Fosse (23 page)

As a show about office life,
How to Succeed
was inherently antagonistic to musical-comedy bombast. How could one dance funny about everyday situations without compromising their everydayness? Fosse’s priority had always been to create entertaining dances (with the odd concession to moving the story forward, adding a layer to a character, or removing a layer of propriety), but now a certain amount of reality had to be accounted for. “The main problem,”
he said, “was to make everything seem like it was
possible,
even remotely. They had to seem like people in an office. That put a certain number of restrictions on me and removed a number of dance conventions as well. No dancing on the desks, for one thing.”

The first song Fosse and Verdon staged, or restaged, was “Coffee Break.” Fosse made it into a number about addiction and withdrawal. “I took it to its extreme,”
he said, “treating coffee as if it were a drug—as though people needed a coffee
fix.
” Fosse’s isolations—more than natural, less than fantastical—helped bridge the gap between naturalism and dance. “On ‘Coffee Break,’ they
made us rehearse our little fingers and our eyes,” McKechnie said. “It was like we were dancing with our hands and faces.” Fosse might have achieved close to the same effect if he’d brought in and rehearsed a real office. No matter how small their roles, all the chorus members,
even if they weren’t named, were asked to write up their characters’ life stories, from their daily routines to the people they disliked in the office. They had become a chorus of individuals.

Particularly confounding was “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” which had been passed around
the company like an unwanted orphan. Burrows tried it with four guys in front of a scrim before he gave it to Rudy Vallee, who refused to sing the song in three-four time, as Frank Loesser had written it—and Loesser quit the show. He returned three days later, and “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” a song everyone loved, was cut.

But the melody lingered on. Unwilling to part with the number, the team met
one night at Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel,
How to Succeed
’s home base, for one of those headache-making sessions that turn ordinarily pleasant places like Philadelphia and New Haven into mental hospitals for theater people. At four in the morning, with no new ideas on the table and the next day’s rehearsal only a few hours away, it was decided they should give up, or at least try to sleep, and the meeting adjourned. Shuffling out into the hall, Feuer heard Fosse mumbling to himself. Maybe something about a giant soft-shoe. He asked Fosse to clarify, but he didn’t get much back.

Feuer resumed the line of questioning the following day. “What did you mean by that?
A ‘giant soft-shoe’?”

Fosse might not have looked up. “I’ve got an idea.
Can you get me a large rehearsal hall?”

For the sake of expedience, they would have to be covert. If Loesser found out Fosse was making additional tests, he might walk off the production for another three days, wasting more time, something that, at this late juncture, they needed every second of.

Moving fast, Feuer rented Fosse a big room in the Masonic Temple across from the Shubert, and Fosse worked alone with Gwen. Macheteing his way through ideas, Fosse felt every genius he could not be or had already been glowering at his every move, blocking his escape from the jungle. Gwen knew the jungle; her job was to lead him to it, to save him from it. That alone was a dance. “The creative person is an absolute
monster who tries to destroy Bob Fosse,” she said. “His face changes. He’d get ropey looking. His eyes sink into his head and it looks like a death mask. I’ve worked in insane asylums and the inmates don’t look as weird as Bob. He’s driven, jumpy, crazed and all psyched up. Raw. He’s like those safe-crackers in old movies who file their fingertips down to keep them sensitive.” His concentration was more than merely intense; it was motorized. “When you stage a dance,”
he said, “you’ve gotta care if the dancer’s hair bow is red or green. Dexedrine makes you care. A lot of people would rather I didn’t say that, but it’s true.” Fosse called them his care pills.

His job was to know more about the dancers’ bodies than the dancers did. He would say, “Do it again,” when it seemed they couldn’t, and he did not have to thank them. Open gratitude was for emergencies. Swollen ankles did not dissuade him, and he refused to let them just mark the steps, though he would be begged. “I want to see it full out,”
he would say, “again.” He would say, “The word
tired
does not exist
in a dancer’s vocabulary.” He would say, “No,” and lose his temper. He would insult them. Some resented his pitilessness; others understood the fight was Fosse’s gift to them. Because as he broke you down, and he did, the look in his eye—“I see you and I’m with you”—held you up. “It was his belief in you,”
McKechnie said, “that kept you going.” There was such a thing as flawlessness, and if he could get them to believe him, they all might touch it. “We see the perfection,”
Ben Vereen would say. “But our humanness is holding us back.”

