Fosse (6 page)

There had been so many out-of-town shows—Peoria, Springfield, Dubuque—not even Charles Grass could be sure where his seventeen-year-old Riff Brother met the older stripper who arrived, pregnant, on Sadie Fosse’s doorstep, long after Fosse had left for the navy. The woman told Mrs. Fosse
about the pregnancy, Grass recalled, “and Mrs. Fosse went to Mr. Weaver. She kept it quiet from the family and let Mr. Weaver handle it because he got him the job and Mr. Weaver, as the second father, should have told Fosse about the birds and the bees while he was on the road.” Weaver instructed Grass never to tell Fosse, as per his mother’s wishes, and Grass never did. “I want you to know,”
Weaver assured him, “I took care of it. It’s over with.” And Grass maintained Fosse never knew. “Mrs. Fosse,” he said, “was protecting her son.”

Fosse toured
Tough Situation
for three months, appearing almost a hundred times on the troop’s long way across the Pacific. The air transportation was nauseating, the weather was scorching, and the show was inane, but despite all that, and despite Fosse’s gloomy, lovesick heart, he rehearsed his numbers before every show and, when he wasn’t satisfied—which was always—after. Others in his company told him to take it easy. They said the soldiers, many of whom had been stationed out there for years, wouldn’t know the difference. They were too shell-shocked and show-starved to discern, let alone care, whether “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” was perfect or merely good enough. But Fosse cared; more than that—he feared. To the unyielding critic in his ear, the beaches were Broadway floorboards. Guam
was
the Palace, and
Tough Situation
was a rehearsal for auditions for more shows, which were auditions for more auditions. He couldn’t rest after the nineteenth run-through to treat his sunburn or sigh in relief because somebody somewhere would still be going, doing it again for the twentieth time. If he stopped now, if he allowed himself a breath, there’d be no one else to blame for failure.

Dancing alone in the forest,
he’d look up into the trees. He saw Japanese eyes watching him.

By the time
Tough Situation
touched down in Tokyo at the Ernie Pyle Theater, renamed after the Americans took Japan, Fosse had become the company star. He had even managed to squeeze a few of his own solos onto the bill and convince Papp to end
Tough Situation
with a version of his Andrews Sisters drag routine, a flash finish that would have made Mr. Weaver proud. They sold out the Pyle for five nights. The venue, at two thousand seats, was by far the biggest he’d ever played, and the Andrews Sisters bit went over beautifully. It was a delicious success, much of it Fosse’s, and for those five nights, he crowed. Then there were the days. America had won, but the destruction of Tokyo and the way his buddies treated Japanese civilians—the women in particular—horrified Fosse. He said, “That was the first time
I was really ashamed to be an American.”

L
IKE VAUDEVILLE, NEW YORK CITY
had something for everyone. Discharged from service in August 1946,
Fosse ran toward it. He sat front row at the Lower East Side’s scrappy circus of Jewish, Italian, and Russian routines; uptown, he passed the pinball machines and two-cent scams of Forty-Second Street; he swallowed up Third Avenue lying in the shadows of the El, waiting on the edge of town like a bum looking for a fight. They were all waiting for a fight. The Germans of Yorkville hated the Irish of Yorkville, and the Irish hated the Poles. They all hated the blacks. You’d hear stories about guys getting on the 2 train instead of the 1 train and ending up in Harlem with no taxi to get them back. Things were safer below Eighty-Sixth Street, near the old ladies of the West Side. All day they sat on benches in the median along Broadway. But only along Broadway. Columbus was too far in the wrong direction. Before white flight—highways ushering the rich into the suburbs—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, fat bankers, and politicians poured in together, climbing the crumbling walls along the Hudson, fighting for space, watching the other guys’ acts, learning them, absorbing them, topping them. The whole town was a mongrel work in progress.

All that cohabitation, all that bumping around, and it was only a matter of time before the right bumps begat a new species, only a matter of time before Richard Rodgers bumped Oscar Hammerstein II, who bumped Agnes de Mille, who bumped Rouben Mamoulian, and out came
Oklahoma!,
the first great musical. “In a great musical,”
wrote Richard Rodgers, “the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look. That’s what made
Oklahoma!
work. All the components dovetailed.” The reason for dovetailing music with lyrics with dance with story seems obvious today, but by 1943, it happened only piecemeal—a little in
Show Boat,
a little more in
Pal Joey,
and even more in
Lady in the Dark
—because a musical didn’t have to be good to be fun, and before
Oklahoma!,
fun was really all a show needed to be.

