Fosse (56 page)

“
Chicago
was always cynical but
there was supposed to be something joyous about it too,” John Kander said. “There was this feeling that sex was bad. I don’t know where that came from. It was ugly.” It was vengeful, like a retaliation. But against whom? The producers, for banking on his early death; the dancers, for dancing freely, as if they weren’t wrecked from bypass surgery; Gwen, for roping him into it; Fred Ebb, for questioning Fosse’s story instincts; or the New York critics for handing Fosse—he could only imagine—the same old razzle-dazzle rap? Or was
Chicago
railing against the audience, soon to fill the Forty-Sixth Street Theater, for buying its own bullshit? Was Fosse preemptively hating them before they could hate him? “There was a feeling of tension
all the time,” John Kander said. “We didn’t know what to do.”

He began smoking again, Hav-A-Tampas and cigarillos, putting the dancers in the awkward position of wondering how and if they should ask him to stop. “I’m walking off the stage
unless you put that cigarette out,” Chita would say, and Fosse would oblige. When she went away, he’d light another. Once, Chayefsky bounded across the room and, in front of the entire cast, slapped the cigarette out of his mouth. “I felt pretty bad about it,”
Fosse said later, “and then I realized it was an act of love.” Love—he could accept it only from Paddy.

After he left the relative security of the New York studio for tryouts in Philadelphia, Fosse’s depression met Fosse’s fear. “Going out of town was
a sad time for Bob,” Pam Sousa said, “because he had to let go. He really felt, leaving the studio, eighty percent [of the show] had to work. Once you’re up and running, there’s the added expense of changing the show and of course it’s hard on the company, rehearsing at day and performing at night. In Philly he told us, ‘I’m going to make this darker and meaner.’” Neon set pieces, part of the older, brighter
Chicago,
were discovered in the alleyway.

Rewriting the book, or getting Ebb to, Fosse could exorcise his desperation at little cost to the producers. But at great cost to Ebb; as Fosse’s scapegoat, and a natural sufferer, he agonized through every rewrite.
“Their angsts were not well matched,”
Stevens said, “and neither were their ideas for the show. Fred missed its pizzazz, and out of town he realized he wasn’t going to get it back.” Fosse snapped at him publicly,
but Fred Ebb admired his director too much to deny him and was, by nature, too gentle to fight. During rehearsal, Candy Brown found Ebb in the bathroom,
crying alone. “Why don’t we get on a train
and go back to New York?” John Kander offered one night. “This isn’t worth it. No show is worth dying for.” One afternoon, after a particularly dark episode, Kander, Ebb, and Chita Rivera met in the back of the theater to weigh their options. “We made a pact,”
she said. “We agreed that if one of us goes, we
all
go.”

They were staying at the Bellevue-Stratford, a five-minute walk from the theater, and unwinding as a group at the local Variety Club, where an Equity card bought you drinks at reduced “theatrical” rates and where there was a little dance floor in the back to release tension. Fosse was drinking more than usual,
putting Stevens in the tricky position of having to monitor him. On a few occasions, Stevens literally had to carry Bob to his hotel room and slip him into bed. “His suite was so clean,” Stevens said. “I expected to see the place a debauched nightmare, with pills on the bathroom floor and cigarette holes in the pillows, but it was like no one was living there.” One night, hanging up Fosse’s jacket, Stevens discovered a closet full of black—shirts, pants, jackets—all nearly identical, one after the next. He asked Fosse where he shopped. “Gwen bought them,” Fosse said. In the suite again, stumbling to bed, he said, “They don’t like me, do they?”

“What do you care?”

Fosse laughed. “I’m not a bad guy, you know.”

“I don’t know,” Stevens teased. “You might be.”

“I hear Michael Bennett’s a
really
nice guy.”

“Oh, he is—nice, talented, good-looking . . .”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

(Fosse called Stevens Mary Sunshine, and Stevens called Fosse the Prince of Darkness.)

“Is there a Hershey bar in there?” Fosse asked next, pointing to a jacket.

Stevens dug through the pockets, past a folded-up picture Nicole had drawn, found the candy, and tossed it across the room.

“My dad,” Fosse said, “he used to work for Hershey.”

