Fosse (37 page)

Then he left the building.

Bretherton turned to Ramirez. “I must have really screwed up.”

The next morning, Bretherton came back to the cutting room. He wasn’t sure if he’d been fired, so he waited, thinking back over the previous day’s events, not knowing where else to go.

Then Fosse appeared. “I didn’t mean to say that,” he said. “I’m sorry. Can we run it again?”

This time Fosse had questions: Why did Bretherton use these particular takes? Why weren’t the dancers on the beat?

“Because,” Bretherton said, “the script says it’s that kind of nightclub.” As in schlocky, third-rate; he had added the missteps on purpose.

This had to change. “The most important thing to me as choreographer,” Fosse explained, “is for
that
toe to hit
that
floor at
that particular
split second.” Bretherton took the note and recut the number, recut
all
numbers, correcting the intentional missteps.

Fosse loved watching him work. Streaming film through the smoky air, Bretherton cut with his whole body, throwing himself onto the splicer then whipping himself back, splicing and taping to an unheard beat, reaching up for a filmstrip and driving it down to the Moviola as he drifted the excised strip into the clipping bin above him, then swooping down again with yet another, and on and on through lunch and dinner and cartons of Camels, watching and rewatching take A against take F, breaking down take C into subsections one, two, and three, and comparing the feel of ba-ta-da-
dee
to ba-ta-da-
dum.

Then Fosse stepped out. “He paced like a panther
outside the editing room door,” Bretherton said, “and wouldn’t come in, even when invited.” What now?

For three weeks, Fosse stayed out there in the hall. Bretherton, who had no idea what was happening, pressed on as best he could, but a week later he finally had to beg Fosse to join him. “I’m fiddling with three or four pieces of film,” he said, “and I need you to make a quick decision.”

Fosse paused outside the door. “Can I tell you something?”

Bretherton swallowed.

“I can’t sit.”

“What?”

“I have the worst case of hemorrhoids anyone ever had.”

That got them both laughing and Fosse came back in.

Watching his director learn to edit, Bretherton was simply amazed at what he saw. Where many worked cut to cut, one deliberate piece at a time, Fosse had an automatic feel for movement and rhythm that gave him mental flickers of whole sequences, like a chess master sees checkmate long before it comes. And having shot certain numbers from as many as five angles, Fosse had provided them with a wealth of variations on every turn. Most musicals favored cuts continuous with the number, staying inside the performance as if the world outside had vanished, but Fosse and Bretherton began to see they could cut away from the number, keeping the outside reality alive, and then jump back into the number without disrupting the flow. This technique, they found, tripled the impact, made the numbers seem more natural, as if they were really happening; it allowed them to embellish the rhythm with a turn of a head or the wink of an eye and provided them with a means of commenting, by way of juxtaposition, on the number, the outside world, or both.

They caught fire. First they would cut the number the classical way, straight through, without interruption. Then they would go back and look for creative opportunities, the sort Fosse could see coming. “Every cut you make changes another
cut,” Bretherton said. “Then all of a sudden this opens up a new way of doing something. [Working with Fosse] I learned that nothing is impossible.” Dancers’ bones broke, but celluloid did not protest. It only performed. Here in the cutting room, Fosse could realize his dream of total and precise control of every stage element, toe tap, and facial expression. Nothing fought him. The world of machines rendered thought and action nearly identical, and Fosse could finally move at the perfect speed of amphetamines. He was free.

Elsewhere in his life, he was trapped. Moving into the Hyde Park Hotel with Ilse, across the park from his old home, where his daughter lived (without him), had backed Fosse into a familiar corner. How to keep his women—for their protection and for his—separate and content? Ordinarily, he’d have the number all worked out in advance, but this time was different. This time one of those women was Nicole. She was only eight.

Fosse was lying to her about Ilse. He asked Ilse never to answer
the phone, just in case it was Nicole calling. Nicole, he told Ilse,
was the most important thing in his life. Then he added, “With work,” and then, smiling, “and you—maybe.” But the few afternoons Fosse had with his daughter brought him more pain than relief. Where once he had auditioned for the role of good father, a lead, now he would take anything, a place in her chorus even, just to be near her.

