Fosse (5 page)

As his beloved vaudeville sank, Fosse witnessed the final degradation of favorite acts, and his low-rent proclivities dropped, by popular standards, even lower. A decade after they were wired for sound, America’s vaude-houses emptied their giants onto the streets. The performers vanished wholesale from conversation, only to reappear days or years later on ghost-town barstools, folded over or dead. Others died alive. Joe Frisco, Fosse’s favorite flash dancer, turned up on a bill with a couple of trained dogs and two hand balancers. Georgie Tapps ended up a salesman in Beverly Hills. So followed a generation of the country’s wackiest individuals, all flattened to sameness. Fosse knew what it meant. He could never be an Astaire. Maybe not even a Draper.

Meanwhile, the good boy cleaned up. Based on Fosse’s academic performance, admirable character, and participation in school activities, in December 1944, the Amundsen faculty named him an outstanding student of the year. The story appeared in the
Tribune,
which ran a full list of his credits: “Chairman of senior class,
vice president Letterman’s club, prom committee, Latin club, honor society, swimming team, president of Alpha Hi-Y [the high-school branch of the YMCA], student council.” The students elected him
senior-class president. Buttressed, perhaps, by his popularity, Fosse decided the time was right to stop hiding his shame and dance for the toughest crowd in Chicago: his high-school class. Consisting mostly of sketches and songs,
Miss Philbrick’s annual variety show rarely featured dancers, but she made an exception for Bob, whom everyone loved but no one really knew. Lying, he told his drama teacher he had played the Empire Room and the Palmer House, and having seen him practice for hours at a time, perfecting pullbacks and leaps that already seemed perfect, Miss Philbrick had no reason to doubt him.

Moments after the curtains parted, the band struck up, and Fosse flew onto the stage for a showy, tap-happy rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever”—mastered, by now, after years of presentation houses and junky burlesques—that finished up with an explosive knee slide that took him virtually into the orchestra. Trying not to gasp for breath, he was said to have held his position at the lip of the stage—arms open, Jolson-like—waiting for the shower of applause to come his way. It did.

He was a hit.

Enjoying Fosse’s sudden celebrity, a few of his friends thought it might be fun to get some of their own. Fosse agreed and came up with an act. A drag act. Assuming the role of director, he taught them to lip-synch with exact fidelity to the Andrews Sisters’ “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.” At first the boys thought it was all pretty funny. Three of Amundsen’s finest donning full drag for the senior-class assembly! But Fosse wasn’t laughing. He rehearsed his trio late into the afternoon and well into the homework hour. Racing toward perfection, he was not content simply to have them walk across the stage. They had to walk across the stage in character.

Between runs, George Foutris, a wrestler in mascara and heels, pulled Bob aside. “How do you keep doing all this?” he asked.

“All what?”

“The sports, the girls, the schoolwork. And now the dancing. How?”

“You have to learn to compartmentalize, George.”

Marion Hauser correctly believed herself to be Bob Fosse’s favorite girlfriend. When they were together, she believed he believed it when he said he loved her and not the others. At least, she believed it for a while. Hauser threw in the towel when she heard that Marion “Smoochie” Geweke had taken Bob home to meet her parents. But that didn’t last long either. “He had his mind made up about being a performer,” Smoochie said, “and it just wasn’t the life for me. I knew he would never settle down to a nine-to-five job and I just wasn’t the kind of person who would feel comfortable with a show-business type.”

According to Charlie Grass, Fosse’s parents weren’t either. “I think they didn’t believe
too much in entertainment,” Grass recalled. “They were against show dancing. They went with it in the beginning, the amateur shows, because Bob was bringing home money.” Cy and Sadie endorsed the sort of ballroom style that Bob’s eldest brother, Buddy, practiced—and practiced in ways Cy and Sadie never knew. When no one was looking, Buddy took his baby brother
to junky dime-a-dance halls and to the Rialto on State Street, a burlesque house run by the Minskys. On one occasion, Fosse invited Charlie to join them. “No, no.”
Grass blushed. “I’m going to go home.”

