Fosse (24 page)

When she answered the door a half an hour later, Verdon could see the news was the most serious kind of serious.

“Gwen,” Campbell began,
“I didn’t want you to hear about it on the radio. Joanie died.”

Joanie McCracken.

Gwen turned back into the apartment and told Fosse.

He was flattened. More than a wife, more even than a friend, McCracken had been a sort of angel to him. Mary-Ann Niles was a kid, a sidekick; Joan saw how good he could be. Gwen knew it; Joan had been the one to change Fosse. “Years from now,”
Gwen said, “you’ll read how Bob enhanced so many lives, which he did. But I’m going to tell you Bob’s real tragedy: Nobody, not one of us, except Joan, was ever able to enhance his.”

Soon after he got the news, Fosse sat down
at the typewriter. He may have thought of himself as a sporadically above-average showman, but he knew he was hopeless as a writer. Not that he wasn’t capable of a cute remark here and there, but what Neil Simon, Paddy Chayefsky, and George Abbott did took more than tricks. You couldn’t tap-dance on the page. You had to say something. What did Fosse have to say?

When Joan died, he tried to find out. He wrote a story about an unnamed wanderer angry to the point of madness. “He” appears in a shitty hotel in Cleveland. Feeling betrayed, he walks to the Roxy Burlesque, looking for a laugh. “He’d show her. He’d show he[r] he could go on living.” Inside the theater, a baggy-pants comic in a toy derby scratches his crotch. He’s followed by a beat-up stripper, then a fat man reading aloud from dirty magazines and sweating. “He hated them all,” wrote Fosse. Enraged, he bolts up and screams, “Shut up! Shut up about that stuff! God damn you, shut up!” He runs up the aisle and out of the theater, wanting to hold the one he lost, damning vanity and pride, running until he can’t run anymore and then collapsing on the cemetery green, crying, grasping at nothing, calling out her name in love.

The guilt—he’d never lose it.

De Mille, Robbins, and Richard Rodgers were among
the standing-room-only crowd of dancers, stage managers, and wardrobe mistresses that gathered, two days later, inside a funeral parlor on West Seventy-Second where Joan’s forty-three-year-old body rested in an open casket, a pink pillow under her head. Joan’s “funeral was dreadful,”
wrote Leo Lerman, “with this wax creature exposed in what seemed a party dress. You could not avoid it—the room was so small, many could not get into the mediocre, awful place—the sick sweet stench of perishing flowers—an utterly ordinary-voiced, black-smocked preacher reading prayers and nothing about her.” It was a long fifteen minutes before the coffin was carried out into the street and placed in the hearse.

Fosse watched from the other side
of Seventy-Second, and then he walked away.

Early in 1962, he got a call from Cy Feuer.
It was good news.
How to Succeed
was continuing its smash run, playing to the fortunate few, like President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe (on different nights), who could actually get tickets. How did Bob feel about codirecting Feuer and Martin’s next show,
Little Me
?

“Co-?” Bob asked.
“With who?”

“Me,” Cy replied.

And then, the ultimate Fosse question: “Why co-?”

“Because I can handle Sid Caesar.”

Good point. Having appeared with Mary-Ann Niles on Caesar’s
Your Show of Shows,
Fosse knew Caesar was a handful on TV, where he was at home, so one could only imagine the headache he would be onstage (or, more likely, backstage, drinking), where he hadn’t been in nearly twenty years, appearing live, without cutaways, eight shows a week—

“Playing six different parts,” Feuer explained. “Maybe seven.”

“What?”

Based on the novel by Patrick Dennis, author of
Auntie Mame,
Little Me
told the story of Belle Poitrine (translation: “beautiful breasts”), her gold-digging rise to fame and fortune, and the men—Noble Eggleston, Mr. Pinchley, Val du Val, Fred Poitrine, Otto Schnitzler, Prince Cherney, and Noble Junior—she married on the way up. It was book writer Neil Simon’s idea
to shift the focus from Belle to her husbands, have one actor play all seven husbands, and have that actor be Sid Caesar—who, on top of everything else, was known to be loose with his lines. This was one thing on TV, but onstage, with dozens of cues to knock down, he could run the whole show into the orchestra. Also: he couldn’t sing, he couldn’t dance, and he had a temper. Once, after a performance
didn’t go his way, he calmly excused himself from the venue holding two double-barreled twelve-gauge shotguns under his arm and fired a round into the woods. He was said to punch desks, tables, and horses. And he was a genius.

