Fosse (49 page)

With his
Lenny
cast assembled, Fosse arranged an extended table read in December 1973. “We were just reading scenes,
making changes,” Barry recalled. It was an out-of-town tryout for the script.

“Hey, Bob,” Hoffman said one afternoon. “I want to show you something.”

Fosse looked up. “What’s that, Dustin?”

“I got a walk—I think I worked out a walk.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

“What?”

“The last five performances of yours degenerated into a walk.”

It was untrue, but Fosse didn’t care. This was the O.K. Corral and he wanted Hoffman to see the gun on his belt. And Hoffman did. Julian Barry said Hoffman’s reaction evoked “one of those cats in a cartoon, thrown against a wall, when their face variegates. One piece starts to go, then another, then another . . .”

Hoffman put on a sarcastic grin and raised a finger at Fosse. “Limited gains, Bob . . .” he said. “Limited gains, talking to me that way . . .”

The more time Hoffman spent with the script, the more he came to believe that Lenny’s layers,
his changes and complexities, weren’t on the page. The current draft, he suspected, was a carryover from the play version of
Lenny
, which seemed more of a one-man show (“Gorman was brilliant,” he said, “you went to see Gorman”) than a character study. So little of Bruce’s biography made it into the script, Hoffman thought they might be better off turning Lenny into a fictional character and then writing freely from there. “Why not call the movie
Benny
?” Hoffman said.

Fosse agreed they had a story problem. “We don’t have a movie,” he announced one Friday rehearsal. “We don’t have a screenplay. It doesn’t work.” Hoffman half expected Fosse to shelve the project right there—it might even have been something of a relief. “If I had to guess,” Hoffman said, “I would guess I didn’t want to do
Lenny
and I was talked into it, probably because it was the best of what was around and I wanted to go to work.” Though he was in awe of Fosse’s eye, Hoffman sensed Fosse didn’t have an instinct for directing actors, not like Mike Nichols and John Schlesinger. He would use generalizations, results, telling Hoffman to play young Lenny with more “innocence, innocence, pure innocence.” That didn’t help; attitudes are ideas about performance results. They’re not playable human drives, the layers Hoffman needed Fosse to help him add to the character.

But Fosse didn’t call off the movie. “I think we solved it,” he said Monday morning, explaining how he and Barry decided the new draft would splice into the drama naturalistic “interviews” with the film’s characters, as if they were playing a scripted version of the truth game. It was an interesting concept, but was it a superficial solution? Or would the interviews really unearth
Lenny
’s missing layers? Hoffman wondered. Eager to deepen the character, he volunteered to help Fosse and Barry rewrite or at least join them at Fosse’s office and be a sounding board for their ideas. They turned him down. “Okay,” Hoffman said. “Then I’m going to Los Angeles to do the research I can do.”

No, Fosse did not want Hoffman doing research. He didn’t want him getting ideas about any element outside of his approval. “He wanted me just to show up,” Hoffman said, “and do what I was told. Fosse was the kind of director who would tell you what he wanted before the first take. An actor’s director will guide you to surprising them. But Bob did not want me to find my own way in. He declared that very early on.” But to Hoffman, a committed researcher, getting
inside
the part was his only way to personalize the performance. To give the character immediacy, he needed to find their overlap. Where in Lenny was the electric socket Hoffman could plug his heart into? Browsing through the comedian’s personal interviews and writings, he had the nonfiction facts of Bruce down cold. It gave Hoffman a wealth of raw humanity to draw from, but with Fosse telling him not to think about any of it, Hoffman, who had never seen Bruce onstage, got caught. He had to choose: Lenny or Bob.

Hoffman chose Lenny. He went to Vegas to meet with Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr, and she introduced him to Lenny’s friends. “They all loved him,” Hoffman said. “He never hurt anybody except for himself.” Not Buddy Hackett (“I took a walk with Lenny on the beach and there was a dead shark and he pulled out his dick and he fucked the shark!”). Nichols and May told him Lenny played not to the audience but to the band. They were the hippest in the room; Lenny wanted to break
them
up. Hoffman said, “I came back to New York with great scenes. I found out when Lenny got a gig in LA, he advertised by getting a huge cutout of Hitler and he put it on the side of the freeway and the sign said
See Lenny Bruce! Opening . 
.
 .
I said to Bob, ‘You gotta do that!’ I heard a story about the time the cops would come to see Lenny and they’d wait on the stage in case he said a dirty word. This is the kind of imagination Lenny had. He asked for a hundred-foot mic cord. So when he did the show and when he had to say a dirty word, he’d tell the audience, ‘I’m not allowed to say a dirty word onstage,’ and he’d go out onto the street and say, ‘I’m now on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, you cocksucker kike motherfuckers . . .’ It was great! I was so excited to talk to Bob and Julian [Barry] but I had difficulty even telling him the stories. I think it was the first time I felt
This guy doesn’t even want to hear it. This guy is not a collaborator
.”

