Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen (13 page)

Aware that a Gwen Verdon show was not the same as a Bea Lillie show, the producers hired David Shaw and Sidney Sheldon as librettists. According to one source, Shaw was brought in by Verdon, since he had written “Native Dancer” for her, and that he was hired because Sidney Sheldon refused to rewrite with Fosse. Another source claims that Sheldon and Shaw were brought in to assist Dorothy Fields after her librettist brother, Herbert, died. Yet another says that Sheldon was lured away by Hollywood and that’s why Shaw was brought in. In the
New York Times
(June 23, 1958) Lewis Gelb reported that Shaw had been assigned to the show to revise and polish. The rewriting amounted to cutting subplots to make room for dances. Verdon joined Fosse for the casting auditions for five hundred singers, dancers and actors. Richard Kiley was so nervous auditioning that Verdon and Fosse sang with him to give him more confidence, and he was chosen to play opposite her.

Rehearsals began in October 1958 at the Variety Arts Studios. At one rehearsal Kiley reportedly erupted at Verdon when she appeared after an argument began between Fosse and the actor on an acting point. She knew that Fosse was unused to a performer expressing an opposing opinion. Kiley ordered Verdon out of the room, telling her, “You may be the star of the show, but this isn’t any of your business.” He knew who she was but Kiley still considered her the director’s girlfriend. Verdon retreated because she and Fosse found him very imposing and neither would dare abuse him. However this didn’t stop Fosse from suggesting that Kiley should cover his receding hairline with a wig, because he felt it was right for the character. Kiley saw the humor in the situation when he tried on toupees. Verdon also had trouble with Sidney Sheldon, whose name she supposedly omitted as the co-author when interviewed. It is not known what the specific problem between the two was.

For “Erbie Hitch’s Twitch” where Essie imitates her father, Verdon said she imitated Laurence Olivier’s Archie Rice from
The Entertainer
. This was a role he had originated on the London stage in 1957 and had played on Broadway from February 12 to May 10, 1958 (he received a nomination for the Best Actor Tony Award). She found the tongue-twisting words of the song tricky because there were so many of them. Verdon had been asked to perform them as fast as Danny Kaye had done his patter song “Tchaikovsky” in the musical
Lady in the Dark
, where he named fifty Russian composers in thirty-nine seconds. She began by saying the words slowly and precisely, then faster and faster still until her mouth just did it without her having to think about it.

Ten nights of tryouts were held in December in New Haven. Fosse devised a thirty-minute ballet for Verdon in an attempt to compensate for what he felt the book lacked. “Essie’s Dream” consisted of five parts: jazz, cancan, gypsy, military march, and music hall with fast costume changes. It was the most challenging dance that she had attempted to date, and Verdon appeared in every section. She entered one on the wings of a table, jumped onto a trampoline, and dove out on the stage horizontally. Verdon claimed that the exertion of the performance made her lose several pounds each night. To keep up her weight she is said to have guzzled root beer floats, hot chocolate, milk shakes and honey. She told a
New York Times
reporter that by the time she hit Broadway, she was also consuming a double orange juice, gobs of whipped cream with her hot chocolate, several pieces of candy, and a chicken and a roast beef sandwich. Verdon claimed that she was having the time of her life and it was the first time that she wasn’t scared on stage.

Later she would say that the show may have been her favorite, and that it was a treat working with Kiley. The musical contained what Verdon would say was her favorite onstage moment, when Essie walked into the cloud of smoke that the departing Kiley had produced from his cigar. It also contained her personal favorite of all her musical numbers, “Erbie Fitch’s Twitch.” Verdon loved the character because once Essie became part of the travelling show, she was a flop. “Erbie Fitch’s Twitch” was meant to be the act of an amateur where she would tell a joke that wasn’t funny and the other characters on stage would look at her with derision. Verdon found using the Cockney accent easy because her whole family was Cockney. She found that she was so adept at it that she was told to pull it back a bit because Americans could never understand the way a real Cockney speaks.

