Fosse (17 page)

Fosse and Verdon fought back. “They replied that it was high art,”
Abbott recalled, “that they didn’t care what the audience liked, and that people had thrown fruit at Stravinsky. We tried to point out that the act of throwing fruit at a project was not in the strictest logic an absolute proof of its [being] high art, but our argument was not able to pierce the emotional armor with which they had invested their creation.” The dancers stood with Fosse.

Arriving at rehearsal the next morning,
the company met yet another shock. The theater had been padlocked, which sent an enraging message the New Haven Police were on hand to enforce:
New Girl in Town
would not play until the “Red Light Ballet” was cut. Who called in the law? Gwen alleged an angry mother had
complained to a crossing guard, but no one could be sure, and it didn’t matter. The ballet’s forty-thousand-dollar stairway, critical to the number’s most crucial innuendo, was discovered in the alley theater burned to ashes.

Fosse had no choice but to throw together a stopgap riff on Agnes de Mille (ironically more passé than the original ballet) and
New Girl
trudged on to Boston, where audiences wanted to see a dancing Gwen Verdon, which gave Abbott reason to reverse course. Ordering Fosse to add conventional dance numbers and cutting stretches of O’Neill to make room for them, he turned
New Girl in Town,
inch by inch, into an unfunny musical comedy.

An employee without a union, Fosse had no leverage. But the star did. She demanded Hal Prince deliver George Abbott.

“He’s too busy to talk right now.”

“Then I’m too busy to go on.”

It was the flu, she said. To replace her, the production had to
split the part into four different sections for four different performers. One sang and played the book scenes, and the remaining three divided the dances among them—proof that Gwen Verdon, the most threatening of triple threats, could do what no other single person could.

When she returned to the show, a week later, Verdon dove into character work. Irritating Abbott with actorly conflict, she would avenge the loss of the “Red Light Ballet.”

“Just say the lines!”

“I have no more lines to say!” (He had cut that many.)

Retaliating, Abbott kept her waiting onstage all afternoon, refusing to bring on a stand-in when he rehearsed elements around her.

“You cheap son of a bitch!”
she called out. “Why don’t you hire someone here to stand for me?”

New Girl
’s trials only brought Fosse and Verdon closer. The high-pressure rush of opening night in New York, the feeling of unjust persecution, and their sense of righteous collaboration in the name of art electrified all channels of their relationship. “Gwen and Fosse were now
so, so in love,” Prince said, “it was almost dangerous.” Conflict fired their work, work fired their romance, and romance fired the conflict. There was something conspiratorial about it. “I’d set my hair on fire if he
asked me to,” Verdon said. But dancers had to wonder, as they watched him raid the dressing rooms for chorus girls, would he do the same for her?

The exact parameters of their liaison did not concern Gwen’s son, Jimmy.
Visiting New York, he found them mutually devoted and preparing for marriage. They were just waiting on Joan McCracken, Gwen told him. “She had had a breakdown,”
Charlie Grass explained, “she’d been institutionalized, and Bob and Gwen helped. For years, they paid.” Fosse wouldn’t seek his divorce
until Joan’s release, when she’d recovered and was able to start performing again. (When that day came, in April 1957, Fosse went to Winston County, Alabama, quickie-divorce mecca of the South.) In the meantime, Fosse and Verdon maintained separate residences: he on the West Side of midtown, she on Lexington and Sixty-Eighth. Most nights, after
New Girl
runs at Broadway’s Forty-Sixth Street Theater, Fosse and Jim would meet Gwen away from the mob, in the alley outside her dressing room, and they’d all follow it a hundred paces to Dinty Moore’s back door, enter the restaurant through the kitchen, and sit down at their table.

Fosse never tried to father Jim or force a friendship. From early on, he maintained a policy of frankness and humor, with a tentative edge.

“Bob had his demons,” Henaghan recalled, “but he was funny, really funny.” Walking down the street with Jim and Gwen one evening, Fosse spotted an old man clonking toward them with a wonky limp. Fosse stopped short, then turned to Jim and Gwen. “Everybody steals my steps.”

