Fosse (41 page)

Then, finally, having relieved himself of the fear that he was rushing to judgment, the audition could begin. “Our eyes met during
the audition,” said one dancer, “and I thought,
My God. He’s
rooting
for me
.”

The dancers were broken down into groups of three or four to show Fosse what they had. When he was as certain as possible, he let go of the dancers he had to, first joining them onstage to excuse them one by one with a heartfelt expression of appreciation. And Fosse always meant it. (“It was like he was cutting himself,”
one observer said.) “He would literally walk over
and practically put his arm around their shoulder,” dancer Valarie Pettiford said, “and thank them.” He tried, with each dancer, to wish him or her luck in a specific and credible way that could slip a stent into a damaged vessel and maybe lift the person up, a little, forever. (“I think I’ve turned down
more people than even girls have turned me down,” he said. “It’s pretty close.”) This took time.

The surviving dancers, all of whom had demonstrated such high levels of skill that differentiating their gifts was near impossible, were then asked to sing. Some were cut off and thanked before they finished their songs. The remaining dancers were asked to read scenes from the script, and again, more were thanked.

At this point during the
Pippin
auditions, sitting only a couple rows from the stage, Fosse, Ostrow, Schwartz, Hirson, and casting director Michael Shurtleff were taking notes on each actor. For the sake of expedience, no discussions took place until the very end of auditions each day. Then the entire pool was brought out onstage and lined up for further examination. Here they stood, watching the dark, waiting for someone to speak. Every day their faces changed.

One day, a voice—kind but firm—came out of the dark.

“Number nine, will you step forward please. Number three, step forward.”

The dancers waited.

One of them was Robie Sacco; he was eighteen and from Allentown, Pennsylvania. When asked, he said that he figured the pay would be about eight hundred dollars a week but added, “I’ll settle for a dollar and a quarter an hour.”

On the day Sacco was cut,
Fosse saw fifteen lineups of hundreds of candidates; of those hundreds, one hundred and twenty-five were cut and seventy-five asked to sing. Singing—songs they loved, which they prepared in advance—they showed something of themselves. To ensure none of them would hear what was being said about them, Fosse had the line move as far upstage as possible; it protected both sides from too much involvement. Next, he asked an assistant for his cards; he had one for each dancer. Each card listed categories, and in each category, the dancer was rated a 1, 2, or 3—1 being the best—with pluses and minuses for subtle distinction. The difference between, say, a 1-minus and a 2-plus in the song category was clear to Fosse. A 1-minus might signify a singer with good intonation and musicality but no power. A 2-plus singer might have a limited range but strong energy. Asterisks were for pretty girls.

Of the seventy-five asked to sing the day Sacco was cut, three were asked to read. After the reading, Fosse got up and stood next to the two who still interested him. Here they talked. He was sniffing around, going more on gut than science, reacting maybe to qualities he couldn’t define or matters of conduct that had nothing to do with talent. “I remember once,”
dancer Ken Urmston said, “there were at least three hundred girls auditioning for one replacement, and I was sitting with Bob, who had gotten them down to five, and we said, ‘What about that girl?’ And he said, ‘She’s the best one up there but I’m not going to hire her.’ We all said, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘When she went to do her song, I didn’t like the way she talked to the piano player.’”

“He would cast dancers
over singers,” Stephen Schwartz said, “so I felt we didn’t have the best singers in the world and that was frustrating to me.” Jennifer Nairn-Smith, a five-foot-ten Balanchine ballerina (six foot two
en pointe
), was widely considered the most beautiful girl at the audition. She wasn’t a singer, but with a figure like that and ballet chops to boot, Fosse wasn’t about to let Schwartz send her away. He gave Nairn-Smith a part in the chorus alongside Kathy Doby and dancers Cheryl Clark, Pam Sousa, and
Liza
alum Candy Brown. Tall, short, busty, thin: each was distinctive. “You couldn’t have gotten a more
eclectic group in
Pippin,
” Brown said. “It wasn’t just leggy blondes. It was all types.”

Ann Reinking arrived at
the Imperial Theater dressed to order in black tights and high heels. Black—that was one of two things she knew about Bob Fosse. The other was that he was a terrific dancer, far better than anyone gave him credit for.
The Affairs of Dobie Gillis,
Kiss Me Kate,
My Sister Eileen
—especially
My Sister Eileen
—she remembered seeing them on TV as a kid in Seattle, and while she didn’t know how to get those dance memories into her body so she could get her body into
Pippin,
she sensed a subtle, sexy humor in his style, a mysterious quality she understood he would respond to in others. “I was drawn to him before I met him,” Reinking said. He saw she had the rhythm and classical technique to pass through “Tea for Two” without difficulty. “The moment I met him, I liked him,” she said, “and I knew he liked me. I thought,
This person’s going to be my friend.
There’s no reason for it. I don’t know why. I hadn’t gotten the job yet, but I started kidding him, which was nervy. I guess I felt at home with him.”

