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Authors: Sam Wasson

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The Riff Brothers, Charles and Bob, on the
Morris B. Sachs Amateur Hour,
1940.

Courtesy of Charles Grass

 

Bob Fosse—professional, but not yet ready for sex—around the time he started playing Chicago’s strip circuit. “I think Bob protected his mother from the fact that she hadn’t been able to protect him,” Ann Reinking said. “He didn’t want to risk hurting her, but he needed to tell it, to talk about it, so it kept creeping out in his work.”

Photofest

 

Weaver’s class of 1944. Charles Grass on left; Fosse on right; Beth Kellough, a crush, to Fosse’s immediate right.

Courtesy of Beth Kellough

 

Fosse and Mary-Ann Niles in the national tour of
Call Me Mister,
1946. They met shortly before this picture was taken and married shortly thereafter.

Photofest

 

Joan McCracken in
Dance Me a Song,
where she met and fell in love with Fosse in January 1950.

Historic Images

 

Fosse, Stanley Donen, and Debbie Reynolds rehearsing
Give a Girl a Break.
“During rehearsals,” Reynolds wrote, “Bobby, who was so in love with his own well-endowed self, would come up behind me and press his ‘gift’ into my backside to tease me.” Reynolds bought him a jockstrap.

MGM

 

The “Alley Dance” from
My Sister Eileen,
danced, choreographed, and directed by Bob Fosse, waged jazzy pointillism against Broadway-big, inwardness against exuberance, Bob Fosse against Tommy Rall, for Fosse’s greatest performance on film until “Snake in the Grass” in
The Little Prince.

Columbia Pictures

 

Gwen Verdon acing “Whatever Lola Wants” from
Damn Yankees,
simultaneously dancing, acting, and singing where most could only hope to alternate between them.

Photofest

 

Fosse as Joey Evans in
Pal Joey,
City Center, 1958, with Billie Mahoney.

Courtesy of Billie Mahoney

 

A precious glimpse of
Pleasures and Palaces,
which closed out of town in 1965.

Corbis/Bettmann

 

Gwen Verdon in the “Pickpocket Tango” from
Redhead,
her favorite show and Fosse’s first as director/choreographer. His thing for bad girls on a line would rear up five years later in
Sweet Charity
’s “Big Spender,” and then again, behind bars once more, in
Chicago’s
“Cell Block Tango.”

Photofest

 

This is how it looks when Paddy Chayefsky has something to say. (With Gwen and Bob.)

Photofest

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