Fosse (10 page)

J
UST OUTSIDE THE
high walls
of MGM’s main lot, on a back alley behind the Thalberg Building, the Smith and Salsbury Mortuary waited, grim and triumphant. “You know, Helen,”
producer Arthur Freed liked to say to his secretary, “I have a feeling they’re doing better business than Leo the Lion.” Louis B. Mayer hated Smith and Salsbury.
They’d been there as long as anyone could remember, and they had refused his every offer to buy them out. There had been a time, years before, when Mayer might have roared their door down, but those days were behind him. TV was coming. There would be new kings.

L. B. Mayer’s 167 Culver City acres
of offices, sound stages, prop shops, projection rooms, bungalows, recording studios, and rehearsal halls once teemed with six thousand workers, two dozen directors, thirty stars, and one dentist; it had never spelled efficiency, but Mayer, the grand benefactor of the great American movie musical, hadn’t built his reputation by being cheap.

“If I start up another studio,”
he said to Esther Williams one night at Chasen’s, “would you come with me?”

“Thanks, Mr. Mayer,” she said. “But where are you going to find a pool like the one on Stage 30? How can I go with you if you don’t have a pool?”

“I’ll build one.”

“No, you won’t,” she said. “But call me if you do.”

He never did.

Now Dore Schary, the pipe-smoking crusader Mayer installed to get MGM back on its feet, had the place to himself. Gone was the man who approved a five-hundred-thousand-dollar budget for a single number
(the ballet from
An American in Paris
), and in came a former screenwriter, an intellectual, angling for “important” pictures. Schary’s unofficial credo—Nobler and Cheaper—didn’t go over well with Metro’s older artists and technicians, but few were more irritated and creatively hindered than Arthur Freed, the producer Mayer had hired in 1939 to oversee every aspect of musical production at MGM, starting with
The Wizard of Oz
. Economic mandates did not work for the Freed unit. They didn’t create fast, like television people did. Musicals took time. They took talent.

Before Schary, Freed had reinvented a genre that was slipping into decadence; more than simply rich in resources and luxury, his musicals, conceived holistically, were the most carefully and thoughtfully constructed productions in Hollywood history. Prior to Freed, a great many movie musicals were diminished by unintegrated musical asides, song-and-dance episodes that interrupted—rather than enhanced—the story line (
story line
being a generous term for the hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show! scenario). Mostly, these numbers were shot head-on in long airless takes meant to simulate the natural theatrical relationship of audience and performer. The pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein dearth of resonant material didn’t help. Add to that the Fred and Ginger movies, Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic floorshows, the many miscellaneous backstagers that seemed to vanish on the take-up reel, and one could see that the Hollywood musical was doomed to vapor. Freed changed that; he made vapor into liquid. Elsewhere, escapist fare might escape reason, but in the glory years of Arthur Freed,
entertainment
was not a euphemism; it was a dream made real. But by 1952, when Bob Fosse sublet Buddy Hackett’s place
in West Hollywood, MGM was ending its tenure as American pop culture’s primary producer.

Ghosts of a golden time ambled around the sound stages as if they were living people. Judy Garland. Gene Kelly making
Brigadoon.
Donald O’Connor. The Donald O’Connor knockoffs. The guileless Bob Fosse fit somewhere in there, though exactly where, no one knew for sure. He didn’t have Kelly’s hardy build or expansive spirit. He didn’t score high on the O’Connor scale of personality. Never mind that he was one of the best dancers on the lot. Close-ups didn’t care about that. Bob Fosse was mild of voice, limited of expression, and small onscreen. What did they need him for?

Fosse endured many screen tests,
innumerable changes of clothes, hairstyles, poses, and expressions, until the studio finally decided who he was. They would accent the trait Fosse’s women called his most compelling: his boyishness. They gave him a toupee.
“That was a trauma for me,”
Fosse said; at twenty-five, he was certain his thinning hair predicted a lifetime of impotence.

