Fosse (61 page)

Chicago
closed on August 27, 1977, after nearly a thousand performances, and the very next day, rehearsals for the national tour began, Bob Fosse presiding. For five weeks, he overlooked no detail. After years of modification and careful realignment, his visuals hit his dancers with perfect accuracy. “In ‘All That Jazz,’
there’s a movement where people have their palms flat downstage,” explained Susan Stroman, then a dancer in the tour, “and they sort of wipe their palms back and forth, and Fosse always told us to make believe we had blood all over our hands and like we were trying to wipe it off on a wall, kind of like the way the Manson family did.” After a tech run at Boston’s
Colonial Theater, Fosse appeared onstage wholly dissatisfied with the state of “All I Care About Is Love.” Hovering above the near-naked girls—on their backs, their crotches raised—he whispered, smoothly, “I wanna smell you girls
from the back row.” It was shocking, unforgettable, and persistently effective. “You could see his joy
and sexuality about what they were doing,” said Maxine Glorsky. Touching a microphone to his lower lip, Fosse would purr and moan through the numbers, as if turning him on turned them on, which turned him on even more. “It was like applause,”
Glorsky said. “He gave so they gave back.”

The Colonial’s stage-door exit opened into an alley behind the theater. One night, walking out with dancer Carolyn Kirsch, Fosse looked up from his conversation to see some kind of commotion in the darkness up ahead. Drawn in, Fosse and Kirsch pushed through the crowd and saw it: a lifeless man propped up against the theater wall.

“Is he dead?”
Fosse was urgent, in need of an answer. None came, and he kept asking it to no one in particular. “Is he dead? Is he dead?” “It scared him,”
Kirsch said. “He wasn’t fascinated, he wasn’t worried, he was scared.”

It was decided that Richard Dreyfuss could probably play Joe Gideon. Released only two weeks apart,
The Goodbye Girl
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
lifted Dreyfuss’s star and showed his mastery of the manic yet likable intensity that Gideon needed. A dancing Dreyfuss wouldn’t be a problem—Fosse could cheat that—if the performance was strong enough, which it probably would be. So they met: Dreyfuss was noodgy and nervous; Fosse was remote. “As soon as we got together,
you could smell disaster,” Fosse said. But he didn’t have a better option, and the production was running out of time. When Dreyfuss expressed his doubts to Dan Melnick, Melnick nailed him to the wall. “Sign this or I’ll kill you,”
he half joked. Dreyfuss signed.

Finding exactly the right dancers was difficult on any show, but
Dancin’
had no parts, at least not yet. Without a book, freed from the cumbersome dictates of story and character, Fosse could hire dancers exclusively on talent and personality. There was no composer to fight for his favorite singer, no writer to point out the best actor
.
Dancin’
was his, and the dancers were there to
dance.
Who blew him away? “So what do you think
of that one?” he’d whisper to assistants Gail Benedict and Kathryn Doby. “Do you see anything there?” He was on a shopping spree with a blank check. “Eh,” he said to Benedict, “that one looks like she has dirty fingernails.” (What did that mean?) They roared in from outside—people waited in a line around the theater
for two hours—and danced for Fosse all afternoon, for as many as six hours,
and in all styles, from ballet to jazz to Fosse. What did he have in mind? He didn’t know. Impress him. “He didn’t want to see your technique,”
said dancer Christine Colby. “He wanted to see
you.
” He wanted a full company of
yous,
principal dancers every one. No chorus, all thoroughbreds; white contracts, not pink. That too hadn’t been done before. “We were afraid the show was not
going to work,” Benedict admitted. “We were without a book, without new music, without stars. What was that? It was just a dance concert.” A talent show of the top talent in New York, a ballet company minus ballet.

He held callbacks.

Then he held callbacks again, this time to
really
see them, to audition the qualities in them he couldn’t see. He had them improvise. They talked. Who were they?

“What’s this show about?” they asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What are you doing?”

“I really don’t know.”

Jill Cook brought a snake
to her audition. At the final callback, Fosse warned Sandahl Bergman to think twice about leaving
A Chorus Line
for him. “That show’s a huge hit,”
he muttered, “and I have no idea what I’m doing, so I’m telling you, you have the job, but don’t take it.” This was, she suspected, the final combination she had to perform. She could twirl, but could she leap? Could she trust? (She said yes.) What about Ann Reinking? Despite their problems, could she trust? (She said yes.)

