Fosse (39 page)

Fosse moved on. With music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Roger Hirson,
Pippin
was a musical inspired by tales of Pippin, son of Charlemagne. It was slight, but Schwartz had written some lovely songs, and his
Godspell
was performing sensationally well off Broadway.

In LA, finishing postproduction on
Cabaret,
Fosse thought of John Rubinstein, an actor who’d auditioned for the part Fosse eventually gave to Michael York. “He called me up out of the blue,”
Rubinstein said, “and asked me if I’d be interested in the title role of
Pippin.
” Of course he was interested: the leading part in a new Bob Fosse musical? A short time later, Fosse arrived at Rubinstein’s house on Beverly Glen to go through the entire script, Rubinstein reading his part and Fosse all the others.

When they finished, Rubinstein looked up.

“What do you think?” Fosse asked.

The question needed a delicate answer. The story was thin, the characters thinner. As spirited as it was,
Pippin
felt naïve, part of another era’s Broadway. One had to wonder, what—other than the fact that it was a follow-up to
Godspell
—did Fosse see in it?

“Well,” Rubinstein said, “I like that song ‘Corner of the Sky’ . . .” Wanting the job, the actor was in no position to challenge Fosse’s taste, but not acknowledging
Pippin
’s problems could make him look foolish, especially if this was some kind of a test. Rubinstein sighed. “I’m not crazy about it.”

“Yeah,” Fosse said. “Neither am I.”

If Rubinstein was surprised before, he was baffled now. Why had Fosse, who could direct just about anything he wanted, picked a show he didn’t like?

“I need you to come to New York,” Fosse said, and he left.

With a final cut of
Cabaret
behind him, Fosse returned to New York and met with Schwartz, who at twenty-four was new to Broadway and had certainly never collaborated with such a powerful director. But his talent was apparent and his success phenomenal. “Fosse told me of his enthusiasm
for
Godspell,
how buoyant he had found it,” Schwartz recalled. He had been working on
Pippin
since college, he told Fosse, impressing him, and they seemed to grow more excited as the meeting progressed. When Fosse left, Schwartz called up book writer Roger Hirson to celebrate.

“Isn’t this terrific? We have
Bob Fosse!
”

“Yes, that’s terrific,” Hirson admitted. “I just want to tell you this is our last happy day on the show.”

In the months that followed, Fosse and producer Stuart Ostrow met
regularly to discuss what Ostrow described as “the earnestness of the book” (Fosse told him he considered the book “a piece of shit”). They had known each other socially, from poker games, as far back as the Mary-Ann Niles years (Fosse “could bluff you with a pair of deuces,” Ostrow wrote), but they remained at a friendly distance professionally. None of the Feuer stuff here. Ostrow worried about producing and Fosse worried about the show, which is just how Fosse liked it. Whenever Fosse brought up financial matters—
Pippin
was budgeted at around $750,000, a figure Fosse thought far too high—Ostrow told him not to worry. “Stu Ostrow trusted Bob and that made
Bob trust him,” Wolfgang Glattes said. Out of trust came a respectful exchange of suggestions. Their subject was
Pippin
’s perhaps too-gleeful outlook and how to profane it. Strolling through the woods around
the producer’s home in Pound Ridge, they decided that lampooning the show with anachronistic dialogue and modern attitudes could bring it down to earth, though how they could do it without violating Dramatists Guild regulations, which granted authors script approval, wasn’t certain.

Fosse offered the part of Catherine, Pippin’s pure and decent love, to Janice Lynde. That she turned it down surprised them both; that turning it down drew them closer surprised them even more. With Fosse’s professional interest in her confirmed, Janice felt her caution begin to erode. They touched more. He asked her to be with him.

“I don’t want to,” she said.
“I know what will happen.”

“You don’t know.”

“That’s how it always starts. Someone says, ‘You don’t know. You can’t know.’ But I know.”

“You think being with me will hurt you in some way?”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“Yes.” They’d been here before. “I don’t know.”

“Look at the women I’ve been with. Look at the women I married. We were
partners,
Janice. Look at me and Gwen. It was
good
for us.”

Janice knew that being with him meant being with death. “Bob had an absolute obsession with death,” Lynde said. “He would always say he didn’t want to live past sixty.” Sixty seemed an arbitrary age, but it came up so often, she felt it had to be meaningful.
Sixty
sounded like a mantra, the way he would repeat it, as if it soothed him.
I’ll go when I’m sixty,
he would say.
Just wait until I’m sixty.

