Fosse (57 page)

The next morning, while Stevens and Doby worked the dancers on the stage, Gwen, Rivera, and Fosse met downstairs, in the Forrest Theater’s lounge, to hear what Kander and Ebb had taken “all day” to write.

“Nowadays” is a beautiful song—resilient, not tart; wistful, not saccharine—and it’s composed of such rich romance, one could even believe, against the obvious truth, that Roxie and Velma really were as classy as they were pretending to be. What else could pass for good? Where there is no absolute, panache may be all we have—sadly, gladly, trapped but happy—and “Nowadays” is the perfect resolution, ending a show about the dangers of razzle-dazzle with a soaring display of classic showmanship: top hat, white tie, and tails.

Kander and Ebb had done it: the ending was, amazingly, ironic and sincere.

Gwen said, “I want this song, Bobby,” in front of everyone. “Chita and I are very close, so this is going to be fine with her. I want that song.”

Standing up to Fosse was clearly a struggle for Gwen. Though she had been a star for twenty years and his wife for fifteen, she was not accustomed to contradicting him in public, and it showed; her intensity embarrassed everyone. Kander and Ebb looked down, away from Chita. No one spoke.

Fosse asked to hear the song again, this time with Gwen singing.

She began. “She was standing at the end
of the piano,” Rivera remembered, “and there were tears in her voice and an unhappy feeling in the room. But she never stopped singing.”

Sensing Kander’s embarrassment at having to hear Gwen sing through such unhappiness—and why she was unhappy, they could not say for sure, but maybe it was because she had come so close to the big moment she wanted and Fosse, dangling it, still hadn’t given it all to her—Chita spoke up. “Bobby, can we do this another time, maybe?”

“She’ll do as I say.”

As Gwen sang, Chita, her frustration mounting, scribbled a note on a piece of paper and slipped it to John Kander. “I was sitting at the piano,”
he said, “slumping, so I didn’t have to see the blood that was about to spill.” When he was sure Fosse couldn’t see him, he opened Chita’s note.
Give her the song,
it said. She just wanted peace.

Of course who sang what was Fosse’s call to make. Ultimately, he had them split the number, a strategy he may have intended to provoke backstage tension that Verdon and Rivera could transfer onstage, to Roxie and Velma. “Bobby, I know what you’re doing,”
Gwen was overheard saying, “and I want you to stop. Chita and I won’t go for any of that.” Or perhaps by splitting “Nowadays,” Fosse was doing his best to delegate, giving his stars equal time. “Sharing the wealth is a difficult
thing to do,” Ann Reinking said, “and Bob had to make them all equal and equally good. He had to be Henry Kissinger and Sigmund Freud and Bob Fosse.” That evening—on the day he first heard “Nowadays”—Fosse told Reinking the song had the perfect melody, haunting, beautiful, simple, and true, and what he witnessed in the bathroom lounge reached the highest level of artistry and professionalism. “Annie,” he said, “I just saw magnificent talent in front of me.”

Chicago
moved back to New York, to the Forty-Sixth Street Theater, for more previews. The former home of
Damn Yankees,
New Girl in Town,
Redhead,
and
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,
the Forty-Sixth Street Theater was the closest Fosse and Verdon came to a good-luck charm, which was something they needed, now more than ever. On May 21, just over a week ahead of
Chicago
’s New York opening,
A Chorus Line
premiered at the Public Theater to once-in-a-generation sensational reviews. Bennett’s “choreography and direction burn up
superlatives as if they were inflammable,” wrote Clive Barnes in the
Times.
“In no way could it have been better done.” It was a landmark, respectful of its progenitors and brazenly innovative, opening with an audition number that Bennett realized with exacting and naturalistic attention to the most granular detail. As in life, some learn the routine faster than others, some wander, some tic nervously in a corner trying to will their bodies to move. None behave as if they’re in a musical—and yet,
A Chorus Line
is half fantasy. Bennett whirls dream dances from his characters’ confessionals, curling reality and hope in an infinite loop of objective and subjective time. His show is always moving, and his control of the moving parts appears seamless to the point of being innate. It’s masterful.

“
A Chorus Line
is a great
concept
for a musical,” Fosse told the
Times,
“but if you see it again, watch how much they sing and talk about dancing and how little they do.” They do talk, and most of the time like they’re in a TV movie, but behind Bennett’s schmaltz is a real and intense passion for the entire theatrical enterprise, for wanting it, making it, living it, and, most meaningfully, loving it. Abundant with joy, the musical laid bare what Fosse made a career prestidigitating: a big Broadway heart.

