Fosse (40 page)

Sound would be an issue. Dancing at full tilt, with no chance to catch her breath, Liza would sound better if she prerecorded her songs—but that would compromise the show’s
liveness,
“the real me,”
as Minnelli said, “without anybody drying me off.” To have it both ways, the crew would break the audio into pieces and preselect which would be sung live and which would be looped. “Fosse wanted to bring reality
to the stage,” said audio designer Phil Ramone. Fosse’s beloved snaps, pops, and claps could be replicated in the studio, but Minnelli’s breathing would not be, he decreed; that would be live. Her
effort
was the whole point of the show. Her sweat. “Bob wanted all those breathing sounds,” said Ramone. “I’ve never seen anyone be that detailed about anything.” To someone else, it might seem like splitting hairs, but to Fosse, who had internalized precise volumes and sound textures for every degree of movement, audio was as exacting an art as any.

“I can’t have anybody think this is phony,” said Fosse to Ramone. “If they know bar eight is going to be prerecorded for four beats and then goes back, they’re going to figure it out.”

“What if I keep changing it?”

“How?”

“When she goes upstage to dance, we’ll go with the prerecord. When she comes downstage to sing out to the audience, she’ll go live.”

“But how will you match it?”

“We’ll have a cue system.”

It was yet another part of the show that had to be not simply practiced but
perfected.
The cue-system technique Ramone devised for
Liza
had never been tried before. “When Liza went downstage,” Ramone explained, “I would open up this mic in her bra so you could hear her panting and do three or four lines if she wasn’t out of breath totally. Whenever she touched her earlobe or hit her hand on her chest, we would go live. When she went upstage, we’d go to the track. Everyone was desperately afraid of being caught with the tape not working, with our pants down, so to speak. It was quite adventurous. So in rehearsal Bob would sit right in the front row to see if he could tell if she was lip-synching or not. When it worked, he smiled so big. That was rare for him.”

Hiding a battery pack as big as a pack of cigarettes under Minnelli’s minimalist blouse—designed by Halston just for her—proved as difficult as hiding her cleavage from the network. “When the sponsors would come around,”
Minnelli said, “and they’d have to let them in, Fosse would call a break. As soon as they left, we’d get back to work.” A little skin was one thing on a Broadway stage, but on TV—on NBC—there were rules, rules that only tempted Bob Fosse to break them. “He could not be stopped,”
said director of photography Owen Roizman. “He was the ultimate leader in that respect.” If he succeeded,
Liza with a Z
would break ground; it would test the conventions of filming live for TV, audio manipulation, and the strictures of the concert special. And—if Fosse could keep the sponsors away from Liza’s costume—viewers would get that sensual something extra on the side.

“Now, you’ve gotta imagine,”
Minnelli said, “there’s this group of guys—Bob Fosse, Fred Ebb, Marvin Hamlisch, and John Kander—and they’re all challenging each other to get better. I’m in the middle saying, ‘What do I do? Where do I go? How do you want it done?’” In February, Minnelli appeared as Sally Bowles on the covers of both
Newsweek
and
Time
(“The New Miss Show Biz”), but in no sense had she reached her peak.
Liza with a Z
asked her to carry an entire evening—not intimately, before fifty people in the Empire Room, or even somewhat less intimately, on Broadway, but for NBC’s audience, thousands deep and close up. She was twenty-six and more nervous than she had ever been in her life. “I always watched [Fosse’s] face,”
Minnelli said. “What was he thinking? [A step] wasn’t just a step. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for every movement.” Minnelli impressed even the most hard-working dancers, rehearsing full out, and then, when they all thought she was done for the day, joining them at a disco after work. “Liza really, really wanted to learn,”
said dancer Candy Brown, wanted “to do well. I remember thinking she had a real desperation, like, ‘I’ve
got
to take everything out of life. I’ve
got
to enjoy it all.’”

“One night,”
Roizman recalled, “around three in the morning, everybody was just beat. We all had our tongues hanging out and all the dancers were exhausted from having to do this over and over again. Fosse saw this, stopped everyone, and made a speech to everybody. He said, ‘Look, I know it’s three o’clock in the morning, and I know you’re tired, beat, and you’re worn out, but when this is cut together nobody’s going to know that it was three o’clock in the morning and you were tired. So you have to take the approach that this is your first time out, this is live, this is your
best,
and you have to give it your best because that’s all anybody will ever see.’”

