Fosse (51 page)

“I’m so depressed,”
he said to Wolsky after that year’s Oscar nominations were announced.

“Why?”

He was looking away. “I’m not nominated.”

“Bob, you didn’t make a movie last year.”

“That’s why I’m depressed.”

Toward the end of production, Fosse told Wolsky he’d seen a big, bearded man,
maybe Coppola, wandering around the set. He’d seen him a few times. Fosse would follow the stranger around trailers, planning to jump him and demand to know what he was doing there, on his location. Had they fired Fosse? He’d make Coppola tell him everything. He’d get back at them somehow: Fosse’s innate paranoia conjured the fantasy, and his pills made it so. But it wasn’t so. There was no Coppola on
Lenny,
no secret meetings to take the movie away from Fosse. Only Fosse, Job without God, sinned against, but by whom he didn’t know. “He fought everything so hard,”
Hoffman said, “like he was going to prove—I don’t know to who—that he was an artist. This guy wanted so desperately to be an artist—and that was his tragedy—because he already was.”

Filming ended in the spring of 1974, and full-time editing began. The task: getting about 360,000 feet of printed film to
a releasable 11,000. Fosse could get impatient while he cut, so Heim, relaxed, would set him up on the flatbed editing machine with a reel of reaction shots or one of Hoffman’s long monologues—something to keep him busy. With bigger screens and reels, the flatbed Kem, which could take as much as a thousand feet of film, was better for screening, while the upright Moviolas—loud green monsters Heim stood before and spliced down hard into—were nimbler and better for cutting. They spent the day floating between the machines; their collaboration rarely got heated. The heat was between Fosse and
Lenny.
“He taught me how to be hard on material,”
Heim said. “But he was so unrelenting, sometimes I had to rescue him from his own dislike.” But there was peace in postproduction. A face, an arm, an upper lip—things he spotted in dailies—they were now his to control, full stop.

Sometimes lunch would be personally delivered
by Chayefsky, Gardner, or David Picker, and often for the whole family. “There were times in the cutting room,”
said assistant editor Jonathan Pontell, “when Fosse was very jovial, full of stories, almost literally dancing. Then there were dark times.” He made no effort to hide the attaché
case Heim called “the pharmacy,” leaving it open by the Moviola in full view of all who passed by. “I’m positive that Bob did this intentionally,”
Heim said. “He didn’t want to tell me that he was having these moods, but he did want me to know that it wasn’t personal.” Fosse did not discuss his bottom-most fears with male associates outside of his immediate circle, not even Heim, whom he had known and respected for years. Women were another matter. Whether owing to sex or friendship, in female company, Fosse opened up almost involuntarily. “Bob would talk to me about
the tremendous guilt he felt not being able to stay faithful to his girlfriends,” Trudy Ship said. “He was still thinking about Gwen. He said he loved her very much but that his unfaithfulness became too much for her.” He would laugh at himself for dating
girls closer and closer to Nicole’s age, like Kim St. Leon, the nineteen-year-old extra he picked up on the set in Miami. She had followed him back to New York, and though she got a place of her own in the city, St. Leon had some accidental run-ins with Ann Reinking, one heading toward Fosse’s apartment as the other headed away.

“Who was it last night?”
Ship asked him one morning.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “But amyl nitrite helped.”

One night Fosse invited Kim and Ann
to 1600 Broadway, led them to seats at the Moviola, and then settled into a deep armchair. Trudy Ship cued up the reel. He gave the word and the lights went off. A few flickers in, Fosse’s audience knew why they were there—it was the threesome scene. He wanted to watch them watch it.

At home, Fosse found Kim had
written a man’s name and number on a pad by the phone. Though she assured Fosse he was only her scene partner in acting class, he didn’t care. Kim was not to see other men. It didn’t have to make sense; it just was.

“If you can’t go by the rules,”
he said, “then I guess we can’t see each other.”

“Well, I guess we can’t, then.” And that was it.

In the cutting room, Fosse could finally win his battle with Hoffman. The performance, Fosse decreed,
lacked the sour edge of the real Lenny Bruce. “It was the racial monologue,”
Heim said. “Dustin had backed off on it, made it softer.” Though Fosse, as director, had cocreated the performance, allowing Hoffman to make the choices Fosse now found distasteful, Fosse refused to assume his share of the responsibility. Hoffman became yet another Cy Feuer; this time, though, his opponent couldn’t defend himself. Ship said, “[Fosse] was frequently demeaning him.
Dustin would do something, or not do something, or ad lib something, and Fosse would [see it on the screen and] say, ‘That little
shit.
’” To save Fosse from his emotionality, Ship mediated from behind the Moviola, defying the code of cautious silence to save good takes, or good moments in middling takes, for the sake of the picture. One particular five-second reaction struck her as one of Hoffman’s best.