A Chorus Line,
he knew, would erase
Chicago.
“They can only buy one hit
a season,” Fosse told Ebb.

Chicago
opened on June 3 to an ecstatic audience. “Well, we fooled ’em again,”
Fosse said to restaurateur Joe Allen as they partied afterward in the Rainbow Room. Gwen arrived in a sequined spaghetti-strap
gown with a boa thrown around her neck, and Nicole came in an offhandedly glamorous floppy hat, a streak of blond hair bouncing down her back. Every day, it seemed, Nicole was showing more of her father’s lissome appeal. Now twelve, she needed a chaperone for
the boy-girl parties Gwen allowed her (with one rule: no closed doors). Leading her to the dance floor, Fosse watched his daughter with a smile of perfect happiness, as if discovering, in her, in her joy of movement, a creation he could be unequivocally proud of. The only trouble was now she wanted to be a dancer. A ballerina, she said. How was he supposed to respond to that? “I would say it’s not a good life,”
he said. “There are so many rejects in the field. It’s great when you’re winning, but boy, it sure isn’t when you’re not. It can toughen a person in the wrong way. It’s odd because the very thing that makes you good is the softness you bring to the work, the sensitivity. This business tends to make you callous because you get so many no’s. You have to develop a suit of armor on the outside to be tough and protect that little thing inside of you that makes you want to be an artist.” It would be hypocritical to discourage Nicole—after all, she had him for a father and Gwen Verdon for a mother—but what else could he say? He was a father. It was his life’s other job to protect her.

(He had said to her, at one point, “I’d rather you swallowed
flaming swords in the circus.”

“But Daddy, why?”

“You get applause a lot longer.” Then: “If you really want to be a dancer then you need to go to class.”

She nodded. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

“You have to go today, every day.”

“It’s too late for the four o’clock class.”

“What about a five o’clock class?”)

In the Rainbow Room, word of Clive Barnes’s review spread.
Chicago
was old news, derivative of
Pippin,
“one of those shows,”
Barnes wrote, “where a great deal has been done with very little.” Again, the show trumped the book; attitude prevailed. Fosse’s hostility was too thick a gravy for such a light dish. Where were the laughs?
Chicago
’s dud puns, yuks, and gags (all in the vaudeville spirit) had a way of making a gloomy evening gloomier. And then there was
Cabaret.
Hal Prince’s
Cabaret.
“It was a steal,”
Prince said, “he unabashedly stole
Cabaret.
” Kerr saw it, Barnes saw it, Frank Rich saw it.
And then there was
Follies.
Sondheim said, “What happened is [Fosse] saw
Follies,
he saw the last twenty minutes of
Follies,
and thought,
Oh boy . . .
and made a career out of it. Simple as that. I saw what his work was pre-
Follies
and after
Follies.
If anything, I wouldn’t say he refined it, he just used it with great skill, like any idea, whether it’s been used before or not, if it’s wielded with skill is worth doing. If you look at the songs at the end of
Follies
and you look at the songs in
Chicago
and the way they’re treated, it’s the same thing.” Certainly both shows made good on a similar device, but to separate effect. Sondheim’s vaudeville is abstract, a metaphoric depiction of a nervous breakdown; Fosse’s is representational, a description of corrupt America in show-business terms.

Where
Pippin
borrowed liberally from diverse traditions of world entertainment to create an all-in language for an out-of-time fable—Esperanto in dance—
Chicago
excavated vaudeville, the Hebrew of our showbiz past, to satirize the pandemic of our showbiz present, in which everything, even truth and politics, is an act. Popular American amusement has been around since the first Americans paid two pennies to look at the Liberty Bell, but vaudeville, the first industrialized road show, was the original shared performance idiom, spreading and standardizing national tastes, giving Americans their initial looney salmagundi of entertainment personality.
Chicago
turns the founding fathers of the Palace into folklore, a Brechtian-American commedia dell’arte for the post-Watergate era. Fosse replaced commedia’s stock characters—Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine—with the changeable personae of our vaudeville heritage. Texas Guinan (Velma in “All That Jazz”), Helen Morgan (Roxie in “Funny Honey”), Sophie Tucker (Mama in “When You’re Good to Mama”), Ted Lewis (Billy Flynn in “All I Care About Is Love”), Eddie Cantor (Roxie in “Me and My Baby”), and Bert Williams (Amos in “Mr. Cellophane”)—they are America’s stock company, parts played by
Chicago
’s corrupt and powerful.

