Fosse (38 page)

Most nights Cohn stayed at the office until curtain time. He decried the weakness of people who ate dinner at six, so he ate after the show—and there was always a show (
Dirty Harry,
or an oboe concerto, or, most often, the play or movie of a client). Dinner was most often at Wally’s (steak, wine), where Cohn’s photo hung above the coatroom doorway. Around midnight, he would return home to 25 Central Park West, where he lived, a fifteen-minute walk from the office. There he read—his clients’ work. “Unless it was extremely urgent,”
said his associate Arlene Donovan, “Sam would never read in the office.” There wasn’t time.

Also, he ate paper. Script corners, napkins, checks, matchbooks, menus. Black carbon got all over his teeth. “He was supposed to meet me [once],”
Donovan said, “but he got lost because he ate the directions.” He ate paper absent-mindedly, as a smoker might reach for a cigarette. It didn’t matter who saw him. “He seemed totally oblivious
to the fact that someone might find it strange,” writer Teresa Carpenter said.

“You remember that deal we made?”
Cohn once asked producer Alan Ladd Jr. an hour after their lunch.

“Of course I do.”

“What was it?”

Ladd paused. “You ate the deal?”

“I’m sorry.”

Screwing the other guy held no appeal for Cohn. Moreover, it was bad business in those days. “It’s a very small group of people,”
Cohn said of his kingdom, “and we can’t afford to euchre each other too badly.” A certain geographical intimacy (midtown, mostly) channeled the competition into close quarters, forcing show-business professionals to embrace neighborliness and even fraternity, like immigrants in steerage. “The different disciplines exist within
twelve blocks of one another,” he said. “One can literally go in a direct line almost from my office to Bantam Books, to United Artists, to the Shubert Theater. And, if you wanted to, you could stop by CBS or ABC on the way and you wouldn’t even have to take a cab.” That didn’t shake the dirt off every rat, but it did encourage respect, and on both sides of the table. The goal was not the big deal (as it would be in the 1980s) but the
right
deal, and in Cohn’s case, very little dealing was necessary; Liza, Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet—his clients sold themselves. “Sam loved talent so much,”
Ladd said, “he would be pushing clients he didn’t even represent anymore.”

“His clients,”
said Cohn’s daughter, Marya. “They were his family.” And none more so than Steve Tesich, screenwriter of
Breaking Away.
He was with Cohn at the theater or at Wally’s almost every night of the week. Fosse was there too. “Sam was just overwhelmed by
Fosse’s talent,” Donovan said. “He thought Fosse was one of the most talented people he had ever come across. He worshipped him.” The feeling was mutual. Cohn’s professorial manner and vehement anti-Hollywoodism earned him Fosse’s respect, but it was Cohn’s spectacular faith in Fosse that won him his client’s devotion. “Those guys had a true guy-code
friendship,” assistant Susan Anderson said. Cohn introduced Fosse to the writers Peter Maas and E. L. Doctorow, and, along with Tesich and Peter Stone (all Cohn clients), they joined Fosse’s buddy brigade with Paddy and Herb, Falstaffs every one, with heavy undertones of Hamlet. Fosse put them—his (mostly Jewish) intellectuals—on a pedestal. “But Bobby is an extremely intelligent man,”
Cohn said, “though his pose is to be non-intellectual. He claims he doesn’t know some of the big words Paddy uses, but I think that’s a pretense. Bob would like you to think, for some obscure reason, that he’s still a gypsy, a vaudeville hoofer.” Cohn hung all their photos on his office wall. There were no pictures of his children.
“Family dinners?” Cohn once asked
a friend. “Who wants to go to
that?
” (Then, reconsidering: “What’s that like?”)

For the select few, Cohn’s office couch was always open. Clients Robert Altman and John Guare came by for backgammon, Tesich to talk through an idea. Most called in advance. Fosse just appeared. “At any time of day,”
Anderson said, “Bobby would walk in laughing.” If Cohn was on a call, Fosse would let himself in, get comfortable on the couch, and try to get Sam to break up. He’d mimic the way he sat, mimic his voice. “Susaaaaaaaan, would you get me—” “Susaaaaaaaan, would you get me—” He gave Cohn a telescope to put by his window, the joke being that Sam Cohn had no use for it. What did he care about the outside? One evening, with her boss away, Susan Anderson peeked through the lens,
which had been turned north, toward Fosse’s apartment a few blocks away. She caught Fosse standing behind his own telescope looking back at her. Then the phone rang in Cohn’s office.

