Fosse (20 page)

Bob and Gwen lived in a penthouse apartment at 91 Central Park West, a beige fifteen-story prewar building on the corner of Sixty-Ninth Street. From their terrace, vast enough to hold a vegetable garden, a Ping-Pong table, and dog run for Gwen’s pets, they could watch the park below, and on fair-weather days they could entertain their small group of friends, most of them carryovers from their Long Island summers and weekends. On those afternoons, Gwen had trees and potted plants moved out to the balustrade and set up a tent and awning for shade. With high vaulted ceilings and large mirrors, the apartment itself was fairly majestic but Gwen did her best to simplify, stationing little found objects about the floor, and antiques around the living room. They loved crafts. As Fosse and McCracken had, Fosse and Verdon spent weekend time
combing junkyards, beaches, and secondhand stores in search of the perfect old lamp, which they would then rehabilitate for that handmade look ex-beatniks of the Upper West Side had begun to favor. Their Tonys were not on display.

With afternoon rehearsals and evening performances, theirs or others, Fosse and Verdon didn’t have much free time. Anyway, they weren’t the scene type. They preferred to spend a night off at home, if not alone, then visiting with the Jule Stynes, the Sydney Chaplins, the Neil Simons, or, when he was in New York, Buddy Hackett (for dinner at Rao’s). Though he enjoyed his fame, Fosse shied away from large gatherings.
They were performances, too much like work. Instead, he had the guys over for poker or joined a game at Cy Coleman’s, at his apartment nearby. They talked sports. To Fosse, a lifelong fan, football and baseball were essential television. He loved the Mets, the losers.
“He admired the difficulty of being
an athlete,” Ann Reinking said. “The training, the discipline, the talent.” Gwen didn’t care about sports, but she loved having him home. Going back and forth from the kitchen
to the TV, her shoes off to exercise the muscles in her toes, she kept the beer and pretzels flowing, occasionally attempting and failing to interest him in an eggplant or zucchini from the terrace garden. An avowed progressive in health matters, Gwen was on the nutrition train fairly early, cooking (instead of red meat) spaghetti and clam sauce and interrupting stirs with pliés. Rather than keeping the spices close by, she put them high up in a cupboard that was most easily reachable by an arabesque.

She was also early on the brain train. An active and outspoken proponent of psychoanalysis, Verdon regularly donated time and resources to the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, the oldest low-cost psychiatric clinic in New York City. The Gwen Verdon that longed for a complete family, that lived to serve Jack Cole and then Bob Fosse, was devoted to helping children with physical disabilities, teaching them, as little Gwen in her orthopedic boots had been taught, how to get better through exercise and movement. To raise awareness, Fosse and Verdon gave premiere benefits and hosted fundraising dinner parties on their long panoramic terrace. One Postgraduate Center affair, luau themed, “made Bob such a nervous wreck,”
said a friend, “buzzing around worrying about the tent and the food.” These were brain people, some of them from Gwen’s group therapy, some of them mental-health professionals, likely to put Fosse on the defensive. “Come and get your food!” he announced at the event, and the whole party moved outside to see the tent blow off the terrace and spin down over the park. “Well,” Fosse said, “there goes our fucking dinner.”

Everything was two things; their collaboration crossed with love, and they danced a paradox. “You could see they really cared
about each other,” Leonard Stone said, “but Bob played the husband. He did it for her.” Signs of the arrangement shadowed the place. “Most of it was hers,” Stone said. “The paintings, the furniture.” Gypsy life trained Fosse to live out of a suitcase, a lifestyle marriage did not reform. New York was his apartment. He still stayed out late, rehearsing. He went for drinks with the cast
after the show; Gwen, exhausted, went home. When Fosse girled around, he girled around, but mostly at a discreet distance from Gwen, respectful of her star status, her invaluable assistance, and her emotional support, the years she’d spent darning the holes in his ego, threading her patient needle through his every burst of panic. Verdon was his night seamstress, on the nights he came home. How many women were there? “How d’you do it?”
hairdresser Vidal Sassoon asked Fosse one night at dinner. “Showers,” Fosse replied. “Hot showers.” Some nights it seemed silly to follow Gwen uptown. His mind on tomorrow, he’d take a room at the Edison Hotel
next door to Variety Arts. “All I need,”
Fosse said, “is a rehearsal studio and bedroom—preferably attached. I could spend all my time going from one to the other.” And he did.

