Fosse (44 page)

His ideas clarified too. In the context of the Leading Player’s final entreaty, we, the audience, understand that
Pippin
’s opening number, “Magic to Do,” in which the players were directed to seduce the audience to join them for the show, was actually a pretty invitation to go out with a bang. “We did not work
with
each other,”
said Gene Foote, “we worked out front [to the audience]. The whole show was out front.” The show
was
a front—
Pippin
was only a pretense, a piece of entertainment there to disguise a cruel reality: our lives have no meaning. All we have (if we want it) is a good finale, the gift of our own destruction, and—
ha-cha!
—we might as well make the most of it. (So how destructive is entertainment, after all?)

Fosse’s style seemed to degenerate as it developed. His
Pippin
was neater, wittier, and darker than
Sweet Charity,
Cabaret,
and
Liza with a Z;
it showed a deathlike anti-vigor on the one hand and a clarification of his show-business vocabulary on the other. Those open-faced palms in “Magic to Do,” Walter Kerr wrote, were “Jolson’s, Martha Graham’s,
Alla Nazimova’s, the
theater’s
.” The burlesque bumps and Suzie Qs of “The Manson Trio,” and of course Ben Vereen as the devil in Bojangles, made a definitive statement on entertainment’s power of perversion and destruction, on Fosse’s own downfall, which he saw hurrying toward him, coming faster and closer the harder he worked.

“I don’t hesitate to lift from
every form of American show business,” he said. “I love the old minstrel shows.” The timeless, spaceless black that surrounded the
Pippin
stage enabled him to draw from all corners of entertainment, and not just through dance, but with classic vaudeville sound effects and lighting cues. “The follow spots for Fosse
were choreographed,” said Maxine Glorsky. “I mean, they were
really
choreographed to be like old vaudeville. He was evoking a piece of America’s folk-art history in light.” With love, he underscored the show’s deceit, which did not fall far from his own. As a collage artist who was never certain of his own worth, whose influences were obvious as far back as “Steam Heat”—which showed his roots in Jack Cole—the question of originality was constant, nagging Fosse to ceaseless work and self-recrimination. Those who viewed his low opinion of himself as false modesty or as an invitation for others to contradict him with love and praise—a handy mirror for the narcissist—knew him only from the press or in passing. The view from close up was much different. He was empty; the slouching, knock-kneed, burlesque kid whose own mother hadn’t protected him from the fiendish strippers in the backstage of his unconscious. “I kept telling him he was a good person,”
Reinking said, “but I don’t know if he ever believed me.” It was never enough, because
he
was never enough.

He never could take care of himself. “I understand why you love him,” Reinking’s mother told her daughter when she first met Fosse.

“Why?”

“Because there’s a lot of boy in that man.”

He had to be bad to be good. That would safeguard him from critics who were hip to
Pippin
’s every move, “stolen” or otherwise: he had to add grief and depression. The more the merrier. “We now get to New York [with
Pippin
],”
Rubinstein recounted, “and Bob gets nervous about the New York critics accusing him of sentimentality. That’s when he starts putting in more lines about assholes and fucks and things like that. We started cutting some corny stuff too, all of which was fun, until Bob came to me before the premiere and said, Cut ‘But happy.’”

Rubinstein had protested. “But that’s the whole thing!”

“Nah, it’s sentimental bullshit. It’s crap. I hate it.”

“Now Pippin’s defeated—it changes the whole character—”

“Do it,” Fosse said. “The line is ‘Trapped—which isn’t too bad for the end of a musical comedy. Ta-da.’”

Schwartz, who, despite everything, had come to love much of what Fosse did with the show, was equally opposed to cutting “But happy,” but he told Rubinstein they didn’t have a choice; he had already tried, unsuccessfully, to invoke the Dramatists Guild. Fosse had the clout to overrule him.

On opening night, Fosse sent each of his dancers a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a personal note. He hated his handwriting, which was as bumpy and twisted as his dances, so he typed. “Candy, Candy, Candy,
the Amazing Candy: The face of a cherub, the smile of summer. She moves with the sensuality of a panther, talent spilling out all around her. She could turn on all the boys in the band. Always with that humor that can salvage the most tense situations, always with that demanding self-knowledge. Always huggable, always lovable, always, always—what’s your name again?—oh, yeah, Candy. I . . . LOVE . . . You . . . And . . . I don’t care . . . who knows it. Doo-dah. Love, Bob.”

