Fosse (69 page)

Jerome Robbins was a competitor too, but he was also a god. Fosse wrote to him
about Nicole: now out of high school, she did not want to be a Broadway dancer like her father or mother (Fosse felt this showed “discrimination” on her part) but a ballerina. “She has two gods,” Fosse wrote, “you and Mr. Balanchine.” Fosse needed his help: Training at the School of American Ballet that summer, Nicole was told she wasn’t built for ballet and that there might not be room for her in the winter session. She had been offered a full scholarship for an upcoming term with Joffrey and an apprentice position with the Cleveland Ballet, but if there was anything Jerry could do to keep her at SAB, Fosse wrote, anything at all . . . Robbins obliged, but Nicole’s ballet career did not progress much further. All torso, no legs, and small, she showed her mother’s shape on her father’s frame, a body, like Joan McCracken’s, more suitable to Broadway. And there it was. Strings Fosse could pull, but he could not protect her from her limitations. It was a short step, he knew, from losing the part to feeling a failure, and a shorter step from failure to believing failure was innate, to living one’s life as a reject. The meat grinder of show business: enough turns, and the meat grinds itself.

Reading, at Paddy’s suggestion,
“Death of a Playmate,” Teresa Carpenter’s
Village Voice
story about Dorothy Stratten, raped and murdered at twenty, only three years older than Nicole, Fosse observed the meat grinder at its cruelest. In her guilelessness, Stratten reminded him of his younger self,
a sweet kid. Vulnerable. Paul Snider, local scum, saw it too. “That girl could make me a lot of money,”
he said in Carpenter’s piece. He took her to her prom and sent her nude photos to
Playboy.
Hefner loved them. He loved her. More than a Playmate, she had Marilyn Monroe potential, the stuff of a genuine crossover, stardom, the big time, and Stratten went higher, and the higher she climbed, the less she saw of Snider, and the angrier he got. When she fell in love with Peter Bogdanovich, Snider went crazy. He shot her and sodomized her and then killed himself. Carpenter concluded, “It was all too big for him.
In that Elysium of dreams and deals, he had reached the limits of his class. His sin, his unforgivable sin, was being small time.” Fosse was Snider too.

He was Faust and Mephistopheles.

Stratten’s tragedy stirred the psychology-of-spotlight ideas Fosse wrote to Dr. Sager about, and pushed his lifelong autobiographical inquiry even farther, into hell. Far grislier than
All That Jazz,
Lenny,
or
Cabaret,
“Death of a Playmate” was the most horrific show business tale imaginable—and all true. Coming so soon after the tragedy itself, it smacked of exploitation and immorality. Fosse knew his approach to the story—trying to come at it from Snider’s perspective—would be considered a kind of empathy with evil. “I somehow identified with him
because he was trying to get in,” Fosse said. “It’s not that I’ve been excluded that much, but I know that sense of them all knowing something I don’t know. And that makes me very angry.”

This script, he would write. No compromises, no collaborators.

He began to research. He studied the autopsy reports, underlining gruesome specifics in red pen.
Postmortem abrasions to forehead, knees, and left shoulder. The brain is pulped. The anus is patulous, shows striations.
Teresa Carpenter led Fosse to public documents.
She gave him the taped interviews and transcripts she’d used for her research. Like a detective, he scrutinized property profiles of Bogdanovich’s Bel-Air home and the Playboy Mansion; he secured internal
Playboy
correspondence from the time of the murder and conducted interviews of his own with cast and crew from Bogdanovich’s
They All Laughed,
Stratten’s last movie. This was the Fosse of Broadway Arts, listening to records, watching the mirror. He got Stratten’s high-school yearbook and interrogated Snider’s private photographs. He made Xerox blowups of Hefner’s face. Everything he knew about the case he put into a twenty-two-page history—his road map.

Certain scenes called out as script-worthy. Collecting them, Fosse began to find his story. He began to write.

It came easier than expected.
Using real dialogue gave him some grounding, and as expert on the available facts, Fosse had the confidence to charge forth. Some said he didn’t know the truth, but who did? He knew Snider; he was uniquely qualified to write that story.