For dinner parties, Fosse and Verdon appeared together. At David Shaw’s house in Amagansett,
they met Paddy Chayefsky, Bronx-born mensch of the proletariat, playwright lion of television’s golden age, and Oscar-winning screenwriter of
Marty.
His titanic intellect triggered Fosse’s clam mechanism, and Fosse retreated to the back row of his personality, a bit scared of the fiery, funny, rabbinical grizzly bear holding court across the table, like Tevye by way of Sky Masterson. Chayefsky was a thought dancer, and his brain was his stage. Bursting with ideas and controversy, and as informed as a newsstand on Monday morning, he could argue either side of any debate, social or cultural, political or religious, pastrami or corned beef. He could beat himself and still win. Paddy Chayefsky was an artist, Fosse decided, maybe an entertainer on the side, but a writer first and last, a generator of stories, not lucky or slick but a real talent. Was Fosse?

With Gwen on or off his arm, Fosse was fodder for Louella Parsons’s column and high up on every producer’s call sheet. Agents dropped scripts at his feet for him to read whenever he could find the time. He began talks to oversee
Viva!,
a Pancho Villa musical, and briefly considered a musical of
The Farmer’s Daughter,
by
Redhead
’s producers, Fryer and Carr, before switching to
Saturday Night,
a show with songs by Stephen Sondheim. An old work predating his
West Side Story
and
Gypsy
streak
,
Saturday Night
was to be Sondheim’s debut as composer-lyricist—prior to this, it had been lyrics only. Set in Brooklyn in the late twenties, the small-scale show followed the romantic and get-rich-quick schemes of a group of working-class kids on the eve of the stock-market crash. Acting as producer, Jule Styne knew the project would appeal to Fosse; he delivered the material to him, and talks progressed through the summer of 1959. “Bobby wanted to both direct
and star in it,” said Sondheim. “Though I had only seen him in movies, I had every reason to believe he’d be fine in the part. So we started having auditions for other actors and I think we had maybe one or two audition sessions and I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I didn’t want to go back to old work and so I stopped it. And that was that.”

By September, the director was directing again, this time for NBC as part of a package put together by Fosse’s agents at MCA, the biggest, most powerful agency in the world (and soon to be investigated for antitrust violations). Stocked with MCA talent
and
produced by MCA executives,
Ford Startime
was a vaudeville-style anthology series of sketches, dramatic scenes, and star-filled musical numbers. Fosse’s episode, “The Wonderful World of Entertainment,” he codirected with Kirk Browning. Fosse and Browning split
rehearsal duty, Browning focusing on the scenes and Fosse on the numbers, which he populated with a handful of dancers from
Redhead
sure to know his style and produce results fast. He drove them on for as much as eleven hours at a stretch but never went later than 7:15, when the caravan of limousines appeared to rush his dancers back to Broadway for their half-hour calls. The pressure was worse than anything he had known in the theater. “A TV show is put together
so quickly,” said dancer Sharon Shore, who was in the production, “there just isn’t time for dances as intricate as those in the theater.” At rehearsal’s end, Fosse would, on occasion, drop by
Redhead
to see that its screws were tightly turned, but only on occasion. Tampering with an old show was walking across quicksand; at any moment, he could be sucked into a bottomless hole of self-doubt and lose faith in the entire enterprise. Fosse’s assistants were a tremendous help in this respect, keeping an eye on the show, catching its accidental shifts—missed beats, slack cues—and reversing them before they got serious. Every morning, Fosse would be back at NBC’s studios in Brooklyn.

As its title indicates, “The Wonderful World of Entertainment” gave Fosse an excuse to showcase his facility for performance styles, from vaudeville (“Ain’t We Got Fun?” was a favorite) to flapper to ballet, all under the protective cover of spoof—a strategy Fosse had been refining for years and had finally perfected in
Redhead.
But it was Fosse’s growing interest in eerie sensuality and in an all-black jazz look he borrowed from “Essie’s Dream” that made the special momentous.