Late on October 23, 1972, after the final moments of
Pippin
’s Broadway premiere at the Imperial Theater, the curtain came down, and John Rubinstein felt the audience recoil
at the new ending. “Part of the problem,”
Schwartz said later, “was that Bob was imposing his own psychological demons on a story that in many ways couldn’t support that. To have the final line be ‘Trapped. Which isn’t too bad for a musical comedy,’ I felt, well, actually it
is
too bad for a musical comedy.”

Fosse certainly had imposed his demons on
Pippin,
but he had also done his research. Earlier that year, the
Wall Street Journal
ran a piece about the rise of depression in the United States. One paragraph in particular caught Fosse’s attention: “For those who cannot find a cure, suicide is often the result. The suicide rate of known depressives is 36 times that of the general population.” That hardly meant “Trapped” would be a sure thing with critics, but Fosse knew malaise was out there, all over America, and musical comedy, to be meaningful, had a responsibility to address it. “The statement of [
Pippin
],”
he told the
New York Times,
“is that life is pretty crumby but, in the end, there stands the family—pretty ugly, stripped of costumes and magic, but holding hands.”

Holding hands. It wasn’t the sort of magic Fosse had in mind, or even believed in. Gwen Verdon, who believed in him, who still held out a hand to Fosse, knew he needed far more than what he had. “He never seems to enjoy achieving
success or love or friendship or whatever it is children give you, all the things most people aspire to and feel make up a life,” she said. “Maybe he can feel the warmth of those things momentarily, but he can’t retain it. Do you know what the only thing Bob can retain is? Sorrow.”

“There’s something deflating in that,”
Kerr wrote of
Pippin
’s ending, “as though we’d all gone through a lot for very little.” Despite its impact, the ending was only an ending, almost literally tacked on. A comprehensive existential statement had been merely suggested.

Style over substance.

Ticket sales were mild.

Thanksgiving came around and Fosse tried to take time off. He hung out for a couple of days. Then he flew to Germany to catch up with some old
Cabaret
friends; flew to Vegas to see Liza
and Joel Grey’s act at the Riviera; was the guest of honor at a party Sue Mengers threw for him in Los Angeles; and took Nicole to Disneyland. Until then, the two had had the usual father-daughter dinners and crossed paths at Gwen’s on Long Island, but they hadn’t spent that much time together since the split. “I never use my name to get tickets
or reservations,” he said, “afraid someone will say, ‘Bob
who?
’ But I’ve pulled every string I can think of to get her to Disneyland.” The day he came to get Nicole at Gwen’s apartment, Fosse trembled with worry about the trip and confessed all to her at the door. “Don’t worry about it, pal,”
Nicole said. She touched her tiny hand to his. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Nicole at nine years old was too young to have seen her father dance in the movies, but she was old enough to know
The Little Prince,
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Stanley Donen planned to adapt it into a musical film and had offered Fosse a small dancing part as the Snake. They’d shoot in Tunisia. For the longest time, Fosse brooded on the offer,
first deferring, then saying no, then reconsidering and deferring again. As much as he loved performing, he knew a dancer in his midforties would never look better than he felt, which wasn’t that great. It had been a long time since Fosse danced in public, let alone on film for the whole world to see. To sweeten the deal, Donen offered Fosse complete control of the number, from preproduction to post- (“You can even wear a bowler,”
Donen said), but still Fosse said no. “Nicole was crazy about that book,”
Gwen said, “so she said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to do it!’ and Bob always said, ‘The next thing I knew I was in Africa.’”

The Snake: It’s how he’d imagined death. “One sting,”
he had told Janice Lynde, “and all your worries . . .” They disappear.

