Fosse (8 page)

They needed a signature, an angle.

They took dancing roles in the national company of
Make Mine Manhattan,
a musical revue starring Bert Lahr in a part Sid Caesar originated on Broadway. The show opened in Boston on January 11, 1949, moved to Philadelphia two weeks later, and then went on to Baltimore, where a local critic, delighted by Fosse and Niles’s big ballet number, wrote, “What faith a wife must have
in her husband to allow him to lift her so high above his head, also to swing her around through space with such abandon! Suppose hubby should be angry with wifey some night—and decide to administer a bit of punishment?”

Those were dark days for Mary-Ann Niles. Fosse’s infidelities humiliated her, and in the hours after the applause died down, her suffering was splintered by loneliness, the feeling that no matter how incensed those who consoled her appeared to be, no one was terribly shocked or outraged by his behavior. It was, after all, that way for all of them. That was life on the road: a hundred hotel-room doors guarded a hundred unknowns, and everyone had something on someone. Except Niles. No one had anything on Mary-Ann. She was the party on two feet, openly adored by the entire company, Fosse included. So he said.

At the show’s end, Fosse and Niles returned to New York, jobless yet again. To juice up their act, they gathered what was left of their money and Mary-Ann’s fortitude and enrolled in dance class with Frances Cole at her studio in the CBS building. “There were about fifteen of us
in that class,” said dancer Phyllis Sherwood. “In those days, you did more ballet than you did jazz, and Bobby would like to stay in the back, almost like he was embarrassed.” He probably was. Ballet was Fosse’s weakness, or so he believed, and for the duration, he laid low, covering up, apologizing as he sponged. “Unless he knew everything perfect,”
Sherwood said, “he would stand in the back there behind Mary-Ann or he would watch, like he was sucking everything in.” He watched the technique, yes, but he watched the people too, inculcating in himself their emotions, imagined histories, and idiosyncrasies. They were characters, all of them richly detailed. Everyone had a walk. Everyone had a tell.

In that very same CBS building, at Broadway and Fifty-Fourth Street, Ed Sullivan taped his shows, and the network broadcast
The Fifty-Fourth Street Revue,
a live variety program with regular spots for Fosse and Niles and fellow Lapue client Carl Reiner. They made several appearances (once with Bojangles Robinson) through May and June of 1949, Fosse rising to the post of dance director and attracting the attention of twenty-six-year-old Sid Caesar. He brought them on a show of his,
The Admiral Broadway Revue,
and made Fosse and Niles his opening act at Chicago’s Empire Room, where
Variety
caught them, by then a full-blown dance-comedy double. Comedy—Fosse loved to mess around; Niles lived for a laugh—that was the angle they needed. “Little bit of comedy in ‘showoff’ stint
garners chuckles but duo really starts selling with their East Indian hoke tap, sharp travesty on the Jack Cole imitators. Satire on the old vaude days at the Palace is close to the original with youngsters getting nifty reception for cakewalk finale.” Showbiz; Fosse had let it in again. Maybe that’s what Caesar saw in them. Showbiz and satire.

They toured again, briefly, through the fall of 1949, and then returned to New York, where it was back to Charlie’s or Hansen’s and a few weeks of waiting by the phone, which soon rang with news of
Alive and Kicking,
a harebrained revue to be choreographed by Jack Cole, the slithering id of American exotica, and off they went. (The day of their audition, Gwen Verdon, Fosse’s future wife and lifelong partner, was in the audience
serving as Cole’s right-hand dance assistant and keeper of his style.) Fosse and Niles did not get the job; in November, they signed on instead to
Dance Me a Song
, another revue, also harebrained
.
But it hardly mattered. The once-popular revue format was dying or dead (the
Oklahoma!
revolution already seven years in the past) and Fosse’s marriage was a corpse duet, but in
Dance Me a Song,
Fosse found himself, at long last, on Broadway. On Broadway and in love.

H
ER NAME WAS
Joan McCracken. She was a ballet dancer.

Barely five feet and broad across the shoulders, she looked more like an acrobat than a swan princess, but when a soft light beamed across her eyes, a more than melancholy romance shone, and Joan became the moon. Glancing at those big, silent eyes, one might have guessed—and guessed correctly—she was in love with Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”
“Her eyes, in particular, often looked
as if she were about to cry, or had been crying,” a friend observed. And yet when Joan McCracken danced, nothing like sadness came through. Laughter did. The
New York Times
once called her “practically a musical comedy in herself.”

