Fosse (53 page)

That night, sitting with Fosse at the Moviola, Heim caught him kneading his upper arm, repeatedly clenching and unclenching his fist. And his face was white.

Bob looked away from the Moviola.

“Are you okay?”

“Just tired. Went from rehearsal to see Annie.” Reinking was in the hospital. She had fractured her vertebrae in two places and had to leave
Over Here.
“Then I went back to rehearsal.”

Heim said nothing.

“Now here,” Fosse added.

Finally, he had to stop. Heim helped him out of his chair, walked him to the street, and put him in a cab.

“You going home?”

“Annie.”

That was Saturday.

Monday, Fosse and the cast of
Chicago
assembled at Broadway Arts for the first table read. Everyone was thrilled. They all seemed to agree they were working at the top of their game. Soaring in, Chita Rivera placed a big bouquet of red roses
in the middle of the table; Tony Walton showed off a model
of the sleek bare set, and Kander and Ebb played their songs, which were among their rousing, cheeky best. The tastefully sinister dances Fosse had sketched out over the first week of rehearsal captivated everyone, and to see him reunited with Gwen lent a sense of rightness to their delight. Gwen may have been the only one to worry. That morning, she sensed something different in Fosse. “I was shocked,”
she said. “He was puffed up. He had a funny high voice. I’d never seen him like that.” This time, Fosse did not deny it. He asked stage manager
Phil Friedman to make him an appointment with Dr. Leder for the lunch break.

How exactly did he feel? Friedman asked.

Like a truck was driving
across his chest, Fosse said.

Friedman called Leder,
as directed, and the reading progressed without difficulty. Rising from the table, Fosse thanked and dismissed the company and told Friedman he should go ahead and work on “All That Jazz” if Fosse didn’t make it back from Dr. Leder’s office in time to start the number himself. He was clutching his chest.

On their way to lunch, producers Joe Harris and Ira Bernstein ran into Neil Simon
crossing Broadway. Simon asked how the show was going; they told him the show was going great, and they all schmoozed for a moment and then parted ways. Bernstein and Harris ate their lunch and strolled back to their offices on East Forty-Eighth Street in time to pick up a ringing phone and hear a strange piece of news. Fosse had been taken to New York Hospital, and the doctors weren’t letting him out. Joe Harris got in a cab.

In the hospital, Fosse—trying to keep calm—told Harris
that Dr. Leder had sent him directly to the ER for further evaluation. Harris could see why. Fosse’s face was slick; his breathing labored. While Leder, engaged with his stethoscope, examined the patient’s chest, Fosse slipped Harris his attaché case. “The show is over,”
he whispered, and he told Harris to get rid of it, then put on an innocent face for cardiologist Edwin Ettinger. The pain comes and goes, Fosse explained, it wasn’t serious. He’d been living with it for months; he’d just gone to Leder for a checkup, routine stuff, and now he had to get back to rehearsal. Ettinger held up a hand. Fosse was not going back to rehearsal. He was going to have a heart attack.

Fosse explained, in the clearest terms possible: He was doing a show, a Kander and Ebb show. People were counting on him.

Ettinger cut him off. Fosse needed an EKG.

“What do you mean?
I have to go back. You don’t understand show business.”

Ettinger didn’t understand that shows were not just shows; they were domino lines of careers and paychecks, and if his domino tipped, lives would fall down around him. Maybe the producers were already trying to replace him. Were they calling Robbins? Gower Champion? Hal Prince? What if his show was a hit without him and the
New York Times
wrote Hal Prince was better at Fosse than Fosse? Or what if the producers decided to shut down the whole thing and walk away with the insurance? They had a legitimate case for abandonment (which would give them 1 to 2 percent on the value
of the policy) and could board up the show right then and still rake in the money. If they did, Fosse’s premiums would skyrocket, and he’d be branded a liability, beholden to producers, possibly for the rest of his life. It was essential Ettinger understood this.

