Fosse (14 page)

“Bob came to the set with a sense
of how his dances ought to be filmed,” said costar Tommy Rall. “It was [Richard] Quine’s picture, but
The Pajama Game
had done so much for Bob’s reputation, Quine let him have a hand in the filming.” Fosse shot his dances in the Astaire style, head to toe and flat up-front, with as few interruptions as possible. As Astaire said, “I have always tried to run a dance
straight in the movies, keeping the full figure of the dancer, or dancers, in view and retaining the flow of the movement intact.” His camera was like an audience on wheels.

“How do you know what you’re doing?”
cowriter Blake Edwards asked the first-time director.

“I don’t.”

“But you do. You’re doing it!”

“Nahhhh.”

Credited director Richard Quine looked on,
admiring Fosse’s persistence and humor. Fosse needed humor; levity greased the wheels, allowing him to play his own good cop when he had to get tough. “He was determined to make
memorable dances,” Rall said, “determined to make them a cut above what Hollywood was doing, and he tore himself apart trying to do it. He tore us apart. We’d go over the number again and again until it was absolutely perfect.”

Set in an alley behind a theater, Rall’s and Fosse’s “Alley Dance” took the better part of two weeks to rehearse and film.
Eileen
’s bravura centerpiece, Fosse made the number into a challenge dance and laced it with his own insecurities. Pitting himself against Rall, he wagered his self-perceived deficits against one of moviedom’s most accomplished ballet dancers. Could jazz beat ballet? the dance asked. Could showbiz take on real grace? To level the playing field, he added echoes from “Steam Heat,” like hat tricks and nods to Chaplin and Durante, whose signature walks gave Fosse and Rall another means of competition.

Harry Cohn was so impressed with Fosse’s work on
My Sister Eileen,
he encouraged him to stay on at Columbia, sweetening his initial offer with a house and, as Fosse told it, “anything I wanted.”
If he committed wholesale to being a choreographer, Fosse knew he could lose sight of his long-term goal, to dance, and he turned Cohn down. Besides, the Hollywood musical—at least in its present incarnation—had run its course. On the publicity tour,
the cast of
Eileen
was told not to emphasize the film’s singing and dancing.

Back in New York, Joan lost her bounce; her heart had been damaged by a lifetime of smoking and further compromised by complications of diabetes.
Ruminating on the loss of her baby and the disappearances of her husband only worsened the situation, and she smoked more. The problems with Fosse added immeasurably to her distress,
Henry Dolger, McCracken’s physician, believed. But as her husband’s work drew more attention, it became increasingly hard for Joan to hide her disintegration. They were supposed to be a golden couple.

The Tonys were only eight years old in March 1955. Before the American Theatre Wing tried to make the award show
into a version of the Oscars—introducing the concept of nominees, announcing them well in advance, and broadcasting on television—Broadway’s biggest night was no bigger than a high-priced wedding, presented with dinner and dancing in the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. Fosse, neat in a little tux, came with Joan, slight as an icicle. With fewer than twenty medallions to hand out, no nominees to list, and acceptance speeches limited so the program could be broadcast on the radio, the ceremony began with coffee and ended by dessert. Joan gamely clapped and grinned as
The Pajama Game
took home best musical, best performance by a featured actress (Carol Haney), and best choreographer for twenty-seven-year-old Bob Fosse. “He was his usual
cool-cat self,” recalled Rae Allen, “with just a bit more I-told-you-so glint in his eye.”

McCracken’s condition might have hooked Fosse and drawn him back home to her, but he had already been hooked and yanked in the opposite direction.
Damn Yankees,
Abbott and company’s follow-up to
The Pajama Game,
was about to unite New York’s most exciting young choreographer with Prince, Griffith, Adler, Ross, a few familiar dancers, and
Can-Can
’s Gwen Verdon, princess of Broadway—pending Bob Fosse’s approval of her. They looked to him now. Per the grosses and the critics, he was suddenly, officially, a Tony-nominated part of the musical mainstream and of definite value to George Abbott, Mr. Mainstream himself. But Fosse had had help on
The Pajama Game
. Without Jerome Robbins, could he do it again on
Damn Yankees
? And if he could, and if Ms. Verdon—
Jack Cole
’s Gwen Verdon—triumphed, what credit would they give him?

“Look,” he said to Hal Prince.
“I have to audition her.”

“Bobby, you know she’s good.”

“I know. I know,” he said. “But is she good for me?”

