Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen (22 page)

Verdon returns with Richard Kiley for
Redhead
and they perform “Look Who’s in Love.” He is seated on the set with the 1959 year display on it and she sits on a lower level in between his legs and holding onto his left leg. The pair stays in the same positions for the whole performance. Verdon wears a black dress with white blouse and black triangular pattern on the front, white gloves, and a black ribbon in her hair. She is also seen under the closing credits of the show singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with the cast.-

According to Verdon, Sally Bowles in
I Am a Camera
was the dream role that she never got to play. It was written by John Van Druten as an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s book
The Berlin Stories
and been staged successfully on Broadway from November 28, 1951, to July 12, 1952. Verdon had seen Dorothy Tutin do it in London in 1954. Fosse had been offered the chance to direct the stage musical version earlier but had declined.

The film of
Cabaret
was in production in Germany from February to July 1971. Verdon agreed to join Fosse when he said he had a crisis over costumes, and she brought Nicole with her. The time that Verdon was in Berlin included Nicole’s eighth birthday on March 4. The Fosses stayed at the Hotel Residenz in the town of Schwabing on the outskirts of Munich. Verdon joined the company of actors and dancers in late-night card games.

She enjoyed Liza Minnelli and was not envious of the way that Fosse was transforming her into a spectacular dancer. Verdon also worked on the star’s personal style, creating the Louise Brooks–style helmet look of her hair with a widow’s peak. It was supposedly her idea that Sally Bowles had emerald-green fingernail polish, although this feature of the character came from Christopher Isherwood’s source novella.

It was not a surprise that Verdon would have an affinity with Bowles since she was not far removed from her own Charity persona, another hopeful and eccentric but luckless waif. Fosse could not see Minnelli playing Bowles in damask which was the costume designer’s choice of material, and he was so distressed about her look that Verdon “butted in.” She went to junk shops and antique stores in Paris to find authentic period clothes. Verdon found the purple dress with the beaded centerpiece that Minnelli wore for the title song. She gave Minnelli a vest that belonged to Fosse that the star wore without a shirt for the “Mein Heir” number. Verdon also contributed some of her own clothes like a shawl that she had brought with her, her green blouse used for “Maybe This Time,” and her kimono.

Her emergency rescue also brought the fighting factions of the production together since the crew loved her. Verdon’s faith in people was contagious and it reflected back upon people having faith in her. Fosse had begun a relationship with another woman whom he had met months before. She was Ilse Schwarzwald, the interpreter he had been given in the film’s pre-production period to help him communicate. Their romance extended into production and Fosse promoted her to production secretary. People noticed that Ilse resembled Verdon, something which became more apparent when Verdon arrived in town. She innocently chatted with the German girl on set, unaware of the affair that was common knowledge to everyone else. Fosse had initially tried to keep it a secret but soon he was publicly declaring his love for Ilse. While she was not the first woman he had had an affair with, the situation was different now because the Fosses were in Europe, where he no longer made an effort to hide his philandering from his wife. Another difference was that Fosse told Ilse that he was now only staying married to Verdon for Nicole.

Matters might have come to a head when Verdon learned about Ilse from the man she was living with—some sources say he was Ilse’s husband. He apparently sent her a note telling all, including a warning about Ilse’s expensive tastes. But Verdon’s reaction was more sarcastic than angry, and to the crew’s amazement, she decided to stay on in Munich to work on costumes and makeup and with the dancers. One makeup tip that she contributed was to put melted crayon on eyelashes for a startling effect. Verdon said that she did all the girls using melted Crayola so that they could have different colors. Again her generosity over her husband’s work took precedent over her personal feelings, particularly as she was not paid for her services. Cynics might have believed that Verdon’s attitude was based on a refusal to show her suffering. If she did, people might think that Fosse did not love her and then she would lose her title as his queen. It was better for her to stay strong, because there was dignity in transcendence. But this attitude would only work for Verdon for a time. Others observed a serious weight loss that they attributed to her grief.

