Fosse (43 page)

Pippin
’s social climate was the perfect complement to Fosse’s aesthetic ambitions for the show. “Bob wanted no chorus in
Pippin,
”
said dancer Pam Sousa. “He wanted everyone to have a personal role. It really bonded us together. It made us feel a part of something.” Bringing the company together offstage, Fosse enhanced their chemistry onstage, increasing their collaborative power to lure Pippin to his demise. The girls would have poker nights
at Kathryn Doby’s. “We called Kathryn Mother,”
Cheryl Clark said. “She’d put our little shoes out for us.” They would play tricks on
stage manager Phil Friedman, piling into his tiny bathroom, waiting there, and pouncing on him when he opened the door. They’d hide in the shower when he called, “Places.” “We were a family on
Pippin,
”
Candy Brown said. “Bob made us a family.” Fosse would join the dancers on break and tell them stories of his MGM days,
about working not too far from Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and about the nail that couldn’t be kicked beautifully enough.

Entertainment organisms are vulnerable at every turn, to new audiences, new critics, and new personnel, and they can completely transform at the slightest provocation, like going out of town. Anxiety, jealousy, ego—functions of any collaborative environment—are roller-coastered by the very public nature of performing, quadrupled by the God-given temperament of show people, and raised to the
n
th degree by the lifespan of a company, which, no matter how successful the production, is brief. Writer Julian Barry said, “People in plays and in movies,
when they are a community, and they’re in danger as a community, which is what they are, they get very, very close. Then they go out of town and the danger is even greater. They fall in love with one another and they fuck one another and they vow that this is the person for me, and my wife back in New York is second rate.” Even if a show is extended, an end is always looming. Time is condensed. Emotions are high. In a vinous swirl of sugared feeling, liaisons are quickly formed and quickly broken, and the other lives resume.

“He was a star director,”
one dancer said, “and we were so young, most of us virgins on Broadway. Many of us would have done anything he said.” Washington was a heady time for all. “Most of us got those calls
in the middle of the night,” Brown said. “These conversations went on for about half an hour. I guess it sounds bizarre, but at the time it was—I don’t know, I loved him, so if he was in pain I would try to talk to him. There was always some kind of angst about something. Just general angst.” He was the best topic of discussion, the single most powerful something they all had in common. If one slept with him, they all slept with him; if one deflected his passes, they deflected him together. “I get involved in the material and the people,”
he said once, with spectacular cool. They were, after all, the same thing.

The extent to which Fosse reused the same dancers, drawing them so consistently into his home life, and his nightlife, meant Fosse’s productions occasioned more than the standard amount of company intimacy. Adding sex complicated matters enormously, but rarely did it hurt the work. It could hurt a dancer, maybe, but never the dance. “It made me nervous
and I did whatever I could do to get away,” Brown said. “He was an old man to me, you know? I was nineteen or twenty. We were at a party during
Pippin
and he kept asking me to come home with him but I kept saying—I didn’t know what to say—‘I gotta go home and feed my dogs!’ I kept saying it over and over. He wouldn’t let up.” Even when Fosse was persistent, his manner could be so childlike that almost all forgave it. “I think it’s fair to say
Bob came on to all of us,” dancer Pam Sousa said. “But it was never to a place that affected us. Some women were flattered. That was Bob being Bob.” The net result of Fosse’s sexual involvement was mostly positive. That many dancers described their
Pippin
relationships as familial can be attributed to Fosse’s urge—creative, like the others—to build a strong family of his own. The same urge led him to Paddy and Herb and the coterie of Cohn’s writers he knew would not betray him; it was the impulse that drove him to distrust. To never know sustained intimacy in love.

Jennifer Nairn-Smith, however, was not flattered by Fosse’s attentions. Before coming to Washington, she’d reluctantly accepted his invitation to dinner, fearing, as many women had before her, that she would lose the job if she didn’t put out. “I was never attracted to him,”
she said, “but he kept hounding me and hounding me, pushing and pushing.” They discussed ballet, her training with Balanchine. Nairn-Smith was tough, a self-proclaimed ballet diva, suspicious of Fosse’s style and suspicious of him. But as a ballet dancer, she was of interest to Fosse, as imposing sexually as she was artistically. Ballet was the real thing; the club Fosse could never be a part of, one of the many chasms separating him from the likes of Jerry Robbins. It wasn’t just ballet technique that scared him; Fosse didn’t think he could sustain a dance for more than four or five minutes, the length of a Broadway musical number. He could see
Big Deal
(if he ever did it) ending with a big robbery sequence all in dance, but a full hour of uninterrupted choreography—not to mention
classical
choreography—was Mount Everest, simply beyond the clouds.

