Fosse (11 page)

She could get away with more onstage than on film. There were no censors on Broadway.

In Los Angeles, Fosse was far from McCracken and the grimy New York streets he trusted; his disappointment over
Give a Girl a Break
turned into loneliness,
and his loneliness, compounded by his worst fears, turned into despair. The despair shattered him. He blamed Hollywood, the crimes it committed in the name of creativity. He obsessed over the injustice, wondering why he looked better onstage than onscreen, why lesser talents fared better. This time, he was not just being too hard on himself. No one could tell him that his failure lived only in his fears. In
Give a Girl a Break,
he finally had the proof he needed, and his new role, in
The Affairs of Dobie Gillis,
was just as flabby. “My parts were getting smaller,”
Fosse said, looking back. “I knew what that meant.”

He confided in Peggy King, a young singer he’d met in his first few days at the studio when they were both supposed to be in
Jumbo
. “He was depressed,”
she said. “There was no doubt about that. We would comfort each other. I remember telling him I couldn’t get in to see Arthur Freed. I remember saying to Bobby, ‘At least
you’re
making a film!’ We both knew if we did something wrong, we were out of there. Bobby would say, ‘I feel like they’re watching me.’ Well, of course they were. It was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer! We were all treated like serfs.” Fosse could break his contract and try again in New York, but movie stars weren’t born on Broadway. The money and fame was here, where Astaire lived. Where Fosse waited for his next lackluster assignment. “Every day was the same,” King said. “We got there at nine and started our lessons. Or, if we were lucky enough to be shooting, we’d start shooting. On Saturday we were expected to be doing benefits to ballyhoo new pictures. I was doing so many benefits I had benefits coming out my ears. Or they would give us walk-ons in pictures. Otherwise, they didn’t tell us anything. There was no information, just days of waiting. Why didn’t they get in touch with us? We were all worried—even the big stars were worried. They thought we were going to replace them. We thought they were going to block us. Bobby and I didn’t know what in the world was going on. So we hung on to each other.”

He withdrew. “He lived like a monk,” recalled journalist Ken Geist, “because he wanted to save all his energy for his dances.” His every free hour was spent in the Eleanor Powell bungalow, rehearsing. He missed lunch. He rarely went out. “I loved him, I would have done anything for him, but he could be remote,” King said. “None of us knew where Bobby lived, and we were his friends.”

He nursed his loneliness with girls. The actress Pier Angeli was so beautiful, so subtle, like Garbo with a tan, her face seemingly lifted from one of those tender, timid, sinless handmaidens of mythology. Anna, as her friends called her, was said to be kind to those in the ranks, and she spoke with a sincerity unusual to the famous—or perhaps that was her native Italian translated into English. Universally beloved, Anna drew the big time; producer Arthur Loew, Kirk Douglas,
and James Dean fought for her Saturday nights. Fosse had to get in line. “Anna was moving up
very, very fast,” said King. “Bobby would not have had a chance.” Fosse blamed his broken heart on the studio. Had he shown more promise, had MGM
seen
his promise, he knew studio executives might have intervened on his behalf, setting him and Anna up on dates so they could be photographed together canoodling in little bistros, the way the studio had done with Anna and Vic Damone.

When
The Affairs of Dobie Gillis
was completed, in early February 1953, the very same Arthur Loew screened the film for Dore Schary in a projection room underneath the Thalberg Building. A meager seventy-two minutes later, Schary had seen all he needed to of Bob Fosse. “I think it would have been better if
you had been in it and he had produced it,” he said to Loew. Schary’s mood worsened several months later,
when, in the same projection room, he beheld the muddled furor of
Arena,
MGM’s first—and, he hoped, last—3-D movie. But before he could sign its death certificate, a high-ranking executive
(who had invested a half a million of MGM’s dollars in 3-D glasses) suggested he might let stereoscopic cinema live five hundred thousand dollars longer. Schary gave in and made
Kiss Me Kate,
MGM’s final 3-D picture. Bob Fosse was cast in March 1953.

