Fosse (29 page)

Fosse sneered at Simon when he appeared in the theater. “Let’s give a big hand to the star of the show, Neil Simon.” Missing the sarcasm completely, the dancers applauded.

Star of the show?

Was that Bert Lewis talking? A month earlier, before Simon completed the
Sweet Charity
revision—a revision that ultimately turned into a full rewrite—Bert Lewis (aka Robert Louis Fosse) was the credited author. Removing his pseudonym from the byline was a preemptive move, Fosse said,
to protect himself from a possible backlash. “Directed, choreographed,
and
written by Bob Fosse?” people would say. Not even Jerome Robbins had dared. But now that Simon’s work had received such a warm critical response, Fosse considered the outcome an injustice. (So did Martin Charnin. When he awoke Sunday morning,
October 31, 1965, to a full-page ad in the
New York Times
for a Bob Fosse musical based on
Nights of Cabiria
that did not have Charnin’s name anywhere on it, he called his lawyer. “He told me I had to wait and see
what of mine—mine and Bob’s—was used in the show before I could claim anything. So all I could do was wait for opening night.”)

Sometime after New Year’s, Fosse asked Stanley Donen to come up
and see the show in Detroit. A veteran collaborator and writers’-room hero, Neil Simon had a policy of welcoming outside opinion, but after Donen saw the show, he and Fosse went off to discuss it. Without Simon. The playwright returned to the hotel to wait and wonder what was going on. How could he, the writer, be excluded from his own rewrite? Had the good review cost Simon that much?

He didn’t hear from Fosse until the next morning.

“The ending,” Fosse said
to him at breakfast. He thought it wasn’t tough enough.

Neil Simon tried to laugh. He knew Fosse often confused pain and profundity. In dress rehearsals, midway into a run of “Big Spender,” Fosse had decided Irene Sharaff’s
costumes—elaborately sequined and tailored—were far too glamorous. He wanted degradation. Sharaff reminded him he had already approved the sketches, but Fosse didn’t care about the sketches; the effect was completely off. “They fought,”
Lee Roy Reams said. “Bob took the Spender dresses backstage and sprayed paint on the sequins, and Gwen’s fishtail dress was replaced by a black slip, simple and a touch lower down.” Like Sharaff’s designs, Simon’s ending was too polite.

“It should be grittier, darker,”
Fosse persisted. “Charity should be devastated and the audience should feel her pain. Now it’s just funny and kind of sweet.”

But how much darker could it get? The show already ended with Charity being left at the altar and then pushed into a lake and robbed. John McMartin, playing Oscar, her heartbreaker, agreed with Simon. “People in the audience would
yell at me after the show,” McMartin said. “It was awkward.”

Look, Neil Simon said to Fosse:
“To suddenly pull the rug out from under the show and make it darker and grimmer would be awkward and really pretentious.”

“Who made that rule?” Bob asked him.

“I didn’t.”

“I want it darker.”

But writers are not dancers. They can be hired and fired like dancers, but they are co-authors of the work. There are times when directors might try to blur the distinctions—indeed, that’s part of their talent; it’s how they get the job done—but they have to be able to restore those distinctions if they find they’ve gone too far. Did Fosse ever find he’d gone too far?

“I still think I’m right,” he said
to Simon the next day. “But I’m not positive.”

Their collaboration was a dance of exploitation and recovery, anger and apology. Fosse, who wanted to control every element of his work, didn’t want to need writers. He wanted to be one.

Sweet Charity
would open at the Palace Theater,
and—in a brilliant feat of cross-promotion—the Palace Theater would reopen with
Sweet Charity.
Once the center of the Keith-Albee circuit, home to the likes of Chaplin and Jolson and Fanny Brice, the Palace had long since fallen from its vaudeville heyday into neglect. The last movie ever to screen where
Citizen Kane
premiered was
Harlow,
in 1965. That summer, the film and the theater went down together, and the theater stayed down until the Nederlanders began renovating it. It would be ready in time for the premiere of
Sweet Charity,
the first legit production in the Palace’s storied fifty-year history.

The date was January 29, 1966. Hundreds of elegantly attired guests, including Mayor Lindsay, Ethel Merman, and Paddy Chayefsky, jammed the restored lobby, hung with portraits of the Palace’s most famous acts. The curtain bells rang, and they tiptoed into the auditorium and took a final look around the Palace’s insides—placenta red from seats to ceiling and paneled in baroque curls of creamy gold—before the room went completely dark, and quiet, at almost seven thirty.