The perfection. It was the only medicine for agony.

Three nights later, during a preview run at Shubert, Fosse and Verdon, alone except
for a rehearsal pianist, presented the new “Secretary” to Cy Feuer in secret. Imagining upwards of forty performers—a majority of the company—they explained how the ensemble would break away into clusters of four or five people, each singing a
part
of the lyric before splitting into new clusters to sing the next part. Feuer was amazed by what he heard. “Secretary” was indeed a giant soft-shoe of office life; it was simple enough to be a credible workplace dance yet it went to bigger, funnier extremes than its previous incarnations, which had done little to expand on the lyric. There’s no reason to dance if the dance only reiterates—it must build. Reaching beyond secretaries and their bosses to include every branch of the business mechanism, Fosse and Verdon enlarged “Secretary” into a bureaucratic conspiracy, a show of self-delusion, the idea being that office politics, like national politics, is no more than an act. The truth? A secretary
is
a toy.

Fosse peeked up at Feuer. “Frank’s gonna kill me for fucking with his rhythm.”

Feuer didn’t care. He ran into the theater, directly to Loesser’s seat in the audience. “You’ve gotta see this,” he said to Loesser, leading him back to the Masonic Temple. “And you’re gonna keep your mouth shut till it’s finished.”

Frank Loesser watched and kept his mouth shut—until his jaw dropped. Between the two of them, Fosse and Verdon had worked out everything, every part, snapping and tapping together in polyphonic counterpoint, playfully changing the tempo for rhythmic fun, as if the number itself were a toy. Loesser’s waltz was a thing of the past. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I’m going to have to rewrite the whole thing.” Which he did, that night.

After many months of delays, the American Arbitration Association finally decided for Fosse in the case against Whitehead, awarding him a total of six cents in damages. “The results were exactly what
we asked for,” said Jack Perlman, Fosse’s lawyer. “We wanted only 6 cents to vindicate Mr. Fosse’s rights in the choreography.” (Jay Topkis, lawyer for the respondent, sent Fosse a nickel and a penny.) But if Fosse wanted to protect his future work, and that of the choreographic community at large, then founding some kind of union was in order. There had been a few attempts
at organization, but the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers had gone unrecognized by the League of New York Theaters, the reigning producers and theater owners on Broadway. The league contended that directors and choreographers were supervisory personnel, not employees, and therefore had no standing as a bargaining group—a decision that left Fosse and the SSDC out in the cold. The
Hero
victory shot an arrow through all that, but whether it would yield results for the SSDC was anybody’s guess.

On October 15, 1961, the drizzly morning after
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
opened at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater to raves, Fosse bounded into Variety Arts
, spread the papers in a circle on the studio floor, and lay down in the middle of them, grinning at the ceiling. “Crafty, conniving, sneaky,
cynical, irreverent, impertinent, sly, malicious, and lovely, just lovely” (Walter Kerr,
Herald Tribune
). “The most inventive and stylized
and altogether infectious new musical in recent tradition” (John McClain,
Journal-American
). “It belongs to the blue chips
among modern musicals . . .
How to Succeed
arrives bearing precious gifts of an adult viewpoint and consistency of style . . . bent on fun with a helping of malice . . . an ingenious dance celebrating the point that a stenographer is not a toy keeps a tongue in cheek” (Howard Taubman,
New York Times
). For the first time, Fosse’s style coated an entire show, from the dances to the book scenes. “Nobody just walked across
the stage,” Tommy Tune recalled. “Everybody had a stylized walk.” Winking cynicism fashioned every corner of the production, and every character in it, with a fleck of irony. Even when dancers weren’t performing, they
seemed
to be performing, an aesthetic gradient—or perhaps even a statement—he had intended for
Hero
but exacted here.

