Fosse (79 page)

Verdon and Fosse were there in Toronto on July 2, 1987, before
Charity
opened at the Royal Alexandra Theater. As she readied her dance bag for the first dress rehearsal, Donna McKechnie flipped on the radio
and scanned the room for the items on her checklist. Then she heard it: Michael Bennett had died that morning.

AIDS.

The
Times
obituary called him “the most influential theater director
and choreographer of his generation.”

Later that month, Hugh Wheeler died. Hal Prince hosted his memorial at Sardi’s.
Both Fosse and Prince shared a long history with Wheeler—book writer of
A Little Night Music
and
Sweeney Todd,
co-screenwriter of
Cabaret
—and judging by the crowd, so did most of Broadway. Between greetings and nervous stares (one at Sondheim), Fosse circled the idea of approaching Prince to inquire about his progress casting
The Phantom of the Opera.
Nicole was still waiting, fingers crossed, to hear if she had made it into the ballet chorus. If she got it,
Phantom
would be her first appearance on Broadway; if she didn’t, her chances of ever dancing on Broadway would decrease considerably. Time was against her. Nicole was twenty-four, and her days of being the youngest, strongest dancer in a given company were already years in the past.

Fosse knew
Phantom
had stumbled into delays out of Prince’s control, so it was possible certain casting decisions had been unofficially determined, and Prince, as he stood there, had the answer to Nicole’s future. All Fosse had to do was ask him. But asking a director, even director to director, to show his hand, even a little, was to apply unfair pressure, and though they went back to
Pajama Game
—
debuted
with
Pajama Game
—and the air was warm with Wheeler’s legacy, talking business felt like an amateur’s transgression. But Fosse, to Fosse, was an amateur.

“I’ve been a performer,” he explained to Marty Richards. “You know what it is to wait.”

Richards understood Fosse’s predicament, but he had no compunction about approaching Prince that very moment and asking the question himself.

“Don’t you dare!”

Richards made straight for Prince, and Prince, seeming to comprehend the situation, excused himself from Richards and walked over to Fosse, who, comprehending Prince’s comprehension, blushed as he saw him approach. There was an exchange of embarrassments, and Prince immediately assured Fosse
he
was the embarrassed one; the production, he said, should have called Nicole long ago. She had the part, a good part, and Fosse was right to wonder. “This is ridiculous,” Prince said to him. “We’re both fathers.”

Now that
Phantom
had arrived,
Cats
seemed less a one-off than a visitor from the future. And there were more on the way. The yuppie appetite for gargantuan feats of staging—
Phantom
’s chandelier,
Saigon
’s helicopter,
Les Mis
’s turntable barricade—had most certainly brought to visceral life what a
Company
or
Chicago
never could; that was the upside. But with all that stuff onstage, there was almost literally no room to dance and even less reason to. Broadway choreographers could blame the British. “For the New York theater,”
Frank Rich wrote, “the rise of London as a musical-theater capital is as sobering a specter as the awakening of the Japanese automobile industry was for Detroit.” The anti-dance rage did not make the world safe for a Fosse revival.

On September 23, 1987, Fosse and Verdon were on hand at the National Theater to run the last cleanup rehearsal before
Sweet Charity
’s Washington opening, which was scheduled for 7:30 that evening. The day’s work began with a production meeting, held in the theater’s second-floor lobby, where Fosse and Verdon, assisted by Mimi Quillin and Chet Walker, walked the various department heads through the morning agenda. Fosse hacked through the entire meeting.
He asked Walker about the morale
of the company. Walker was tentative. Worry prevailed, he said. There was concern they were
underprepared, that the tour was rushed, that management was guarding the real truth from the company, and that the show, rather than bumping along, would close before moving on to Boston and Los Angeles.

Fosse administered general notes around noon
and the company split into groups to rehearse individual pieces of the show. Book scenes in the lobby, dance scenes onstage. Though he moved between venues, Fosse stayed mostly in the house, first working one-on-one with McKechnie before he moved to the ensemble. With curtain time only hours away, Fosse and McKechnie rehearsed the bite Charity gives Charlie’s arm
in “You Should See Yourself,” her first number. He hurried her delivery of “provolone sandwich and a bottle of beer” and slowed her rendition of “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” Charity’s joy blast, which needed savoring. (“Talk about emotion during the entire number,”
Fosse wrote to himself. “It’s rushed.”) The orchestra needed to clean up “Friends” too, but that would come later, at the end of the day, with whatever time remained.

