Fosse (70 page)

Paddy died.

Janice Lynde called Fosse from LA. “Are you okay?
Should I fly out?”

“You’ve got to work.”

“I can get time off.”

“No, no. The work is the most important.”

“Bob,” she said, “are you okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“Really?”

His voice broke. “How could anyone be okay?”

She stayed in LA.

An estimated five hundred people came
to Riverside Chapel—Kazan, Mike Nichols, Comden and Green, David Shaw, Doctorow, Vonnegut, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, David Picker, Lionel Larner, Peter Stone, screenwriter of
Sweet Charity
—so many of them faces from Fosse’s life that the gathering must have looked to him a little like his own funeral. And in a way, it was. Paddy Chayefsky’s friendship was the happiest love Fosse would ever know. His life with Gwen was too complex to compare. It existed in another part of his heart, much of it shaped by the ruins of their former life, their daughter, and his fear of failing them. But Paddy he could never fail. Eating together, working together, they had cohabited every afternoon for fifteen years, their calendars, like Laurel- and Hardy-shaped Venn diagrams, almost a single circle. And what would Fosse’s calendar look like now? Who else could he trust? Under his Howard Beale was the Marty part of Paddy, and that part understood and embraced the Charity Hope Valentine in Fosse. It was they who met at the deli every day.

“I kept looking for Bob before
the service,” Lionel Larner said. “I couldn’t find him.” No one likes paying hospital visits to the dying, no one wants to go to funerals, but everyone does. Some are even comforted by the ritual. Fosse was not. As much as he could, he avoided the social customs of grief. He visited Bob Aurthur in New York Hospital only once; Joan McCracken’s funeral he observed alone, from across Seventy-Second; and when Mr. Weaver died,
Fosse only sent flowers. He made exceptions to bury family in Chicago; in the cases of Carol Haney and Jack Cole—artists he knew personally but never loved—Fosse came to their memorials, sometimes to speak, to give a sincere speech and make a joke, and then he left the theater to be alone. At Paddy’s memorial, where his sorrow was doubled by the atmosphere of mourning he dreaded, Fosse had to fight the instinct to disappear to a far corner of the chapel or even to flee. “Then I saw him,”
Larner said. “He was sitting in the front row.”

Herb Gardner gave the opening eulogy.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. spoke of Chayefsky’s big theme, “the corrupt and lunatic energies
secreted by our great modern organizations,” continuing, “No American in recent times had a more exact and stinging satirical gift, but he never used that gift for purely destructive purposes. He was sardonic, not cynical. He wanted to clear our minds of cant and our souls of hypocrisy. For all his relish in human folly, he never abandoned hope in humanity. His satire, like that of all great satirists, sprang from love—from his instinctive sweet understanding of the inarticulate Martys and Claras of the world, bravely living lives of quiet desperation.”

Fosse was the last speaker. “When his turn came,”
remembered James Lipton, “he mounted the steps slowly, then turned to face us . . .”

He began. “As most of you know, Paddy and I
were friends . . .”

Fosse stopped to breathe.

He said he had to audition for the role of Paddy’s friend, and it took him eight years to get the part. They laughed.

He explained the deal they had made when Paddy had come to visit him in the hospital six years earlier. At Fosse’s bedside, Paddy promised Bob that if Bob died first, he would deliver a tedious eulogy at his funeral. Laughing, Fosse had told Paddy that if he died first, he’d do a little tap dance at Paddy’s.

“I hope nobody will be offended.”

He performed a soft-shoe. “It was a very quiet dance for about
thirty seconds,” Doctorow said. “There was nothing funny about it. Bob made it totally appropriate.”

Sobbing, Fosse said, “I can’t imagine my life without you.”

Chayefsky was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Westchester, a forty-minute drive from the chapel. At the graveside, during the first kaddish, Paddy’s friend Eddie White looked up from the casket to see Fosse had drifted from the circle to
the far edge of the cemetery. He was bent forward, collapsed in grief.

