Fosse (26 page)

Sex was a medium for Fosse. It was as much a physical act as it was an opportunity to learn about and merge with his female collaborators, a way of giving to them so they could give back more and better—that is, if they didn’t break under the pressure or retreat in anger. As a means of communication, sex was an exclamation point, far better than the periods of regular life. Sex improved on respect and trust—for the dancers and for him. Sex brought him closer to the epicenter of talent, as if by dipping a hand to the geyser, he could steal back a drop for himself. And all his effort brought him applause too. Fit, built, and endlessly attentive to detail, Fosse was a terrific lover, some said the best they ever had, and in bed, he worked as hard as he did in Variety Arts, giving to get. In bed he owned the spotlight, Fred Astaire performing for an audience of one (or sometimes two) night after happy night—and they really were happy—laughing, sweating, talking
together.
Sex was better than being up late and trying to drink the amphetamines to sleep on his own, without anyone there to hold back his dread.

H
E HAD TIME
, still waiting on Lerner’s revisions, to get to know his daughter. “Nicole kept Bob in life,”
Ann Reinking said. “She forced him to slow down, to be home.” Suddenly he was anchored to someone else’s physical and emotional well-being, and rather than resenting the responsibility or buckling under his fear of bungling it, he loved it. Fatherhood was bullshit repellent; it cut the fat out of Fosse’s brain; it organized him. All at once, the suicidal fantasies—the ones that weren’t for show—he vowed to put aside, for her.
“When Nicole came along,”
dancer Fred Mann III said, “it opened the heavens for Bob. She was the stars, the moon, the sun. Nicole was everything to him.” She was a dazzler of the most ingenious sort, and Gwen, beaming from across their living room, watched him fall for her. “He’s a fabulous father to Nicole,”
she said. These were glorious days, rapturous days. “There was this point of great happiness,”
Fosse said, “and I wanted to give Gwen something wonderful. I wanted to give her the best show she ever had.”

That show would not be
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
In April of 1964, with several drafts of the musical already outlined, Truman Capote decided Verdon, at thirty-eight,
was too old to play Holly Golightly, and ordered Fryer and Carr’s option money returned. Still itching to collaborate, the producers bounced back with another idea: What about a Fosse musical of Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories,
with Gwen as Sally Bowles? It was a compelling suggestion. Sally had qualities Bob and Gwen could work with: she was happy on the outside, sad on the inside, and, like Roxie and Holly, a party girl on the down and out. But Fosse and Verdon didn’t see Nazi Germany
as the right setting for a musical and passed.

So they kept looking, since
On a Clear Day
wasn’t going anywhere either. What if, Fosse thought, they did an evening of musicals, two or three one-acts in a single night? With Fryer and Carr’s blessing, Fosse went down to Times Square to prowl the shelves of the Drama Book Shop and returned with a copy of
Modern One-Act Plays.
A Sunny Morning,
an old Spanish comedy of 1914, stirred his interest. So did
Passionella,
a new work by Martin Charnin and Bob Kessler, which Fryer, Carr, Verdon, and Fosse heard at Gus Schirmer’s apartment
before deciding against it. Moving on, Fosse thought back to the spring of 1962, when Vivian Shaw, ex-wife of writer David Shaw, told him to see Fellini’s film
Nights of Cabiria,
which was then playing in repertory at the Bleecker Street Cinema. As predicted, the film enthralled Fosse, and the part of Cabiria was perfect for Gwen. A low-rent hooker desperate for love, she was in many respects a modern-day (and female) Harlequin, the sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte clown Verdon saw as her personal archetype. “Harlequin is a well rounded,
sensitive person,” she explained. “His love for Columbine—especially when she breaks his heart—makes a man of him. He’s transformed by suffering. The twirl of blue paper in his eye represents tears. The flower on his nose is a symbol of unattainable beauty—like Columbine. He hunts for it everywhere, not realizing that it is right in front of him.” He was also her husband.

Without delay, Fosse screened
Nights of Cabiria
for Fryer and Carr and Gwen in Fryer and Carr’s offices at 445 Park Avenue. Everyone seemed to love the movie, but midway through, Fosse knew
he had a tough sell on his hands.
Cabiria
had no happy romance, and it ended on a very sad note—a bad combination for a musical comedy. In the elevator going down, Fryer admitted he felt only so-so
about
Cabiria
’s Broadway potential, and Gwen, to Fosse’s surprise, agreed. But Carr—driving Gwen and Bob back home to their apartment—privately encouraged Fosse to stay
with it.
Cabiria
had a big little heart, he said. That had to be good for something.

