Fosse (18 page)

Sometimes Verdon and Fosse would close their eyes or turn away from the dancers to remind themselves of the basic rhythms of the piece, the rhythms they felt. They didn’t have to speak in order to communicate, but when they did, they made comments in code, in a shorthand system of grunts and images mixing technical jargon and a kind of pillow talk. But despite everyone’s efforts,
Copper and Brass
closed on November 16, 1957, after thirty-six dreary performances. Verdon and Fosse headed to Hollywood for a few weeks of work on the
Damn Yankees
movie—starring Verdon, choreographed by Fosse, and codirected by Abbott and Donen—and the old
New Girl
tensions returned. “Gwen wanted Bobby on the set
with her at all times,” said Fosse’s dance assistant Pat Ferrier, “because she was still having such a hard time with Abbott.” As Verdon had looked out for Fosse on
Copper and Brass,
Fosse, during Gwen’s scenes, stationed himself at the camera
to protect her, a difficult job given that Abbott was against her and Donen didn’t like her on camera. On the first day of shooting, Gwen told Shannon Bolin, a transfer from Broadway, that Donen refused to shoot her in close-up. “But that’s why Bob was there,”
Bolin said. “Even when he wasn’t working on the dances, he was making sure Donen did right by her.” The film shows that Donen may have been right; Verdon’s body conveys more heart than her face.

Perhaps feeling the urge to direct, to sample his growing power, Fosse began to clash with Donen. “At the rushes,”
Patricia Ferrier said, “Stanley and Bobby would scream like hell at each other all the way through.” Looking back to the “Red Light Ballet” and presaging the limbos he would create in
Pippin
and
Chicago,
Fosse wanted Donen to engulf “Who’s Got the Pain?” in as much blackness as possible, using only a single, bright spotlight to follow the dancers. “It’ll look like the black hole
of Calcutta!” Donen protested. They struck a compromise.

Replacing dancer Eddie Phillips,
Fosse performed the number with Verdon. It would be their only movie duet.

“The happiest times I ever had with Gwen,”
Fosse would say, “were when we were working together. They stimulated all sorts of things. I mean they were fun, we had our own little jokes about rehearsals, we had something in common, I think it even affected sex.” While in California, they rented a little house in Malibu, drove the red convertible Fosse called Baby
up and down the coast, and visited with Gwen’s son, Jimmy. Fosse knew she wanted another child. Not now, while they were on the rise, but soon.

Up late, alone, he’d call Joan
in Fire Island. She had always loved the ocean, but now she needed it; the air was cool magic to what was left of her body, and living away from the theater she couldn’t have was a welcome relief. But then the phone rang. And rang. At first, she’d hear only silence
on the other end. Rather than ignore him, she took the call every time, leading his silence to dialogue and sustaining their conversation into the night. “I felt she was almost flattered
by his bizarre behavior,” said her companion Marc Adams. Joan would talk to Fosse about his depression, the failures only he saw. “I’m half Irish,”
he said, “which I suppose is my
up,
cheery, drinking side. And half Norwegian, which is very dark.”

At night, his dark prevailed. When Fosse thought of his worthlessness, he thought of a woman, a sweet,
sexy warm woman come to take him away. “I’m fascinated,”
Fosse admitted, “by that thin line between a person’s jumping or not jumping, shooting himself or not shooting himself . . . like flirting with a girl.” A flirtation that eventually would be consummated. “The problem,”
he said, “is you flirt so long that one day you may have to put up or shut up. I’ve come close to going that little step too far, just out of drunkenness, and not knowing how many sleeping pills I’ve swallowed. You forget, pop a couple more, and pretty soon you’re in trouble.” Fosse liked to joke about death and dying, but he was completely serious.

Certain nights, the pain was unbearable. That’s when, if he was out of town, he’d pick up the phone. Or call a girl down the hall. Just talking helped. “An attraction to death is present in a high percentage
of survivors of childhood trauma,” said Dr. Charles Rousell. “These individuals frequently do not want to die but find reassurance in the fact that if emotional pain becomes unbearable they have the power to walk out that door. As they are survivors, often they never choose to do it but are soothed by the reassurance that the powerlessness they experienced as a child is replaced by the power they have as an adult. Childhood trauma survivors may also find themselves in endless pursuit of numbing agents, seeking prescription and recreational drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol.”

