Fosse (47 page)

Except
Cabaret
was winning. Joel Grey heard his name and got up. One of the show’s hosts, Charlton Heston, got a flat tire and missed his entrance, so Clint Eastwood, pulled from the audience, got up. The editor David Bretherton heard his name and got up, and Geoffrey Unsworth, who took Fosse’s side in the darkness, got up. It was happening, and with each win, the next win seemed more likely; the next loss more humiliating. But they didn’t lose; they kept sweeping: best score, best art direction, and best sound, which made it difficult to completely discount the possibility that Fosse might win, although he wouldn’t. Coppola would. “He was very still,”
Emanuel Wolf said. “He was somewhere else.” They had lost best adapted screenplay to Coppola, but the tally showed
Cabaret
was quietly, and strangely, ahead of
The Godfather.
As the bodies piled up and the ceremony approached its end,
The Godfather
had only two wins to
Cabaret
’s seven.

George Stevens and Julie Andrews, at the podium, announced the nominees for best director.

“Bob Fosse for
Cabaret
.”

His head was down. Janice was not with him.
The show’s directors had removed the pretty girl from the edge of the frame to make for a better, more intense close-up of Fosse. Surrounded by men, seat fillers he hadn’t met before, Fosse looked much more alone.

“John Boorman,” Andrews said, “for
Deliverance.
”

“Jan Troell for
The Emigrants.
”

“Francis Ford Coppola for
The Godfather.
”

“Joseph Mankiewicz for
Sleuth.
”

Then the envelope and Bob Fosse heard his name again, and he was onstage, taking a cold statue from George Stevens. “My legs were like cooked spaghetti,”
he recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I going to say? I should be bright, how am I going to look on TV? I wonder if Nicole is watching? Don’t make an ass of yourself. Show enough emotion. But don’t slobber.’”

“Thank you,” he said at the podium. “Thank you very much. Thank you. I must say I feel a little like Clint Eastwood, that you’re letting me stand up here because Coppola or Mankiewicz hasn’t shown up yet.”

Unsteady laughter from the house.

“But being characteristically a pessimist and cynic, this and some of the other nice things that have happened to me the last couple days may turn me into some sort of hopeful optimist and ruin my whole life.”

Steady laughter.

“There’s so many people to thank. You’ve heard a lot of the names, but it’s important for me to say them, and I’m sure I’m gonna miss some of the ones and regret it tomorrow. Of course Liza, and Joel, Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Marty Baum, Manny Wolf, Kander and Ebb. A terrific guy by the name of Doug Green. A dear friend of mine by the name of Gwen Verdon. And I’d also like to mention Cy Feuer, the producer, with whom I had a lot of disputes. But on a night like this, you start having affection for everybody. Thank you.”

Fosse was escorted backstage for the hailstorm of press and photographs, and then he returned to his seat, woozy, for the rest of the show. Liza Minnelli heard her name, squeezed her father’s arm, and got up. Then Marlon Brando’s name was read and Sacheen Littlefeather, new to show business, got up. When the best-picture envelope was opened, Cy Feuer got up. Then he heard that
The Godfather
won and he sat down.

As soon as he could, Fosse called home; that is, he called Nicole at Gwen’s in East Hampton.

“Hi, Dad.”
She was distant.

“What did you think of the show?”

“Nice.”

He asked her about her new bicycle; she answered about her new bicycle; and she handed the phone to Gwen. “You should have been here,” Gwen said. “When you won it, she screamed so loud she said, ‘I think I broke something in my throat.’”

Somewhere around midnight, Fosse and Janice and the Academy Award for best director returned to the quiet of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Paddy, Herb, and Marlo were waiting up for them. They convened in Fosse’s suite and opened
bottles and windows and looked over the one or two swimmers flying over the pool below. The occasional clink of crystal on crystal or sound of a pretty girl’s laugh curled its long way up through the palms to Fosse’s balcony, where he sat, smoking, laughing, unbelieving, with his friends. It was a cool evening. Nothing lasts, but Fosse knew these stubborn wisecracking maniacs belonged to him for life. “I’ll walk you one more block,” he had said
to Herb and Paddy after lunch one afternoon, “and then I have to go back to work.” “Don’t you remember,” Paddy shot back. “You have no work. You’re finished in this business.” Fosse nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “I forgot.” They had loved him before he won and they would love him after he won and with a fervency no critic, not even him, could ever corrupt.

