Fosse (52 page)

With their help,
Chicago
would be Fosse’s penitent thank-you to Gwen. After all she had given him and all he had taken,
Chicago
was his way—his only way—of giving back. Perhaps he felt guilty for being a bad husband; perhaps he felt guilty for (finally) passing her on the rise to artistic renown—whatever his reasons, he told all who asked that he did it for her. Yet there was no denying that reteaming Fosse and Verdon for the first time since their separation would fuel gossip and sell tickets, and selling tickets would go a long way to ensuring Nicole’s security, which was the one responsibility they shared.

Verdon’s
Chicago
contract was a valentine
of power. It granted her a nice piece of the profits; a strictly limited pre-Broadway run; and star billing, with her name as large and prominent as the show’s title on posters and promotional materials (all subject to her approval). She also had approval of all creative elements, including but not limited to
Chicago
’s principal cast; scenic, lighting, and costume designers; their designs; her own clothes; the show’s composer and compositions; orchestrator and orchestrations; librettist and libretto; dance music and dance orchestrations; and any of her understudies—whatever Lola wants.

Three years after Verdon and Fosse’s separation, the dust had settled somewhat. Verdon’s budding romance with actor Jerry Lanning helped them both a great deal. New love obliged Verdon to sequester the Fosse-hurt part of her heart, and her growing respect for Ann Reinking, as dancer, girlfriend to Fosse, and ally to Nicole, helped clear the debris between them. “Gwen knew a child needed both parents
and was very giving in allowing us time with Nicole,” Reinking said. “But it was hard for Bob that he didn’t have the day-to-day of waking up every morning with his daughter and his wife. They had both gone forward since their separation and received happiness that way; it was amicable, but it was still painful.” Looking at Verdon, you could see she never stopped loving Fosse. “And she continued to love him,
I think, in a way he never did her,” Reinking said. “I think that’s why she was so good to me. She knew what I was up against. I never talked to Gwen about this, but I think she understood. She understood Bob was Bob and if you were really in love with him there was going to be a good and a bad side.” Reinking clearly respected Verdon’s position as Fosse’s first and Nicole’s only, and Verdon understood she had to retreat if she wanted to stay close. All Fosse’s women did. Except Nicole.

As the summer of 1974 wore on, Fosse flew from Kander and Ebb to the cutting room and back, getting light only through the windows in his office or, after midnight, from the white flashes on the Moviola. Actual weather—that was a rumor. Actual life he lived on the side. “If you want to make something good,”
he said, “like a movie, it matters more than your health. So you trade a couple of years.”
Lenny
nights,
Chicago
days;
Chicago
days,
Lenny
nights. Fosse said, “I’d wake up in the morning,
and pop a pill. After lunch, when I couldn’t get going, I’d pop another one. There was a certain romanticism about that stuff. There was Bob drinking and smoking and turning out good work. Still popping and screwing around with the girls. ‘Isn’t it terrific macho behavior?’ they said. I probably thought I was indestructible.” Fosse had his next show but he didn’t have his next movie, which, whatever its subject, would have to somehow upstage
Lenny
the way
Lenny,
in its fervor and audacity, had upstaged
Cabaret,
which had upstaged
Sweet Charity.
He put Sam Cohn on the case. Together with Stuart Ostrow, who joined on as producer, they shuffled through galleys and scanned book reviews, finally touching down on
Ending,
a novel by Hilma Wolitzer about dying. “In American writing now,”
the
Times
review of her book began, “the romance of death seems to be challenging the romance of love. The sexual revolution has so redefined love that many of us are no longer sure what it is, while a growing existential awareness has brought death out of the funeral parlor.” The review was a rave. “Above all,
Ending
made me feel
how suicidally we waste our allotted time, how we often try to ‘kill it,’ as if it were something else and not ourselves that was being defeated.” Ostrow was drawn to
Ending
’s smallness of scope, likening it to a string-quartet
reprieve from Fosse’s regular symphonies, and the book was optioned right away.

Ending
is the story of a man’s death but it is also the story of his wife’s grief and the everyday ways they try to hold on and let go. With no showbiz connection, it was an odd match for Fosse. “My characters were as far from
Bob Fosse as possible,” Wolitzer said. “Their lives are very ordinary, very middle class.” In the novel, Jay Kaufman’s death is not Nazi-related or drug-induced but the result of multiple myeloma, tumors in the marrow of his bones. Which in a way makes it worse, far more arbitrary, rivaling even Hitler in the horror department. Everyone dies.

