Fosse (60 page)

Fosse loved that. “Jesus, Larry, that’s good,” he said, his laugh taking over. “That’s really, fucking good.”

In a life apart from Paddy and Herb, Fosse indulged in good-time friendships with guys’ guys, like real estate maven Kenny Laub. Chartering a boat for an island vacation, Fosse and Laub could skim off the top where the deli boys plumbed and plumbed the depths. He might escape—to the extent that he could—the panics of work and kick back al fresco for a hot week on the sea. Laub said, “If Bob had a free evening
and didn’t have a broad he wanted to call, he wasn’t going to call Paddy. He was going to have some fun. I was his break and Bob took breaks as hard as he worked. He was an extremist, and fun was one extreme. Kindness was another.” Joining them on St. Martin might be Cy Coleman or Laub’s close friend the comedian Dick Shawn. There would be dancing, eating, and time enough for nothing at all. With girls. “On those trips,” Laub said, “I would
occasionally
see him reading on the beach.
Occasionally.
”

Partying with Fosse, Laub played among the beauty and beauties of show business, and Fosse, with Laub as his guide, reveled in New York’s other high life: money. Laub knew money. Fosse did not. At dinner at Elaine’s one night, Laub grinned across the table. “Bob,” he said, “we’re a bunch of chauvinist pigs.”

“Showbiz and women.” Fosse lit a cigarette. “Assholes and vaginas.”

Meanwhile,
All That Jazz
had no star, Columbia kept ordering changes to the script, and Fosse, getting less young every day, had to do something, anything, before Michael Bennett made his next move, before the clock ran out on Fosse’s knees, his back, his ventricles. He didn’t have much of an idea, but he had ideas—plural—for an all-dance show with no book and no story, a Broadway musical written the way Bob Fosse wrote, in dance. “I think he wanted to prove
to himself that just dancing was enough,” Reinking said. “That he could make a great show without the other elements.” In July 1977, a month after his fiftieth birthday, he stepped into Broadway Arts with no book, half a century of unsettled scores, and one question: How much did he know about dance?

Before it was too late, he wanted to see if he could carry a show, alone, on the strength of his own talents. He wanted to show those talents to be diverse, richer, and more expansive than his own style, having touched its bottom in
Chicago.
He wanted to escape the strictures of the musical for a paradise of free movement where no writer, designer, actor, or formal convention could stop him from checking off the ideas he had left to check off on his dream list. Refusing to be refused, he wanted to push the body farther than was healthy. He wanted to show that
A Chorus Line
had nothing to do with dance. He wanted to do a show about love, which is to say about dance, and he wanted to star. As
All That Jazz
was his life in death,
Dancin’
would be his life in dance, an autobiography of style. And it had to push him; merely too far was not far enough. For the project to interest Fosse,
Dancin’
would have to ask more of him, emotionally and artistically, than
Redhead,
The Conquering Hero,
Pippin,
or
Chicago
had and take him through a deeper pit to a deeper triumph.

Selecting the music was the closest he came to writing an actual book. To begin, Fosse delivered music director Gordon Harrell a list of potential songs twenty pages long. “I don’t know what I want
to do with these,” Fosse said, handing him the document, “but I circled seven or eight I know I want to use.” One of them was Benny Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing,” a piece Jack Cole had used in his club act. Another was Neil Diamond’s “Crunchy Granola Suite.”

Language had a ceiling. With Harrell as interpreter, Fosse spoke pre-verbally, in images and rhythms, groping through the air for a melody he could bring down to earth. “I want to do a number for two boys and two girls,” he might say, “and it needs to be Latin.” Then Harrell would fly off to the library or to his own record collection, spread samples before Fosse, and match music to notion. Once the piece had been selected, Harrell would break the score down into danceable phrases and counts and render it on piano for Fosse to test his body against. It didn’t always work out. Fosse took a Cat Stevens song to the mirrors and poked at it from all sides before turning back to Harrell with the verdict: “There’s nothing here for me.”

But it wasn’t always that clear. Often, as if he were auditioning a dancer he didn’t want to turn down, Fosse would have to exhaust his brain exhausting a song before he could permit himself to accept it had no life for him. But rather than fail the song, Fosse would fail himself. “I saw him in major black holes,” Harrell said. “He was paralyzed. Nothing happened. He was staring at the floor with his head between his hands. Not saying anything, not sharing anything, not emoting. He would go over to the window and look out and sort of like leave the room for a little while. Or he’d get on the phone and call Annie. I remember one day he put the stool into the middle of the room and sat there staring at himself in the mirror for a good thirty minutes. [Sometimes] this could go on for five minutes. Sometimes for half an hour. Sometimes all day and I would just sit there, stone-cold silent. I don’t get up, I don’t get a cup of coffee, I don’t play anything, I don’t even go to the bathroom. Only he could pull himself up from this bottom. The room was full of depression. You could feel his machinery had stopped working. Nothing could happen. At those points, no person—no Annie, no Sam Cohn, no Kathy Doby—could even get near Bob. People understood that without it being discussed. There were occasions when I would arrive at ten o’clock in the morning, and he would be looking like this, like Bob was caught out there looking for a clue or a stargate.”

But he could not force himself to move; he had to
be
moved. That’s what they were waiting for.

“Wait!” Fosse said. “Go back. Play me that section. Do it again.”

His body answered with a reflex, a snap—good. That was something.

“Okay, try that again.”

To the snap, a flicker was added, to the reflex a wink.

“Okay, if she’s gonna do
that,
then he’s—” He pointed at the piano. “Gordon, one more time.”