McCracken—like Fosse, like Verdon—had learned to offset her clumsy figure and irregular technique with levity. By way of splits, straddles, back bends, and contortions, she added to ballet the plucky air of a knockabout, a clown. “There are lots of ballerinas,”
Agnes de Mille said of McCracken, “but comediennes who can dance are rare.” De Mille thought Joan’s lower extremities resembled piano legs,
but she had a balletic grace that tangled with something wilder, more American. “McCracken was exactly the right kind
of dancer to embody the choreographic innovations de Mille was bringing to Broadway,” wrote biographer Lisa Jo Sagolla, “the melding of acting and movement in a balletic yet nonclassical vein that reflected and spoke to mid-twentieth-century American sensibilities.”

She was pure personality. With a quick wink to the second balcony, McCracken could smack a guy in the groin, cross his eyes, and take his heart for payment. As one of the original members of the Actors Studio,
she could dance a dance as if it were a scene in a play. She was an actress. “I can fall down and make it
look real,” McCracken said to de Mille during an
Oklahoma!
rehearsal one afternoon—and on opening night, the whole world saw she wasn’t kidding. They went nuts. “You could have sopped the audience up
with a piece of bread,” de Mille said.
Playbill
changed her billing to read
The Girl Who Falls Down: Joan McCracken.

Fosse fell for McCracken and snapped Mary-Ann from his life like training wheels. It was obvious to everyone: Mary-Ann, poor thing, didn’t stand a chance. In ability, looks, class, fame, and achievement, McCracken was simply the next level, an artist and a star. A full decade older than Fosse, she had appeared onstage with Charles Laughton and John Garfield and had even danced in the movies, at MGM, no less, home to the greatest names in Hollywood. Lover and mentor, McCracken was the best parts of Mary-Ann and Mr. Weaver; her attention was as invigorating to Fosse as a headline in the
New York Times.
“He would give her a flower
when she came off stage,” Bob Scheerer said. “It was very loving.”

To Mary-Ann, Fosse gave a new
washing machine, and he went out with Joan or his new friend comedian Wally Cox (who, along with Joan, was the show’s breakout star) while Niles stayed at home, drinking and wringing his clean pants dry. At least he was honest about lying—once, she could let it go. But this time was different. Joan McCracken was different.
But feeling sorry for herself—that’s where Mary-Ann Niles drew the line. No matter who knew or how humiliating displays became, Niles would show them all that she was okay. She would laugh out loud for them to see. Ol’ Spooky (she wanted them to say),
always game for a good time.

That McCracken continued to upstage her onstage was a humiliation too perverse to bear. “Strange New Look” was widely considered one of the best numbers in the show, dramatic and just a touch poetic, tailor-made for McCracken’s talents. Worse,
Dance Me a Song’
s choreographer, Robert Sidney, seemed to give her
everything she asked for—additional music here, creative freedom there, and he featured her, yet again, in “Paper,” a musical-comedy-style ballet that had McCracken, the very picture of beatnik grace, in a coquettish black velvet jacket and black tights. The number was ridiculous, but McCracken was impervious and shone all the brighter by comparison. Not Niles. Bourrées, arabesques, sissonnes; the curtain call came and went, and Mary-Ann split from the group and went back to her hotel window and her cigarettes. If she left Fosse, she’d be leaving her partner, her career, and if she left her career, she’d be back to zero, just another girl Bob Fosse loved once, without a dime to dance on. So she opened another bottle and hung his pants up to dry, jabbing them with clothespins.

Dance Me a Song
opened on Broadway at the Royale Theater on January 20, 1950, and it closed thirty-five performances later. But no matter: work was steady now. A few episodes of
Toni Twin Time
(Jack Lemmon, host) begat spots on
Ford Star Revue
and
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.
As the Lucky Strike Extra dancers on
Your Hit Parade,
Fosse and Niles appeared weekly, live, in front of studio cameras and danced in a variety of styles to the hit songs of the moment. Confined to chart-topping tunes, Fosse was forced to produce, and produce quickly, in styles not necessarily to his taste.
But limitation was adaptation. Added dance modes increased Fosse’s ever-expanding choreographic vocabulary, and the fear of deadlines (and public failure) whipped him on. (Gwen Verdon: “Interviewers would say,
‘What is your motive? What drives you?’ He would say, ‘Fear.’ And everyone would laugh, but Bob was telling the truth.”) Flop sweat—one of Fosse’s favorite expressions—was the stick he beat against his own ass. It had to hurt; stress was his muse. “Take care of myself?”
He would laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

