Fosse (33 page)

After dinner that night, Prince told Fosse what he knew of the
Cabaret
movie plans. Emanuel L. Wolf at Allied Artists owned the rights and had partnered with Marty Baum at ABC Pictures. To produce, they brought on Cy Feuer, Fosse’s friend of many years. Liza Minnelli would star and Jay Presson Allen would write the script, but as of yet, no one had been signed to direct.

Fosse started calling,
pushing to meet with Feuer, which, oddly, Feuer seemed reluctant to do. Finally he agreed to meet Fosse for lunch.

Feuer had pasta;
Fosse had cigarettes.

I have to do it, Fosse told him.

“I have to see the other guys,” Feuer said. Big box-office names like Billy Wilder and Gene Kelly. “They expect it. If I don’t see them, I’ll seem unreasonable.

“But,” Feuer added, sounding sincere, “after I see them, I’ll tell Marty that I’ve talked to everyone and I want Fosse.”

Fosse kept looking for work.

He got a call from Sue Mengers
at CMA. A dumpling-shaped yenta in love with the underdog, Mengers had survived the Holocaust and the Bronx to become the funniest, toughest young agent in Hollywood. She called Larry Turman, an open-minded producer with a nice deal at Fox, and let him know Fosse was on the market. Turman didn’t need to be sold. “I always, always wanted to work with Fosse,” he said. “Even after
Sweet Charity
when he was persona non grata in Hollywood.” Turman had taken a chance on
The Graduate;
he had taken a chance on Noel Black, director of
Pretty Poison;
and he had taken a chance on Robert Marasco’s first screenplay, a wonky thriller called
Burnt Offerings
—he sent that script on to Fosse in New York. Fosse agreed to direct the movie and flew to LA as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Turman and Fosse worked in Turman’s office eight hours a day, every day, for two weeks. “Fosse was tenacious with the story,” Turman said. “He had steel in his backbone, but he actually had a soft demeanor. I used to kid him and say, ‘You’re a tough guy, huh?’ and he would sort of giggle like a kid.”
Burnt Offerings
—a nonmusical about a happy family and the haunted house that destroys them—was dark even for dark material. But the contrast to
Sweet Charity
enticed Fosse, as did the (low) proposed budget and
Burnt Offerings
’ central question: How much of a beating can a family withstand? On breaks, Fosse taught Turman how to skull, raising his hat with both hands and wiggling himself underneath it—an old burlesque trick used for comic emphasis, like a rim shot. “I loved the guy,” Turman said. “Everyone said he was dark, but I thought he was fun.” They settled on a summer 1970 shoot date, and Fosse took a trip up the California coast
to look for his haunted mansion. When Fosse returned to New York, he expected to meet with Marasco
for daily script discussions, but Marasco was devoted to his new play and slow to rewrite. Dissatisfied, Fosse let things fizzle from there.

Hastening the dissolution of Fosse’s interest in
Burnt Offerings,
the news came that Emanuel Wolf,
Cabaret
’s top-line producer, wanted to meet with Fosse. It looked like Feuer, true to his word, had indeed fought for him.

Cabaret
was Wolf’s second production as president and chairman of Allied Artists, a hand-to-mouth outfit with temporary office space in New York. When he heard Wolf had bought the
Cabaret
rights (for $1.5 million, the cost split with Marty Baum at ABC), Lew Wasserman told Wolf he was committing suicide. The failure of
Sweet Charity,
he explained, was not an isolated incident but part of a pattern that continued with
Paint Your Wagon
and
Star!,
flop musicals that spelled the end of the genre. And the end of Fosse. Wolf shrugged. “I knew the best time to get
a talented director,” he said, “was after a failure. Frank Perry [director of
Last Summer,
Allied’s first film] couldn’t get arrested when I hired him, but that’s how I knew he was going to give me everything, and he did.”

Fosse walked into Wolf’s office, his eyes on the floor, and extended his fingers for a limp handshake. He seemed angry. “We were Hollywood,” Wolf said, “and after what he had been through, I knew he must have hated Hollywood.” They got to talking, taking shots at Lew Wasserman, and soon Fosse warmed. “He told me Wasserman misled him on
Sweet Charity,
” Wolf said. “When he met Lew, Lew told him that he should spend as much as he needed, that he’d give Fosse everything. So Fosse thought when his time ran out he was following Lew’s directions.” They spoke for an hour and a half, each watching the other guy for tells. “I knew this is a guy with a major distrust of people,” Wolf said. “But I also knew he would go to any length he could to seek victory. I could see this was his life, and after
Sweet Charity
he was in a life-or-death situation.”