On the evening of the performance, May 31, 1972, Fosse rehearsed the company as long as he could. To many, that seemed counterintuitive, but his thinking was clear. “When you get out there
on that stage,” he said to Candy Brown, “then adrenaline is going to take over. But if you’re already at your max when it kicks in, you’re not going to be able to push much farther. You won’t go from zero to sixty.” At 5:30, Liza and the dancers were excused. They were out of time.

What Minnelli needed now
was a moment of her own to go to her apartment and freshen up before the show. But there was no way she could get there and back in time for curtain. So instead, she took her hair, makeup, and wardrobe people to the hotel across the street, where she would try to relax in relative seclusion. As they made their way in, however, Minnelli and her entourage sensed they were in the wrong sort of establishment. (“It was a hooker hotel!”
Minnelli said.) Unfazed, she settled into an upstairs room facing the theater and dressed at the window, watching the tuxedos and their dates gather at the theater door. Though she couldn’t quite make out faces, she knew somewhere among them were Chita Rivera, Paddy Chayefsky, her former director Otto Preminger, Michael Bennett, Harold Arlen, Lotte Lenya, Tony Bennett, and of course her father, Vincente Minnelli.

It began to rain. Was that a bad sign? One by one, umbrellas opened over the crowd, enclosing the Lyceum in a black tie of its own.

She had only one shot.

He had only one shot.

“Liza was very nervous,
exceedingly nervous,” said Christopher Newman. “She was concerned that her lip-synching wouldn’t be good because there hadn’t been that much rehearsal and the live singing might not be perfect because it wasn’t in a studio.”

A few minutes before 7:30, Minnelli left the hooker hotel for her place backstage, trying to squeeze her nerves into something like energy. The faces of Bobby, Freddy, and Johnny pulsed through her panic, warming her with love. Only moments before the curtain went up, Halston appeared with a teardrop necklace, emboldening Minnelli with a propulsive surge of good feeling. Out she marched, summoning as much poise as a girl-woman could manage when about to face, alone, a theater full of the most discerning people on Broadway and, eventually, everyone watching NBC.

Kander and Ebb’s songs, with their determined air of
Just listen to me and you’ll understand,
suited her, helped her shrink the room to a manageable size, first face by face, as she made eye contact, establishing personal attachments, then in clusters as she picked up steam, until, finally, at the precise moment, she threw open her arms to harvest the whole house in a single immolating swoop. “I think she’s great because
everybody wants to take care of her,” Fred Ebb said. “You kind of want to help her, although she doesn’t need help.” Several songs later, Minnelli was in the wings again, catching her breath before “It Was a Good Time,” her big confessional number about the end of a marriage, maybe her parents’. With only a few beats to connect to that part of her where the song lived, she crossed behind the curtain to her dear old friend lyricist Fred Ebb.

“Freddy! Freddy!”

He turned.

“Gimme the story, Freddy! Gimme the story!”

“I can’t.” He looked drawn. “I just took a Valium, and I have to sit down.”

Ebb stumbled off, and in a whirl of smoke, Fosse appeared.

“Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, help me, tell me the story.”

“Okay,” he said. “All right,” he said. “It’s a woman. Okay? A man and a woman. They have a wonderful marriage. They have a daughter—” And then he began—she thought—to cry, but she was back onstage.

It was a good time, it was the best time

It was a party, just to be near you.

It was a jaunty refrain about heartbreak. To accentuate the façade, Fosse gave Minnelli a small gesture. Holding her hands at hip height, with her palms open to the audience and her fingers splayed, she evoked Jolson, but with her arms at loose angles, a broken Jolson. Like a showbiz hieroglyphic, these hands signified pep, the equivalent of “the show must go on.” In this case, that show—that charade—was pretending a broken family was still intact. Later in the evening, the same gesture reappeared in Liza’s sweet rendition of “Mammy,” down at the lip of the stage. Specifically evoking Jolson now, Fosse was placing Minnelli in the company of one of the industry’s all-time greatest performers; in having Liza sing about her mammy, Fosse summoned Judy Garland to his—their—side. This time, though, the fingers on Minnelli’s Jolson-palms stretched out farther, brighter, and her arms opened wider, to reinforce the sincerity of a gesture that earlier in the show had been presented ironically. She had come full circle. Where the first number drew a mean line between show business and family, the second erased it.