Janice Lynde soothed him.
A twenty-two-year-old Texas beauty with the wholesome look Fosse couldn’t resist, Janice was understudying the role of Eve Harrington in
Applause,
her first Broadway show. They had met before he took off for Germany, backstage at the Palace after her opening night.

“You’re so tall,” he said.

“Well, you’re so short.”

She had a pillow voice. It said
I can take care of you tonight.

Fosse told her he wanted to put her in a movie, something he was working on with Herb Gardner. Friends who knew Fosse advised Janice to be careful, that he was not on the market, that he would say lovely things and then he would hurt her; Janice assured them she could take care of herself. “I wanted a career and work,” she said, “so getting involved with Bob was no problem for me. I wasn’t going to be his girlfriend.”

That was fine for Fosse; in fact, it was better. “Unfortunately,” he confessed, “and I’ll never know why, I can’t be a faithful husband or lover, but I can be a helpful one.”

They would stick to show business.

Out at night, she could feel him looking at her hands. “Sometimes he’d watch me,” she said, “and later he’d say, ‘That was interesting, the way you put your hand on the table.’ Or we’d go for a drink and he’d say, ‘What if you lean your body and you put one leg up over here?’ I’d start laughing and he’d go, ‘What’s so funny?’ It was
all
work.
I
was work. He was looking at me through the lens, picking shots like he was directing.” It was his only consistent indication of love, the attention he paid her in the form of work.

For months, they walked the goose-bumpy line between closeness and intimacy, work and more than work, occasionally crossing over and then stepping back. Was it a ploy, his little-boy look when she turned him down, or did he actually
feel
that small? He must have known what he was doing to her, having done this kind of thing so many times before. He must have known she wanted him to keep trying, that when she held her hand out to stop him, she hoped he’d take it. “I always knew, we both knew, it could never be a just-you-just-me commitment,” Lynde said. “But there were spurts of things.” It would be difficult to say who was leading.

“Good night, Bobby.”

“Janice . . . come on, Janice . . .”

“I’m sorry, Bobby, no. I can’t.” She kissed him and walked off toward her building. “Good
night,
Bobby.”

“You know,” he called after her, “you seem very sophisticated but really you’re very middle-class.”

He had made this sort of remark before. It was meant to hurt.

Inside her apartment, she cried. There was no way for her to know that Bob Fosse, who seemed to her the apex of sophistication, with his black uniform and Tony Awards, was himself uncomfortable, even afraid, of the sexual excesses he was so drawn to. “I remember him saying it was
wrong that in Europe men and women could be naked together on the beach,” Ann Reinking said. “I thought, for him, that was an odd thing to say.” He could be middle-class too.

Covetous of virtue but obsessed with corruption, Fosse was unsure where to place Janice or even himself on the sin spectrum, wanting so much to test her “goodness” against his “badness” and discover, definitively, what color they shone in the dark. “He took me to these strip clubs,”
Janice said. “Some of them were still doing the old-fashioned striptease he liked, some of them were becoming more go-go kind of places. I was afraid, but he was fascinated. He said the strippers he grew up with could be very motherly to him, and a couple of them really took him under their wing sexually and taught him a lot, how to be a good lover. But he also said they teased him and hurt him before he went up onstage.” The contamination of innocence had obsessed Fosse since “Whatever Lola Wants,” when first he stained Gwen Verdon with his touch of vice that he then spread through
Sweet Charity
and
Cabaret
.

Fosse and Janice were both night people, both talkers. “Mostly, he worried about Nicole,” she said. “He worried that he was going to give her a cynical view of men, and that it would hurt her.” He seemed more and more breakable every hour they stayed awake. “When he was working, when he was passionate, the adrenaline would kick in and he’d be fine,” she said, “he’d be naturally up. But at nights the darkness would take him. You know how in movies when they put dark contacts over people’s whole eye? That’s how Bob would look to me. Like there was no one out front.”

Sex and work, Lynde found, could restore him. “A lot of the time sexuality would relieve some of that darkness. It was like medication for him. Talking about working and working helped him to feel okay too, but he had a hard time following through. The Dexedrine made him feel like he could put his ideas into action. He would say, ‘I have to be totally passionate or I don’t want to go to work.’ That’s why he envied Sidney Lumet. He said Lumet was a real craftsman, that he could do every film they offered him whether he felt he could do it or not. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t, but [Lumet] would always do it. Bob wanted to be that way. He wanted to be a craftsman for whom the work was easy and who could fly from project to project without too much worry of flop or hit, bad or good.”