Verdon felt the most memorable part of the show was the beginning at the wax museum, where she wore a severe wig and had a Jane Eyre look. She had fun being the ugly duckling swooning over Kiley’s American because he would look at her as if Essie was the last woman he would ever consider. Verdon loved the innocence of Essie, a quality that she knew that she could project, though she never did it in a calculated way. This innocence came through in a lot of future characters, like Charity and Roxie Hart. In acting class, Verdon did scenes from
The Madwoman of Chaillot
; that character also had an innocence about her along with her madness. In addition Verdon studied singing with Keith Davis, who gave her images to think of when she sang. The most important lesson he gave her was to sing on a speaking level: not to think about notes but to consider yourself as speaking lyrics, which made it seem more natural. Davis described Verdon’s voice as a “character voice” which worked for musical theater because a show is about a character so the voice needs to be real. She was playing Essie so she couldn’t sound like an opera singer.

In Philadelphia the show got good reviews and did good business. But in the “Pick-Pocket Tango,” a row of metal bars from the jail set landed hard on Verdon’s feet after a stagehand missed his cue, and she cried out and fell backward. The audience gasped and Fosse yelled for the curtain to come down. He ran to her but she claimed not to be injured. Verdon wanted to keep going but Fosse refused to let her. The trope cry of “Is there a doctor in the house?” came from the public address system, which produced three or five, according to different sources. Verdon was bruised but had no broken bones. Sources differ as to whether the show resumed that night. One says it did and that she wore a pair of slippers under her costume. As the next scene required her to stamp her foot three times at the request of the American, the audience supposedly groaned, dreading what might happen. However, to protect herself, Verdon softly and gingerly tapped her foot instead, which made the audience stand up and cheer. The source claims that the show closed for the next night because Verdon’s understudy had left the show after a burst appendix. Another says that the star and the show did not carry on the night of the accident, because Fosse didn’t want her to and there was no understudy to replace her. He supposedly went after the stagehand at fault, who was supposedly drunk. Sources also suggest that Verdon’s good spirits in the show were only temporary, and perhaps things changed after the accident. She became strained, and criticized the chorus behind her and started missing performances, where she was presumably replaced by her new cast understudies Patti Karr and Allyn Ann McLerie.

The company moved to Washington for a season from December 31, 1958, to the first two weeks of January 1959. Verdon occasionally asked to skip a song because she was tired. This became more frequent so that dialogue had to be altered and song cues dropped to accommodate the change. At one performance, when Verdon asked to drop seven songs, composer Albert Hague objected strenuously. The producer asked him whether he wanted to complain to the Dramatists Guild and close the show and he backed down. Verdon also had the orchestrations for her songs transposed so that, depending on how she felt, she could sing numbers either in a higher or lower key. By the time the show came to Broadway she would be performing in the lower key because it was easier for her to sing. She made an exception when she appeared at an Actors Fund benefit since it was attended by theater professionals.

For the
New York Times
of February 1, 1959, Al Hirschfeld provided four caricatures of Verdon in the show. On the same night she was given a party at the Herwyn Club, where she wore a black sleeveless cocktail dress with a flower in the cleavage.
Redhead
opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre as scheduled on February 5, 1959, and ran till March 19, 1960. The
New York Times’
Brooks Atkinson gave the show a mixed review. He wrote that when Verdon is dancing it was a delight but when she was not, which was most of the time, it was a “hurrah’s-nest of old show paraphernalia.”

The original cast recording was made on February 8, 1959, and released by RCA Victor on February 13. On May 10, 1959, John S. Wilson of the
New York Times
wrote that Verdon gave a disarming and virtuoso performance, and seemed thoroughly at home vocally in the English music hall world of the early 1900s. She sparkled through Hague’s lively and lusty music and Fields’ witty lyrics, giving an added personal filip of bright vitality to a score that Wilson found fresh and engaging. At the 1960 Grammy Awards held on November 29, 1959,
Redhead
tied for Best Broadway Show album with
Gypsy
. On April 12, 1959, at the Waldorf Astoria it won Tony Awards for Best Musical, Kiley for Best Actor in a Musical, Verdon for Best Actress in a Musical, Fosse for Best Choreography, and Rouben Ter-Arutunian for Best Costume Design. Interestingly, Fosse was not even nominated as Best Director.

