Fosse (16 page)

W
ITH VERDON COMMITTED
to
Damn Yankees,
Fosse seemed to stall for time. He was both waiting for her release so they could begin work on the next show—theirs—and trying to decide if he, on his own, was a star choreographer or an up-and-coming star. Once again, the chance to play
Pal Joey,
this time in a Wallingford, Connecticut, production, decided the question for him. In June of 1955, he went off to the Oakdale Theater
for a week’s run of the show he was determined to make his own. But audiences did not want him. Fosse might have rejected them for it and looked elsewhere for his applause, but he was trapped. “In this business,”
a friend said, “you are driven by insecurity. You need more love than what you’re getting in life. But you’ll never, never get enough. The hole stays with you, no matter what you do, and can’t be fulfilled by another human being. Bob was a walking hole.” His
Pal Joey
dream only deepened that hole. “Show business is really important
to my life,” Fosse said, “and I’m eternally grateful for all it’s given me, but there is an underlying hate that I have for it. I think it’s really hurt my life and I think I could have gotten more.” But where? A deli counter? Medical school? He said it many times: “I can’t do anything but show business.”

It was Stanley Donen who suggested Fosse might choreograph the dances for
Funny Face,
his new Audrey Hepburn/Fred Astaire musical. The job was virtually unbeatable, and Fosse accepted. Getting the green light from MGM producer Roger Edens, he jumped into a studio, and for ten hours a day, every day for four weeks,
he played out ideas in the mirror, banishing from his mind the pending particulars of his salary, which he soon discovered were not all that favorable. He read the studio’s terms as a personal insult, and rather than seize the chance to work with his idol, Fosse fought Edens over the deal, as if it were not a negotiation but a score he needed to settle. Money, for Fosse, wasn’t about money in the bank—he was not greedy or materialistic—it was about value, his. “At the time the money seemed important,”
Fosse said, “but in retrospect, it was one of the dumbest things that happened in my life.” The deal fell through. He’d never work with Fred Astaire.

Late in 1956, he headed to Warner Brothers, where Donen was filming
The Pajama Game,
to ensure his dances made smooth transitions to the screen. “Bob was always there
and was very involved,” dancer Harvey Evans recalled. “He designed some of the shots for the ‘Once-a-Year Day’ number, which was shot on location in a park, and he changed some of the choreography to fit the location.” A notch or two more ambitious than the “Alley Dance,” the “Once-a-Year Day” number favored the proscenium-style arrangements of classic Astaire, but this time, Fosse kept changing the proscenium, cutting throughout the location from one dance space to another, and rather than confine his dancers to the absolute foreground, he placed them in all corners of the frame and at all depths. Unlike the “Alley Dance,” the film version of “Once-a-Year Day” could not have taken place onstage; it was expressly for the movies, made to suit the magnitude of the exterior.

In August, Fosse took an apprentice-type position, regressing slightly in his career to co-choreograph
Bells Are Ringing
with Jerome Robbins, who was also directing. Robbins felt that splitting the workload would give him more time to focus on the bigger picture—his credit would read “Entire Production Directed by Jerome Robbins”—and he also didn’t think he could handle Judy Holliday, a nondancer. “Robbins would make her nervous,”
Buzz Miller recalled. “It was her personality type. Robbins was fairly new in directing and he really didn’t know his acting that well and naturally he was defensive.” Fosse learned to adapt his ambitions to Holliday’s limitations. Rather than curbing his creativity, her personality actually enhanced the effects of his choreography—for no dancer, he found, no matter how grand his or her technique, could carry a number without that inner something Holliday had in superabundance. That actors couldn’t dance didn’t matter. Though Fosse had every step planned in advance, their natural or mundane behavior could be transformed into caricature. He would just have to watch closely and make the right choice. Once isolated, a tic or a twitch could give a whole character an inner life. Holliday’s own genius would carry the rest. “To Bob, the steps were dialogue,”
Ann Reinking said. “He liked dancers who knew how to speak them, or even add something of themselves. Dance per se is only one part of a great dancer.” Fosse devised a simple audition for the nondancers, a box step to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” On certain words, he’d have them move their hands from their hips to their heads and back again so he could be sure they could at least move and sing at the same time.

