Fosse (63 page)

“Look, I’ll tell you what,” Fosse said. “If you come to my apartment every night this week and read this script with me, I’ll consider you for the part.”

“It’s a deal.”

Beginning the following Monday, they met every day that week. It was soon clear that as Joe Gideon, Roy Scheider was wryly, wearily, sexily at ease.

“Okay,” Fosse said. “You’re the guy.”

Scheider had just started filming
Last Embrace,
a thriller, for Jonathan Demme, so
All That Jazz
had to wait, again—until October, three months away. Shutting down, the crew
took 50 percent of their salary, and Fosse split himself between shaping up Scheider by day and tightening
Dancin
’ at night. Often, Scheider would follow Fosse
to the Broadhurst to study him watching the dancers, recording his every behavior and the thoughts he read underneath. They made an amusing pair. A
Dancin
’ dancer looking across the stage for a reaction would see not one but two Bob Fosses watching her. They spent all day together. Studio, theater, restaurant, cab. Fosse didn’t need to say it: Scheider’s task was to become him, body and soul. “Roy was so committed,”
said rehearsal pianist Don Rebic, “if he was there during one of Fosse’s coughing fits, he’d follow Bob out into the bathroom. Then Bob would return with a cigarette. Roy too.” Fosse worked on Scheider’s cough
like it was a monologue, bringing him down to a deeper, gutsier hack—his own. They laughed while they did it, rehearsing dying to perfection.

Dancin’,
meanwhile, was fraying around the edges. “People were dropping like flies,”
Christine Colby said. Wayne Cilento pulled his hamstring;
Gail Benedict took a spill
after a grand jeté and had to literally pull herself off the stage. Colby had consented to swing,
learning eight different women’s roles before she started going on for men too, but she couldn’t cover everyone. From night to night, even number to number,
Dancin
’ saw more injuries, and there was more filling in than most swings could keep straight. “[Dancer] Jill Cook would stand
in the wings when I came off and she’d say, ‘Vicki Frederick!,’ and then I’d turn back and do Vicki’s part. Then I’d come back off and she’d say, ‘Craig!,’ then I’d do that, and I’d know which wing to come out of, and I’d come off and she’d say, ‘Karen!’ It was wild.” Being a swing on
Dancin’
was the hardest dance job imaginable—in the running for the hardest dance job in Broadway history—but swings, some said, stood a better chance of survival. Using different parts of their bodies every night, they could, maybe, distribute tension evenly. Maybe. “Any dancer that lasted more
than six months was amazing,” Allen Herman said. As bodies were gurneyed from the theater and new, not always practiced dancers rushed in,
Dancin’
erupted with emergency scenarios and swings swinging for swings. But enough swinging, and wouldn’t swings become principals? There was no time to think it through. Dancers had to be on their toes for any number, until
Dancin
’ fell to jigsaw-pieces swings scrambled together in the wings of the Broadhurst. “It was a free-for-all,”
Wayne Cilento said, “because people would decide they’d be out for three numbers and then be out for the other eight numbers. They were picking and choosing. People were falling apart.” On Wednesdays, two-show days, Gail Benedict couldn’t walk up the stairs. “I had to drag myself up the railing,”
she said. Those days, a masseur came
for the company. Certain bumps, certain sprains, told the masseur stories of old numbers. Kneading them, he read the Braille of shows past: here, the shellacking of Michael Bennett; there, the raked stage knees of Fosse. These bodies were the corrugated maps of old Forty-Second Street, preserved in hurt’s formaldehyde.

All That Jazz
rehearsals took over Broadway Arts. Moving from studio to studio, Fosse would check in on Ben Vereen in one room; Gene Foote and Kathryn Doby—taken from
Dancin’
—leading the dancers in another, where he’d offer small notes or ask to see it “once more, kids, do it once more.”
Then he’d go on to the studio where Ann and Liz Foldi were running “Everything Old Is New Again,” the sweetest, most joyful number Fosse had ever created (intended to soften Gideon, as per
Melnick’s request), after which he’d move on to Roy Scheider, who was working in a studio of his own. Observing him would be Bob Aurthur, touching up scenes as he and Scheider uncovered new ideas for the role.

