Fosse (30 page)

In her dressing room after a matinee one day, Gwen placed a frightened call to Robert Alan Aurthur.
She needed help, fast. “Bobby called,” she said, sounding scared. “He told me he’s having chest pains.”

“Can he get to a doctor?”

“I don’t know. I called home just now and there was no answer—”

Aurthur finally reached Fosse
the next morning. Was he okay? Did he see the doctor? Was he still having chest pains?

“Chest pains? There weren’t any chest pains,” he lied. “But I hear Gwen gave one hell of a performance last night.”

“H
AVE YOU FINISHED
work yet, Daddy?”

Nicole would sit outside the room Fosse designated as his office slipping notes under his door, plying him with the trademark Fosse tenacity no one, not even another Fosse, could resist. At three, she already looked like the baby-girl version of her father, possibly cuter, with her little dimples, little nose, and dollop of bright blond hair. It was all too much for him. He needed to find another place to work.

Fosse had an idea for a musical version of
Big Deal on Madonna Street,
the Italian comedy about a bunch of lowlifes trying to pull off a big heist (a story, he would admit, with a certain personal resonance
), and he had decided this time he would make good on his private vow to write the book himself. As opposed to
The Conquering Hero
and
Sweet Charity,
this idea, he wouldn’t give up; he would be responsible for every element, top to bottom. The time had come to insist. Fosse had the clout, the financial security, and, with Paddy Chayefsky encouraging him, the blessing of a true artist.

To be closer to Paddy, he took an eleventh-floor office at 850 Seventh Avenue, a suite literally down the hall from Chayefsky, who may have been the only other man in New York who worked as hard as Fosse. Paddy was always around. His marriage by now a function of habit, an agreement more than a relationship, Paddy often spent nights at 850 Seventh, which seemed convenient for everyone—him, his wife, Susan, and especially Bob Fosse, whose beginning-writer questions could be answered most any hour, day or night, by one of the best in the business. All Fosse had to do was walk ten or twelve steps down the hallway and knock. Sometimes Bob and Paddy would shut the place down or wake each other up the next morning, one leaving dinner or breakfast outside the other’s door before slipping back to his own office for yet another crack at the scene. “This is the manic-depressive floor,”
Fosse joked. “‘I’m no good. I’m no good.’”

Fosse’s suite was nicely disheveled,
walls plastered with posters from his shows, many of them from his former life as a performer, and adoring reviews, like a clipping from one of his
Pal Joey
s. On his desk, beside a framed picture of Nicole playing in Central Park, stood a photo of his nine-year-old self in Riff Brothers’ white tie and tails, as if he were trying to remind himself—as if he could ever forget—what he truly was: just a kid with a few tricks.

Down the hall from Fosse and Chayefsky, the agent Lionel Larner kept his office door open to whoever was inclined to put up his feet and browse through the day’s trades or hear a funny story or use Larner’s copying machine, the only one in the building. Looking more like a country home than a place of business, the offices of Lionel Larner Limited were a natural salon for the eleventh floor; Larner, at one time the agent with the highest client-renewal rate on Broadway, was convivial, witty, fluent in all dialects of industry tradecraft. He called 850 Seventh a magical place,
“the Dakota of office buildings.” Former tenants included Elia Kazan and the actor Dickie Moore, who had starred as Dietrich’s baby in
Blonde Venus.
Larner, Fosse, and Chayefsky stuck together. They knew one another’s business. When Larner heard his dear friend and client Larry Blyden had died, Bob and Paddy sat with Larner in his office until the end of the day; 850 Seventh was like that.

Located in midtown only slightly north of the theater district, the building had considerable Broadway appeal, but its secret ingredient was its landlord, Herbert Tuttle. Tuttle loved show business. He thought of himself as a patron of the arts. Every year, he renegotiated each tenant’s lease, the renter’s box-office figures in hand, charging only what the gross percentages promised he or she could afford. If lessees were hot, their rents would go up or stay the same; cold, and Herb would cut them a break. “The world of show business was smaller then,” Larner said. “There was money to be made, of course, but there was more money elsewhere. The people of 850 Seventh were in show business because they loved show business, and Herb Tuttle was one of those people. He looked after us. We looked after each other.”

