Fosse (45 page)

Whether it was true or not, Barry was quick to accept Fosse’s explanation. He wanted this job. “I understand.”

“I need time.”

“Okay.”

“Good,” Fosse said in his soft, small voice, “so how about this: while I’m in Africa, you write some new scenes. When I get back, we’ll talk.”

Barry smiled. “Bob, you want me to audition. That’s what you’re saying.”

“We’re in show business,” he said. “We audition our whole lives.”

That was true, but so was this: Fosse wanted to write. He had wanted to write
Redhead,
The Conquering Hero,
Sweet Charity,
Pippin,
and one could argue that to varying degrees, legal and less than legal, he actually had. But on each of those projects, he had been forced to collaborate. Sole authorship—of all elements—still lay ahead of Fosse, reminding him he could not fly on his own and that his incomplete vision, stymied by his incomplete control, would forever stand between him and claims to real art. By conferring with Chayefsky and Gardner before returning Barry’s calls, Fosse prepared to step into the ring a better fighter, and perhaps he even stood a chance of pinning Barry against the ropes. Beating a writer, or trying to, was a lot like trying to write.

In February 1973 Fosse said goodbye to Ilse and left Madeira for Nefta, the Saharan village where Donen’s production was based. At his hotel, the Nefta Palace, he caught up with his old assistant Pat Ferrier Kiley, whose husband, Richard Kiley, had been cast as the Pilot in
The Little Prince.
They had known each other for years, since before
Redhead.
“I want to go out and find where we’re shooting,”
Fosse told her. “Will you help me?” Fosse’s Snake number—literally a sand dance—would be filmed on location, in trees and on dunes and at the tops of cliffs, and Pat would be the extra pair of eyes he needed to see himself. Just then a coughing fit hit him—it sounded deep, from the stomach, like something was trying to break out of him—and Pat froze solid, unsure whether to watch him for signs of emergency or look away to give him privacy. Before she could act, someone reached for a chair in case he wanted to sit down, or had to, but Fosse waved it off with a sharp smile as if to say this was normal and kept coughing. When he finally recovered, Pat looked him square in the eye and said what few had the courage to say: “Bobby, you’ve got to cut down. You’ve got to take it easy.”

“Listen, Pat,” he replied with the air of making a prepared speech. “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I take pills too much, I work too much, I girl around too much, I
everything
too much.” He winked at her. “That’s just the way I am.”

That wink, she thought, sealed his fate.

The next day, Fosse and Pat prowled the dunes for shots. When his eyes lit on something, the two stopped. She stood in for Fosse as he played with the camera, then they switched; Fosse hid a thin slab of plywood under the sand, took his position on the board, and Pat stepped back for the view. He taught her the dance piece by piece, using a portable cassette player for the rhythm section. “Bobby came with the Snake Dance already mapped out,” Pat said, “and Stanley [Donen] was occupied in other areas, so Bobby and I would get up there and literally pick out camera angles.” Donen would have final cut, but he would take Fosse’s suggestions, as he had since they filmed
The Pajama Game,
all the way to the editing room.

The run of
Pippin
kept Reinking from joining Fosse on location—but nothing stopped Janice Lynde. With the Snake Dance prepped and ready to shoot, she arrived just in time—for some terrible weather. The brutal cold and desert winds would be miserable under any circumstances, but to a dancer, who needed to keep warm and limber between takes, the conditions were devastating. “They told us to bring resort wear
and they ended up flying in skiwear from London because it was that freezing,” Lynde said. “Me and [Donen’s wife] Yvette Mimieux were on the backside of those cliffs standing there with comforters and blankets. So that whole dance, Yvette and I were keeping Bob’s legs and muscles warm, rubbing him, papoosing him in blankets and things and praying that he wasn’t going to be blown off that cliff. It was amazing that he could even do it.” They shot the number for days.