Fosse’s brothers had all served in the war—Buddy in the Pacific, Edward in France, Donald in England—and now that Fosse was approaching high-school graduation, the time had come for him to act. Trying to preempt Bob’s being drafted to God knows where, Buddy and Ed “wrote to the Great Lakes
Training Center,” Grass recalled, “and told them about Bob’s experience as an entertainer, hoping they would get him entertainment work and he wouldn’t have to go where the fighting was.” Fosse was indeed accepted into Great Lakes, a naval training facility north of Chicago, but despite the USO shows he had played, and the official letters Weaver gave him to prove his talent, Fosse was rejected by the special services entertainment division and was set to go to boot camp as soon as he graduated. He didn’t know what would happen to him after that.

But first, commencement. Disguised as an ordinary high-school student,
Fosse, the president of the Class of ’45, approached the podium, delivered a short welcome, and then ceded the floor to Principal Perry, the main act. His speech, entitled “Post-War Opportunities,” met with a rally of patriotic cheers, none of which were Fosse’s. After his rejection from special services, he had managed to negotiate a six-month reprieve into his military contract. At seventeen, Fosse was going on the road, a solo act. He wouldn’t have to share credit anymore.

“You want to come with me?”
he asked his Riff Brother in February of 1945. They met at the studio to talk it over. Weaver was with them, managing both his interests.

“I would love to, Bob,” Charlie said, “but I can’t leave school.” He had half a year left.

“Well, then, can I use our routines?”

This is probably what he wants anyway,
Grass thought,
a solo career.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s fine, Bob.”

Now that he had gotten a deferral from the war,
Fosse negotiated himself back into Marion Hauser’s arms, to which he would return, intermittently, for the next half a year. He expected to be away more, but he quickly saw the road idea wasn’t working. Too old to do the kid act, too young to pull off the big time, Fosse spent his six-month reprieve playing the Midwest’s remotest shitholes, lonely and far from home. Stealing, selling, and being sold, he was getting cynical about his trade, the people in it, and the places it was taking him. “I hate show business
and I love it,” Fosse often said. Fortunately, unfortunately, it was in him, an affliction he would never be without.

In the summer of 1945,
Weaver’s enrollment dropped, the academy shut down, and Bob began his nine months of boot camp. With no sense of his future, Seaman Second-Class Fosse surely felt frightened and out of place, like Eddie Bracken with a machine gun. He wrote to Mr. Weaver for help, and Weaver, mercifully, came to his aid, not for the first time or the last. The old man arranged a meeting with the training center’s base commander, “a kind of audition,”
Grass said, bringing with him music and headshots and an agent’s prayer he could somehow save Fosse from combat. On the day of the meeting, Weaver hunched over the piano and played “Stars and Stripes Forever” while Bob, in navy blues and sailor’s cap, machine-gun-tapped his way to a new assignment. “That might have saved Bob’s life,”
Grass said.

But if Weaver hadn’t rescued Fosse, the subsequent world events probably would have. In September of 1945, shortly after Fosse arrived for duty, Japan surrendered, and World War II went to the Allies. Though the fighting had ended, troops held on to their Pacific island posts, keeping watch and awaiting relocation. For their amusement, Bob Fosse was transferred to the entertainment branch’s Navy Liaison Unit in New York City, where the man behind the desk directed him upstate, to a naval training station in Sampson, New York. There he met former vaudevillian Tommy Sternfeld (late of Tommy Stern and His Girls), who was preparing
Hook, Line, and Sinker,
a sailor show stitched together with help from
Joe Miller’s Joke Book
(“What did one wall say to the other? I’ll meet you at the corner”) and the talents of whoever was available. “It was songs and sketches
and they threw mops on their heads and dressed up as girls,” said Sternfeld’s daughter Buzz Halliday. The show rehearsed, and then Fosse and his company packed up their collapsible stage and hit the Pacific in November of 1945, flying and boating from one forgotten barracks to the next.

Months later,
Hook
came to an end and Fosse resurfaced in New York City. There he met chief petty officer Joe Papirofsky, newly appointed head of yet another in-service entertainment division. Assembling a company of twelve or thirteen performing sailors, Papirofsky held informal audition/interviews at Rockefeller Center, where he encountered an unassuming,
“very thin, Irish-looking kid”—Bob Fosse. Though Fosse liked Papirofsky, it took him time to feel genuinely at ease with new people. He could be shy, and his life so far had been full of vulnerability—to older siblings, older strippers, clueless parents—making distrust his default. Cigarettes gave him a comfortable piece of business. And they looked good, which was nice too. The swirl of smoke suited Fosse’s natural hunch and made him seem, to all who didn’t really know him, cool, out of reach, in want of nothing—which he wasn’t. But it was a useful pose.