Fosse accepted the job. But only if Feuer and Martin,
leading members of the League of New York Theaters, formally recognized the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, now backed by Harold Clurman,
Agnes de Mille, and Elia Kazan. Fearing an SSDC strike, Feuer and Martin wisely accepted Fosse’s terms, and Fosse, now a hero to the SSDC, looked like even more of a producer’s headache than he had before, which, in light of the
Conquering Hero
scandal, was a considerable feat. Paranoid dealings lay ahead, but in the meantime, signing the
Little Me
contract was worth more than a few bottles of champagne.

Little Me
was a healthy challenge for Fosse. The book, however hilarious, didn’t make room for dance numbers, and the sprawling story, shifting mercilessly across decades and from place to place and never looking back (there were no repeated sets in the show), put a crimp in continuity. The whole affair was resistant to cohesion, and so was Fosse: he had his own weakness in the conceptual-unity department. “You know, I never can find
an overall idea for a show,” he said to a reporter covering
Little Me.
“It comes to me piece by piece, and then, if I’m lucky, the pieces fit together and style emerges. But it happens by trial and error.”

As was their custom, Fosse and Verdon spent several weeks working out the steps at Variety Arts, and every night, Edith,
the receptionist, closed up, shutting down the switchboard and locking the iron gate on the stairway leading up to the studios. Just beyond Edith’s desk, the Variety Recording Studio stayed open for business, cutting acetate records and LPs into the quiet hours. It was soon after Edith left one evening that Fernando Vargas, the studio’s co-owner, heard
a rattling on the iron gate down the hall. Shouting up the stairs, Vargas demanded the rattler identify himself. He did, but Vargas didn’t recognize the name that came back. When he threatened to call the police, the intruder lost his cool and blurted out, “I’m Gwen Verdon’s husband!” Vargas unlocked the gate and Bob Fosse, his head down, apologized for the confusion. He’d lost his key. Fosse laughed, but Mr. Gwen Verdon was humiliated.

“Fosse loved the front room
on the top floor,” dancer Dan Siretta said. He and Gwen worked
in a low-ceilinged space—the biggest studio in the building—with mirrors on one side and smudged windows on the other. Throughout rehearsal, Fosse kept his dance notes close at hand. He had one composition book
for every show, and he filled each one with all manner of miscellany pertaining, or potentially pertaining, to dances formed or in formation, all of it scribbled in messy cursive. Uneasy with proper dance notation, Fosse relied heavily on stick-figure images and pop-culture shorthand. His
Little Me
ideas were, more than usual, bound to ghosts of showbiz past and present. Jerry Lewis’s knees slid into “Rich Kid’s Rag,” bits of Red Buttons into “Deep Down Inside,” Chaplin into “Dimples,” and Jolson into “Lafayette.” The picaresque show was well suited to pastiche, and pastiche was an ideal format for satire—a good fit for Fosse.
Little Me
showed the choreographer in tune with his strengths and sensibility and practicing his own language, consciously drawing from “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” and taking jumps he liked from
Redhead.

In “The Rich Kid’s Rag,” a dig at the bratty rich, Fosse wasn’t merely parodying popular ragtime dance but satirizing personality, and in his own style. He kept increasing and changing the tempo (a favorite technique), pushing the kids faster and faster, as if trying to break their stiff upper lips, but not a single one balked. Fosse gave a toylike quality to their jerks and snaps, their knocked knees and turned-in toes. At first it was fun and funny, but by the number’s end, one couldn’t help but sense that, even at play, these automatons were more like figures in a Victorian music box than real live kids. Their snootiness—a performance like any other—practically embalmed them.

“I would pass Variety Arts every night
and look up,” Siretta said, “and there he was. You could see him in silhouette through the windows. There was only one man on Broadway with that silhouette. There was only one man that obsessed.”

In the midst of rehearsals, Barrie Chase returned to New York.
How Fosse found out, she had no idea.

“Can we meet?”

“I don’t think so, Bobby.”

“Why not?”

As if he didn’t know. “Gwen,” she said. “I adore Gwen . . . I would never—”

He called Chase almost every night she was in New York, which was about a month. In time she came to expect his calls—then look forward to them. Their conversations grew longer, more personal. “We’d talk for maybe an hour,”
Chase said, “and about everything. We had a great time on the phone. I found him interesting and very funny. I don’t know, maybe he thought he’d break me down and I’d give in. At some point in the conversation, he’d always try, he’d always slip it in.”