That was the beautiful thing about amphetamines: they felt good. The warm release of dopamine gave a sense of well-being, even exhilaration. Energy increased. The heartbeat quickened; blood moved faster. Concentration, formerly expansive, homed in on close-range stimuli, things. Important things! For Fosse, punctuation, a drumbeat, a speck of dirt, dots; the amphetamines extracted total focus, obliterated unrelated thoughts (money, Jerome Robbins) and worry. There was no worry because there was no distraction. Only the sweet feeling of
bull’s-eye,
of line-’em-up-and-knock-’em-down. Simply
doing
felt good.
Yes! There are thirty-six tasks to perform and I’ve performed all of them! Yes times thirty-six! I’m good
[dehydrated, malnourished, exhausted]
!
I’m better than good! I’m five milligrams better! I’m ten better than five
[arrhythmia, hypertension]!
I see everything. I can do everything. I am everything. I am Jesus. They’re trying to kill me. I heard them. I know what they’re thinking. But I won’t let them. I’m ten better than five! I’m five better than ten! What does he know? What do they know? They’re not me. I’m me
[cardiac arrest]!
I’m better than me! Look!

In 1937, the American Medical Association
recommended Benzedrine to treat depression. Its side effects, like irritability and insomnia, both of which affected Fosse, were often addressed with a sedative barbiturate, like Seconal. The trick was to keep the balance: one for up, one for down. But there was no cause for concern: Psychiatrists said
amphetamines were not addictive, and they observed no obvious physical withdrawal symptoms in their patients. Best of all, people saw results. Athletes ran faster; Judy Garland worked harder. The real-life equivalent of the Vitameatavegamin Lucy Ricardo touted on her hugely popular sitcom, Benzedrine dried up runny noses, gave energy to the weak, and, by 1959, it was regarded almost as highly
as aspirin and available in inhaler form without a prescription. An estimated 3.5 billion doses
were given nationwide.

And so, neither Fosse nor his psychiatrist,
Dr. Clifford Sager, would call Fosse’s Seconal habit an addiction. When Fosse’s lows dropped too low, there was always Dexedrine to pick him up. But the therapy itself weighed him down. Fosse found himself scrutinizing everything. Sometimes he’d spend a full day rehearsing a speech, fogged in doubt, trying to analyze his behavior and then to analyze his analysis. Was that good? Frustrated at himself, Fosse grew angry at Dr. Sager. He skipped sessions. Was Sager’s Freudian silence going to make him into the kind of person who could sustain a loving relationship? Or into Fred Astaire?

Sager, a pioneer in the field of couples therapy, urged his clients to make conscious the unconscious contracts they wrote with their partners; he was among New York’s most respected psychiatrists. “Dr. Sager loved Bob, and Bob loved Dr. Sager,” Ann Reinking said. “Bob felt he genuinely wanted to help him.” But Sager’s specialty—the strains of sex and marriage—conveyed only one dimension of Fosse’s struggle. An ailment far more elusive than domestic discomfort complicated his treatment. “Bob felt betrayed by his own work, which he loved,” Reinking said. “But there isn’t a medicine for that, for the psychological problems of show people. Everybody understands cancer. But that’s because they’ve been educated. Because in show business, we’re in a kind of rarefied world, this is an orphan issue, how to protect your brains, body, and heart from the theater.”

“Why can’t I stop working?” Fosse would ask. “Why didn’t my mother stop me? Why can’t anyone stop me?”

It would be many years before psychiatrists began to understand narcissistic personality disorder, a condition that stems not from self-love but from the narcissist’s feelings of utter worthlessness, often caused by a failed attachment to his caregivers early on. In ideal circumstances, Dr. Aaron Stern wrote, “Countless nurturing parental acts
are employed to establish a critical level of dependency that will compel the child to view his parents as vital to his own personal survival. This dependent tie to the parents is the foundation on which the ability to love another person is built.” Love, having been contaminated for the narcissist, is replaced with its thinnest simulacrum: self-gratification. Professional success, sexual conquest, power, food, drink, adulation, fame—healthy pleasures almost everyone pursues, in some degree—are, in extreme cases, pursued to the exclusion of genuine compassion. They become addictions.