Orders were always changing. MGM moved Fosse from the Donald O’Connor part in Stanley Donen’s
Jumbo,
which had been postponed, to the Gene Kelly part in Stanley Donen’s
Give a Girl a Break;
that is, the part Kelly was
supposed
to play
before the picture was downgraded—thanks to the Schary regime—to a smaller-budget film. From there, more was compromised. Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich knew they had a turkey on their hands.
The last-minute casting
(to Fosse’s awe and consternation) of Marge and Gower Champion gave them only ten days to rewrite what years could not have improved. Unceasing revisions put a strain
on a cast that now included Debbie Reynolds, fresh off
Singin’ in the Rain,
who quickly and accurately determined that Bob Fosse, a dancer nobody had ever heard of, was her director’s primary interest; she shared this gripe with the Champions, who also felt shortchanged. “They were Mr. Show Biz,
and we were no talent,” Reynolds said. To be fair, Donen had to think fast. With the script in a shambles, he saw Fosse as a lifeboat on the horizon. “In my opinion,”
Donen said, “he was going to be as good of a song-and-dance man, for lack of a better word, as any of the others—the only other two—as Kelly and Astaire. I thought, ‘This guy is going to be it.’”

While the Champions worked with Reynolds, Donen and Fosse, in isolation from the company, began what would become a lifelong friendship. Like Joe Papp and Buddy Hackett, Donen shared Fosse’s hoofer ethic of hard work and good humor. At sixteen, Donen had been in the chorus of the original
Pal Joey,
a major feat, Fosse thought, as was Donen’s preternaturally fast transition from tap dancing to directing major MGM musicals—with Fred Astaire! Only a few years older than Fosse but with power and experience in the movie department, Donen rose quickly from friend to mentor/friend, as Papp had in the Pacific. All of Fosse’s relationships, erotic or platonic, generally began this way: a boy, eager to collaborate, seeking to learn from a master. These liaisons had a political benefit too: friending talent was never a bad idea. Especially when the friend was the director and the script was being rewritten daily.

“Fosse and Donen were wrapped up
in each other,” Marge Champion remembered. “They really didn’t give us the time of day.” When the two weren’t working, they were clowning. Donen was seen creeping up behind
Fosse to snatch a toupee from his balding head. Fosse was seen creeping up behind
Debbie Reynolds, hoping for a kiss (he didn’t get one).

The bright light might have been stunning that California afternoon as Fosse shuffled across the lot with Stanley Donen, but he wouldn’t have known it; the world, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, was something he’d have to crane his neck to notice. Naturally hunched, he had an almost collaborative complicity with the pavement, a rehearsal space he could engage at any time. All he had to do was look down, and he disappeared.

And then, suddenly, walking across the lot, he reappeared.

He felt a rhythm he knew.

Fosse looked up.

There. Out of a distant sound stage sailed
a human stripe that looked and moved alarmingly like Fred Astaire. The bounding figure appeared to recognize Donen, and he came toward them. Yes, Fosse saw it: that heedless stride. That merry pinch he gave his tie. Fosse watched a few more paces, and he was certain. It was him.

Donen made the introduction, and Astaire flung out a hand. “Hiya, Foss!”

Fosse was too thwacked to speak. Bashful under normal circumstances, he was practically unalive now. Fosse shot his hands into his pockets and looked down, zeroing in on a nail a few inches from the world’s greatest dancer’s shoe. Astaire toe-tapped the nail as thoughtlessly as he would flick a cigarette, but to Fosse, that nail was no cigarette—it was Ginger Rogers. And then, without warning, Astaire flicked his foot, and—
ping!
—the nail was in the air and then careening off the sound-stage wall with the force of a rifle shot. Nonplussed by Fosse’s silence, God said goodbye to Donen, tipped his hat to Fosse, and headed off to eat.

Fosse was horrified. He was nothing; Astaire danced even as he stood still. The precision of the swipe and offhanded elegance of the technique made Fosse feel like that sound-stage wall a thousand nails later. He told Donen to go to lunch without him.

When the coast was clear, Fosse approached the spot where the nail had been and practiced the swipe as best he could remember it. As much as he wanted to replicate the step, he wanted to duplicate the sound. He wanted to hear the exact right scuff of shoe on pavement, the precise ping of nail on wall. He wanted to kick at the exact same angle in the identical time signature and recover, as Astaire did, with the cool look of having not performed a miracle. “You see it on the screen,”
Fosse would later say of Astaire, “and it looks like he just made it up. I mean, he just
happened
to have some firecrackers in his hand, he just happened to be around a piano or a set of drums. ‘Well, I’ll fool around a bit.’”

As the rest of the MGM employees ate their sandwiches, Fosse kicked the nail around the lot, but he never got it flying as Astaire had. Dozens of kicks later, he was still Bob Fosse.

