Fosse (73 page)

Fosse would turn “Thriller” down, but Jackson kept his door open and they stayed in sporadic communication.

Meanwhile, early test screenings showed
Star 80
did more than merely depress audiences; it actually seemed to traumatize them. Even the hippest crowds in New York fled the theater in abject speechlessness. A Lincoln Center screening ended, Heim said, as “the whole front row walked out.
They averted their eyes and held each other as they left.” But Fosse didn’t make any significant changes.
He maintained
Star 80
was his best film; trauma should be traumatic. And though he knew they had a problem, Alan Heim basically agreed with Fosse’s assessment. Laddie took a respectful distance. “I was not thinking,
This is a hit,
” he said. “I was thinking,
This is nervous time
.”

Herb Gardner dragged his feet through the cutting of
The Goodbye People,
refusing to part with or even trim
his fulsome monologues or the long silences sandwiched in between. The comedy, which disappointed twice on Broadway, ballooned to over two and a half hours of film, and Cynthia Scheider, sick of Herb’s craziness, finally quit the picture, leaving David Picker and United Artists with no editor and a director who preferred to cut alone, in a corner of the Brill Building, doodling hieroglyphics on choice takes he surrendered to no one. “If Herb let me cut twenty seconds in a week,” said Rick Shaine, the new editor, “that was major.” In came Picker, threatening to kidnap the footage from Gardner if he didn’t shape up, and behind Picker came Fosse, to mediate as he had many times before. Taking the reins, he told Gardner to face the wall—literally—to turn away from the flatbed and count how long those too-long silent moments he refused to cut actually lasted. When Herb got up to twenty seconds, he gave in, and
The Goodbye People
passed to Fosse.

Fosse spent his first day as captain getting to know his editor. Did Shaine have a musical background? What instrument? (Saxophone.) Could he recut the parade scene to a temporary music track? “I don’t care what shots you use,” Fosse said, “but start here, with close-ups of Judd Hirsch and Pamela Reed, and end up on this master shot . . .” Then he left for lunch. Fosse’s strategy surprised Shaine. Rather than asking him to cut the sequence to story, Fosse had asked him to cut by shot size—close-up, medium, and so forth. When Fosse returned, Shaine screened the new parade scene, his eyes watching Fosse’s. It worked; the scene crescendoed from small shots to big, building a visual rhythm that actually clarified the story. “I had seen other directors work this way with actors,” Shaine said. “He wanted to probe what I could do.” Over the next month, Fosse brought in additional temp scores (once “Mr. Bojangles”), and
The Goodbye People
began to slim.

Mostly, Gardner stayed away. “It was painful for Herb,” Shaine said.

The morning Shaine came late to work, he caught Fosse skulking in the hall outside the editing room. “You better get in there,” he mumbled, and Shaine, unsure of what was happening, did as he said. On his way in, he ran into David Picker. “Do you have any aspirin?” he asked. Shaine looked past him. There was Herb, watching his movie on the Steenbeck. Watching with him was the notoriously, brilliantly, and painstakingly slow director Elaine May, whose oft-delayed
Mikey and Nicky
reportedly reached well over a million feet of film and had taken years to edit (into a wonderful movie). She and Herb were in the middle of a heated exchange. Before her was a document of twenty single-spaced pages—her notes, most of them nanoscale. “If they want tits,” May blurted out, “you gotta
give ’em
tits!” Picker intervened, and that was it for Elaine May.

Otherwise, Gardner and Fosse stayed in sync. Over lunch at the Carnegie, they traded
Goodbye People
updates and howled against the gales of Hollywood like the blustery old men of Gardner’s new play
I’m Not Rappaport.
As always, Herb Schlein greeted them with the white linen napkins he saved for their table, but only two. “They missed Paddy,” Shaine said. “There was a lot of sentiment around Paddy and very little joking.”

For Paddy.
Lingering at the end of the credits, they were the final words of
Star 80.

“If you’ve turned to writing,”
E. L. Doctorow said to Fosse, “I’m going to turn to dancing.”

Fosse lit up.

“We’re going to have a dance class called Dancing for Writers.”

“Terrific. Who else should we have?”

“Well, Peter Maas.”

“Norman Mailer might be interested.”

Doctorow considered this. “I can approach Isaac Bashevis Singer.”

“How about Herman Melville?”

“I’ll call Flaubert.”

