Fosse (32 page)

Fosse vacillated up to the very last minute.
So did Universal. Both endings tested to mixed results:
the sad was stronger; the happy fit better. Universal delayed the final decision for weeks, the studio executives changing their minds through the previews. “When I saw the movie
for the first time,” Sonja Haney said, “I didn’t know how it was going to end.” This was Fosse’s chance. He knew the director had more power in Hollywood than on Broadway, but as a first-time filmmaker, he didn’t know how to wield it. “If a director overuses it,”
he said, “he can start indulging his every whim—and so can the cast. On the other hand, if you underuse that power, you lose control. The picture can be taken away from you by the actors, the cameraman, or the studio itself.” Ultimately, Universal went with the sadder version.

“If it’s a flop,”
Fosse said to Shirley MacLaine, “I’ll want to put my head in the oven. If it’s a hit, I’ll want to keep it there.”

In October 1968, with the bulk of editing behind him, Fosse took a moment to repay Gwen the only way he knew how. He choreographed two pieces for her appearance on
The Bob Hope Show,
“Cool Hand Luke” and “Tijuana Brass.” Each betrayed the softness he tried so hard to conceal. “Cool Hand Luke,” especially—Fosse’s most warm-hearted creation, a matador’s lullaby devoid of ironic comment. Accompanied by Lee Roy Reams and Buddy Vest, Gwen strutted and snapped through “Luke” with elegant machismo, receiving in wide welcoming arms Fosse’s plaintive offering to her sensuality. “Every moment of creating this dance,”
Reams said, “was a pleasure and a joy.”

Fosse had reason to feel the closest he ever came to calm. On January 29, 1969,
Variety
wrote, “[
Sweet Charity
] will become one of the memorable artistic and commercial successes of this generation.” He received unmitigated raves on all fronts. “Bob Fosse,” the entertainment world read, “has become a major film director.” The
Hollywood Reporter
followed suit, predicting
Charity
would become Universal’s all-time box-office champion—and the press ride began.
Sweet Charity
’s world premiere in Boston was preceded by lavish previews in Chicago, where Fosse returned a conquering hero, and New York. Perhaps he would do
Big Deal on Madonna Street
next, as a movie musical. Keeping track of his progress in a little red pocket diary, he thought of setting the heist in Tijuana for that cool, weary Herb Alpert sound that was so popular, the style he’d used for Gwen’s dance on
The Bob Hope Show
—or maybe he’d change Mexico to Harlem and make
Big Deal
an all-black show. As the Broadway success of
Cabaret
had demonstrated, the time was certainly right for a socially conscious musical.

But on April 1, 1969, his plans vaporized.
Sweet Charity
opened—and bombed at the box office. The next day, Fosse took out his red journal and wrote, “Didn’t do anything except feel sorry
for myself.” Over the course of the next week, the box-office numbers got worse.

An autopsy of a movie gives the bereaved a feeling of power, consoling them with the cold comfort of pseudo-theories and the remote possibility of finding an explanation in the carnage. But show business is bad science. There is never a clear explanation. There is only the yes or no of an unfeeling box office, and one impossible commandment that sometimes passes for wisdom: Don’t take it personally.

Bob Fosse took it all personally. “Long,” “noisy,” “dim,” “literal.” If words were spoken against his movie, they were spoken against him. He accepted the blame, encouraged it even. “That was my fault,”
he said. “Entirely.” Screenwriter Peter Stone would indict
Universal’s promotional strategy; others would lament the immaturity of MCA’s movie division. But these were standard snipes, transparent to any seasoned executive. Bob Fosse was through. The entirety of his filmmaking career had been a one hundred percent failure.

And he had no agent, nobody to leverage him some kind of recovery work. In 1962, midway into Fosse’s
Little Me
deal,
MCA, Fosse’s agency of fifteen successful years, had sent him—and every other client—a formal breakup letter. By acquiring Universal Pictures, MCA had broken federal antitrust laws, so the conglomerate had to choose between the agency business and the production business. As the breakup letter stated, MCA chose production, abandoning Fosse midnegotiation and forcing him to seek representation elsewhere. A squabble over unpaid commissions ensued; cases were argued and settlements reached, and Fosse walked off with broken trust in agents. Since then—six years before the film of
Sweet Charity
—Fosse’s lawyer Jack Perlman had done his negotiating. With a direct line to any Broadway producer in town, Fosse had decided his reputation would work for him, and he chose not to sign with another agency. But now that
Sweet Charity
had failed, no one called. And without formal representation, Fosse had no one to call on his behalf. A five-time Tony winner, he had never had to beg before. Of course, he had important friends. He could arrange a meeting with Cy Feuer or Fryer and Carr, but they were Broadway friends, and returning to the stage, Fosse knew, would underline his defeat. He wanted to be in movies. In movies, the director was the king. Maybe even the star.

