My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  The first few rows audibly gasped. I had added insult to his injury. I wanted to die. I quickly retrieved the hat and continued on with the number. Fosse’s face never left the front of my mind. Here was a chance for him to see that his number didn’t rise or fall on Carol Haney’s performance alone. I wanted him to see that it would work regardless of who performed it. But I had let him down.

  It didn’t matter to me that the audience applauded wildly when it was over. This was a repetition of the same emotional moment I experienced as a child running a relay. My father had come to see the race, and as our team was rounding the finish line and it was my turn to take the stick and run for the end, I dropped it! I dropped the stick in front of my expectant and cheering father. I let him and his expectations of me down, to say nothing of my teammates.

  The humiliation of dropping the stick was with me for years. I couldn’t resolve it. I couldn’t let it go. So it followed me until the next time I had a feat to perform under pressure with a father figure whom I longed to please watching expectantly … Bob Fosse.

  The audience seemed to love what I was doing, though, as did my fellow performers who were still piled on top of one another, watching from the wings.

  When the show came to an end and curtain calls were the final act of our reward, I skipped out onto the stage with Buzz and Peter. The three of us took a bow and then Peter and Buzz stepped away from me, leaving me in the center of the stage to be acknowledged. I did not relish the moment. I wanted to meld back into the company of players. It was only their recognition—my peers’—that I wanted. I had never hungered for fame, or dreamed of my name in lights. And now at this moment, facing a standing ovation, when most people would have reacted with “Gee, I made it,” I felt only the inclination that had motivated me all my life: make something of myself and do it well. Recognition, reward, fame, and fortune were not requirements of mine.

  I’ve thought often of that moment in relation to my drive to carve out a place for myself in show business. Was it because I was young and not quite ready to accept stardom as my right that I didn’t feel more elated?

  Or was it something deeper? I was aware that so much of what had motivated me lay with my family and their expectations, unfulfilled for themselves. Why then wasn’t I appreciative and hungry for more?

  After the show, Fosse came to the dressing room that for the next week or so would be mine. He thrust his hands into his pockets and paced back and forth, his image reflected in the mirror.

  “Good,” he said. “You made the part yours. Are you all right?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Take it. My assistant will help you tomorrow. You were good. Good energy.”

  Steve took me home and we went to work on the acting. Because he had been an actor, he understood some of my problems as a newcomer. We worked into the night on the lines and the attitude. “Remember what Fosse told you,” said Steve. “Everything is energy.”

  It was from Fosse that I realized energy was the primary requirement for a good performance on the stage, on the screen, and in life.

  It was many years before I’d work with him again. He and Hal Prince had given me the ball to run with. I would go for the touchdown.

  Soon after my weeks of replacing Haney were over, came the offer from Hal Wallis to go to Hollywood.

  Hal Prince tells the story on himself. “Don’t go,” he said. “You’ll get lost in the shuffle. Stay in New York. Do some more Broadway shows, and then when you’re ready, another opportunity will present itself.”

  I thought about what Hal Prince had said. I went back to the chorus, and about two months later Haney was out again for one night. I went on again. That was the night Hitchcock was in the audience.

  My future was assured.

  Fosse went on to do Damn Yankees, Bells Are Ringing, New Girl in Town, Redhead, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Little Me, and Sweet Charity, each a hit in its own way.

  In the meantime I established a career in Hollywood, acting. Fosse stayed in New York.

  About fifteen years later Lew Wasserman, by then head of Universal Pictures, was interested in doing a musical. I had seen Sweet Charity in New York starring Gwen Verdon, who was now married to Fosse. She told me she had patterned the character of Charity after a picture she saw of me. I looked gamine, slightly lost, and my feet were turned in. She suggested I do the part on the screen. I told her of the time I nearly missed my break in Pajama Game because I longed to understudy her instead of Haney.

  Sometimes it seems there are only twelve people in the world, all of whom play an important part for one another. Gwen and Fosse were two of these people for me.

  I went to Wasserman with the idea of doing Charity on the screen. He liked it but wondered who could direct. I suggested Fosse. Lew said, “He’s a choreographer and a Broadway director. What does he know about the camera?”

  I said, “What did Jerry Robbins and Herb Ross and Stanley Donen know about the camera? But Fosse would be better than any of them because he’s studied everything Fellini ever made, frame to frame.”

  Lew saw how convinced I was. It was my career too, after all. He thought for a moment. He had no board of directors to answer to. He was the only boss.

  “Okay, kid,” he said. “Let’s get him.”

  Bobby loved the idea. He came to California and his future was assured.

  Since Bob was such a devotee of Fellini, and since Fellini had done the original Nights of Cabiria, on which Charity was based, Fosse was way ahead of the game. He knew exactly how he wanted to shoot it. There was a small glitch, however. Lew had assigned Ross Hunter to produce the picture. Ross was an aficionado of glitzy, glamorous big spending. Fosse didn’t see Charity shot with so much Hollywood-ness. He wanted the picture to look like a tacky dance hall on Forty-second Street. There were long, rancorous meetings over the conflict of styles. Fosse’s vision won, Ross Hunter politely left, and Robert Alan Aurthur took over, a man whom Bob felt comfortable with for many years in Hollywood.

