Fosse (59 page)

“He put himself down,”
Reinking said, “then he defended himself.”

Quogue: his parry-riposte to New York. There he worked on
Ending
with Bob Aurthur. Taking Hamill’s notes, Fosse decided to turn the movie into a story of his own death, that is, how he imagined his death would have been if instead of checking out of New York Hospital, he’d never left. Tape recorders in hand, Fosse and Bob Aurthur interviewed everyone, friend and foe, who had been around for the
Lenny
/heart attack/
Chicago
episode. Fosse wanted to know the truth about that period, the mean truth, and started asking questions, which some took to be a pretext for persecution, as if by interrogating the witnesses under the auspices of Art, he could finally get them to open up about what they really thought of him. Aurthur and Fosse divided up the list.

Aurthur got Dustin Hoffman. “What do you think?”
Aurthur asked. “Do you think Bob’s queer?”

“Bob?” Dustin had never considered it. “They called him Mr. Multiples.” Girls.

“Do you think he’s covering up?”

“I would not say he was queer. But I wouldn’t say Bob didn’t have any . . .
characteristics.
” It went right into the script.

Fred Ebb got a call
in California. Fosse asked, “Can I use the song title ‘All That Jazz’ for the movie? Because it’s yours.”

“Actually, it’s not. I was reading one of the
Time-Life
book series, and there was a chapter entitled ‘All That Jazz.’ I took it from there. I didn’t really invent it, Bob.”

This impressed Fosse. “If there is a line that you take from somebody,” he said, “you acknowledge it. I never do. The sincerest form of flattery is to steal.” Clicking on the tape recorder, he asked, “When I had my heart attack during
Chicago,
when you knew that I wasn’t going to be back for rehearsals for a while, and that it might have meant closing down the show, what was your reaction?”

“I was horrified, Bob. I was disappointed and sad.”

“What about the rest of the people who were involved with the show? Was anybody happy?”

“No, nobody was happy.”

“I thought people were happy. Gwen told me a couple of people were happy.”

“Nobody was happy. It was the loss of a job if nothing else, and a concern for you, who we all clearly idolized.”

“What about Hal Prince?”

“What about Hal Prince?”

“When you and Kander went to Hal Prince to have him take over the show . . . You apparently thought I was going to die.”

The more Ebb denied, the harder Fosse pushed.

All through the summer of 1976, each of Fosse’s comrades got a phone call. Each was told to speak fearless truths about Bob Fosse; no matter how hurtful the revelations, he wanted everyone’s best shot. Herb Gardner said when Fosse openly
condemned himself, it was not to repent but to be absolved, to be forgiven by someone who then says, You’re wonderful, don’t be so hard on yourself, I love you. Gardner said the pity play was Fosse’s biggest con of all. Nicole confessed she knew all about
the girls, going back to Mary-Ann Niles. She confessed she knew he’d married Niles because she was pregnant. Verdon, interviewed by Aurthur, remembered
how Fosse, jealous of her talent, had hated her when they first met. Wasn’t she jealous of all his girls? Not really. She knew Death was the only real affair of his life. Ann admitted that he’d changed
after his operation. Chayefsky said he was punishing Ann
for making him fall in love with her. It’s the same story with every girl,
Hoffman said. Fosse starts as their gay best friend; that’s how he gets them. He loses them, Paddy said,
when things get serious and he knows he’s going to fail them. Then Fosse turns against them. Then, as he expected, he loses and—the slingshot draws back—Fosse is himself once again. He couldn’t have anyone love him. But, Dr. Sager explained, he let
himself be adored. For some reason, probably having to do with something that had happened to him as a kid in burlesque, he had to prove every woman was a whore. Those with self-respect would and should leave him. His only chance for love, Sager said, for a future, was Nicole.

As Fosse swam through these unvarnished opinions, in Quogue that summer, an idea for a ballet began to take shape. He imagined a company of boring businessmen aboard a cross-country flight from LA to New York, or vice versa. In midair, to the spoken music of a Richard Pryor or Bob Newhart monologue, an orgy breaks out aboard the plane, and as more suits are sucked in, the aircraft expands, opening up, pulling apart to clear space for the action, leaving only the movie screen and the seats to dance around. When the plane lands at the end of the ballet, the businessmen reach for their briefcases and walk off as they came on, as if nothing had happened. He wrote to Robert Joffrey in June 1976,
accepting an invitation he had been putting off answering for over a year, since his release from New York Hospital, an offer to give him an original Bob Fosse ballet. To at last measure his choreographic worth against ballet—perhaps the only true metric—was, at his age and in his condition, beginning to look like a now-or-never proposition.

