Fosse (42 page)

Stationed at their flatbed Kem, Fosse and Heim worked a few paces from Ship, in her own room syncing and sorting their film trims, always ready with the strip or the part of the strip or the part of the part when it was needed. “I arranged a very elaborate system
whereby Alan could find anything he wanted,” Ship explained. “It was a great big roll broken down into little sections. I had numbered the film along the edges. He knew what take it was, what song it was, what part of the number, and what angle it was. I did it with letters and numbers with a coding machine. Let’s say you had the song ‘Liza with a Z.’ I designated it song number one. If it was shot with the A camera I would have it say ‘one-A-one’ [meaning part one], and then a letter telling me if it was a close-up or what kind of shot it was.”

Because Fosse shot
Liza
only once, he had fewer options than usual in editing. “We had a wide-angle way in the back of the theater over the audience onto the stage,” Ship said. “We had a medium angle of the same shot. We had one in each wing, so you can get side angles. And then there was a high overhead medium to really focus on Liza, and there were close-ups of Liza from both sides and the back.” Her close-up shot from below was cinematographer Owen Roizman’s favorite angle. As opposed to the face-forward close-up, which simulated the audience’s front-row line of sight, the side angle offered a seemingly stolen intimacy with Minnelli. Watching her from this angle, the audience sees what they aren’t meant to—the sweat, the feral effort behind the razzle-dazzle. It tells them,
This is not easy.

When the day’s
Pippin
rehearsal finished, Fosse appeared at Heim’s side; if Heim had already left 1600 Broadway, then Fosse appeared at Trudy Ship’s side, sometimes to work through the night. Fosse loved that editors didn’t need to balance a hundred production schedules to do their work perfectly. Like writers, they worked as fast as their brains did, at the speed of fired neurons. Cutting film at 1600 Broadway, Fosse attained the kind of pure, monastic immersion difficult to achieve in rehearsal or production, where outside reality insisted on breaking in. “I had no idea how late we were staying,” Ship said. “We worked crazy hours and we worked weekends and I didn’t keep track. I didn’t care. We had so much fun, and Bob was a delight.”

There was a game Fosse liked to play. Out of nowhere, he would walk up to Ship and speak the lyrics of a song.

“‘When you see.’”

“
Guys and Dolls.
”

“Yeah. Good.”

There was another game called Would You Trust.

“Hey, Trudy?”

“Yes?”

“Would you trust . . . Tony Perkins?”

An easy one. “Not if I was taking a shower. Would you trust Timothy Carey?”

“Not if I was a racehorse.” (Carey shoots a racehorse in
The Killing.
)

Sitting next to Fosse, Ship grew accustomed to his scent, Revlon’s Wild Lemon cologne. She liked it so much she went out and bought a bottle for herself. Before long, the entire suite smelled of summer lemon and cigarettes and, on the days Fred Ebb stopped by with lunch, hot pastrami too. But Fosse didn’t eat much. Amphetamines kept his appetite down to sandwiches and wine—“the Fosse diet,”
Heim called it—which worried the Carnegie Deli’s Herb Schlein so much he once turned up at 1600 Broadway with a large aluminum tray and a furrowed brow. “Is Bobby around?”

“He’s somewhere,” Heim said.

“Has he been eating?”

“Sandwiches.”

“Well, I saw him not too long ago and thought he didn’t look right. Here.” Peeling back the aluminum, Schlein revealed the biggest turkey Alan Heim had ever seen. With it was apple pie. “I made it myself,” he said. “Make sure Bobby eats it, okay?”

Heim was amazed and a little saddened by Fosse’s tenacity. “He was never sure he’d actually done it,” he said. “He would always say to me, ‘Get your next job before the film comes out.’” One of the hottest filmmakers in the country, well on his way to finishing a television special that would likely take him even higher, and still Fosse was looking for more to do, in sickness and in health—though telling one from the other with him was near impossible. The amphetamines gave him constant energy, so Fosse could look bad, like a figure out of Munch, and feel just fine. No one knew.

Not even Heim. “How you feeling, Bob?” he asked one day.

“Fine. Did you read it?” Fosse was talking about
Lenny,
a script by Julian Barry based on his play about the life and death of Lenny Bruce. He had had a copy sent to Heim’s apartment days earlier. “What do you think?”

“I read it after my wife went to sleep,” Heim said, “then I woke her up and I said, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ This was the middle of the night. She said, ‘I’ll read it in the morning,’ and I said, ‘No, no, you’ve gotta read this now.’”