At 3:30, Fosse’s doctors called Broadway Arts,
gave the news to Phil Friedman, and asked him to get Gwen to the hospital, fast. Friedman found Verdon alone with Chita—a relief. This had to be kept private. Friedman apologized to Chita and led Gwen out of the studio and to a chair against the wall. Knitting needles in hand—she and Chita were practicing their knitting for
Chicago
’s big trial scene—Verdon seated herself where directed, and Friedman explained everything. Calmly, she changed her clothes and left the building. “[Gwen] really went through this
like an actress,” Friedman said. She believed this was, in a way,
what he wanted, not to die, but to come to the cliff’s edge of death, kiss it, and turn back. She thought it put him in touch with his talent, like fighting the producers, who in a sense were like heart attacks, like terminal illnesses, with their cruel and incessant reminders of time running out . . . last one . . . no more . . .

“Please don’t let them keep me
in this place,” Fosse said to Gwen when she appeared in the ER.

“He’s staying.”

She reached a hand out for the medical papers.

“I’m his wife.”

Meanwhile, Joe Harris called Ann Reinking, at her own hospital, and told her very little. No one could know anything. Razzle-dazzle damage control.

“Alan,” Verdon said to Heim,
“Bob won’t be in for a few days.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Big exhale. “He’s exhausted.”

At 5:30 that evening, producers Fryer and Harris
returned to Broadway Arts to tell the dancers, if not the exact truth, then something like it. “It’s exhaustion,” they said.
Not to worry. Rehearsals would be off for a couple of days. Fosse would return Thursday. Really, there was no reason to worry.
You know Bob. Overworked, overstressed, over-everything . . . Go home, we’ll know more tomorrow.

Dr. Ettinger moved Fosse
to a private room and recommended immediate surgery, a cardiac bypass. There was a 98 percent chance he’d survive.

Fosse nodded. He asked if he could have a smoke
and think it over.

They would take a vein
from Fosse’s leg, Ettinger explained, and move it to his heart. Fosse stopped him right there. Better if they didn’t touch his leg; as a dancer, he’d be happier if they cut the artery out of his chest. Ettinger made the deal.

The following day, the
Chicago
company
was told there would be a delay; for how long, no one knew. Maybe four months. “Do
not
worry,” the producers said. “We will look out for you.” They promised to call around for work and encouraged the dancers to be in touch if they needed money. If they needed
anything
. But money was not the issue for some. Having moved across the country, having said tired and fighting goodbyes to their boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives, having decided, as if they had a choice, to give up, again, their lives for the barre, the dancers had put much of everything on hold to be in
Chicago,
and now that hold was being put on hold. They were in nothing, limbo. Pam Sousa booked a couple commercials
and extra work in
Three Days of the Condor.

As the company mother, Verdon held them close. She threw parties
to keep spirits up. Losing one dancer to the world might inspire another to go, and then another, and though Verdon wanted them to shore themselves up with pickup gigs, she knew if the company disintegrated, schedules would fly away, and
Chicago
would be put back even farther, maybe too far, and she’d be too old.

The doctors instructed Fosse to relax. But he couldn’t relax if he relaxed, so he called the theater to check up
on
Pippin,
wanting to know about every dancer. How were they? How was the show? How was
Lenny
? Heim came to the hospital with a report.
There were lines, he told him, all the way around the block; it was Cinema One’s best opening day
in twelve years. “Fosse has learned
a phenomenal amount about film technique in a short time,” Pauline Kael wrote. “
Lenny
is only his third movie . . . and it’s a handsome piece of work. I don’t know any other movie director who entered moviemaking so late in life and developed such technical proficiency; Fosse is a true prodigy.”

But lying in intensive care, awaiting the surgery that was to increase blood flow to the heart they said would attack him if he didn’t get real, Fosse continued to worry. He worried about his cock. Drugged out, he called Annie
in her hospital room, terrified the operation would make him impotent. The idea obsessed him. He blamed her. He said she hadn’t taken care of him. Reinking knew it was the drugs talking; his words were slow to come and he drifted from subject to subject. He wondered whether he should have the open-heart surgery at all (“I’m going to a real opening,”
he joked). He wondered how he would live if he couldn’t fuck; how he would work if he couldn’t move; how he would live if he couldn’t work. He could die. He would die. Maybe not here, but somewhere. Then again, maybe here. Maybe tomorrow.

The big yank, the end without end.