Prince conceded; she would audition.

Days later, in a tangle of forgotten props and wooden chairs, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon faced each other in Walton’s Warehouse, a cavernous rehearsal space in midtown Manhattan. It was night. He looked like night.

“I’m very nervous,”
he said.

“So am I.”

She saw a crumpled, soft-talking dance tramp, and he saw the sweetest, hottest dancing comedienne of the age. One with a reputation. Underneath her smile, he had heard, Verdon could be a difficult collaborator, a high-class snob with an ironclad pedigree and an almost pathological aversion to the kind of heigh-ho Broadway jumping around she called animated wallpaper. Verdon could see through him. If he tried any of those vaudeville tricks on her, she’d nail him for it in a second.

“I’m just going to show you
this number,” he said. “I’ll just do it.”

She stepped back to the mirror and waited, watching.

It was her big number, “Whatever Lola Wants,” and Fosse, she saw, had filled it with all sorts of burlesque moves, moves she recognized from her early days,
before Cole, playing clubs on Hollywood Boulevard at the age of fifteen, wearing a rubber bra and a body smear of gold powder. Now, watching Bob Fosse slithering and stalking his way through the oldest stripper tricks in the book, slipping off invisible gloves and shaking his imaginary tits, she felt herself giving in. He was fantastic.

Every wink, every blink, every finger curl was quite obviously the product of weeks of careful experimentation. He told her when to breathe, when to laugh, when to smile and how much. In time, her incredulity became enthusiasm; her enthusiasm gave him confidence; and his confidence inflamed her enthusiasm. Now it was her turn to be intimidated. Where another dancer would have collapsed, Gwen asked for more, to do it again, and maybe this time, if he didn’t mind, with one of those robust Jack Cole turns. Did he mind? No, he didn’t mind. He didn’t mind at all.

They went at it for hours.

He loved what she knew. Refined over years of formal study and practice, Verdon’s repertoire pulsed with a vast knowledge of tap, ballet, Denishawn training, and a hard-won supply of Jack Cole. Born and raised in Culver City, a short pony ride from the MGM lot, Gwyneth Verdon could plug into Fosse’s showbiz history, body and mind, as far back as they both could remember. She had a mind like a tuning fork. Her mother had been a dance teacher, her father a gaffer at Metro. At the age of three, she had entertained at an MGM Christmas party thrown by Marion Davies; at six, she was being billed as the “fastest little tapper in the world.”

“It’s a vulnerability,”
Fosse said later. “Even if she’s knocking down brick walls, you suddenly want to take care of Gwen Verdon.” Crying or smiling or both at once, she was the picture of hope trying to squeeze its way out any way it can. With a winning smile, thick hair, and a voluptuous machine for a body, Verdon became the kind of grown-up girl that turned boys into men and men into idiots. Like Fosse, she had been groped, slapped, overused, underused, injured, rejected, forgotten, and fooled. The perverts, the pigs, the egos, the artists, the phonies, the producers who said yes when they meant no, the directors who said they wanted you for the show because they wanted you for the night, and the dancers who lined up against you and then called you their friend—she knew them all. Soft on the outside, on the inside, she was a dancer. “Sure, Bob’s tough,”
she said. “He’s demanding and exact, but I get a much bigger kick out of pleasing him in rehearsal than I do an entire audience in a performance.” Her genius was that she made killing herself look like fun, and Bob Fosse, who also killed himself, who was never impressed, was impressed. He said, “The thing that impresses me most
about her is her enthusiasm, her desire for perfection, and
endless
energy. Whenever I have an idea, I’ll kind of fumble my way up to it with an ‘Ah, I think we should . . .’ and she’ll say, ‘No, I know
exactly
what you mean!’ and she’s off to the races.”

He gave her the part, of course, of Lola in
Damn Yankees.

They began to rehearse, exchanging pieces of their autobiographies, which they unearthed from each other’s style. Those bowlers Fosse put on his dancers? From the English music-hall tradition? He got used to them covering his bald spot. Gwen’s facility with hands and fingers? She learned sign language from a girl at elementary school. Her twisted, turned-in feet? “My knees were so badly knocked,”
she said, “that they crossed over each other. I wore braces on my legs, and orthopedic shoes and I was never without big, angry sores on my knees because they knocked together so hard.” Fosse’s body could speak to that; he was pigeon-toed too. Adversity became them. Those heavy black orthopedic shoes had only made little Gwen work harder, and her poor turnout forced her to compensate—with personality.