On the morning of February 13,
with only a day of the Snake Dance left to film, Fosse squeezed himself into his tight black pants, slipped on his tinted shades, and angled his derby devilishly to one side. Emerging from his trailer, he saw the entire crew standing there waiting for him. They had lined up in an aisle formation stretching from his trailer door all the way to the set. What had happened? What was going on? Then someone told him: The Oscar nominations had been announced.
Cabaret
had ten, including best actress (Liza Minnelli), best supporting actor (Joel Grey), best cinematography (Geoffrey Unsworth), best editing (David Bretherton), best picture, and best director of 1972—you. By then, a full year after
Cabaret
’s release, the film and Fosse had been honored by a slew of prominent critics and had even won a few prizes, but Fosse knew not to get excited. The Oscar was not coming his way. As everyone was aware, the year 1972 was the year of
The Godfather.
“We knew what that meant,”
said Emanuel Wolf. “But we were just so happy to have all those nominations.”

Cabaret
had opened throughout Europe to enormous praise. “When we left Africa, we came back
through France,” Lynde said, “and Bob was the toast of Paris.” The red carpet rolled out from the plane to Fosse’s suite at the George V; from dinner with Janice on the Seine to the late show at the Crazy Horse. “He was fascinated with that show,” Lynde said. “They did a tribute to him by doing some of the songs from
Cabaret.
Nobody sang them, they were totally dance-production numbers, but there was one with this gigantic spider web across the entire stage. Somehow they rigged it so the dancers could climb into the veins of the web and do almost aerial choreography. They called him out in the audience to a standing ovation and bravos.” It was a wondrous evening. To be honored by the Crazy Horse, that esteemed purveyor of Continental grind, was to return to the slime bars of his youth and find them cleaned up, semi-assimilated into the mainstream; even better, it meant he was—to the Parisians, at least—if not an artist, then a showman king. “Bob was so happy that night,” Lynde said. “It meant so much to him that they got him.”

Lynde returned to their suite one afternoon to find Fosse on the floor. On his knees. Assuming he was working on a new step, she proceeded to move around him cautiously, but as she got closer, she could see he wasn’t moving. His head was down.

“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He said nothing.

“Bob, what is it?”

“Wally . . .”

Fosse had known Wally Cox since 1949, when they’d met in rehearsals for
Dance Me a Song,
their first Broadway show. A shrugging, bespectacled comic and sometime writer who once described himself as “a harmless preoccupied guy
in a constant state of reduced effect,” who looked as Fosse felt—as if he knew he’d drawn a losing hand but wasn’t quite ready to lose—had collapsed at his home in Bel-Air. A heart attack, the papers said. He was forty-eight. “They were roommates at one time,”
Lynde said. “Bob was devastated. He went into a deep depression.” For the rest of their stay in Paris, Fosse and Lynde appeared where they had been invited, and Fosse tried his best to accept the well-wishes from his hosts and give thanks in return, but he was only halfway there.

Days later, preparing to leave the hotel for an afternoon, Janice reached into the wardrobe for a jacket. Fosse was standing inside.

“What are you doing?”

“It should be me.”

“No, it shouldn’t.”

“I’m the fraud. Wally wasn’t a fraud. I’m the fraud.”

They flew back to New York. Janice tried to assure him his success was not in the least fraudulent, that it could not possibly be a fluke; it was far too consistent to be accidental or lucky. He had a record. He had accolades. But rather than comforting him, being reminded of his sterling reputation only intensified Fosse’s despair. One day, he told Janice, he would run out of smoke. “He said his greatest fear was that they’d find out it was all razzle-dazzle,” said Lynde, “that they’d realize he didn’t have talent, like in
The Wizard of Oz,
they’d pull back the curtain.” On the heels of
Cabaret,
Liza with a Z,
and the slow-growing popular interest in
Pippin,
he sensed justice waiting for him around the corner. On the outer rings of culture, Fosse couldn’t fail—marginalization was his destiny—but on the inside, under the microscope of national acclaim, Fosse knew his public unmasking was inevitable, his downfall only a question of time. Gravity was the law.

Fosse and Julian Barry met at Fosse’s office at 850 Seventh Avenue to work on Barry’s script for
Lenny.
As soon as he walked in, Fosse blasted him with story ideas—good, awful, funny, sexy, mean, weird—in white-hot streaks of drug-induced mania. It was as if Fosse felt that the more he said, the farther he’d get from failure. “When you sat in the room
with Bob Fosse,” Barry said, “his mind made you so tired, you couldn’t wait to get out of there. It was so intense. He was taking Dexamyl, these little green-and-white spansules, and chain-smoking the whole time. It was the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done in my life.” Dexamyl—or Christmas trees, as they were known, for their coloring—was a combination barbiturate-amphetamine popular on the all-night disco scene. Fosse kept his in a little black attaché case he left open for all to see. “He was in the romantic period with it,” Barry said. “I knew what that meant. He thought it gave him ideas, and maybe it did, but I knew he’d crash any moment.” With a Seconal-like drug to counter the effects of the Dexedrine, Dexamyl provided the two-in-one solution. Aside from being highly addictive, the drug further strained Fosse’s cardiovascular system, already damaged by a lifetime of cigarettes and stress.

