Fosse (77 page)

Sam Cohn arranged for the writer Michael Herr
to meet Fosse at the Russian Tea Room. Herr had an idea for a movie about Walter Winchell, and Scott Rudin, then head of production at Fox, thought Fosse perfectly suited to direct. He was right. Full of slime and glamour, Winchell’s story exposed the corrupt interplay of news and entertainment at the showbiz heart of American journalism. “If people go around today treating themselves like celebrities,” Herr wrote, “because not to be a celebrity is just too awful, we may have Walter Winchell to thank.” There was a lot for Fosse there. Primed for drama, “his story had such a great shape to it,” Herr said, “a tremendous low point rising to incredible power and power and wealth and completely losing it all.” And Winchell began as a hoofer in vaudeville.

Herr was waiting for Fosse to arrive when Sam Cohn, Louis XIV of the Russian Tea Room, appeared from across the restaurant and took a seat next to Herr. Invited or not, he was at home at every table, as welcome as a good omen. “Bob’s coming,” Cohn said, “but you should know, he’s in a bad mood. He just [closed] his show
Big Deal.
” When Fosse appeared, blue as predicted, Cohn facilitated the introductions—Michael Herr, author of
Dispatches,
co-writer of
Full Metal Jacket
—and bowed out to another part of the Russian Tea Room, presumably for more facilitating.

Without ado, Fosse laid his cards on the table. “You know, I have to tell you I knew Walter Winchell and I really hated the guy. And I can’t imagine spending two or three years of my life doing a movie about someone I hated so much.”

“There’s nothing I can say to that.”

Leaving the restaurant, they ended up talking their way through midtown, to the front doors of FAO Schwarz, where, Herr said, he wanted to get gifts for his kids back in London. Fosse decided to join Herr inside. The subject of their meeting long gone from their conversation, Fosse nudged Herr toward the designer stuffed animals, stayed by him through the purchase, and followed him out the door. Herr was having such easy fun, he hardly realized Fosse had walked him to his hotel, the Ritz, a couple blocks away on Central Park South. And then Fosse followed him to his room, a room Fosse didn’t like. It was small and dark and in the back of the hotel. The room didn’t bother Herr, but Fosse insisted he change. “You should [not] be staying in a room like this,” he said, and led Herr back down to the front desk, where he negotiated a room change and then invited Herr for a drink at the bar. They talked for three hours.

“What are you going to do now?” Fosse asked, wrapping up the audition.

“I’m going to go back to London and write this thing.”

When he got home, Herr found a message on his answering machine. It was Cohn. He wanted Robert Benton to produce the Winchell movie and suggested they meet again to talk further. Back in New York, in Cohn’s office, Herr turned the conversation to directors. Did Sam like the idea of Coppola? “There was silence,” Herr recalled. “It was like everybody headed under their desks when I mentioned a non-ICM client.” As he had for Kubrick on
Full Metal Jacket,
Herr agreed to write an outline of the Winchell story, which he ultimately sent to Cohn, who forwarded it to Fosse.

It was a powerfully glamorous beginning. Inspired by the long, single-location opening sequence of John Huston’s
Moulin Rouge
(a film he didn’t know ranked high among Fosse’s favorites), Herr began his outline with
a giant Stork Club set piece one late afternoon in 1943. Hung prominently in the main room, Winchell’s portrait gets a quick dusting, no doubt for the big man’s imminent arrival. Deeper in, a member of the kitchen staff stuffs hundred-dollar bills into helium balloons, and a hat-check girl is told, abruptly, to fix her pretty hair. A tablecloth comes down over table 50, Winchell’s headquarters, and the opening credits begin. To an eerily calming “Autumn in New York,” the booth is set for power: ashtrays, a telephone, a pad and pencils. Then, Herr writes, “one last touch: a glistening orchid is placed on the table, so fresh that it practically shivers.” The credits end.

The Stork Club sequence continues to unfold for some twenty pages. We mingle with Ernest Hemingway, Hedy Lamarr, Damon Runyon, and of course Winchell himself. This is the peak of New York society, the highlife young Bob Fosse, new in town after a tour of the Pacific, could only have read about—in Winchell’s column. We get the gossip and the music and the terrific uneasy feeling that this fast-talking hotshot has a grip on the skinny throat of American media, which is to say, on everything America thinks, or thinks it thinks. He is the razzle-dazzle demon incarnate. Herr said, “I didn’t sentimentalize Winchell. In a lot of ways I made him a hateful character and still kept him a human being.” A mix of Paul Snider’s barbarity and Hugh Hefner’s power, Winchell is the unchecked god of mass manipulation.