“Hello?”

“This is Bob Fosse. I’m a client of Mr. Cohn’s. Is he in?”

Anderson laughed. “Mr. Cohn is out right now. May I have him call you in a bit?”

In the midst of cutting
Cabaret,
Fosse told Sam about an idea
he had had in Germany. Watching Liza work, hard, Fosse thought of filming the making and performance of a Liza Minnelli concert for television. It would not be a canned, airless affair in the manner of most television specials (which were usually filmed at a private studio, with a limited audience, with time for retakes) but a
cinematic
stage performance, perhaps supported by interstitial interviews with Minnelli herself, backstage and in the wings, as she prepared for and recovered from her big night. As he wrote in his proposal, Fosse imagined an entertainment about the “joy, fear, anxiety, and eventual gratification” of making entertainment, a show about putting on a show. The results would be both a concert film and a documentary look at the nerve and exertion of one of the world’s most entrenched representatives of show business, a fusion of razzle-dazzle and (razzle-dazzle’s sometime opposite) live truth. Fosse would direct and choreograph; Kander and Ebb would oversee the production and contribute songs; and NBC would air the one-hour special the following year, in September 1972. If
Cabaret,
scheduled to open months prior, made Minnelli a movie star (as Cohn, Chayefsky, Gardner, and Fosse suspected it might), then
Liza with a Z
—a singing, dancing, confessional close-up—could promote her to phenomenon.

Amid the highs and lows of his separation, the black-and-blues of seeing Nicole, the neither-here-nor-there of his thing with Janice, Fosse sent Ilse back home,
moved into a one-bedroom apartment formerly occupied by Begelman on West Fifty-Eighth Street, and threw himself into
Cabaret
for the final stretch. “Fellas, this is much too long,”
Wolf said after the lights came up on a rough cut one hot day in July. “I need a picture of two hours.” But Fosse was reluctant to cut anything, not because he thought he had a masterpiece, but because the longer he was in the cage with a movie, the more he convinced himself he had already failed. “There’s a certain amount of self-delusion
that has to go on,” he said. “You
think
you did this scene very well and you
think
you got the most out of the actor and you
think
you shot it well and three months later you see you really messed it up.” Thus Bob Fosse would follow movie with show, Broadway with Hollywood. “Bob would do a movie,”
his assistant director Wolfgang Glattes said, “get disappointed and scared, then go back to the theater.” Nothing was a sure thing, but the record showed he had far more success on the stage than on the screen, making Broadway a sort of safety net under Fosse’s Hollywood tightrope, insuring him against the likelihood of oncoming failure. Following
Cabaret
with
Liza with a Z,
and then
Liza with a Z
with a new Broadway musical, he would buy himself insurance across three media. But what, he asked Cohn and company, should that new musical be?

In the years since the 1966–1967 Broadway season—the last time a new Fosse work had been onstage—Broadway had begun to show signs of a nervous breakdown. The late 1960s crises of race, war, sex, and national pride put traditional ideas of entertainment out to pasture, leaving Broadway to crawl, and sometimes plummet, toward new meaning and purpose. The year of
Cabaret
was also the year of
The Homecoming,
A Delicate Balance,
The Killing of Sister George,
and
Little Murders;
that year, comedy—ashamed of having a good time in a bad world—commingled so successfully with horror, it seemed inappropriate to laugh out loud. And everything seemed to
mean
something. Even in the most grotesque comedies, the suggestion of allegory kept the misery relatable. The breakdown cranked up a notch the following season, as
After the Rain,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
and
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
(as well as the American premiere of
Exit the King
) added meta-theatricality to the hysterical pitch-blackness. “Now, serious theater must
accomplish two things,” Edward Albee said in 1966. “The serious play has got to say something about the nature of the play as an art form itself; it has got to try to advance, to change that art form. It must also try to change the spectator in some fashion; alter his point of view, his view of reality, his view of the theater.” So actors ran down aisles, characters marched to the lip of the stage and harassed real-life people in the front row, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern realized they were fictional. Putting on a “show,” the Broadway play of the late sixties confronted audiences with the conceptual illusions at large in the real world.