They settled on three rules,
all highly negotiable. One, you had to be published (a couple sentences would do). Two, you had to smoke. Three, you had to be over fifty (no one could show up Fosse that way). Pete Hamill said, “All I wanted to master was that dance
all the great dancers did on sand that we saw the beginning of in
The Little Prince.
Or the thing with the hats from
Pajama Game.
To learn either of those would have been enough for one life on this earth and Fosse promised he would do that. All of us—the writers—were nervous of course because once we learned all the moves he was going to get us to perform somewhere, open out of town, wait for the notices, who knew what might happen? Fosse told us the great moment of panic would be when we left the mirror. But he would do it, he said, he would get us through it, he promised that.” A short time later Doctorow found a package at his front door:
a pair of Capezios with taps, gloves, a scarf, an enameled walking stick, and a sweatshirt that said
Broadway.

Dancing for Writers never happened, but it didn’t have to. Just by their enthusiasm, the writers’ ratified Fosse’s long-held faith—perhaps his only faith—in what Doctorow called the fraternity of performance. Real writers, Fosse told Peter Maas,
were performers in a way too, laying themselves open, putting it all on the line. “Living his entire life in show business,
he made performing a metaphor for existence,” Doctorow wrote. “Irremediable life was the curtain opening, and the lights coming up, and the world waiting for you to do something.” They recognized him.

Fosse gave
Star 80
’s benefit premiere as
a gift to Gwen and her most favored cause. Proceeds from the November 9 screening and the Tavern on the Green after-party went to the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, the oldest low-cost psychiatric clinic in New York City. Verdon had been affiliated with the center for decades, and now, with the opening of a new division specifically for patients in the performing arts, a
Star 80
fundraiser seemed appropriate. Why, Dr. Harry Sands was asked, have a counseling program specifically for performers? “Constant rejection can be devastating,”
he replied.

Not even Fosse, a lifelong romancer of the worst-case scenario, could have predicted the widespread critical rejection of
Star 80.
With few exceptions (Schickel, Siskel),
former allies and detractors came together across all media to catapult a giant tomato at the screen. In certain cases, their disgust rose into a rage so profound it could not possibly be directed at the film alone. They weren’t just talking about bad taste; they were talking about a perverted mind. “Fosse has served up a smorgasbord
of supercilious mannerisms in one of the most glumly misogynous movies ever produced on this continent,” wrote Andrew Sarris, ordinarily the soberest of critics. “The gruesome ending, particularly, is the biggest treat for women-haters this side of the underground snuff circuit . . . One must concede that Fosse has polished the shrug, stoop, and stutter-step of Jerome Robbins to an all-purpose statement . . . His movies have all been metaphorical antimovies in which very little happens but everything is supposed to Mean Something even when the filmmaker is too proud (or, perhaps, too lazy) to come right out and say what that Something is.”

Famously opposed, Sarris and Pauline Kael could have buried the hatchet in
Star 80
and walked into the cinema sunset like Bogart and Claude Rains. “Fosse must believe that he can make
art out of anything,” she wrote, “that he doesn’t need a writer to create characters, that he can just take the idea of a pimp murdering a pinup and give it such razzle-dazzle that it will shake people to the marrow. He uses his whole pack of tricks—flashbacks, interviews, shock cuts, the works—to keep the audience in a state of dread.” The moral and aesthetic case they built against
Star 80
was the one-two punch that knocked Fosse out.

“He took to the woods,”
Heim said, “and said he wasn’t going to be leaving Long Island.” Why fight? “He really thought he was going to win
the Oscar for
Star 80,
” Glattes said. There was no hope of reparations and little need; if they hated his best work, then they had at last rejected Fosse, just as he always knew they would. (“I didn’t work for years after that,”
Hemingway said. “Sam Cohn never got me a job after that.”) Fosse sent out messages in bottles, calling people he knew, even those he knew only vaguely, to air his depression and field their support. He called Teresa Carpenter. “I found it very strange,”
she said. “We only met once at Sam’s office . . . after we got off the phone, I thought, Why should he care [about the critics]? The man’s an artist. You would think, perhaps from his work, he might have been more ego driven.” As always, Ann Reinking was empathetic. She knew his feeling for the dark foundation of showbiz pathology and his attempt to comprehend it were heartfelt. “You really understood this,”
she said. “Yes, I did,” he shot back.

The anger subsided, and Fosse acquiesced to loss. This time he did not fight it. He did not assign blame and hurry toward the next project, as he had after
Sweet Charity
bombed. Instead, he sat in sadness and closed the door behind him. He was getting older.