On the very same hall as Fosse and Chayefsky, Herb Gardner—cartoonist, playwright of
A Thousand Clowns,
and the building’s unofficial monologist—worked in blessed agony. Erupting with the spirit of quixotic Jews, Gardner was a firework rambler, discoursing in all directions at once and always—like Fosse danced and Chayefsky reasoned—on the jolly side of madness. He’d grown up at his father’s Canal Street saloon, listening to nutjobs fight about cantaloupe and politics and rhapsodize about fat old girlfriends. Now Gardner was nuts. He wrote about nuts. “A man who is not touched by
the earthy lyricism of hot pastrami, the pungent fantasy of corned beef, pickles, frankfurters, the great lusty impertinence of good mustard . . . is a man of stone and without heart,” he wrote in one play. He wrote about people caught up in the ageless clash between trying to act like grownups on the one hand and running naked through the Lower East Side with pretty girls on the other. In Gardner’s plays, the nicest thing someone could say to someone else was “You’re the craziest person I’ve ever met.” “I’d like you to fall madly in love with me and think I’m wonderful and throw yourself at my feet,” says Sally in
Thieves,
“and I’d like you to do it on the phone.” That was Herb Gardner. He was the ukulele type.

Masters of the hangout, Bobby, Paddy, and Herbie became best friends. Paddy was in awe of Bobby’s charm; Bobby was captivated by Paddy’s warmth and intellect; and they were both enthralled by Herb’s lunatic whimsy. “That was a marriage between
three men,” said producer David Picker. “They were there for each other in any way possible. So if Herb had a play, Paddy had a play, Bobby had a [show], they were there. It was ‘What can we do?’ ‘How can we help?’” No matter how gruesome the
Variety
headlines or the show problems or the women problems, they would be together, laughing in their ugly elevator down to lunch.

Lunch was the same every day. Thirty steps from the lobby of 850 Seventh Avenue was the Carnegie Deli, their downstairs dining room. Compared to the venerable Stage Deli only a block south, the Carnegie was a cluttered, cranky hole in the wall. Both delis had begun at the starting line with an equal shot, but the Stage, originally at Broadway and Forty-Eighth, was closer to the theaters and the first to go showbiz. It caught on. Stage Deli founder Max Asnas was so quotable, Fred Allen called him the “Corned Beef Confucius.”
Once Walter Winchell started writing about the restaurant and Asnas got on TV and radio, there was no way any other deli could keep up. In 1943, the Stage moved uptown, into Carnegie turf. Asnas opened a sidewalk conservatory, put in a bar, and became the sort of assimilated fancy-shmancy deli the Carnegie types loved to kvetch about.
Theirs
was a
real
deli, the Carnegie folks would say, hoping to be asked why. Why? Well, for one thing, at the Carnegie they do the same sandwich better and for less. At the Carnegie, you have to chase down a waiter to get some service and fight the kitchen noise to hear yourself complain, and you also have to eat every bite on your plate so the owner won’t be insulted if he passes by, which he will, and he’ll probably sit down and complain too, if not about his business, then about the Yankees, even if they’re winning. This was Chayefsky’s kind of place. If you left feeling more on edge than you arrived, all the better; you’d had some life for lunch.

It was the Carnegie in Chayefsky that Fosse had no trouble getting next to. Over lunch, he came to see Paddy wasn’t just the brains behind
Marty,
he
was
Marty, and wasn’t Marty with girls a lot like Fosse was with Fosse? Intellect aside, these were two hard-working satirists from the same metaphysical deli, not the “Broadway” one with the conservatory and fresh-squeezed orange juice, but the one with guts and loss and laughs. The deli of truths: merciless and lacerating, at all costs and on all subjects. Not many had the chutzpah to give the famous director Bob Fosse direction, especially not the kind nobody likes to get, but Paddy did. “That’s bullshit, Fosse!” he would say, and Fosse would thank him. That’s who they were. They hated bullshit more than they hated their own misery; they hated it together. “Paddy could tell Bob everything,”
Ann Reinking said, “and in such a loving way that Bob couldn’t get defensive.” When he was with Paddy, phoniness died on sight. “You’d see them at their table
against the wall,” Karen Hassett said, “the big bear and the dancing elf, debating and laughing.” They loved each other. It was just Fosse’s
goyishe
sandwich
order—corned beef with mayo on white—that drove Paddy crazy.

