Fosse (27 page)

Fosse’s
Pleasures
ideas burlesqued Russian acrobatics and ballet. “One man did a great big
jumping split,” Gwen said, “at which point, with sound effects, his pants would rip. Another man would do a cartwheel and his hairpiece would come undone.” A mechanical horse, belly dancers, Cossacks, girls in mustaches:
Pleasures and Palaces
was a half-a-million-dollar extravaganza, Fosse’s biggest assignment yet. But, as many had predicted, the book broke underneath him. “I knew we had trouble,”
he said. “But I still thought I could pull it off . . . I really thought I could save it—but we were all doing different things. Spewack was doing a Shavian comedy, Loesser was doing an opera, and I was doing a Russian version of
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
” Behind closed doors, everyone blamed the other guy: Fosse didn’t like the score, Loesser didn’t like the book, and Spewack was against the production.

They left for Detroit in early March 1965. “Bobby worked morning, noon, and night,”
said actress Phyllis Newman, “and Gwen was with him. They were such a team, partners in every sense. He would be going back and forth between Gwen, working with the dancers in the lobby, to the principals onstage.” “He would always be checking with her,”
said dancer Don Emmons. “He knew the show was in trouble and was trying everything, but mostly the wrong things, changing tiny little things, wrists there, legs there, when the whole second act needed rewriting.” Jack Cassidy replaced Alfred Marks, the show’s star. Comden and Green came to help. Then Abe Burrows and Cy Feuer. They couldn’t save the sinking ship, but just having them there lightened the mood. “In rehearsal, Loesser told me to
throw packs of cigarettes at Bobby when he started smoking,” dancer Stan Page said. “So I did. But Bobby would pick up the cigarettes and throw them at Loesser, who was sitting in the house. And Loesser would throw them back on the stage.”

After the first preview, few missed the writing on the wall. Loesser, a producer, suggested they cut their losses
and pack up, but Fosse held on, urging him to give
Pleasures
another shot, in Boston this time, before opening in New York. He admitted the “Tears of Joy” number could be funnier, though he had already changed it many times, by cutting mostly, first lyrics, then music, turning what was once a ballad into a Bronx-dancehallish human drum symphony of stomps, snaps, and claps, and he knew now he could go farther. He would put up his own money. Would Loesser agree to that? He would pay for the storage and shipment of sets and scenery. He’d reconsider his plans for Nicole’s education. “Well, so the kid doesn’t go
to Vassar,” he joked with the company.

“The cast was so distraught,”
Kathryn Doby said, “they wanted to raise money to get orchestrations for new versions of the numbers so new backers might see it and help out.” They would go that far for Fosse. He had gone that far for them, picking them out of the thousands, not just once but again and again, show after show. Fosse had proved his allegiance, demonstrated his beneficence, bestowing work, careers, and personal self-worth on those who might have floundered out of show business without him. He, the father, had given them life; and they, the children, repaid him with devotion. They called themselves Bobby’s. He called them—in the parlance of choreographers—kids. He knew their lives, and he knew their boyfriends’ and girlfriends’ lives; he had seen them through innumerable dramas; he had watched them, and in many cases helped them to, improve. They owed him for that too. But how to repay him wasn’t always clear, especially when Fosse’s charisma, kindness, and intrepid sensuality blurred personal and professional dedication—which could easily backfire.

As in any family, jealousy and sibling rivalry were key factors in the creation and realignment of factions and subfactions within the company. Competition is inherent in any dancer’s life—an artist consistently on the hunt for work, striving to keep her body and improve her technique—but to Bobby’s girls of nineteen or twenty-five, frightened and naïve, vying to secure their slivers of stage or their sectors of the director’s attention, competition was an epidemic, a sort of high-school cliquishness on overdrive. To the dancers, at least. To Fosse, conflict could be a valuable tool, a motivator like any other. “Women are very attracted to power,”
he said, with characteristic candor, “and to have that power is a terrific feeling.” Ask the girls: “It takes two to play that game,”
said one dancer. “We knew what was what.”