That night Fosse could not sleep.

There was so much for him in
Nights of Cabiria:
the sort of crummy feelings musical comedy never touched; Fellini’s hooker underground of ugly-beautiful women Fosse recognized from the clubs he did not discuss; Giulietta Masina’s masterly evocation of Chaplin, that touch of vaudeville he couldn’t resist; and his own ties to Cabiria, who, despite her hard shell, was sweet inside, like him. Most didn’t see it but she was there, behind the black and the cigarettes and the suicide monologues and all Fosse did to imitate a brooding and far-off artist (which, ironically, he didn’t have to pretend to be). But when Fosse was at home, relaxing with his friends, his stylin’ desert boots kicked up on the coffee table, he let his natural state—Cabiria gamin—take over. (“Bob would be furious if
I called him a nice guy,” dancer Laurent Giroux said.) As much a strategy as a defense, Fosse made “cool” work for him, like a billboard or a great review in the
New York Times.
It was part of his show.

He got out of bed.

In nine pages,
Fosse outlined a one-act musical of
Nights of Cabiria
and showed it to Gwen the next morning. Still, she was unconvinced. The character and milieu were stridently unglamorous, seedy even. Hadn’t they learned their lesson after
New Girl in Town
’s whorehouse ballet?

Fosse got a similar response from
Fryer and Carr: depressing wasn’t Broadway. Which was depressing.

But what
was
Broadway? Rodgers and Hammerstein?

Not anymore:
The Sound of Music,
their last show, had climbed its last mountain on June 15, 1963. As if in reaction, the whole of musical theater scrambled for their crown, denting it somewhat on the way to high seriousness and literary good taste. The cotton-candy days of
The Pajama Game
and
Damn Yankees
had given way to “important” subjects, dutifully making good on the musical’s long-term plan to sophisticate itself, like Henry Higgins did for Eliza Doolittle. In that respect, its evolution may have been natural; the Broadway musical was not a kid anymore but a college freshman, falling in love with fancy culture and the classics, like
Camelot,
as if that made him smarter. The upside was
My Fair Lady.
The downside was that “important” subjects deserved “important” productions, and shows got bigger and more expensive. With all that money onstage, producers were apt to shift their focus away from book, music, and lyrics. Musical
comedy,
the college freshman’s kid brother, was particularly vulnerable. What important books should he read for fun? Or: How could an essentially antic form match
Gypsy
and
West Side Story
for guts and impact without forfeiting the silliness essential to its very being? It was an old question with many answers (
Guys and Dolls,
How to Succeed,
and so on), but now that Shaw was fair game, the lure of bourgeois soft-core pulled even harder.
Bye Bye Birdie,
Do Re Mi, Fade Out—Fade In:
under pressure to mature or escape maturity, comedies either sank or went puff and floated away. The old masters, meanwhile, kept getting older. In 1962, Irving Berlin opened
Mr. President,
his final show. No one knew it then, but
How to Succeed
would be Frank Loesser’s last on Broadway. The great ones were dying. Hammerstein, Cole Porter; 1960, 1964, respectively. A Camelot was ending.

And another golden age was beginning. Stephen Sondheim’s
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
was built (with Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove) on sound, self-aware characterization, and airtight farce—Sondheim meets the best of George Abbott. And, in contrast to many of its forebears, the 1962 comedy was as conscientiously engineered as a Russian novel, written and rewritten well in advance of the rehearsal process with the intention of grounding its silliness on the soundest possible foundations. This was a new concept—workshopping. New shows of the Abbott era had flown into rehearsal relatively quickly, relegating (somewhat counterintuitively) hard questions about the bigger picture to trials out of town (at which point, in many cases, it was too late to do anything). The post-
Forum
handling of musical books as a kind of literature was yet another facet of the new seriousness on Broadway. Seriousness of the best kind.

