Fosse (62 page)

Early one morning, Blane Savage found himself with Fosse at the hotel’s breakfast counter. Hunched over an untouched plate of hash browns and eggs, Fosse smoked, staring down at his food. “I haven’t been asleep for three days,”
he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t been asleep for three days.”

“Bob, you need to sleep.”

“I will eventually,” he said. “I’m trying.”

He had more than one reason to stay awake. A few blocks from
Dancin’,
at the Colonial,
Pippin
was playing the Shubert, and although it had been five years since it opened at the Imperial, Fosse was still trying to improve the show. “Don’t spend your life at the mall,”
he told the
Pippin
company. “Teach each other. Give classes. Talk, learn . . .” The
Pippin
ensemble thrived on that kind of community. Helping them get there was his break from
Dancin’.

“You look tired,”
Pippin
dancer Diane Duncan told Fosse.

“I literally never sleep.”

Reinking’s relationship with Ward,
who the dancers thought was obviously gay, puzzled most everyone. Maybe they didn’t have sex, they speculated; maybe she did it just to get to Fosse, but the truth was Reinking cared for Ward, and from a purely tactical vantage point, it would have been foolish to provoke Fosse. She cared for him too. “All she wanted to do was please him,”
Allen Herman said. Bob was no longer her lover, but he was still Bob Fosse, her director, her friend, the best butcher on the block. “There were a few bars of the Trumpet Solo that stifled Ann,” Allen Herman said, “and we were all sitting around watching him put her through the wringer until finally she broke down crying.” Fosse called ten. He stepped onto the stage, put an arm around Reinking, and led her off, into the house and out into the lobby, where they sat and spoke privately, away from the drama.

But he would not be the best butcher without the blades he kept twinkling in the dark, like Jessica Lange, who appeared one day in Boston, dressed
all in white, as if in snow scooped up from the street. Months earlier, he had had the idea to
get her to the studio. She said, “He really knew the way
he was going to get me was by dancing for me, like, so I would really appreciate his extraordinary talent.” Suspecting another man in her life, Fosse
overrehearsed the entire seduction number, from the offhand hello to the lean-in and kiss. When she came in, he saw himself standing before the mirror, the lights lowered to let Manhattan through the window, then he would start, and she would fall as planned. But their meeting was delayed, and he soon realized that the other man, someone named Misha, was not just another man but Mikhail Baryshnikov. Fosse quickly dropped the studio idea, but he hadn’t given up. Now Jessica Lange was in Boston, in white, in the darkened back of the theater. “All of our eyes popped out
of our heads,” said Christine Colby, and Reinking simply left the stage. The following day she came late
to rehearsal. After a run of “The Dream Barre,” which still wasn’t working, she snapped at dancer René Ceballos, who returned, “It’s not just
your
rehearsal, Annie.
It’s our rehearsal too!” and Reinking stormed off again; Charles Ward went after her. Fosse looked up from the ground. “René,” he said into the hush,
“she’s not angry at
you.
”

Labeling
Dancin’
a plotless musical (“They’ve forgotten there’s a thing
called the revue form,” Fosse countered), Boston critics put the wrong frame on the show and then blamed the show, leaving some in
Dancin’
, as they returned to New York for the opening, to ask if they were part of an innovation or an aberration. “Precision and style mark the evening
at its best; but too frequently they are in the service of very little,” the
New York Times
noted in its review. “The hollowness shows; it becomes a gaudy and elaborate mask covering nothing: a deification of emptiness,” another way of saying
Dancin’,
like
Pippin,
endeavored to peel skin from the bones of entertainment and evaluate the skeleton for meaning.
Here is everything I know,
Fosse says.
What am I worth?

Only as much as you always were, the
New Yorker
’s Arlene Croce replied, which was never much to begin with. “Fosse knows his limitations,”
she wrote, “and he knows how to make them look like powerful artistic choices marked by daring and style.” He went big wherever possible. But by flaunting Fosse’s showstoppers—powerhouse music, an all-black stage, breathtaking endurance challenges—
Dancin’
inadvertently revealed how hollow the old tricks were. One Fosse-imposed challenge—nailing his dancers’ clogs to the floor—took footwork out of the picture, but “footwork has about as much to do with Fosse style as lariat-twirling,” Croce wrote, “gyrating body shapes are the essence of that style.” The panorama of human experience, of styles, evaded him. The showiness upended the show.