A level under the stage, behind a door with her name in gold letters, Gwen calmed herself in the dressing room
she had designed for maximum comfort. Here was a small Victorian chair; here was a chaise longue. A knock came on her door. It was time. Gwen said, Okay, thank you, and, leaning into her reflection, drew a little black dot under each eye. No one beyond the third row would be able to see them, but she didn’t do it for them, she did it for Chaplin; it was his idea. “It opens up the eye,”
she said. She kept his photo by her mirror. She dreamed about him.

In the first-row balcony, Martin Charnin,
Martin’s agent, and their wives sat with a lawyer and a court stenographer. From the moment the curtain went up on
Sweet Charity
to the moment it fell (to joyful applause), the steno typed every sung or spoken word into her machine. By the end of the night, Charnin had a script he could compare with his own mimeographed first draft. But he didn’t need to. He already knew. “There was material on that stage
I had nothing to do with,” Charnin said, “because they had fleshed it out from a one-act into an entire musical, but most of what Fosse and I had written was up there.”

He felt sick. But what could he say? He was a kid; Fosse was a prince. “The last thing I wanted to do
as I was rising in the community was to reveal myself as a sore loser,” Charnin said. “It was definitely loaded against me, but that’s why Fosse picked me, a young guy, because he knew a young guy needed the opportunity and he could rule them better. It was deliberate. I think everything that Fosse did was deliberate. If you look at his choreography you’ll see there isn’t a movement that wasn’t deliberate. Every pinkie move, every pointed toe is deliberate. I don’t think he behaved in a manner outside of how he choreographed. I don’t believe he knew how to be a human being.”

Sweet Charity
is an exuberant, brilliant dance show. “If My Friends Could See Me Now”—a piñata of twitches and merry distortions—plays as if Chaplin had been broken into pieces and thrown out like confetti; “Rich Man’s Frug,” drawn from the dance clubs of New York, stretched bodies to Giacomettis, long in every direction, and the longer the funnier. And then there was “Big Spender,” Fosse’s black cartoon of female credentials and his most personal number to date. “Talented Bob Fosse,”
Harold Clurman wrote, “has created dizzying patterns of movement out of ugliness. The rest is a kind of brilliant and ingenious hideousness which
is
a style—a style wrought from the streets and manners we observe as we enter and leave the theater.” Anguish, depravity, scarcity, showmanship, seduction—it was his story in style.

But there are book problems. (Walter Kerr: “Where, for heaven’s sake, did bittersweet come from?”) As with many of Fosse’s shows,
Charity
’s struggle to reconcile musical comedy with musical depression reveals more about Fosse’s own drama than the dramas of its characters. In that mysterious ending, Charity pulls herself out of the orchestra pit dripping with lake water, and a good fairy—making her first appearance in the show—waves her wand and promises Charity all her dreams will come true. Then the good fairy turns and walks away, revealing a sign on her back:
Watch
The Good Fairy
tonight—8:00 on CBS.
She’s a fake.

The show was pivotal for Fosse. Teeming with stylized fourth-wall-breaking touches—the silent film–like titles, zippy scene changes, and iris-in techniques to create close-up effects—Fosse’s grand concept, his directorial style, was a fractured thing, in pieces. It was edited. “The proscenium is all broken up,
jagged, like a child made it,” Reinking said. “Gwen told me that’s how she thinks. That’s her mind. And that’s how Bob’s brain worked too.”
Sweet Charity
was made of defects, built on them. Charity herself was damaged; Oscar was neurotic. The story unfolded quickly, in narrative isolations, and the stage was obscured in pools of black. They all combined to give
Sweet Charity
the feel of a “Big Spender” girl—fast, dark, empty, broken.

Late in 1966, Cy Feuer called Fosse in to help on
Walking Happy,
his musical adaptation of
Hobson’s Choice
. “Bob was there from the first day
of rehearsal until we opened on Broadway,” said dancer Dan Siretta. “He was the overall supervisor of the show.” Sitting six or seven rows from the stage, Fosse saw Feuer and choreographer Danny Daniels through Detroit and Toronto. He gave his opinion only when Feuer asked for it, and he did it privately, in the back of the house at the end of the day or in the hotel lobby that evening or at breakfast the following morning. “The only time he spoke directly
to us was out of town on a number called ‘Think of Something Else,’” Siretta said. “Think of Something Else,” a comic song about hanging around the pub, Fosse turned into a cartoon strip, playing up his dancers’ character types and extreme behaviors. “He did come up with the one idea
of the clog number [‘Clog and Grog’],” Verdon said, “where the men did wear clogs and where they did, again, a lot of tricks with hat passing. Where it would go back along the line and come forward on the line this way.”

