Fosse (58 page)

New York mayor Abraham Beame took the stage and presented Minnelli with a key to the city. “Never before,”
he declared, “has one great star stepped in for another on such short notice for so brief a period a time, with no advance publicity and, most incredibly, without any billing throughout the entire five weeks.” It was the night of her final performance—so those people lining up around the Forty-Sixth Street Theater the next day couldn’t have been buying tickets for Liza Minnelli. They were there for
Chicago.
For Gwen.

“Good,” Fosse said.
“But I could have done better for her.” He might not have been talking about the show. “I could have done better.”

To keep Nicole’s heart unmarried to show business, Fosse deliberately led his daughter to all sorts of
sports and literature (she was named, he liked to say, for
Nicole in
Tender Is the Night
), but dance kept pulling her back. Ballet in particular. It was the basis for all movement, she told
her father, as her mother had told her many times before. Tendues and pliés, he agreed, were pennies in the bank; they seem small, but with practice, each becomes a fortune. Talking like this, Fosse and the young Nicole, the Dalton School girl, seemed to be meeting now for the first time. He knew they had only a short window. Soon she would be gone from him, lost to her teen years, too embarrassed to dance impromptu with Reinking on the backyard deck at Quogue or to giggle openly. The day would come when she wouldn’t let him push her around in shopping carts, which she used to love, he dancing down the aisle, goofing on fake ballet to the supermarket Muzak, she screaming out for more,
Do it again, Daddy, again.
Those laughs were blood transfusions. “No matter how hard the work, or how depressed he would get over something, there was always an element of humor,” she said. “I could get him to laugh about things.” Soon he’d be lecturing her about drinking (with a drink in hand) and warning her to pick her boyfriends carefully (as girls cycled in and out of his bedroom). Soon he’d be telling her about the casting couch. But first, seventh grade.

Exhausted, he tried not to think too much about future projects, about
Ending,
but Aurthur’s script needed his attention. They sent pages back and forth through the fall of 1975, rewriting and interviewing doctors about medicine, hospital culture, and grief. Then, suddenly, a shift occurred. Researching
Ending,
speaking with health-care professionals about his own hospital experience, remembering his symptoms and the emotions of his recent history, Fosse began to give body to his own story, adding to
Ending
pieces of primary evidence he knew to be true.

Aurthur’s adaptation was terrific, doggedly attuned to the quotidian trials of deaths, and grim. A little too grim. To lighten the mood without compromising the principle, they took a cue from
Lenny,
weaving into the hospital drama a series of into-the-camera interviews, all scripted, with various “doctors,” “patients,” and “researchers.” Like musical numbers, the interviews commented on aspects of the story, adding and shading and offering a kind of relief—that was good—but Fosse and Aurthur still hadn’t found their big idea. How would they make this movie entertaining? (
Should
they?) Caught between death and Hollywood, they set
Ending
aside and turned their attention to other matters.

With
Chicago
going strong and
Pippin
still bringing in royalties, Fosse wrote urgently to Lennie Strauss,
his accountant, suggesting that since his earning capacity was at its highest, they should invest a part of his savings now, before the inevitable decline set in. Unsurprisingly, Fosse viewed his financial good fortune as he did his professional success—with suspicion. “The black attaché case Fosse carried
with him was always overflowing with bank savings-account books,” Julian Barry said, “and I remember asking him why. He told me he had put his money into a variety of savings accounts as he felt that was the best way to protect his assets. He said he didn’t trust the usual route.” As a boy, Fosse had personally defended
his pennies, storing them safely in a shoebox he kept close at all times. Now that shoebox was diversified—perhaps too diversified. “I’d come home and he’d have yet another bankbook,” Reinking said. “He had coins and dollar bills stashed all over the place. And when he felt frightened, he’d count it. Some of it was in socks, some of it was in a paper bag. ‘Just in case,’ he said.” How much of it was there? “Bob was not a multimillionaire,
but he had money,” said Fosse’s friend and financial adviser Kenny Laub. “When Bob came to me to ask me to manage his money, I thought it was a joke at first until he called me a second and third time. He came and told me how much he had and it wasn’t an earthshattering amount.”