“I changed my mind,”
Fosse told Herr. “I see the movie here. I want to do this.”

They continued to meet, socially and professionally. Fosse invited Herr and his daughter over for one of his football-watching parties, the sort he and Paddy used to have. “He was so sweet to my daughter,” Herr said. “He wanted to give her a book she might like and found one about dance.”

The Winchell movie was an exception: Phoebe could see Fosse extricating
himself from all other new projects. Still on the hook for
Big Deal,
he wouldn’t plan a new work for Broadway. He could spend afternoons sketching
out new dance ideas in Quogue, but at the thought of working those ideas into a story or some kind of bigger picture, he froze. Martin Richards approached him
about filming
Chicago
with Michael Jackson and/or Madonna and/or Bette Midler, but Fosse seemed tentative about the idea. Sam had been pushing it
for years, never quite convincing Fosse that by going back, he could also go forward. For a brief moment, he considered filming
Dreamgirls
and thought of doing
The Vampire Lestat
on Broadway with David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Phoebe loved the rock-vampire idea, but she couldn’t talk him into starting anything from scratch. Cohn sent him the
Good Morning, Vietnam
script, which suited Fosse, but all that scouting, all those months on location, and in Vietnam, turned him right off. “It’s a strange paradox,”
he mused. “I feel I’m getting near the latter part of my career, so I’m getting more picky.” Despite his reservations,
Fosse resumed the conversation about directing a Michael Jackson music video, and he flew out to Los Angeles for a meeting at Neverland. Again, Jackson freaked him out.

“He has fake plants,” Fosse told Phoebe. “They’re all over the house.”

“Why?”

“Fake plants don’t die.”

Jackson’s “Capone,” then in demo, had a rhythm and melody Fosse grooved to, but he wanted more lyrically, and he sent back a request for changes. But the changes didn’t come, at least not to his satisfaction. By the time “Capone” became “Smooth Criminal,” Fosse had moved on—but judging by the finished product, it would seem Jackson hadn’t. His video showcases Astaire and Fosse throughout.

The last time Fosse met with Herr
to discuss
Winchell,
he was quite obviously ill. “Phoebe, I could see, was really worried about him,” Herr recalled. “I was touched by her.” She and Fosse cut short the meal, downplaying his symptoms as they hurried from the restaurant. He suffered angina attacks regularly but did not want to publicize his condition for fear of raising his insurance any higher. Too high, and he would almost definitely never make another movie or direct another show. If he did—if they let him—backers would glare at his every move. So Phoebe had to get Fosse out of the restaurant, quickly. On the street, out of view, she gave him the first of four medications
she carried with her at all times—that pill gave immediate comfort. Then, in a cab, she helped him take the next three. “A couple of times he was as white as a ghost,” she said, “and I didn’t know what was going to happen.” He breathed slowly; color returned to his face. “And he would recover,” Phoebe said, “like nothing was wrong.”

Award committees must have smelled the blood; they started honoring him. The Mr. Abbott (as in George) Award came earlier in the year; the Astaire shortly thereafter. Fosse was said to be drunk at the ceremony,
held at the Plaza Hotel. With Phoebe on his arm, he rounded the tables, picking fights with critics, causing scenes.

Phoebe, meanwhile, took
a steady prescription of acting, voice, and dance classes in town—and Fosse had her schedule memorized. At first, his interest touched her. Then she learned he was making calls to her teachers after class, checking in to see that she was where she said she would be. In between classes, he questioned her.

“How was it?”

“Good, fine.”

“It was?” His silence scared her. “
Really?
”

He called her sister’s apartment and demanded to speak with Phoebe.

“You were late to class.”

“There was a traffic jam downtown.”

That silence again. “Are you
sure?
”

Their small talk had become an interrogation; dead set on discovering his own betrayal, Fosse badgered her to confess. But for what?

“The problem I find
with myself,” he would say, “is the closer I get to somebody, the more possessive I get. I’m afraid I start putting restrictions on them.”