To ease his worry as he waited, Fosse choreographed a number for Gwen to do on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Through January 1970, he worked the way he usually did: at first, in three-hour shifts, from eleven to two or twelve to three, and then, as the air date drew near, every day from ten to six, a short break for dinner, and back to work from eight o’clock on into the night. To an observer, he would have appeared in a state of perfect and complete immersion, all parts of his body communing with each flash of his brain. Only Gwen, leading a group of six male dancers, could sense that his heart wasn’t in the room. He was a hamster on a wheel, rehearsing only to rehearse. “The worst tragedy can befall me
while I am rehearsing,” he said, “and I’ll still go on rehearsing.” And so “A Fine, Fine Day” became imitation Fosse, a soft assemblage of bowlers, back bumps, and snaps. There was no character observation, no satire, no invention, only a literal pantomiming of lyrics. But the indefatigable Gwen played along, smiling big.

They were in trouble. “I was living like a wife and a mother,”
she later said, “which was really what I wanted to be, but I was the wrong kind of wife for him. I think Bob outgrew me. Bob started writing and he was involved in all kinds of things, and I was so involved with Nicole I didn’t really care if I worked or not. I guess the hardest thing was I was honest with Bob and I admired him. I got sick of not being able to admire him. He began to think, ‘Oh, you’re my wife.’ I hated that.”

Soon thereafter, Fosse heard from Emanuel Wolf: Fosse would direct
Cabaret.
Production would begin the spring of the following year on location in Germany, and the money would be tight.
Cabaret
was to be a three-million-dollar picture, full stop. Fosse would get $125,000 for directing, $50,000 for choreography, and, to encourage a certain budgetary mindfulness, 7.5 percent of the profits. Wolf would stay in New York, but Feuer would accompany the production to Germany. To watch Fosse. To watch the money. “They
all
thought I could be controlled,”
Fosse said, “figuring I’d be too anxious after the failure of
Sweet Charity,
too scared to give anybody trouble. And I
was
scared.”

Sitting across from
Sam Clark and Marty Baum in the ABC offices, Fosse was as remote as he’d been at first with Wolf. “I’m here,” he mumbled to the floor. “What do you want?”

Though Wolf had spoken, the ABC executives wanted to hold their own interview. “I understand you want to do
Cabaret,
” one of the men said. “Why?”

There was a pause. “I think I can make a good movie out of it.”

The meeting inched along, neither side engaged. Finally, Fosse squeezed out a goodbye and left.

Baum turned to Clark. “We’re going into the toilet with this.”

A meeting of the
Cabaret
production team was set for January 20.
Fosse joined Kander and Ebb and Jay Allen in Feuer’s office for the customary get-acquainted exchange of big ideas, held mostly for Fosse’s benefit. He needed to be filled in. But Fosse didn’t like being filled in.
Cabaret
was his movie; he’d fill
them
in. “I didn’t find him the happiest
collaborator I ever had,” Allen said. “For a man who dealt with women as much as he was obliged to, let’s say he had an extremely parochial view of women.” Fosse summoned his opinion panel for backup. Opposing Allen’s approach to the script, both Neil Simon and Bob Aurthur gave Fosse the writerly ammo he needed to convince Feuer to spring for additional revisions. But Feuer wasn’t dissatisfied with Allen’s work, which dissatisfied Fosse even more, and so began—a full year before the first day of shooting—the old battle of “All you care about is money” versus “You do your job and I’ll do mine.” Wisely, the men tabled the tension, and in February, Wolf sent Feuer and Fosse on a research trip to Germany.

Munich, Hamburg, Berlin. Fosse was the bloodhound, sniffing here and there for locations, and Feuer held the leash. Too many yanks and the dog would growl; too few and Feuer would hear Emanuel Wolf growling all the way from New York. So it was that producer and director pulled each other around Germany in search of just the right castle, forest, and cobblestone street, acting like friends throughout.