He’d call at night or in the afternoons when he wasn’t working. They lived only a few buildings apart.

“Bob?”

“Oh God,” he’d say. “It’s a really blue day.”

She would go to him. The nights she couldn’t get to his place, she’d stay with him on the phone. “No matter where I was,” she said, “he would call at three or four in the morning, which was fine with me because I would go back to sleep or I was up anyway or I would be with friends. They’d say, ‘There’s this crazy man on the phone who wants to speak to you,’ and I’d say, ‘I know that man. Give me the phone.’” He would talk about dying in musical terms. It helped, sometimes. On the phone with Janice, he described death as a dance with a snake. “One sting,” he said, “and you’ll be in a place you want to be where you can do what you want to do without the angst and the depression and the doubt and the insecurities.”

On bad nights, the nights of no music, Janice would hear a flatness in his voice, and she’d panic. She would call a doctor and run over to his apartment. “What have you taken? Are you drinking?” She wasn’t sure if the Dexedrine was helping or hurting (he said it was helping), and she called a psychiatrist to lead her through the contents of his medicine cabinet, just to be sure, or try to be. On the hardest nights, Janice insisted on staying with him. “Come on,” she said, “I’m going to make you dinner at my place and you’re going to have to put up with my dog you
hate.
” If she got him to laugh, she thought, she could get him back. “Humor,” Lynde said, “made the colors change.” So she kept watching his eyes. They were small eyes. When he couldn’t laugh, the smallest sparkle would show her what she needed to see—Bob, in there, a sparkle.

Before getting in bed one blue night Bob spent with her, she locked her dog in the bathroom. Then the howling began.

It lasted all night.

“I’m gonna kill that thing,” Bob said to her.

“You want me to let him out?”

“No!”

“I’m gonna let him out!”

“No! No! Janice!”

She got up and opened the bathroom door. A fur ball flew through the air and landed on the bed.

“Fine,” Bob said. “But he’s sleeping on
that
side.” There—the sparkle.

She’d play him music. He loved Satie and Billy Joel. Fosse said Joel played the piano like he had a rhythm section on the keyboard—rhythm, he needed rhythm; she saw how cleanly it separated his body from the dark part of his brain. So did sex. “His darkness would often precede his sexual impulse,” she said, “like he was trying to climb out of it.” And she would be there for him—that worried her. “Bob knew I had very strong caretaker instincts,” she said, “and I was afraid that would take over my ambition.” To love too much and love Bob Fosse would be loving alone. Janice knew not to ask for a solo.

“I want to,” he volunteered. “Be with just you.”

“You’re going to try?”

He didn’t answer that.

“Bobby? Can you?”

Fosse couldn’t lie about love. He could cheat and steal, but he couldn’t tell a dancer she could make it if she couldn’t, and he couldn’t profane the trust of someone he cared for. The loneliness he could live with; the bullshit he refused to accept. He told Janice if they were together, he could not allow her to do what he did—see other people. Of course it wasn’t fair, but it was the truth. He’d been Bob Fosse long enough to know jealousy shredded him. “He never agreed to anything he couldn’t do,” Lynde said. “I was amazed because I’d never been with anyone so honest.” Somehow, his spirit of full disclosure, even at its harshest, drew her in. This too was dazzling. To a woman preparing to leave him, it was the most seductive twist of all.

“This is who I am,” he said. “I don’t like it, I wish it wasn’t this way, but . . .”

“But what? Don’t you
love?
If you love someone, then you want to be with
just
them.
”

They’d been here before too.

“I go out with them,” he said. “But I’d come home to you.”

F
OR THREE CONSECUTIVE DAYS
before
Cabaret
opened at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, on February 13, 1972, Fosse adjusted the house lights and levels, honing the ambience for optimum viewing. He could not be too careful, even now. An exhibition atmosphere anything less than immaculate could undo all the efforts of the past year, his work from Jay Allen to David Bretherton, from Berlin to LA. Emanuel Wolf tried to calm him,
and Vincente Minnelli’s response to a preview screening—he called
Cabaret
the perfect movie—was touching praise, but Fosse knew the Ziegfeld was his last line of defense against the likes of Pauline Kael and the critics from the
New York Times,
whose reviews had the power to send audiences away, taking with them Fosse’s long hoped-for chances of stardom. Directors could be stars now. In the wake of Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, and the auteur-minded critics of the late sixties, Hollywood’s new filmmakers had acquired highbrow cultural prominence and, for some, even celebrity. As never before, Fosse (and others) could become an Astaire behind the camera, where every square inch of the frame was his to master and take credit for. “Bob and I were standing in the back
of the Ziegfeld the night
Cabaret
opened,” Wolf said, “and I could see his mind working, spinning and spinning, and I said to him, ‘Bob, stop cutting the picture! It’s over! It’s
over!
’”