By all accounts,
Bells Are Ringing
was only a minor achievement. Fosse’s stamp on “The Midas Touch,” a boob-bouncing nightclub affair, was highly evident, as was his influence on “Hello, Hello, There!” a funny fandango in a Brooklyn subway. “One terrible part of the show,”
Robbins wrote, “is that Bob Fosse, who did most of the dances, managed to eke out a bad secondhand version of dances I’ve already done, so that it looks like I have just copied myself and repeated badly what I once did well.” Fosse would be the first to agree that Robbins’s dances weren’t the only rehashes in
Bells Are Ringing.
“Mu Cha Cha,” a cute-enough duet tailored to Holliday’s range, was partially recycled “Who’s Got the Pain?” “You develop a certain few tricks,”
Fosse freely admitted, “a few steps, a gimmick or so, and then you use that for the rest of your life and you keep working off of that and you protect it as though national security depended upon it.”

It was working, anyway. With
Damn Yankees
still playing to happy crowds and the sensational one-thousand-show run of
The Pajama Game
only recently ended, Abbott’s boys had Broadway on a string, though you wouldn’t know it by the cramped offices they kept
at 630 Fifth Avenue. Mr. Abbott in one room, scribbling in the margins of scripts notes like
Keep,
Terrible,
or
Fix,
could hear Hal Prince and Robert Griffith on calls in another, each of them speaking on the phone and to the other simultaneously without losing the thread of either conversation. There was no desk for partner Frederick Brisson, husband of Rosalind Russell and negotiator extraordinaire, presumably because he was always at lunch someplace, negotiating extraordinarily. Nor was there a desk for Bob Fosse—their Tony winner for best choreography two years in a row—presumably because Fosse did his work standing up.

At last, the time had come for Abbott and company to discuss their next venture. With the recent death of Jerry Ross, half of the songwriting team of Adler and Ross, they couldn’t return to the well.
On Doris Day’s recommendation—she and Abbott had met on the set of
The Pajama Game
—Abbott and his office mates listened to some wonderful songs Bob Merrill had written for a film MGM planned to make of O’Neill’s
Anna Christie
. The songs were lovely. “The score,”
Prince said. “That’s why we did the show.” They bought the rights from Metro, and Abbott wrote the book in six weeks. He called it
New Girl in Town.

Two red flags for Fosse. The first: In keeping with the seriousness of the subject, Abbott designed the show to be more sung than danced. Hence the second red flag: Abbott intended to give the part of Anna—a former prostitute trying to hide her past and make a new life—to an actress with a strong Rodgers and Hammerstein voice; not, he said, to Gwen Verdon.
But Gwen wanted the part, and very badly. “I thought, ‘What an extraordinary
opportunity to show that musical theater acting is acting,’” she explained. “It’s not different from doing just straight
Anna Christie.
It’s the same.”
Abbott made Verdon audition—an affront to her stardom. It irritated her. Unconvinced by what he heard, he gave Verdon three weeks to rehearse and try again. In that time, Verdon, at Fosse’s suggestion,
had begun to work on the part with Sanford Meisner, a small threat to Abbott’s control. But he gave her the part anyway; she was the biggest star on Broadway.

To maximize Verdon’s time
with Meisner, Fosse sketched out movement around her, ever mindful that he had to keep
New Girl in Town
a predominantly nondancing show. For weeks, he and his dance assistant Patricia Ferrier built stylized gestures and poses to mesh with
New Girl
’s darker, erotic milieu. Between those gestures, ligatures developed and evolved, and glints of actual dance appeared, almost accidentally. Out came a lyrical bump-and-grind ballet, far from family-friendly. But George Abbott was nothing if not reasonable. He decided to reserve judgment until this clump of spurts and undulations—whatever it was—congealed in context, and out of town. From mud, he knew, a garden could grow. “There’s a lot of serious material
on the musical stage today,” Abbott told the
Herald Tribune.
“
Pal Joey
is serious material.
Carousel
is. American musicals have progressed far beyond the musical comedy stage; a musical comedy implies a kind of
Follies
atmosphere. The trend of our musicals is to try to give honest characters and an honest story and have the musical development come out of that story.” But was Abbott up to grown-up fare? Late in 1956, it was a question Fosse’s dancers—for they were, body and mind, completely Fosse’s—asked aloud. “Right away we assumed
George Abbott didn’t know what to do with this show,” said Harvey Evans, “because it was so dark, about a prostitute.”

