Fosse (48 page)

Like a seesaw, winning the Triple Crown lifted Fosse up and threw him down to hell. Up, he was the king—dancing, choreographing, and directing huge movies and musicals; down, it wouldn’t last. Cut with the Dexamyl, the extremes were changing him, changing the air around him. Bolstered by a fresh, substantiated arrogance and a deeper fear of failure, the new Fosse was asking for more and settling less often. Most of his dancers, writers, and editors would agree that his higher standards produced better work—and for many, his double-barreled intensity wouldn’t be a problem—but post–Triple Crown Fosse was losing his patience with others. Where once he had had to cohabitate, now he had the muscle to insist on carte blanche ad infinitum. Who would stop him? This Fosse pushed hard and regularly, lodging dynamite indiscriminately, like a prospector without a lead. Though Fosse acted with stubborn assurance, many sensed he was lost. Anger and conviction seemed his way of imposing order on the turmoil. Meticulousness became compulsion. His associates asked themselves not whom but
what
they were trying to satisfy.

Therein lay the beauty of United Artists,
Lenny
’s financiers. Founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford “to protect the great motion picture public
from threatening combinations and trusts that would force upon them mediocre productions and machine-made entertainment,” UA was premised on privileging, as its name suggested, the rights of the artist. Taking charge of the studio in 1951, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, two gifted New York lawyers with appropriate amounts of creative ambition (none), restricted their business to business matters and evolved UA from a movie studio into a partner. The company flourished. Sharing profits with free agents like the Mirisch Brothers and Hecht-Hill-Lancaster (producers of Chayefsky’s
Marty
), UA drew, under Krim and Benjamin, the sort of independently minded producers who were themselves drawn to the sort of independently minded talent that movie audiences of the seventies (and sixties and fifties) were hungry for. “The thing about UA was we didn’t
look at dailies,” said UA producer and former CEO David Picker. “We approved the budget and off they went.” Freedom and trust, anathema to old-school studio executives, would crown UA with the greatest postwar record of any Hollywood backer. Its films with Altman, Ashby, Coppola, Kubrick, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (and James Bond and the Pink Panther) say all. Fosse was home.

At UA, there would be no Cy Feuer. Under Picker, a tall, young veteran of show business, Fosse would have his wishes pre-granted. “I’d do anything to make it possible
for Bobby to do whatever he needed to do,” Picker said. “And I knew being satisfied was not his goal. He wanted to get everything he could until there was no more to get.” It was love—and they were already talking honeymoon. After
Lenny,
Fosse and Picker planned to make a film of Herb Gardner’s play
The Goodbye People.

But right now they needed a star.

“I want you to play Lenny,”
Fosse said to Dustin Hoffman.

“Why don’t you get Cliff Gorman? He did it on Broadway and he was brilliant.”

“He was my first choice but the studio wouldn’t finance it. So I’m coming to you.”

This kind of maneuver had not been necessary before, but Fosse had never been scared of his leading actor before. On
Sweet Charity,
Shirley MacLaine subordinated herself to his (and Verdon’s) expertise and had wisely kept from playing the star card, and Liza Minnelli, on
Cabaret,
was not yet star enough to cross the line of Fosse’s authority. Casting his Broadway musicals in much the same way, Fosse had been very lucky, or very clever, in the diva department.
Hero
,
Pleasures
,
Pippin:
no big stars. For marquee names, he mostly kept to Verdon, his wife. (There had also been Sid Caesar in
Little Me
. And look how that turned out.) Then came
Lenny
and Dustin Hoffman, perhaps the biggest star in Hollywood. By putting Hoffman on the defensive, Fosse was trying to take his power back—even before he lost it. “It was not the right way to
begin a collaboration,” Hoffman said. “I worried if I was going to be his second choice through the whole picture.” He took the part.