Though hiring a European camera crew would have been the most cost-effective way to film the movie, Fosse was dead set on working with Robert Surtees, his
Charity
cameraman. Here Feuer tightened the leash. The issue of expenses aside, the producer felt Surtees had gone overboard on
Charity,
complicating the film with needless tricks and arty moonshine, and he asked Fosse to please consider some equally talented European cameramen, like Geoffrey Unsworth and Sven Nykvist. Fosse promised to keep an open mind, and Feuer agreed to do the same. “I lied,”
Feuer admitted later. “I firmly believe that there are show-business promises that have to be made—for the sake of a fragile ego or to prop up an unsteady state of mind—but that do not have to be kept.” Again, they tabled the tension and returned to New York.

The time had come for Fosse to meet his star. Liza Minnelli was working the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria, and she was working very hard. Wearing a fringed red-and-orange dress, she looked like she sounded, loud (too loud, the
New York Times
thought)
and a touch desperate, like Judy Garland, her mother. At twenty-three, Liza Minnelli was already a strange, spastic showbiz animal, a volcano of nerdy confidence. She wasn’t beautiful and she moved a little crazy, like a drunken elfin girl kept up past her bedtime to sing for her parents’ guests. “Hi, everyone!”—Liza had a big voice, one that conveyed the punishing truth about making entertainment: It was mean. It was messy. It was a C-section and she was both mother and baby. “It’s a long, hard battle,”
the
Times
wrote of her Empire act, “but she finally comes out ahead.” Every night was a massacre she didn’t always survive.

Fosse met Minnelli in the Waldorf
coffee shop after the show. “How do you feel about going topless?” he asked.

“I won’t do it.”

“What if the scene calls for it?”

“It can call another way. There’s always another way around, isn’t there?”

“All right,” he said. “I was just wondering.”

So there was the line. “I knew what he was doing and he knew what I was doing,” Minnelli said. She was not the sort of actress he could power into a corner.

Later that year, Fosse and Feuer returned to Europe to tie up
Cabaret
’s remaining loose ends. In London they met and cast Michael York; in Munich, Fosse oversaw sundry screen tests and dance auditions and dove deeper into research.
He read the memoir of Albert Speer, a first-person account of life in the Third Reich, and studied the German expressionist George Grosz,
carrying a catalog of his artwork with him from meeting to meeting and guarding it like the answers to a final exam. If Fosse had a cinematographer, he would use Grosz’s paintings to help him settle on some kind of lighting scheme, but the Surtees issue had stalled
the process. Over dinner one night at Fosse and Feuer’s hotel, Munich’s lavish Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, Feuer, worn down, sincerely vowed to fight Marty Baum for Surtees, reiterating his allegiance to Fosse. On that note, they said good night and made for their rooms, separated, Fosse soon discovered, by a very thin wall.

“No,” Fosse heard around midnight.
“I don’t want him. Marty, I don’t want to open that up again. I do not want Surtees on the picture.” Then: “Don’t worry. I can control him.”

Fosse listened to the entire phone call, transcribing as much as he could onto hotel stationery before calling Gwen in a fit of rage. What did she think? What should he do? She replied, simply, that he should do whatever he wanted.

Want? Fosse was persona non grata in the movie business. He
needed
the work.

He called Chayefsky in New York. Paddy told him, reasonably, “If you quit,
you don’t get paid, and they’ll give you a bad name. Stay and if they fire you you’ll be paid and they’ll call it ‘creative differences.’”

The next morning Fosse was still seething. He banged on Feuer’s hotel-room door, and when the door opened, Fosse raged at him. “I heard your whole fucking conversation with Baum last night. I heard it through the wall. You no-good son of a bitch.”

Feuer was in his bathrobe. He could see Fosse hadn’t slept.
His face was brittle white. “I never promised Surtees.”

“That’s a fucking lie. You’re a two-faced shit.”

Fosse accused Feuer of undermining him from the start, of betraying their years of friendship, of trying to use him for his choreography and then throwing him out as a director. It was hopeless. Feuer could do nothing but wait for Fosse to exhaust himself. “What do you want to do about it, Bob?”

“If you want me off the picture,” Fosse said, “you’re going to have to fire me.” Fosse held the beat, watching Feuer’s face show signs of pain.