Give a Girl a Break
wrapped in early December of 1952 and Fosse, energized by his first appearance on film, flew back to New York to be with Joan. His marriage to Niles officially ended, Fosse married McCracken on December 30 in a civil ceremony, a city clerk officiating. The diabetes McCracken had tried so hard to conceal—if people found out, she feared, they’d never
let her dance—had whittled her doll-like limbs to sticks. She was a marionette, brittle, wan, seemingly too delicate to move. Still, she had been cast in
Me and Juliet,
a new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical directed by George Abbott, the Zeus of Broadway comedy. By the time rehearsals began, in March, Fosse was back in Hollywood.

Returning to MGM, Fosse discovered
Give a Girl a Break,
his star-making breakthrough, now belonged to the Champions. “After they previewed it
for MGM,” Marge Champion said, “Stanley was told to reshoot it closer to the original script and make it as much our movie as Bob’s.” Donen did as he was told, but MGM was still unhappy with the picture. It was released to bland reviews.

Though it was Gower Champion who shared dance credit with Donen, Fosse had managed to slip in enough of his own material to get Mr. Weaver and Charlie Grass, watching back home, to sit straight up in their seats. “Charlie,”
Bob explained to his friend later, “I showed them a couple of Riff Brothers tricks”—wings and toe stands, hammed up for the camera. Dancing “In Our United State,” Fosse pulled out the old vaudeville stops, Ray Bolgering around on his heels, Chaplining at the knees, shooting up his hands as Miss Comerford had told him not to, throwing his limbs wide then snapping them shut, like a starfish going sardine. Fosse was clearly the best dancer in the movie. His articulation—sharp, fast, and exact—is the visual equivalent of Olivier’s diction. The dancer can’t act, but he (almost) doesn’t need to; his innate gee-shucks-ness suits the part—so much so that Charlie Grass thought that Fosse, playing Bob Dowdy, was really playing himself. “That’s the teenaged Bob Fosse,”
he said.

The picture fizzled. “I was living in a one-room apartment
in Culver City, with a Murphy bed, believing in my own stardom,” Fosse said. “But then, within a year I realized those people who told me I’d be a movie star weren’t telling me the truth.” Stopping by one of choreographer Michael Kidd’s parties,
he ran into Gwen Verdon, who was about to head, with Kidd, to Broadway to start rehearsing
Can-Can,
the new Cole Porter show. They recognized each other from around the MGM lot, where Gwen had been working on
The Merry Widow
as Jack Cole’s assistant and lead cancan dancer (“Dance it like a lady athlete,”
Cole had told her). Beginning enthusiastically with discussions of Cole and Astaire, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon had a lot to talk about that night. Joan McCracken, Mrs. Bob Fosse, had been one of Verdon’s
early role models. Her performance in Joseph Losey’s production of
Galileo
had made an immediate and lasting impression on the teenage Gwen. It was the first time she understood a dancer could act (this was Brecht!), that a musical-theater comedienne could be an artist, and Verdon—who at that age had danced mostly in girlie shows around Hollywood—immediately signed up for acting classes. Fosse’s proximity to McCracken and Verdon’s to Cole raised their esteem for each other, inflaming the flirty lure of mutual curiosity and the snug air of a second date, which, in a way, Kidd’s party was. They had met before, when Fosse and Niles auditioned for
Alive and Kicking.

They talked into the night, agreeing that movies weren’t showing them at their best. Hollywood’s Production Code Administration censors, frowning at every wink, had had their shears out for Verdon since her honky-tonk twist in
The I Don’t Care Girl
—a dance they cut. It set a precedent. “Then came
David and Bathsheba,
”
she said. “David wanted to go to war but he was supposed to go home to Bathsheba, and my dance was supposed to put him in the mood to go home to her. Well, I guess it was too much, because everybody who saw it got the same idea . . .” The same thing happened to Verdon in
The Mississippi Gambler,
in
Meet Me After the Show,
in
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
and, again, as she expected, in
The Merry Widow.

“One more body on the cutting room floor,”
she would say with a laugh. “So what’s new?”

It gave Verdon a lift knowing someone thought she was too hot to be onscreen, even if she herself didn’t really believe it. “I never think of myself as sexy,”
she said. “Most of the time I’m just-kidding sex, you know.”