Before he could cast Honey, Bruce’s wife, Fosse had to feel out each contender, looking for a way in. He tried Raquel Welch.
He tried to get Janice Lynde comfortable with stripping. He considered his sometime girlfriend Joey Heatherton,
and then he found Valerie Perrine. Her mother had been a showgirl
in Earl Carroll’s
Vanities
and George White’s
Scandals
, and Valerie had been the lead nude dancer of the Lido de Paris Extravaganza at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas. “That was,”
she said, “two shows a night, three shows a Saturday night, and you never got a night off. You went to work at seven and got home at two in the morning. You had to be dying not to go to work. I’ve worked when I had stomach flu. I had buckets waiting for me in the wings so I could throw up into them.” What Fosse would give her, he knew she could take.

“We read two hundred and fifty actresses
for Honey,” David Picker said. “Then we reduced them to six and screen-tested them at the Warwick Hotel.” Fosse set up in a room big enough to accommodate a small crew, and over the course of several afternoons, he narrowed the six actresses down to two: dreamy Jill Robinson and fun, sexy, Valerie Perrine. On camera, they each ran the love scenes a couple of times with Hoffman, with some ad libs around the outside.
Lenny
’s every word was scripted—there would be no improvisation on Fosse’s set—but hearing what the actors came up with in auditions gave Fosse and Hoffman a sense of their natural state. It was a version of the truth game.

“I’m Leonard Albert Schneider,”
Hoffman said, in character.

Perrine paused. “Is that Jewish or something?”

“Yes. Do you like Jewish men?”

“They have large noses and I like that.”

“Why?”

“Because they give good head.”

Fosse and the crew cracked up.

Perrine got the part. Fosse asked her to dinner and over drinks at the Plaza started coming on to her.

“Does this mean”—she began to cry—“I’m not going to get the part?”

Fosse laughed. “No, no, no. You’ve
got
the part.”

“Really?”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“Oh, good . . . thank you. That’s good.”

In lieu of carnal knowledge, he interrogated her, but gently, so it didn’t seem like an interrogation. Of course she opened up. Fosse’s interest was flattering, genuinely, and his voice was small and the Plaza was grand and she told him about her family, her boyfriend, her background—she told him everything, even more than she thought she had to tell. By the end of the night, she said, “He knew more about me than he would have if I slept with him.” The data he filed away, and Perrine went back to her hotel brimming with the zing of a great new job but having learned nothing about her director.

There was a time when Fosse could summer with Gwen and Nicole without leaving too much life behind, but with Ann Reinking’s ascension to girlfriend of girlfriends, he respectfully rented his own
summer home in Quogue, a village not too far away from Gwen’s place in East Hampton. “I remember how Gwen suffered
through the early Ann Reinking days,” said John Rubinstein. “During those summers out on the island, it was very painful for her. She knew that it was going to be serious with Bob and Annie.” In the months after Payne Whitney, Fosse turned much of his depression into anger—against Gwen, against “them,” whoever “they” were. “He suddenly allowed a lot of
this submerged rage to emerge,” set designer Tony Walton said. “The anger Bob felt toward Gwen was violent.” It was all those shows where the critics gave him second billing to her star status, status she owed mostly to him; all those years he spent extolling her boundless gifts, hiding the envy that grew in him the more love she took. In
Sweet Charity,
Gwen Verdon stole the show—his—but he let her, he needed her to, because without her blush and quiver, he could not show his heart onstage. She was the cure to a Bob Fosse production.

And his cure was Quogue. Tucked behind a wall of bayberries a short distance from the sand stood a white cypress
castle built by architect Jay Sears, modern and mysterious. Fosse would rent it summer after summer. A multilevel maze of decks, balconies, indoor bridges, and see-through stairways, the house was a hide-and-seeker’s paradise, redolent of unplanned-for kisses and secret games. Chunky bay windows gave the structure a Rubik’s Cube quality, as if sky giants, frustrated with the puzzle, had thrown it down to Earth. The whole place seemed to be in constant motion. There were rolling greens and long decks for big parties on Sundays; there were jagged, sharp-cornered culs-de-sac too small to fit more than three people and a joint. It was fun.

