Fosse (36 page)

“Tell me one thing you’ve done for me and this film,” Fosse demanded of the producer at one point, his voice loud enough for all to hear.

“I’ll tell you two, Bob. I hired you and so far I haven’t fired you.”

At Feuer’s insistence, they sent the film negative to LA for a second opinion. “Some television cameraman confirmed Cy’s fears the film was unviewable,” MacDonald said, and Fosse got phone calls from California. “What are you doing?” they howled. “If you use one more filter we’ll consider it an act of subordination!” (He did not stop using filters; in fact, he ordered stronger filters to block even more light.) One might imagine that the
Sweet Charity
debacle would make Fosse hedge his bets a little, but the scent of failure charged Fosse up, dared him to prove his opposition wrong. “All through the shooting,”
Michael York said, “there were guys in suits looking at their watches.” It fueled Fosse’s drive. “After a run-in with Feuer,”
MacDonald said, “you would see Bob slumped in a corner, like a boxer against the rope, thinking,
How do I get this guy? How much more of this shit do I have to take?
”

And the costumes: they weren’t dingy enough for Fosse. “I’m sure it was a miscommunication,”
Kathryn Doby said. “The designer, Charlotte Flemming, spoke almost no English and Bob spoke no German.” The same problem had come up with Irene Sharaff on
Sweet Charity,
but this time it would not be as easy to fix. Rifling through the German studio’s costume shops, Fosse and Minnelli (whose original costumes, she said, made her look like Joe Namath) soon realized they had been led to fakes. Still trying to bury evidence of war, the Germans had actually hidden their Nazi-era paraphernalia. “I asked for some real thirties clothes,”
Minnelli said, “slinky, no bra. I said, ‘It should look like before the war.’ And the Germans all said, ‘What war?’” With practically the whole country against him, Fosse would be hard-pressed to find period clothing, much less a Nazi armband, which shifted his movie a big step closer to bullshit musical, and a step closer to Cy Feuer. He called Gwen. She grabbed Nicole and got on a plane.

“Gwen came and literally went
to the junk shops and we all ended up with improvised things,” said Michael York. She hunted through antique shops in Paris; Gwen gave Liza Fosse’s vest to wear (without a shirt) in “Mein Herr,” her own green blouse for “Maybe This Time,” and her kimono to wear here and there. Gwen’s emergency rescue enhanced the communal, us-against-them mentality. The crew loved her. Faith—theirs in her, hers in them—was contagious.

And the dailies were sensational—or terrible, depending on one’s allegiance. Ordinarily, Fosse and Feuer sat at opposite sides of the screening room,
like planets in angry orbit around the same sun, each ringed by his own entourage. The one occasion Feuer decided to enter Fosse’s atmosphere, he sat down directly behind him in a seat regularly reserved for Peter MacDonald. Calmly, Fosse turned around and asked Feuer
to move. Feuer moved. But then he started holding screenings of his own, often before Fosse’s. Word of Feuer’s disgust with the film would arrive just in time for Fosse’s screening; some thought it was an attempt to further discourage the director and throw him off course. But if this was his plan, it didn’t work. There was too much going right to quibble about lighting. “Watching dailies,”
Michael York said, “you felt like a creative team. Some directors don’t let the actors in to dailies, but Fosse would insist. We would sit there and he would say, ‘That doesn’t work because . . .’ or ‘Now that’s better because . . .’” It was too soon to get excited, but they were, struck with that knock-wood feeling of having caught something maybe very good. Fosse was already referring to
Cabaret
as the first adult musical. He grew a goatee.

Good feeling spread. There were the Kit Kat girls, gigglingly, tipsy on wine, scotch, vodka, running out for a smoke (“By the end of the shooting day,”
Louise Quick said, “[they] were plastered”); there was Liza and her boyfriend, drummer Rex Kramer, playing badminton on a patch
of green outside stage 3; there was Joel Grey reminiscing all the way back to
Mickey Katz and Joe Frisco with Fosse, three inches of ash hanging from his smile. “Friday nights after shooting,”
Glattes said, “we’d have dinner in Munich and then eight o’clock or nine o’clock we’d meet at the top floor of Fosse’s hotel to play poker. It was me and Kathryn and Liza and Louise Quick and Bob.” Fosse was nuts about poker. “It would sometimes go on to five
or six in the morning,” Glattes said, “and people would do crazy things. [If you lost] you’d have to go out in the corridor of the hotel and go to Joel Grey’s apartment and scream at the door or say something dirty at Michael York’s apartment or pour a cold bucket of water on yourself.” Fosse loved what gambling did to people. He loved to watch risk exposing raw nerves, true selves. Poker was, like drugs and sex, a steadfast bullshit destroyer, and, with girls present, flirty as hell.