With Joan McCracken appearing (not too far away) at Connecticut’s Westport Playhouse, her day- and nighttime assignations with Fosse slid easily into the cracks between rehearsals. They carried on as McCracken’s current show,
Angel in the Pawnshop,
toured New England for the rest of the year; it arrived, finally, on Broadway on January 18, 1951, only a day before Fosse and Niles returned to the Cotillion Room. With little left to call a marriage, they danced better than they ever had. “Since last caught,”
Billboard
said, “the kids have improved so much there’s hardly any comparison. Today they are one of the freshest acts to hit the classroom circuit in many a long month. The tow-headed, boyish Fosse is more than a hoofer, tho [
sic
] he’s excellent in that department; he’s now a comedian with a sly approach that builds, if not for yocks, then certainly for healthy enough laughs.” The place was so full, chairs had to be
pushed against the walls. “The kids’ walk-off, a strawhatted old vaude exit, complete with sand-steps and deliberately corny chatter, almost stopped the show.” They were held over.

Club owner Marty Proser signed Fosse, and Niles, to a production in his café theater, a midsize saloon that specialized in recycling Broadway musicals into dinner-theater revues. This particular retread, a tongue-in-cheek montage of 1920s America, which cut song to song from Texas Guinan (“Hello, suckers!”) to the stock-market crash of 1929, was carved from the carcass of
Billion Dollar Baby,
a hit show on Broadway. Dancer George Marcy said, “There wasn’t much choreography
on [that show], so Bobby did his own dances, but they weren’t much, not like they became. He gave me the Charleston. He did his knee slides, his tricks, his Fred Astaire and the commercial Gene Kelly kind of thing.” Marty Proser was in the consignment business. If it’s all been done before—and it has, many times—then showbiz is the act of hocking used for new, and the guy under the top hat is Elmer Gantry, at least on his best day, when they buy it. When they don’t, which is most days, he’s only Willy Loman, overselling to a basement of jerks. “We’re all here to woo you,”
Fosse said of his profession. “God, it’s disgusting.” In early April 1951, Proser swapped
out a couple numbers and retitled the show
The Roaring Twenties
so he wouldn’t have to pay any royalties.

At night after the show, Fosse would lead
the peach-faced boy and girl dancers out of the theater to a bar on the other side of the block to carouse in rounds of liquor dreams until late into the morning. They wanted Broadway and Hollywood. They couldn’t wait anymore. “I remember going there
practically every night with Bobby,” said dancer George Marcy. “He would sit there and talk about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. We all loved listening to him, the girls especially. He had ideas, ideas about directing and choreographing. It was so good to be around him because whatever we were feeling about ourselves, which was generally not so good—we were so poor and young and we worked so hard—Bobby would make us feel good about show business again. ‘It’s a wonderful thing,’ he’d say. He made me believe it.” And wherever there was Fosse, there was Mary-Ann. “Jesus, she was so in love
with him,” Marcy said. “She’d always talk about him. Even in front of him, like his mother. She’d brag about him and then she’d get embarrassed and cut him down. She was drinking so much in those days, drinking like a fish, drinking every night.”

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, early fans of Fosse and Niles, had gone to see them at the Pierre, where they were all officially introduced. “I want you kids to choreograph my show,” Lewis said, and they did.
The Colgate Comedy Hour,
a variety program on NBC, was an hour long, roomy enough to accommodate a couple of dances, including a featured spot for Fosse and Niles. Here was a challenge: The show required Fosse to stage, for the first time, an entire ensemble. From his tiny repertoire, Fosse picked the Jack Cole–inspired “Limehouse Blues,” which he (in white tux and turban) and Niles danced before a giant Shiva as half a dozen others twirled around them. To downplay his lack of experience in the production department, Fosse broke the ensemble into pairs and choreographed them as duos—easier to manage that way. Sometimes the duos merged; that was about it. But, significantly, the group number showcased Fosse’s details, like wrist isolations, limp hands held up high in the air, flopping like the teeny-weeny wings of a fat bird. Martin and Lewis were pleased enough with it to invite them back to choreograph another
Colgate Comedy Hour,
at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater, not far from Martin and Lewis’s engagement at the Chez Paree. Late in April 1951, Fosse cast a company that included his Riff Brother, Charlie Grass, for “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” a white-tie-and-tails homage to Astaire. Again, the group work was generic, but the number showed an increased awareness of background and foreground space, which Fosse used to contrast grand acrobatics with cinematic close-ups of nondancers; in this case, a man in a top hat blowing cigarette smoke into the camera.