“Don’t look too close, folks,” he liked to say, “watch the rabbit, don’t watch where it’s coming from.”

Soon after the New York opening of
Dancin’
, Fosse called Ann Reinking from Payne Whitney.
“He was afraid he was going to kill himself,” she said, “and this time he came near to believing it.” She went to see him. “He told me about all the stuff they took away from him so he didn’t hurt himself.” It was important for him to put her at ease. She could see that soothing her calmed him. He could see she believed he was going to be okay.

“Love is total acceptance,” Reinking said, “and the only way for me to totally accept him was as his friend. Gwen ultimately saw it the same way. The best way to be with him was to not be with him.” They would talk on the phone. They would have lunch. Reinking was virtually starring in
Dancin
’, appearing about town in cabaret acts and getting her picture taken with other men, and he could see she was happy. They grew closer. “You can’t kill love,”
she said. “You can mess it up but it doesn’t die.” Removing sex only nurtured the friendship
that, years ago, had begun their romance, and though one could only borrow Fosse, he was a devoted ally, as married to Annie as he was to Paddy and Herb. “You can’t live without trust,”
she said, “and I never stopped trusting Bob.”

W
ITH
DANCIN
’
BEHIND
him, a star onboard for
All That Jazz
, and a script in working order, Fosse leaped feet first into the project, finally. Casting the film was an exercise in innuendo. “I want you to do the Gwen
Verdon role,” he said to Leland Palmer. They had barely communicated since
Pippin,
when Palmer played Fastrada, considered by many to be that show’s Gwen Verdon role. Now he was asking her to play Mrs. Joe Gideon, practically a one-to-one copy of the real-life Gwen (Shirley MacLaine had turned him down, and casting Gwen as herself would have made it impossible for Fosse to deny he was filming his autobiography). Fosse had not seen Palmer for almost a decade, and when she stepped into his office, he took a quick look at her and furrowed his brow. “What’s happened to you?” he whispered. Recovering from a difficult illness, Palmer had gone through an enormous spiritual transformation Fosse knew nothing about—until that second. “I know,” he said. “You found God.” But before she could answer (yes, she had), he asked, “Did you bring an orange towel?” That towel—he still remembered they put it over the lamp the night they didn’t make love on the road with
Little Me
many shows ago. He had everyone’s key: knowledge of an actor’s most private trauma, a dancer’s secret ambition, a girlfriend’s biggest fear. Fosse could reach a hand into any head; he could draw from everyone’s biography the very thing he needed to get what he wanted. Reinking he made audition for
Katie Jagger, the Ann Reinking character (she got the part). Cliff Gorman, the original Lenny on Broadway, whom Fosse couldn’t cast in
Lenny,
was cast as Dustin Hoffman à clef. He put Sidney Lumet in the Chayefsky role, and when he cut the part, he moved Lumet into Lucas Sergeant, Gideon’s nemesis, who, like Hal Prince, wore his glasses up on his head. Jules Fisher, Alan Heim, Phil Friedman, and Kathryn Doby (excused from
Dancin
’) all played themselves.

To find the young actress-dancer to play Michelle, Joe Gideon’s daughter, Fosse ran hundreds of girls
through the audition process he reserved for child actors. “You’re not going to read a hundred
kids separately,” Fosse explained to Larry Mark. “That’s not what it’s about. So what I would do was, I’d tell groups of ten to stand at one end of the stage and I’d stand at the other. Then I tell them to run like hell and jump into my arms. Only about two of a hundred kids would trust me enough to really do that.” He added, “I wish I could do that with adults.” Erzsebet Foldi, a twelve-year-old student
at the School of American Ballet, made her way through auditions and callbacks and screen-tested with Dreyfuss until it was down to her and one other girl. To break the tie, Fosse gave them a single very little, very big task. “Will you light my cigarette?”
he asked the first girl, kneeling down to her height and putting a cigarette in his mouth. Without thinking, she scratched off a match as swiftly as Tatum O’Neal in
Paper Moon.
After thanking her, Fosse brought in Foldi—Liz, they called her—and asked her to do the same thing. With the lit match in one hand, she took the cigarette out of his mouth with the other and then touched the cigarette to the flame like they were the tips of two fingers. Then she handed Fosse his cigarette. “You got the job,”
he said.