Despite his circumstances, he was being courted by David Begelman of Creative Management Associates, an agency Begelman and Freddie Fields had opened with the help of certain VIP clients (Streisand, Judy Garland, Peter Sellers) they had brought over from MCA. William Morris had come up by playing the odds, signing clients big and small on the grounds that 10 percent of a dollar was still ten cents more than nothing, but CMA, a boutique agency, kept itself exclusive to haute Hollywood. The B-list need not apply. Young and slick and charming, Fields and Begelman made the movie business look fun, exchanging the Old Testament techniques of Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner for the honey-baby mode of the hotshot generation. You wanted to be with them. Sometimes, on a call, one would pretend to be the other, carry on negotiations for a while, and then switch midstream to his real self, confounding whoever was on the other end of the phone and maybe getting a little foothold on the deal.

Fosse signed with CMA
on April 9, a week after the film of
Charity
opened.

Back in New York, he kept
his head down and worked on the screenplay of
Big Deal on Madonna Street,
and he lived in terror of running into a concerned friend or associate on the street or at a party and having to watch that person try to console him with the glass-half-full showings of the usual bullshit. There was a time when he would have thought of killing himself, or at least savored the fantasy (“So young!” he imagined them saying. “Such a promising career!”), but now, at forty-two, he was too old to die a tragic prodigy, and there was Nicole. Nicole: for her, he vowed to control his death wish.

When Fosse fell victim to self-pity, Paddy and Herb Gardner got him out of his office and hurried him downstairs to the Carnegie Deli, their clubhouse, where Herb Schlein, permanently concerned
Jewish mother and deli maître d’, lived in eager anticipation of the Bobby/Paddy/Herb lunch-hour invasion. It was the best part of his day, every day. He saved them white linen napkins. An undiscriminating collector of
Playbill
s, cast albums, and signed memorabilia, Schlein was the ultimate fan, two hundred and fifty smiling pounds of “What can I do for you great men of Broadway?” (And “How is Nicole?” And “How is your infection?”) “He knows every cockamamie show,”
Chayefsky said. “It’s his totally untarnished illusions about show business, which is the way I’d like to think of it but can’t.” Schlein made no secret of hating the deli. His dream was to work on a show. Acting, writing—anything. Pulling back a chair (“Do you mind if I sit?”), he’d tell about the time Kazan told him not to become an actor. Schlein knew he had a one-in-ten-billion shot, working his three-hundred-dollar-a-week job, living with his mother in Jersey, waiting for his SAG membership to come through. Fosse adored him. He identified with him.

Herbie guarded the trio’s table—in the back, to the left and against the wall—like the Secret Service guarded the Oval Office. The men had no need for menus. Bob sat facing the entrance so he could keep an eye on the door (he had been known to hide when journalists came in), and Paddy sat facing the kitchen, waiting for his fruit and coffee (or, when Herbie wasn’t watching him, pastrami). Fosse completed his first draft of the
Big Deal
script in June 1969 and gave it to Paddy for notes. “You would look over,”
Dan Siretta said, “and see pages being passed back and forth across the [deli] table.” Fosse would tell Paddy to take his best shot—and Paddy always took it. Where there was trust, they knew, bullshit had no power. “[Paddy’s] a very compassionate,
understanding man,” Fosse said. “And I don’t sense that he’s going to turn on me and call me a weakling or a coward ever, even though I may relate some feelings that are rather cowardly.” How many women could give him that? How many men? How many writers, directors, producers, and dancers would use Fosse to move up, as Fosse would be the first to admit he had used them? Many. But Chayefsky—who had nothing to gain from Fosse’s success or failure—was simply the realest man Fosse knew.

So when Paddy told Fosse
Big Deal
didn’t work, Fosse knew
Big Deal
didn’t work. Armed with a revised step outline (written for him by Chayefsky) and further notes from David Shaw and Bob Aurthur, Fosse started to revamp
Big Deal
in the summer of 1969. He took his manuscript to Amagansett, where he grilled and Ping-Ponged (openly cheating) with Neil Simon, but he couldn’t stop his mind from revisiting the failure of
Sweet Charity.
Aurthur recalled a day of waterskiing that was “marred only by Fosse’s depression.”
There was a time during the filming of
Charity
when Fosse had any number of offers. That time had passed.