After the roaring subsided and the crowd left, some to sleep and some to disco, Candy Brown took the long way out
through the empty theater. She saw, sitting in the back under a line of smoke, Fosse and a woman. Save for two or three ushers, they were the only people left.

“Excuse me, Mr. Fosse,” she said. “I had a really good time—”

“Oh, Candy,” he said. “I’d like to introduce you to someone. This is Gwen Verdon.”

They would never divorce.

Pippin
auditions were in full swing. The principals, including John Rubinstein, Jill Clayburgh, Leland Palmer, and Ben Vereen as the Old Man, had been cast earlier in the year, but Fosse still needed his chorus.

Fast becoming a Broadway ritual, Fosse’s open calls were highly anticipated, carefully orchestrated talent marathons that could last for days or even weeks. Hopped up on Fosse’s legend and rumors, dancers gathered by the hundreds at the designated theater to trade insights, many of them accurate, about the sort of girls Bob liked. “I was told cut your leotard higher, you’ll get it.” “Tease your hair way up.” “Stuff your cleavage.” “Use eyeliner.” The men? “He goes for personality.” “No, he goes for sexy.” “Don’t be sexy.
He
has to be the sexy one.” “Be funny.” “Don’t
try
to be funny.” When the offstage space filled, they lined up around the block, stretching legs up against the theater wall, crying and talking, catching up with friends or stepping back to size up the buffet of muscle and beauty Fosse had to peruse. He knew many of them personally after nearly two decades in the elimination business, which made eliminating the ones he had to—those a fraction shy of sensational, those he had seen year after year who still weren’t good enough, those who were good enough but just not what he was looking for, those whom he’d promised last time he’d help next time, and those he’d fucked or fucked over or wanted to fuck—even more terrible. As best he could, he tried not to look at anyone’s face until the final round.

It always began the same:
first, dance captain Kathryn Doby taught them “Tea for Two,” basically a ballet combination with rhythmic bits of Fosse throughout.

“What do you see in ‘Tea for Two’?”
dancer Chet Walker asked him.

“I see everything.”

Depending on the musical being cast, “Tea for Two” would change, slightly, but the vocabulary was always the same. “It has jumps, turns, rhythm,
and syncopation,” Walker explained. “It showed Bob your technique, and because certain parts of it are awkward and don’t come naturally, it showed how well you listened to him.” By nudging the dancers off balance, Fosse got snapshots of their natural instincts, the truth between the lines. But could they master those instincts? Could they master those instincts without forfeiting their personalities? “Sometimes, he’d put in this
passé leap across the stage,” dancer Jane Lanier said. “He’d look at the height of the jump, the position of the arms, the point of the foot. There was a lot to fit in.” Buried in the steps were the details Fosse craved. There were walks. “A lot of people wouldn’t see
the walks right,” Kathryn Doby said, “and Bob would know.”

As many dancers as could comfortably fit onstage were called out for “Tea for Two,” and Fosse observed from ten or so rows back. After several runs, he would separate the ineligible from the possible without too much uneasiness or deliberation. Dividing the dancers into smaller groups, Fosse would run the combination again to watch each one close and long enough to know—or come
close
to knowing—if the dancer had really learned the combination to the best of his or her ability. Joining them onstage to help, he took on the guise of teacher so he could interact with the dancers personally. But the willingness to teach was genuine. “He was always there to
make people better,” said arranger and conductor Gordon Harrell. “He could get stern sometimes, but it was never for the purpose of burying anyone. It was always for their own sake.” And Fosse’s: before he could pass judgment, Fosse had to get them to their best. “He would tell people in
the middle of their audition to step to the side and work on it and then come back,” Candy Brown said. “Most choreographers wouldn’t take the time.” Crouching, pacing, touching, thanking, smoking, watching, playing, pushing . . . when would he accept a dancer’s limitations? “I’ve seen Bob audition people
he believed in,” said dancer Laurent Giroux. “It was like he was begging them to let him hire them.” If the dancers needed him to, he would dance with them.