Fosse (25 page)

Fifteen minutes later, when Fosse was
on his feet again, something around the orchestra pit caught his attention. A drunk had left the second or third row and was stumbling to the back of the house, chatting to folks he had quite obviously never met before as he made his way up the aisle. As if Caesar weren’t wildcard enough. Planting himself before Feuer, Simon, and Fosse, the man patted his brow with a handkerchief and declared, “This is the worst goddamned show I’ve seen since
My Fair Lady,
” and then stormed off. Fosse fell to the floor again, this time laughing himself to tears. There were still two hours to go.

“If all the theatrical platitudes of
the last half-century could be turned into playing cards,” Walter Kerr wrote, “and the pack scattered wildly from portal to portal, you would arrive at something like
Little Me,
luckily.” Flip the coin—it’s a wooden nickel. “I have the feeling,”
wrote another critic, “that this is a pressure show, a show in which pressures are applied to blind you to its weaknesses. There is nothing wrong with that tactic if it isn’t too visible a tactic. There is, indeed, a word for it, a word not used often these days but still valid—showmanship. It takes skill and showmanship in combination to razzle-dazzle you into believing you are seeing a whizzer of a show when factually you are not.” But was that such a bad thing? It often seemed being a good fake was not so different from being good.

Fatherhood: the realest thing of all. Fatherhood and death.

But would he be a good father?

What about names? Have you thought about names? people asked.

“If it’s a boy,
Nicholas,” Fosse said. “Nick. It’s so unphony.”

Nicole Providence Fosse was born on March 24, 1963. “I can’t explain it,”
Fosse said, “but she’s the perfect love of my life.”

It was a good time to be Bob Fosse, at least in theory. In theory, he could stand in the middle of Forty-Sixth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and gaze up at the marquees—his. He could see, to one side of the street,
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,
winner of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Looking directly across, at the Lunt-Fontanne, he could smile up at the lights that spelled
Little Me,
which in April 1963 was the source of two more Tony nominations for Fosse: best director of a musical (which he’d lose to George Abbott) and best choreography (which he’d win).

That month he won yet another honor. “I’ve been dancing since
I was nine,” he said, accepting his
Dance Magazine
award, “and that’s almost twenty-seven years. In that twenty-seven years I’ve been plagued and harassed with a fear, a doubt that I was really not very good, that I didn’t have too much to offer. This feeling was—you might think it was in my imagination, and it might have been—but I can remember reviews and criticisms that seemed to add to this feeling of self-doubt. And of course I worked hard. As a matter of fact, that feeling of being a little insecure I think made me work a little harder. And I achieved some success, so much so that the people on the outside of the dance world treated me as if I knew my business. But the people on the in, the people in the dance world, always seemed to look at me as though I were sort of a commercial curiosity that occurs every so often.” (If he called himself a phony, would that make him less of a phony?) He closed the speech by telling a story—one of his standards, which he told over and over, like a creation myth—of the time he broke the news of his career to his father. “Well, he asked me what a choreographer was—that’s not good—and he said, ‘Do you mean you’re going to give away all your steps?’ He then kind of threw up his arms in exasperation. Of course later on when I began to send more money home, his arms lowered and went into a gesture resembling a shrug, you know. And I think if he were here today, he might raise his arms again and hug me or pat me on the back and say, ‘Do you think I could get one of those choreography jobs they’re passing out?’” That last part, about the hug and the passing out, was the
two-bits!
after
shave-and-a-haircut
—compulsory, for the crowd. His father had passed away two weeks earlier.

After Fosse and Verdon married, Verdon deliberately removed herself from Broadway to live life as Mrs. Fosse, wife of Bob, mother of baby Nicole, the Fosse triangle’s tallest point. If in a few years she wanted to return to the theater—and she did—Verdon knew she would have to move quickly. Nearing forty, she was far too old to be a young dancer; soon she would be too old to be an old dancer. So Gwen decided when Nicole turned three she would come back to Broadway for one giant victory lap, a Fosse-Verdon show to top
Redhead,
but this time, one they would build for themselves, from the ground up. Until then, they would search for the ideal material, something new and challenging and personal to both, with dance potential for him and a honey of a leading role for her.

