carpenter, Lynne Carrow, Eileen Casey, George Chakiris, Marge Champion, Emile Charlap, Suzanne Charney, Martin Charnin, Barrie Chase, Sybil Christopher, Wayne Cilento, Cheryl Clark, Madilyn Clark, Jill Clayburgh, Perry Cline, Marya Cohn, Peter Cohn, Christine Colby, Shaun Considine, Mel Cooper, Marilyn D’Honau, Danny Daniels, Joan Darling, Leslee Dart, Loretta Devine, Sara Dillon, Kathryn Doby, E. L. Doctorow, Arlene Donovan, Ervin Drake, Richard Dreyfuss, Diane Duncan, Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, Blake Edwards, Kevin Elders, Lisa Embs, Don Emmons, Harvey Evans, Tracy Everitt, Robin Utt Fajardo, Jules Feiffer, Jules Fisher, Gary Flannery, Ted Flicker, Liz (Erzsebet) Foldi, David Freeman, Bruce Jay Friedman, Victor Garber, Rita Gardner, Dr. Richard Gartner, Gene Gavin, Deborah Geffner, Ken Geist, Gary Gendell, David Warren Gibson, Norman Gimbel, Laurent Giroux, Tony Gittelson, Wolfgang Glattes, Maxine Glorsky, Ellen Graff, Charles Grass, Wayne Green, Robert Greenhut, Joel Grey, Charles Grodin, John Guare, Clyde Haberman, Buzz Halliday, Sonja Haney, Gordon Lowry Harrell, Karen Hassett, Bill Hastings, Bill Hayes, Jack Heifner, Alan Heim, Mariel Hemingway, Jim Henaghan, Allen Herman, Michael Herr, Gregg Heschong, Jim Hewes, Dustin Hoffman, Norman Hollyn, Celeste Holm, James Horvath, Jerry Jaffe, Leilani Jones, Sherri Kandell, John Kander, Steve Kennedy, Patricia Ferrier Kiley, Peggy King, Carolyn Kirsch, Dorothy Kloss, Alice Korsick, Richard Korthaze, Michael Kubala, Alan Ladd Jr., Nathan Lane, Bonnie Langford, Jane Lanier, Sherry Lansing, Lionel Larner, Pamela Larsson-Toscher, Ken Laub, Diana Laurenson, Carmen LaVia, Dr. Drew Leder, John Lithgow, Jo Loesser, Susan Loesser, Tom Lofaro, Aarne Lofgren, John Henry Loomis, Lynn Lovett, Janice Lynde, Peter MacDonald, Neil Machlis, Norman Henry Mamey, Frankie Man, Fred Mann III, George Marcy, Larry Mark, Mary Ellen Mark, Marsha Mason, Paul Mazursky, Craig McKay, Donna McKechnie, John McMartin, Debra McWaters, John Miller, Dana Moore, Robert Morse, Sharon Murray, Gail Mutrux, Jennifer Nairn-Smith, Lenora Nemetz, Chris Newman, Leslie Newman, Phyllis Newman, Mark Obenhaus, Cynthia Onrubia, Stuart Ostrow, Stan Page, Janis Paige, Valerie Perrine, Valarie Pettiford, Wende Phifer, David Picker, Dean Pitchford, Jonathan Pontell, Linda Posner (Leland Palmer), CCH Pounder, Seymour Red Press, Frank Price, Harold Prince, Mimi Quillin, Tommy Rall, Phil Ramone, Marion Ramsey, Brett Raphael, David Ray, Lee Roy Reams, Dona
ld Rebic, Carl Reiner, Ann Reinking, Frank Rich, Chita Rivera, Eric Roberts, Cliff Robertson, David Rogow, Owen Roizman, David Rose, Bentley Roton, Dr. Charles Rousell, Sandy Rovetta, Cyma Rubin, Eva Rubinstein, John Rubinstein, Cis Rundle, Vidal Sassoon, Blane Savage, Cynthia Scheider, Maurice Schell, Richard Schickel, Murray Schisgal, Betsy Schulberg, Stephen Schwartz, Jay Sears, Jeff Shade, Rick Shaine, Barbara Sharma, David Sheehan, Richard Shepherd, Phyllis Sherwood, Trudy Ship, Dan Siretta, Warren Allen Smith, Lew Soloff, Stephen Sondheim, Pamela Sousa, John Sowinski, Larry “Spoosh” Spivack, Tony Stevens, Leonard Stone, Susan Stroman, Bruce Surtees, Claudette Sutherland, Kristoffer Tabori, Celia Tackaberry, Harry Teeter, Terri Treas, Michael Tronick, Tommy Tune, Paul Turgeon, Larry Turman, Phoebe Ungerer, Ken Urmston, Beth Kellough Vandenboom, Jack Vartoogian, Ben Vereen, Chet Walker, Marie Wallace, Sigourney Weaver, Raquel Welch, Elmarie Wendel, William Whitener, Dan Wilensky, Kathy Witt, Emanuel L. Wolf, Hilma Wolitzer, Sandy Wolshin, Albert Wolsky, Michael York, Adele Yoshioka, Jimmie Young, and George Zima. I don’t believe in ghosts, but now I believe in those who do.
Without librarians and research advisers, I’d be running circles in the storm, swiping at thunder and plunging into mud. Thank you, Walter Zvonchenko, Patricia Baughman, and James Wintle, my Igors at Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Reading Room, home of the Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Collection, for keeping the box-flow flowing, for putting up with my last-minute queries, and for generally helping me master a holding thousands of items deep. Thank you, Charles Silver and Jenny He at the Museum of Modern Art, for leading me to some precious clippings (with a lovely view of the courtyard) and then letting me alone to Xerox like crazy. Jane Klain at the Paley Center for Media in New York was more than a knowledgeable source d’showbiz; she managed to help me uncover some material I thought had been lost forever. On one great day, she spoke the three little words every researcher dreams of hearing: “I found it.” I am grateful to you, Jane.