Dancin’
rehearsals took place toward the wintry end of 1977. Sixteen dancers as diverse in look and personality as Fosse’s musical selections met in a large studio above the Minskoff Theater with little or no sense of what was coming. Both a trampoline and a black hole, their ignorance precipitated as much imagination as worry and—to Fosse’s advantage—competition. “We all wanted Bob’s approval,” Benedict said. “There were a lot of high emotions and people on edge. The air was hot.” Perfect: where brains melt, bodies follow.

Benedict came to one rehearsal in a tight, formfitting body suit. “Gail,”
Doby said, “if you wore that the first day of rehearsal, you’d have a solo right now.”

“Oh,” she said, “you mean I’m still auditioning?”

Fosse’s thoroughbreds were all stars, but who would be
the
star? Who would take the front spot in the big number? (What was the big number?) Who would have the most numbers? The hardest numbers? The best numbers? “Everyone was fighting for
fucking everything,” said dancer Wayne Cilento. “People were killing each other to try to get parts, and he knew it. He used a lot of that with a lot of the girls. He played them against each other.” It fed the show. “He definitely used all that to get the best performances he could,” Cilento said.

With no story to maintain, Fosse could recast and “rewrite” on a whim, making moves rational and impulsive to better his show and, as was his prerogative, to protect his favorites and punish his betrayers. The dancers’ best bet was to err on the side of increase, to dance harder and flirt more, with him and one another. The sparks between Sandahl Bergman and Blane Savage flipped Fosse’s idea switches, permitting him new access to real offstage emotions. “He really liked Sandahl,”
said Savage. “There was a lot of giving her special attention, always choreographing with her, always demonstrating with her. And all of this stuff was very sexy, so he’d be rolling around with her. And when Bob Fosse was focused on someone, it was a total focus. He looked at you like he was having a relationship with you. Other people would see that, and they’d want it.” Savage reasoned that Fosse thought his open
flirtation with Savage’s girlfriend would provoke jealousy and that Savage would use that, perhaps against Bergman, perhaps against Fosse, in their number together on the floor. But Bergman didn’t take Fosse
to be flirtatious, not seriously; rather, she sensed he wanted to bring out the two dancers’ passion for each other. Their heat could help him through a block. “You know,” Fosse said,
standing over their tangled bodies, “you guys do this every night, so why don’t you just figure it out?” And he walked away.

Fosse watched all from above, on a stepladder he brought into the Minskoff. He would sit up there all day—Ahab with an ashtray—admiring, editing, calculating, “looking like a raptor,
ready to dive down,” Savage said. “He was the most compelling guy to watch doing nothing.” But he was never doing nothing. Looking down on them, he was looking down on himself, trying to erase the defects he called limitations. “I’ve really tried to vary my choices
to try to get rid of whatever it is that people call my style,” he said.
Dancin’
was the fire; he was the phoenix. “One valve is still partially clogged,”
he told a visiting reporter, “and I still have angina, but I take medication daily.” He would run out of the room in the middle of a coughing fit.

He was almost written off as uninsurable. The Shubert Organization’s first attempts to insure Fosse were outright denied, forcing the producers into an expensive and highly provisional agreement with Lloyd’s of London. Rightfully concerned, the producers asked the dancers to
monitor Fosse as best they could. But the dancers didn’t need to be told.
Dancin’
was their show too, but unlike
Chicago,
unlike any musical (was this a musical?), there could be no replacement if Fosse went under. So if he said he was going out for a slice, two or three dancers would get hungry for pizza. Socializing en masse became the norm. “We were always together on that show,”
Bergman said. “We’d dance together, then we’d hang out together.” That worked for Fosse; togetherness gave him new insight into his materials.

The baroque emotional atmosphere took a turn for the rococo as Ann Reinking fell in love with Charles Ward, a singularly gifted dancer who had come to
Dancin’
by way of the American Ballet Theater, making him an object of Fosse’s envy and admiration well before Ward’s romance with Reinking—who may or may not have still been seeing Fosse—went public. “Everyone was talking about it,”
said Savage. “Bob was clearly getting off watching Charles with Annie just like he was getting off watching me with Sandahl. That’s when Bob started to get a little bit competitive. He would say things to try to get her jealous; she would say things to try to get him jealous. It got a little crazy and a little complex.” It was painful. It was an opportunity.