The next morning, Fosse ordered room service and climbed into the shower. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Janice standing before the mirror, looking at herself holding the Oscar as if she’d won it. “Would you do
anything
to win one?”
he asked.

The next week was terrific. Glorying in the attention satiated Fosse. But then the accolades passed, and he came down. “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Instead of jumping down the street and being all smiles, I’d find I was badly depressed.” Once a drug, the thrill of winning was starting to feel merely good; in a way, it didn’t feel like winning anymore.

Then the Emmys came around. Fosse flew back to LA and won the best director award, his third, for
Liza with a Z.
He was now the only person in history to win the Tony, the Oscar, and the Emmy—the Triple Crown—in a single year. Which made him the only person in history to follow that victory with the most terrible depression of his life.

There was no achievement that could be better than winning everything, which he had just done. Here he was, a record-breaker, again: He was here. Where was he? He was alone. Public triumph brought Fosse a magic wand with a surprise curse—against him. Whenever he decided to tap it on a project or a person, to make a dream come true, there appeared from somewhere else—poof—a rejected individual furious at Fosse for not alchemizing him. There were just too many against him now, more every day. The pressure to please everyone, to share his freshly notarized genius and personally return every phone call (and happily) and weather everyone’s retaliatory anger without absorbing that blame into blame against himself led Ann Reinking to observe that success for Bob Fosse was harder than failure. “He didn’t understand why people seemed to be trying to tear him down,” she said. “It confused him. He’d ask, ‘Why am I so miserable when everything’s going right?’”

He knew he couldn’t complain. Discussing this sort of high-level heartache with anyone outside of Reinking (or Paddy and Herb) would further estrange him from his friends and his “friends” and those aspirants in between, so Fosse, at the pinnacle, called off the parade. He withdrew. And withdrawing, he drew more criticism. Now, they said, he thought he was too good for them. “Bob couldn’t win that one,” Reinking said. “He lost a lot of friends.”

“His pain was extreme,”
Lynde said. Was this supposed to be as good as he ever felt? Was this the dream? Because if it was—and it
was,
or at least it had been—then his whole life was behind him. Except for decline.

Decline was still ahead.

“He was afraid he would not be able
to figure out what to do next,” Lynde said. “Nothing would ever be as good again.” It would seem he had given all he had to give. Creating a new dance vocabulary, reinventing the television special, reinventing the movie musical, and dragging all those genres to hell, both onscreen and onstage, Fosse had raised the bar on blackness impossibly high. And now he would have to raise it higher. But how? What human truth was darker than Nazism or suicide? What was darker than pitch-black? “There’s this Looney Tunes cartoon,”
Ann Reinking said, “called
Show Biz Bugs,
with Daffy and Bugs Bunny in competing acts. The audience loves Bugs, and Daffy keeps trying to outdo him and he can’t. Daffy figures out the only way he can upstage him is to blow himself up. When he finally does, the audience goes wild. Bugs loves it and claps for an encore. Daffy, his ghost floating up, says, ‘I know, I know. But I can only do it once.’ That’s Bob.” At the end of May, he checked in to the Payne Whitney psychiatry clinic.

H
E WAS NO LONGER
interested in therapy,
not for himself. Since getting off Seconal,
Fosse had stopped trying to solve his problems; he now just accepted them. Infidelity, addiction, depression, and the zero he held inside himself were, like his baldness, permanent. Like everyone else in New York, he had his theories about why he was what he was: there was the negligent mom, the loserish dad—old masks of the Freudian commedia dell’arte—and being the smallest and youngest boy in a very full house during the Depression. They were only theories. “It was too early to be Bob Fosse,” Reinking said. “His doctors didn’t always know how to help him. Psychiatric medicine was not what it is now.” Someone, Fosse used to say, must have scared
him when he was little. That boy, Dr. Sager told him, was
trying to get back at someone. He was enraged, betrayed, although by whom, Dr. Sager didn’t know. That was about as far as they got. Fosse hurt someplace too far down for Sager to reach. Did that make the doctor the failure, or the patient? Fosse thought both.
Checking into Payne Whitney, Weill Cornell’s renowned psychiatric hospital on the East River, he could have some time away, sober up, maybe, a little.