At the peak of his clash with Abbott, Fosse got the most appealing offer of
his life—at least, the most appealing so far—from Feuer and Martin, producers of
Can-Can,
Broadway’s best. From
Where’s Charley?
to
Guys and Dolls
to
The Boy Friend
to
Silk Stockings,
in pure box office, Feuer and Martin had a better record than Rodgers and Hammerstein. The envious chalked up their stunning success to good luck, but good luck didn’t account for the chutzpah it took to cut a whole number from
Guys and Dolls
less than twenty-four hours before its premiere; it didn’t give Feuer his Juilliard training or inborn musical charisma (his trumpet impression was a favorite of Cole Porter’s); and luck didn’t give Martin his show sense, an instinct so acute that he feared his actually going to the theater to see how the money was spent would disrupt it. “It’s a sounder way of appraising
a show from the business end of things,” he said. Feuer, the more art-minded of the two, worked in the moment; Martin, account ledgers before him, figured the future. Feuer was short, pepped up, and smoked cigars; Martin, a pipe man, was tall and cool. They lived two blocks from each other—Feuer in a townhouse on East Sixty-Third, Martin in a townhouse on East Sixty-Second—and they worked in an apartment on East Fifty-Second.

Feuer and Martin’s offer to Fosse—to choreograph and star in
Stay Away, Joe,
a new musical based on Dan Cushman’s novel
—
promised Fosse his biggest showcase yet. A gloss on
Pal Joey
’s Joey Evans, the part of girl-chasing, matron-swindling Joe Champlain was heaven-sent, an overdue escape from the house of Abbott and the next big break Fosse had been waiting for. In March 1957, all parties shook hands; lyricist Norman Gimbel and composer Moose Charlap signed on; and a theater was booked. A month later, MGM called
Feuer and Martin. Dore Schary invited them to make
Stay Away, Joe
into a movie—needless to say, a movie that didn’t star the balding Bob Fosse. His hopes dashed, the choreographer was Abbott’s once again.

New Girl in Town
opened on Broadway on May 15, 1957, to, as Prince said, “the reviews it deserved.”
The clashes of light and dark, of director and choreographer, remained unresolved, but once again, Verdon’s performance transcended the material. “It would be an affecting job
on any stage,” rejoiced Brooks Atkinson in the
Times.
“Amid the familiar diversion of Broadway jamboree, it is sobering and admirable.”

After opening, Fosse waved in the dancers. “Little by little,”
Harvey Evans said, “Fosse got the ballet to where it was originally, without telling anybody. We’d go in once a week and we’d rehearse a little more.” On June 23, 1957,
Fosse’s thirtieth birthday, the “Red Light Ballet” was restored, minus the grand staircase and plus one orchestral change. The slow, sensual drum of the double bass was thrown out for something lighter and faster, and the number brought the audience to its feet.

The scuffle over the “Red Light Ballet” showed how Fosse’s style and sensibility grew in the dark, and it hastened his thirst to control, to be the author of his own work and defend his artistic urges.

Though the musical drama knew how to be funny (just look at Joan McCracken), the musical comedy had no idea how to be grown-up. It was the fifties; a binary time. Man was man; woman was woman; funny was light, not dark. In 1957, no less a personage than George S. Kaufman openly endorsed their segregation. “There were long years,”
he wrote nostalgically, “when the outcome of the romance depended on which lad won the big football game, or the foot race, or the automobile race, or the boat race, or the airplane race. Naturally, the fellow who won the race was given permanent possession of the ingénue.” Musical comedy was about basic jubilation—singing in the rain, not dancing in the dark—which posed a problem for a show that wanted to get serious and still stay up; for that to work, someone had to jubilantly pull the rug out from under jubilation.

That someone would be Fosse, but not yet. Even if Abbott had allowed it to flourish, Fosse’s
New Girl in Town
would likely have contained a healthy amount of old-fashioned fun anyway. For every “Steam Heat” or “Whatever Lola Wants,” Fosse seemed to stage two rousing group numbers, like
The Pajama Game
’s “Once-a-Year Day,”
Damn Yankees
’ “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.,” and
New Girl
’s “Roll Yer Socks Up.” “Bob’s choreography in the Abbott years
was big and lusty,” recalled Tony Stevens, “not like the micromanaging detail work that would really come to define his style. He was always very specific, but at first it was more acrobatic, like Gene Kelly with flashes of Fosse.” As late as 1962, Fosse’s Abbott side still existed: “I think of dancing as sheer joy,”
he would say, “as exhilaration, as running, as jumping, as athletic, like a trapeze artist, you know?”