“How much time is left?”
he asked stage manager Craig Jacobs. “How much stuff is left to get done?”

At around three o’clock, Fosse led
the whole company through “Rhythm of Life,” which he had intended to run the day earlier
(he had run out of time) and which had been needling him since he’d first started working with the LA company. “Dance like you’re on your way
to percussion heaven!” he called out. “Dance like you’re in church on your way to heaven!” Walking down the line, he made serious, sustained eye contact
with each dancer in “Rhythm,” personalizing their relationships to
this moment now
. They were to remember it tonight. “The energy in the room was so
incredibly high,” dancer Mamie Duncan-Gibbs said. “There was a lot of joy in the room, a sense of accomplishment. I remember even Bob smiling about it.”

“He rehearsed us so hard that day,”
McKechnie said. “Hard even for Bob. He couldn’t direct us enough that day.”

He called for a break. With his back to the orchestra, Fosse faced the empty seats and watched as they filled one by one with tired dancers. They knew to expect Fosse’s opening-night rally speech, his “just do the show, no more, no less,”
push of customary encouragement. But that particular afternoon they got more. Fosse told them he had done everything
he could to save the show. “He said it more like a father
than a director,” McKechnie recalled. If he could, he said, he would
go out there, put on a sandwich board, and sell tickets on the sidewalk. “Your business is to do the best
you can,” he said. Then his tone changed. Fosse seemed to crumple.
He grew philosophical:

“When you get up in the morning,
don’t compete with anybody.

“Ask yourself, how can I be a better person?

“Save your money.

“I’m
so sorry
this isn’t going well.”

Usually a man of few words, he spoke for twenty minutes.
The curtains, hanging behind Fosse, framed him perfectly, as if he had planned the shot and put himself in it.

“As Bob was talking to us that day,
I remember thinking it was like he was reciting his last will and testament,” Lisa Embs said. “He was talking about how difficult our lives are in terms of the life of an artist, in terms of trying to take care of daily things like rent and family, and where’s our next job, our self-esteem, and that even though it didn’t always feel like it, what we’re doing is worth something.”

He said, “I would do anything to make
this show a success.”

A
ROUND FIVE THIRTY
, Fosse ended his speech.
With a final apology and a Thank you,
all,
he excused the dancers to their dressing rooms and hotels to eat, change, and ready themselves for six thirty, the half-hour call. Fosse devoted the next hour exclusively to
his orchestra. Onstage, Chet Walker stood in for
McKechnie, Verdon at his side; on the floor, glued to the podium
for maximum control, Fosse and Cy Coleman flanked conductor Wayne Green, watching him closely. Green didn’t need the extra pressure, but as they came to “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” time did not allow for anyone’s needs, least of all his. Fosse’s mood was changing. He had been up all day, dutifully caressing them once more unto the breach, but now the clock had gotten the better of him, the better of everyone; the whiplash-inducing collision of slow-down-the-song-and-hurry-up-and-fix-it was twisting the orchestra inside out. “Don’t rush this section,”
he implored Green, and Green tried not to rush, but with less than an hour left to rehearse, rushing seemed the only way out.

It was percussion. It was the cowbell, the
pitch
of the cowbell.
Diggadiggadum:
five burlesquey notes on Charity’s little shimmy. She turns her ass to the audience and wobbles it to
diggadiggadum;
beats that are beat out, in theory, by drummer Allen Herman, Fosse’s original drummer on
Dancin
’. But
Charity
had left Herman in a hospital
in Philadelphia, being treated for an infected cyst. The show’s percussionist, Larry “Spoosh” Spivack, took over
cowbell duty.
Diggadiggadum.

“I don’t like that cowbell,”
Fosse said. But he
did
like that cowbell; it was the cowbell they used in Philadelphia,
Toronto, Los Angeles; it
was
the cowbell they used for “If My Friends Could See Me Now,”
diggadiggadum;
it was the
Sweet Charity
cowbell. “Fix that cowbell!”