Progress on
Ending
was briefly and pleasantly interrupted by a call from Herb Gardner offering Fosse a cameo (one scene, a few lines) in John Berry’s film of
Thieves,
which Gardner adapted from his own 1974 play. Gardner cast Fosse as Mr. Day, a junkie who tries to rob strait-laced Martin Cramer, played by Charles Grodin, in an alley behind a Broadway theater. Regular members of Gardner’s inner circle, Fosse and Grodin had hung out many times before, mostly at Herb’s. “We had this jokingly competitive
relationship,” Grodin said. “At a party in LA, I asked Bob’s date to dance very close with me just to see what it would do to him. When he saw it, he leaped off the sofa and cut in.”

Thieves
turned out to be a troubled shoot. Midway into production, Gardner replaced John Berry, and the obstacles only increased from there. A slow and stubborn collaborator,
Gardner alienated people on both sides of the table, dragging
Thieves
many months behind schedule and forcing Sam Cohn into a tough spot with the studio. If Cohn could not keep his client in control, he knew, Paramount would take the picture away from him. But controlling Herb Gardner was even more difficult than controlling Bob Fosse. At least Fosse collaborated. Grodin said, “Herb said once he’d rather not
do the whole thing if he had to cut two lines.” With a phone to each ear, the businessman-therapist in Cohn tried to talk Paramount off his back and Gardner off the ledge, but all he managed were reprieves.
Thieves
was going to bust.

Sam called Chayefsky, Fosse, and
Thieves
’ editor Craig McKay to join him and Gardner for an emergency dinner at Wally’s.
Thieves
wasn’t Herb Gardner’s mess, it was
their
mess, and Cohn made sure they would clean it up, all of them together, with five brains and one heart. “We were Sam’s children,”
said editor Cynthia Scheider. “He was like the king of New York and we were princes and princesses. He did not care if you were down and out. He didn’t care about money. If you had talent, Sam would stick by you no matter what. He just wanted us all working. We were a family.” Wally’s was the family’s dining room.

Fosse, McKay, and Chayefsky joined Sam and Herb at a table in the back corner, specifically selected by Cohn so they would not turn heads at the outburst he expected from Gardner, which came right on schedule.

“What do they want from me?
I’m giving those schmucks everything I’ve got!”

“Herbie,” Sam said. “In fairness—”

“In fairness? I’m in there every day! What do they want from me?”

“They have a budget, Herbie . . .”

Chayefsky spoke up. “Sam,” he said. “Listen to him. Let him speak.”

Cohn did as he was told and waited for Gardner, like one of the crazies in a Herb Gardner play, to run out of steam. He waited through several minutes of expletives, jokes, impassioned appeals—he was practically singing—romantic visions, political diatribes, calls to arms.

Then Sam spoke. “Herbie, I love you,” he said, “but you’re not doing enough.”

“I’m doing everything I can!”

“You’re not doing enough to placate the studio.”

“Placate the studio? I don’t want to placate the studio! Fuck
them!
Fuck
them!
”

Diners’ heads turned.

“Well, you’ve got to do something.”

Gardner’s expression changed. “Well, fuck you too, Sam.”

“Herbie, Jesus . . .” Paddy said.

Cohn waited for a retraction. It didn’t come. “All right. If that’s the way you want it, I’m outta here.”

“Yeah, that’s the way I want it. You’re outta here.”

“Okay, guys,” Fosse said, “everyone calm down . . . calm down.”

Days later, Herb’s back went out. “Herb was in agony,” said McKay. “He would drink Myers’s Rum with pineapple juice and painkillers. We even tried working in his apartment. Nothing worked. He couldn’t move.” Their snail’s pace came to a full stop, and Gardner asked Fosse to cut the picture for the interim. Baiting the hook by inviting Fosse to cut his own scene, Gardner hoped Fosse would stay on as long as Gardner was laid out on the floor of his apartment. Of course, Fosse agreed.

When he arrived in the cutting room the first day, Fosse told McKay he did not want to override Gardner’s work, only add and subtract where needed. “Fosse never hesitated,” McKay said. “He knew what he wanted and when he didn’t; he’d say, ‘Craig, you know what it should be. Do it.’ But I have no idea how he saw anything with all that smoke in front of his face.” Soon Fosse settled in. “He was cutting in his style,” McKay said. “The way he went to certain places and how quickly he did it. He was always trying to get a lot of detail, cutting more than you would have normally, punctuating stuff with short cuts. He liked to get around a lot, image-wise. I think he got more humor out of it that way.”