But the ballet he imagined for Joffrey never got to Joffrey. It went instead to the movie Fosse was bringing to life with Bob Aurthur. Secluded in Quogue, the two Bobs took the best of their transcripts (almost a hundred, Fosse claimed
), and began to discuss
All That Jazz,
their unwritten movie about a director-choreographer tired of mounting the same old irrelevant musical comedies and striving to make a piece of meaningful entertainment before he dies. What scenes from Fosse’s life would make good scenes in Fosse’s movie? Using actual names,
an early scene at Wally’s would have Bob, Herbie, Paddy, and Sam discussing
NY to LA,
Bob’s next musical, which he’s dreading (“the thought of one more time step . . .”) but that he owes to Gwen, his estranged wife. There would be scenes from his past: strippers, an alcoholic mother, an absent father. The heart attack, the hospital. A hallucination. Coming to, Bob would tell Paddy and Herbie he has an idea: a movie of his life, strippers, mother, father, hospital, hallucination. Then a second heart attack, one he doesn’t survive. He’s dead. We cut to his memorial at Wally’s. Bob’s ghost is there, watching. He tries to get his guests’ attention. They don’t hear him. Why don’t they hear him? Someone has to hear him. Returning to the hospital, his spirit implores the sick and dying to enjoy their lives while they can, to live while they’re alive, and then in some middle-reality limbo apart from life and death, he sings a farewell number, maybe “Bye Bye Life,” borrowed from “Bye Bye Love.” Then his spirit expires. Hard cut: Bob’s time on earth is summed up in “interviews” with characters from the film, and
All That Jazz
ends on opening night of his last show,
NY to LA.
And it’s a hit. Hal Prince gets the credit.

Aurthur wrote a first draft quickly,
in a week, Fosse said. But the new story idea had changed their working relationship. Returning to the city, the Bobs were unsure of each other. Fosse’s idea for a limbo world between death and life worried the other Bob. It was too arty. Arty? Fosse countered. It’s my brain. As in: Not yours,
mine
. “Bob Aurthur said that I was crazy,
that it was far out, pretentious,” Fosse said. “But I saw a big room with cobwebs, junk, old scenery and costumes, theatrical memorabilia; the scene was in the character’s head and his head was a mess.” They were a long way from
Ending
and Paramount had let their option lapse, so Sam Cohn, in search of new funds, sent
All That Jazz
to Dan Melnick at Columbia. Cohn admired Melnick. He knew his boss, studio president David Begelman, had a solid history with Fosse and would be open to teaming again. And he was right. Columbia picked up
All That Jazz,
and Fosse signed on as director, coproducer, cowriter, and (though he denied it) subject of his autobiography. Emotionally and artistically, the project was without question the most ambitious work of his career and, judging by his constant cough, very likely his last. “I’ve only got one more film
in me,” he said to editor Craig McKay during
Thieves,
“and this is it.” McKay knew Fosse wasn’t talking about retiring. “He knew he was going,”
the editor said, “there was no question about that.”

Fosse flew to LA to meet with Melnick
and begin casting. Like most executives, Melnick dressed his Beverly Hills home with impeccable works of art and a kind of standard-issue modernism that told artists he was arty and his bosses that he wasn’t. Despite his house and shiny car, Melnick was New York all the way; Fosse liked that. His reputation tended toward the kinky, and his dark and wily appearance—he looked like a Jewish Cassavetes—did little to contradict it. Melnick wasn’t afraid of leveling with you; he was afraid of you thinking he was afraid to. So he leveled with you all the time, compulsively, sometimes on subjects he wasn’t quite prepared to level with you on, and if you asked for more, asked him to elaborate, he’d tell you, on the level, he wasn’t quite prepared to, probably relieved to finally be on the level with the level. He was a truth junkie; Fosse liked that too.