G
ENUINE DISAPPOINTMENT COOLED
his ambition, and Fosse changed, perhaps for the last time. His white Bauhaus castle, site of countless parties and weekend getaways, he exchanged for a plain brown home
farther inland, on Quogue’s Stone Lane. The former he had rented; this one he bought. He paneled the garage with mirrors
and installed a barre, and he stopped making regular trips into Manhattan. It was his new studio, and though it waited only a few steps from his front door, some days Fosse had to fight himself to get himself inside. “It’s painful for me to go
into my studio,” he said in 1984. “You look in the mirrors and your spirit is in the air, but your body is on the ground like a little toad with broken legs.”

Now a semipermanent resident of Quogue, he discovered new circles of year-round Long Islanders, like the writer Budd Schulberg and his wife, Betsy. The author of
What Makes Sammy Run?
and
The Disenchanted,
his generation’s greatest Hollywood novels, and
On the Waterfront
and
A Face in the Crowd,
two of his generation’s greatest screenplays, Schulberg was also showbiz emeritus, the son of Paramount’s former chief of production B. P. Schulberg, born inside, and a perfect fit for Fosse. Contentious and expansive, Budd was,
like Paddy, a sports-loving tough Jew with a
hamishe
heart and was, of all things, a serious bird watcher, swans in particular. He’d even written a book about it. The simple joy of watching their plumes draw slow circles around the inlet suited the new Fosse, and soon his afternoons filled with all kinds of birds. “For some reason when you get older
you start looking at how many cardinals and blue jays are in your feeder and not getting into the studio and sweating it out,” he said. He found a mangled stray cat
in the brush and took it home. He fattened it up and called it Macho.

Suddenly, he said, I like all the things my dad used to do.

He thought half seriously of unmade movies. E. L. Doctorow’s novel
Loon Lake,
a picaresque romance with notes of
An American Tragedy,
stirred the dime-store underdog in him, and its Adirondack setting suited Fosse’s elegiac mood. But his mood shifted. He called Doctorow in the middle of the night
to talk about his short story “The Hunter,” a desolate tale about a lonely schoolteacher. Hardly a movie, it was more of a feeling.

Melnick tried to get Fosse interested in something, but he couldn’t bait the hook. The future was a blur to Fosse, and the present had no need for him. “It’s generally tough
to make serious films nowadays,” he said. “I do think that everybody wants to think things are great nowadays, and I think they all want the
Rocky
story in form.” Discouraged by the box-office successes of the sort of Spielberg films he admired but could never make, Fosse did not consider his Hollywood exile entirely self-imposed. They simply weren’t interested in his kind of movies, not anymore. This was the age of
Porky
’s.

“I saw it,”
the writer Bruce Jay Friedman admitted.

They were at dinner with Pete Hamill.

“You
saw
it?” Fosse asked, hardening.

“Yeah, you know, I’m interested. It’s the cultural phenomenon of the moment, like Hula-Hoops.”

“How could you?” Fosse lost it. “
You!
You’re responsible for
The Heartbreak Kid,
you’re good, you’re funny!”

“I don’t know . . . I wanted to know what it was about . . .”

“How could you sink so low?”

Fosse and Cohn felt the business change. The corporatization of Hollywood disgusted them. Cohn never made his clients sign
actual contracts (if they weren’t happy, why keep them?), but in recent years, ICM started twisting his arm to get legal and binding commitments from the talent. Cohn openly ignored them. He ignored their requests to curb his “old Hollywood” expenditures on expensive client dinners and shows and he ignored their ingratiating pseudo-complaisance, but he could not ignore what could not be denied: the trend away from pro-director negotiations. Where once he could push through a Fosse or Altman deal, contracts famous for their carte blanche clauses, Cohn now faced stubborn resistance. All they wanted to talk about now was money. The new agents, looking like basketball coaches with their slicked-back hair and matching Hugo Boss uniforms, didn’t know the first thing about art. Even worse, they weren’t ashamed of it. “Sam would lecture
studio executives on honor,” Sigourney Weaver recalled. “He couldn’t believe
these guys didn’t care about the theater,” said his assistant Susan Anderson. “He hated that they didn’t know anything about the law and didn’t love the business.” For sport, Cohn and Fosse lured them to Cohn’s office couch, where Sam bullied them to submission. “It was not Sam’s finest hour,” Anderson said. To Fosse and Cohn, these assholes were all the same. Todd and Josh, they called them, sometimes to their faces.