Fosse (4 page)

Fosse knew right away
he would be a dancer, and rather than dream big, he dreamed real. Astaire was a god and he was a mortal, and the godliest mortals danced in supper clubs—hotel ballrooms with fancily dressed couples at little tables around a dance floor—so Fosse would too. His newer models Fosse took from the middle shelf. The convenient thing about dancers Georgie Tapps and Paul Draper
was they tapped to classical music, matching pirouettes and ronds de jambe to the syncopation of earthbound hoofers. It didn’t get any classier,
fifteen-year-old Fosse thought, than shuffling off to Bach. Years earlier, Mr. Weaver and Miss Comerford had taken him to see Draper play the Mayfair Room of Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. “I think that [Draper] was probably
the most elegant performer that I had ever seen,” he said, “and in subsequent performances I saw later, he maintained that elegance. For me, he created a kind of magic, and I think for everyone in the room also, a kind of enchantment that stuck in my head for a long, long time.”

Elegance was only half of the equation. Filth was the other half.

“When the war came along
and so many men got drafted, I became the youngest M.C. in Chicago,” Fosse said. “I was sixteen years old and I played the whole burlesque wheel.” But this wasn’t the belle époque burlesque of parody and sexual innuendo; by the time Fosse appeared at places like the Silver Cloud and Cave of Winds, that burlesque
had lost to its grimier twin. This one grew in the dank back rooms of abandoned storefronts and had no compensatory cultural merit—another way of saying it was pure entertainment, tits and laughs and that’s about it. But no one watched it for the laughs. The guys who hung around the Roxy at three and four in the morning weren’t there to see a couple of clowns twirling plates. At that hour, they came to see girls who couldn’t cut it as actresses, didn’t want to be typists, and, in some cases, had no place else to go; girls who had good enough bodies to make okay money plus kickbacks on booze; girls who could give those guys a good bad time for an hour and a half. This was not art. Art would not be out of a job when the strip joints and porn palaces moved in, but burlesque was.

“The more we talked about him
wanting to be an entertainer,” said a high-school girlfriend, Miriom Wilson, “the more I realized it was a lifestyle I wasn’t interested in. Bob was exposed to things most of us weren’t. Today’s young people think nothing of promiscuity, but I knew little about nightclubs and such, places where that sort of thing went on. And so Bob kept that part of his life from me—and probably a lot of people at school—because he knew we didn’t understand it.”

This was not the burlesque of Gypsy Rose Lee. It was not, as today’s feather dancers would have modern audiences believe, an unorthodox form of female empowerment. It was a living, and a bad one. “There wasn’t much dancing,”
Grass said. “They just peeled it off.” And it made people mean. Some came in already mean, but the real porny dives—the sort of places Fosse moved around in late at night, with no one looking out for him—made mean meaner. “These people wanted to make money,” Grass said. “They didn’t care if you were twelve or fifteen years old. If you looked seventeen, fine.” Old toilets overflowed. Dark halls smelled of stale greasepaint and piss. In the men’s room, Bob and Charlie had to walk around on their heels, and when they needed to change into their tuxedos, they had to put a piece of cardboard down first. “When we played the low-class clubs,” Grass said, “we knew not to ask who was running the thing.” If they had to, the club managers could mess up the girls, and the girls’ boyfriends could mess up the managers, but the Mob had the final say on who came back to work. (Grass said, “You didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother you.”) It was rough on adults, but for Fosse, a kid, it was hell aboveground, and in some cases not even aboveground. His mother and father didn’t really know,
or seem to care, what it was doing to him. Neither did he, for the moment.

For the rest of his life, he would never let go of the girls, the failures, and the slimeballs. The dreck, the
true
showbiz—he understood their estrangement from the world’s Astaires. In a way, he loved them. He admired their losers’ tenacity. Soon, he would share it. In time, they would be Fosse’s dramatis personae. The bumps and grinds would be the prepositions of his dance vocabulary, and the whining horns and beat-up drums thumping from offstage would live in his ear forever, as unforgettable as original sin, screwing him up, but screwing him up good. And something else too: there was a philosophy here. Seeing firsthand the human component in sleaze, Fosse felt the beginnings of a question he would ask his audiences, and himself, for the rest of his life: What is filth? If it makes them smile and hard, how bad could it be? Weren’t the lowest common denominators what universal appeal was all about? Didn’t the whole of show business, of humanity, really, come down to wanting a little peek?