He lasted only a few days.
More than his depression, Fosse hated the lithium
they prescribed to combat it; the drug flatlined him, killing his sex drive, and he was happier to be unhappy and fucking than not unhappy, dull-witted, and not fucking. “I knew it was time to check out,”
he said to Janice Lynde one day and Ann Reinking another, “when I started to put on shows with the other inmates.” It was a great line, whether or not it was true, and coming up with a great line was reason enough to get back to work. Anyway, that was the only thing that really seemed to help—that and sex—and he wasn’t getting either in his white hotel.

Two scripts needed his attention. The first was
Lenny,
half completed. Marvin Worth, one of the film’s producers, had notes for Barry and Fosse. He was concerned their hero was losing
“hugability” and that the threesome scene Fosse had given Lenny and his ex-wife, Honey (a scene Fosse and Barry had completely invented),
could get them into a libel situation. Also, Worth said all the chronological
jumpings-around in space and time, from Lenny’s nightclub act to his past, present, and future, threw off the story. He wanted to see
Lenny
streamlined and cleaned up. Fosse tossed Worth’s notes aside and proceeded instead to revise
Lenny
with Barry in the mornings and to work with Fred Ebb on the
Chicago
book in the afternoons. Fosse had made history with Kander and Ebb’s
Cabaret
and
Liza,
and so far,
Chicago
was coming along nicely, a genuine collaboration. They were having fun. At clutch intervals, Kander would join them at Fosse’s office for a little volley. “We’d be talking about the form
and sharing ideas,” Kander said. “It was totally open, a total joy. We were all on the same page.”

That Fred Ebb feared and revered Fosse made for a smoother partnership, at least from Fosse’s point of view. “I was malleable,”
Ebb said. “I never stood up to him. I never argued with him.” Fosse set the rules. As he had with Julian Barry, Fosse would spend the afternoon talking through scenes with Ebb, and then Ebb would go home to the typewriter and write, alone. In no time, Fosse had a map of Ebb’s pressure points, could hover a finger over the bruise. “He would say, ‘Oh, this is
all right,’ but he was never very wholehearted in his praise,” Ebb recalled. “The mere fact that he accepted [the scenes] was terrific as far as I was concerned.” The collaboration got tense. Ebb was anxious.

At the deli one day, Ebb found a moment alone with Chayefsky and Gardner. He wanted their opinion. Having respect for both sides, they encouraged Ebb to do as they would and fight Fosse. “He’s an arrogant son of a bitch,”
they said, “but he knows what he’s doing. Don’t let him bully you.” Ebb nodded in agreement but lost his conviction upstairs, ultimately agreeing to give Fosse what none of Fosse’s other writers had: credit. No matter the division of labor,
Chicago
was going to have a book by Fred Ebb
and
Bob Fosse.

Meanwhile, with
Pippin
sales flagging, Fosse and Ostrow hit upon a wholly novel idea: a commercial. Experts believed TV audiences were uninterested in
Broadway musicals, and the expense of producing commercials confined low-budget productions like
Pippin
to the more affordable print ads. But shooting on the cheap, in a studio in Princeton, Ostrow could save on major production fees. He picked a small number, “The Manson Trio,” and had it filmed quickly, with one camera, on June 7, 1973. Preoccupied with
Lenny,
Fosse left the directing to William Fucci and the dancing to Vereen, Pam Sousa, and Candy Brown, who were by now more than equipped to handle the old-time Suzie Qs and flirty finger wags without him. “This cameraman was just shooting us
head-on,” said Sousa. “I didn’t know much about film but I kept thinking, ‘This can’t be that interesting.’ Then Bobby showed up—we never expected him to—and he had this cameraman going all over the place.” In the cutting room, Fosse laid a droll voice-over on the sixty-second spot: “Here’s a free minute from
Pippin,
Broadway’s musical-comedy sensation, directed by Bob Fosse. You can see the other one hundred and nineteen minutes of
Pippin
live, at the Imperial Theater. Without commercial interruption.” It worked. Ticket sales soared, and continued to soar, through
Pippin
’s five-year run. Henceforth, the commercial would be an essential part of Fosse’s promotional outreach, and it soon became a cornerstone of Broadway musical advertising. But unlike the cut-and-paste TV spots of his contemporaries, Fosse’s commercials were as much short films as sales pitches, and they would grow artistically from show to show. They too were Bob Fosse productions.