Throughout, he kept Paddy in mind. As coach and guru, Paddy’s faith urged Fosse back to the typewriter, back to the script’s larger ideas. He began to think of Paul Snider as a modern George Eastman, Montgomery Clift’s character in
A Place in the Sun.
Both killed for status; the difference was the sort of business they were in. Though Snider was a psychopath, Fosse could present his mania as a perverted offshoot of the showbiz epidemic, the media-obsessed frenzy of fame, flash, and glossy three-page foldouts. He knew it would take a scholar-dramatist of Chayefsky’s caliber to make the analogy into compelling entertainment, and all through the writing of the first draft, he expected to turn the pages over to Paddy for a rewrite. But Chayefsky had other plans for his protégé. “You don’t need another writer,”
he told him. “Finish it yourself.”

Paddy was finished with movies.
Altered States
did him in, was
doing
him in. Untoward changes of director (Arthur Penn to Ken Russell), lawsuits, and perversions of Chayefsky’s original intent hastened the use of his pseudonym (Sidney Aaron) and increased his smoking. His diet worsened and he stopped going to the gym. Paddy wasn’t in the mood. Down in the deli, he told Fosse of the great alienation. His, everyone’s. Since getting out of the hospital, he’d become convinced the whole business of living, once marked by possibility and agency, had overrun the population with futility. “What are you going to do about anything?”
he shouted. “The problems that face us are beyond any of our conception.” Wars, corporations, corrupt politicians. There’s nothing we can do, so Americans retreat to our little TVs, our family dinners. “I think perhaps they feel like I do,” he said, “they really feel unable to cope. Life is just too much.” Paddy used to get to the office at nine; he was coming in now around eleven thirty. He rarely went out to dinner anymore. It exhausted him. Hollywood exhausted him. He told Fosse about the producer who asked him to write a movie based on a Marvin Hamlisch song. A
song.
Was this guy crazy? He couldn’t write that. Only Jean Cocteau could write that. “Oh, the hell with the script,” the producer said. “Think of the
album.
” So was that it? Was he in the music business now?

They laughed. At that.

But it
was
different in the fifties. Television then, Paddy said, was a bohemia.

Before long, Paddy was back in the hospital with pleurisy.

He couldn’t join Fosse and Shel Silverstein at Herb’s Christmas dinner party, an epic
revel that ended with an impromptu round of the truth game. “Do you always sleep with your leading dancer?” Silverstein’s date, Pamela Larsson-Toscher, asked Fosse. “Of course,” Fosse said. “I have to know we’re in perfect sync, and she has to know
exactly
where I’m coming from.” Some gave performances. Gardner’s wife, Barbara Sproul, read a poem, which Larsson-Toscher translated into sign language. Fosse was so touched by the beauty and precision of her handwork that he insisted she see
Children of a Lesser God,
then running on Broadway. That night he got Larsson-Toscher tickets and arranged for her to meet with the actors backstage.

For all that dissatisfied him, Bob Fosse could never be cynical in the face of true talent. Wherever it showed, the creative bloom was always worth a detour. He attended acquaintances’ downtown gigs, listened to their long-in-the-works symphonies, and gave advice (all of it considered, none of it encouraging) to someone’s friend’s daughter interested in dance. As coach and confidant, he gave them all their next moves. He visited their studios, read their scripts, and went to their previews. If they wrote for his opinion, he’d write them back with itemized lists; I don’t have the answers, he would say,
but if you want to help yourself, do
this.
Cut your hair, retake your headshot, give up on ballet, pick another dream if you can. He wouldn’t sugarcoat the bad news. He knew leaving the business, fleeing a loser’s game, was in its way a win. Read
Backstage,
he told them, try out for everything, keep up your education, perform as much as possible, and train, practice, rehearse. How do I become a director? Read. Watch people,
learn
them. Store up memories. The rest was luck, and he couldn’t help them with that. Nothing could. Behind every ask hovered a Hail Mary prayer that the great Bob Fosse would see in a life story or girlish cursive on pink stationery or relation to a distant relation some fetal promise or potential and invite the kid to New York, to his office, and make her Gwen Verdon tonight. It hurt him. They were kids—the Nicoles, the Dorothy Strattens.

Paddy Chayefsky turned fifty-eight in January 1981, and Fosse took over a corner of the River Café
to throw him a birthday party. Before a sweeping view of the East River and easily the best window on New York City in Brooklyn, Cohn, Gardner, and the rest of the gang celebrated with two cakes, one with the name Paddy Chayefsky and the other with his birth name, credited screenwriter of
Altered States,
Sidney Aaron. The party came right on time. Thin and gray, Paddy needed all the celebration he could get. His movie—psychedelically smothered to death by director Ken Russell, as Paddy had expected it would be—had been a disappointment.