Verdon solved another costume crisis that occurred with the number “If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song).” She flew back to New York to Brooks Costume to handpick a gorilla costume to replace the blue velour one provided by designer Charlotte Flemming. Other sources claim that Fosse’s complaint was just about the head of the costume. Verdon flew back to Munich with the costume’s head on her lap. This head was enormous and rather unusual because it had a ring through its nose. This was presumably the same ring that Joel Grey in the film places in the female gorilla’s nose as an engagement ring. Grey commented that the head looked like Verdon’s head if she were a gorilla, that it was very much her kind of stage persona. In the film the sparkling eyes and big smile of the gorilla do perversely recall her. Looking past the idea of the bestial love of a gorilla as an example of the perversity demonstrated in the club’s array of sexual proclivities, one can read a parallel between Verdon’s relationship with Fosse. He is represented by Grey’s M.C. and she is the gorilla, who wears a feather in her hat which is a look that Verdon often used. She is the pathetic female, with unconventional looks, who is led by the nose by a man who claims to appreciate her individual qualities, but only feigns sentiment. Yes he will marry her, but he will also hold her gullibility up for ridicule.

Upon her return to Munich, Verdon walked in on Fosse with a couple of German girls and that was the last straw for her. She went back to New York and sent a letter to her husband in Berlin, where he had gone for the end of location photography. In it Verdon stated that she loved Fosse, but that they had to separate because he had been cheating on her from virtually the moment they had met. The separation also meant that she no longer wanted him living in their apartment, and he moved to a two-bedroom apartment at 58 West 58th Street. Fosse told a friend that he cheated because he was constantly thrown into a situation with beautiful women but he had always made it clear that he was married and that the affair would lead to nothing big. But after the letter, Fosse dove into the relationship with Ilse, making it sound as if it was practically his wife’s fault.

In Madrid after the end filming, he called Verdon and asked her to meet him at the Simons’ rented villa in Majorca. She agreed and met him at the house. Hal and Judy Prince were staying at the mountaintop near the Simons. The Princes and the Fosses had drinks in Palma and then Fosse and Verdon went back to the Prince house for dinner. The couple spent a week together but their fighting resumed and they learned that a reconciliation was not possible. They endured a dance performance by the Simons’ fourteen-year old daughter Ellen which she had created as a farewell gesture to them. Then supposedly Neil Simon asked them both to leave when neither Fosse not Verdon could muster the enthusiasm to pay the girl a compliment. They spent their last night together in a hotel in Palma and then Verdon went back to New York and Nicole.

She would later say that she was living like a wife and a mother, which was really what she wanted to be, but she was the wrong kind of wife for him. Verdon thought that Fosse outgrew her. He started writing and he was involved in all kinds of things, and she was so involved with Nicole she didn’t really care if she worked or not. She said that the hardest thing was that she was honest with Fosse but Fosse would say that it was his fault that the marriage failed and that it had to do with his work. When he worked, he shut everything out. Fosse said that he tried harder with Verdon than with his other two wives, but marriage was a disaster for him. He likened it to one big closing in New Haven. Verdon thought that the marriage failed because she didn’t know what he wanted, but they remained friends after they separated. Verdon’s sustained friendship with Fosse allowed him to regularly visit his daughter in her apartment, and also to Verdon working with him again.

On June 21, 1971, Verdon was one of 100 women handing out leaflets in front of Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s department stores that claimed that the spiralling cost of living was linked to the war in Vietnam. The women wore sandwich boards reading “Don’t Buy War” and they asked shoppers to postpone doing anything for one day, as a protest against the war. They also handed out “shopping lists” of 1971 “war prices” for such items as eggs and coffee as being sharply higher than “peace prices” for the same goods in March 1961. On October 7, Verdon was one of the many celebrities participating in a benefit reception to raise money for the New York Public Library’s theater collection. She was photographed with auctioneer Timothy Tetlow displaying a poster of Sarah Bernhardt’s 1900 Farewell American Tour during an auction, wearing a white long-sleeved high-necked jacket with a row of buttons on the left side.