There was only one thing he could do about dying now: fuck as much as he could. In anticipation of an unsuccessful “opening night,” Fosse made a pass at almost every nurse
who came in to see him. The one who took his blood pressure got a hand on her hips. Another had her chest examined by a toy stethoscope. The nurse assigned to massage duty arrived to find lemon oils on his bedside. Some didn’t mind; others were less amenable. Outside his door, the ICU nurses held
a private conference to discuss the sex-and-comedy routine they termed Fosse’s defense mechanism.

He called Janice in LA.

“Bob, are you smoking?”

“Yeah. It’s not a big deal.”

“Are you on oxygen?”

“Yeah.”

“Bob, if you don’t put that out right now, I’m calling the hospital!”

“You’re not my mother.”

“You could blow the whole place up!”

“Sometimes you act like my mother . . .”

“I’m calling them right now. I’ll tell them to turn
off
the oxygen, Bob!”

“Okay”—chuckling—“okay.”

At nine o’clock the evening before the operation, he called Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner into his hospital room to witness the signing of his new, revised will. They arrived moments after the lawyers and hung over Fosse’s bed, staring. It was depressing. To see this life-hungry maniac lying there semiconscious weighing next to nothing and hooked into tubes and drips and beeping screens was to behold a baffling and tragic ridiculousness. To the lawyers’ shock, Paddy and Herb actually started laughing. Then Fosse started laughing. “We were lifetime friends,” Gardner said at Fosse’s memorial, “and we knew it and reveled in the security of it and attacked each other’s weakness and laughed every day at each other’s expense knowing there was plenty to spend. Paddy hunched over with his evil little cackle, and Bobby with his head thrown back laughed till he cried, one of us having just led a search-and-destroy mission to a weakness in the other.”

It began with Chayefsky. In his rabbinical way, he declared he wasn’t going to sign any document without reading it first. Snatching the will from Fosse’s hand, he crossed to a chair in the corner of the room and read every word of the entire thirty-page document.

“Hey,” Chayefsky mumbled. “I’m not in here.” He flipped back to the beginning, just to make sure.

“Paddy,” Fosse said, with a certain amount of feeling. “You’re in good shape. You can take care of yourself. I’ve got Nicole and Gwen to plan for.”

“I’m your oldest and best friend, and I’m not in your will?”

Fosse hesitated. This was not the response he expected. “There are people who really need taking care of,” he said. “This has nothing to do with my love for you.”

“You left me out of your will?”

“Yes, Paddy. I did.”

Chayefsky took a portentous beat and then spoke. “Fuck you!” he said. “
Live!
”

Fosse exploded laughing. The wires hooked into him started flapping like fish on a boat, and one of the lawyers had to brace the heart monitor to make sure it didn’t go down with the food tray that had been kicked off the bed, which got Chayefsky laughing, which started Gardner laughing, and the harder they laughed, the more embarrassed the lawyers got, until finally Chayefsky took pity on them and signed the will. It said, in part, “I give and bequest the sum of $25,000 to be distributed to the friends of mine listed . . . so that when my friends receive this bequest they will go out and have dinner on me. They have all at one time or another during my life been very kind to me. I thank them.”

After the signing, the sedation kicked in and Fosse fell asleep, leaving Chayefsky and Gardner to small-talk with the suits. It must have been one or two o’clock in the morning when one of the lawyers, endeavoring to fill the silence, said he heard the director Joshua Logan had put a similar clause in his will.

Fosse opened one eye. “For how much?”

The lawyer told him.

“Make mine ten grand more,” he said and closed his eye.

So now Chayefsky and Gardner fell down laughing, which actually got the lawyers laughing, and then the surgeon came in, and just seeing them all laughing, he started to laugh. Trying to pull himself together, the doctor put on a solemn face and approached Fosse’s bedside. This was serious, he said, and he led the patient through the steps of the next day’s operation—the whole number, from top to bottom. The surgeon took out a pen and pointed it at a diagram of Fosse’s heart. Highlighting the damaged tissue, he showed Fosse exactly how they’d be taking a vein from his chest and putting it into his heart, which—

The surgeon dropped his pen.

“Whoops,” the surgeon said.

Everyone froze. Whoops?

“Operation canceled,” Fosse murmured. They all started laughing again, harder than before, laughing as if they weren’t in New York Hospital but at their table at the Carnegie Deli. “Doc,” Fosse said to the surgeon, a man by the name of William Gay, “Doc, I won’t let you operate unless you promise one thing, okay?”