In “The Dream Barre,” Fosse had Ward play a nerdy ballet student who fantasizes about the girl in his class, danced by Reinking. To the music of Bach, Ward’s character translated his ballet master’s dance instructions into erotic terms, performing on Reinking visual double-entendres that struck many as a burlesque of their romance and too crass to be funny. “It was obvious yuk-yuk humor,”
said Christine Colby. “I don’t know whether he did it to subconsciously hurt them or to get more dynamic performances.” That was the question Gordon Harrell asked himself as Fosse made “Ionisation,” Ward’s big solo, progressively more and more difficult, stretching him and the number to the point where “Ionisation” came to be known as the dance of death. “It was like he was killing Charles,”
rehearsal pianist Don Rebic said. “It was that hard.” Drummer Allen Herman recalled they kept
an oxygen tank offstage just in case. But Ward had the talent. The end result, the most virtuosic endurance test that Fosse ever choreographed, Fosse placed, respectfully, at the end of act one. The number finished as Ward threw his hands up and said, “That’s all, folks!”

Ann Reinking’s Trumpet Solo section of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” a slinky, exuberant tribute to her long limbs and power, eerily slow and then wild, combined a range of small, insular movements with rocket-launch kicks and impossible extensions. She seemed to morph from panther to eagle, ending the number almost by climaxing out of her skin. Using the whole palette,
her
palette, Fosse painted the portrait of Reinking in full motion; Annie dancing naked, he told Christine Colby, alone before her mirror. Colby said, “I remember looking at the Trumpet
Solo thinking,
That’s a language, a language only the two of them know
.” Reinking said, “The Trumpet Solo was primarily choreographed when we were still going together. It’s about having that strong, educated stem in the midst of improvisation. That’s what jazz is all about. You’re sticking to the structure; then you’re free. Then you’re back to the structure. Really good jazz musicianship is like that. You’re constantly listening, constantly concentrating, and yet you have to perform. You are yourself and you are the music. That struggle is constant. It’s about having wildness in the control.” It looked like a fight.

The worst snowstorm in a decade froze Boston white and rerouted Fosse’s dancers
from plane to train. Power was out all over town, and the winds were so mean, taxis refused to drive. The production hired horse-drawn carriages
to get people to the hotel. Stagehands met dancers at the station,
taking them by the hand to form a human chain against the blizzard. Unable to see, company members were shuffled to the hotel and then down into the basement, where a strip
of floor had been cleared for rehearsal. Bone-cold and lit only by candles, they worked in the shadows, aching and undeterred.
Dancin’
was the hardest show of their lives, as strenuous as any ballet, and, looking ahead to a Broadway schedule of eight shows a week, far more hazardous. Sprains, twisted ankles, tweaked knees, bruises, torn Achilles tendons, groin problems, lower back problems, muscle spasms, a crushed L4 vertebra; the comprehensive dance show invited comprehensive injury. The show that began with two swings (understudies)—one boy, one girl—brought on two more in Boston
to pad the bunkers. “It was absurdly hard,”
said Gail Benedict, “like playing a Super Bowl every day.” But there was no complaining. These dancers, largely unknown, were there to work, and work with Bob Fosse.

One couldn’t be certain if drugs helped or hurt. Cocaine, aside from being the disco drug of choice, was, for a few
Dancin’
dancers, the only
way to master the exhaustion and pain. “The dressers would lay out your lines in your quick change booth,” one dancer said. “You pick up your tissue and there would be lines and a straw and in thirty seconds you’d be back out there.” Quaaludes, marijuana, sleeping pills for hard nights—most everything was available and passed freely from room to room. A good policy was give to get; you never knew what you were going to need when. The counterargument said drugs made risky situations more dangerous, pushing dancers farther than their bodies could go, twisting ankles and swinging moods. But so what? There were more drugs for that. “We were so tired,”
one dancer said, “we weren’t thinking. When a life raft comes, do you question it? You get on and keep going.”