“Jennifer, the Joffrey wants me to do a ballet for them,” he admitted one night. “But I can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know the vernacular.”

“They don’t want the vernacular. They want your
style.
”

When he made his move, Jennifer tried to flee. When he attempted to stop her, she kicked him in the groin. He made such a flagrant example of her shortcomings in rehearsals, most could guess what had (or hadn’t) gone on the nights before. Fosse would do that, zero in on a girl. “There was always one person
that he picked on,” Candy Brown said. “But that wasn’t uncommon. I saw that behavior in other choreographers. One person they yelled at constantly. ‘That was sloppy! What are you doing? Get your head in it!’ It’s awful, especially when you know you’re the person making the mistake and Bob should be berating
you.
” Nairn-Smith could take it, for a while; a certain amount of punishment was part of the game. “She would be in tears, sobbing,”
Rubinstein said, “and two hours later they would be going out to lunch.” Nairn-Smith thought Fosse’s cruelty came mixed with jealousy, sexual and artistic. A ballerina with a boyfriend, she represented a double rejection to him, even when she let him have her. That’s why, some thought, he made her hold a flag in
Pippin
, like a girl in the school play. “He was a director,”
Nairn-Smith said, “a manipulator. He knew the button to make you feel great and he knew the button to make you feel like shit.”

In Washington, Nairn-Smith’s boyfriend found out about Fosse, and he threatened to kill
him. According to stage manager Maxine Glorsky, there were detectives trailing Fosse. “I was working in the theater and
these two guys in suits came looking for him. I said, ‘He’s not here. It’s the lunch hour.’ But they’d come back and Fosse would slip past them. It kept happening. It was like some kind of funny movie.” Ostrow did not think so. He put the Kennedy Center on red alert, and Fosse shifted into defense. “Bob protected me from
all the creeps,” Nairn-Smith said. “And he did try to get to know me but I was ice.”

Candy Brown stayed at the Howard Johnson with the rest of the chorus. One night, she was standing in the elevator of the Watergate Hotel, where Fosse and the higher-ups had rooms, and the doors opened to reveal Ann Reinking waiting to leave Fosse’s floor.

“Annie!”

“Candy?”

They tried smiles to buy time. Fosse had quite openly flirted with both of them, so it was possible that Reinking was coming from whence Brown was going. If so, had they betrayed each other, or had Fosse betrayed both of them? Neither could tell.

“I’m sorry,” Reinking said.

“What?”

“You and Bob. I’m sorry.”

“No, no!” Brown threw a hand to keep the elevator door open. “It’s not like that.”

A certain amount of nighttime overlap was inevitable, even intentional. (“Jennifer and Ann came in one day
wearing matching jackets,” one dancer said, “and we thought,
Oh Lord, Bob!
”) All that crossing in the halls nicely precipitated threesomes. So did Quaaludes. “There were lots of poppers backstage
on
Pippin,
” one dancer said. “A couple of stagehands were handing out PCP. Lots of stuff was going on.” The drugs cut both ways, building the togetherness Fosse aimed for, and sometimes shaking it apart. “Someone dropped a lude
in my Seven-Up,” another dancer said. “I remember a bunch of us were walking a St. Bernard through a cemetery in DC one night and I fell asleep on a tombstone.”

While the company was still in Washington, Fosse called Reinking to formally and properly ask her out. She had asked him to wait and he had waited. “I talked so much on the phone
that night,” she said. “He made me nervous and relaxed, if that makes any sense.” Reinking had told him she wanted to keep their thing outside of the show, and now that the show was up on its feet, they were as outside as they were ever going to be.

“Don’t you think it’s a little unfair to ask a girl out when she’s still auditioning for you?” she asked him on their first date.

“Yes,” he said. “But I admired you for turning me down.”

Her admiration for Fosse pulled and pushed her, toward him and away. “It was like being with someone I had known forever, someone I could embrace, and also somebody I couldn’t touch because he was that good.” Several dinners later, she was pulled only toward him, and harder the more she saw him. Fosse recognized the feelings, hers, his. They were as good as producer’s promises. “I know enough about emotions
to know that nothing is permanent,” he would say. But already he loved her.