At one time, Fosse knew he was sexy. Now he was old. His body looked okay, but his legs didn’t bend like they used to and he had to take more breaks when he danced. He had to catch his breath. He had to sit down. Having never developed a full vocabulary for his style, Fosse always relied on demonstration to communicate his intention, and in the old days he was forever leaping up from his folding director’s chair to bend back an arm or tilt sideways a pretty face. Now that the folding chair directed him, a wealth of intention and imagination stayed locked in his head. And by not showing the best part of himself, he confirmed, more than ever, the worst of his fears. He was done. Old friends tried to cheer him, but Fosse had his proof in the studio mirror. There was the old man’s face he hated. Then there was Phoebe’s face, at the crest of its beauty, visible every day to the sexy young men of her acting and dance classes. Why was she with him? “He knew people used people in show business as a steppingstone,” Phoebe said. “It was because of his
post-traumatic show-business-stress disorder, PTSBSD.” Less plausible was the possibility that she loved him.

“Roy’s been a little down lately,” he said to her one night as they were on their way to meet Scheider for dinner. “If you can, please be happy and cheerful with him.”

She was her usual fun self at dinner, or at least she thought she was, but when they returned to the apartment, Fosse’s scowl told Phoebe she’d made a horrendous mistake.

“You’d really like to fuck a movie star, wouldn’t you?”

“You wanted me to be
cheerful!
”

“Oh, I’ll have to remember
that,
” he sneered. “I’ll have to put
that
in a movie.”

She ended up sleeping in the studio apartment Fosse kept downstairs on the eleventh floor. A small office space for his assistant, it doubled as Phoebe’s getaway. On bad nights, she could be there awhile. “When he got really angry,” she said, “he would completely retreat to Siberia.”

Despite his behavior, Fosse still tried to reorder the love-busted part of himself. Years earlier, his whimsy came up with a solution: he imagined his ideal partner as an octopus.
“He is neither male nor female,” Fosse wrote, “or rather is both. I am likewise. This does not bother our friendship, for when I have need of a male—he is a male—when I desire the female-type companionship—she is a female—when I wish neither or a mixture my friend obliges—I do likewise for my friend—It is effortless transition by both parties.” Fosse and Ungerer talked about getting married,
but Phoebe couldn’t reconcile the Fosse who followed her home at night, whistling at her and catcalling in the dark just to see if she would turn around with a sexy look in her eye, with the man who sat awestruck at dinner as Richard Attenborough described his four-decade marriage and then questioned him, child to magician, about how he made it work. “Tell me, please,” Fosse begged. “Please, Richard, I need to know.”

Someone hurt him once, Phoebe thought, and he’d spent his life retaliating. Years of tilting at windmills left him with a conscience he could not abide. He still worried about Mary-Ann Niles. Rumor said she never
took off her wedding band, that when asked about her famous genius ex-husband, she talked on about how bad he was to her with a smile on her face. Her friends knew Niles’s drinking was killing her, that when they left her apartment for the night, she stayed up laughing alone, hardly moving from the stool she had told them to call Mary’s Bar. Fosse sent her money,
and more money, year after year, and tried to get her work as a stage manager to keep her in the ring. He couldn’t. But Fosse’s classic regret, Phoebe thought, was in his memories of Joan McCracken. Phoebe and he were watching an old MGM musical on TV one night, and he brought Joan up. He had that look he had when Truffaut died. “I think the loss of Joan McCracken caused significant damage to Bob’s ever loving again,” Ungerer said. “I always, always felt like he was haunted by Joan McCracken.” Gwen did too.

Fosse and Cis Rundle spent one afternoon
walking and talking around New York, his city. They started in the Village for coffee and by early evening had climbed to the heart of midtown, a few square blocks Noel Behn called Fosse Country.
The Deli. The DGA. The Brill Building. The Russian Tea Room. Sam’s office at West Fifty-Seventh, which Fosse could see from his place on West Fifty-Eighth. Minus the first twenty years and a couple locations, his whole life had been spent in these buildings. They buffered him from the neon sting of Broadway, ten blocks below, where dreams were torn like tickets and forgotten innocents reached out to him from the dark. “I see a hooker on a corner,”
he said to Pete Hamill on one such stroll, “and I can only think: there’s some kinda story there. I mean, she was once six years old. . . .”