No matter how late they stayed up or how drunk he was at bedtime, Fosse was never anything less than completely prepared for the next day’s rehearsal. Turning to Stevens, who was Fosse’s inside line to Michael Bennett (or so he hoped), he would ask, with increasing regularity and decreasing irony, “Is this better than
A Chorus Line
?” “Bobby, it’s totally different.” “Do you think Michael Bennett could do this?” “It’s apples and oranges.” “But what do you
think?
”

Chicago
’s first preview was a disaster, a sign many took to mean the show was too nasty, but to Fosse it meant
Chicago
was not nasty enough. The anger he once turned inward, against himself, he now turned outward. Critics, dancers, writers—they were Fosse’s postoperative antagonists. Seeking vengeance, he scoured preview audiences for signs of discomfort; when people walked out in the middle of the show, he would say, “We got ’em!” Their laughter meant they missed the point; Fosse did not intend
Chicago
to be a comedy.

“I’m afraid this show is my image
of America right now,” he said. “It’s about the lack of justice in our legal procedure: how justice and law hardly function at all. It makes some interesting comments on the press, about the way they make celebrities out of killers, exploiting and glamorizing criminals. When you think of people like Charlie Manson, or see Mafia killers publishing their autobiographies, you can see that
Chicago
isn’t just about the 20s. It says some things that are pertinent for today, for now.” The poor reviews he regarded as vendettas against him. “I’m a target now,”
he said, “because of the success I’ve had in the past few years. People tend to want to knock a target down.” They said the show didn’t have heart; he said,
Heart?
In 1975? “
Chicago
was theater and politics,”
Verdon said, “Bob’s response to Watergate.”

Further marginalizing Fred Ebb, Fosse asked Gardner, Chayefsky, and Neil Simon to have a look at troublesome book scenes and contribute jokes. Herb and Paddy did their share, writing between them new material for Roxie and the “Cell Block Tango,” but Simon refused to help. Ebb asked Fosse why. “Neil hated it,”
Fosse told him. “But don’t feel bad.” How could Ebb not feel bad? The funniest man on Broadway saw no hope for his musical comedy. “And by the way,” Fosse said to Ebb a little while later, “why didn’t you ever give me the rewrite on the ‘Roxie’ number?”

What rewrite? Fosse had never asked for a rewrite.

“We were in Philadelphia for
twelve years,” Kander said. “It never ended.”

After each of the many previews,
Tony Stevens and Kathryn Doby would work for an hour, collating Fosse’s notes: notes for Gwen, notes for Chita, notes for the boy dancers, the girl dancers, the conductor, and Jerry Orbach. Stevens would take the dancing notes and Doby the directing notes, type them up, and the following morning, they would go door to door at the Bellevue-Stratford, delivering Fosse’s feedback as if it were room service. But the inevitable morning knock rarely brought pleasure. It meant there were to be more changes tonight, changes different from last night, which had been different from the night before, and not always totally different, but generally
slightly
different, a matter of inches or seconds. “They were the tiniest things,”
Rivera said. “Bobby wants you to do
this,
Bobby wants you to do
that
. . .” Keeping notes up to the moment is part of any performer’s job, but for
Chicago
’s company, finding their way was like finding the door in a house of mirrors.
Knock knock knock.

“Come in, honey.”

Chita opened the door. Stevens had painted black bags under his eyes and wrinkle lines on his face, like an old man. They’d been in Philadelphia that long.

“Just one . . . more . . . note . . .”

Most of the dancers were sharing rooms, two to a room, which cut down on Stevens’s and Doby’s travel time but presented the awkward problem of how a girl was supposed to handle Fosse’s nighttime phone calls without offending the roommate whom he hadn’t picked (assuming she had wanted to be picked). This midnight tension Fosse naturally used to his advantage. Asking to speak with one dancer and not the other, he sparked an arterial fuse of jealousy that snaked from the switchboard through the twenty-some floors of the hotel, often circling back to the first spark for the
other
girl, upping the temperature from jealousy to anger (“He called me
first
”; “He likes
me
better”), which he could direct—now that the air was hot and emotions malleable—into a threesome, either with him and them, or him, one of them, and another girl a phone call away.

The phone rang in Cheryl Clark’s room around eleven.
Her roommate, who had been with Fosse, picked it up.