He recoiled when he saw the sound stage. “When I saw the sets for
Kate,
I thought, ‘No, they’re wrong . . . that’s not backstage.’ Everything was beautiful, glossy. The real backstage that I knew was a jungle.” There was one saving grace, however. Choreographer Hermes Pan asked
Kiss Me Kate
’s top dancers—which included Fosse, Ann Miller, Bobby Van, and Tommy Rall—to look at a section of a Gene Kelly film,
Invitation to the Dance.
He was hoping it could help them to devise something wonderful for their movie. “I met Bobby for the first time
in that projection room,” said Rall. “My impression of him was he wasn’t too happy I had the bigger part. There was that side of him, the tough side, sometimes even mean. He hated people who didn’t know what they were talking about and he would bait them to make them say more and more about things they didn’t know anything about. This would amuse Bob.”

After the screening, Pan broke
“From This Moment On” into sections in need of choreography, and he paired off his dancers—Ann Miller with Tommy Rall, Bobby Van with Jeanne Coyne, and Fosse with Carol Haney. Formerly Gene Kelly’s assistant and before that Jack Cole’s, Haney fit Fosse like a pair of old shoes. At five and a half feet with a punky Beat-girl haircut and whiplash spark, she looked like jazz sounded. “You just have a way of dancing,”
Pan said to Fosse and Haney. “Why don’t you choreograph your own piece?”

Fosse’s section was short, only forty-five seconds, but it showed, for the first time, what happened when Bob Fosse danced on film in what would become known as the Fosse style.

The score, which until their entrance is an ebullient, MGM-friendly bouquet of bells and strings, is trounced by a fat swagger of brass—a stripper’s vamp, to be precise—and then a leg swings up (all the way up) from camera right. It’s Carol Haney’s leg. Dashing to the center of the frame, she snaps her arms in the air—a burst of red-hot ecstasy contorted by gnarled charges of pain. And then, from off camera right, Bob Fosse leaps and lands in a baseball slide. There’s a scream, and Fosse and Haney, a duet now, spin forward together and freeze. The music stops. A beat later, the music starts up again, slower, smoother this time, and the pair slither in syncopation, shoulders hunched and knees bent, boy and girl Fosses. They look sad. They look broken. Then—out of nowhere—a shot of music throws them in the air. Haney bolts around a pole, and Fosse—more like Gene Kelly than Bob Fosse—flies to the very top of it and opens up like a flag. The music dies again. Trancelike, the two snap to a laid-back beat, their faces down like bum junkies, and then he leaps over her, lands on his downstage knee, and begins a bizarre (and quite funny) slide camera right. Is he supposed to be a bird? His head on his shoulder and his shoulders tucked to his sides, Fosse moves his fingers like hummingbird wings and they flutter him forward as Carol Haney, in a fetal crouch beside him, crawls—with a touch of desperation—in his direction. He jumps up, lifting her off her feet, and together they take a cheery musical-comedy turn around the stage. Until the music chills and they each hit what looks like a scarecrow pose—left arm parallel to the ground, right arm at a forty-five-degree angle—and sidestep; then Fosse performs a perfect backflip, slides out with wide-open arms, and he and Haney, left arms raised as if to say
Ta-da!
, shuffle off camera in the direction they came from. (How like Fosse—who hated his backflip, who struggled to make his imperfect version Donen-ready for
Give a Girl a Break
—to insist on inserting a backflip-from-a-standing-position here and to insist on going all the way to New York to work with Joe Price,
the country’s foremost acrobatic teacher, not once but three times during filming.)

The Fosse influence is unmistakable to the modern viewer. One can discern his taste for showbiz symbolism and convention in the burlesque vamp, Astaire-tilted hat, and outstretched Al Jolson arms. Face-open palms, inherited from the minstrelsy tradition Fosse had seen passed through vaudeville, hang coolly on his wrists and even flicker for a moment—razzle-dazzle. Tiny pantomimes seem closer to clowning than to choreography; single joints hiccup; appendages engage, then drop. There’s also an element of acting, as if he and Haney aren’t merely dancing but dancing about something. They have wants. He grins; she’s desperate, crawling after him. This is not de Mille–fluid, nor Robbins-robust; it’s not American ballet and it’s not American colloquial. It’s Fosse.

And he didn’t think much of the job. He said, “I thought choreographers were all rock bottom.”
Astaire was a star, not Hermes Pan. As for Broadway, de Mille and Robbins transcended. They were artists. At best, Fosse was an entertainer.

Kiss Me Kate
was the last straw. With a full six years remaining on his contract, Bob Fosse saw no future for himself or for the movie musical. “Bob knew what was happening,”
Rall said. “He saw that they weren’t making musicals the way they used to and he was tired of hanging around Culver City, waiting for another disappointment.” MGM didn’t stop him from going. In August, the studio granted Fosse
a six-month leave of absence, and he flew back to New York, to Joan.