After weeks of discussion and shared input, Joe Gideon now lived beyond the script. He was now a character independent of Fosse’s real life, a creation Fosse and Scheider could step back and interrogate. “What do you think Joe would say
to that?” one would ask. “What do you think he’d do?” Scheider had been living with Gideon, and Fosse, long enough to know the answers, and the answers he didn’t have, he was expert enough to extrapolate. “Okay,” Fosse would say, “but is that truthful?” Meaning,
Do you, Roy Scheider, believe it?
When Scheider stumbled, like he did over Gideon’s excesses (Where did all that
all that
come from?), Fosse walked Scheider through Scheider’s own memory, drawing comparisons, browsing old songs for the right harmony. “Yes . . .” Fosse would say. “That’s good.
That’s
the feeling.” Fortified, Scheider would do it again the new way, with
his
past for Gideon’s, and more often than not, by rehearsal’s end, his director would be squinting at him—not a good squint, but not a bad one either. “Are you sure that’s right?” Fosse would smile. “You know when it’s on film, it’s forever.” He’d ask for another take, then for one more, and on and on, chipping, chipping, chipping away until the chisel struck a nerve.

And that was just the acting. Scheider had to dance too.

He and Fosse worked at Broadway Arts for two and a half weeks of confidence building and reassurance. But the trouble wasn’t the steps, per se; it was the dancing on top of everything else.

“You want me to dance and talk and act at the same time?”

“Yeah,” Fosse said. “You’ll be ready.”

Anticipating Scheider’s concerns, assistant director Wolfgang Glattes scheduled a relatively concise pas de deux—Gideon’s duet with his daughter—for Scheider’s first days of shooting. They shot it on a sound stage at Astoria Studios, replicating the Broadway Arts interior in exact detail, down to the smudgy windows and peeling paint. Fosse gave Foldi a few leaps and ballet poses, nothing substantial, and he choreographed Scheider around her. As promised, it was a simple arrangement; so simple, in fact, the dance seems less like a musical number than a father-daughter dialogue. Of course, it’s both, just as
All That Jazz
is a musical and a straight drama, a film that tries to reconcile the two genres as Gideon tries to negotiate work life and real life. The emotional power of this duet comes from that frisson, the convergence of labor and love, a picture of Bob Fosse’s perfect peace: rehearsing with his daughter.

“That was the first big hurdle,” Scheider said.

For the film’s opening number, a giant cattle-call audition shot on location at the Palace Theater, Fosse came to Scheider with an immersion strategy ready-made. “I apologize for having to do this,” he said, “but we’re going to put this thing in your ear, this little earpiece, so I can direct you from far away.” They had only two days at the location, Fosse said; whether that was true or not, the tight schedule was a smooth excuse for Fosse to go almost
literally
inside Scheider’s head without insulting the actor or impeding his process. “Bobby would talk to him throughout
the entire cattle-call sequence,” said sound mixer Christopher Newman, “and Roy, to his credit, never betrayed listening to someone as he was taking his physical direction from Fosse, who was up in a booth, looking down to the stage.”

Gideon’s cattle call was identical to Fosse’s, from “Tea for Two” right up to the regretful, mutually humiliating “Thank you very much for coming.” Fosse’s earpiece directives to Scheider consisted largely of directives he wanted Gideon to give his dancers—“Tell her
this
”; “Take his arm”; “Smile at them.” To capture the best reactions, Fosse had to stay flexible. He dispatched five cameras to scavenge
about the Palace stage, as if they were filming a documentary about an open-call audition—the
real
chorus line. The sequence that was supposed to take only a couple of days ended up taking seven.
Michael Bennett was on Fosse’s mind throughout. To Laurent Giroux, Fosse said, “In this audition, I’m going to do in fifteen minutes
what it takes Michael two and a half hours to do every night. And without dialogue.”

Sitting in the back of the theater was Robert Alan Aurthur. Having completed his duties as screenwriter, Aurthur, as Fosse’s coproducer, shifted his attention to the production—but was basically excluded.
“Bob dropped him,”
Glattes said. “Aurthur had an opinion, and Fosse didn’t want to hear it. He was going to be completely in charge.” The biting pain in Aurthur’s side persisted
throughout the Palace shoot and into the examining rooms of New York Hospital, a venue Fosse knew all too well. Aurthur’s friends Murray Schisgal and Joseph Heller came by, and Aurthur assured them he would be going home soon. The real problem, he said, was Fosse. “He thought Fosse was killing him,”
Schisgal said. “He was very disappointed and he was in a lot of pain.” His broken ribs—that’s what they said it was—continued to hurt through strategy meetings with Melnick,
which Aurthur conducted from his hospital bed, and through pro/con debates over whether to stop shooting while he recovered. They agreed that shutting down (again) would mean losing more money and probably ceding some kind of independence from the studio, and they decided to go on filming. Each afternoon, a secretary shuttled over from Astoria Studios to Aurthur’s bedside with news of the day’s progress, then returned to the production with his reports, and each afternoon, Aurthur expected Fosse to appear with the secretary. But, his focus on the film, Fosse reasoned that dancers danced with far worse injuries than Aurthur’s and never went in to visit him. They spoke by phone. A week in, doctors realized Aurthur’s broken ribs were only part of the trouble. A cough had broken his ribs, a cough from fluid in the lungs, lungs full of cancer.

