Fosse (7 page)

Fosse had one eye on Niles, a peppy chorus dancer with the face of a girl and the mouth of a hooker, Debbie Reynolds after a night with Mae West. They called her Spooky.
She was up for anything. “Marian was a spitfire,”
said dancer Harvey Evans. “She was just dynamite.” “I wanted to walk behind her
with a tape recorder,” said dancer Margery Beddow. “Everything she said was hysterical.” In addition to being a career smoker, drinker, and all-night partier, Niles had what none of Fosse’s former girlfriends did: talent and experience. “Spooky was a wonderful tap dancer,”
said Belkin. “The show called for her to do a mixture of ballet and tap, and she could move smoothly between them. There were others who were stronger in the chorus, others with longer legs, but Spooky was the best tap dancer in the bunch.” Like Fosse, she had been dancing for money since she was a kid, but unlike Fosse, Niles really had played some of the most fashionable bistros, and some of them in New York. She was a
real
pro. “Bobby liked beauty but he loved talent,”
said dancer Deborah Geffner. “That’s what he wanted to sleep with. He wanted to get as far into it as he could.” Craving solace from his sense of inadequacy and adding value to his gifts, Fosse, for the rest of his life, would surround himself with an army of talent—talent of all kinds—using all means possible, including sex, to mine their value for his own. Niles was the first of many. He may even have loved her too.

They decided to team up. As a double act, Fosse and Niles were twice as appealing to club agents, and with a lot of hard work, they could move up from night holes outside Newark all the way to the Plaza Hotel. Or so they dreamed. “No matter where the show took us,”
Belkin said, “whether New Haven or Boston or Los Angeles, in the afternoons and on their nights off Bobby and Spooky rehearsed their tap routines.” Niles was more than a great partner; she gave Fosse a foretaste of a big future, the feeling of shared ambition easily confused with love. And she had something more tangible to offer him—a repertoire. “Limehouse Blues,”
the jewel of her solo act, Fosse remade into a duet, heavy on drums, part tap, part Jack Cole–Oriental. It would be a Fosse-and-Niles staple. “She was a not too educated girl,”
Belkin said. “Too in love to see how much she was giving him.”

For the newcomer, the thin line between influence and plagiarism is difficult to see. For Fosse, who had spent more time watching than inventing, who was ashamed of his showbiz instincts—the vaudeville, the burlesque—that line was almost invisible. Fearing he had nothing of his own, he drew regularly, and reluctantly, from the offerings around him. (A year earlier, in
Ziegfeld Follies,
Astaire had also danced “Limehouse Blues” as a duet.) Fosse did not consider his chameleonism or the inventions it would spawn anything but a life jacket for a drowning man, which is how he danced. Despite his flash, when he danced with Niles, Fosse moved with an inwardness comparable to shame. She “had a lot of clarity
as a dancer,” one dancer said, “with wonderful changes of rhythm. Bob just seemed detached as a dancer, as though he was choreographing himself out of the number.” How to open up, how to play off an audience—she gave him that too.

During
Call Me Mister
’s five-week run in Boston, the company stayed at the Bradford Hotel, a few doors from the Shubert Theater. The weekend the Ice Capades
came to town, the Bradford’s every square foot was filled with smoke and the chatter of show folk. It was pandemonium, a cageless zoo. Instant lifelong friends threw their arms around each other, and all of them flooded strangers’ suites until the sun came up or a wife walked in. Buddy Hackett turned his room into an open bar, and girls peeled off the wallpaper. Marian Niles didn’t stand a chance. “Could you imagine,”
Hackett said, “being twenty-one years old and you’re out with a musical and there’s sixteen girl dancers and sixteen girl singers plus the leads and semi-leads? What a candy store!” Late in the evening,
Hackett’s room was mostly empty, so there wasn’t much of a need for Fosse to close the bathroom door behind him, which is how Hackett, looking up from his girl, caught Bob’s reflection in the medicine-chest mirror, jauntily fucking another reflection. Before Hackett had time to wonder how Fosse could have left the door open or how it was anatomically possible to achieve such an angle, Marian Niles walked in, burst into tears, and tore out of the room. (“We all knew about Bobby,”
Belkin said. “But we kept our mouths shut.”) Hackett ran after her.