Nights alone were murder on Fosse. “Bob would get so lonely,”
Siretta said. “He’d call up girls at two, three in the morning and say, ‘Hey, I want you to come down here to my room.’ He hated the night. It wasn’t just about the sex with Bobby. He was looking for kindness, tenderness. He was looking for support. He wanted to be held and treasured. He just wanted to be told he was good.” The amphetamines kept him up, freaked out. “Fosse would call me at night
when we were out of town,”
Walking Happy
dancer Ellen Graff recalled, “and I remember being very flattered. Of course I knew he was trying to date me, but he made me feel good talking about what he was there to do. I believe he was interested in what I had to say. We talked about how he was trying to get the performances down from caricature. I’m not sure if he succeeded.” In the dressing room, girls traded stories, some jealously. (“Did Bobby call
you
last night?” “Did you . . . ?”) Some wished they had gotten a call; others wished they hadn’t. He was so hard to say no to—or, rather, he made it so hard to say no. “Bobby was so much a little boy,”
Siretta said, “but it could get pathetic.”
Walking Happy
opened and closed.

And
Sweet Charity
was a terrific hit. The credit—most of it, at least—went to Gwen. “You are the strangest actor
I have ever watched,” Cary Grant confessed to her one night after the show.

“Why?”

“Because when you play a scene where you’re just so happy, I cry. And when you play a scene where it’s very sad, I laugh.”

Fosse would have snorted at this. “Whose performance do you think
she gave anyhow?” he grumbled to a friend. “Do they think a performance comes out of the air? She didn’t make it up. A performance has to be
directed.
”

For years Fosse had kept his anger to himself. Since
Damn Yankees
, it often seemed that Gwen, the star, stole his accolades. Didn’t anyone see how his talent amplified hers? With
Sweet Charity,
Fosse’s sense of injustice increased.
On this show, his effort and influence had overwhelmed, he thought, the talent of any other single contributor. From book to stage, this one was Fosse’s. A longtime friend, designer Tony Walton, said, “During much of their joint professional
career, whenever they did a show together, Gwen was very much the critics’ darling, and if there was any blame to be placed, Bob was always the recipient even though who knew how much of her performance was his creation.”

Despite Fosse’s gloom, Gwen remained her husband’s personal press secretary, standing at the door of their new East Hampton home, waving in dancers by the busload. “If Fosse did anything generous
or lovely,” said
Sweet Charity
dancer Marie Wallace, “I somehow thought Gwen was behind it.” The all-day cast parties, the silver dishes from Tiffany that said
Christmas ’66 Gwen and Bob
. “She loved being with us,”
Wallace said. “I don’t know if Bob was that way. My sense was Gwen did it for him.” Gwen was certainly the more outgoing of the two, but there was no doubt Fosse enjoyed having friends over, especially his growing crop of writer pals, which now included his East Hampton neighbor Robert Alan Aurthur, an old comrade of Chayefsky’s from the golden days of TV drama. Croquet, champagne, steaks on the grill—Gwen liked to show her family home was thriving. “Those were fabulous parties,”
one dancer said. “But knowing what we all knew about Bob and Gwen, it felt a little strange, like, Were they putting on a show?”

“I felt sorry for Gwen,”
Ruth Buzzi said. “She seemed so lonely, maybe because Bobby never ever came in [to her dressing room]. He never seemed to pay any attention to her backstage and he never went out with her after the show.” Sensing this, Buzzi and Nick Malekos, one of the stage managers, would visit Gwen in her dressing room whenever they could.
It began casually enough, with a cracked door and a hello, but soon they found themselves staying for as much as an hour, gossiping about the show or sewing stuffed animals for Nicole’s birthday. “We were in there most nights
of the week,” Buzzi said. “It became part of the day. I remember thinking I just want to make her laugh. Gwen seemed to need it. She needed to visit with people after the show who cared.” Gwen never mentioned Fosse, and Buzzi and Malekos never brought him up.