Fosse (22 page)

A pause.

“I conceived this show. I outlined it. I casted it. I choreographed it. I drew the first sketches for the design. I directed it—and—the first thing that goes wrong, they blame me.”

A pause.

“I don’t know.”

He took Gwen’s arm.

“See y’around.”

F
OSSE CALLED JACK PERLMAN
,
his lawyer. In exchange for Fosse’s services as director and choreographer, the contract Perlman negotiated granted his client approval rights on all artistic matters “not to be unreasonably withheld.” Perlman reasoned that having fired Fosse, effectively denying him artistic approval, Whitehead was not entitled to the benefits of Fosse’s direction or choreography. There was the leverage: Fosse could withdraw his dances from the show. But there was a catch: having deferred a fee up-front in exchange for a piece of the gross, Fosse had a financial stake in seeing
The Conquering Hero
become the best show possible. His numbers would sell tickets. The deal: Fosse agreed to let Whitehead use his choreography with the understanding that it was not to be changed.

On December 5, two days after he was fired, Fosse—who had also been barred from seeing the show—heard by way of friendly dancers that changes were being made to his work. Whitehead had violated their agreement. In the spirit of compromise, Perlman suggested that if Whitehead allowed Fosse’s major ballets (including the antiwar ballet) to survive in their original form, Fosse would permit Whitehead to change as much of the remaining choreography as he wanted. Whitehead refused. The antiwar ballet went too far.

On December 7, Fosse filed a demand for arbitration with the American Arbitration Association, seeking damages and an injunction against further use of the choreography. “I am hopeful,”
he said to the
New York Times,
“that the association will enforce my rights by restraining the producers from altering these ballets without my consent.” On December 16, partway through
Hero
’s Philadelphia tryout, Whitehead claimed the whole business stank from the start. Since he felt nothing had been “unreasonably withheld”
in the first place, he had not violated the contract and could therefore do what he liked with any part of
The Conquering Hero.
On January 16, the show opened in New York. The
Times
called it a dud: “An indication of the troubles
it has known is the fact that the program lists neither stage director nor choreographer.” On January 19, the performance was canceled. On January 21, the day
The Conquering Hero
was set to close (after only seven performances), Fosse and Verdon arrived late at the ANTA Playhouse in New York, stood behind the last row, and watched what the producers had done to him.

Standing there, he later said,
and seeing how they had butchered his ballet was one of the worst experiences of his life.

By the time the curtain fell, he was fuming. When he caught sight of a bald, bespectacled man—composer Moose Charlap, Fosse was sure—coming up the aisle, he grabbed the man by the lapel and held him against the back wall of the theater.

“How the fuck can you have
done this?” Fosse locked his hands around the composer’s neck. “What the fuck are you trying to do to me?”

Gwen pulled Fosse away, into the lobby, and Hal Prince, who had been there to see the show, ran up to help the victim—who wasn’t Charlap—off the floor. The man was Prince’s partner Robert Griffith.

“What the hell was that?” Griffith asked, brushing himself off. “What did—”

“I don’t know,” Prince said. “But stay here.”

Prince ran after Fosse, and Griffith, disregarding Prince’s instructions, followed close behind. When they reached the lobby, they stopped short: Fosse was on the floor, curled up, almost catatonic. “It was very upsetting,” Prince said later. “No one knew what was happening.” Gwen was beside him, stroking his head, explaining to him in a whisper, “That was Bobby . . . Bobby Griffith.”

“
What?
” Fosse said.

“Bobby Griffith . . . Bobby Griffith.”

Fosse spent the winter miserable and unavenged. After the show folded, Whitehead conceded that he’d changed the choreography; Fosse filed for damages, but no settlement was reached for a long time. “It made him look like he couldn’t choreograph,”
Reinking said. “The antiwar ballet meant so much to him—it was his big statement—and they ruined it.” Though his name had been removed from the playbill, he knew people knew, and people talked. They would agree Fosse had tried to make a show his own, from the ground up, and he couldn’t. They would call him a failure.