But first: temptation. City Center was dedicating its spring season to Richard Rodgers with a short May-to-June cycle of
Oklahoma!,
Pal Joey,
and
The King and I.
Gus Schirmer, who had directed Fosse at City Center in 1961, would direct
Joey
once more, this time with Viveca Lindfors in the part of Vera. Fosse couldn’t resist the offer to reprise Joey; it was a propulsive B
₁₂
boost to his fading Riff Brother dream. He could shop for his next musical as he danced.

Lindfors kept her nine-year-old son, Kristoffer Tabori, backstage. He was enchanted by Fosse. “He was so charming and sweet
and available,” Tabori said. “I was amazed he could do Joey—dance and sing and act—with that cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. It never dropped, it never moved. It did exactly what he wanted.” One day Fosse let Tabori in on the secret. “After his number, he came over,
threw his arms around me, and tousled my hair. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, and told me that you had to keep your lip extremely dry so the cigarette adhered, so you had a kind of cementing. Then he said ‘Here,’ and put a cigarette on my lip to show me how.” It worked.

If Fosse worried about his performance or the production or sidestepping George and Ethel Martin, the show’s credited choreographers, he didn’t let it show. “I adored him,”
said actress Rita Gardner. “I remember there were so many dances in the show, we ran out of time before we could rehearse my number, ‘I Could Write a Book,’ so Bobby cut out his rehearsal so we could go over that number for me. He knew the show backwards and forwards, but he knew I didn’t. He was there for me.” And he was there for Lindfors as he had been there for Heckart in 1961. “I could see him really helping her
through it,” Tabori said, “really helping her in her limitations. He flirted with my mother, who was a tough woman, and even she loved him. They all did. He was always surrounded by the most beautiful chorines, killing them with kindness. It was a massacre! He was so sweet to them, so dear to them, and they towered over him! I’d look up and just see Fosse in the midst of so much leg.”

With several productions of the show comfortably behind him and his own personal and professional successes at an all-time high, Fosse’s 1963 Joey seemed softer, with a natural confidence
new to him and suitable to the part. “Fosse had an incredible sense
of relaxation,” Tabori said. “His Joey wasn’t about finesse or cool, like Sinatra, and he wasn’t as shiny-good-looking as Gene Kelly, but still we understood how he was so attractive to people. He was a performer, completely comfortable in his skin.” To some, the metaphor was clear: Joey’s con is his feet. The reviews were mixed.

Gwen Verdon, the star of the family, suggested the possibility of adapting Maurine Watkins’s play
Chicago.
The part of Roxie had interested her for years, since she first saw Ginger Rogers in
Roxie Hart,
the 1942 film adaptation, during the run of
Can-Can
a decade earlier. She could remember flipping between
the McCarthy hearings and a broadcast of the movie, thinking Watkins’s flapper murderess would be a terrific part for her: sweetly criminal, sexy, and somehow innocent. Fosse and Verdon inquired after the rights but came up with nothing: Watkins, a born-again Christian, did not want her moralistic tale of sin and corruption turned into a musical comedy.

Next idea: a musical of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Redhead
’s producers, Fryer and Carr, went for it. They optioned Capote’s book and tempted Fosse (and writer Hugh Wheeler) with the adaptation. Holly could be a lot like Roxie—a bitter part for a sweet-tasting girl—and, from Fosse’s perspective, a way to look sex in the eye and wink at the same time. He said yes.

About that time, producers Ray Stark and David Merrick, having lost Jerome Robbins to script
disputes, approached Fosse to direct their as-yet-untitled show about Fanny Brice. The combination of backstage musical, underdog story, and vaudeville comedy meant it came fully equipped for Fosse—and, he thought,
for Gwen—and Fosse, after expressing interest, approached Stark and Merrick with the idea
of replacing Barbra Streisand, who had already been cast, with Verdon. Wisely, they turned him down. As if in retaliation, Fosse had Jack Perlman draw up a rider to the proposed contract. He would not make the same mistake twice: if Stark and Merrick ordered changes to Fosse’s work without his consent, the rider stated,
all rights to his dances would automatically revert to Fosse. The burn of
Hero
still with him, he refused to budge on this point, and the negotiation continued far longer than schedules permitted. Meanwhile, time was wasting. If Fosse was going to go ahead with the Fanny Brice show, he needed to get to work immediately, and for the sake of expedience, he budged slightly on the rider dispute and agreed to work on spec, for the moment, until Stark and Merrick saw some work and presumably felt more comfortable. They tabled the rights discussion in good faith.