Rather than dwell, Paddy went back to writing plays. In February, he was diagnosed with cancer. He refused surgery, began chemotherapy, and lost his hair. Humiliated, Paddy put on a hat and stopped showing up at the deli. Herb Schlein panicked, and Fosse enlisted Romaine Greene—Stratten’s hairstylist on
They All Laughed
—to make him a wig. “It was a very funny situation,”
Gwen remembered, “and of course, Paddy loved the absurdity of it all.” Their laughter was imperative. Not the bullshit kind, the really scared kind. And the bullshit kind too.

Other than doing the odd commercial, Fosse refused a decade’s worth of offers to film his shows, even for historical safekeeping. When Lincoln Center’s Theater on Film and Tape Archive had asked him to film
Pippin
in 1971, he answered, “So people can come in and
rip me off? Absolutely not!” and he did not look back. Ten years later, his vaudeville ethic gave way to the promise of cable TV and videotape, new technologies David Sheehan had explained to Fosse in Cannes. Releasing first on cassette and LaserDisc, then going to cable, and finally to network television, a show—in this case,
Pippin
—could pick up three big paydays, live again in the afterlife, and perhaps even run “forever.” Handing the reins to Kathryn Doby, who would direct the show in Toronto before three live audiences, Fosse would have the time he needed to stay in Quogue, working on the Dorothy Stratten script. He could edit the footage remotely, off tapes sent back and forth from Burbank to New York. The terms looked good. According to the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Pippin
deal marked “the first time a work of such scope
and commercial success has been attempted specifically for the home video market.” The pioneer potential had enormous appeal for Fosse.

But after many nights of wondering what would become of
Pippin,
this time for VHS in perpetuity and without him, Fosse rushed to the phone a day before
the shoot in June 1981. He could not simply stand by. At Fosse’s insistence, Sheehan sent a jet to Quogue,
and Fosse flew to Toronto to run the show to his satisfaction before turning back for home to continue working the Dorothy Stratten movie, which he named—after the vanity plate on Snider’s Mercedes—
Star 80.
The weekend Roy and Cynthia Scheider came
to Quogue, the conversation about Stratten became a conversation about Paddy. They were so worried about him. Everyone was. Some time before, the Scheiders had referred Paddy to a chiropractor, who sent him to the ICU, where, they were told, he would remain until further notice. The details were unclear. Fosse and the Scheiders stood by the phone, bracing themselves for terrible news, but when the phone finally did ring, it brought news of Paddy’s release—a relief.

One night Fosse invited the Scheiders to join him at a bar—he didn’t tell them what kind—on the Lower East Side. From their front row seats, the Scheiders were stormed by girls, girls, girls, girls who could blow out candles with their vaginas, vaginas that could smoke cigarettes. It was almost too much for them to take in, but Fosse absorbed the performance with clinical appreciation, explaining to Roy and Cynthia the etymology of each grind and feather. He’d say, “That one’s stealing from that one who stole from that one . . .” It could be repulsive, but there was a kind of eloquence in the uncensored circle of sex and money. Here was the oldest truth game on record, the big bang of entertainment. Wasn’t ballet born the night some baron asked to see a little thigh?

Fosse and the Scheiders soon discovered they hadn’t let Paddy out of the ICU because he was improving. “They took him out,” Cynthia Scheider said, “because he wasn’t getting any better.” Toward the end, when Fosse and Herb visited him in the hospital, Paddy would fake bad death scenes
from old B movies. “It’s getting dark, fellows! It’s getting very dark!” It didn’t matter where, it didn’t matter why; when they laughed, they burned with mad, fearless hilarity, in the dead center of the bluest part of the flame. Nothing deterred them. Coming and going from Paddy’s room, Bob and Herb busted up hearing him holler his old movie clichés out to the hall. Then they didn’t hear anything. An emergency tracheotomy took Paddy’s voice, so he wrote notes, to Fosse, Herb, and his family. He fell into a coma, and they put tubes in him. “He wasn’t conscious,”
said Chayefsky’s son Dan, “but he kept yanking the tubes out.” His obstinacy surprised no one; he’d always been terrible with compromise.