It was time to talk stars. Who would play the character they now called—borrowing from Chayefsky’s play
Gideon
—Joe Gideon? The studio encouraged Melnick to
encourage Fosse into casting an actor
likable
enough to undercut Gideon’s distasteful qualities. Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were obvious choices. But Beatty (after his customary
period of intense deliberation) asked Fosse to let Gideon live at the end, and Nicholson, who took Fosse to
a Laker game, wasn’t quite the dancing type—but that didn’t stop Jack from trying. When Fosse arrived at his house for a meeting, Nicholson came to the door in a pair of tap shoes. Fosse approached Dustin Hoffman, and Hoffman, an admirer of Bob Aurthur’s, read the script and found it surprisingly
moving, but he declined. Once with Fosse was enough. Keith Carradine?

In Hollywood, Fosse met Jessica Lange. On the verge of her film debut—the
King Kong
remake Boredom, Whimsy, and Flash had turned down—Lange was by all standards a beauty, airy like Marilyn Monroe but serene and more relatable. Few in Hollywood had any faith in her talent. “I think you’re wonderful,”
Fosse said. It was catnip to a young actress. “He befriended me in a very
unfriendly town,” Lange said. “I mean, he really cared about me and how I did. He was a great friend. Nobody was ever more loyal and caring than Fosse and I knew he wanted to do something for me.” In other words, they were lovers. He had her in mind for
All That Jazz,
for Angelique, the Angel of Death who presides over limbo, flirting Gideon’s life away from him. That’s how Fosse had always described his fascination with death—a flirtation. “This is a man who did not want
to die,” Reinking said. “But he did want to flirt.” Putting Lange in the role, he literalized the metaphor. “When you think something’s about to
happen to you in a car,” he said, “or on an airplane, coming close to The End, this is a flash I’ll get—a woman dressed in various outfits, sometimes a nun’s habit, that whole hallucinatory thing. It’s like the Final Fuck.”

Angelique, Fosse said, was the one
character Joe Gideon couldn’t bullshit. He expects her to be repulsed by the ugly, self-destructive aspects of his life, but in fact, destruction being her greatest achievement, the closer he comes to death, the more she loves him. Killing himself is wooing her. Fosse—the real Gideon—was practicing off camera. “He used to tell people
how he was trying to woo me,” Lange said; that is, he knew she was seeing someone else and wanted her all to himself. In New York, she came to one of Fosse’s parties with Charles Grodin, her
King Kong
costar. “He assumed she was my girlfriend,”
Grodin said, “and made a quick move on her, which I didn’t dispute. I guess he felt guilty [for trying to seduce her away] because he disappeared into another room and came back with a record from
Evita,
which hadn’t come to America yet.”

Still without a star, Fosse couldn’t move on
All That Jazz,
and he directed his attention to putting Ann Reinking into
Chicago.
After almost two years, Verdon was finally stepping out of Roxie; and in February of 1977, Reinking took off from
A Chorus Line
—she had taken over Cassie, the lead—to step in. Technique and personality made her, like Gwen, a Fosse dancer nonpareil, but their intimacy—unmatched by any other Fosse dancer—licensed both Svengali and Trilby to push her that much harder, and more than just her body.

“Is it good?”
he asked about the show one night.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s good.”

“You think it’s mediocre.”

“No, I think it’s
good.
”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Yes, Bob . . .”

He refused to accept it, so she reached for a dictionary and took him through each definition of
good.
There was no mention of mediocrity. “See?” she said. “I said
good
and I meant
good.
If you think it isn’t good, stop taking it out on me.”

“He was hooked on his stress,”
Reinking said. “He knew the stress was killing him and knew he couldn’t work without it. It was a drug like any other. I think that’s why he created his own bad guy, to push him. But then that persona which once helped him actually started to hurt him. It hurt his heart; it hurt his mind. It hurt me that people began to see him as so dark. But he wasn’t so dark. Not always.”

Dancer Laurent Giroux suspected Fosse didn’t want to be thought of as a nice guy. The two were at a party, standing in a corner, when Giroux decided to call him on it, to Fosse Bob Fosse.

“You know what?”
he said.

“What, Larry?”

“You know, with all the
black
and the
brooding
and the
women
and all this
stuff,
you don’t fool me one fucking bit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you and I know that underneath that rough exterior, you’ve got a heart of gold”—Giroux pinched his thumb and forefinger together—“
that
big.”