Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  They were a bouncy bunch. Equipped with a phonograph and a radio, the Fosses could transform into a seven-person (and two-dog) repertory company at a moment’s notice. Sometimes Cyril Sr. would push the furniture to the walls, steal Sadie from the kitchen, and show the boys how a man really danced with a woman. Rarely would he sing. Though Mr. Fosse had a fine tenor voice, he felt effeminate using it offstage. There was a piano too, which Sadie played, filling the room with honky-tonk as Cy, wagging fingers in the air, ­Suzie-Q’d around the dogs.

  With so many people making so much noise, dinner could be fun, but Bobby had to fight the grownups to be heard. He would remember his father eyeing him from the head of the table. “He used to tell me, ‘Always leave ’em with a joke,’” Fosse recalled. “‘Don’t leave the table without saying something funny.’ It was heavy stuff to lay on a kid.” Cy’s advice sagged with his own failure. “That was one of the reasons I think he wanted me to be in show business,” Fosse said. There was no doubting Bobby was born with the look. His pink cheeks called out for pinches, and his hair begged to be tousled. An aerodynamic piston, Bobby was the blond embodiment of 1927. (How this adorable rascal had sprung from Sadie’s and Cyril’s nineteenth-century DNA, no geneticist could possibly explain.) It might have been due to Bobby’s good looks or perhaps to the fact that, as the smallest, he seemed defenseless, but whatever the reason, his father decided that Bobby would be the one to fill Cyril’s dead brother’s shoes. “Bob was the favorite,” Ann Reinking said. “His parents decided he was the boy that was going to make it for them.”

  “I was a good kid,” he said, “so I had to be a good kid. You’re trapped by your own publicity.” At too young an age, Bobby knew that not even the most capable person could outdo himself night after night, seven dinners a week, especially when his six dinner companions, all older and bigger than he was, were occupied outdoing one another. “I come from a big family,” he explained. “Maybe they never paid attention to me.”

  He was told to escort his sister Patsy, then only ten, to dance class at the nearby Chicago Academy of Theater Arts. Patsy didn’t want to go, but nine-year-old Bobby was a good boy and, according to his mother, needed the exercise. She wouldn’t let him play baseball or football, and the academy was nearby, only a three-minute walk from home. And there was something in it for Bobby too—Patsy’s friends. “I had a crush on one of the girlfriends,” he said, “so I said, ‘Gee, I’m not going to get left out of this.’”

  Canopied by twin rows of sidewalk trees, those quiet blocks from the Fosse home to the academy, on the corner of Ashland and Montrose, might have made for a pleasant stroll if Patsy hadn’t cried the whole way there. Bobby tried to console her but nothing he said did any good. She simply did not want to dance. If it had been 1965 instead of 1936, by which time Fosse had mastered the art of handling unwilling dancers and actors, he might have been able to soothe, or even frighten, Patsy into leaping without looking. But it was 1936, so he just walked her around the corner and across the street to a tiny upstairs studio, a converted apartment above a drugstore, where he made the acquaintance of a dozen other youngsters, mostly girls, and a spindly rake with a pencil mustache who went by the name of Frederic Weaver.

  There was more than a touch of forgery about him, but Fred Weaver was the real thing, a been-everywhere, all-around veteran of the performing arts (some of those less artful than others), rumored to have led the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and studied music theory with the illegitimate son of Richard Wagner. He was (he said) a close personal friend of both Cesar Romero and Mickey Rooney’s father. Who knew how old he was? Weaver had a daughter, somewhere, and a first wife he should never have married. “If you want to be in show business,” he told the kids, “don’t get married.” He played the violin, but he’d lost his touch after the accident, he told them in his thin British accent (from central Illinois), that damaged the fingers on his left hand. That put a crimp in his piano playing too, but Mr. Weaver still played, standing up over the keys the way he’d learned to do as a pit player in silent-movie orchestras. From monocle to faded spats, his costume suggested an ersatz sophistication somewhere between Fagin and Fred Astaire, a goodhearted opportunist and an all-purpose codger who tap-danced the children in with a low bow, a straw hat in one hand and an agent’s contract in the other. “I, the undersigned,” it read, “offer to employ you to be my sole and exclusive personal representative and manager.” Here was Weaver’s way out of the Depression: turn a good kid into a good dancer, and everyone got a percentage.