Soon thereafter, on December 19, 1960, Sadie Fosse died of heart disease. “He sat by her bed a long, long, long time,”
Reinking said. She was sixty-five. “After my mother died,”
Fosse said, “it all sort of disintegrated.” Cy soon remarried; the siblings dispersed and lost touch. Save for his baby sister, Marianne, Fosse had never been able to relate to any of them. Now there was less reason to try. “Most of what I know about Bob,”
Cy Fosse would tell Charlie Grass, “I get from the gossip columns.” Fosse returned home for his father’s funeral (Cy died, also of heart disease, two years later) and discovered he had been seeing another woman
long before Sadie had passed. Peering into the coffin, Fosse got a sad thrill glimpsing his dad in lipstick
and pancake powder, looking every inch the sissy Cy had seen in his son. From then on, family reunions became a formality. The generic and timid content of Fosse’s
correspondence with his siblings—news of jobs and marriages, broad good wishes, and reports of the whereabouts of nieces and nephews—written sometimes with years-old bulletins and polite queries (“If you could find a spare minute . . .”) belied any real intimacy.

He might have languished the whole spring if Gus Schirmer, who had directed him in
Pal Joey
many summer-stock seasons back, hadn’t approached Fosse and asked him to reappear in his favorite part in an upcoming City Center revival. How could Fosse hesitate? The part of Melba went to Eileen Heckart, an accomplished dramatic actress without musical-comedy experience. The first time she performed her big
number “Zip”—Melba’s story of her interview with Gypsy Rose Lee—with the orchestra, Heckart knew she had bombed. Fosse waited for her to ask his opinion. “Well,” he said,
“I have to tell you, it’s the worst rendition of ‘Zip’ I’ve ever heard in my life.” That night he and Verdon took Heckart to Downey’s, a casual alternative to Sardi’s, for a quick dinner, then they all packed into a cab and went downtown.

What exactly was going on? Heckart wanted to know when they reached the empty studio.

“We are going to restage your number.”

She was touched. But there was no way she could accept the offer. She wasn’t about to go behind the back of Ralph Beaumont. She said, “It would break [the choreographer’s] heart if I did that to him.”

“It’s
your
ass up there, Heckart! Who gives a shit about [his] heart, for Chrissake?”

She said no but thanked him anyway.

“You know, Heckart,
that’s
why you’ll never be a star!”

For the next two hours, they worked. Gwen Verdon danced beside Heckart, with Fosse in front. “Yes, it was quite magnificent,”
Heckart would say. “For a nonmusical person to have them be as giving as they both were to me was wonderful.” Wonderful, yes, and not just for Heckart. “Zip,” which Melba performs for Joey, was, like any two-person exchange, essentially a pas de deux. Fosse needed her to look good in order for him to look his best.

Beaumont could not have been pleased with Fosse’s attitude, but there was little the choreographer could do. New touches that were quite obviously Fosse’s were popping up all over the show. According to dancer Billie Mahoney: “[There was one number] when we wore the little white gloves
and had all these specific little movements, we drilled and drilled. There were eleven dance numbers in the show and more than half of the rehearsal time was spent on that one dance. And the other choreographer resented it a bit.” Fosse had given the dancers so many details, Mahoney went on stage shaking with the terrible feeling she wouldn’t remember all of them. But she did—and they thanked her for it. “Every night,”
she said, “that applause went on and on and you think, ‘Boy, it is
worth
it.’”

Pal Joey
was enthusiastically received, and so was Fosse, though, ironically, less for his Joey than for the choreography no critic knew was his. “The high spot,”
wrote the
Wall Street Journal,
“is Eileen Heckart’s rendition of that wonderfully tired song simply entitled ‘Zip.’ . . . It’s as funny as it was the first time, which is saying a great deal.” Fosse registered onstage as he had onscreen, as a malfunctioning star: all sparkle and no shine. “I saw Bob in
Pal Joey,
”
said Tommy Tune, a Tony-winning choreographer, “and his dancing was spectacular, but as an actor, Bobby didn’t come across. I think it was his innate shyness. There was a removed quality to him. In Broadway musicals, there’s got to be a lot of ‘Love me! Love me!’ and Bobby didn’t want to ask for that.”