So, no, a musical of
Nights of Cabiria
didn’t look to Verdon, Fryer, or Carr like a Broadway comedy of the early sixties. Fosse tried to move on to another project, but automatic instinct, like gravity, brought him—and then
Cabiria
—back down to the dancehall. He thought of the dime-a-dance places of his teenage years, the sort his brother Buddy took him to. He thought of the Times Square entrance to the Tango Palace,
a narrow, paint-chipped artery clogged with girls’ headshots: browse the dance hostesses available in every flavor, some sixteen, some forty-two, some with Louise Brooks haircuts years out of date, some from before the war, none with talent. The smart ones knew to forget about Broadway. Any soldier or college kid could buy himself a dance for a fifty-cent ticket; two tickets, and the girl would talk to him between songs. At the end of the night, each hostess turned in her tickets for a commission—half of ticket sales plus a piece of the bar. (What the girls did after that was their business.) But the ticket was a metaphor: Who could claim never to have sold one?

This time Fryer, Carr, and Verdon
got it. Setting
Cabiria
in a dancehall lent theatricality to the piece, livening up the atmosphere and blurring the prostitution angle. And of course, Fosse wanted to write it. To provide himself and Gwen with the absolute best opportunities, Fosse knew he needed to man the show’s conceptual entryway and keep collaboration, and therefore dissent, to a minimum. He needed control.

But he also needed a co-writer, ideally someone he could overrule in a pinch. Fryer and Carr suggested Martin Charnin,
author of
Passionella;
they had recently produced his first show,
Hot Spot,
on Broadway. Fosse knew Charnin, sort of, from
The Girls Against the Boys.
As a kid of twenty-five, Charnin had been called in for last-minute revisions, and he impressed Fosse with “Love Is,” a made-to-order composition with dance possibilities galore. Young, Fosse-compatible, gifted, uncelebrated, Charnin fit the job description perfectly. What up-and-comer would turn down a shot at working with one of Broadway’s biggest names?

“The first day I met Fosse,
at his apartment on Central Park West,” Charnin said, “we watched
Nights of Cabiria.
” The film would be the basis for the first act of a two-act musical called
Hearts and Flowers,
Fosse explained. They discussed at length how to fit the piece to Gwen’s strengths. “That was his first priority,” Charnin said. “The other priority was that he wanted to be the controlling force of every single aspect of the piece.” For the next three weeks, they worked—either at Fryer and Carr’s office, where they would order up deli and rewatch
Cabiria,
or chez Fosse, in the big room that had been converted into an office. Throughout, Fosse stayed remote. “He was mind-bogglingly private,” Charnin said. “Any time I attempted to ingratiate myself to him, my collaborator, the subject was dropped entirely.” With Fellini’s script and Fosse’s outline in hand, they sat at a dining room table, tossing lines and situations back and forth. Charnin typed. “Fosse was a terrific idea man,” he explained, “but not a good writer. One would have to take his disconnected thoughts and try to structure them so that they made sense.” The precision Fosse wanted from his dancers, he himself could not sustain in conversation. “He didn’t always know how to make language work for him,” Charnin said, “and he would get impatient.”

In June, they submitted the first draft of sixty pages to Fryer and Carr. “And I never heard from Fosse again,” Charnin said. “Not a phone call, not a letter, nothing. My agent, Abe Newborn, chased down Fryer and Carr, but he couldn’t get them on the phone. They disappeared.” It would be years before Charnin knew why.

Shopping for a composer, Fosse reached out
to Burton Lane. He showed
Hearts and Flowers
to Frank Loesser, who suggested turning it into a ballet. Cy Coleman had some interest, but only if he could have Dorothy Fields on lyrics. Fields was interested, but without
Hearts and Flowers
’s second-act musical decided—or even assigned—she couldn’t be sure, so Fosse put his composer search aside to shop for act-two book writers, beginning a long process that ultimately broke everyone’s schedule. By the time Elaine May came on, Fosse had dropped out of
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
—still delayed—to direct and choreograph the new Loesser show
Pleasures and Palaces,
and he disappeared into the studio.

Adapted by Sam Spewack from his comedy
Once There Was a Russian
(which opened and closed in one night; you’d think they would have known),
Pleasures and Palaces
was a titanic show typical of the bigger-and-older craze, crammed with sex and jokes and political double-dealing, nobly set in the age of Catherine the Great. Fosse had been looking over Spewack’s shoulder since the idea had first crossed Spewack’s desk a year earlier and had helped nurse the failed play into a musical farce. He was curious about Slavic dance, and with the Cold War toying with American minds, all things Russian were in a kind of hazardous vogue. But mostly, Fosse just needed to work.