“Hi, it’s Bob. Can I talk to Cheryl?”

This was typical. No hello. No hi, how are you? She handed Cheryl the phone and withdrew to the other side of the room.

“Bob?”

“Can you come to my room and we can talk?”

Cheryl couldn’t say she wasn’t flattered. That afternoon, in rehearsal, he had put his hand on her leotard (“That’s good, Cheryl”), and that night, at the Variety Club, they looked at each other differently. It was a look she understood, a pressure she recognized. Though relatively naïve, Clark had seen all the big girls go through this on
Pippin.
Now it was her turn.

“I’m ready for bed,” Cheryl said on the phone, “but I’ll see you in the morning for rehearsal.” After the third night of phone calls, she went.

A full cart of liquor waited for her inside Fosse’s suite. There was no need to pretend they didn’t know what was about to happen. He poured Cheryl a screwdriver and they started dancing, closer, to Harry Nilsson, to Neil Diamond, and then slower. Another drink and they were touching more than moving; another drink and they weren’t moving. The record ended. There was no intent in his embrace, no innuendo. He held her, not to take her, but to feel her, because feeling felt good. “He was so happy,” she recalled. “I mean, like a kid. I’ve never seen anybody happier. He was in heaven and I felt fabulous.” It rested him.

The attraction she had never known was there was suddenly there. “He was a beautifully built man,” she said, “a gorgeous guy.” Three hours later, around three in the morning, she fell to the bed, exhausted. “It was such a beautiful, intimate encounter, the whole evening.” But Fosse—nearly fifty years old and just four months out of open-heart surgery—still had more to give and take. “We felt such serenity,” Clark said. He begged her to stay.

“Bob, I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’ve got
rehearsal.
At ten in the morning.”

“Okay,” he said. “Come on.”

He insisted on walking her back to her bedroom, though she begged him not to.

“We’ll take the stairs,” he said. “No one will see us.”

“That’s a lot of stairs.”

“It’s fine.”

“No, Bob, this is crazy. You just got out of the hospital.”

“I’m fine.”

“You have a death wish.”

“No, no, no. Let’s go.”

More than three flights of stairs later, she was afraid he was going to have another heart attack. “Come on,” she insisted. “I’m taking you back.”

Fosse shook his head no. Taking Cheryl’s hand, he walked her to her door and said good night.

Weeks later, they were still in Philadelphia.

They needed a new ending. What they had was, at last, Roxie and Velma’s club act, their happy ending, and celebrity’s victory over justice. They might be criminals, but what a show! Consisting of two numbers, “It” and “Loopin’ the Loop,” the finale began with Gwen playing the saxophone and Chita the drums. They would dance triumphantly, and then face their audience to thank them for everything.

It wasn’t working, Tony Stevens thought, for the reasons Gwen said: Roxie needed her big moment. “She was screaming and crying
and hollering in the lobby of the theater downstairs,” Stevens said, “and Bob knew he was in trouble. She had had it with him.” Stevens understood Gwen wasn’t just out for her own solo. She knew ending
Chicago
on the cynical note that began it wasn’t ending the show at all. The story needed to take the audience somewhere else; Roxie needed to change. But even that posed a problem. Roxie couldn’t simply reform. It was too late in the 1970s for that sort of hokum. What
Chicago
needed was to have it both ways. If they ended the show with something sincere, even ironically sincere—whatever that meant—they would amend, slightly, the cynical pose that opened
Chicago
and allow the audience to leave the theater feeling good about feeling bad. “We had to toe a line,”
Stevens said, “between a happy ending and a hard one. This was a musical comedy!”

Fosse went to Kander and Ebb and asked them to ditch the two bouncy numbers for a single sophisticated one. After a bitter evening, there could be a kind of pathos in class. “Bobby was almost embarrassed
when he came to us,” Kander said. “He wanted to know if we’d be upset. Freddy and I didn’t even look at each other. We looked at our shoes and said, ‘Oh, gosh . . .’ And we turned and walked out of the hotel ballroom. And the minute we hit the street we started skipping because we were so happy to be out of there.” They returned to their hotel piano and wrote “Nowadays” in half an hour. To make their effort seem more effortful, they took the rest of the day off.