“We were almost done with Bob’s new,
satirical idea for ‘Tears of Joy,’ almost a day away, when the notice to close the show went up,” Doby said. “The cast decided we should let him finish the number, so we had an extra rehearsal and he did finish the number.” But no one left. Fosse watched as “Tears of Joy” evolved
into a medley of his work dating back to the recollections of the oldest member of the company. Beginning with “The Pickpocket Tango,” from
Redhead,
the boys and girls of
Pleasures and Palaces
reconstructed—part on the fly, part prepared—selections from “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” the (original) whorehouse ballet from
New Girl
in Town,
“The Rich Kid’s Rag,” and, finally,
The Conquering Hero
’s war ballet. “That’s how far the cast would go
for Fosse,” Doby said. What they thought they had forgotten, their bodies remembered; what their bodies didn’t recall, they invented in his style. To watch them review the story of his life in dance, each step the product of untold deliberation, each deliberation the fruit of untold drama, one could see Bob Fosse was more than spiritually aligned with his dancers. He was in them.

Fosse took actor John McMartin for a drink
across from the theater. They’d known each other since
The Conquering Hero
and despite not spending all that much time together outside rehearsal, they had developed a friendly rhythm. McMartin had always considered his director a relatively shy guy, but he found that after a few drinks, Fosse didn’t have to force himself to speak.

“What are you doing when you get back?” Fosse asked.

“Nothing.”

“Would you consider doing something else with me?”

McMartin hesitated.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, I’ve been in two of these in a row”—
these
meaning “bombs”—“and I thought you’d think, maybe, I was bringing you bad luck.”

Fosse laughed. “I thought you’d think that about me.”

There was no time for post-
Pleasures
blues. After returning to New York, Fosse held a backers’ audition
at Delmonico’s for his unnamed two-one-acts musical. The reading revealed Elaine May had barely completed her half of the show, “The Larger World of Faith,” and Fosse’s half, “Cabiria,” seemed rushed. Fosse needed more stage time—a full two acts, even—if he intended to develop the relationship between Cabiria and Oscar, her beau, to a sensible degree, and at the suggestion of Fryer and Carr, Fosse returned to his dining room table to face the blank page.

He needed help. In May 1965 he approached a friend of his, writer David Shaw, whose ex-wife had suggested
Nights of Cabiria
in the first place; he went to Abe Burrows; he tried Hugh Wheeler. Wheeler rewrote the first seven scenes before admitting he wasn’t a good match for the material, and Fosse called off the search. Better to write the two acts on his own than waste any more time auditioning writers. That summer, he and Gwen rented a cottage in East Hampton only a few steps from the beach, and Fosse wrote for five days—until he got a call from Robert Fryer. Paddy Chayefsky, Fryer said, hadn’t recoiled at the idea of working on the book. Would Bob be willing to meet Paddy? Almost before he got off the phone, Fosse had his desk packed up and was heading for Manhattan.

Paddy Chayefsky!

Here was a
real
artist, an Astaire of the Olivetti. Where other writers merely wrote, tiptapping away like secretaries on old machines, Chayefsky thundered with meaning and wisdom and purpose. He had something to say—something important about authenticity and compassion—and he was saying it, and in a way that hadn’t been heard before. With
Marty,
first on TV in 1953 and then adapted for film in 1955, he launched a new naturalness in American drama. His characters—regular New York working-class people—spoke plainly in a common idiom but with a poetic conviction that lifted their worn-out soles a few inches off the pavement. Marty and Clara, Agnes in
The Catered Affair,
Jerry in
Middle of the Night:
they were like the rest of us, only a little bigger. “I tried in
Middle of the Night
to write about love and happiness and fulfillment in particularly mundane terms,” he said, “because I believe they are mundane things, as real as the audience or electric light bulbs, palpable to the touch, recognizable to the senses.” And everything he wrote, he guarded fervently. When
Marty
went to Hollywood, Chayefsky insisted on a thorough rehearsal period well in advance of shooting; he insisted Delbert Mann, director of the TV version, go on to direct the film; he insisted on attending preparatory meetings and making whatever changes to the script he deemed necessary. This was far from normal practice in the industry that he called “grasping, vicious, and pandering,”
but Chayefsky had been burned before. “I swore I’d never again let
a script get outta my hands, outta my control,” he said. It was the right move; he won the Oscar for his adaptation of
Marty,
and
Marty
won the Oscar for best picture.

Seeking to further indemnify his work, in 1957 Chayefsky founded Carnegie Productions and became his own producer. “I decided to form my own company,”
he said on the set of
The Goddess.
“I always figured that if you went for a low budget you could go for art, and I’ve tried to write
The Goddess
as a major work of art.” By that decade’s end, he had begun a move away from stenographic realism and toward hulking questions of philosophy and metaphysics. His play
Gideon
grew from the Old Testament. “I thought he was a funny fellow,”
Chayefsky said of his creation. “Other men in the Bible needed just one miracle to accept God—the burning bush sufficed for Moses—but God kept performing miracle after miracle for Gideon and Gideon didn’t buy them.” Like Gideon, Chayefsky kept doubting, fighting, aspiring. About his
The Passion of Josef D.,
which Chayefsky himself directed in 1964, he said, “I meant the play to be
political vaudeville, the boulevard theater of the German expressionists.” It closed after fifteen performances. He had taken a part-time teaching position
at City College when he got the
Cabiria
call from Fryer and Carr.