Diggadiggadum.

“Fix it! Fix it!”
He was yelling now at Spivack, who was unsure of what else to try. There was no time to get another cowbell that night, so Green suggested getting one the next day. Fosse shook him off.
Tomorrow?
The show went on in under two hours: they had to fix this one, now. But what else could they do? Hit it under, over? Lighter, softer? Quicker—

“Don’t rush it!”

Diggadiggadum.

“No!”

They passed the cowbell to the percussionist hired to replace Spoosh to see if he could do something with it. He couldn’t. The cowbell then went to the assistant conductor.
Diggadiggadum.
They passed it back to Spoosh.

Spoosh,
Diggadiggadum.
No no no.

“Later I asked [Spoosh] to show me
how he was hitting it,” Herman said. “He picks up the stick in the proper position and he hit the way any percussionist would hit it—the way he’s supposed to. I said, ‘Aw, man. Aw, shit.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘You gotta turn the stick around and hit it with the
fat
end!’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘That’s the way Bob wanted it. He wanted a fatter sound!’”

Spivack couldn’t know he was hitting the cowbell with the wrong side of the stick. “Fosse was angry,”
he recalled, “he was getting angrier, and I was freaking out. The whole theater was waiting for the next twenty minutes of rehearsal, waiting on me, as I tried to fix the cowbell. I must have tried fifteen or twenty times, every combination I could. I was sure I was going to get fired. I was frazzled. All the dancers, all the actors, all the lighting, all the sound people were just waiting for me to get this right. Sixty, seventy people just waiting around. The pressure! The local guys in Washington thought this was very entertaining for them. The trombone player put down his horn, crossed his hands, and said, ‘Oh boy,
now
we’re getting the show.’ I thought my fucking career was over.” Fosse was responding to the difference of a quarter-inch of wood.

It was six o’clock. “Ladies and gentlemen,”
Craig Jacobs announced, “we’re out of time.”

That was it. There was nothing he could do now.

Fosse picked his hat up off
the seat and left the theater to change into his opening-night tux. Gwen was with him.

They went out through the front
of the house, passing theater manager Harry Teeter in the business office (“Show’s going good,”
Fosse murmured), and went down a hallway, headed to the street. Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, on her way in to warm up, passed Bob and Gwen (“Have a good show!”
Gwen said) as they stepped out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, which was whooshing with rush-hour traffic, the fall air dropping a touch below seventy degrees. Together, they strolled toward the Willard Hotel, where
Fosse was staying that night, alone; Phoebe was in New York.

A shady green parkway on their left, Bob and Gwen crossed Fourteenth Street a block from the theater and went up to the great gilded doors of the Willard. Fosse nodded at Steve Blum, the hotel’s doorman, as they entered, and a short time later, he and Gwen reappeared, looking their best. “Theater thataway,”
Fosse said, pointing ahead. Blum tipped his hat.

Inside the Willard’s Round Robin Bar, folks had gathered for a quick dinner before the show. A cluster of people at the window stood up.

“Hey!” someone said.

Bartender Jim Hewes turned to face the commotion. The place grew quiet, then suddenly noisy again.

“Hey, someone fell down in the street.”

“What?”

“He better get up.”

Through the window, Hewes could see the intersection of Pennsylvania and Fourteenth Street. A man had collapsed toward the far side of the crosswalk, a few steps away from the curb. Outside, a crowd gathered, shouting for the paramedics, for an ambulance.

It took twenty minutes for the paramedics
to arrive, and by the time they got there, traffic had completely clogged up the intersection. It was chaos, car horns blaring against sirens, but from behind her windshield, Patricia Baughman could see into the swarm. Rush-hour businesspeople grappled with medical personnel, pedestrians hovered for a look, and a shock of orange-red hair flashed by. “She was running around,”
Baughman said, “pushing people out of the way and screaming.”

Thinking Fosse’s heart attack was a seizure,
Gwen dropped to her knees and held his head in her lap.

He had loved and not loved many women, but the one with him on the pavement, the last one to see him, had been letting go of him the longest.