On that tenuous note, Fosse dove into the book. He scribbled notes, took down song ideas, and sent off suggestions to writer Isobel Lennart (who seemed amenable to his input). Midway through the overture, Fosse thought, they should have the curtain rise on a pair of electricians at work on the bare stage. Checking the lights would prompt certain sparks and flashes timed to the music. A few beats later, Fanny’s dressing room would roll on and Streisand would make her entrance, moving across the stage to her dressing-room door. Less inspired was Fosse’s suggestion to cut the song “People.” The lyrics, he said, made no sense
for Fanny Brice. She was a star and stars did not “need people.” They needed the stage, the audience—no more.

His brainstorming halted when Fosse heard Stark had placed
a worried call to Feuer and Martin. Stark questioning Fosse’s competence was a breach of good faith—Fosse identified it immediately, and he decided to quit the show. In September 1963 he wrote a six-page letter explaining
how he reached his decision, sent it to the full company, and left for Feuer and Martin’s
I Picked a Daisy.
When Stark found out, he fired off a telegram threatening
Fosse with legal action. But it didn’t take: they never had a contract in the first place.

I Picked a Daisy
became
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,
and Fosse settled into a comfortable routine of story conferences with Feuer and Martin, producers he knew too well to distrust. As writer and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner worked (very slowly) on revisions, Fosse turned his attention to his Gwen show, to writer Hugh Wheeler and their adaptation of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s;
he auditioned and rehearsed touring productions of
How to Succeed
and
Little Me,
for which he hired dancers Kathryn Doby and Leland Palmer, the latter a Broadway newcomer with a great deal of talent but, at twenty-four, without a full sense of herself.

Soon after rehearsals began, Fosse pulled her aside.

“Leland,” he said, “I want to tell you something very honestly. May I?”

“Yes . . . okay.” She feared the worst. He was going to fire her.

“You’re not the most beautiful woman in the usual terms of beautiful,” he said softly, “but you have something very unusual and very special and I don’t want you to forget that.”

A few nights later, Palmer’s hotel-room phone rang.
It was around ten o’clock.

“Hello?”

“Leland. It’s Bob Fosse.”

She had been deeply touched by what he had said to her in rehearsal. Never before had anyone of Fosse’s stature addressed her with such conviction and grace.

“Will you come to my room?” he asked. “I want to talk to you.”

A minute later, Palmer opened the door to Fosse’s room. He was in bed, under the covers. She was surprised: he hadn’t seemed sick that day in rehearsal.

“The light is so bright,” he said to her. “Would you put a towel over the lamp?”

She did.

“I want you. Come here.”

She sat beside him on the bed.

“I would like to sleep with you.”

“Bob,” she said, unsure of what she would, or should, say. “I respect and admire you and I respect and admire Gwen, but I won’t, not tonight, not ever . . .”

“But will you kiss me?”

She thought for a moment, then kissed him on the forehead. A stranger walking in would not have known who was the grownup and who was the kid.

Palmer got up from the bed and crossed to the door. “Would you like me to take the towel off the lamp?”

“No.”

“Would you like me to turn out the light?”

“No, thank you.”

“Okay.” She opened the door. “Good night, Bob.”

“Good night.”

Palmer left with a new sensation, one that, years later, she would understand to be the beginnings of sophistication and deepening self-respect. She billowed back to her room feeling fuller and new, as if a sound foundation had been slipped under the kid in her, raising her up from innocence to peek at adulthood. Fosse hadn’t changed Palmer; he had seen in her what she had not yet become. And that night, for the first time, Palmer saw it too. Getting into bed, she felt special.