“You liked it.”

“I think it’s the greatest script I’ve ever read.”

In every way, Lenny Bruce was a perfect fit for Fosse: self-immolating, filthy, funny, and drug addicted, a man who had a short life and a pathetic demise and whose crusade against bullshit broke entertainment taboos and drove him to his death—the passion of the showbiz Christ. A no-punches-pulled First Amendment drama,
Lenny
was an opportunity for Fosse to break his own entertainment taboos, to leave singing and dancing for the sort of hard, ruthless truths Bruce himself would have respected, and to exchange razzle-dazzle for capital-
A
Art. Here also was the possibility for autobiography in biography, a chance for Fosse to continue his ongoing effort to tell his own story, from strip clubs to self-destruction. No more Mr. Musical: this film he’d shoot in black-and-white.

At
Pippin
’s first read-through, at Broadway Arts, a ten-minute walk away from 1600 Broadway, Ben Vereen faced Fosse, trying to keep the faith. His agent had told him not to do the show, that his part, the Old Man, a sort of narrator/chorus leader, would not do for him what
Jesus Christ Superstar
had. But Vereen had loved working with Fosse on
Sweet Charity,
both in the Vegas edition and in the movie, and knowing that most Broadway directors didn’t generally give white roles to black actors, Vereen wanted in. Reading through the script, however, he found the character did a lot of waiting. “Enter Fastrada!” the Old Man says. (Wait.) “Enter Louis!” (Longer wait.) Whenever Vereen looked across the table hoping for a wordless answer to his unspoken
What is this?,
he saw Fosse laughing to himself.

“Don’t worry about it,”
he whispered to Vereen after the read-through. “Go to the library. Go look at cats like Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson and Jimmy Slyde.”

He did. The most esteemed black tapper of vaudeville, Bill Robinson made a name for himself in nightclubs and on Broadway before reaching stardom beside Shirley Temple in movies like
The Little Colonel,
where he performed his virtuosic stair dance. Some traced the nickname Bojangles back to the French
beau jongleur,
meaning “juggler” or “trickster,” suggesting audiences may have cast Robinson as a kind of devil—Fosse would have loved that. Jimmy Slyde, Vereen read, had a slide step so smooth, when he danced he made the stage look like it was made of cream. Like Bojangles, one of his idols, Slyde slid with the utmost upper-body control, enhancing the illusion of effortlessness as he skimmed across the stage, his derby lifted high in the air. All of it would go into the Old Man. “On the page,”
Vereen said, “he doesn’t read as evil. He reads as [Pippin’s] best friend. He was the devil on his shoulder, the cat who was gonna show you everything, but inside he was a killer. He had his band of killers [the players] with him. His whole thing was to devour this young man.” The Old Man became the Leading Player, a black-magic killer with the charm of an entertainer.

Schwartz and Hirson liked the idea
and agreed to revise
Pippin
with the Leading Player’s malevolent purpose in mind. “The show was being discovered
as we went along,” Schwartz said. “But then [the Leading Player] began to take over the show so much that it began to diminish Pippin. The character became basically passive and reactive and didn’t have the same kind of drive, energy, and intelligence that Roger [Hirson] and I were trying to achieve with him. Yes, he was an innocent, and yes, he was naïve about things, but a lot of specific lines he had got taken away—either given away to the Leading Player or just cut—lines that showed he had a sharp sense of humor or an awareness of what was going on.” Rubinstein sensed the shift right away. He said, “I realized [Fosse] was having me
sit on the stage and watch these numbers, one after another after another after another. I was just the observer.”

The vaudeville concept was burning up the show. Fosse’s inclusion of nasty contemporary language and references to the modern day undercut the out-of-time setting Schwartz thought they had agreed on. New digs and asides at Pippin’s expense clunked hard, like a bad comic’s bad jokes, curdling the show’s innate tenderness and naïveté. But that seemed to be Fosse’s intention. “I didn’t feel Bob’s dominance was
out of ego,” Schwartz said, “but at the same time it wasn’t purely artistic. It felt megalomaniacal. He was working with his gut.” It seemed Fosse’s
Pippin
was sending up Schwartz’s, as if Fosse were the Leading Player, laughing at Pippin, or Schwartz, on his way to the flames.

In fact, Fosse was as much Pippin as he was Leading Player, as much victim as invader. “He wanted to be good,” Ann Reinking said. “More than anything, he wanted people to see that that’s what he truly was, even if he felt he didn’t deserve it, or didn’t behave that way.”