D
AN MELNICK PASSED
on
Star 80.
Dark was one thing, but rape, necrophilia, and murder (without catharsis), he didn’t want to see.
Who did? Not Alan Ladd Jr., but he had so much faith in Fosse he would have agreed to anything. “Whatever he wanted to do,
I would have done it because I thought he was a genius,” Ladd said. “I don’t know anyone more talented that I’ve ever worked with, and if you’re doing a picture you know doesn’t have to bring in vast sums of money, you’re happy as a movie studio. I never thought for a minute that
Star 80
was going to be
Star Wars.
” Nor was he deterred by the poor commercial prospects of a film of such unrelenting gloom and with such a horrific final scene. That earned Laddie even more respect from Fosse. When the two met for dinner at Village cafés off the showbiz circuit, Fosse left his black armor at home. “On those occasions,”
Laddie recalled, “when Fosse knew he wouldn’t be seen, he would wear color. And he’d only smoke once in a while. That was Bob the guy”—an exotic sighting—“the other was Fosse the showman. He’d come out for Wally’s.” Laddie saw both Fosses. A Hollywood executive unafraid of his director’s power, Ladd too was exotic.

If only
Star 80
were a work of fiction, Fosse might have started casting right away. But the painstaking and (for Stratten’s family) painful back-and-forths of rights and releases
hobbled his progress through the fall of 1981. With the Stratten tragedy only months in the past and her family beyond devastation,
Star 80
screamed lawsuit. Scalpels in hand, attorneys, executives, and rightfully concerned insurance carriers examined each word of each draft of Fosse’s script, hemorrhaging fine print. Prevented from using actual names, Fosse was also required to provide documentation
for objectionable dialogue and ordered to refrain from any implication that sodomy preceded the murder. He reluctantly agreed to use close-ups
of Snider’s face in lieu of more incriminating wide shots, and he consented not to arrange dead bodies in such a way as to suggest consensual sex or rape had taken place. No matter how well intended, each smoothed truth affronted the sincerity of Fosse’s effort. But those were the terms.

As promised, David Sheehan kept in close communication with Fosse through the cutting of
Pippin,
dutifully sending him tapes, which Fosse flatly hated.
He called Sheehan in the middle of the night, screaming, “You’re cutting off the feet!
We don’t want to see their faces! We want to see their
bodies!
” Sheehan didn’t understand. This was TV, he explained, a faces medium. But, Fosse explained, this was
Pippin,
a dance show. You wanted to see the
bodies.
“He would send notes on a Thursday,” Sheehan said, “and he would want to see results by the weekend. But we didn’t work that fast.” Fosse didn’t understand why; he could. Railing against Sheehan’s dissolves and music-video-like cuts on the beat, Fosse demanded he cut
Pippin
like
Liza with a Z,
keeping its theatricality intact. “I don’t think I ever had his trust,” Sheehan said, “but he wanted that show immortalized.”

It was agony. Late in November, Fosse watched the final cut, expecting to see his notes implemented, as Sheehan had assured him they would be. What he saw appalled him. Not only were his specific instructions ignored, but parts of the show had been outright deleted. After shutting off the television, he wrote to
Pippin
’s cast and crew apologizing for a “foolishly butchered version of the show
. . . [that] was mysteriously kept from me.” It aired in January 1982 to awful reviews.

Mariel Hemingway, a Cohn client, was desperate to
play Dorothy, a role wildly unlike the character she played in her previous film,
Personal Best.
Cohn encouraged Fosse to give her a shot,
but Fosse didn’t see it. Hemingway had a tomboyish quality that wasn’t right for Dorothy. Dorothy was silk, sweet, womanly. He liked Melanie Griffith.
But Hemingway persisted. She wrote him letters, begging him to see her. Finally, Cohn got them together on the phone.

“You must read me.”

“You’re not right for it.”

“Let me show you.”

“Listen, I like you. You’re just not right for this part.”

With no other recourse, Hemingway turned up in New York.
He had to admit she had the right sort of unused quality, and her relentlessness brought to mind the sort of hunger
Star 80
was about. But breast size was a problem.
Hemingway’s wasn’t a Dorothy Stratten figure—a real concern for a movie about a
Playboy
playmate—but taking Cohn’s advice, Fosse let her read, and after the reading, they talked. Instinct told Hemingway this exchange was
the real audition. “Fosse had to merge with the actor,” she said. “It was really more for him than the other person.” The trick was merging on her terms (“But I sleep with all my leading ladies,” he pleaded). Trying to facilitate intimacy but unwilling to sleep with him, Hemingway had to walk the tightrope of deep but guarded involvement. “How can I make it feel as though he is having a relationship with me without actually having one?” The question rarely left her mind. “It was a tough line,” she said, “because then he’d get mad at me and call me a cocktease, and then I’d be heartbroken.” Soon thereafter Hemingway got breast implants, and then she got the part.