Fosse assigned Robert Alan Aurthur to the adaptation, likely anticipating the chance to pull rank if push came to shove. Aurthur had studied medicine before turning to writing and would surely be handy to have around for the script’s technical elements. His first step was to try to talk Fosse out of building the story around terminal illness. No one wanted to see that in a movie; it was dramatically uninteresting and just too depressing. Instead, Aurthur suggested, they should turn the script away
from the husband and toward the wife. Exploring her choices, Aurthur could open a tunnel under the narrative cul-de-sac of the husband’s inevitable death and ask how a loved one’s passing changes the living. Fosse talked Aurthur into inventing
a new character, a dying patient who wants to go out big, who keeps rehearsing memorable death speeches for his final close-up but who dies unceremoniously, without a word. The character manifested one of Fosse’s greatest fears—not death, but an
ordinary
death. He said, “What’ll happen is I’ll probably die in some hospital with no glory at all. No theatrics.”

Fosse bade Aurthur good luck with
Ending
and returned, with Verdon, to Broadway Arts, where they began to step through
Chicago
. They were at work for a month before Fosse summoned Kathryn Doby and Tony Stevens, his new assistant. “Don’t let me do anything I’ve done before,”
Fosse told Stevens on their first day. “Keep me away from the Charleston. I want to do a twenties musical without all that flapper stuff.” Stevens soon realized exactly what
Fosse meant. Far from the slaphappy antics of the Prohibition age, Fosse’s
Chicago
movements seemed closer to group sculpture than dance. He was draining the color. These were not people but bodies, automatons. Their eyes were still and mean. Ann Reinking called it “the Know.”
“You have to have the magnificent stare
that bores a hole at the other end of the theater,” she said. Glazed eyes give a character an air of humanless evil. Soul is missing.

The irony
Pippin
attained through exaggeration,
Chicago
was achieving through absence. One was filtered through commedia, the other through Brecht, whose epic theater had fascinated Fosse since he saw Tony Richardson’s
short-lived production of
Arturo Ui
in 1963, which Richardson set in 1930s Chicago. The Know was an appropriation of a Brechtian alienation technique. “The performer portrays incidents
of utmost passion,” Brecht wrote, “but without his delivery becoming heated.” Positing a style of performance he termed
gest,
Brecht could have been describing Fosse’s
Chicago
dances. “‘Gest’ is not supposed to mean gesticulation:
it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes.” The opposite of imitative, the gest is representative. It’s showbiz.

Chicago
days,
Lenny
nights.

For a while, Fosse had practically cut off communication with Julian Barry. “The reason I haven’t called you,”
he said on the phone, “is because I wanted you to have a completely fresh eye when you saw the movie. Could you come down to the screening room today?”

Before he left his home in Connecticut that day, Barry stopped at his mailbox and found a letter from his wife. She had only recently taken off for Atlanta to “discover” herself (with a redneck, in a trailer), leaving Barry, miserable and alone, to care for their kids. Her latest letter said she wasn’t coming back and that the redneck was not a redneck but the man of her dreams. “I went into a complete daze,” Barry said, “but I got in the car and drove to New York, didn’t remember how I got there, not one bridge, not one turn.” He arrived at the screening room and Fosse ran the movie, and the lights came up.

“So,” Fosse said. “What did you think?”

“Bob, I gotta be honest with you.”

Fosse nodded for him to continue.

“I don’t remember any of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t see it.”

“What does that mean? What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it—”

“Come on, Julian. Goddamn it.”

“Bob, I got a letter from Pat . . . Just before I left . . .”

Barry held out the letter. Fosse scanned it and threw it on the floor. “I don’t give a fuck about that bitch,” he said. “I need to know what you thought of the fucking movie.”

The recutting was endless. “People would walk into the editing room,
see there was a black cloud in the room, and walk out,” Heim said. Fosse would shred scenes down to nothing, just to see if he needed them. Heim wouldn’t stop him—he knew Bob was cutting the diamond—but he’d have to stay alert. The longer they worked, the greater the chances of Bob mistaking a flaw in the stone for a flaw in himself, or someone else. “You were a better cutter before
you were a father,” Fosse told Heim.