Fosse’s personal and professional admiration for Chayefsky was vast, but he found Chayefsky’s interest in his musical comedy bewildering. Fosse drove back to Manhattan bristling with excitement. Since their first meeting, in 1959, at David Shaw’s in Amagansett, Chayefsky and Fosse had impressed each other, a kind of beginners’ chemistry. “From that time on,”
Gwen said, “there was a sort of tentative feeling out of one another.” Erudition had always been like an open flame for Bob Fosse, too fascinating to look away from, too scary to touch, and Fosse’s showbiz reputation read too slick for Paddy, though he couldn’t help but smile at the little guy’s left-right combination of shtick and insecurity.

They got to work in Paddy’s office,
a converted efficiency apartment eleven floors above the honks of Seventh Avenue in the heart of midtown. The kitchenette, doubling as file archive and paper repository, abutted a small foyer space and a larger corner room where Paddy sat behind his typewriter in semilight. “It was like a cave,”
said Karen Hassett, a friend of Chayefsky’s. “Paddy kept the room dark, his back to the window, and the blinds were always drawn.” He kept a couch by his desk for long nights, and—walking in and seeing this, Fosse must have smiled—a baby grand against the wall.

At their second meeting
Paddy and Fosse gave up on
Cabiria,
and Fosse returned to Long Island to finish the book on his own. At the end of July, he called Neil Simon in Rome
to tell him he had managed to squeeze out a first draft of what he was calling
Sweet Charity.
But it wasn’t funny enough, Fosse said. He needed help. Between shooting
After the Fox
and writing the screenplay of
Barefoot in the Park,
Simon couldn’t really take on another project, but he agreed to have a look, and Fosse sent out a script marked
urgent
the next day. Indeed, input was urgent;
Sweet Charity
rehearsals were scheduled to begin in August, only a few weeks away.

In lieu of major reconstruction, Simon scribbled a few suggestions in the margins and sent the script back to Fosse. Simon’s phone rang a few days later.

“I love the new lines,”
Fosse said. “You can’t stop now.”

“Bob, I just don’t have the time. I can barely get
Barefoot
done.”

“I’m not letting you off the hook. You owe me one.”

“For what?”

“I’ll think of something.”

A week later, Fosse was in Rome. “I’m here,” Fosse said. “I brought a tape of the score. You have listen to it. Pick me up at TWA.”

Hours later, Fosse was in Neil Simon’s Roman living room, pushing furniture against the wall to free up dance space. On the director’s cue, Simon and his wife, Joan, seated themselves, and Fosse screeched his tape player to the first bar of silence and strode to the center of the room facing the Simons. “This number,” he said through
the cigarette smoke, “takes place the first time we see these sleazy dance-hall girls that Charity works with.” The music began.

Fosse then went on to set the stage for “Big Spender,” explaining how the fan of colored lights would catch a hip or shoulder or half an ass in a line of hungry girls twisted in skin-tight sexery waiting in the dark. A loud blast of brass came from the tape player, and Fosse described how the girls, their backs to the audience, would vamp, slowly, their hips shifting with each slow step, to the long bar rising up from downstage, and then turn all at once into the bright lights with limbs held at fractured angles and looks of abject nothingness in their eyes. Each girl would freeze in mangled vogue, hanging off the bar and one another. In that soundless moment, there was no telling what came next. They’d look so cold they could be dead, but they’d also look so mean—this one carefully spreading her talons on the bar, that one a hyena . . . Then, as if seizing, they’d throw themselves back and forth—
ba-badda
ba-badda
—then stop. Now there’d be little twitches no bigger than winks and finger thrusts. The shift would be eerie, as if each girl were two girls: one writhing, and the other playing it cute. They’d switch on a dime. “When you’re dancing in one of Bob’s
shows, you’re always dancing a paradox,” Ann Reinking said. “In ‘Big Spender,’ you really want to get that guy to come to you, so from the waist up you’re glamorous, you’re wonderful. But from the waist down, you’re tired and your legs are busted and your feet are hurt. ‘Please God let me go home and get to sleep’ and ‘But I have to get the money’ at once.”