When Fosse entertained, he did it big, inviting dozens to stay all day and into the night. When he was working, he’d eat anything or nothing, whatever was brought to him, but when he partied, he opted for rich foods, lobster especially, and Chinese spare ribs,
with French or Italian wine and after dinner, warm Courvoisier. “I would have made a terrific waiter,”
he said. “Sometimes I really like making people feel good, like they had a good time. I’m a good host at a party; I knock myself out. Most people clean house when they give a party. I paint the house. I want everything right. I rehearse the whole dinner—music, napkins. It takes me days.” Brahms, Chopin, or
(his favorite) Satie during the meal; something folky like Carly Simon after; then maybe show music, and if the evening went late enough, harder rock. No one got drunk at these gatherings, just loose. Too much scotch could take Fosse down
the rabbit hole, but the right amount of wine or rum got him where he wanted to be, high and happy. “I love big parties,”
he said. “I enjoy all the flirtatiousness—that slightly reckless attitude.” Fosse liked seeing people without their masks debating sensitive subjects with raw nerves exposed, and food, wine, and music broke down the barriers. There was something else too. Seeing people’s real selves in their relaxed state, he could better grasp their up and down levers. As a dancer and choreographer, he knew that body language was personal history. “Most nondancers don’t understand
this,” Fred Mann III said, “but we’re constantly reading each other. Just the way a person walks can tell you the difference in their training. You can see their Balanchine, their forced turn-out. That kind of a thing. We’re constantly reading each other.” The auditioning never stopped.

East Hampton weekends, when Fosse and Reinking had time, began after Ann’s last
show on Saturday night and lasted through Monday, when she had to go back to town for a show. Fosse bought a Lincoln—black, of course—to take them to Quogue and back. “Quogue was a place of peace for him,” she said. “He just lived.” Away from New York, Fosse smoked less and cooked more. He read. Biographies, mostly, books about Lincoln and Clarence Darrow, problem solvers who suffered from depression and greatness. He and Ann played cards. They walked to the beach and scavenged the shoreline for treasure. Like Fosse and Gwen had. Like he and Joan had. “We got all these seashells,” Reinking said, “and he bought these mirrors and glued the seashells all over the mirrors, layering them, and he varnished them and it looked great.” At the end of the day, Fosse would take labels that he’d peeled off their empty wine bottles and decoupage them around a wastebasket. “He loved an idea like that, where you take a common ordinary thing and make it look beautiful,” Reinking said, “which is exactly what he does. I said, ‘You make tinsel look like a mink coat!’ Even in these crafts, he wants you to feel the grit, but he wants you to feel there’s beauty there too. There’s the depressed side and there’s the clown side; it’s the best of both worlds.”

They would have to have that conversation. He would have to tell her what he was not capable of, again, and she would have to pretend to feel okay about it.
This is sophisticated,
she would tell herself.
I am sophisticated.
If he came home late one night and she asked, which she knew she shouldn’t, where he’d been, he would tell her where, and with whom, and she would have to show no sign of hurt. She could not ask him to apologize. This was him and she loved him, so she had to love
this.
Otherwise she didn’t love him, and she
did
love him, so she wouldn’t ask. But she would know, and knowing, she would hurt. “I always felt on the precipice of a cliff,” she said. “Even though Bob had other women in his life, I knew he wasn’t having deep relationships with them. He would talk to me about things he really cared about, and yet I’m there and I’m not there at the same time. The double standard was very hard. I didn’t want to see anyone else, but I felt somehow I should. I think he felt guilty for that too. I
did
know that he loved me but I was always looking over my shoulder, frightened that he’d find someone else. Death was going to happen, there was nothing I could do about that, but I felt if I ever really lost him I would have been devastated. I wanted security. But I didn’t want to lose him.”

Seeing her struggle and wanting to help, Fosse encouraged Reinking to see a therapist. “Everybody needs someone to talk to,” he said. “It’s fine. It’s good.” And she went, expecting to sit down at the controls and tweak the knobs until she made him trust her or until she became more accepting of his limitations. But he knew she couldn’t; they blamed each other, and the guilt slayed him. Am I taking advantage of this power? he wondered. Then he would turn on her. He’d do it before she could turn on him. Both knew the reprisal was inevitable. After all, how could she be happy with the little he gave her, and how could he be sure she really loved him? “Do you like me because I’m me or because I’m a success?” he would ask her. “If I was a janitor, would you like me?” Being together, in Quogue or in town or on the road in between, they chastised themselves for not being different people, and they each worried, when happy, that the other was worrying alone.