On November 15, 1971, Verdon was chairperson of a conference meeting to raise funds to prevent the Research Library of the Performing Arts of the New York Public Library from closing as planned on January 1, 1972. Under the auspices of the Actors Equity Association, artists for these programs would donate their time for a series of “Nine O’Clock Crisis Concerts.” These were planned to be held in the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts Auditorium on December 6, 13, 18 and 20, 1971, and January 14, 1972. On December 18, Verdon led dance shock troops to give a couple of the fund-raising concerts. In 1971 Verdon had also modeled the furs of Ben Kahn at a show at the Park Lane Theatre in aid of the Actor’s Guild.

On January 13, 1972, it was announced in the
New York Times
that Verdon had been cast in the theatrical thriller
Children! Children!
by Jack Horrigan. She asked Louis Calta to please not write that she was making her debut in a straight play, preferring to say that it was the first show in which she didn’t sing or dance. But Calta did not do as she asked. Verdon explained the difference was that using “straight play” implied that she had not done any acting in such plot-ridden shows as
Sweet Charity
,
New Girl in Town
,
Damn Yankees
, and
Redhead
. She asked: If she wasn’t acting in any of those shows, what was she doing?

Verdon was to play Helen Giles, a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown who took the job as babysitter to three malevolent children. The story was set in a Gramercy Park duplex on New Year’s Eve. Unbeknownst to Helen, the children had caused the demise of their last sitter and they planned a similar fate for her. It was to open on March 7, 1972. Director Joseph Hardy described it as a suspense play with social and psychological implications. It was produced by Arthur Whitelaw, Seth Harrison, Ben Gerard and Hardy. There were no out-of-town tryouts scheduled. Verdon said the extraordinary thing about it was that it was very funny yet terrifying.

On February 16, 1972, she was one of many speakers who gave a brief speech of greetings and good wishes to welcome back the Ritz Theatre to Broadway as a legitimate playhouse. The space had begun life as such fifty years earlier, but had then served as a radio and television studio and most recently as a porno theater. Verdon was to appear in the theater in her new Broadway play and the producers of the show had refurbished it. This included mounting on the theater walls and displayed in the playhouse old programs, pictures, records and memorabilia they had found in the Theatre Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

After thirteen previews from February 24, 1972,
Children! Children!
opened on Broadway on March 8 and closed the same night. It was lambasted by Clive Barnes in the
New York Times
who wrote that the acting of the entire cast, including Verdon, was indescribably bad and that it seemed ill-advised in its effrontery. She talked about the experience on
The Mike Douglas Show
on June 14, 1976. Verdon said that during the previews, material was taken out and nothing was put in its place so that the opening night performance was 65 minutes without an intermission. She was reminded of the show business adage to never work with children or animals and this show had her working with three children and two cats. After Verdon was advised that the show would be closing the next day, she went back and got the cats. She later commented that Jack Horrigan had refused to do any rewriting and a lot of cutting was done by the director, whose name recalled the character in
Damn Yankees
.

Verdon was back as a Tony Award presenter on April 23, 1972. The ceremony was held at the Broadway Theatre and broadcast by ABC. She appeared with Alfred Drake to present the Best Actor in a Musical Award to Phil Silvers for
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
She wore a lime green and yellow-lined bare-shouldered dress with a tie to the neck and her hair in a longer style to her shoulders. The couple were introduced by Peter Ustinov as having six Tonys between them. Drake corrected Ustinov by saying that actually they had eight Tonys and Verdon explained that the eight were their own and the two they had come to present. She then laughed and said to Ustinov, “I worried you, didn’t I?” Verdon was also among the show’s cast under the end credits holding a ukulele as they all sang “I Want to Be Happy.”