Roxie, Velma, Billy Flynn, and the rest aren’t
literally
the entertainers whose styles they co-opt, but they are literally American showmen, using a good act to cover their bad deeds, and the joke’s on us: we in the audience are the schmoes who paid the pennies, loving every dumb minute of our own swindling. That was bound to offend someone, or a lot of someones, if Fosse got his wish. But
Chicago
isn’t all jeremiad. “At first Fosse seems to be saying
that America treats criminals like superstars,” Stephen Farber wrote after the critics weighed in, but “he ends up saying something subtly different; that entertainers are like killers.” Lie, cheat, kill, die. Whatever keeps you in the act.

Turned off by Fosse’s vitriol and unmoved by the praise of some critics, audiences stayed away from
Chicago
for some time. Here Fosse could feel misunderstood. Where once he would have blamed himself, he now blamed them. “For a while,” Tony Stevens said, “it looked like we weren’t going anywhere.” Then Gwen sucked down some of
the confetti they threw at her in “My Own Best Friend” and blistered her vocal cords. She had to leave the show, temporarily, for surgery. And Liza Minnelli stepped in, but covertly. Fosse decreed there was to be no promotional fanfare in advance of the change, and hence no new reviews. If Liza got better press, it could kill Verdon and very likely kill
Chicago
when she returned. They would treat the substitution as they would any other understudy, like Liza Minnelli was no big deal, which actually made the switch a
bigger
deal, an inside secret everyone wanted to know.

“Liza learned the show in a
week,
” said Tony Stevens. “All of a sudden,” he said, “I was teaching her Roxie. Dialogue, staging, steps, everything.” They stayed up until four every night the week of the show, switching from the stage (when it was vacant, in the afternoons), to the studio, to Liza’s house, working in side trips to the show to see Lenora Nemetz in the part so Minnelli could have a better grasp of the bigger picture when her time came. Stevens said, “We would get in the limousine, run lines, arrive at the theater, watch the show, go back to Liza’s, and rehearse. It was crazy.” There weren’t many changes. Fosse would cut Velma from “My Own Best Friend” to make it a solo for Minnelli, and he’d strip some of the ballet from “Me and My Baby.” Fosse and Minnelli were in heaven. “What you have to understand is Bob and Gwen and Liza were show-business animals,” Stevens said. “They
lived
in that rehearsal room, they
came
to life
on that stage.” Rehearsing the second half of “All That Jazz,” Minnelli jumped on the bed, threw up her arms, and called out, “I love show business, Bobby!”

Minnelli’s name would not be listed in the program or written in lights above the theater. Only a five-foot billboard placed discreetly outside the entrance noted the change: “At this performance of
CHICAGO
the role of
ROXIE HART
usually played by
GWEN VERDON
will be played by
LIZA MINNELLI
.” A simple announcement was made before every performance. “When they heard Liza’s name,” Stevens said, “the audience just lost control of itself.” In an era predating that of the obligatory standing ovation, they were on their feet for Minnelli every night she was in the show. “It was a rock show,” Stevens said. “People weren’t sitting in a Broadway theater anymore, but an intimate stadium.” They stationed security guards on the street and security guards at the lip of the stage.

“That was terrific,” Fosse said to Tony Stevens after the show one night. “But what about Gwen?”

“She’ll be happy for her. She’s a pro.”

“Pros are happy for each other?”

Fosse tried his best to keep the critics away, but Clive Barnes threatened a
New York Times
boycott of Fryer and Cresson’s future shows if he was kept from writing about the new
Chicago,
and the embargo was lifted. He wrote, “The cast seems altogether tighter
and tauter, and although the far weaker second half of the show remains a problem, this Walpurgisnacht of Chicago in the nineteen-twenties, with its cynicism, irony, and biting wit, has some beautifully decadent charms.” The show that had both disappointed and impressed Barnes now dazzled him. And the ticket buying began: seats were so scarce, producer Martin Richards, who had given
his ticket to Julie Styne (who had given his to some high-ranking diplomat), had to stand in the back of his own show.