Angrily
annotated scripts—scribbled on hard enough to rip through the pages—shuttled back and forth from director to writer. Fosse’s suggestions were x’ed by Schwartz, and then Schwartz’s x’s were crossed out. Fosse wanted Pippin to say, “Oh, I know this is a musical comedy, but I want my life to mean something,” and Schwartz and Hirson countered with “I’m getting old. Very old. And I still haven’t done anything with my life.” Fosse wrote
Terrible
next to that suggestion and
Up yours, Schwartz
beside another. “There’s a theory,”
Harvey Evans said, “that Fosse picked weaker material so the critics would say, ‘Oh, it’s not much of a show, but what Bob Fosse did with it!’” A second theory suggests that Fosse could produce only when behind the eight ball; another that the only way he could write was by manipulating a writer; and yet another that in order to tell his story, he had to break through the stories of others.

Fosse would intrude on Schwartz’s songs. In the case of “War Is a Science”—a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan that descends into minstrelsy—he corrupted the number with an occasional “Doo-dah!” from the chorus. “
Pippin
is classic vaudeville with
something wrong,” Ann Reinking said. “When they say ‘Ta-
da!
’ at the end of the number, it could be ironic and mean war is not good or it could mean war is an incredible show. Bob knew there were some people who saw war as beautiful. He was playing to both of them.” Yet another point of contention with Schwartz were Fosse’s
ha-cha
s,
yuk-yuk
s,
yeah
s, and
skiddoo
s—the verbal equivalent of Fosse’s pet percussion sounds. It was an interesting idea, Schwartz thought,
one that was (once again) taken too far. The Leading Player’s “Nyaa”—as in Jolson’s “
Nyaa,
folks, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”—is a reminder that everything is entertainment, even death. It was a continuation of a philosophy Fosse had been working on since
The Conquering Hero.
He’d work on it for the rest of his life.

Fosse stormed into rehearsal late one afternoon. “There was a cloud over his head,”
Candy Brown recalled. “We were all kind of backing away because we didn’t know what the hell was going on.” They knew he lived in doubt, even fed on it, but going from
Liza
to
Pippin,
Pippin
to
Liza,
Fosse doubled his stress, and on little sleep, doubled his exhaustion. There was no telling what, or who, had pushed him over the edge, whether that edge was real or imagined, whether he was sober or drugged. “All we could do,” Brown said, “was wait.”

Finally, he looked up from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.” He slouched forward. “I was editing
Liza
today and my editor dropped a piece of ash onto the film. I’m sorry.”

There was an uncertain silence.

Then Brown said, “Well, he didn’t ruin any of
my
stuff, did he?”

Fosse burst out laughing, walked over to Brown, and took her in his arms. “He smelled like lemon,” she said later, “and his body was almost kind of vibrating when we hugged. I know now that it was probably some kind of drug. I could feel it literally on the inner parts that his body was all vibrating, shaking like a scared animal.”

Liza with a Z
aired on September 10, 1972, to terrific reviews. Combining his stage sense and choreographic skill with his cinematic technique and packaging them for television, Fosse reinvented the televised concert special and mastered it in a single effort—his first. Of all the definitions of genius, fluency in the midst of discovery—grace where no artist has been graceful before—seems the most incontestable. As with Orson Welles and Noël Coward, two of stage and screen’s most expansive and fluent discoverers, Fosse had a chameleonic intuition for both performance and presentation. His cross-pollination of entertainment media, beginning with
Cabaret
and continuing with
Liza with a Z,
elevated him to the exclusive plane of absolute conqueror, the Mozart of show business.

Translation: he had a long way to fall.

Before
Pippin
left New York for tryouts in Washington, DC, Schwartz may have spoken a little too candidly to
Newsday.
“I sort of aired some of the dirty
laundry, which did not endear me to Bob or Stuart Ostrow,” he said. “Then Bob retaliated.” “I think he’s very talented,”
Fosse said to the
New York Times.
“But not as talented as
he
thinks he is.” Their relationship deteriorated from there. There were outbursts in Washington, some of them public, and all of them useful. Though Schwartz’s “ingratitude” genuinely angered Fosse, controversy was too fortifying to waste. As Fosse had discovered many times over, learning whom he couldn’t trust helped him reach those he did. Whether defeating Abbott or banishing Schwartz, these battles paid artistic and social dividends, harnessing Fosse a muse, goading him to go deeper and darker while also drawing his company closer, strengthening their allegiance to himself and one another.