  Sweet Charity—Charity Hope Valentine—was originally a hooker. But Fosse had an aversion to American hookers. He had no problem with French or English or German ones (as evidenced in Cabaret), but American prostitutes were not characters he was comfortable with. So Charity became a dance hall hostess. I had a problem with that because the toughness of her hard-earned attitude toward money would be compromised. And the milieu of a Forty-second Street prostitute was different from a Forty-second Street dance hall hostess’s. Nevertheless a dance hall girl she was. To watch Fosse conceive a musical number for the camera was like witnessing a master painter using celluloid instead of oil colors. He choreographed the film itself, coloring it, clipping it, slowing it, speeding it up, double exposing it, cutting it. He literally made you feel the film was moving, rather than the people.

  From the first day, Gwen was there for me, helping me with a role she must have privately coveted for herself. She coached me in wily ways to execute Bob’s steps without throwing myself off balance. Fosse was a genius at going against the flow of the body in any given dance movement. His body conceptions did not flow easily. That is what made them so startling to watch. They were mind-bogglingly unpredictable. That is also why many dancers hurt themselves doing Fosse’s work. It was unpredictably countergravitational! One’s own body was never really prepared for what it had been instructed to do. But Gwen showed me ways to prepare my legs, my back, and my feet. She had been performing his work for nearly fifteen years. Aside from being married to him, she was the finest interpreter of his movement. She could show me how to wrap my body around a move that belonged to the language of another planet—the Fosse Planet.

  Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly worked on either side of me. When we danced together, they were so powerful it was like being between two disciplined and well-oiled steam rollers. They carried me along with their energy.

  The three of us became very close. I was beginning a love affair with a TV journalist. Thi
s relationship entailed a great deal of traveling. Fosse liked to work late on Fridays because there was no union turnaround on Saturday. He also liked to work late because he knew I wanted to get away early in order to have a longer weekend. He never said that specifically, but it was understood. So, I would stand around behind the camera, in costume, warmed up and ready to dance as he moved bodies about in geometric designs, trying unusual visual compositions. Chita and Paula would feign exhaustion and cover for me so I could get out early. I was determined to have a personal life while living up to the demands of being a “star.”

  The most difficult part of Sweet Charity for me, which Fosse never knew, was that for the entire shoot I suffered from an infected root canal. Every step I took, every movement I made was agony. I didn’t want to take the time off to have it fixed because I would have held up production. I would rather die than not be disciplined and dependable. During one number my fever was so high I don’t even remember shooting it.

  Then Martin Luther King was killed, and Paula was so upset she couldn’t work. Fosse didn’t understand. She said, “We’ve lost a great leader and this is only a movie.” Fosse blanched. It wasn’t only a movie to him. It was his life. But he let us all go early. I had my tooth fixed and was a new person.

  Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I knew Bobby and his family, and I was destroyed. Seeing how upset I was, Fosse switched around the shooting schedule to include a new scene in which I had to cry. Everything in human experience is grist for a director’s mill, particularly a director who feels he gives birth to films as a woman gives birth to a child.

  It was this obsessive dedication that made Fosse great. He was a person addicted to detail. The detail of stitching on a dress hem, the detail of a swift movement of the eyes. He missed nothing. As a result, he saw too much. Being the repository of all he saw rendered him indecisive. That was the reason for the constant repetition. He was trying to process all that he saw. It wasn’t so much that he was cruel with his demands of “once again from the top” it was that he saw something new and different each time. If he let it go by, perhaps he was missing a value in a movement or a scene that could be the focal point of creating.

  Many times I watched him stew in the juice of his own awareness, remembering how he had been nearly fifteen years before in Pajama Game. He was unchanged, visiting upon everything and everybody the same alert, anxiety-riddled consideration.

  One day early on in the shooting of Charity, he was stuck trying to decide how to move the camera on a tracking shot. I could see he was getting himself into a morass of possibilities. (If you were Fosse those possibilities were endless.) The cameraman was becoming so confused he couldn’t help him. I made the mistake of offering a suggestion.

  “You brought me out here to direct this picture, so let me do it my way,” he said. He was absolutely right. And his way was to leave no stone unturned in the process of creative decision making. Again I thought back to the time he picked me out of the chorus, saw my “detail,” and believed in me. Now the roles were reversed. I was in the position of defending his work style to the producers and the studio, because I so deeply believed in him.

  Fosse once told me that he was reluctant to work with actors who were not performers. He didn’t like or understand the indulgent “movie star” style of finding a character and coming to grips with the expression of it. “Performers,” he said, “have the right energy. They know there’s an audience out there who must understand them and hear them. Movie actors don’t get that. Performers have a level of intentful energy that people in Hollywood don’t have.”

  I understand what he meant. When you’ve done a lot of stage work, you understand.