Moments after Fosse arrived that afternoon at Variety Arts, dancer Barrie Chase
opened the studio door to find him on the floor, surrounded by the dailies. For the past week and a half, they had been rehearsing “Seasons of Youth,” an hourlong Timex revue Fosse was supposed to be choreographing for ABC. But with most of Fosse’s attention on
How to Succeed,
Chase spent the better part of rehearsal working with Gwen. “She was madly, madly in love with him,” Chase said. “It was just so obvious.” She came in every day, for free, to line up chairs and clean up the space. When a costume ripped, Gwen produced a needle and thread and started sewing. The few times Fosse and Chase rehearsed together, she found him gruff and preoccupied. “In rehearsal, my feeling was that he was very pressured,” Chase said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t want to be there. He wasn’t giving it his best.” Most of their numbers were variations on his earlier work.

Their gloss on “Who’s Got the Pain?” was danced to “I Don’t Think I’ll End It All Today,” a cheery calypso routine about suicide. In straw hats, Fosse and Chase sang, “Away with monoxide!/Away with the one-way ride!” At one point, they hold pantomime nooses over their heads and yank themselves off their knees, grinning. With considerable help from Gwen, Fosse worked out an audition number, an omnibus dance about a dancer, played by Chase, who practically kills herself to get the job. Fosse, giving voice to the off-camera director, makes her jump higher and higher through flamenco, cancan, and ballet steps—and it’s never good enough. “You didn’t make me cry,” he sneers at her. Out of ideas, she stoops to “a little interpretive dancing” and appears in a black sequined leotard and feathered headpiece for some old-fashioned stripper stuff—this bit the director likes—and she proceeds to the singing phase of the audition. Midway in, the voice of Fosse interrupts the dancer. She’s not what he’s looking for. “He knew I felt so inadequate about opening my mouth and singing,” Chase said. He used it.

When the time came to film, Fosse would run back and forth from camera to stage, giving direction to both dancers and technicians and taking notes from Gwen on his own dancing, and all without pausing for a moment’s consideration. “Shaking hands with Bob was like
shaking hands with a grapefruit,” said producer Ervin Drake. “His hand squished with all that flop sweat.” Fosse was doing more than staging, filming, and dancing in the musicals scenes; he was staging the entire production, down to the comedy sketches by the Premise Players. “I went along with everything Fosse suggested,”
said Drake. “Everything on that screen was a choice he made, even the camera work, which he wasn’t credited for.” According to Drake, Joseph Cates, the credited director, “stayed away.
Joe knew when he had a hit on his hands and would get the credit.” His biggest TV assignment to date, the filming absorbed Fosse completely,
and in ways rehearsal had not. It seemed the dances were merely a pretext for him to try his hand at the camera. “He was very involved
in that aspect of it,” Chase said. “But when I asked him for help on the flamenco because it was something I knew nothing about, he said it didn’t matter, that we could spoof it. He said, ‘You always get away with it if you spoof it.’”

They didn’t get away with it. “Seasons of Youth” aroused the unproven auteur in Fosse, and he’d fumbled out his heart’s ambition, unripe and grasping. The style he had harnessed onstage in dance had not translated to the camera. When the show aired, on October 25, 1961,
Variety
suggested Fosse’s audition sequence
(“a total cliché,”
Chase said) was lifted from the 1956 remake of
A Star Is Born.
Other critics reacted similarly.

The next day, Chase was back at the Plaza, packing her suitcase. The phone rang.

“Hiya, Barrie.”

“Bobby?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m packing.”

With sadness: “You’re leaving?”

“Well, yes. The show’s over.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tonight!” She laughed.

“Where are you going?”

“Sweden. My boyfriend lives there.”

“I’m downstairs.”

“What?”

“In the lobby.”

Then he was in her room, and then he was coming up behind her, kissing her. Trying to kiss her.

“Bobby, come on!” She shoved him off. “What are you doing?”

Chase might not have been so surprised if Fosse had shown any interest in her during rehearsal. But he hadn’t. If anything, he’d been short with her, treating Chase—who was one of Fred Astaire’s former partners, no less—as the out-of-shape Hollywood talent he believed her to be.

Fosse and Verdon were home the evening of November 1 when Gwen got a call
from Patton Campbell, costumer of
Redhead
and
Hero.
It was something serious, Campbell said. Could he come over and see them?