They were at it for three weeks, Fosse, McKay, and Fosse’s veteran assistant editor Trudy Ship. “Craig,” he announced one afternoon, “today I became a millionaire” (courtesy of
Pippin
and
Chicago
), and he took him out to lunch.

Another day, he was standing behind the Moviola, behind Ship, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a copy of Kübler-Ross’s blockbuster
On Death and Dying
tucked under his arm. “You’re carrying
that
book
and
smoking?” she asked. His reply was flat: “Uh-huh.”

He’d heard about the book from Stuart Ostrow, who had borrowed its five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—to frame his first play,
Stages,
then still in process. Though Ostrow had left
Ending,
Fosse considered borrowing what Ostrow
had borrowed for Aurthur’s script, which in the spring of 1976 still needed work. The same questions remained. Chayefsky had weighed in with notes and the latest was out to Gardner, but it was Fosse’s pal Pete Hamill who came back with the most inspired feedback of all.
Ending
was relentless, Hamill explained,
more like journalism than a work of art. Fosse’s problem wasn’t dying-related but form-related. What if he, for instance, took those
Lenny
-style documentary interludes and turned them into musical sequences? They could be illustrative of the Kübler-Ross phases. If Jay, the dying man, could somehow visualize these concepts, then Fosse could maybe give denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance a sort of grandeur that would make them cinematic and emotionally relatable to all. And making Jay a dancer or choreographer would justify that kind of dreamlike maneuver. After all, one could not make a straight documentary-like film about dying, as
Ending
endeavored to be. It was impossible. There were no reports from the deceased, no primary-source accounts of life’s final moments. The only way to show it was to imagine it, to dance it. To dance what it felt like to die? Did that make sense to Fosse? Yes—yes, it did—to be truthful about the unknowable, one
had
to invent. To know death, Bob Fosse had to turn to fantasy, to entertainment. Reality: That was the bullshit. But show business—singing and dancing and all that jazz—held the absolute truth.

A
NN REINKING WAS
his date to the Tonys, held that year at Broadway’s Shubert Theater, where
A Chorus Line
had moved from the Public and would remain for the next fifteen years. There’s no such thing as home-court advantage for the Tonys, but nonetheless,
A Chorus Line
had it. Velocity and industry support—it had those too. “We were pretty sure they were going
to win everything,” Reinking said, “but you always hope.” The nomination breakdown gave no hint of the outcome.
A Chorus Line
had twelve and
Chicago
had eleven. Bob Fosse had three and Michael Bennett (without book credit) had two, and their respective partners (muses? Best friends?), Gwen Verdon and Donna McKechnie, stars of each show, were up against each other. “It was hell,”
Tony Stevens said. “Bob was in hell.”

Category by category,
Chicago
lost. “It was like you start disappearing,”
Reinking said. “You watch as you’re slowly being erased.” The Tonys were going to
A Chorus Line,
first in trickles, then in waves. “Every time they cut back to Bob,”
said Alan Heim, who was watching on TV, “he sunk a little deeper in his chair.” Best score went to Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban (cynical remark: “conventional”), best book to James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante (cynical remark: “sentimental”), best actress to McKechnie (“You know she can’t act,”
Gwen said. “She was just playing her own story”), Michael Bennett for choreography (cynical remark: “unimaginative”), and Michael Bennett for direction (cynical remark . . . none). By the time the envelope for best musical of the year appeared onstage, all suspense was gone—the audience actually laughed as it was opened. The Tony went to Fosse’s old friend Joe Papp, producer of
A Chorus Line.
They had known each other since they were kids in the navy, doing drag shows on Pacific island shores, and Fosse barely acknowledged him on his way out.
Chicago
lost everything.

If winning defeated Bob Fosse, then losing was actually a running start. “Being depressed is not a bad thing,”
he would say, looking back. “It makes you think. It makes you say, what’s wrong? Why am I feeling this way?”