At twenty-five, Papirofsky, with his streetwise
Brooklynese and hot-blooded charm, had an older brother’s appeal for Fosse and cleared his trust test far quicker than most. Lifting a wave of black hair from his eyes, Papirofsky—or Papp—could quote Shakespeare easily and in an unpretentious way that brought down Fosse’s guard. They shared a devilish sense of humor. “I saw at once that he was footjoy,
carefree, jaunty,” Papp said. “He loved to dance. On some islands he would perform in the hot sun for five or six hours. He’d go on until he nearly collapsed from the heat.” They were both devoted to the same kind of popular theater: pure entertainment. “I thought plays were effete,
plays were sissy,” Papp said. “What I liked was vaudeville, skits, singing, and dancing.” Papp brought that sensibility to the sailor shows, which he would write and direct. They had everything. Fosse said, “One guy would sing Irish songs, somebody would sing hillbilly songs, there was a tap dancer and a guy who did impressions of James Cagney.” It was vaudeville on the beach.

Touring the Pacific with Papp’s show
Tough Situation
was a kind of paradise for Fosse, his first time on the road with a regular, respectable gig. Palling around with guys who didn’t have to hide their dance shoes, playing to grateful soldiers on warm South Pacific evenings, he felt like a man of the world, a part of something. They played ships, aircraft carriers, officers clubs, parade fields; it felt legit. “We played a different base on a different island every day,” Fosse said, “places like Hawaii, Guam, Chuuk, Okinawa, Wake, all the way through to Tokyo. The guys preferred the shows with girls in them, so we had two strikes against us there, but still we were successful. We’d do sketches with a lot of inside jokes about the navy, like if an officer and a Wave got married, what would their life be like after the war. I played a girl in that skit—I was in drag with wigs and everything.” Papp would toss in a ballad or tap number to break up the yocks. But no matter how crude the acts or how casual their conceptualization, Fosse and Papp took their work, and each other, very seriously.

Papp was only six years older than Fosse, but as their ship neared Japan, the end of their tour, the two developed a mentor-apprentice relationship. As the outfit’s leader, Papp had an automatic authority, and Fosse, who decried his lack of education, paid very close attention to his superior’s riffs on acting, literature, politics (which didn’t interest Fosse), and whether Fosse was destined for film or theater. Flagrant intellectuals cooled Fosse, but Papp never went to college, and he talked as much about how to throw a custard pie as he did about psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Papp supported him through his self-described “semi-fake-arty dance period” (“with twenty thousand sailors in the South Pacific looking at me, I’d be dancing Ravel’s
Bolero
”) and wowed him with tales of Gene Tierney, whom Papp claimed to know personally. That amazed Fosse. He’d never met anyone who actually knew a movie star, not to mention such a hot one (“that overbite,”
Fosse said, “just knocked me out”).

Fosse was like an ever-expanding sponge, and whenever he felt deficient, which was often, especially in the presence of an intellectual, the sponge would absorb a little more, retaining it for later use. From his front-row seat, Fosse listened intently, recording Papp in pictures that he filed away in a personality catalog he would add to consciously and unconsciously for the rest of his life, a folder for everyone. He was always filing. When rehearsal arguments broke out among cast members and Papp intervened, Fosse filed away a major lesson about directing. “If we went too far or started to get physical,” Fosse said, “he would step in, as any good officer in charge of men should do. But up till then he would not only watch but also stimulate the situation a little bit.” What Papp incited offstage, the performers carried into the show. People had buttons, Fosse saw, and Papp knew how to find them and when to push them.

Papp and Bill Quillin,
another sailor in the outfit, sat patiently as Fosse told sad stories of a girl he loved back home. Months earlier, on leave in Chicago, Fosse had eloped with one of his high-school girlfriends—a secret he kept from everyone except one person. “I heard about it later,”
Grass said, “from Mr. Weaver. The girl must have told her parents because Mrs. Fosse found out about it and had it annulled after Bob left for the navy. She could do that because they were both underage. But I don’t think Bob wanted to get an annulment. He wanted a girl he could write letters to.” Married or not, Fosse wrote letters anyway.