Fosse (12 page)

“Well, Claudine,”
he said, “I guess we’ll see you soon.”

She looked up at him. “What?”

“Darling, you’ve got the job.” Claudine: the character’s name.

Gwen went to the Warwick Hotel
alone and ordered room service. She didn’t know anyone in New York, and had always wondered what it would be like to order room service.

On Sunday she went back to Hollywood, to Jack Cole. “How’d it go, honey?”
he asked, blasé.

“I got the job.”

He punched her.
It was not the most effective way to tell Gwen he needed her with him.

Verdon returned to New York, and rehearsals went smoothly. In Philadelphia,
Can-Can
sold well and opened nicely (Cole Porter shows did that). Gwen wasn’t crazy about director Michael Kidd,
but the real problem was with Lilo, the show’s bombshell
française.
Jealous of Verdon, Lilo insisted
on restaging their numbers so Gwen ended up offstage for the applause (most of which was for Gwen); for the curtain call, Lilo arranged to hide Gwen behind a bench in far-off Siberia. Then Gwen’s numbers started to disappear. Her lines too. “I don’t really blame Lilo,”
Verdon said years later. “She was the star and I was stealing the show. In the theater, that’s like another woman in a marriage triangle.”

By opening night—May 7, 1953—the company was out of steam. Cramped in her phone-booth-size dressing room
off of stage left, Gwen warmed up her kicks for the big Apache number, a comedy dance that had her, the spurned girl, going after her lover with a knife. “I don’t know how Michael [Kidd] did it,”
said Cy Feuer, “but the whole thing was done in slow motion and a waiter passed with a big cheese and there was a knife in it—in the climax of the big dance—and she in slow motion grabbed the knife, turned around, and went to her lover and stabbed him in the stomach, and came back, turned around, put the knife back in the cheese, and she walked off.” It was big, juicy material and required tremendous control, which did not come easily to Verdon. “Sometimes I’m on stage,”
she said, “and I’m so tired but I’ll kick and my legs go way up and I follow them. It’s almost like they’re separate from me.”

On opening night, act one went well. Then came act two and the deadly Apache number.

Mostly, when people say a number stopped a show, they don’t mean the show literally stopped. But when people speak of Gwen Verdon’s showstopping Apache number in
Can-Can
and of the standing ovation she got on opening night,
in the middle
of the show,
they really do mean the actors stopped acting, the stage managers stopped stage-managing, and the producers stopped worrying. In fact, the response to Gwen’s Apache dance was so powerful,
the ovation, lasting for seven minutes, became a theatrical happening of its own. No one knew quite how to react. A few stagehands beginning to move the next scene’s set into place were waved away by a cluster of dancers who were unable to leave the stage during the ovation but who were unsure of what they were supposed to do now that the show had stopped and the applause had taken over the theater.

Gwen Verdon, meanwhile, was oblivious.
Following the dance, as she had been directed to do, she returned to her phone booth to change quickly for her next number. Thanks to a recalcitrant zipper, she was too busy fighting her pants to realize the roar from inside was all for her. Michael Kidd figured as much.
A couple minutes into the ovation, he dashed out of the Shubert Theater, through Shubert Alley, up to the stage door, and into Gwen’s dressing room. When the door opened, she heard them chanting from the house: “We want Verdon! We want Verdon!”

“You have to go out there,”
Kidd said.

“But—”

He grabbed her arm. The zipper would have to stay unzipped.

With only a towel to cover her, Gwen returned to the stage and faced New York. “I could have walked into Tokyo,”
she said of that moment. “It was just that strange to be suddenly out there.”

Shubert Alley was so mobbed with fans and press after the show that to get to the Hotel Astor for the opening-night party, Gwen had to ride with a policeman
on the back of his horse.

“I remember the first time I saw her
in
Can-Can,
” Fosse said. “People ask if I created Gwen, and I say, ‘She was hot when I met her.’ That alabaster skin, those eyes, that bantam rooster walk.”

Across from the Shubert, at the Majestic, Fosse would wait for Joan.
On
Me and Juliet
’s matinee days, she led a small acting class
for chorus kids. She taught Mary Tarcai,
a Stanislavskian. Sometimes, in the half darkness of the ghost light, Fosse could be seen pacing
the distant back of the theater, filling the empty house with clouds of smoke. Joan’s students—including dancer Shirley MacLaine—wondered why he, whom they semi-recognized from TV and a couple lame movies, didn’t have anywhere else to be. They would not have known what Fosse knew, what McCracken had told Bill Hayes, her friend, student, and costar, during the run of
Me and Juliet.
“Joan was pregnant,”
Hayes said, “and she was thrilled about it. We talked about how she was going to leave the show and have the baby.” But she never did. Before McCracken could change the size of her costume, she lost the baby.
Hayes assumed a miscarriage. “Joan had hard numbers in that show,”
he said, “and she danced with everything she had.” Biographer Lisa Jo Sagolla submits
that McCracken’s diabetes, which she had to keep secret from the company, made a healthy pregnancy unlikely, even dangerous. Abortion may have been her only option. The property the Fosses bought
on Fire Island, they never developed.