Certain rehearsals Fosse devoted to Lenny’s monologues. But telling jokes to a near-empty, highly critical environment of Fosse, Barry, and David Picker, Hoffman couldn’t get laughs. It tried both sides.

“I’m bombing out.”

“Yes,” Fosse said.

“It’s hard to make these jokes work because you’re not an audience and your grimness is affecting me!”

“You’re not funny,” Fosse said.

“I’m
rehearsing,
Bob. It’s just a rehearsal!”

Make it bigger, Fosse told him, and Hoffman resisted. Lenny wasn’t shtick. Anyone who found his stuff funny wouldn’t need his common-sense punch lines italicized.

“Bob, can I ask you a question?”

“Okay, Dustin.”

“What do you find funny about Lenny Bruce?”

“I don’t think Lenny Bruce is funny.”

“Then why do you want to make this movie?”

“I’m interested in the ménage à trois.”

The ménage à trois Fosse and Barry had invented.

Hoffman called his agent and pleaded with him to get him out of the movie. But he’d already signed.

As a favor to Liza Minnelli, Fosse directed
Liza
Live at the Winter Garden,
an encore repurposing of
Liza with a Z
with some new numbers sprinkled in. As expected, the demand for Liza had not waned: thirty-six hours after tickets went on sale, the show had sold out its three-week run.

He could not complete the last piece of
Lenny
casting until he arrived on location in Miami, after
Liza
opened late in January 1974. If they were to represent a credible cross-section of midcentury Americans, Lenny’s nightclub audiences could not be selected en masse, like extras, but face by face, depending on place and time. There were faces for LA, faces for the Catskills, faces for New York, faces for the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s. For the close-ups, “Bob insisted that no extra could
see more than two takes to get an authentic reaction,” David Picker said. “So we had to have twenty-five hundred extras for that first week, each one right for the location, and after two takes they were out.”

They filmed the nightclub scenes in a dressed-up banquet hall in the Barcelona Hotel, a tired shack a déclassé distance from the beach. Filming these scenes at the hotel, a few rooms away from where most of production had been installed for the Miami leg of
Lenny
, was cheaper than shooting on location, in real nightclubs, as Fosse had promised Hoffman they would.
Proximity was good news for Fosse—they lived where they worked. The all-in feel of the shoot put Fosse’s crew in the right mood—summer campers after their parents drove away—and the punchy spirit of Lenny Bruce spread easily. Everyone was a little high, a little dirty, and working for last year’s Oscar-winning director promised to be enriching. They could fool around with pride.

Picker’s phone rang at five thirty in the morning on the first day of shooting.

“We got a problem.”
It was Fosse.

“What?”

“It’s Dustin.”

“What happened?”

“He doesn’t think he can be funny.”

Picker threw on his clothes, met Fosse in his hotel room, and, together, they walked into Hoffman’s room. The actor was sitting on the edge of the bed. “I can’t be funny,” he murmured. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t do this.” After a calm exchange, Fosse suggested they start with one of the bland routines Lenny did en route to his big breakdown and then work up to the funny material from there. Hoffman was fine with that, and Fosse, though he did not want to set an accommodating precedent, would be too. “After that,” Picker said, “Dustin got comfortable.”

Now Fosse had Hoffman’s audience to worry about. To keep the extras loose, Fosse was not opposed to their being served a drink or two, no matter the hour, and he had hired real waiters—people who truly knew how to put down a glass—to do the pouring. Once the drinks had been served, Hoffman would tell Fosse to roll film, and he’d start to play. “Hey,” he said to a guy in the front, “what’s your shlong doing on that ashtray?”
It didn’t have to make sense, it just had to spark a reaction, something Hoffman could then push against, into another canto of Lenny’s. If Hoffman stumbled, Fosse would throw him a rope, like “When you were in the hospital, Mr. Hoffman, were you faithful to your wife?” “Deny it!” Hoffman snapped back, sliding into Lenny. Even if he liked the take, Fosse went again. He was always going again. “Mr. Hoffman, what would you do if your wife came home and found a pair of pantyhose, not her size—” “Deny it!” “Mr. Hoffman . . .” “Deny it!” “Mr. Hoffman—” “I said
denyyyyy!
Even if they have pictures, say it’s a lie! Deny! Tell her a crazy woman burst into your house naked saying she had malaria and that she cried, ‘Lie on top of me and keep me physically active or I’ll die!’”