Bob Fosse was the best thing ever to come out of burlesque, and he would pay for it forever.

The nights Weaver didn’t send him out on his own, he appeared with Charlie Grass. Mrs. Grass, their stage mother,
drove the boys from show to show, made them complete their Latin assignments in the back seat of her sedan, and advised them not to mix with the strippers. “They’re not nice girls,”
she warned. The warnings hardly mattered. When the toilet doors in their own changing rooms wouldn’t open, Bob and Charlie were detoured deeper in, to the big ladies’ den, where not-nice Amazons powdered up, the boys repeating to themselves the mantras of professional conduct Mr. Weaver had been drilling into their heads for years. “Always refer to the conductor as Maestro . . .”

Strippers—twice Bobby’s size in two directions, and twice as sharp—preyed on him before the show
as he stood in the wings about to go on. That was the worst part, waiting for them to call his name, breathing into a moldy moth-eaten curtain and trying not to think of the twisted faces or what they would yell at him tonight. It was throw-up time.

“Oh, Bobby . . .”

“Come
on,
Bobby . . .”

When the girls found out
he wasn’t the eighteen-year-old he said he was, they started messing with him. Feathered gorgons appeared at the doors, all doors, backing him into dark corners. They pulled Fosse from his Latin conjugations onto their laps, crushing his face in fingers and tongues, twirling his perfect hair and the cock in his tuxedo pants. Scared and alone, he did as he was told. Even if that meant doing what no good boy should do, he did it, because if he cried out, they’d blow his cover and he’d be out of the show for good, and what would he tell his mother?

In the tense seconds
before he was about to go on, they came from behind him, kneading his pants. As they jerked him off, Bobby ran the conscious part of his brain through the Cubs starting lineup and National League batting averages, while the other part of him, the part that couldn’t get to Wrigley Field or Sunday school, got harder and harder and—

“Come
on,
kid.”

He heard his name followed by something about “Chicago’s youngest . . . ,” and a drumbeat later he was pummeled with a hot beam of spotlight.

He was onstage.

“Ladies and gentlemen . . .”

The piano twanged, and without thinking, Bobby started tapping out “Tea for Two,” with one sweaty hand on his top hat and the other on a coattail he held between his bulge and the audience. They laughed. Half the jokes he told he was too young to understand, so he could never be sure if they were laughing at the punch line or heckling him.

Then there was the war. The war he wasn’t fighting in.

“Hey, where’s your uniform, buddy?”

“What’s the matter? You shirking?”

Even if what they were doing to him felt wrong, doing what he was told felt right.

“Oh, Bobby . . .”

His parents were so proud of him.

“Come
on,
Bobby . . .”

Something must have been seriously, shamefully wrong with him, because, despite everything he should have run from—the fondling, the sinning, the heckling, and the shirking—to him, having the strippers’ attention felt a little like being a star. Years later, he would tell Janice Lynde, a girlfriend, the women were like mothers to him. “They were affectionate,”
Lynde said. “Maybe too affectionate.” Perhaps that was the source of the confusion. Perhaps that’s why night after night, he came back, like a shell-shocked veteran, even long after he left Chicago. “I can romanticize it,”
he said forty years later, “but it was an awful life. I was very lonely, very scared. You know, hotel rooms in strange towns, and I was all alone, thirteen or fourteen, too shy to talk to anyone, not really knowing what it was all about, and among—not the best people . . . I think it’s done me a lot of harm, being exposed to things that early that I shouldn’t have been exposed to . . . it left some scar that I have not quite been able to figure out.” He was drawn to the girls, then hurt by them. “It was schizophrenic,”
Fosse said. He couldn’t get away from it and he didn’t want to.

“It just wasn’t the same world
my mother and father had told me it was,” he said. “The battle going on inside me was just tremendous.” On the one hand, being a dancer troubled the track star in him. On the other, being a dancer got him attention. It got him girls. And as for those girls, he knew of two kinds, separated by night and day. One variety, at the Cuban Village,
spun tassels in his face. The other variety, at Amundsen, wore skirts and demurred when kissed. And his parents, who seemed to love him, who took him to every soda counter in the neighborhood for his birthday, also condoned, by their ignorance, Bobby’s scared nights alone. They abandoned him, he’d later feel, to a world no child, let alone an unaccompanied child, should be exposed to. To bolster his nerve, he would replay his mother’s favorite piece of encouragement, “It will put hair on your chest!” She would be horrified if she found out about the strippers. “Bob could charm his way anywhere,”
Ann Reinking said, “and he probably charmed his mother into being proud of him for playing those burlesque clubs. But he later felt she encouraged him to be a bon vivant, and that she should have stopped him. He thought she was supposed to protect him and know better. He used to say, ‘She shouldn’t have let me.’” Fosse said, “She thought you could send
a boy of that age into a roomful of naked women and it wouldn’t bother him—because he was such a good boy. Obviously, she was wrong.” He fucked a waitress in Springfield, who latched on to him like a suction cup and may or may not have forgotten to mention she was married. But she was, to a soldier, who returned from the war and started checking around for his wife’s boyfriend. Fosse said, “I panicked at the time,
still in high school and afraid my mother would find out.”