The more they saw of each other, the more anguished she became about their relationship, whatever it was. Janice knew about Ilse; he had volunteered all that. But had he told her to protect her, or to absolve himself?

“Dance for me,” he said. “I want to see you dance.”

They were up late again, drinking too much.

“If you choreograph it, then I’ll dance it.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I want to see how you move without being told anything.”

Having learned from
Sweet Charity
that no career, no matter how good it looked, was ever secure and no production was a sure thing, Fosse scoured New York for his next project—or, rather, projects. He cast as wide a net as possible, spread himself all over the map, reading film scripts, TV scripts, and new musicals with the preemptive urgency of a nervous creature busily hoarding for winter. It was both inauspiciously timed, then, and very interesting that David Begelman told Fosse he was
leaving CMA’s New York office for the LA bureau. It was inauspiciously timed because trusting new agents was among the few talents Fosse did not possess. It was very interesting because stepping in for Begelman was Sam Cohn.

Sam Cohn was on his way to being the best agent in New York. The funny thing about Cohn—one of the funny things—was that he didn’t think-Yiddish-dress-British, like Begelman, who reportedly kept a closet full of one hundred identical (numbered)
black ties. He was more like a schlepster librarian in his old khakis, oversize sweaters (often stained, often torn), white gym socks, and loafers, their gold buckles sliced off so no one would know they were from Gucci. The whole package said
I don’t bullshit; I’m not one of them.
“The shibboleth,”
Cohn explained, in his Princeton-and-Yale accent, “the image of agents, is something that frankly bothers me.” He despised Los Angeles. When he had to go, he flew there and back in the same day.

At his peak, Sam Cohn saw
at least five hundred movies and seventy-five plays a year. He had three assistants (phone, schedule, filing). He had a private bathroom so when he was forced to leave his desk, he didn’t have to lose time mingling with others on his way to the “people other than Sam” bathroom out there in the office. Time was a problem. Cohn was rarely on time. “Sam,” his client Herb Gardner
said to him, “you’re doomed to live in the present.” Cohn’s present could last a long time. His day started late, with the papers, as many as his short attention span would allow. He read them on his way to morning therapy and on his way from therapy to ICM at 40 West Fifty-Seventh Street, where he tossed them away to free up his hands—one to pitch his jacket to an assistant, the other to take the box-office figures she handed him, which he read on his way to his office, an organized mess with a view of Central Park he never had time to enjoy. By then it was almost lunch.

Lunch was generally at the Russian Tea Room, a short walk from his office, where the management kept a booth for him: the first one on the right, just beyond the bar, visible to all who walked in. And everyone walked in, many with the intention of “accidentally” running into Sam, which slowed him down even more. But he made up for lost time in the deal, whose terms he laid out as plainly as a menu (“Take it or leave it, but you really should take it”—and they took it). Eating at the Russian Tea Room was like speed-dating. In a short time, in a small space, Cohn got everyone in, and then he got out in time to get back to his desk as the West Coast woke up. He’d sit there talking on the phone with one arm slung over his head and both eyes closed, as if inspired. He’d be there all day. On the phone.

Sam Cohn’s phone was legend. It rang as often as 200 times a day. On his record-breaking busiest day, Cohn hit 353. The intercom slowed him down, so Cohn shouted for his messages.

“Who is it?”

“
It’s Woody!”

“Put him on!”

Cohn didn’t take all the calls; with that kind of volume, he simply couldn’t. Many clients joked they needed an agent to get in touch with their agent. (“I would call up pretending to be Fosse,” Cohn’s client Paul Mazursky said, “just to get Cohn on the phone.”) Thus the widespread “running into” Sam at the Russian Tea Room. Some would attempt to bribe the maître d’ to be seated beside him. Once, a client sent a dime to Cohn’s booth with the note reading
Please call me.
Another wrote his own obituary and sent it to the office just to get a reaction. “I have a neurotic response
to some people,” Cohn admitted, “and I find it very hard to call.”