He was dying, fast. “If I die before Fosse,”
he said in the hospital, “I’ll never forgive the SOB.”

When he heard Aurthur’s prognosis, Fosse finally visited Aurthur
in his hospital room. He then returned to Astoria Studios, to a cavernous sound stage where, on November 20, 1978, rehearsing a long white line of Ziegfeldian fan dancers, he got the news
that Bob Aurthur had died. Production assistant Jerry Jaffe remembered that “[producer] Kenny Utt came in
and told Bob. Bob smoked a cigarette, then went back to rehearsal.”

Per Aurthur’s will, a memorial party
was set for Wally’s the following Sunday. To Fosse, who didn’t shoot most Sundays, it must have played like a dress rehearsal for his own memorial. Of course Fosse’s would be better. It would have to be.

“Who’s going to do yours?”
asked Jane, Aurthur’s wife.

The last time Wolfgang Glattes had AD’d for Fosse, on
Cabaret,
Fosse’s set teemed with the excitement of happy collaboration, his Cy Feuer feuds notwithstanding. The current production, beset with tragedy, excess, and an even more demanding and schismatic vision, held Fosse and crew in a loop of frustration and awe. Glattes was the cage protecting both sides, a task generally delegated to the producer. “With each movie he got
more frustrated,” the AD said. “You had to get to know his problems or know what
would be
a problem. Driving to the set every morning, I would tell him what problems to expect so he could work around them.” Scheduling the shoot on production boards—interlocking accordion panels, each lined with colored stripes for every scene, each scene movable in case of delays or changes—Glattes represented the ideal confluence of pragmatism and art, and as Kathryn Doby’s husband, he was not suspected of treachery. Glattes carried the rainbow boards with him wherever he went, becoming Fosse’s voice of reason on the set, as Alan Heim would be in postproduction. “Fosse had nobody looking out for him,”
script supervisor Lynn Lovett said. “Kathryn and Wolf were able to be strict with him in a way nobody else could.” If Fosse’s clothes were covered in ash, Doby had him change; if Glattes caught a crew member working on a crossword puzzle, he calmly asked him to put it away. “Wolf and Kathryn were his caretakers,”
Lovett said.

Weekends, Glattes and Fosse spent location scouting. They took art director Phil Rosenberg to twenty-five different hospitals, and at each one, Fosse insisted on watching an operation. “His favorite was the hip operation,”
Glattes said, “because in those days hip operations were the bloodiest of all. It made his day when he could see one first thing in the morning.”

“What is it like if you’ve been through
a bypass and then have another heart attack?” Scheider asked his director.

“It’s like having an enormous weight, like an anvil, pressing down on your chest.”

Built but never opened, Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical Center was the perfect location. With no patients to work around, Fosse could smoke up the halls and generally do as he pleased. By his side at all times, Nancy Bird, head nurse of one of St. Luke’s cardiac care units, acted as technical adviser. “I was surprised,”
she said. “Rather than medicine, he wanted to talk about his feelings, how scared he was when he went into surgery. And as he was talking to me, he of course had a cigarette in his mouth. We joked about that.”

“Nancy,” he would say, “could you come over here and take a look at Roy’s face? Is his coloring right?”

She’d look. “Well, is this how you remember it?”

Authenticity took time. “His stress was incredible,” Bird said. “The film was going way over budget. People didn’t know whether their scenes were going to be cut. Everyone was just waiting to hear.”

All That Jazz
was indeed going over, way over, and there was no plan to make up for lost time. On
Sweet Charity
Fosse had storyboarded—which was helpful when it came to pinning down a schedule—but beginning with
Lenny,
he discovered a new freedom in delaying his decisions to the final moment. On
All That Jazz
, his opacity was even more extreme. Few people (other than Glattes) could tell what he was thinking. It wasn’t that Fosse was indecisive; he just needed to be there, to see it. “I’d say more than fifty percent of
the time on the set was consumed with Fosse trying to figure out how he wanted to shoot it,” said Christopher Newman. Unavailable for conversation even during lunch, Fosse could be seen dancing in a corner, a sandwich in one hand and his viewfinder in the other, throwing poses at a mirror he kept for himself. To accommodate Fosse’s new ideas, Glattes would break open his production board like a rib cage and rearrange its moving pieces of days, scenes, locations, and actors, minimizing losses wherever possible. Cast and crew buses left Columbus Circle
for Astoria at five thirty in the morning, so nearing evening, Glattes and Kenneth Utt had to be careful—overtime was another expense. “At seven o’clock,”
remembered Lynn Lovett, “Wolf would have to tell Bob, quietly, ‘Last shot. That’s enough,’” and Fosse would step back from the camera, alive but somewhere else.