At home one night with Reinking, he had a seizure, a petit mal. “He was on his back,” Reinking said, “on the bed. His eyes were rolled up and his lids were fluttering.” Unsure of what to do, Reinking froze in the doorway; she had never seen a seizure before. When he stopped trembling, she rushed to the bed and held him. Helping himself up, Fosse explained what had happened, that stress was likely to blame, and he calmed them both with a slow walk to the medicine cabinet for a dose of Dilantin. “He was embarrassed,” she said. “I could see him thinking it was a show of weakness. Predators would see blood and come in for the attack.”

While driving back from Quogue, Fosse felt his hand cramp up, which it had been doing a lot. Reinking didn’t know why it kept happening. “I just don’t feel good,”
he would say. “I just—I don’t know . . .”

She had suggested they see a doctor.

“No, no, no, it’s all right,” he would say.

Now, as he drove, he looked nauseated, maybe carsick.

She felt his forehead. It was a little cold.

“It’s okay, really. I feel okay now.”

The first week of dance
rehearsals began October 26 at Broadway Arts. Fosse gave them “All That Jazz,”
Chicago
’s opening number, while Gwen worked on her own in another part of the studio. “All That Jazz” belonged to Velma Kelly, the star that Roxie Hart, only a showgirl, desperately wants to be. “The number started with me,
Velma, coming up on this huge lift,” Chita Rivera said. “It was practically half the size of the stage. When the elevator came up, I was in the center of the platform with my back to the audience in one of my Fosse poses and this shaft of light shot down from out of nowhere. First you saw the light, then you saw the finger, then the hand, then the arm. Then there I was. Then the vamp started. It was so slow. I turned around slowly and stopped for a second and I went all the way down the stage and placed myself, and I just look. I have the whole stage to myself. The vamp is the only friend you’ve got at that moment. And then I start to sing.” The company joins in behind her.

Fosse showed the company images of
the sort of period steps he did not want them to emulate. The Charleston, the shimmy, and the black bottom were meant only to give them a context, forms to be deconstructed. Then he pointed to a black trunk in the corner of the studio. “Go over there,”
he said, “and pick out anything you want and then spread out.” Dancers Graciela Daniele, Kathryn Doby, Cheryl Clark, Candy Brown, Pam Sousa, and a handful of others did as they were told, opening the trunk to find all sorts of vaudeville treasures (derbies, garters, canes, boas); they picked what appealed to them and spread out to different parts of the floor. “Okay,” Fosse said, pointing at one dancer, “now you do the shimmy in
slow motion.
” He pointed to another. “You do the black bottom in
slow motion.
” These weren’t to be flapper steps. They were streaks of blood. “In ‘All That Jazz,’”
dancer Gene Foote said, “he said to us, ‘I want you to confront the audience with murder in your eyes and dare them to look at you.’” It was the Know in action.

The dancers kept their straw hats and derbies in a pile, but Tony Stevens guarded Fosse’s bowler in a hatbox he kept with him at all times. It looked like the other bowlers with the exception of one detail: inside the brim,
Expressly made for Bob Fosse
was embroidered in gold thread. “It was the crown,”
Stevens said. Whenever Fosse would get up to demonstrate a step, he would signal to Stevens for his hat. “He would just open his fingers, and I would know where to aim,” he said. It seemed to Stevens that Fosse couldn’t dance without it. “It got so that he wouldn’t put on
the bowler without lighting a cigarette first,” Stevens said. “I remember thinking,
Maybe it’s the bowler that’s killing him, not the smoke
.”

Heim said Fosse didn’t look so good,
that he should go home and be confident about
Lenny
, but Fosse wasn’t ready to call it a day. The latest cut still wasn’t working, and the release date, November 11, 1974, was only days away. That was more than enough time to rescue the picture; more than enough time, Heim feared, for Fosse to second-guess and disassemble the whole thing. But he could not assuage Fosse’s doubts. After the two screened the picture (again)
,
Fosse went (coughing) back into the editing room and cut three whole minutes from
Lenny
. No matter that his teeth ached and there was a tightening in his chest. No matter that Ann Reinking was worried about the purplish color
of his lips. Every dancer learns to live with muscle aches, and what he had here, tingling aside, was routine discomfort. A pulled muscle, maybe. Nothing compared to the pain he would suffer, probably forever, if he didn’t get
Lenny
right, and fast. Stress? Who wasn’t stressed? They’d go until they got it.