Relinquishing as little as possible to the casting department, Fosse and Aurthur swallowed their tensions, or tried to, for more auditions. They needed strippers, the strippers who torment young Joe Gideon backstage before he goes on. As the line of zaftig possibilities moved by, this one too young, that one too pretty, Fosse’s mood darkened. The room grew tense. “Finding those strippers was churning up something in Bob,” Ann Reinking noted. “He got a little angry, a little aggressive.” Further unsettling his company, Fosse asked Aurthur to take a seat in front of him and read the part of Young Joe. Fosse gave no explanation, and Aurthur obliged. After the next stripper introduced herself, Fosse instructed her to approach Aurthur and “disturb” him. The request and subsequent interaction was so uncomfortable, Ann Reinking had to look away. Pretending not to notice, Fosse called for the next stripper and told her to really go for Aurthur. Aurthur, again, obliged him. “As he encouraged the strippers to be more aggressive and more aggressive,” Reinking said, “something came out of Bob Fosse that didn’t belong, that wasn’t really directed at Bob Aurthur. He went back in time. It was like watching someone almost relive it, and with a hard edge I had never seen before. I think Bob Aurthur took it [in stride] but it was hard to tell.”

Screen tests took place at Astoria Studios, a long-abandoned warehouse in Queens, across the river from the Manhattan skyline. In sound stages squeezed between factories, Fosse and Dreyfuss read actors for uncast parts, and Fosse’s bad feeling got worse. He suspected Dreyfuss was talking to
the actors between takes, giving them notes as Joe Gideon might have—that would be the actor’s defense—but Fosse saw something else, a movie star usurping his authority. “In my test, they were fighting,”
Sandahl Bergman recalled. “I remember getting into the elevator with Dreyfuss and he said, ‘Sandahl, I’m so sorry about this.’” To Melnick, Dreyfuss said, worried, “I can’t get up there with
my big Jewish ass and try to be a dancer.”

To his pal Roy Scheider, Dreyfuss said, “I don’t think I want to do
this movie.” They were having dinner at Scheider’s apartment. “I don’t like Fosse and he doesn’t like me. I just don’t feel mentally prepared to do this thing.” Patience was failing both Dreyfuss and Fosse, but at this point neither could walk away that easily. Dreyfuss had a contract, Fosse a schedule, and Dan Melnick, suddenly, had a studio to run. It happened quickly. After David Begelman, Fosse’s former agent, pleaded nolo contendere to embezzling studio funds and resigned, Melnick—without forfeiting his producership of
All That Jazz
—assumed the position of president and COO of Columbia Pictures. By releasing Dreyfuss, Melnick would incur further delays and additional costs, and he would likely bear the criticism of authorizing, as studio head, his own wastefulness as producer—a doubly bad proposition for any executive, but for one so new to the job,
doubly
doubly. Buying time without money, Melnick begged Dreyfuss to hold on; Sam Cohn begged Bob Aurthur, also a producer, to hold on; and they all held off from telling Fosse what everyone else knew: Richard Dreyfuss wanted out. Then Aurthur told Fosse.

“I want to play the part” was his response.

Aurthur was stupefied. “If I propose this to Melnick, he will say I’m crazy.”

“You must support me in this.”

Which Aurthur did—but Melnick shut him down. Fosse would not star, cowrite, coproduce, and direct a picture he was making
about himself.
It was outrageous, Melnick said. If making the movie didn’t kill him, the critics certainly would.

Alan Bates?
Alan Alda? Gene Hackman? Redford, Ryan O’Neal, and Paul Newman weren’t right, Fosse thought, and De Niro too expensive. James Caan? Melnick still dreamed of Beatty. Sam Cohn called Roy Scheider—like Fosse, an ICM client—to find he was interested, even more so after Cohn sent him the script, which Scheider loved. Cohn arranged a meeting at Fosse’s office, and when the day came, Scheider arrived fully prepared with a self-deprecating autobiographical monologue and an overflow of deference and humor. “I told him all of the silly, wild,
crazy, dopey, ridiculous parts that I’d ever played in summer stock and a lot of other places that perhaps he never would have dreamed that I would have played that kinda stuff,” Scheider recalled, “because I wanted to give him an idea that in my theater background, which was considerable, [I did] fourteen years in a lot of very classical theater but a lot of dumb dopey fun stuff too.”