“Throw it out,” Fosse said.

“No, no . . .”

Bob turned around.

“Oh, please save it,” she begged.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the best thing he does in the scene.”

Fosse turned back to the Moviola. “But I can’t stand this guy.”

Ship was right, of course. And what Fosse hadn’t caught in the masters, he uncovered in fragments, details he could muscle into a movie mosaic. Fosse had experimented with fragmentation on
Sweet Charity
and
Cabaret,
but cutting
Lenny,
Fosse and Heim freed themselves more fully from linearity. Heim said, “We discovered that by fragmenting
Hoffman’s performance, even more than it had been in the script, we were able to make him seem tougher, to make the film move better.” There is no time in
Lenny
, at least not in the sense of chronological time; for Fosse and Heim, time was a jazz standard, there to be riffed on. The result: a network of asynchronous pieces of picture and sound that orchestrator Ralph Burns called “Fosse time.”

Just as Fosse’s dance style had risen from his own perceived inadequacies, Fosse time came from what Fosse perceived as a deficiency of usable film. Cutting up and around Hoffman’s performance, he and Heim learned they could excavate an aspect of Lenny’s personality through a chosen tempo, the speedy feeling of being everywhere at once. Intermixing past with present and the stage with the real world, they fashioned a zippy associative style closer to cogitation than reality, as if
Lenny
were thinking itself to life. It was so much about rhythm. “Film is just like music,”
Fosse said, “and acting is dancing. The rhythms . . . the appeal to the unconscious.” Tossing the script aside, Heim and Fosse finished each other’s sentences on film, like Ginger leading Fred leading Ginger.

But the script belonged to Julian Barry. Early in June 1974, Fosse wrote him asking for co-credit.
Fosse’s tone was patient and respectful and he made it clear to Barry that if Barry decided against co-authorship, it would in no way affect their friendship. Barry owed him nothing, but after all those story meetings, Fosse felt he deserved the credit. “I wrote back and told him no,”
Barry said. “I said the guy who goes home with the stomachache and brings in the pages the next morning is the writer.” Fosse said he’d never bring it up
again, and he never did.

He was coughing all the time now. Hacking fits would overtake him in the middle of a conversation. Then he would recover, light another cigarette, and return to work. “He was coughing and coughing
and coughing,” Ship said, “and the whole room was tense.
Oh my God,
I thought,
his lungs are going to come out.
” Fosse wouldn’t speak about it. There was little use in discussing what seemed obvious to all. “The nerve-racking thing,”
Robert Greenhut said, “was he would leave the cigarette between his lips and kind of forget about it. And it would burn down so much he would only remember it because his lip would get too hot. Sometimes he would burn himself. There were lots of times where people had to actually help him get it out because he couldn’t take it out with his fingers. They had to swat it out of his mouth.” They could miss and end up hitting him in the face or, worse, on the mouth, which was blistered up from forgotten butts he’d let burn too long. But he never ran out of lip. After singeing one side of his mouth,
he would put his next cigarette on the other, burn that one, and cover the burn with a foul-tasting ointment before lighting his next and putting it on the same spot.

He was smoking and coughing when he and Paddy and Herb met to discuss, with an air of spoof seriousness, Dino De Laurentiis’s proposed remake of
King Kong.
“Although we had worked on each other’s
stuff for years,” Gardner said, “some animal instinct had kept us from working
with
each other.” But this notion was too funny to pass up. Meeting at the Russian Tea Room, a place of real business, they could pretend like they were giving
King Kong
a real shot. Watching one another’s eyes for signs of laughter, they slid into one of the Russian Tea Room’s red-leather booths, and Fosse, the director, ordered chicken Kiev and started delegating.

“Paddy,” he said. “You will handle the dignified, philosophical part of the script; that is, the boredom. Herb, you will do your usual semicomic lyrical bullshit. You’ll do the whimsy. And then I’ll shine it up so maybe someone will come and see it. I’ll do the flash.” They decided to call their
King Kong
company Boredom, Whimsy, and Flash (“It was how we referred to each other for the next fifteen years or so,” Gardner said), and they agreed the movie would open at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Kong—a coked-up Hollywood has-been—being paged over the loudspeaker. Lighting a tree-size joint, Kong rises from his lounge chair and stomps through the pool on his way to the phone. He listens carefully to his agent. “Okay, Sam,” he says. “I’ll do the series.” If only.