He moved them into a jazzy impression of Robbins’s
Afternoon of a Faun
—romantic, but tangled inward. Reinking said, “Our feet and legs were in a turned-in fourth position, torso bent over parallel to the floor, arms in fourth position mimicking the legs.” Floating separate muscles in isolated harmony, her body felt to her like the inside of a clock, all parts moving together but at different speeds, one witty, one lyrical, with an innocence she would not have associated with the slick alley dancer from
My Sister Eileen.
The addition of “soft-boiled-egg hands” turned the thermostat a small notch to the erotic. “It’s as if you are holding soft-boiled eggs,” he explained, “at the curves of your fingers.” The image described the nymphy drift of lowered, half-open fists side to side behind their backs. There was tacit power—Fosse’s phrase—in slowness. At twenty-two, Reinking had only just begun to understand why.

Fosse joined them onstage, handed out personalized instructions to each dancer, watching their bodies for the results and their faces for private reactions. “He wanted to know how we responded to praise and criticism,” Reinking said, “and he wanted to know if we trusted him. Trust was important for him. Very important.” She found he was kind to the dancers and gentle with her. “Okay, let’s try this . . . you look good . . . why don’t we turn here . . . very good . . . stay elegant . . .” Once again, he separated the dancers into groups of three. “He then gave us a pantomime with a ball,” she said. “You throw it up and catch it and roll it up on your shoulder, and then from the waist down is this specific dance with tiny little back bumps. You spin a web up here [with your torso] but from the waist down you’re like a machine. The magic is on top; the industry is on the bottom. It was beautiful, like commedia dell’arte.”

Though Reinking had the ballet dancer’s shape—strong and tall and lean—she was not distant or gauzily beautiful like so many ballerinas; she was sexy in a real and neighborhood-girl way, and she smiled easily. Nervousness lit her. Like Verdon, she spoke with a rough squeak, sounding like a kid hoarse from too much fun in the sandbox, and more than anything, she really loved to dance. She was game—Fosse could see that.

“Ann extended Bob’s talent,”
Verdon said.

That night he called her
at home and asked her out. Fosse would do that: ask a dancer to dinner before telling her she got the part or, in some cases, right after. Some got nervous and lied about having boyfriends. Others got angry. What if she told him to go fuck himself? What if she said yes?

Reinking was cool.
“You and me,” she said, happy to hear from him, “
that
has to be outside the show.”

There was something about being told to wait—when it was done by the right girl in the right way—that Bob Fosse liked. It was the straight stuff. “Okay,” he said. “That’s okay.”

Reinking got the part, joining
Pippin
’s players’ chorus, and Fosse stepped away, slightly, so she could be certain she was there because he wanted her talent, which he did, mostly.

“The thing you love can also be the death of you,” Reinking said. “Dancers are aware of that much more than the average artist.”

It was his first summer in the Hamptons unmarried to Gwen. “
Separate
is not the right word,”
she would say. “We just don’t live in the same house.” She oversimplified. There was something pathetic, Fosse thought, about gathering together as a family—or whatever they were—for croquet, Ping-Pong, and dinner, as if they were putting on a little show. And if they were, who was it for? Neil and Joan Simon? Paddy, Herb, and Sam? Perhaps Gwen was doing it as much for herself as for Nicole. Nicole: Fosse did it for her, though he couldn’t say if she liked having him around. But his not being there could further alienate her; then again, he couldn’t be sure if forced closeness helped her feel any safer. “I want to be a good father
to her,” he said, “to be there when she needs me. But I’m sort of on a date with my daughter; her mother lives with her, and the difference is vast. There’s a day to day interdependence between them.”

Of course, Fosse had fun that summer too. “Bob was the most notorious
and blatant cheater I ever saw,” Neil Simon said. “The wonderful thing is, he never did anything sneaky or surreptitious.” He’d simply kick a promising shot away from the croquet wire or call off a game he was losing
just
before he lost it. “Or sometimes,” Simon added, “he would just pick up the wire and the wicket and just place it an inch away from wherever his ball was. And then he’d smile and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ His philosophy was that what he was doing was right. They just forgot to write ‘Cheating allowed’ into the rule book.” Fosse was exactly eleven days older than Simon, so age became a constant source of shtick. “I always look up to you, Bob,”
Simon told him, “and want to be just like you when I get to be your age.” “In the first eleven days of my life,” Fosse replied, “before you were born, I had more girls than you’d ever have in all your life.”