The first filmed ensemble in Fosse’s signature style, “Let Me Entertain You,” featured a clump of scarecrow-looking dancers in clown makeup, each in full-body black topped off with a black porkpie hat. They slunk in coagulated discontinuity, squirming en masse like a can of horny worms. The formation that would come to be known as an amoeba came to Fosse by way of coffee-table books—a great deal of his work did. Verdon said, “He was intrigued by the surrealist painters.
Not just Dalí, but Hieronymus Bosch. I don’t know if you’re familiar with, you know, people being born out of big eggs with eight arms and legs . . . I mean having flowers for tails and a lot more than that. And people all joined together and freaks.”

Before he took
Redhead
on the road, Fosse joined
The Girls Against the Boys
in Philadelphia, a few weeks before it was to open and, most likely, close. A goofball revue starring Bert Lahr, Nancy Walker, and Dick Van Dyke, the show needed a full overhaul, and fast. Unlike his
Copper and Brass
agreement,
which forced Fosse to retain Sokolow’s work, Fosse’s present contract granted him complete approval of all artistic elements. “Fosse told us he was going to be
assigning new things every day,” said dancer Buzz Halliday. “And from there, it was total lunacy. I couldn’t believe how quickly the ideas came. We were working so fast, I slept at the theater literally every night. Equity never knew.” To inject some semblance of continuity into the sketches and the numbers, Fosse devised a series of fourth-wall-breaking,
vaudeville-inspired, “Ya ready for the next number, folks?” segues. It made for cheap ligature, but Fosse loved showing the seams; it was chintzy, but unveiling desperate artistic straits struck him as real showbiz, clumsy and honest. And real showbiz it was: During the actual run, before actual audiences, Fosse would pass messages to the stage manager, who would shout them to the actors in the split seconds before they went on. “What a rush!”
Halliday said. “So much had to be improvised and so much of it was about what was actually going on and going wrong. The curtain would come down between a number and a sketch and I would get the word from the stage manager to call out to Dick [Van Dyke], ‘Hey, Dick, get ready for the next sketch! These people are waiting!’” Given all that metatheatrical hoofing, maybe the audience wouldn’t see the dud they were seeing. (They did.
The Girls Against the Boys
played sixteen performances and died.)

What happened to the show didn’t matter. Whether the production was a hit or a miss, Fosse’s name would stay off the playbill, sparing him public embarrassment. He did
The Girls Against the Boys
for the work. Work: it wasn’t like living, but not doing it was a lot like being dead. “Part of the work ethic,”
he said, “is probably a way of saying, ‘You forgot me, folks. I want to remind you I’m here.’” Why stop? So Robbins could do another
West Side Story
? Hal Prince said, “I told him, ‘I care as much
about the theater as you do, but there’s always another musical. Life, however, is not a show. Life is life. This is the only one you’ve got.’ Bobby could never quite believe it. I thought,
Jesus, this guy is not going to live a long life
.”

One night in April 1960, Fosse called
Joan McCracken. He told her where he was—in Chicago, on the road with
Redhead
and Gwen—and asked her if she ever thought about getting back together with him. Her answer was no.

The following day, on April 2, 1960, Fosse and Verdon took out a license and wed in a secret ceremony in Oak Park, Illinois. “We married because we were going to
have a child,” she would explain years later. “And a child needs that protection.” To be a mother again, to have a complete family; it was what she had always wanted. After
Redhead
—the incessant gruel of it, the joy of it—she would take a few years off to raise the baby. Fosse? “I finally decided that I was
as grown up as I’d ever be.”

He had been running away from fatherhood his whole life. Surprise pregnancy and subsequent abortion had trailed him as far back as his teenage years, his time spent on the road, blackened by burlesque rim shots and human sludge. Though Fosse kept trying for clarity, healing still largely evaded him. Five years earlier, he had begun psychotherapy
with the intention of breaking, or at least examining, his ruinous relationships with women. But the longer he tried to understand why he couldn’t trust intimacy, the closer he came to understanding he never would, until he saw isolation as a fact of his constitution, as much a part of him as his talent, or his hopelessness.

Now that Fosse had finally remarried, he wondered if it would be appropriate to end his therapy with Dr. Sager. It had been helpful in many ways, mostly work-related; for everything the analysis did not accomplish, Fosse naturally blamed himself. But when he realized his dependency on Seconal was more of an addiction, he turned his anger on Sager and stopped both the drug and his analyst cold turkey. Despairing, he resigned himself to accepting that the pitch-blackest part of him—the remembered child in the dark of the Silver Cloud—might never be illuminated.