Fosse kept his idea for
Pippin
’s finale a secret as long as he could, up until a day or so before the first preview. Saving it allowed him to rethink the sequence for as long as possible, and it kept the company abuzz, leaving them to wonder, from one run-through to the next, how dark
Pippin
would get, how far it would really go into existential limbo. (“You mean you want me to get into that box and set myself on fire?” Pippin asks.) “When Bob finally told us
what we were going to do, we talked about it in detail,” Doby said. “After Pippin decides not to kill himself, we [the players] were supposed to get audience members to come up onto the stage for the ultimate fulfillment. It became a tribal frenzy.” Here the family atmosphere would pay off. Dancer Gene Foote said, “We didn’t realize that
at the end of this show we were going to ask someone to set themselves on fire, and kill themselves, so we could orgasm. That was the end of the show. But we didn’t know anything about any of this, we just kept doing the steps.”

When Pippin rejects their offer, the players push themselves into an orgiastic death collective, writhing to the lip of the stage and stretching their hands into the crowd. “I know that there are many of you out there,” the Leading Player says, “extraordinary people—exceptional people—who would gladly trade your ordinary lives for the opportunity to perform one perfect act, our grand finale.”

Death.

“Bob would remind us,”
Candy Brown said, “that we would want to get them to think committing suicide was the best deal ever.” Was there a better finale?

Not to
Pippin,
but to a career?

Was there a better finale to a life?

Yes, you, in seat K116. “Some people came up,”
said Ken Urmston, who appeared in a later production. “You’d ask the blue-haired ladies and they didn’t know what was going on but I remember asking a ten-year-old-girl and she said, ‘Oh no, I like my life.’ And I remember once there was a sixteen-year-old boy who was shaking—I don’t know what he thought, but he came up on stage unsettled, he was very serious—and Ben Vereen took him into the wings and said, ‘Look, this is just a show.’”

Ultimately,
Pippin
’s players get no volunteers, and the fabulous finale idea is dropped. Infuriated, the Leading Player strips the stage of all its scenery and commands the orchestra to shut up. Just before exiting, he says to Pippin, “You try singing without music, sweetheart.” You try to make meaning without show business.

It gets quiet.

Pippin sings. Catherine, who loves him, stands with him, holding her little boy.

Then the song ends. It’s quiet again.

“Pippin,” she asks. “Do you feel that you’ve compromised?”

“No.”

Quiet.

“Do you feel like a coward?”

“No.”

“Well, then, how do you feel?”

His answer would be the last moment in the show. John Rubinstein said, “The audience is expecting me
to say something sentimental and wrap it up. But I don’t. I just stand there and I say, ‘Trapped.’ That first night in Washington, the audience screamed with laughter. Then the laughter dies down and Pippin feels he can’t say that to this woman. He loves her. So I say, ‘But happy. Which isn’t too bad for the end of a musical comedy.’ And I discover it for the first time as I say it. And the audience goes,
Ahhh.
It’s not a laugh. It’s
yes.
Because that’s how we all feel. We have all this dissatisfaction. We are trapped, just like Pippin, but we’re happy. We’re okay. I love my kids, I love my wife, even though she’s a pain in the ass. The audience was let off the cynical hook. After that audible sigh of relief in the Kennedy Center Opera House, I would then take their little hands—Jill [Clayburgh] and the boy—and pick them up over my head and go ‘Ta-da!’ very softly. Then the curtain would go down.”

Jaundiced, sultry, satirical,
Pippin
opened September 20 at the Kennedy Center and met with sensational reviews. The show bettered the Fosse brand. It pushed more buttons harder and refined his style in staging and dance; that is,
Pippin
amplified Fosse by
simplifying
Fosse. He was a minimalist now. Minutiae matched his smallness of stature and self-worth; it seasoned earnest displays of aerobic grandeur with irony, inviting the audience to look beyond the surface burn to the ice beneath. Or vice versa. Fosse’s temperature could be hot or cool depending on any number of tiny, closely watched variables, and when those variables took the form of pantomime, running the gamut from parody (hot) to innuendo (cool), they could be quite funny too. “I used to be more involved in patterns
and complex steps,” he said after the show opened. “Now I try for the simplest thing that will say what I want it to say.”