Fosse asked John Rubinstein to
his apartment for a drink the night before the first
Pippin
rehearsal. Expecting to see the book improved since his first meeting with Fosse almost a year earlier, Rubinstein was confused by the latest revisions and wasn’t sure how to discuss them without causing offense. “When I
really
read the script,
when I started working on it, I said to my wife, ‘Oh God, this thing ain’t gonna fly. What are we going to do with this?’”

With more than a touch of concern, he walked into Fosse’s building at 58 West Fifty-Eighth Street and took the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor. A welcoming blend of bachelor and cozy, Fosse’s two-bedroom apartment had all the requisite guy furniture—glass coffee table, bar, audio equipment—mellowed by crisscrossing rugs, pillows, and a welcoming disarray of books, ashtrays, and antiques. He kept a tea-service tray out on the balcony; a neon Tango Palace sign (from
Sweet Charity
) over the couch; and pictures of Nicole, both in and out of Fosse’s arms, seemingly everywhere. “The place had a fun and temporary feel,”
one dancer said, “like he was never there and when he was he wanted to have a good time.”

Fosse gave Rubinstein his drink, got one for himself, led him to the living room, and they sat there for a while, saying nothing. “We were sort of looking at each other,”
Rubinstein explained. “I didn’t know what he wanted me to do. Were we going to read the play again? Did he want to give me some sort of character analysis? Did he want to get to know me? What?”

Finally, Fosse spoke. “Yeah, I don’t know, John,” he said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

Fosse took a sip of his drink. “What the fuck are we going to do about this show?”

The floodgates opened. They proceeded to discuss the problematic aspects of the book, item by item. They weren’t trashing
Pippin
but inspecting it, turning it over like a piece of produce, examining it for possibility. “He told me that the ‘War Is a Science’ number was going to be a vaudeville routine, an olio, with a bunch of people with tambourines going ‘Ha-cha!’ and all of that. I thought that was brilliant. He told me a lot of that kind of stuff, how he was planning on doing the sex scenes. He said, ‘That’s not going to be a pastoral thing. It’s going to be you and five knock-out babes and they’re going to hurl you around and be an orgiastic sex scene.’” It became evident to Rubinstein that Fosse was using Schwartz and Hirson’s creation as merely a point of departure, inspiration for what sounded like a different and much darker show. The skeleton of the story—about a group of medieval players leading Pippin on a picaresque quest for self-fulfillment—worked well enough, mostly, but the show’s ending needled Fosse: Rejecting the players’ suggestion to find meaning in a triumphant show of self-immolation, Pippin decides instead to settle down to a normal life with Catherine, singing, “And if I’m never tied to anything / I’ll never be free.” Fosse knew that wasn’t right. Ending a musical comedy with a happy family was pat, old-fashioned, and, furthermore, not credible, especially in light of the Old Man’s offer: stardom via suicide, the best career move of all.

The Variety Arts building had burned to the ground years earlier, on July 11, 1968. The only thing salvaged from the four stories of studios was a Hammond organ, saved under the diagonal cover of a fallen wall. The morning after the fire, a sentimental stranger
was spotted brushing ash off the keys and playing a chorus of “I’ll Be Seeing You” for a ring of unappreciative insurance adjusters. That was the last music to come from Variety Arts; the structure was never rebuilt. But the spirit of the place followed Fosse and his dancers to
Pippin
rehearsals at Broadway Arts, at 1755 Broadway, not too far away. The new space was conveniently located. After rehearsals, Fosse headed seven blocks down, to 1600 Broadway, where, in the busy collegiate atmosphere that was New York’s Pentagon of postproduction, Bob, editor Alan Heim, and assistant editor Trudy Ship cut
Liza with a Z
in their scantily furnished high-walled tenth-floor echo chamber tight on air and low on light. Cranky chairs and a few wooden tables insisted on ascetic devotion to the work. This was the war room. “Bob would always be pushing people
to push people to do something deeper, something different,” Heim said. “And it was always thrilling to be in that atmosphere. I mean, for me it was. For some people it was different.” They clicked together, tooth in sprocket. Heim’s face, glinting behind a bushy mustache and glasses, had the New York look Fosse trusted, and he spoke calmly and clearly with the assurance of serious consideration, surely a comfort to raw nerves. That Sidney Lumet had recommended Heim sealed the deal.