In those years, the mid- to late sixties, movie-musical intelligence—taking a cue from
The Sound of Music,
a gargantuan hit—said bigger was better. To compete with the smallness of TV, which had gained on movies only in the decade since Dore Schary tried to squash it with 3-D, Hollywood bet on the extravaganza, spending more, casting more, and stretching aspect ratios ever wider to take in more of the stunning locations no TV camera could fully capture. So it hardly seemed unreasonable that Universal Pictures, now one with MCA under Lew Wasserman, poured millions into
Thoroughly Modern Millie,
an elephantine folly held up by the highly bankable promise of Julie Andrews. It would not have surprised Paddy, himself writing Paramount’s twenty-million-dollar
Paint Your Wagon,
that Wasserman, looking down from his black tower in Burbank, had his sights set on
Sweet Charity
next.

But before Universal could buy the film rights from Fryer, Carr, and Joe Harris, Charnin’s arbitration
suit over
Sweet Charity
authorship had to be resolved. With a movie deal hanging in the balance, suddenly, after years of delays and evasions, a settlement was reached. “Fryer and Carr had to admit to it,”
Charnin said; that was his victory. The producers stipulated Charnin could not discuss the terms of the settlement; that was theirs.

Wasserman set Ross Hunter, producer of
Thoroughly Modern Millie,
to oversee the production of
Sweet Charity,
and signed Shirley MacLaine to star. MacLaine, who had loved Fosse since her chorus-girl days in
The Pajama Game,
considered him a life-changing influence. Fosse was one of the first to recognize her talent, the way Joan McCracken had seen his. Now a Hollywood star, MacLaine was prepared to wield her influence and make sure Fosse got to direct the movie. She reminded Wasserman there was precedent—first-time directors could make successful films of their own musicals; think of Jerome Robbins’s stage-to-film transfer of
West Side Story
. According to MacLaine, Wasserman didn’t counter with the obvious
Yes, but Robbins drew on the vast experience of his codirector, Robert Wise;
he said nothing but “Okay, kid.
Let’s get him.”

“I remember feeling tentative,
to say the least,” Fosse said of his first movie deal, “but not wanting to communicate it. You can’t express self-doubt in Hollywood; it’s fatal.” Instead, he led with a touch of bullshit—what little he knew of production from MGM and the television specials on his résumé—and clung to tales of his forebears Jerry Robbins and Stanley Donen.

Fosse hated Hollywood. He had a fifteen-year-old grudge against the industry that had failed him; it represented everything that was wrong with the business he loved. “I hate show business and I love it,”
Fosse would say. “I love working with actors and dancers and writers and designers. I think they’re the most beautiful, talented, and witty people in the world. But I hate the bullshit, the Beverly Hills homes with swimming pools. I hate Mercedes. I hate Gucci bags, I hate all of that shit.”

In Los Angeles, Universal paired Fosse with Robert Surtees, three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer of
My Fair Lady
and
The Graduate,
a pro at home in styles both classical and carefully avant-garde and a man well suited to Fosse’s sense of humor. Surtees liked to joke that one day
he would become a producer so that he could double-cross all his friends. “Bobby was fascinated with
Surtees’s technical expertise,” said Sonja Haney, dance assistant on the film. “He wasn’t afraid to ask him anything. If there was something he didn’t know the answer to, he’d say, ‘That’s a Robert Surtees question.’” Surtees’s son Bruce, an uncredited camera operator on
Sweet Charity,
remembered Fosse as glued to his father’s side. “Anyone less charming than Bob
could never have gotten away with so many interruptions, so many questions,” Surtees said. “Even if he didn’t say it, his demeanor was ‘I’m just a schmuck dancer. I don’t know anything about the camera.’ But of course he did. He just didn’t know as much as he
wanted to,
which was everything.”

The side of Fosse that needed struggle in order to create may have been relieved to learn producer Ross Hunter had soft-focus ideas in store
for
Sweet Charity.
“There was quite a fight,”
Fosse said, “about whether Charity could say ‘Up yours.’ I felt that if she couldn’t, then we might as well make
Mary Poppins
all the way.” Encouraged by Shirley MacLaine, Wasserman allied with Fosse and took Hunter off the picture, freeing the virgin filmmaker to fly solo and indulge his whims, good or bad, happy musical or sad. Other than Wasserman himself, no one could stop
Sweet Charity
from becoming a Bob Fosse picture through and through—whatever that meant.