There was a lull out there, one that had less to do with Fosse and McCracken than with musical comedy, which in those days, the early 1950s, had everything to do with George Abbott, the most prolific, successful writer and director of comedy on Broadway. Everybody’s grandfather, Mr. Abbott didn’t look like a musical wizard; he looked liked Abraham Lincoln. Tall, suave, and always correct, he was basically a producer with director’s responsibilities, a good man of dependable taste. Not great taste, but really, really good taste, safe and solid, just like the musical comedy of his safe and solid era. Few comedies dared what
Oklahoma!
had dared. One would have to go back to the year 1950, to
Guys and Dolls,
to find one with a head on its lovely shoulders. Other than that, the vestiges of the 1920s remained.
Top Banana
was all gags;
Flahooley
was a mess; and
Kismet
didn’t meet its Cole dances halfway. Abbott’s shows hewed closer to plot than character, nearer to frippery than to life. Revolution was not his strong suit.

That’s why he didn’t warm to the wildcard in McCracken when he first directed her in
Billion Dollar Baby
in 1945. But “by the time they did
Me and Juliet,
”
Hal Prince recalled, “he’d forgotten he’d ever objected to her in the first place.” Abbott and McCracken had grown closer since; before he went out dancing, which he did most every night after the show, Abbott liked to swing by her dressing room for a chat. In November 1953, he told Joan his new musical—based on the novel
7
½
Cents,
by Richard Bissell—was to be about a pajama-factory strike, an odd topic, he admitted, for a musical comedy. “Others seemed to be even more shy
of the material than I was,” Abbott wrote. “They felt that a garment factory and a strike was too serious and controversial a subject for a jolly musical.” Was this why Jerome Robbins, whom Abbott had used on several occasions, most recently and successfully on
Call Me Madam,
had turned him down? (No: Robbins was aiming higher.
He wanted to choreograph
and
direct.)

Recognizing an opportunity for her husband, McCracken took Abbott to see
Kiss Me Kate,
then playing at Radio City Music Hall, where she hoped Fosse’s forty-five-second choreography debut would double as his life-changing audition, the big break he’d look back on and say, “That’s when it all really started for me.” McCracken’s faith in him was tremendous. “Joanie sounded off about Bob every time
I went into her dressing room,” Abbott said. “To me, he seemed very unassuming, not very impressive at all. But she built him up to be like the next Great White Hope.” The Radio City proscenium lights dimmed, and McCracken sat back, fingers crossed under her seat. She watched her director through the entire picture.

Abbott smiled. “Have you done much choreography?”
he asked Fosse, days later.

“Oh, yeah, a lot.”

“Where?”

(Lying.) “Canada.”

That was enough for Abbott. His genius was for hiring genius. One could say he knew talent, or maybe he just knew business, because, being young and hungry, the talent he hired worked for almost nothing. Kids were good for comedy. But one of Mr. Abbott’s producers, twenty-five-year-old Hal Prince, suggested, wisely, they have some kind of insurance. “Do you think we can talk Robbins into
standing in the wings?” he asked. “Just in case?”

“You talk to him.”

Prince called Robbins.
If Robbins wouldn’t choreograph the show, would he at least look over Fosse’s shoulder, in case he got in trouble? Robbins, who had seen
Kiss Me Kate
and respected Fosse’s work, agreed to do it. But: “I’ll only do it if I can have codirecting credit.”

Prince called Abbott. “He’ll only do it if he can share codirecting credit.”

“Give it to him.”

That was a surprise. “Doesn’t it seem offensive to you?” Prince asked.

“Oh, give it to him, Hal. It’ll make you feel good. Everyone will know who directed the show.”

Codirected by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins, based on a book by Abbott and Richard Bissell, and with songs by newcomers Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, the musical version of
7
½
Cents
was to be choreographed by Bob Fosse. Walking up Fifth Avenue after
a long lunch with Abe Burrows, Abbott thought of a title for the show:
The Pajama Game.

On the street, Fosse ran into
Carl Reiner. They hadn’t seen each other since
Call Me Mister,
several years earlier.