  His students loved him. Weaver was their mentor, their father figure, and he gave them their first taste of meaning—life lessons of the show-business world. First and foremost, he made sure they understood respect: respect for others, respect for yourself. “Mr. Weaver taught us how to act like professionals,” said Charlie Grass, a classmate of Fosse’s at the Chicago Academy of Theater Arts. “He told us Eddie Cantor believed in being good to the people going up the ladder of success because you’re going to need them on the way down.” A sign on the wall said YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE, TREAT IT AS SUCH. And that meant no smoking, Weaver explained, lighting another cigarette as he spoke, and no hanky-panky. Respect one another’s bodies. Be professional, Weaver had said, with each other.

  “And remember this: There’s always someone better than you. Remember that. You’re not the best. There’s always someone better than you, and everything’s been done before.”

  To prove his point, Weaver told them about vaudeville, about Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor and the Nicholas Brothers, who leapfrogged each other down flights of stairs, came up from splits with no hands, and tapped better than Fred Astaire, who could tap better than anyone. Weaver told them a great act was a performer’s ticket to the top, and his signature novelty was his secret weapon. “If you do the time step,” he said, “put a twist on it.” Durante had his “ha-cha-cha” exit. Pat Rooney hiked his pants up and did the clog. Joe Frisco popped his derby off his head like a champagne cork as he tumbled a cigar in and out of his mouth. Groucho Marx bent his knees and zigzagged across the stage. Weaver told them about the magicians and the comics and whiz dancers and the Palace Theater in New York City and the feeling of being center stage, the volcanic high one gets after years of nights of practice when, finally, the hat falls at the right time, at just the right angle, and the cane seems to dance on its own. Once he got going, after a swig from the bottle, there was no doubting Fred Weaver’s love of entertainment, of movies, opera, dance, ballet, tap . . .

  Bobby Fosse fell in love with Mr. Weaver. He called him Skipper. No one else did.

  The academy had a good dance floor and a ballet barre and a few small holes in the brick that could pass for windows. That was about it. Behind Weaver’s desk, a cramped hallway led off to someplace the students were not allowed to investigate, but if they stayed late after class and hid behind the piano, they could hear Weaver and Marguerite Comerford, dance teacher and Weaver’s sometime lover, hollering at each other from the back rooms.

  Comerford knew ballet, but as a former Tiller Girl, her claims to fame were her high kicks and precision tapping, the sort of chorus choreography that would one day roll through Ziegfeld’s theater and eventually influence the Rockettes. Miss Comerford was nothing special to look at—long legs and black hair—but she was terrific with the kids, and Weaver, who didn’t know from ballet, knew he would have no shop without her. Trixie, he called her. At one point, they married. Together, Weaver and Comerford were a perfect instruction manual for a young hoofer, he the text and she the living illustration. “She filled me with all of these wonderful thoughts,” Fosse said, “and the magic of dancing. She cared a great deal about us. So it was a woman, really, that brought me to dancing. It was a woman that brought me everywhere.”

  Miss Comerford, the most elegant woman Bobby had ever known, was certainly the most elegant professional to grace the academy. The rest were entertainers, circus performers, and stage act
s brought in by Weaver to teach the basics of showbiz comportment. To Fosse, they were the big time. Jack Halloran, a local emcee with a speakeasy kind of mien, showed him how to address a microphone. Chris, a Barnum and Bailey clown with a big gold tooth and a scalp as bare as an eight ball, taught the kids how to fall without getting hurt and how with pantomime they could make an audience think that a bucket of confetti was actually a bucket of water. Radio personality Gilbert Ferguson brought in scripts from his soap-opera serials and helped them practice enunciation.