Fosse and Niles married in Chicago. The tour brought them to town, so the time seemed right for Fosse to command center stage, a professional entertainer in full view of his high-school friends and family. On the morning of July 8, the wedding party arrived at St. Chrysostom’s Church, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Reiner appeared with an 8-millimeter camera and pointed it at ushers Hackett and William Warfield, a beaming Sadie Fosse, and the happy couple. Backstage, Fosse pouffed his ascot,
and Niles, on the opposite end of the church, slipped taps onto her wedding shoes. “She was just a very sweet girl,”
Reiner said. “Really very in love with Bobby.” When the organ sounded, she made her entrance, shuffling down the aisle.

Frederic Weaver was not in attendance. Days earlier, he warned Charlie Grass he had no intention of standing by as one of his best pupils destroyed the career he had been working toward for a decade. “Mr. Weaver was a hundred percent against marriage
if you’re in show business,” Grass said. “It was somebody pulling you back. And family too. Bob knew how he felt about that. He’d made it very clear to us early on that you’ve got to be completely dedicated to show business. You’re married to show business.” Hackett was certain Niles was pregnant—either again or for the first time—and that the groom, wanting to do right by her, had no choice but to make it official. “He was very, very nervous
and not cool at all,” Hackett recalled. “That was not a guy who wanted to get married.”

There was a reception that afternoon
at the Fosse family home. But Fosse and Niles couldn’t stay long. That night they had a show.

Call Me Mister
closed in San Francisco in October 1947 and Fosse posted his final review in the scrapbook
he had been keeping since the show opened. He underlined (with the help of a ruler) in red pen every mention of his name, whether good or bad, clipped every article out, and attached it to the page with long strips of tape he laid down at perfect right angles. Even duplicates were included, as though Fosse had to prove not once but twice that it had actually happened. Beside the final review (which heralded Fosse as “awfully good”) he wrote, “End of ‘Call Me Mister.’ Also end of Bob Fosse.”

Fosse and Niles arrived in New York with an agent but no money and no job. In the uneasy months to follow, which Fosse and Niles spent glaring at the phone and imploring it to ring, Maurice Lapue reached out to nightclubs as near as Long Island and as far as the Dominican Republic. But no one was buying.

Most of what they had been rehearsing was old stuff in new clothing, ballroom-type numbers with a youthful touch. Where he could, Fosse threw in a little taste of vaudeville, but nothing too crass; he and Niles were going for the uptown crowd, the Marge and Gower Champion set. Elegant and smiling, the Champions—she had her first tutu before she turned one; he signed with MCA before he graduated high school—had mastered the look of class and good breeding that Fosse feared he couldn’t even fake. But he tried. With no money for studio space, the newlyweds rehearsed their act in the tiny one-room they rented above Times Square, careful not to twirl into the furniture or leap into a wall.

When they weren’t rehearsing, which was rarely, they traveled with packs of other dancers, musicians, and novelty acts, hopeful that someone with an ear to the ground would bring them news of an audition before it hit the papers or they lost the job to another agent’s dancers. The jobless assembled at Hansen’s drugstore and the nearby Charlie’s Tavern, a convenient few paces from Roseland. Those with money for a meal could find seats at the bar or in booths under the headshots Charlie hung on the peeling paint. If the place needed a little work, Charlie could turn to the young and hungry, to Fosse and Niles and the legions of unemployed comics and jazzmen of New York who stood in that patch of turf like it was their office, waiting all day (and, if they didn’t have gigs, all night) for some guy who some other guy knew to show up with a lead.

In a business of lucky breaks, where the revolving door of chance turns for jerk and genius alike, patience, not talent, would get Fosse and Niles where they wanted to be. Dancing was the easy part. Sitting by the phone took work. It took cigarettes and cheap wine and skipping meals. Talking about it made it worse, but not talking about it gave them nothing to do but think about what wasn’t working, and Fosse blamed himself. Never mind what was good for their feet; they should be going through the routine again. Somewhere some team was doing just that, getting better. “Bob likened show business to boxing,”
said Ann Reinking. “He said, ‘If you can stay in the ring it will turn your way again.’” Or: What doesn’t kill you will kill you later.

Winter hit. Waiting outside the theaters for their names to be called, Fosse and Niles huddled close, massaging each other’s muscles to stay loose.

She couldn’t leave him. They needed money, and Fosse was the closest thing she had to a chance.

He couldn’t tell his mother and father what he’d told Mr. Weaver, that he’d spent all their money. “He had a drug problem,”
Charlie Grass said, “and Mr. Weaver helped carry him through.” The maestro put tens and twenties
in an envelope and directed his best and favorite student to spend the money on doctors and drug counselors. Weaver knew the signs. He had seen the top talents in vaudeville waste their lives circling the drain, and he sensed that Fosse watched them with
a kind of envy. He had the jazzman’s crush on burning out. “I always thought I’d be dead by twenty-five,”
he said. “I wanted to be. I thought it was romantic. I thought people would mourn me: ‘Oh, that young career.’”