“They live in their own world,”
Abbott wrote of his dancers. “They talk to the rest of us, they sometimes marry us, but at the same time they shut us out.” He marveled half admiringly at their tattered slacks and sweaters, winced at their omnisexual pairings- and re-pairings-off. They thought differently, weirdly. Living on a diet of carrot sticks and coffee, these were hard-working aliens unfamiliar with the laws of reality. “Their life,”
Abbott wrote, “is an unending struggle against the body”—in most cases, a struggle magnified by a dictatorial choreographer. A vicious Jack Cole or a nasty Jerome Robbins spewed invective that the dancers readily accepted, rarely thinking of revolt, for the choreographer was the genius, the father, the way to success, and they themselves were disposable. “The school of choreography before
Fosse was you didn’t question,” said Tony Stevens. “You were a slave to the dance. It was murder. They killed you and you let them. You thanked them for it.”

Fosse was intimate with the dancer’s drama, with its unremitting rejections and hundred-to-one-shot ambitions, and he led them all with kindness and understanding, ever aware of their suffering, which hurt him as much as his own suffering—rather, it
was
his own. Fosse’s two Tonys didn’t change a thing; he was still a hoofer, still a gypsy, politically and pathologically devoted to the little guy. Even when Fosse yelled or pushed too hard, his anger was all protein, no fat: fuel for them, so they could give back to him. The growing schism between the old fogy Abbott on one side and Fosse and Gwen, the hip uncle and aunt, on the other only amplified the dancers’ allegiance—maybe even love—for the eternally apologetic urchin who never thought he gave them enough. “He was so tight with us
on
New Girl,
” Harvey Evans said, “he would have parties just for the dancers. Gwen would be there too, telling stories about Jack Cole. She could be tough and you didn’t mess around with her,” Evans continued, “but on
New Girl,
Gwen was one of us. And she loved Bobby so much, and he loved her, and they loved us. We all loved each other, like a family.” A kind of family.

The “Red Light Ballet,” the erotic piece
Fosse developed with Pat Ferrier, described Anna’s dream of whorehouse squalor in ways Abbott’s book hadn’t dared. Performed in front of a black backdrop on a bare black stage empty of everything but a few chairs and a simple staircase leading up into the wings, the ballet, in sharp contrast to the rest of the show—a colorful Victorian affair, heavy in naturalistic detail—shifted from objective reality to the unconscious. Evans said, “It was the first time that Fosse
used chairs, and the girls—prostitutes dressed in corsets and garter belts and flesh-colored tights—actually laid back on the chairs and, you know, turned their feet in and out, and pumped their crotches in the air. Their skirts fell over their heads and they writhed. But it had a lot of comedy in it too. I played a kid they brought into the whorehouse, and Gwen flirts with me, and my foot starts shaking, then my leg starts shaking and shoots up like an erection.”

The lonely boom of a double bass, like a heartbeat, drove the audience farther inward, into the mind of the dreamer, hurrying Verdon toward the climax, a backward dive off the top of the stairs into the arms of dancer John Aristides. A sexy pas de deux followed. “And then at the very end of it,”
Evans recalled, “Aristides takes Gwen—in a back bend over his shoulder—and carries her up the stairs, we think to the bed.” Verdon was so involved in the number, she didn’t seem to notice when her corset loosened, partially exposing her breast. “Gwen went as far as she could,” Evans added. “She really wanted to be that prostitute.”

The dancers loved the number and, in rehearsal, Abbott claimed he did too. But members of New Haven’s first preview audience averted their eyes and, by some accounts, shrieked in horror. When the curtain fell that night, not a single individual applauded. (“Now, I [had] never seen that,”
Fosse said later.) In advance of Abbott’s verdict, Fosse collared a pianist and dashed to a nearby gymnasium to perform emergency surgery on the ballet. He worked for hours that night, toning and taming.

Around one in the morning, Prince, Griffith, and George Abbott appeared at the gymnasium. Their edict: The whorehouse ballet had to go. Prince said, “I think the pornographic ballet
was too vulgar and not skillful. It was just not a good dance, I thought. It wasn’t prudery at all. It was just—what is this? Why are we doing this? Because prostitution was not glamorous in the world of that show. It was seedy, sexless, and really grubby. Bob’s number was a Vegas, Crazy Horse in Paris number.” Abbott argued for narrative consistency.
The character of Anna had nothing but contempt for her bordello past, so, vulgarity aside, casting prostitution in an erotic and even funny light made no sense. The whole conceit of a dream ballet, Abbott asserted, was passé.
Oklahoma!
and its dream ballet were history, fifteen years in the past.