Portrait of Verdon in her stage show
Redhead
(1959–1960).

During the run she was out at times. On April 6, 1959, Verdon was suffering from a respiratory ailment. From August 1 and 2, it was after spraining her left ankle while limbering up. On August 11, it was because Verdon had injured her right ankle on the 10th while dancing in the show. On October 28 and 29, she had a throat ailment. Verdon’s stand-in was Allyn Ann McLerie. Verdon later summed up the show by saying that it played in New York and then toured but only six performances came together. “Six! Performances when I sang well and danced well. When I did it right.’’

Verdon scored the cover of
Life
magazine’s February 23, 1959, edition. She was shown in a photograph dressed in black sweater and tights with a black tied choker and brown boots. She held a multi-colored and ribboned tambourine, and was backed up by two male dancers. On the cover it said about her, “Gwen Verdon: Her Joyous Strutting Knocks Broadway Cold.” The magazine’s table of contents referenced the article about her in
Redhead
with “Dancing in dizzy zest in Broadway’s newest musical [she] scores season’s greatest personal triumph and enjoys herself doing it.” The Tom Prideaux article, entitled “Gwen Knocks ’Em in the Aisles,” featured photographs of her alone, with Richard Kiley and dancer Kasimir Kokich in the show, and of her doing dance exercises to warm up for the RCA Victor cast recording as two unidentified men watch. Fosse is quoted as saying that in the past Verdon had always seemed to be proving something to herself. Prideaux wrote that the show brought a new Verdon who enjoyed herself and let her audiences know it. George Abbott said that her hard work stemmed from an unfriendliness to her own body. He claimed that Verdon was not at all vain and never dressed to attract attention to herself. She dressed like a gypsy, wearing old slacks that drooled around her ankles. Abbott also said that Verdon did not think of herself as sexy. She was an intellectual actress and you approached her through reason. Prideaux wrote that Verdon was formerly known as a big worrier, but she was now said to be only a part-time one. Fosse advised that when he went backstage to see her after opening night, he expected her to ask how he thought they liked it. Instead Verdon broke into a grin and told him, “I can’t believe it. I wasn’t nervous at all.”

She and Fosse now lived together in a penthouse apartment at 91 Central Park West with a view of the park. Their terrace was big enough for a vegetable garden (where Verdon grew eggplant and zucchini), a ping pong table, and a dog run for her pets. It also allowed the couple to entertain their small group of friends. Most of the apartment’s furnishings belonged to Verdon since Fosse was more suited to the gypsy life of living out of a suitcase. They both loved crafts, and on the weekends they would go to junkyards, beaches and second-hand shops to find them. Their prized possessions were old lamps which they refurbished, and not Tony Awards which they kept hidden. The couple also spent their nights off from the theater at home, or visiting friends like the Jule Stynes, the Sydney Chaplins, the Neil Simons, and Buddy Hackett when he was in New York. For Hackett they would venture out for dinner at Rao’s. While Verdon did not have the same love of sports as Fosse, she would join him to watch them on television. She provided beer and pretzels, although her diet was more health-conscious.

Verdon also donated time and resources to New York’s Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, a low-cost psychiatric clinic. This was because she was a proponent of psychoanalysis, and also because she wanted to teach children with physical disabilities the benefits of exercise and movement in group therapy. She and Fosse used their terrace to give benefits and fundraising parties to raise awareness for the cause. At one affair with a luau theme, the weather caused a tent they’d set up to blow off and spin down to the park. At a dinner party for David Shaw, the couple met Paddy Chayefsky and he became a close friend to Fosse.