But what did that mean for the musical, obligated to contain song and dance and too expensive to shrug off popular tastes completely? The legit Broadway revolution arrived late (with the notable exception of Hal Prince’s
Cabaret
) to George Abbott country. Before Fosse was offered the film of
Sweet Charity,
he momentarily considered
Promises, Promises,
a musical made from Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment,
and an adaptation of Fellini’s
La Strada,
perhaps with Juliet Prowse in the Giulietta Masina part. For both projects, he would have been too late. Case in point: his film of
Sweet Charity,
which opened a year after—though it seemed a generation before—
Hair.

Hair
was a landmark musical, Fosse thought,
third in a triumvirate that began for him with
Oklahoma!
and
West Side Story.
Sex, drugs, and soft rock and roll,
Hair
was a counterculture parade of kid id—either chic or radical chic, depending on where one had drinks after the show. Containing none of the formal ingenuity of
Oklahoma!
or
West Side Story,
Hair
came complete with full-frontal nudity, a racially expansive cast, and an open invitation to a be-in at the show’s end. Maybe these were all tricks, but who else was doing them? (Soon, everyone.) “I took somebody to an experimental
play recently,” said Sondheim in 1970, “and at the end of the first act we had witnessed about six rapes, seven murders, and a good deal of homosexuality and matricide. . . . And I said to my friend, ‘Why is it so dull?’ He said, ‘Because there’s no surprise.’” Even the giants had run out of good bad ideas. While Albee, the Ernst Lubitsch of bad feelings, did to happy families what
Oh! Calcutta!
did to pants, Neil Simon, Broadway comedy’s Babe Ruth, fell fast and far, tumbling from
Plaza Suite
and
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
to the alcoholism of
The Gingerbread Lady
and the literal nervous breakdown of
The Prisoner of Second Avenue.
The musical tried rock, and stagnated. To really evolve, a form needs more time, or a genius.

In the case of Stephen Sondheim, the form had a genius. In the case of
Company
—music and lyrics by Sondheim, directed by Hal Prince, set design by Boris Aronson, choreography by Michael Bennett—a coven of geniuses. Described by Sondheim as a show about “the challenge of maintaining relationships
in a society becoming increasingly depersonalized,”
Company
reconfigured what had been the musical’s basic DNA: advancing story through songs. This show went for theme. Given that it had virtually no plot—audiences watched as Bobby talked to friends, pondered his relationships, and so forth—
Company
’s episodic structure, fractured in spiritual accord with the theme of depersonalization, tossed out another musical gene: linearity. Yes, time; broken by loose chronology and Aronson’s cubist designs (where are we?), one had to wonder: Was
Company
unfolding in Bobby’s brain?

Follies
was—well, not in Bobby’s brain, but certainly in someone’s, or in
something’s,
unconscious, though precisely how much was difficult to say. The point was the breakdown of the American musical was finally happening. On April 4, 1971, at the Winter Garden Theater, its subconscious was revealed: the curtain falls on two couples at the end of their neurotic tether and comes up again on “Loveland”—“a metaphoric explosion!”
Sondheim once said—a happy place, we’re told, “where everybody loves to live” and “where everybody lives to love” (in other words, musical comedy is a delusion). In races a pastiche of musical forms—vaudeville, Ziegfeld, and Gershwin—each belonging to a neurotic impulse of love, each one its own folly and (in a great big pop-historical masterstroke) all of them follies of musicals gone by. “I was looking at the past with affection,
respect and delight,” Sondheim said. “In no way am I pointing out how silly the songs were because I don’t think they’re silly. What they are is innocent.” And so, in the dawn of 1971, Sondheim, Prince, Aronson, and Bennett eased the musical out of its cocoon, and it flew away.

Even though
Follies
wasn’t to his taste (or so he claimed), Fosse liked it and asked Sondheim
if he would be interested in reading
Big Deal,
his
Big Deal on Madonna Street
musical, now set in Mexico, with an eye to, maybe, contributing music and lyrics. “Out of politeness I said I would
read it,” Sondheim said. “You know, playwrights have enough trouble writing librettos, what am I going to expect from a choreographer? So I read it and to my surprise I thought it was really good. But there was a problem and an insurmountable one. There are only two kinds of music in the world I don’t like: Mexican and Hawaiian. I said, ‘Bobby, you’re not going to believe me. You’re going to think I’m copping out. You’re going to think this is my polite way of saying your book stinks, but I think the book is really good but I can’t write it. If I have to write twelve bars of mariachi music . . .’”