“Come on . . . let’s meet . . . just for a little . . .”

“Bobby, I’m not going over that again.”

They talked of Joan McCracken. “He said he wasn’t very nice to her and regretted it,” Chase said. “He was much darker on the phone than in rehearsal.” They talked of Gwen Verdon. “He told me she was pregnant,” Chase said. “He said he told me before he told anyone else.”

He and Gwen had been trying for a long time. “It looked like we couldn’t have one,”
Fosse said. “I went through all those embarrassing things of taking your sperm out of a tube and having it tested and then when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen, she was pregnant. So it was kind of a happy moment.”

Neil Simon was rewriting constantly.
“You know at this point,”
Caesar said, “nothing’s funny anymore. After four weeks of rehearsal it’s just a matter of logistics. It’s troop movements, deployment of forces, details.” This was Simon’s first musical. He had no yardstick to measure exactly how far he was from where he needed to be—where
they
needed to be, where
he
wasn’t getting them. Fosse, Feuer, Caesar, lyricist Carolyn Leigh, and composer Cy Coleman: six giants sharing a single bed. One couldn’t move without disrupting another. But of course one moved. It was always the same one.

“You mean I got to say it exactly this way?”
an exasperated Caesar asked in the middle of a dress rehearsal. “Suppose I don’t think it’s funny.”

And so on. “He always seemed like he wanted
to bite something,” Feuer noted. “Basically, Sid was a brilliant,
funny, nervous wreck,” said one dancer. “He’d stand in the wings coughing and sweating and you’d think,
Why in the world is he doing this show?
And then he’d walk out onstage and be brilliant, absolutely brilliant.” No one knew what Caesar, drunk or sober, would do from show to show. “There was a joke,”
a cast member recalled, “that this was going to be the only show in history with multiple-choice cues.”

Late in September, fourteen crates of costumes were shipped off to Philadelphia’s Erlanger Theater. (Twenty-one of the costumes were for Caesar; he had forty-eight costume changes over the course of the show, and some had to be made in under thirty-five seconds.) In October, the company said goodbye to New York. Neil Simon was uneasy about it. “It was during the Cuban Missile Crisis,”
he recalled, “and it really looked like the world might end.” As he rewrote for Caesar,
around
Caesar, Simon took calls
from his pregnant wife, Joan, begging him to come home. She was in tears. “If we’re going to die,” she said, “I want all of us to die together.”

It was a funny thing,
Little Me,
a Chinese-food musical spun on a lazy Susan. On the one hand, the show was nothing, and on the other, it was nothing but a good time. Here, Fosse the director shone as never before. With artifice as his guide, he spun the lazy Susan at impossible speeds, changing scenes in a flash, sending his company in circles, calling attention to the sham of human motivation. But the show refuses to believe it’s a nihilistic show. A cannon blast of clichés, tropes, and devices,
Little Me
took great joy in fraudulence and exposed the director’s growing exasperation with the whole kit and caboodle of musical entertainment. “I don’t think there is any
such thing as a
realistic
musical,” he said. “As soon as people start to sing to each other, you’ve already gone beyond ‘realism’ in the musical sense . . . A friend mentioned that, ‘Musicals always disturb me,’ he said. ‘If they’re singing about how they’re going to kill themselves, well, that’s a serious matter. And I’m sitting in the audience and wondering how, if they feel so bad, they can sing so
well?
’” They shared a certain kind of con, musicals and Fosse, masking reality with amusement.

But what would happen if that con was exposed? The question was
Little Me.
The answer was inconclusive—for Fosse aesthetically, for Cy Feuer commercially. “I’ve never been in this position
before,” the producer said to Neil Simon the morning after the first preview. “We have a smash hit and I’m thinking maybe we should close it.”

On November 17, 1962, Feuer, Simon, and Fosse, standing in tuxedos at the back
of New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater, braced themselves for what looked like the funniest, most brilliant flop of their careers and perhaps even in the history of American musical comedy. It began well—Caesar appeared to a roar of planned-for applause. But then he coughed through his first three jokes, ruining them completely. Considering this an omen, Feuer and Simon shared a pained look before turning to Fosse. He was staring straight ahead. Simon described what happened next: “Bob very simply put his arms down
at his sides, closed his eyes, and fell backward, every part of his body hitting the floor simultaneously—a perfect ten at any Olympics.” On the floor, he moaned quietly.