There was one girl in particular. Fosse had met Ilse Schwarzwald months earlier, during preproduction at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, site of the Feuer blowup. She was there as an interpreter, translating for Fosse and the German designer he was interviewing with only one ear. “Ilse was a lovely lady,”
said Peter MacDonald. “She was one of the most beautiful people, aesthetically and as a person.” Fosse and Schwarzwald’s romance extended into production and grew even stronger. “It was as if he lived
in some other category of ethical accountability,” Feuer observed. Fosse promoted her to production secretary.

At first, the affair was known to only a few: Fosse pals and those in Ilse’s small network, like Peter MacDonald, who had worked with her before.

“Do you think Bobby’s gay?”
Geoffrey Unsworth asked MacDonald early on.

“If he is,” MacDonald said, “he’s hiding it very well.”

Word got around and many observed how much Ilse looked like Gwen. By the time Gwen arrived, costumes in hand and crisis averted, the comparison had been made by virtually everyone; Fosse and Ilse were quite publicly and comfortably in love. He should have known better. Back home, in the States, there were rules for breaking the rules. After suffering through a decade of Fosse’s infidelity, Gwen must have felt that grace was the only vestige of couplehood (outside the work) left of the marriage. But the care Fosse took in New York to shield his wife from his latest fling evaporated in Germany. And this relationship—as they all saw—was hardly a fling.

The last thing Gwen needed—a note from Ilse’s husband telling all—she got.

“She was angry, no?”
Ilse asked when Bob told her what had happened.

“No,” Bob said. “She wasn’t angry. She was just sarcastic.”

To the amazement of the crew, Gwen stayed in Munich even after she got the letter, continuing to work here and there on clothes and makeup, smiling her trademark grin. Business as usual was its own retaliation, confirming to the gossip machine that Fosse and Verdon’s commitment to each other, to the
work,
went deeper than sex and bad behavior. She could not show her suffering; if people thought she suffered, they might think he did not love her, and she would lose her title as Fosse’s queen. So better to stiffen and stay strong. There was dignity in transcendence. For a time.

Ilse, meanwhile, did Fosse’s spying.
One day, double-crossing Feuer, she warned MacDonald to stay alert: Feuer was planning to confiscate the light filters.

Five minutes later, as MacDonald was talking to Unsworth, Feuer appeared.

“Hand them over.”

“Over there.” MacDonald nodded to a box on the floor.

Without speaking, Feuer went through the box and then happily strode off with it.

Unsworth looked at MacDonald. “What the fuck was that?”

“Decoys.”

“Ah.”

In Feuer’s defense, he had received a warning of his own. According to
Cabaret
’s insurers, the production was headed into dangerous overages.

“Bob,” Feuer said.
“We’re running out of money. We have to finish on schedule.”

“What happens if we don’t?”

“They’ll close us down. They’ll make their own movie.”

Neither spoke for a moment.

Then Feuer: “We have to take two days off the schedule.”

“No.”

“Bob, we
have
to.”

“No!”

Furious, Fosse wrote a letter
to Ernie Martin, Feuer’s proxy in absentia, begging to be understood. First of all, he was not accountable for overages that, he claimed, he never authorized. Second, any so-called mismanagement of time was the byproduct of Jay Allen’s inadequate screenplay, which had been Feuer’s to oversee, not Fosse’s. Finally, rather than recrimination, Fosse deserved thanks for keeping his personal expenses down and bringing Gwen in to work for free.

Adding to his insurance headache, the “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” gorilla costume the studio had provided was, bafflingly, made of dark blue velour.
Fosse had rejected it on sight, delaying the number as long as he possibly could to buy more time to get a better costume, but now, toward the end of the shoot, with pages flying off the calendar faster than ever, he had finally run out of options—and so had Charlotte Flemming, the costume designer. “He’s impossible,” she complained
to Gwen. But she didn’t know Gwen Verdon. “If the man wants a gorilla,” was Verdon’s reply, “then
get
a gorilla.” Gwen flew to New York, to Brooks Costume, handpicked a real gorilla costume, and flew back, holding the head on her lap from JFK to Munich.