At long last, the musical was no longer a bauble; it was an art form. Prescient, focused, and seriously assembled, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Oklahoma!
brought content to the routinely replagiarized flapper vaudevilles of the twenties and thirties. Most of those shows’ songs, many of them lovely Porter and Gershwin numbers, were unrelated to what was going on onstage, which wasn’t much to begin with (mistaken identities, rags-to-riches stories), and had even less to do with what was going on in real life.
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
put a stop to that; they made singing about the world a very serious, very dramatic thing, and they turned choreography—once just a fancy word for dancing around—into an integral part of the story. Witness the
Oklahoma!
dream ballet, “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.” Make that
Agnes de Mille’s
dream ballet; fusing character and movement, traditional ballet and colloquial ease, it could have been no one else’s. The choreographer had a point of view: her own. And it was about something. As the ballet’s title implies, Laurey makes up her mind
in
the dance, so the number is, like any good dramatic scene, an essential and revelatory part of the musical. “Many a somber problem play,”
wrote
New York Times
dance critic John Martin, “has been built on just such a question of emotional compulsions and has failed to illuminate it half so clearly after several hours of grim dialogue. Yet this is a ‘dance number’ in a ‘musical show’!”

In those days, there was a theater with a big Broadway musical on every corner, and on every corner, there was a bevy of chorus girls looking for fun—good odds for a twenty-one-year-old sailor back from the war, and better odds for a sweet and sexy one like Bob Fosse, who could pivot between a “Geez, I dunno . . .” and a “Whaddaya doing later?” in a single motion. He was that good. “When he talked to you,
you just felt,
Oh my God. He’s in love with me,
” said casting director Lynne Carrow. “He had a personality that drew you in. He could just click with you and pull you into his world. The touching, the looking, the little smiles as he’s talking to you. I don’t want to call it flirting because I think that’s just how he naturally was, but maybe that’s why he was such a good flirt. Just talking to him was a sensual experience.”

In his cupcake way he mastered the art of not taking no for an answer. Even the girls who saw it coming were caught off-guard. That’s how good he was; he could sell without selling. The girl would be upstairs with him, not knowing how she got there, and downstairs the next day, hoping to see him again. His competition didn’t get it. “I had always wondered why
he was always able to get all these girls,” said producer Robert Greenhut. “So I asked this one stripper I knew he slept with, ‘What is it about Fosse that he’s always able to . . . you know. Why is he like flypaper to you guys?’ She says, ‘He is the greatest lay I have ever had in my life. There is absolutely no one more sexually competent than this man.’ And she said his shyness was the thing that gets you to begin with. And I said, ‘Well, okay. At least now I know.’”

And more girls were always around the corner. This was New York, after all, a city of corners. This was Broadway, land of the chorus girl. The streets were ablaze with talent, and there were more than enough to go around. But the girls didn’t go around; they all went back to Fosse. “I think everyone was attracted to him,”
said sound mixer Christopher Newman. “Man, woman, piano. It didn’t matter. He was insanely attractive.” The preponderance of gay men in the dance world elevated Fosse to the role of high satyr almost instantly; he was more than just cute, fun, and a whiz on two feet; he was, to the fervent girls of Broadway, at the top of a very short list. The way he looked at you, you knew you were on the top of his list too. “It was like you were in a tunnel,”
recalled Trudy Ship, assistant editor on
Lenny
and
Liza with a Z.
“He made incredible eye contact and asked you questions. Who were your parents? Where were you born? He oozed sexuality and he was so sweet about it too.”