“Bobby!” Reiner threw out his arms. “How are you? You look great.”

“Well,” he said. “Okay. I got my first job as choreographer.”

“That’s wonderful!”

Fosse shrugged, looked down.

“You’ve got to be very proud of that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe.” Bob tried a laugh. “I don’t know.”

“What?
Why?
”

“I called my dad and I told him, I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to choreograph the dances for a new show, an Abbott show.’ He said, ‘What’s
choreograph
?’ I said, ‘I’m going to be making up the steps for other dancers.’ Then he got upset and said, ‘You mean you’re gonna give away your steps?’”

E
ARLY IN
1954, Fosse locked himself in a studio and tried not to panic. He had given himself eight weeks alone to come up with what he was going to show Abbott, Robbins, and the kids of
The Pajama Game,
figuring the more time he spent perfecting the steps in private, the more humiliation he would spare himself in public. Ideas did not ever simply come to him; he had to force them out. Wrestling his tricks and gimmicks, Fosse quivered around the floor with only piano music to help him, trying to see himself in that wide blank mirror without hating every reflection or blaming the failed MGM star who put it there. That way lay total paralysis. If he could simply give himself permission to
see,
to scavenge without penalty, he would at least have something to start with, a ball of clay to mold discerningly on his way to—best case—mediocrity. “[I] let everything that can come out, come out,”
he said, “even though it may seem ridiculous and as though I’ll never use it, I kind of spill out.” The clock ticking, the money slipping, he looked for ideas, half ideas, things, anything.
“I go through each number and try to get a combination—or just a general feeling of what I want. Just eight bars of movement and I can build from that, with variations.” Then, once he saw, he thought. He added and subtracted until the feeling of embarrassment waned. Mostly, it didn’t wane. Eight weeks of this. Visualizing the horror of facing the producers and cast with nothing or, worse, with dozens of somethings and no more studio time. What would he do then? Add a knee slide? A hat trick? How many hat tricks could he stick in before they caught on?

“I need to have a sense of insecurity,”
Fosse said. “The feeling that I’m in over my head makes me sweat. I get up earlier and stay later.” He had to fight, to stay in the swamp of certain failure long enough to see the black hole become the light at the end of the tunnel. He said, “I finally [get] to the point
where I’d say to myself: ‘I’m the only person here. I’m alone. And I’m just going to stand here until something comes to me.’” He worked through the nights and napped in the days, burning through cigarettes—as many as six or seven
packs a day—and something always did come to him. Fosse worked out every part of every dance all on his own.

When rehearsals began in the Winter Garden Theater in March 1954, the production was still thirty thousand dollars short
of the two hundred fifty thousand dollars it needed. With the specter of Joseph McCarthy looming, the theory that the regular backers had been scared away from a comedy about strikes and unions drove producers Hal Prince and Robert Griffith from Upper East Side parlor to Upper East Side parlor, glad-handing, drinking scotch, eating potato chips, and—with their spin—selling a Romeo and Juliet story with a peppy score. To make up the (considerable) shortfall, they offered the cast of Abbott’s
Me and Juliet
buy-ins at thirty-five dollars each, and, after that, they deferred their own salaries. It wasn’t enough. Prince and Griffith then hired themselves as stage managers and prayed that George Abbott would move through rehearsals with his legendary speed and thrifty, no-nonsense precision.

According to Abbott, the musical comedy was all about timing. The timing and placement of the numbers, the rhythm of the jokes, the length of the beats, the order of the love plots (secondary and primary). To his mathematical mind, timing was a matter of proven formula and so of higher importance than fancy flashes in the pan like “motivation” and “character.” “Abbott would give you line readings,”
said actress Rae Allen. “He’d say, ‘Do that but do it real,’ and then he’d walk away.” If someone started getting arty,
he’d politely invite him into the lobby, fire him, and return to rehearsal. It was never personal with Abbott; there simply wasn’t the time for that. He even
moved
fast. “His legs were so long,”
Allen recalled, “he could climb over the orchestra pit to get onstage. He was a greyhound.” Comedy was a wild beast and he was there to tame it. Prince said, “He was the most disciplined man
in the theater. Don’t suffer fools, learn your lines, say your lines, and don’t get hysterical. He didn’t like crises, he didn’t like contention, and he never hesitated. The theater is a breeding ground for jealousy and insecurity, but Abbott never bothered with that. Presumably, he’d already been through it. By the time we did
Pajama Game,
he was sixty-seven years old and had pretty much seen everything.” He asked the kids to call him George,
but they couldn’t. He was that imposing. The best they could manage was an “Excuse me, George, Mr. Abbott, sir.”