Fosse (15 page)

Cole invited her to audition for a chorus-girl part in
The Blonde from Brooklyn,
the film he was dance-directing at Columbia. The day of the audition, he gave her a few ballet sequences, calling them out in an esoteric dance dialect no Culver City girl could be expected to understand.

“Well, if you say it in English,”
she shot back, “I’ll do it.”

Gwen Verdon wasn’t used to pretension, and Jack Cole wasn’t used to gumption. So Cole repeated himself with a translation, and Gwen did as she was told, beautifully. (“Gwen’s answer to Cole,”
Tommy Tune suggested, “was she could outdance him. She had that against him.”) The assured sensuality of her dance shocked both of them.

“She had an adeptness
and knowhow that showed she had lots of experience but not much real training,” Cole said. “She was good but she had no strong style.” He’d have to burn that into her. If she was willing. If she would move the way he told her to, read everything he said, and follow his word like it was God’s law. Then he could transform her from a dancer into a Jack Cole Dancer. But she had to work. She had to study. Joining him, Gwen would have to rehearse before rehearsals so she would be prepared to prepare.

Still smarting with the pain of a broken family, Verdon wasn’t sure she had the heart or the muscle to withstand Cole’s strength, vision, and unsparing intelligence, which she knew—now firsthand—were more powerful than any other choreographer’s.

It was true that he could wreck her if he wanted to. But what else was there? She had a baby and no money. Dance was all she could do.

“I won’t let him beat me,”
she said.

In 1947, Gwen sold everything she owned (except for her books and records) and filed for divorce. Just after Thanksgiving, she left Jim Jr. with her parents in Culver City and joined the chorus of Cole’s
Bonanza Bound
in New York. Jim Jr. said, “My mom had to decide
whether to become a shop girl and take care of her kid or pursue her career, and her need to dance. That was a tough decision for her to have to make and it bothered her a great deal, but it was her choice and we all went along with it.”

Devotion was innate in Gwen Verdon. As she had once belonged to Henaghan, she now belonged to Jack Cole. “She understood
she had to put up with a lot of hard personality stuff to see greatness,” Jim Jr. explained. “I think that’s the key to all sorts of her relationships.”

And as she had once belonged to Cole, she now belonged to Bob Fosse. “It was quite apparent to everyone
in the [
Damn Yankees
] rehearsals that Bob Fosse was having an affair with Gwen,” observed dancer Svetlana McLee, a pal of McCracken’s from
Me and Juliet.
“When Joan would come into rehearsal and sit there and watch, it was uncomfortable . . . I mean uncomfortable in capital letters.” Both McCracken and Verdon needed tending, and Fosse could have split his time down the middle, running between them as he soon would run between the rehearsal studio and the editing room, night till morning, morning till night. But he didn’t. He openly became Gwen’s, and he cast Joan off like a first draft. “All my women have beauty
and talent,” he said, “and I fall in love with that, and then I don’t know what happens, because it always ends. It’s my fault always.”

McCracken was the one to urge him
to talk to someone. Her analyst made a recommendation, and Fosse, at first opposed, finally acquiesced. Mostly he talked about work,
the stifling insecurity he felt creating for the public, for people he suspected were waiting for him to fail. He craved the privacy of a writer or composer, artists with the luxury to fail behind closed doors. He talked about women, about not being a good husband, about failing his first and maybe now his second marriage. He wanted to do better, to
be
better. He talked of his dreams, swollen with anxieties he couldn’t name, and began to sense a profound thematic undercurrent. “In my own case these were things like
the fear of not being liked,” he said. “I was always very eager to please other people.” He remembered the occasion, after his brothers had gotten into trouble, when he decided he would be his parents’ good boy, the child they depended on. Still, he regularly found himself cheating compulsively, hurting girls, hurting Joan, especially when he worked. “I’m a pretty good husband
when I’m not working,” he said, “but as soon as I start a project, it’s like I don’t know anything else exists.” It was a sinister loop, the need to win; disappointing himself in work was a virus that only more work could treat. His doctor prescribed Seconal.