  In the fifteen years since I had left Broadway and been in films, my level of “intentful energy” had dropped. I knew something was missing, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was unconsciously forcing the camera to come to me, which in many ways makes for natural intimacy on the screen, but in other ways is simply not fulfilling and appears too underdone. Subtlety in acting is another issue. Subtlety on screen is accomplished, I think, by commanding the moment and, when you have the camera’s undivided attention, making a clean, precise, small gesture. When you connect, it’s because you filled the space you commanded with enough security to make broadness unnecessary.

  I had gotten into the lazy habit of allowing the camera to find everything I was doing. It was an excuse for not exerting my creative intention. It was a lack of preparation. I wasn’t doing much homework. I rarely studied a scene the night before. I had become a part of the “let spontaneity carry the day” school. The school that purports that too much thinking and rehearsal make it stale and contrived. The school of lazy intent.

  What Fosse taught me, by rekindling my performer’s intention, was that when I, as an actor, was acquainted with each nuance of thought, movement, and heart in my character, I could then throw that knowledge to the winds and start afresh. But not until I’d earned the right. Not until I’d considered each creative possibility through thought, rehearsal, and much respect for the terrain that was new to me. It was no different than his approach to the hat tricks in “Steam Heat”: “Know the terrain thoroughly. Then you can throw it away.”

  I have to admit that even with Fosse’s genial advice, I remained essentially lazy. I did learn to pay more attention to the memorization of dialogue, so that I wasn’t fighting for my lines on the set. But because I, being basically a dancer, connected all memory to movement, I always found it difficult to memorize my dialogue without knowing my movements in the set. Of course, that was basically an excuse. Fortunately, with age, I have found nature slapping my lazy hands anyway. I have to take time to memorize dialogue now because otherwise it just won’t happen.

  I find the same true for dance steps. Because I come from an acting motivation now, my mind won’t absorb the simple movement and combination of steps as it used to. My mind needs to ask “why?” This is not an endearing trait to choreographers. “Because I said so” is usually the answer.

  The scene in The Turning Point where ballerina Leslie Browne is questioning the movement she’s being given to execute is infuriating to the choreographer, who screams, “It is not up to you to question. Just dance! Don’t think! If you think, you hurt yourself, you ruin the flow of the movement. Dancing is to be felt, not thought about.”

  I would ask how could I feel if I didn’t know what I thought. It is the chicken-and-egg problem.

  Suffice to say, if one wants to stay in show business, it is necessary to remember your words, your steps, your notes, your moves, and your feelings, which are attached to each.

  Fosse was instrumental in reminding me before it was too late that I should never forget my hardworking stage days, where preparation was essential and maybe even everything.

  The reviews on Charity were mixed. A number suggested there were too many Mount Rushmore close-ups of me and others that the milieu of the picture was too theatrical and not a realistic depiction of Times Square dance hall life.

  I talked to Fosse from Mexico. I asked him how he felt.

  “If it’s a flop,” he said, “I’ll want to put my head in the oven. If it’s a success, I’ll want to keep it there.”

  The picture was a moderate success. People didn’t care that much about dancing, and the technique of singing or dancing in the middle of a real street, once so fresh, suddenly had become too unbelievable.

  Fosse took it hard, but he learned from it. I took it harder. It was the first big picture I had actually carried. My name was above the title. If it flopped, it would be my fault. Several articles appeared in which producers claimed I’d had my chance to move into real stardom, but I’d muffed it. I wanted to muff them. I still remember the ones who said that, a kind of enemy’s list of the memory. I went on to do other things and so, ultimately, did Bob. The next musical he made was a period piece, Cabaret, which, because it had a European (German) background, lent itself to thea
trical expression. He won an Academy Award as best director for the movie version, and Liza Minnelli and many other people associated with it won too.

  Fosse was declared the new genius in town, not only for musicals, but for drama as well.

  Then he did Lenny, the true story of Lenny Bruce. He was attracted to it because he believed Lenny Bruce had a God-given, constitutionally guaranteed right to have as filthy an act as he deemed funny. He saw Bruce as a comedy performer with great courage. He was most intrigued by Lenny’s lifestyle—the drugs and women—but he sparked particularly to the performing style Bruce used to convey his convictions.

  Fosse had a hard time with Dustin Hoffman in the starring role. I suppose that wasn’t news. Dustin is a visceral performer who has his own very definite ideas as to how characters should be played. But he wasn’t basically a performer in Bob’s sense of the word. He was an actor. And Bruce was a performer, meaning, he performed as himself, not as another character.

  Fosse was determined to exercise his own First Amendment right to free expression as he told the story of an individual who went down in comedy history straining the public’s tolerance for free speech. Fosse was drawn to danger, to taking things to the edge. He didn’t intend to be controversial. It was more of a quiet confrontation with his own need to rebel. He knew he strained the seams of the fabric of social acceptability. He was, I believe, trying to figure himself out.

  With Lenny a hit and several new Broadway shows beckoning him to return to New York, he decided to invent a deeper struggle for himself.