Anything to get an actor’s horrified expression. “You’re ugly! What are you doing here?
Get out!” Fosse would yell into the audience, filming their shock for later use. These sneak attacks worked for Fosse, but not for Hoffman. He needed real reactions to react to. But Fosse’s extras weren’t laughing. From take to take, they were getting more tired and laughing less. Then they stopped laughing altogether. Hours later, Hoffman was completely on his own, catching all the flak for the downturn in mood. “It was vicious,”
Hoffman said, “because you’re doing pieces of the monologue thirty, forty times and they’re fake laughing. It got so depressing.” Hoffman was beginning to lose faith, in himself, in Fosse.

“Bob, it’s not working.”

“It’s fine. It’s the wrong crowd.”

“They’re not laughing.”

“They’re stiff. Trust me. It’ll cut together fine.”

“Bob—”

“Trust me.”

“We need to do it again.”

“Please, Dustin. We got it.”

Dustin Hoffman was a perfectionist and Bob Fosse was a perfectionist. Satisfaction—with themselves, with each other—rarely came, and when it did, it was even less rarely shared. The other guy’s way wasn’t working: Bob Fosse, the boss, put his foot down. “Dustin felt I was restricting him
because I wasn’t giving him enough freedom to try things,” he said, sounding like the sort of executive he hated. “We’d go off together, away from the set, and battle it out. I said I’d try to give him more freedom and he said he’d try to listen.” But one’s “good enough” was the other’s “wait, it can be better.” Fosse, Hoffman felt, wasn’t directing so much as pushing. For Lenny’s most manic monologue, Fosse pushed Hoffman to run each take faster than the last, take after take, until the actor, gasping, finally held up a hand. “Nobody talks like this, Bob,”
he said. But it wasn’t the speed per se Fosse was after; he liked what the speed and exhaustion
were doing to Hoffman’s performance. It produced an effect. Hoffman felt like shit, but shit was good!
Good?
What? Hoffman had no idea what he was
saying
anymore. He wanted to know what this scene was
about.
Here Fosse would throw up his hands. “All Dustin wants to do is talk!”
Fosse said. “Someone tell Fosse I’m not a machine!”
Hoffman said. “[Fosse] wanted to be Lenny,”
Hoffman said. “That’s what he did when he’d give you a direction—it was him doing it. And inside sometimes I’d cringe because his acting was, well, you know . . .”

By breaking Hoffman down, Fosse (maybe) stood a better chance of breaking Lenny open, and there was always more to break. The broken pieces could be broken again and those fragments ground to sand and the sand pulverized to dust. After dust,
that’s
what Fosse wanted. “There are not a lot of movie directors
who come from the discipline of dance,” David Picker observed. “Most actors are not used to working with that kind of a director.” Twenty takes later, Hoffman was running the speech faster still. But whether his performance was improving or disintegrating was anybody’s guess, a topic of constant debate among the crew. They saw both sides.

Production manager Robert Greenhut suspected Fosse confused extremism for efficacy. One time in particular: Fosse wanted to shoot Lenny’s final routine, his gasping drug-fuddled breakdown, from an isolating distance far across the room, practically losing Hoffman in the frame. He wanted the act, which had become an utter narcissistic bore, to
feel
boring. “We can know what this means
for Lenny without having to bore the audience,” Greenhut said to Fosse. “We don’t have to show it for ten minutes straight.” But Fosse wouldn’t hear of it. If Lenny was boring, then
Lenny
would be boring. “It was ballsy,”
cameraman Bruce Surtees said. “It was hard and it was tough. That’s what Fosse wanted
Lenny
to be. That was the business he was in.” That’s why Fosse wanted black-and-white in the first place, and not a black-and-white with soft grays. He wanted high-contrast,
mean
black-and-white. “I want this to be like
a documentary,” he said to Surtees. “No bullshit.”