The two worlds split his perceptions in two. Innocence, he discovered, lived with corruption, and there was no way to be sure what anything was, and nothing left to trust.

For decades, Fosse’s hometown, like Fosse, struggled to resolve its image problem. Chicago had been considered a bad town as far back as the Great Fire of 1871. Filth sold newspapers, and over time, half-true tales of drunks and bottom-feeding hoods
hardened into legends. The legends stuck. After the Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, Chicago’s image problem became critical. For the city’s 1933 centennial, reformers planned a full-scale makeover in the guise of a world’s fair—a Century of Progress, they called it. “In 1933 the world will talk
about our exposition and not our crime,” Mayor Lenox Lohr announced on WGN radio. “Visitors will see our culture, our beautiful buildings and parks, our giant industries, and will carry away a different conception of Chicago.” They didn’t. They saw Sally Rand.

The fan dance she claimed she had invented upstaged the rest of the fair. There was a scandal; Rand became a national phenomenon. In time, the Society for the Suppression of Vice shooed fan dancing from Boston and New York back to Chicago, the greenhouse of smut, where the feathers could touch tips and multiply. As striptease scholar Rachel Shteir wrote, the gimmick suited the Depression: “The oversized fan poked fun
at wealthy women who, to protect themselves from the elements, carried enormous ostrich feather fans.” Sex and satire: Fosse couldn’t get enough. “He was fascinated with Sally Rand,”
Grass said. “He loved the manipulation of the fans, when she flipped them like a baton twirler.” She was the uptown version of what inflamed him downtown.

In 1943 the academy presented
Hold Ev’rything! A Streamlined Extravaganza in Two Parts,
which featured Bob Fosse’s first full credit as choreographer (“Dance Numbers by Bob Fosse”), as well as his fan dance to “That Old Black Magic,” one of the year’s biggest hits. It was the very first Fosse number. The idea to use pitch-black ostrich feathers,
twelve to a fan, likely came to the sixteen-year-old by way of the girls of the Silver Cloud, who had gotten theirs, at least spiritually, from Sally Rand. “The number was very sophisticated,”
recalled Beth Kellough, one of the eight glamour girls in it. “We had long formfitting gowns that were black lace over red and they were strapless. They went down to your knees and flared out a little.” Fosse’s exposure to tougher varieties of fan dance suggests “That Old Black Magic” might have been a touch prurient, good-boy rock ’n’ roll. But how an angel of his age and guileless Andy Hardy gleam had gotten the idea (not to mention technique) to mount, in faithful miniature, the sort of number husbands would be ashamed to tell their wives they recognized, few could imagine. Of course, Mr. Weaver didn’t wonder. Neither did Charlie Grass. They knew all those nights in all those shitholes had burned red sequins into Fosse’s eyes. “But I like those sequins,”
a grown Fosse would confess. “That’s show business, and I’ve been a showbiz person my whole life.”

Show business and showbiz. One was for the real talent, the artists, and the other for the parasites that needed flash to look real. Fosse knew which side he belonged on. He would never let himself forget. “Whenever I get close
to the real object,” he said, “I think, whoops, that looks Tiffany to me. I better get back to the dime store.” The raunch of burlesque was only half the problem; his own taste for vaudeville shtick was the other. Gags, rim shots, and whistles; rowdy, provincial audiences howling at the acts and the acts howling back; flimsy machinery, threadbare scenery; a circusy rotation of jugglers and dogs—this was his kind of show. It was real too. High theater artfully concealed what vaudeville’s industrial vulgarity always seemed to expose. But Fosse loved that about vaudeville; it seemed to be
about
show business. As much as its talent, it reveled in its transparencies. Later, the acts would be called Brechtian; then, they were crude. Crude and gone.