Then one day the phone rang. Lapue had booked them into the Samovar—in Montreal. In a flash, Marian changed her name to the much tonier Mary-Ann; they got on a bus and played the club on March 23, 1948, where they were, according to a local paper, “the most promising young dancers
. . . in many months.” A week later, they were at the Boulevard in Elmhurst, Long Island. Niles recalled, “When we got off the floor someone said,
‘Did your husband hurt himself?’ I said, ‘What d’you mean?’ She said, ‘Well, he fell.’ . . . He fell and got up and never knew it. Literally fell and got up.” Rest was unthinkable. “They would do their nightclub act somewhere,”
said dancer Eileen Casey, a friend of Niles’s, “and then, that night, go back and rehearse parts of the act that weren’t working.”

“I get terribly involved in my work,”
Fosse later said, “and everything else goes.” Nothing was ever good enough because it came from him, and when he wasn’t fooling them, he was no good. “He thought he was the best and
he thought he was terrible,” Ann Reinking said.

In May, Fosse and Niles played Miami’s Clover Club. Onward to the Dominican Republic, to the Hotel Jaragua, where they appeared for the first time as top-liners. Then north to the Embassy Club in Jacksonville and, finally, back to New York on September 15, 1948, for Bob Fosse’s first appearance on a Manhattan stage: the Belmont Hotel’s Glass Hat. Then October: one night at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. November: a week in Norfolk, Virginia. Come December, they were back in New York for their first TV appearance.
Kobb’s Korner
was a hillbilly jamboree as stupid as it sounds, but it was also CBS and free advertising for their upcoming tenure at the Pierre Hotel’s Cotillion Room, one of the most romantically appointed nightclubs in the city.

The Cotillion. Fosse and Niles could take a deep breath. They’d made it, almost.

Well located at Sixty-First and Fifth Avenue, the Cotillion was only a few steps—and, for the lucky ones, a few bookings—away from the Plaza’s Persian Room, where the Champions cut the parquet for the city’s most fashionable grownups. Fosse and Niles were ready. Refined over the past year, their mélange of tap, ballroom, and East Indian styles had been universally well received. It had spunk. While most café performers built their acts on a kind of pop ballet, Fosse and Niles moved fast, with a Broadway feeling of something for everyone—at least, everyone so far.

The evening of December 7, 1948, they arrived early
at the Cotillion Room to scrub the glossy patches from the dance floor; too much shine, and they’d be slipping around like the Keystone Cops. Then a run-through and a quick bite in the upstairs bedroom the Pierre gave them to change in (a double-breasted business suit for him, a tasteful dress for her), after which they stubbed out their cigarettes and flurried back downstairs to wait, as they had so many times, for their introduction music.

Standing for the first time before a savvy New York audience, Fosse and Niles were about to learn how strong their act really was. This time there would be no sketch to blame for whatever bad press befell them, no dimwitted director to complain about at Hansen’s after the show. There would be only failure—and all of it Fosse’s. He was the choreographer.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome . . .”

To the sound of applause, two silhouettes strode into the ballroom and took their starting positions under the chandelier. The room—lined in floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park—fell silent. Then a fork clinked. Three hundred hidden faces at one hundred tiny tables, and none of them belonged to Mr. Weaver or Miss Comerford.

This was it. There was no more rehearsal.

“You’ve heard of Marge and Gower Champion?”
Fosse asked into the darkness. “Well, we’re the runner-ups.”

They laughed. Good. At least he’d nailed that: knocking oneself for entertainment.

They danced two twelve-minute shows that night, an early and a late; they were fast and clean and, by the end of their final number, beat. But how were they? The act that worked so well out of town was by then old news in New York. “If they looked good they didn’t have
an act that showed much originality,” opined
Billboard.
“Most of their steps were the same. Only their music was different for each number. An East Indian satirical dance was overplayed, and their Eddie Leonard thing with heavy taps, tho [
sic
] flashy, meant little.” Neither Fosse nor
Billboard
’s critic could have known that the act, with its flash references to the early days of American entertainment, would one day emerge as a style, accrue an ideology, and change the face of dance, film, theater, and television—for good. “With more imaginative routines,” concluded
Billboard,
“they can go places.”