It must have been a strange sort of horror to be a famous Broadway director, the star of a hit show (
Pal Joey
was extended, briefly), and the husband of the biggest name in musical comedy and yet feel like Bob Fosse. Few believed his self-hatred was genuine, including Stephen Sondheim. “I remember there was an interview
with him where he said something like ‘I don’t know whether I’m a fraud or a genius,’” Sondheim said. “He was always shit-kicking. A lot of that saying ‘I’m a fraud, I’m a fraud’ was in itself fraudulent. He wanted people to say, ‘Oh, you’re not, Bobby, you’re not. You’re not a fraud, you’re a genius.’” Buzz Halliday believed it, though. At about this time, she found him ambling around
Shubert Alley looking rumpled and faraway. He was hunched over, collar up, a parenthesis with a cigarette in its mouth.

Buzz ran to him. “How are you, Bobby? What’s going on?”

“Well . . .” He took a big breath. “I’m pretty depressed.”

Getting away from show business,
if only physically, was a relief for Fosse, even if he got restless out in East Hampton without a studio. But with friends over for dinner, he might forget for a moment about what had to be done or had been done wrong. Present that season, along with
Fosse and Verdon, were Feuer and Martin; Neil Simon, piping hot on the heels of
Come Blow Your Horn,
his first play; and the composer Cy Coleman, who was known to swim the distance to lyricist Carolyn Leigh’s rented Steinway to work on songs for their upcoming show,
Little Me,
then being written by Neil Simon and produced by Feuer and Martin. They called it Sardi’s on the Beach. “This year [East Hampton] seems to
have reached a peak,” noted the
New York Times,
“with at least thirteen specific productions for the 1961–62 season being master-minded under the sun, and an indeterminate number of others being discussed to the stimulating background boom of the surf.”

One show, Feuer and Martin’s
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,
was practically a
Guys and Dolls
reunion. Teaming Feuer and Martin with book writer/director Abe Burrows and composer-lyricist Frank Loesser,
How to Succeed
was as close to a sure thing as any unsure thing could be. However, instead of hiring Michael Kidd (as he had on
Guys and Dolls
), Feuer chose Hugh Lambert to choreograph. Lambert had never created his own dances for Broadway, but he had arranged a few numbers for the Perry Como and Ed Sullivan shows, assisted Carol Haney on
Flower Drum Song,
and, most recently, put together an extravagant trade show that impressed Feuer immensely. All this Feuer told Fosse and Verdon that summer at the beach.

Then rehearsals began. “At the first reading,”
one of the show’s stars, Robert Morse, recalled, “everybody was laughing. People were falling down all over themselves. Abe Burrows’s secretary was crying! It was just terrific. Then we started blocking the scenes and by the third day, no one laughed. There wasn’t a laugh for the next four weeks.” He continued, “I don’t want to say it was like a burlesque show or a revue, but it felt that way because the musical numbers and book scenes weren’t flowing. It was start-and-stop, like one sketch after the next. What I remember about Hugh Lambert is, he was a gifted choreographer, but he couldn’t stage the numbers.”

“He got us into one big clump
and couldn’t get us out of it,” said Donna McKechnie, then appearing in her first Broadway show. “We were in that clump for three days.” At the rehearsals, held in rooms without air conditioning
in the late-summer heat, Feuer, Martin, Loesser, and Burrows lined up in suits like chairmen of the board and sweated through more fabric than Hugh Lambert, although who worried more—about the number, the show, his reputation—was anybody’s guess. “I’d watch them from the stage,”
McKechnie said. “As the day went on, they’d take their jackets off, roll their sleeves up. By the time they decided to replace Lambert, they were practically in their undershirts.”

Burrows, beloved by his team, was essential to the maintenance of good feeling and had a sure genius for comedy, but when it came to staging numbers, he wisely stepped aside. For backup, Feuer called Fosse, and Fosse said he would help on the condition that Lambert retain credit and remain at rehearsals throughout the remainder of the process. “Because Bob had been fired
on
Hero,
” Verdon said, “he didn’t want Hugh Lambert to be fired on
How to Succeed.
” Feuer agreed, and Fosse arrived, with Gwen, his assistant. (Lambert moved to the balcony.)

A congenial, no-nonsense producer unaccustomed to interference, Cy Feuer was Bob Fosse’s kind of guy, and Bob Fosse was Feuer’s. Hanging around outside the Shubert with Loesser and Burrows—Dead End Kids all grown up—the men shared an honest-to-God, outer-borough love of show-business ritual and brotherhood. At the end of the day, they knew that human beings, at the ends of their days, were more “Did you hear the one about . . . ?” than “What light through yonder window breaks?” They ate steak, looked at girls, and went to the theater.