Fosse loved Joan. In light of his habitual infidelity, it was difficult to understand that, but no more difficult than understanding why Joan would take him back every time. Though hurt, in public, she played a version of herself too bohemian to care about the strictures of total monogamy, and it’s true that her previous marriage to Jack Dunphy was strewn with affairs, hers with composer Rudi Revil and his, at the very end, with Truman Capote. They all tried hard to have fun. Though McCracken hadn’t made peace with Fosse’s indiscretions, she was certainly determined to do her best; upon his return from Hollywood, they bought waterfront land in the Pines area
of Fire Island. She wanted a baby.

In town, they lived in her tenth-floor penthouse on West Fifty-Fifth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Her eye for décor, like her conversation,
was fashionably eclectic, a collage of Victorian wickerwork and Bauhaus modern. Seashore bric-a-brac dotted the shelves and tops of things, and when the wind blew through the open windows, her shells sang a round of ocean songs. On spring nights, her terrace, with its city views and salad-size garden, was home to writers, painters, and dancers invited
to rehearse their work and catch up on one another’s headlines over a feast that McCracken nibbled in premeasured, diabetic-safe portions. When they asked her about
Me and Juliet,
she was careful to respond modestly, embarrassed by how much the critics loved her. Especially in front of Fosse. “She was often very upset
because he was so unhappy,” said McCracken’s
Me and Juliet
costar Isabel Bigley. “Bob was in a terrible mood because he couldn’t find work.” When the attention came her way, McCracken was kind enough to redirect it to him. A nimble hostess, she helped everyone to his or her moment, culling from them all their best stories, like the conductor of a tiny talking orchestra. “There were three rehearsal rooms at MGM,”
Fosse would begin his story. “Astaire would be in one, Kelly in the other, and I would be in the middle stealing from both.” On those buoyant nights, talk would invariably turn to movies, to
Shane
and
From Here to Eternity;
to the current Broadway season of William Inge’s
Picnic,
the adultery comedy
The Seven Year Itch,
Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s and Leonard Bernstein’s wonderful
Wonderful Town,
and Gwen Verdon, the breakout smash of
Can-Can.
Had anyone there seen it coming?

Can-Can
’s producers, Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin,
certainly had. They first spotted Verdon months before, at Chicago’s Chez Paree, where they caught her dancing it like a lady athlete, doing the Jack Cole with Jack Cole. Others could sing or dance or act, but Verdon—a luscious lollipop person with a voice she said sounded like a 78 rpm record
with a wobble in it—could do all three, sometimes all at once, and better than most could do only one. She was what they called a triple threat. McCracken had the big three as well, but she never managed to launch herself out of the soubrette department. An unfortunate combination of illness, bad timing, and (ironically) versatility held her career down. But Gwen Verdon’s road was clear: leading lady. She had opportunity and she had means. A baby-woman at the eye wall of Marilyn Monroe and Irene Dunne, she had a stage persona that was complex enough to be unique to her, but basic enough to be instantly understood. To see her sing and dance was to continually fight the urge to leap, arms outstretched, from your seat. One number, one swivel of hips, and you could feel yourself wanting to run up there and squeeze to pieces all five and a half feet of her—ivory-rocket legs, tiger thighs, surging bust, twinkle nose, and very red hair—and without any guilt. She was that sweet. After they saw her at the Chez Paree, Feuer and Martin offered Verdon a fully paid weekend
in New York if she’d audition there for
Can-Can,
their new show.

With Jack Cole’s permission, Gwen packed up her Siamese cat and her dog and left for the Warwick Hotel in New York. She was so scared of singing for Mr. Cole Porter that when she arrived at the theater, she asked him if she could please dance first and sing second. Mr. Porter said she could. Predictably, her dance killed. But she knew it would. It was her voice, the song, that worried her. “I was so scared,”
she said, “my legs wouldn’t hold me.” Verdon asked if she could sit for the number; permission was granted, and she sang “Pennies from Heaven.” Then she read a scene from the show. (“It probably sounded like,
‘Run, Spot, Run,’” she later said.) The whole thing lasted just under an hour—quite a long time for an audition—and then director Abe Burrows climbed onstage.