Cabaret
pushed the movie musical past one of those through-the-looking-glass thresholds separating before and after, one era from the next. In most cases, cultural transition is gradual, intelligible only in retrospect, like the last days of a marriage. Revolution doesn’t usually rush in, like brick through the glass, the way it happened the night
Cabaret
arrived at the Ziegfeld, an avalanche of newness so disruptive—
Oklahoma!
disruptive;
West Side Story
disruptive—that even those who didn’t care for musicals heard the crash coming from West Fifty-Fourth Street. “Until now there has never been
a diamond-hard big American movie musical,” Kael wrote. “If it doesn’t make money, it will still make movie history.”

Where to begin? The material, for one, was blatantly radical, more so even than Prince’s radical stage version, and with the added power of the crosscut,
Cabaret
could be radical in form too, contrasting showmanship and evil, the stage and reality. Working with these big ideas, Fosse could have succumbed to facile commentary, but his moral position was too slippery to reduce
Cabaret
to irony by numbers. In Fosse’s film
,
there is no formula to soothe the audience. Joel Grey’s grinning Emcee is at once maniacal and thrilling, sleazy and entertaining, and his relationship to Nazism, though it might seem to be clearly defined—he is, we think, the fascist of the cabaret, full stop—becomes more complicated on second glance. When the Emcee is joking, is he endorsing the Nazis or mocking them? When he sings “Money, Money,” is he celebrating wealth or knocking the rich? It’s so fun we can’t be sure. That’s the whole idea. Entertainment is seduction,
Cabaret
says, the happy face on
Triumph of the Will.
And it kills.

No one knew Bob Fosse was telling his own story. A film about the bejeweling of horror,
Cabaret
coruscated with Fosse’s private sequins, the flash he feared made him Fosse. From those fears emerged a nihilistic worldview of political and social double-dealing perfectly synced to the war in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, and the mounting sense that American virtue was little more than an act. Yet that was a byproduct. Personally removed from politics and the societal unrest around him, Fosse was largely untroubled by the not-so-distant cycle of hopelessness and devastation that reached from Altamont to Kent State, My Lai to Attica, but his own gloom happened to meet the public’s halfway, and he stumbled into the present.

There was no time for him to bask in his achievement. Having prepared himself for the worst, another
Sweet Charity
, Fosse was overprepared for a comeback (one he wouldn’t need): a breathless sprint of prepping, auditioning, rehearsing, filming, and finally editing
Liza with a Z
as he prepped, auditioned, and rehearsed
Pippin
in time to be ready for an out-of-town opening, in Washington, DC, later that year.

For four weeks, beginning May 1, Fosse rehearsed his ten
Liza
dancers (five boys, five girls) six days a week. To say he worked harder on this production than he’d ever worked before would imply, incorrectly, that Fosse ever gave anything less than one hundred percent, but how else to describe the rehearsal atmosphere of a one-night-only show? That’s right: There would be no previews and no second night. Only a dress rehearsal, and then they were on, filming live before an invitation-only black-tie audience at the Lyceum Theater, with eight cameras stationed strategically about the premises (in the wings, aisles, balcony, upper boxes, and backstage), rolling not video but 16-millimeter film. Three cameras each held a twelve-hundred-foot
magazine, enough to capture the numbers in their entirety; another three cameras held only three hundred feet of film each, which meant loading and reloading constantly, and with incredible speed; two more were handheld. And the cameras had only one shot. With the exception of one day of pickups—minor shots filmed after the main part of production ended—Fosse would film only one live performance of
Liza with a Z,
upgrading the show from canned variety act to visceral experience, rich in anxiety and truth. Fosse and his crew would be like a
National Geographic
team setting out to capture a show-business creature in the full fever of performance. Shooting film—unprecedented for a television concert special—would allow for better image quality and greater mobility in editing.