Should he leave Joan? Would that be bad? Was
he
bad? He had certainly done bad things. He told his analyst about the strippers. He talked about “a rather bizarre sexual experience” when he was thirteen, something that had been done to him that made Fosse want to prove all women could be gotten, and easily. “I think he felt a sense of betrayal
with women,” Ann Reinking explained, “a sense of loss and betrayal early on in his life. I don’t think he felt safe. I just remember him saying that his mother shouldn’t have let him do burlesque and his father was always gone. He would talk about that a lot. It didn’t matter that Bob’s father had to go out and make a living. To a young Bob, left alone in those places, that didn’t matter.”

Fosse said, “I didn’t realize until I got into analysis
that I really hated going away from home and was scared to death, that I was in an atmosphere, with all those naked ladies running around, way over my head.”

Imagination, Joyce said, is memory. Trauma, the psychologists say, compulsively seeks expression. Like a criminal, the unconscious mind obsessively returns to the scene of the crime to gain mastery over the pain, putting itself in environments and circumstances, professional and emotional, conducive to reenactment. Trauma specialist Dr. Charles Rousell: “If an adult has experienced repetitive trauma
as a child at the hands of people he trusts, he might find that the residual effects become engraved into the narrative of his life. So it is not surprising that if that person had endured trauma at the hands of trusted adults in the theater world he would devote his life to the theater. Working on shows may release some of that pain and creatively forge it into constructive action.” But when that pain is intimately involved with feelings of pleasure—as in sex or entertainment—untangling good from bad can be ceaselessly dissatisfying and difficult to do. “Whatever Lola Wants,” a continuation of a burlesque-haunted trajectory Fosse initiated with “That Old Black Magic” in 1943, refers back to that pain.

George Abbott, who understood Gwen’s power, kept growing the part of Lola. Who else could pull off the satanic Betty Boop? (Barbara Cook? Carol Channing? Ethel Merman? Mary Martin? Doubtful.) It took Verdon, a comedienne, to make sex safe for the American musical; it took a Cole dancer to read Fosse, and an actress to legitimize Lola’s humanity. Beginning March 7, 1955, she zipped
among the show’s separate rehearsal spaces, each on a different floor of the warehouse where Fosse and Verdon created Lola. A service elevator wheezed from one windowless studio to the next, delivering wholesale talent to Abbott’s room for scene work, to Adler and Ross’s floor for voice, and to Fosse’s for dance. Two weeks later, the eighty-three-person company
assembled for the first run-through of
Damn Yankees
.

It ran long. Prince suggested cutting the big
end-of-act-one ballet, a round of musical chairs emceed by the Yankee’s mascot, a gorilla. Desperate to save the number (and seize a spotlight opportunity), Fosse suggested
he
play the gorilla. Performance wasn’t the issue, Prince explained, pace was. The number had to go. But Fosse pushed back; he didn’t trust Hal Prince. He didn’t trust producers. He assumed they were fundamentally unsympathetic to creation, their expenses and bottom lines against his requests for more time to improve. Fosse had to fail his way to success and feel safe and unpressured while he did. “We were very different minds, Bobby and me,” Prince said. “He was quintessential showbiz,” and Prince was a New York college boy—to Fosse, irreconcilable differences. Prince said, “Bobby was not a happy fellow. Not ever. Not with me.” But in the spirit of collaboration, the producer agreed to let the first preview audience in New Haven cast the tiebreaking vote. Would the number stay or go?

The audience backed Prince. Now what? Clumped in a small bedroom of New Haven’s Taft Hotel, Abbott, Prince, and Griffith shrugged and what-ifed their way through the whys and why-nots of the performance.

“Fellas,” Prince began, “I think we all know what we need to do. The gorilla number has to go. I know we put a lot into this but you saw what—”

The telephone rang.

“Excuse me,” Prince said, reaching for the phone. “Hello?”

“Hal, it’s Bob Fosse.” (He always used his full name, afraid they’d say, “Bob who?”)

“Bobby, listen,” Prince said, “we’re all here and we—”

“I’m in the room next door,” he said. “I heard everything you said, Hal.”

“Bobby . . .”

“Why don’t you tell me these things to my face?”

“I’m coming right now,” Prince said, and he hung up.

Seconds later, a very embarrassed, very confused Hal Prince stepped into Fosse’s room and sat down in an armchair a neutral distance away. Fosse cursed at Prince, spitting smoke in the air like an angry train. Joan McCracken, waiting on the little bed, said nothing.