In September 1957, four months after
New Girl
opened at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater, the sheer joy of dance achieved a new and depressingly (for Fosse) high benchmark. Again, the genius was Jerry Robbins. Whereas other musicals, even the great ones, had had to slow down and switch gears to go from a song to a book scene,
West Side Story
spun every disparate ingredient into one cohesive burst of dance-song-story. Worse (for Fosse), it was culturally attuned to its here-and-now gang-life setting (which gave Robbins points for sociology too). Even worse than that,
West Side Story
was bold, ending act one with two dead bodies and act two with a third. It was like a dance opera, defining and expanding character more through movement than book scenes. De Mille had presented character through dance in one memorable
Oklahoma!
number, but this was character through dance from curtain-up—complete, the whole way through—and not in ballet but in a street-ballet vernacular that was part real, part too-wonderful-to-be-true, and (still worse) in comprehensive harmony with the show’s visual life, a swirl of free-floating fire escapes and carefully color-controlled costumes. Worst of all, from Fosse’s point of view, it was a terrific evening. Fosse sent those golden cuff links back to Robbins.

He thought Jerome Robbins talked to God.
“When I call God,” Fosse said, “he’s always out to lunch.”

There was no denying it: After
West Side Story,
it was clear that the American musical wasn’t going to go gently. Now it was mammoth. It was defiant. It had something on its mind and needed to say it. What was Bob Fosse, the entertainer, doing at that very moment? What hoary nightclub shtick was he trying not to steal from?

What Fosse was doing was
Copper and Brass,
a thin excuse to build a musical around comedienne Nancy Walker. It was such a mess, its director and second leads had withdrawn during the show’s Philadelphia tryout, and Fosse—too much the gypsy to turn down a job—did what he could, which, weeks before the show’s move to New York in October 1957, wasn’t much. In part, the problem resided with the original choreographer, Anna Sokolow, whose work did not play well with Fosse, her former student. “Fosse was doing the best he could
trying to throw things in where she would let him,” said dancer Elmarie Wendel. “The poor guy was working so hard, pacing nervously around the stage, trying one thing, trying another, all scrunched up like a coiled wire. By the end of the day his little blond hair was sticking straight up.” Quite mysteriously, Sokolow had insisted on setting a ballet number on the Staten Island ferry. Half of the dancers couldn’t figure out why. “The dancers started to split.
One side was for Sokolow and the other side was for Fosse,” Wendel said. “The Sokolow side thought Fosse had no class. The Fosse side thought Sokolow was rather rarefied. The ballet ended up awkwardly in between.”

On days when there were no matinee performances of
New Girl in Town,
Verdon would join Fosse in Philadelphia
to show his choreography to the dancers. “We had never seen that sort of thing
before,” Wendel said. “We were ballet trained and ballet is the body working all in one piece. Fosse wanted us to break up the body into little pieces. The arm goes this way and the leg goes that. Roll one shoulder, flip one finger; it went against everything we knew.” Unofficially his dance captain, Gwen Verdon was the living illustration of a burgeoning style that few, including Fosse, could put into words. Fosse said, “If something
felt
wrong—or if [Verdon] wanted it on the other foot—she’d say so. Or she’d say, ‘I can do this twice as fast here, if you want me to.’ Those are the kinds of changes she’d contribute to the finished work.” She was paper talking to pen. “He would come up with something
and show it to Gwen and she would knock herself out to do it,” Wendel said. “She did it for us better than he had showed it to her.”

But more than knowing how to move, Verdon knew how Bob Fosse thought, which elevated her above assistant, above collaborator, into a sort of creative cohabitant, beyond anything she had ever done for Jack Cole. Looking at Fosse, she could see it wasn’t her dancing he was frowning at but himself, at what he wasn’t doing, what he couldn’t do, or what he’d done so many times before. “It was Gwen who kept Bob secure,”
said dancer Fred Mann III. “She was his editor, his mother.” His barre. “You could see, from time to time,
he’d want to impress her,” dancer Leland Palmer said. “She had that power over him. That gave Bob a certain wariness too, like Gwen was the director and Bob the dancer.” If the dancers wanted direction,
all they had to do was turn to Verdon and Fosse watching each other in the mirror. Looking in the couple’s admiring eyes, the dancers could see that Fosse’s style was not just about his steps.