“It was a constant conflict,”
Reinking said, “a vicious cycle of loving and running away, and he didn’t know why because he wanted it badly.” There it was—he could see it—happiness in real love, locked under a glass display case. Where was the key? “I don’t define Bob as a complete narcissist,” she added, “but there was a compounded, maybe lethal, amount in him.” In order to appear capable of loving, the narcissist must razzle-dazzle. He must act the part. He must charm, produce, win, earn, score—anything for applause. But when the real thing comes back, he flees, for love is what wounded him in the first place. Efforts at intimacy become, as Reinking described it, a to-and-fro of “come closer, but stay back.” Watch me from the front row; don’t join me onstage. This one’s a solo, and so is the next one, and the next. And the critics say it’s never enough. “[The narcissist’s] insatiable hungers are so great,”
wrote Stern, “that the slightest frustration can create the most intense pain, which often leads to depression. The more narcissistic among us are always around the corner from our next depression.” 

Fosse kept a spiral notebook
marked “Odd Ideas” that chronicled his private self as it evolved in and out of his sessions. Challenging terms, mainly psychosexual and aesthetic concepts, were written over and over, as if he were a kid at a blackboard trying to commit them to memory.
Necrophilism, phlegmatic, narcolepsy
—each was accompanied by its definition. He collected images, like the one of a chorus girl who sat with her legs extended to keep her tights from stretching out. He collected scraps of dialogue. A short conversation between Fosse and Hal Prince concludes with Fosse saying, “I guess work is my religion.” He had an idea for a therapy ballet set to a cacophony of psychoanalytic terminology that ends with the patient dancing off, happily cured, and the analyst climbing up a ladder in the middle of the stage to fix a flickering light bulb—then hanging himself.

D
AVID HOCKER, FOSSE’S
(and Leonard Bernstein’s and Jerome Robbins’s) agent at MCA, called to tell him about
Redhead,
a murder-mystery musical by lyricist Dorothy Fields, another client, and her brother Herbert Fields. In May 1958, looking for a choreographer, producers Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr invited Fosse, Verdon, and Verdon’s agent, Jack Davies, to meet at composer Albert Hague’s apartment and assess their potential. The teaming of Fosse and Verdon tipped negotiations in the couple’s favor. To lure one, a producer had to lure both, which gave Fosse and Verdon the cushier end of the bargain. When the moment came, Fosse, testing his new power, carefully suggested he might also play a small part in the show. The room held its smoky breath—but no one resisted him; with Verdon’s participation still up in the air, Fryer and Carr had to keep every possibility in play. Fosse could be the bait. Noting this, Fryer and Carr excused themselves to a corner of the apartment, exchanged a few quiet words, and returned to the group.

“Bob,” they said.
“Would you like to
direct
the show?”

Verdon spoke for him. “Yes!”

“We can do this now,” Hocker said. “We’re all here.”

The room agreed. They were all there.

Fosse?

“Guys,” he said haltingly, “I’m a little overcome . . . You think I might take a little time?”

The moment he got back to his apartment, he picked up the phone. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

Marian Niles had started him in nightclubs. Joan McCracken had encouraged him to think bigger. Gwen Verdon, though she would deny it the rest of her life, made him a director.

“Wonderful.”

“But,” Fosse said, “the book has to be rewritten a little. It’s not really right for Gwen.”

“Fine. Fine.”

“I’d like to do it myself.”

Unwilling to rewrite with this untested director, the show’s latest author, Sidney Sheldon, told
Verdon that she would have to bring in another writer, a real writer, if she wanted further changes to the book. She suggested David Shaw,
who had written the script for her 1954 television debut (“Native Dancer,” an episode of
Goodyear Playhouse
), and Shaw was brought aboard. Verdonizing
Redhead,
which essentially meant slashing subplots to make room for dances, took Shaw (and, to a certain extent, Fosse) the whole summer, during which time Fosse and Verdon cast the show.

Actor Leonard Stone was among the first
to be seen for the role of George Poppett, the murderer. Having never auditioned for a Broadway musical, Stone had no idea how he was going to get through the afternoon.

As he had expected, his number fizzled. Standing on the stage, hands in his pockets, Stone looked up to get his “Thank you very much.”

“Do you need more time?” Fosse asked. “Would you like to do it again?”

Stone squinted into the black, trying to get a look at the face behind the gentle voice. All he caught was the red burn of a cigarette and a swirl of smoke drifting up to the balcony.