For his Snider, Fosse needed an actor with a star’s good looks and charm but a character actor’s fearlessness—a tall order. Furthermore, he was casting autobiographically, looking for an alter ego, which narrowed the list yet more, and the question “Will anyone do it?” became “Is there anyone who can do it?” The studio answered with Richard Gere,
hot off
American Gigolo.
Fosse read him with Hemingway, but Fosse’s heart was set on Robert De Niro, whom he couldn’t get to read the script. “That fucked him up,”
Hemingway recalled. “He felt less than, like ‘De Niro won’t read my script. He doesn’t think I’m anybody.’” Fosse asked Hemingway, suspecting De Niro wanted to sleep with her, to finesse the transaction. She refused.

Sam Shepard came to his audition
with his friend Cis Rundle, who happened to be Hugh Hefner’s social secretary. (The night of Dorothy’s murder, Rundle’s first on the job, she got the terrible phone call and told Hefner the news. She found him in the game room between a pinball machine and a girl. “It’s Dorothy,” Rundle said. “She’s dead.” The girl looked to Hef. “Does that mean we’re not going to the Jacuzzi?”)

“This is shit,” Rundle said, meaning the script, as Fosse emerged from Shepard’s audition.

“What’s shit?”

“All this about the mansion and Hef. It’s wrong.” She could see Fosse was listening. “Do you want to make a cartoon or a real movie?”

He made Rundle
Star 80
’s technical adviser and gave her a part in the film. She caught the slips (for example, Hef didn’t carry a can of soda, he carried a bottle) and wrote Fosse detailed descriptions of mansion parties and Hef’s famous movie nights. She introduced him to Hefner. They got on. Hefner gave Fosse permission to use the
Playboy
logo and allowed him limited access to the mansion for research, once to study the grounds and once to study the parties. They’d film elsewhere, but of course, their copy of the mansion had to be exact. (It was: when Fosse showed Hef a plan of the set, Hef thought he was looking at his own house.) Returning Hefner’s kindness, Fosse accepted his feedback on casting. “He asked Bob not to cast Harry Dean Stanton [in the Hefner role],” Rundle said, “and approved of Cliff Robertson.”

The search for Snider continued. At his callback, Eric Roberts fielded Fosse’s interview questions.
Where was he educated? What did he do for fun? (Could they merge? Yes, they could.) For Roberts’s second callback, they read through the entire script, and two weeks later, choosing now between Roberts and Gere, Fosse called Roberts back again. “We read the scene he was always rewriting,” Roberts said. “The scene where Snider’s at the mansion for the first time, a hard scene.” It required tremendous control to cover Snider’s desperation with charm. But Roberts could do it. He got the part.

What his actors couldn’t possibly know about the sex industry, Fosse gave them. While scouting Los Angeles for locations, he personally toured Roberts through the traumatized fringe, its people and pathology. “He educated me on the life of the strip clubs,” Roberts said. “He wanted me to know it wasn’t about fucking, that every stripper who was a ‘lifer’—that’s what he called them—has the same issues as children who were molested. Bob believed that. He wanted me to know that this guy [Snider] had expertise, that this guy, if he weren’t a psychopath, would have been hugely successful.” When they arrived at each club, Fosse would vanish, allowing Roberts to mingle with the strippers on his own.

By contrast, Fosse barred Hemingway from doing her own research. As with Valerie Perrine, he wanted to control everything his leading lady knew about her subject. “He gave me everything,”
she recalled. “He’d give me tapes to watch, he’d talk about being damaged goods, he taught me how to walk in high heels. He put on my high heels and showed me. Once he said, ‘You’re so innocent and all-American but you’re not. You come from this sick family.’” He wasn’t talking about Stratten’s family. He was talking about the Hemingways.

His whole life, Fosse had courted despair. He affected it, savored it, feared it, and fled it, but working on
Star 80,
in Los Angeles—Despairsville, USA—reabsorbing the desperate borders of show business (“I’m going to die in one of these places,”
Fosse said, scouting shitholes with Tony Walton), despair flattened him. Paddy was dead.
All That Jazz
had used up everything he had (he feared), and having surrounded himself with allies, from the laissez-faire Laddie to Wolfgang Glattes and Kenneth Utt, Fosse had no scapegoat to condemn. “On
Star 80
he was just impossible,”
Glattes said. “It was very frustrating for Bob to not have anyone to blame.” Starting fights helped him redirect the anger. So did insisting on the impossible, like getting inside the actual house where Snider lived and killed Dorothy. But Glattes didn’t have a permit.