Barry would come to 850 Seventh with scenes he had written or revised the night before, and Fosse would spend the first part of their meetings with pages in hand, reading the scenes aloud, challenging Barry’s every choice. His tone was not so much contrarian as urgent. There was only one right answer—one way to save himself from slipping into mediocrity—and Fosse had to find it. Barry had to help him. Fosse’s career, his life, depended on it. Barry said, “You would say something and he would say, ‘Why do you think that’s a good idea?’ And then you would have to spend hours explaining it and defending it. I mean, he was always probing you that way. You’d be drained. He wanted to push you and he wanted to make sure you really
did
think it was going to work. He’d fucking interrogate me about everything, three hundred and sixty degrees. Then I’d go home and rewrite the scene and bring it in the next day and he’d send me back to do it again.” They worked this way for a month, like a snail on speed. “We weren’t using a typewriter,” Barry said, “but I was taking constant notes. I would be on the couch or in a chair and he would be moving around, talking up and down, using ninety words when he could have used two.”

Fosse made amphetamines look good. With the Oscars fast approaching and the Tony nominations just announced—
Pippin
’s eleven included best musical, best choreography, and best direction of a musical (two more for Fosse)—the entertainment world began to treat Fosse almost like royalty. At first, it felt good. Girls, restaurants, fame: Who wouldn’t love the ride? Never mind the pressure. Never mind that no one took his stresses seriously. He was being modest. He was the king. He was a genius. What will the genius do next? (Will
Lenny
be another masterwork? Another
Cabaret
?) Then
Liza with a Z
was nominated for an Emmy. It was a show-business record: no one had ever been nominated for best director of three different works in a single year (let alone
produced
three such notable works in a single year). But where two nominations seemed prodigious, three ran him down; the Oscar, the Tony, and now the Emmy was a marathon he could not win. Thus the panic. Thus the Dexamyl. Fosse’s prescription came to him from Dr. Harold Leder, his internist of many years. Before the drug was recalled, in June of 1973, around the time Fosse and Barry collaborated, Leder comfortably prescribed Dexamyl for any number of ailments. “They were diet pills,”
said David Freeman, a patient. “Dr. Leder kept them in a jar on his desk like they were M and M’s.” Though Leder was openly concerned about Fosse’s high stress and smoking, he knew better than to interfere with the private lives of his patients. “He was not the sort
of guy to smash his fists on the table and say, ‘You have to take care of yourself,’” his son, Dr. Drew Leder, said. Even if Dr. Leder had, Fosse would have found Dexamyl elsewhere. He had his connections.

Fosse’s office phone rang like crazy. Congratulations from friends, interview requests, and job offers were now a regular part of his day, and though his secretary, Vicki Stein, did the lion’s share
of phone-answering, Fosse couldn’t always stop himself from answering it himself. It was a reflex—muscle memory from the time he couldn’t afford a secretary. Seeing Fosse snap up the phone like a whip, Barry sensed the gypsy in him was still waiting for those life-and-death crumbs from his agent. Barry remembered one particular conversation: “Hello?” Fosse said into the receiver. “Yes . . .” His eyes widened. “Yeah, that sounds really interesting . . . Well, that’s great, that would be wonderful . . .” Smiling, he held up a one-second finger to Barry. “Great, yeah. I have to ask you one question, though. I know how you work so I have to ask. Will you rehearse?” He waited for the answer. Then nodded. His smile faded. “Well, Frank,” he said, “I have to tell you the truth. I can’t do it.” A pause. “Okay, well, thank you. Bye.” Fosse hung up, and his smile came back. “I just fucking turned down Frank Sinatra!”

A few days later, Fosse said, “Okay, Julian. Today,
no phones.
”