Fosse bought his
Snake costume—a pair of shoes from LaRay and white gloves from Bergdorf’s—and rehearsed with Louise Quick at Broadway Arts. Breaking up his slow, limb-laden slither, careful turns of wrist, and vainglorious undulations of arm with kicks, sharp fingers, and staccato back bumps, Fosse made his snake appear to be both the object of his own erotic amusement and a sexual hunter, seducing outward and inward, like a proud matador. With attention on each twitch, which he overenunciated, as if rippling his scales in a full-size mirror, the Snake’s showoffy air and rhythmic irregularity foreshadowed Michael Jackson, and its freezes and stutters on and through the beat presaged the pops and locks of hip-hop, a revolution still very much underground. Dazzled, Herb Gardner thought
it the most incredible number Fosse had ever danced. For that honor, “Snake in the Grass” stands neck and neck with Fosse’s “Alley Dance” from
My Sister Eileen
—his two greatest performances on film—but where the latter shows a Gene Kelly–type arrangement seasoned with Fosse (the tricks of “Steam Heat” in particular), “Snake” rings with his mature style.

En route to film
The Little Prince,
he flew to Madeira, a tiny island off the coast of North Africa, for a short rest. Meeting him was Ilse.
They had broken up and made up more times than they could say, but considering they had never been exclusive, how could they ever really break up? With no clear starting line, there was no need to agree on a finish, and because his romances rarely ended badly—the director in him, handling them—those on the in always stayed in, and Fosse’s stable, rather than narrowing with time, actually deepened. Still, there were shifts in rank and preference. His love for Ann Reinking, his growing fondness for Janice Lynde, and the occasional hot thing with Jennifer Nairn-Smith edged Ilse farther into the outer ring, where she had once been willing to wait. But now she had grown tired of waiting. Strolling the Madeira coastline,
they were literally on the rocks, cliffs black and yellow and red from the giant shield volcano beneath them.

Fosse’s body plunged into vacation, and his mind looked the other way. It was hard to do his famous relaxation act if he didn’t have a job lined up for his return, and two, as always and with everything, was better than one. The first job was a new musical, one he had always wanted to do with Gwen—he felt he
owed her—based on the Maurine Watkins play
Chicago.
For years, Watkins had rejected every offer to adapt her work. The rumor was she had become a superstitious fanatic, reading only tarot cards and
Variety
and living
someplace where not even Sheldon Abend, her agent, could reach her except through a post office box in Jacksonville, Florida. To actually get Watkins in the flesh, Abend had to hire a private detective
who tracked her, ultimately, to an address not far from her post office box. But once located, Watkins (now writing Hallmark cards for a living
) refused to talk to him. When she died, in 1969, her estate, including the book rights to her plays, transferred to her mother. When her mother died, the rights were transferred to Abend, who, at last, sold
Chicago
to Fosse’s producer Robert Fryer, and the team-building process began. Kander and Ebb signed on for music and lyrics, and Fosse and Ebb, it was decided, would collaborate on the book. Having learned the lesson many times over, Fosse would finally be credited as writer.

That was one project.

The other was
Lenny,
the film Fosse had been wanting to make about Lenny Bruce. Before it was a play directed by Tom O’Horgan, whose productions of
Hair
and
Jesus Christ Superstar
influenced
Pippin,
Lenny
had actually begun as a screenplay Columbia Pictures commissioned from writer Julian Barry. But after
Love Story
hit, Columbia concluded that grim material
like the Lenny Bruce story no longer suited the national taste and dropped the project. That’s when Barry and O’Horgan decided to adapt the screenplay to the stage; they cast Cliff Gorman in the leading role, and he eventually won a Tony. “It played like a screenplay onstage,” Barry said, “which is how Lenny’s brain worked:
Cut cut cut, bang bang bang.
” Lenny’s was a jazz brain, like Fosse’s.

Fosse had brought with him to Madeira tapes of Bruce’s routines and a draft of Barry’s play. “Look, Julian,” he had said to Barry at their first meeting, “I’m sure you’re really pissed I haven’t contacted you earlier”—he was; before getting Fosse’s call, Barry had heard he was working on the script with Gardner and Chayefsky; none of Barry’s calls had been returned—“but here’s the thing: you’ve worked on this story for years, you know everything about Lenny, you’ve read every interview and seen every routine, but I’m new. I have to find it all out for myself. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“I don’t want to be in a room working on a script with someone who’s going to correct me on Lenny Bruce. I have to see what works and what doesn’t.”