They had real projects to work on. Paddy’s was
Network,
a movie idea he had been considering off and on since the late sixties. Now Chayefsky and his producing partner Howard Gottfried were shopping it to the studios, fishing for interest. It would not be an easy sell.
Network
drew on ugly facts of the TV nation: the perversion of truth and integrity by razzle-dazzle, the crude selling of everything, no matter how sacred, and the American appetite for entertainment that keeps it looking benign. “We used to turn on the radio,”
Chayefsky said, “and hear the speech [of a presidential candidate]. Today we get ten seconds of an anchorman, fifteen seconds of the reporter on the spot, and fifteen seconds of the
high
points of that speech.
That’s
the speech we get. That’s not
true.
” But people still buy it.

Fosse was intimately invested in every nut and bolt of Chayefsky’s preoccupation with the show-business-ization of network news. It meshed with his own obsession with razzle-dazzle, which he and Fred Ebb had been putting into
Chicago,
turning the show into a wicked satire of American jurisprudence, an entertainment consisting of performing lawyers, “innocent” criminals, and “impartial” journalists writing about justice. “It’s all show business, kid,” says
Chicago
’s lawyer Billy Flynn. “These trials, the whole world, show business.” He sings “Razzle Dazzle,” which could qualify as Fosse’s theme song. (“Throw ’em a fake and a finagle / They’ll never know you’re just a bagel.”)

Fosse edited
Lenny
and worked with Fred Ebb on
Chicago
’s book, and Ebb continued to meet with John Kander, every day, to write the show’s music and lyrics. They lived four blocks from each other on the Upper West Side. Around ten every morning, John Kander
(who liked to go out) would walk over to the apartment of Ebb (who didn’t), and the coffee would be poured and the cigarettes lit. They hung about the kitchen gossiping like the old friends they were, catching up on all they’d missed since they’d seen each other the day before. Together, Ebb, an angsty, witty, waggish New Yorker, and Kander, a sweet midwestern guy, were the dialectical heart of the Broadway musical. They got off on each other’s enthusiasm. “We were pregnant a lot in those days,”
Ebb said. “I would look at him and a song would come out.” One would shine on something that would glint in the other, and the conversation would turn to a moment in the show or a troubling phrase in a song and they would walk their glint into the small room overlooking the park, sit before the spinet piano, and try it. It wouldn’t always work, but they wrote fast and tore up fast, which gave Kander and Ebb permission to dislike just about anything they wrote. After a decade together, there was no need for argument. If one mustered the confidence to assert himself, the other would nod his head okay and the thing would die, or live, for the moment.

They improvised their way to certainty. Enough good guesses about words and music eventually brought them the answers; then, their destination in mind, they’d turn around and smooth their guesswork into the beginnings of a song. But slowly, each leaving small openings in the composition for the other guy to fill in. “I would never write a completed lyric,”
Ebb said, “because then I would confine him to a form, which is not fair to Johnny.” And Kander never handed Ebb a completed melody. They asked each other questions. An important one was “What are these characters feeling?” Or “What are these characters thinking and not saying?” “Are you with me?” “Yes, I’m with you, keep going, keep going.”

“Put in two finger snaps,”
Ebb said on “Razzle Dazzle.”

“Where?”

“Here. In the vamp.”

“Oh . . . yeah, yeah . . .”

“Bobby’s gonna love that.”

Suddenly one would realize he was hungry, the other would remember they hadn’t had anything to eat since ten o’clock, and they’d order up from the deli downstairs. Still working when the food arrived, they’d talk with bread in their mouths, one putting a mug on the spinet to free up a hand for a pencil (“Our copy was so messy,”
Kander said, “our copyist, the Jewish mother of copyists, would berate us for our poor notation”), the other putting on one of those old vaudeville recordings Fosse loved so they could find themselves another glint. To underline the American vaudeville of jurisprudence, they and Fosse decided
Chicago
would be a musical vaudeville too. Ebb and Fosse’s book scenes were broken up by “acts”—the show’s numbers—performed out to the audience in a vaudeville style suited to each character. On most days, good days, they wrote a song.