Fosse’s bed at the YMCA
on Thirty-Fourth and Ninth wasn’t easy to get girls to, but it was a convenient walk to Broadway and, at thirty-five cents a day, ideal for a jobless ex-sailor with only a few hundred bucks in his wallet. Full of servicemen, the Thirty-Fourth Street Y, an imposing brick tower with a red neon sign buzzing
Sloane House,
was the largest YMCA in the city. The building had over a thousand rooms, not all of them equipped with private bathrooms, so Sloane’s communal showers turned social, and Sloane House, also known as the French Embassy, became one of Manhattan’s most popular gay spots. Were it not for some uncomfortable bathroom attention, Fosse might have actually gotten a kick out of the place, where guests were known by their room numbers, and their keys passed through a complicit concierge. Citing the
C
in
YMCA,
scandalized members of the management hired security guards to patrol the showers, but the joke was on them: most of the guards joined in the fun.

Fosse didn’t have to hang around Sloane House for long. One of his navy buddies had introduced him to MCA agent Maurice Lapue, formerly of the adagio dance team Maurice and Cordoba, and Lapue signed Fosse right away. Days later, sporting his freshly pressed sailor suit and a discharge button on his lapel, he appeared before composer Lehman Engel to audition for a part in
Call Me Mister.

“Sing first,”
Engel said.

“I better dance first.”

It was only his second audition, but Fosse got the job—and a pretty good one too. As the dance lead in the national production of
Call Me Mister,
he’d tap and sing (in his thinner-than-Chet-Baker’s voice), touring the country’s biggest second-tier theaters, finally a full-time show-business professional. A homecoming revue with songs by Harold Rome and sketches by Arnold Auerbach,
Mister
was basically for laughs: half sketches, half song and dance, and featuring an eclectic company of unknowns, from bass-baritone William Warfield to tap dancer Marian Niles to comics Buddy Hackett and Carl Reiner. The singers sang, the dancers danced, and the comics told jokes. In those days, no single person had everything.

Buddy Hackett was a trenchant wiseguy, Damon Runyon with a Catskills twang. One of his favorite bits, “The Farting Contest,”
pitted two guys against each other in a kind of boxing match with farts for punches. It was a sketch he liked to follow with his Peter Lorre impression. Like the hippo he resembled, he could charge an innocent passerby if the spirit moved him, barking expletives like a stripper at a speakeasy raid, then laugh and do it again. City born and raised, Hackett introduced Fosse to another side of all-night New York, leading him to underground clubs and dancehalls, tutoring him in the unwritten history of hipster comics and the wide world of Jewish shtick. Best friends, they hung out every night; by day, they rehearsed the show.

Fosse was obsessed. “He was always there early,”
Carl Reiner said, “warming up and doing his steps over and over again, and he was always making up new steps, always inventing. When the rest of us were resting, there was Bobby, getting there early to invent.” He was inventing himself a little too. Fosse’s
Call Me Mister
bio, which cited his tour of “fashionable bistros of the middle-west,” was less actual than aspirational, obliquely disclosing a deep-down, never-to-be-resolved affliction of class—as in, he thought he had none. If they liked his act, he fooled them. “Bobby had the first-act finale number,” Reiner said. “It was the signature song, ‘Call Me Mister,’ and he had a very big dance specialty in it, a solo. I was a floorwalker in the number, he was a customer, and he was dancing around getting clothes for this soldier coming out of the army. And he was just brilliant—so flashy—and he wasn’t going to let anyone get in his way. Even then he had that kind of ambition. One very funny thing I’ll always remember is, at one point he had leaped offstage—stage right—and my entrance was timed to his leap-off. So one day I took a head-start run before I leaped onto the stage just as he was leaping off and as we crossed in the air—I’ll never forget—he said to me, ‘Carl, I’m the lead dancer and you’re outjumping me!’ It was fantastic! Later, he said, ‘Why don’t you land over there, in that third of the stage?’ And I said, ‘But all I can
do
is jump! You dance. My thing is I jump!’ Anyway, we laughed about that, I remember.”

No one was more committed. “At the end of that number,”
dancer Jeanna Belkin said, “Fosse, who was featured, had to do
à la seconde
turns and very quickly in a two-four tempo. When the curtain started coming down, Marian Niles and I, watching from the wings, would rush downstage at just the right time to stop him from spinning into the curtain. He was that involved in the dance. He was that passionate.” This happened every night. And every night, Niles reached out to save him.

Call Me Mister
opened in New Haven, after which it moved on to Philadelphia and then Boston; it played to loving audiences and solid reviews for five months—a long time. “We had a pretty crazy company,”
said Reiner. “People were fighting, people were falling in love.”