To help Gwen’s legs recover, Verdon’s mother enrolled her daughter in dance classes all over Los Angeles. “That child is like wild sunset!”
she said. “She
will
dance!”

In the fourth grade, Gwen started signing
her homework
Ginger Verdon.

“Why Ginger?” her teacher asked.

“Because I can’t [be] Fred.”

Gwen didn’t have technique but
at fifteen, she had a winning smile; thick, delicious hair; and a killer rack, which she didn’t love. But the guys did, and Gwen, who’d dance wherever they let her, took a job at the Florentine Gardens, where she got near naked before a houseful of loud and hungry men. She was underage, but Mrs. Verdon lied for her. Unlike Mrs. Fosse had done for her son, Mrs. Verdon accompanied her daughter from stage to stage, surging with pride. “My grandmother was very supportive,”
said Gwen’s son, Jim Henaghan Jr. “She wanted my mom to dance because my mom loved it and [she] was willing to go to great lengths to see her succeed. Bob’s parents were not supportive in the way my grandmother was at all. They had different ideas about showbiz. Different ideas about manhood. They weren’t mean to him; they just had a different outlook on life. I don’t think they objected to the point that they stopped him, but he was on his own.” For Gwen, context was almost irrelevant; she didn’t care if she was twirling alongside her brother in the creeks behind their bungalow or alone in her room, hopping up and down and blowing on her trumpet. As long as she was moving.

She loved to dance, but she dreamed of love. “Her dream was to have a home
and a hearth and have children that were going to be okay in the world,” Ann Reinking said. James Henaghan was a journalist: witty, older, dashing. Six months after they met, the couple drove down to Orange County, and Gwen told the justice of the peace she was twenty-two.

The new Mrs. Henaghan tossed her tap shoes into a cardboard box and locked the box away. It was time, she told herself, to work at being a wife.

But Henaghan drank.
He lost money. When he woke up in Kansas City with no idea how he got there and a column past due, he called Gwen in the middle of the night and she wrote the piece and filed it for him. Gwen didn’t love the job, but she loved loving him, and for a while she was sure she could survive on the crumbs of tenderness he transmitted by cable. For a while. Soon, they had a son, Jim Jr. Verdon didn’t want to break up the family, but in a sense, the choice was made for her. On New Year’s Eve 1943, she packed up her son and her animals and left her husband.

Depressed and poor and overcome with guilt, the former Venice Beach bathing-suit model and current single mother shrank to a hundred pounds. She was twenty years old. “Jimmy,”
she would say to her little boy later, “you and I grew up together.”

They needed money. One of Henaghan’s contacts asked her to review a nightclub opening. An old lover, dance was a bittersweet memory she held at arm’s length, but Gwen couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the thought of going to see Jack Cole at Slapsie Maxie’s.

Cole stories were legion. He was a terrible genius, witty, bitchy, crazy, a mean man who worked out of deep pockets of brilliance and anger—and it showed in his dancers. If they survived, Cole’s people were alarmingly good. When they appeared with him—tribal and half nude—on the supper-club stage, Gwen felt a yank inside of her. It was true. Cole was stunning, even standing still; he gleamed like a piece of golden technology, and when he moved, he cut the air like a rain of knives. Erotic and exotic, Cole’s style drew from all aspects of world movement. When he danced, he spared no part of himself, slicing air with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer, a beast in a gentleman’s body. “He would do absolutely true
, real authentic East Indian dance,” Verdon said. “But to jazz music.” She was possessed.

Remembering who she was, or, rather, who she’d thought she might be, Gwen went backstage to introduce herself. She had good reason to be terrified.

Cole was mostly silent with Gwen.
When he did talk, it was in speeches and with a grim authority unwelcoming to conversation. Art, like interlocution, was not a group effort for Jack Cole. But somehow, Gwen Verdon, whom Cole could have flicked away like a speck of dandruff, tamed the jackal inside him. Cole himself could hardly believe it. Here she was, backstage, going on about how spectacular he was and about how she needed the money and wanted to join his group, and, miraculously, the great man listened. Maybe she caught him at a good time, or maybe—knowing a good thing when he saw one—Cole felt he had caught her. “Jack was pretty amused,”
Verdon remembered. “For one thing, I had on such a tight skirt that I could hardly sit down.” He could see that Gwen had, like him,
insane drive and a combustible streak of belligerence. Her simply having the nerve to address him proved it. But could she move?