  None of the specialty skills gave Fosse any trouble; he could tap, clog, and tumble like a pro, but whereas his classmates seemed to double in stature when they were onstage, Fosse seemed to disappear. As much as he loved an audience, he danced away from them, rolling himself up like a crustacean, as if he were ashamed to be seen. Which he was. No one at Ravenswood Elementary knew what he did after three o’clock. He wouldn’t let them. They would have called Bobby girls’ names and laughed him out of recess. “They would accept the tap dancing, and the tumbling,” Fosse said, “but the tights and the ballet shoes were hidden in the bottom of the drawer, and I’d sneak those in in a paper bag, you know?” Ballet stifled him. Fosse had no turnout, no extension, and he felt sissy pointing his hands and toes like a prima ballerina. “He was always told to keep his fingers together and his hands down,” Grass recalled, “but up they’d go again, his palms out, his fingers spread. That was his style even then. He was doing Jolson and Eddie Cantor.” Almost Jungian in resonance, these gestures of showbiz’s past would one day form the syntax of Fosse’s dance talk. But not yet. In Miss Comerford’s class, Bobby was reprimanded for sloppy technique. That there was vaudeville: his first naughty act.

  Once a year, the academy presented a recital for the parents. In Fosse’s first, held at Chicago’s Medinah Country Club on June 15, 1936, he played a policeman in the Toy-Town Revue and performed a tap solo (“Stepping It Out”). Fosse also appeared with the full company in the ballet ensemble, though he was afraid of what his father would think of his son’s sissy-flitting through the colored lights. Cy, though he danced the social dances of the day, drew a hard line at first position. And paying for it seemed a lavish indulgence. These being Depression years, cutting some corners could make a difference to such a large family, which, in 1937, had grown one girl larger. Marianne, Bobby’s newest and fifth sibling, was added to the dinner table next to Buddy, who had left home but then returned, bringing with him his new bride and not much income. Thus Sadie and Cy, already stretched to the limit, stretched further: he traveling longer hours in search of more money, she finding ways to prepare bigger meals for more mouths. Fosse’s theatrical training was not essential.

  And he had been improving too. On June 15, 1937, Fosse played the role of Master of Ceremonies, one of his favorite parts, in “Le Petite Café,” act one of La Folies de l’Academie, Weaver and Comerford’s annual recital. A ten-year-old Maurice Chevalier, he tipped his hat to the Gendarme, the Maid, and the Waiters as they crossed le petit boulevard. It was a good part. Keeping an eye on Fosse’s progress, Weaver ushered him from the recital to the YMCA amateur hour in 1938 and then to a lead in a comedy sketch (“Fun in a Courthouse”) for the spring show that year. In November 1937, Fosse was the star of Myrtle Church’s fourth annual Family Nite and Armistice Celebration. La Folies de l’Academie of 1938, presented by F. Weaver with dances by M. Comerford, prominently featured Bobby Fosse’s “Junior Follies.” He kept climbing. “Mr. Weaver really watched us in recitals,” Grass said. “The students he thought had talent he took to the Masons and the Elks and then it progressed to money jobs.”

  Charlie Grass, one of Weaver’s best ballet dancers, was part of a trio, a pintsize version of the Ritz Brothers, and about the time Cy Fosse fell behind on his son’s dance-tuition payments, Charlie’s group lost two-thirds of its talent, which meant that Weaver, their agent, lost his commission. A double act was far easier to book than a solo, and by teaming Fosse with Grass, Weaver could get back his agent’s fee plus enough to cover the tuition Cy Fosse owed him. Best of all—from Cy’s point of view, at least—after Weaver was paid off, Bobby’s share of the profits would go to his father. With all parties pleased, Bobby Fosse signed a contract granting Weaver 15 percent of his earnings for the next ten years, through Fosse’s twenty-first birthday.

  Grass and Fosse were a team, and after a round of paper-scissors-rock, they had a name, the Riff Brothers, an homage to the Nicholas Brothers, and they threw a second round of paper-scissors-rock to decide on their costumes, which would be purchased at a secondhand-clothing shop on Maxwell Street and tailored to fit them by Charlie’s aunt Rita. For the first part of the act, their double, they’d dance side by side in black tails and starched collars; in the second, the singles, they’d wear white dinner jackets. For the third and final part, their competition dance, they would keep the white dinner jackets on and draw cheers one-upping each other with the kind of flash antics made famous by the Nicholas Brothers. “We’d each do tricks,” Grass explained. “Squat wings, eagle wings, over-the-tops, things like that. We didn’t do a lot of acrobatics. We wanted to be more like Fred Astaire. We never put our hands on the floor.” The steps came compliments of Miss Comerford, but the concept—marrying Fosse’s tap with Grass’s ballet—was pure Weaver.