Then it happened. “She walked in on him,”
a friend said. “He was with a couple German girls, and that was it for her. That was the last straw.”

Fosse got her letter in Berlin,
where
Cabaret
had moved for the end of location photography. It said
separation.

The evening before
Cabaret
wrapped,
Fosse threw a small dinner party to honor his allies. It was a terrific evening, sad and full of enervated good feeling, and near the meal’s end the host took the floor. “Now that I bought you all dinner,”
he declared, “I want you to all make big speeches about me, telling me how wonderful you think I am.” If there was irony in this proposition, his guests missed it. Choosing not to recognize their embarrassed faces, Fosse went around the table, pulling out answers one by one. Michael York attempted very graciously
to come up with something on the spot, and a baffled Peter MacDonald tried a curve ball. Standing tall, he looked Fosse in the eye. “If you don’t know what I fucking think
about you now, Bob, I feel sorry for you.”

With money tight and relations soured, the rumor that production hadn’t sprung for a wrap party occasioned an improvised get-together at the foot of the Berlin Wall. Someone found a tiny, ugly bar. Someone else turned up with meats and cheeses from a deli around the corner. Liza got up on the table to sing. “It was glorious,”
Peter MacDonald said, “probably the best wrap party we’d ever been to. And then to walk out at six or seven o’clock in the morning and see the streets of Berlin being washed down and first light coming up . . . it seemed the perfect way to finish the film.”

Fosse was now an exile. Tax restrictions forced him to leave Germany; emotional restrictions blocked him from New York. It was too early to face Gwen.

Ilse seemed his best next move. Leaping headfirst into romance, the two flew to Madrid for what turned out to be a weeklong reenactment of the last shot of
The Graduate.
In the Spanish light of day, Ilse, no matter how lovely, could not fill the vacuum
Gwen had left. He worried about Nicole; if he wasn’t there for her now, she might feel he had left her too.

Had he made a mistake? (A terrible mistake?)

He called Gwen.
They decided to join Neil and Joan Simon at their rented villa in Majorca, and perhaps even reconcile.

The villa turned out to be an estate
overlooking a cliffy chunk of Pollensa, a coastal region on the northern corner of the island. Fosse and Verdon had all the room they needed to stroll, together and alone, through the garden tangle around the pool, or they could take a short walk behind the villa to the ruins of a Roman aqueduct, the perfect backdrop for the last act of their two-person opera. It was so hot that summer, Neil Simon said, his typewriter keys stuck to the page.

The opera ended sooner than anyone had expected. With nothing left to discuss, Fosse and Verdon said their goodbyes to the Simons, and to each other, and left. She for Nicole, he for Ilse.

And she took him back.
As planned, they returned to Berlin for reshoots and pickups, the miscellaneous pieces
Cabaret
needed in order to hang together. By then, Geoffrey Unsworth had moved on to another film, so Peter MacDonald took his place behind the camera.

“Don’t think you’re going to get
lots of money for this,” Feuer told him.

“Cy, for Fosse I’d do it for nothing.”

Liza Minnelli felt the same. Though she wasn’t needed on camera (Louise Quick was acting as her stand-in), Minnelli loved the production too much to go home and refused even to leave the set. “I’m in the camera department!”
she squealed, clapperboard in hand. “Liza was in heaven,”
MacDonald said. “She said she wanted to work every day on this film for the rest of her life.” Fosse too, but he couldn’t put off New York any longer. His film’s editor, David Bretherton, and his daughter needed him.

When Fosse returned home, he was shocked
to discover Bretherton had spent the previous three weeks preparing a rough cut of the film without any input from him. This was common practice in movies, but to Fosse, who had barely communicated with his editor during production, it was like someone had broken into his house and turned over the furniture.

“Well,” Fosse said,
“we’d better look at this stuff.”

As if he wanted to situate himself to flee in case of emergency, Fosse sat in the last row. Bretherton, adjusting to his mood, gave him space. He sat with his assistant, David Ramirez, way down in the front.

They ran the picture.

Afterward, nearly four hours later, Fosse stood up. “My God,” he said, “I feel sick,” and he left the room.