It’s a great agent’s genius to see promise and then make opportunity where others would not even think to look, mixing ideas and personalities like a mad chemist hoping for a reaction. David Begelman was that kind of agent. By way of his CMA associate Sam Cohn, Begelman connected Fosse with playwright and screenwriter Steve Tesich and his script
The Eagle of Naptown.
Both won Fosse over. The script was about a working-class midwestern kid with Fosse’s ambition—although in this case that ambition was directed toward competitive bicycling instead of show business—and it could be financed, all told, for an amazing $800,000,
a figure Begelman marched over to United Artists president David Picker, hoping for a yes. But Picker passed, a blow, Begelman said, that reopened Fosse’s
Sweet Charity
wound.
Naptown
was turned down because of him, wasn’t it? (Ten years later, renamed
Breaking Away,
it would win Tesich an Oscar for best screenplay.)

Fosse was in awe of Tesich, a wistful, world-weary teddy bear, another writer to add to Fosse’s merry band of clown-scholars. “It’s a strange relationship, friendship,”
Tesich would say of their bond. “There is no ceremony that takes place which binds you. There are no vows taken. No birth certificate is issued when a friendship is born. There is nothing tangible. There is just a feeling that your life is different and that your capacity to love and care has miraculously been enlarged without any effort on your part.” No marriage would give Fosse that enlargement, that total acceptance. “It’s like having a tiny apartment
and somebody moves in with you,” Tesich added, “but instead of it becoming cramped and crowded the space expands and you discover rooms you never knew you had.” Prematurely, Fosse sent
Big Deal
to David Picker and waited an anxious two weeks—a bad sign—for feedback, then politely excused Picker from the movie. Fosse was so desperate to work he even
sent
Big Deal
to producer Ray Stark with a bury-the-hatchet note and assured him that if Stark didn’t see the script as a movie, it could easily be transferred to the stage. Nothing happened.

One night, Hal and Judy Prince invited
the Simons and the Fosses for dinner—their ancient feuds were long in the past—but Fosse came alone. The unspoken consensus was that the marriage was in trouble, but no one challenged Fosse’s explanation that Gwen was under the weather, and the party stayed off the subject for the evening. For Fosse’s sake, Simon and Prince also stayed off the subject of their careers, which, as everyone in the Broadway-speaking world knew, had soared as high as Fosse’s had fallen. That left little to discuss. The Simons said they were going to rent a place in Majorca that summer. Hard up for meaningful chitchat, the quintet regrouped for coffee in the living room and Hal Prince confessed he was about to begin rehearsal on
Company,
the new Sondheim musical, so he wouldn’t be directing the film of
Cabaret,
which Emanuel Wolf—

“The movie of
Cabaret
?” Bob said.

Prince had directed the show on Broadway in 1966. Fosse would not admit to liking
Cabaret,
but judging from Fosse’s later shows, and none more than
Chicago,
Prince’s
Cabaret
—from theme to music to stage sense—had made an impression on him. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories
and John Van Druten’s play
I Am a Camera,
an earlier adaptation of Isherwood,
Cabaret
was a good-time, bad-time Nazi vaudeville. A daring crossbreed of the twentieth century’s darkest hour and its lightest form of theater, musical comedy, the show’s ingenious conceit was largely an accident. After weeks of rehearsal, director Hal Prince found his intended musical—the story of Sally Bowles—seemed more like a musical
within
the vaudeville world established by the introductory “this is Berlin” songs (“
Willkommen, bienvenue,
welcome!”). “There were two musicals onstage,”
Prince said. “One took place in real rooms, one in limbo. And in limbo were these numbers which directly commented on the real book show happening upstage.” The limbo, overseen by Joel Grey’s Emcee, permitted
Cabaret
to be a musical comedy. Because he was removed from the story, the Emcee could lighten the mood with jokey up-tempo numbers without compromising the seriousness of the Nazi drama unfolding “outside,” in Berlin—or, for that matter, the real-life drama unfolding outside the Broadhurst Theater. “The first day of rehearsal,”
composer John Kander said, “Hal brought in a double-page spread from
Life
of a black couple entering a white housing development. The white crowd around them was jeering at them. He put it up on a bulletin board in the front of the room and said, ‘That’s what our show is about.’” It was also about the dangers of entertainment, show business as a metaphor for mass delusion. That Emcee was a kind of Hitler, and Sally Bowles, when she crossed the Mylar curtain that separated Berlin from the cabaret, chose show business instead of life. This Fosse could relate to.