“Bobby,” Prince muttered. “It’s terrible that you heard me, just terrible. I’m so terribly sorry you did. But please understand I’m doing what I think is best for the show here, we all are—”

“You’re doing it
behind my back.
”

“We were in a meeting. No one’s doing anything behind your back.”

“Bullshit. I heard what you said.”

“Bobby, I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean. You know what I think of the number—”

“I
know
what was going on in there!”

Joan glanced at Hal. She was embarrassed.

“It’s the
number,
” Prince pleaded. “It’s not you, Bobby, believe me. You’re great, but the show needs work.”

“You’re scheming!”

Joan cut in. “Enough. Stop it.”

“Joanie, please.”

“He
apologized,
Bobby—”

But Fosse didn’t stop. Raging, he ripped into Prince, ripped into all producers, bashing their intelligence and supposed artistic sensitivity.

Long after Prince left the room, Fosse was still glowering. If they were against his work, they were against him. Even if they didn’t say it, he knew they thought it.

The gorilla number went. In came “Who’s Got the Pain?,” a bite-size mambo for Eddie Phillips and Gwen. “Bob and I put the number together
in about two hours,” she said. But speed was no consolation, not to Fosse. Being
directed
by a producer—that he could not tolerate. Prince said, “I begged him to see
that what I felt about him in life had nothing to do with what he did onstage. I begged him as long as I knew him.”

Onward to Boston, where a new version of
Damn Yankees
was performed almost every night. “We were tossing out score
all the time,” said Prince, “writing new material for Gwen to beef up her part.” They gave her a new number, “A Little Brains, a Little Talent.” But rather than show appreciation for an expanded Lola, Verdon turned cold, as if in allegiance to Fosse. “She was very loyal, Gwen,”
Prince explained, “and after all that Jack Cole, so accustomed to trusting, to not questioning, especially guys.”

Gwen’s part continued to expand—as Lola and as Fosse’s girl—as late as May 5, 1955, the night of the
Damn Yankees
Broadway opening. Before the show, McCracken went backstage
to congratulate a friend, actor Ray Walston. Her hands, he noticed, were drenched in sweat. “I put it all together later,”
Walston said, “but it was obviously the result of what was happening between her and Bob.”

She had a heart attack, then another.
Then pneumonia. Though Fosse blamed himself for her decline, it was in the hospital that he left her,
or began to. “Joan was in critical condition on an oxygen tank,” Reinking said, “and she told him that everything was all right, that he shouldn’t worry, that she understood. She was trying to tell him it’s okay. Forgive yourself. You did not have a hand in this. You did not bring this on.” He did not agree. Something was wrong with him.
He saw his psychiatrist as often as
five times a week in double sessions, back to back. Why couldn’t he feel the good others felt in love? Beset with terrible guilt, he could not leave Joan completely, though he practically had, appearing only at odd hours to soothe both of them, or just himself, visits that became less frequent, then finally stopped.

On her own now, Joan continued to keep her heart attacks
a private matter, hoping to bounce back and dance again before word of her condition spread. But Walter Winchell discovered her secret, and everyone who might have hired her found out she was unemployable—and the dominoes fell. First she stopped dancing, then she stopped exercising. Then her blood sugar levels rose. Then her heart tightened. She put on a sporting face, but Walston saw her: She was a living corpse.

She retreated to Fire Island. Alone.

Meanwhile, Gwen Verdon appeared in eight shows a week at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater to overwhelming acclaim. More than anything else in the show, Lola—a character Walter Kerr called “everything undesirable made absolutely and forever desirable”—made
Damn Yankees
matter. Verdon’s smiling face appeared on the cover of
Time,
which called her “the most incendiary star on Broadway.”

A few dancers on their way
to say good night heard the shouts coming from her dressing room. A brave one peeked her head around the door and saw Gwen crying and Fosse against the wall.

“Why can’t you do it?” she was overheard yelling at him. Gwen had finally left her boyfriend, actor Scott Brady. “Why can’t you leave her?”

In a sense, he never would. For the rest of Fosse’s life, he felt Joan following him, and once, he literally followed her, as she was walking down a busy avenue
with a friend, dancer Doria Avila. “Look behind you,” Joan said. Avila looked, and Fosse ducked behind a parked car. At night, he called Joan
at Fire Island—she had finally put a telephone in, for medical emergencies—and hung up as soon as she answered.