  Bobby’s interests expanded from his own routines to include larger matters, like overseeing life at the studio and running the academy’s newsletter, “CATA Gossip,” which he’d founded and which he wrote, edited, and distributed. Fosse’s column, “Looking Thru the Keyhole—by the Sneak,” razzed students for missing class, dished academy romances (“What blonde singer is enamoured of what blonde dancer—and is it unrequited? [If you don’t know what this means consult your Webster]”), and singled out hard workers. “Propaganda note,” wrote the Sneak, “Ruthie Faltermeyer doing her stuff in Gym class at Ravenswood School. She gives the CATA good publicity.” (Publicity: the concept fascinated him.) With Charlie Grass, Bobby wrote his own segue patter for academy recitals, which he was emceeing regularly.

  CHAS:

  Well that’s over.

  BOB:

  What will we do next?

  CHAS:

  Go on with the show.

  BOB:

  What will we call it?

  CHAS:

  “The Parade of Blondes.”

  BOB:

  How do you get that name?

  CHAS:

  YOU SHOULD SEE THEM.

  BOB:

  Oh! Yeah! Well you stay here and on with the show and I’ll be back.

  CHAS:

  Not on your life. MAYBE I’ll be back.

  BOB:

  Well, no kidding. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll tell the folks about the show and you go out there and dig me up a nice blonde.

  CHAS:

  O.K.

  BOB:

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is a show from the Chicago Academy of Theater Arts on Ashland Avenue and Montrose and we hope—

  CHAS:

  Will this do? [Brings on Hal Felman]

  BOB:

  Will what do? I said a BLONDE. You sure must be colorblind.

  CHAS:

  You don’t understand. Hal’s the guy with the blondes.

  BOB:

  Oh, yeah. The blondes. Well, what does he do with them?

  CHAS:

  He sings about them.

  BOB:

  Well, let him sing. Introducing Mr. Hal Felman, who will sing you a number from Alexander’s Ragtime Band, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”!

  Applying himself to rehearsal every day after school and on weekends, Fosse had always showed precocious commitment to the work, but now that he was an earner for his family, his intensity increased. “He was starting to be a perfectionist,” Grass said. “We’d practice over and over in front of the mirror to be exactly the same, legs the same, arms the same, perfectly extended. When someone got on the wrong foot, we’d turn and fac
e each other, like a mirror, and do it again and again until we got on the same foot.” Academy dancer Beth Kellough could see the dedication on his face. “He’d furrow his little eyebrows and concentrate,” she said. “I think he wanted to be better than everybody.” Bobby, dead serious now, told Grass to call him Bob. By 1940, the name Bobby Fosse had disappeared from recital programs. He was Bob Fosse.

  Astaire and Rogers held the movie slot the night he and Grass made their first public appearance, shoulder to shoulder “with five acts of vaudeville!” (the sign said), at Chicago’s Oak Theater. Formerly considered one of the district’s grand palaces of stage entertainment, now the Oak was just one of many theaters called, euphemistically, presentation houses. Vaudeville was dying.

  It would be a long death. Motion pictures had begun to talk, and the more they talked, the more they grew; the more talent the movies pillaged from the Palace stage, the more the stage talent left longed for that lucky call from the coast. The pay was far better in Hollywood, and life under the pink canopies of Beverly Hills was less painful than life—if you could call it that—on the road. As soon as they could, vaudeville giants like Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton sold out and bought in, leaving behind them second-rate hams whose every old-hat yuk and tumble made movies seem fresher than ever. By the 1930s, most of the great vaudeville palaces, unable to command golden-age revenues, were forced to wire themselves for sound. Out went the burnished oak, the gilded arches; in slithered coal-colored cables. Some said it was a fad—they were wrong.