Taking it from the top, he worked on the mirror image. He’d keep switching invisible partners until the pieces fit together, then he’d call in Kathryn Doby and others, teach them, see it whole for the first time, and make the necessary improvements. His grandmother glasses dangling from a chain around his neck, his ash collecting on the lenses, Fosse would jimmy up the kneepads from his ankles and demonstrate what he couldn’t say, in gesture to his dancers, in
badda-dum
s to Harrell at the piano. “In a way, I was like a tailor,” Harrell said. “‘Take the coat out a little bit here. Hem that cuff there.’”

Harrell hauled in a trunk of percussion instruments to keep Fosse in the mood. Next to the piano, he kept a vertical stand of bells, a ratchet, and woodblocks in a half a dozen pitches. “Most choreographers would not be able to hear the difference between a piccolo woodblock and a bass woodblock, but Bob would know every time.” When Fosse connected to the rhythm, he could achieve a musical clarity uncommon to many professionals. Harrell was floored. “He’d say, ‘Put a wrist flick on the sixth count of the seven-eight of section C. I want a little
ting
right there.’” Micromanaging bodies and frames of film had been his prerogative for years, but excising the composer from the process, he could sweat the caesuras and sixteenth notes without objection.

Dancin’
was a playground without a chaperone. Reinking said, “He was moving closer
to absolute control.”

In the old days, before Nicole could dance or think, the love they had stayed at home, in the slivered hours Fosse carved off work. But when she was old enough to have an opinion, he unlocked the studio door
and treated her to his most vulnerable self. Looking to her face after a number, he got the truth no child could hide. At that age, Nicole was too young to tiptoe around his feelings and not yet old enough to know Balanchine or Robbins or what people wrote about him in the
New York Times.
She saw only good and bad. Fosse could count on that. As she grew older and prettier and stayed out later, they would cross paths in the elevator on the way home and walk their conversation into the living room. He would reach for a drink and put on a record and tell her about his day in the studio working on
Dancin’.

“Hey,” he said once. “You know what?”

She looked up—a teenage girl, admiring and faraway.

“Would you stand there, behind those glass doors, and do the ballet version of what I do?”

At night, with the lights turned down, figures on the other side of the glass doors looked out of focus, like memories.

The ballerina took her position behind the glass, and the hoofer changed the record to Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles.” At this point, it was just an idea his feet had: humble little taps.
Toe-toe, heel-heel
. Simple and depleted but crystal clear. Like an old-timer returning to the fundamentals. But the step did not take Fosse back to Bill Bojangles Robinson, the tap-dancing clown of vaudeville; Fosse’s Bojangles was not flashy; he was delicate, almost ghostly. “Don’t dance,”
he would tell one Bojangles, by which he meant, Don’t dance well. Bojangles is too tired for the precise angles and splayed fingers of showbiz Fosse. He’s a faded pair of slacks run through the washing machine too many times, the gutter soul of entertainment remembering all he was, which is all he has left. “I don’t want a caricature,”
Fosse would say. “You’ve got to feel this. This is sacred. This is me.” His memory—Nicole behind the glass doors—dances the same steps, but better, and with the glow of ballet to incarnate the grace he either had lost or had never had to lose. “The character of Bojangles never
danced well, no matter what his age,” Gordon Harrell said. “I’ve always thought the piece was about a phenomenon that exists in the dance world that every dancer faces—their time in the spotlight being very limited. Their bodies cannot sustain for very long the pressure and the pounding that dance requires. So, just as in the opera world, as the voice goes, the singer morphs (should he or she want to) into an extension of his career as a character opera singer.” At the end of his career, Fosse’s Bojangles is reduced to type: he dances in blackface, a panderer.

“It wasn’t that we drifted apart,”
Reinking said, “it was that we got too close. It scared the hell out of him.” Their old arguments, once fought
at surprise intervals, took permanent seats in the front rows of conversation. They knew every word. She wouldn’t live with the double standards and the jealousy. Yes, years ago she had said she could, and she’d tried to, but she couldn’t. She loved him too much for that. Maybe that was her failing (they both said), wanting to change him. Maybe it meant she didn’t love him enough. But she didn’t think so. Grievance begot grievance until blame engulfed their whole history, shared and apart, going back to their parents and their parents’ failures, until all they had left to condemn was fate, their shrinks, and DNA. That’s where the truth game always ended. But not fighting seemed like not talking, which was like not loving. “You only love me because I’m Bob Fosse,” Bob Fosse said to her. “You wouldn’t love me if I was a butcher.” That almost amused her. “Yes, I would,” she said, laughing, “because you’d be the best butcher on the block.” Hurt, he would try anything. “You know nobody loves me.” “Bob, that’s not true. You know that’s not true.” Then he would smile. “Yes, yes”—looking away—“I know that’s not true.” It was always going to be his mistake. Not just with her, with everyone. “Nobody’s wrong here,” Ann concluded. “Our dreams jibe but our reality doesn’t.”

It was a contagious theme that summer. Chayefsky had been working on
a story about alternate consciousnesses and the primal origins of human impulse, improbably inspired by Boredom, Whimsy, and Flash’s aborted
King Kong
jam many Wally’s dinners ago. Somehow the old Jekyll/Hyde dialectic had stuck in his brain’s craw. What,
really,
was “self”? What lived at the very bottom, and how do we get there? Chayefsky began with Freud, and the rest poured in behind him. Genetics, anthropology, biology, meditation, and isolation tanks chain-reacted a detailed outline for
Altered States,
a science-fiction postulate about a doctor, both Frankenstein and his monster, that devolves himself to an animal state. Dan Melnick convinced Chayefsky to make the outline a novel, sell the novel, sell
him
(that is, Columbia) the rights, then write the screenplay for the film, collecting a paycheck at every stop along the way. Chayefsky did—with troublesome side effects. Writing
Altered States,
his first (and only) novel, Chayefsky pushed through and peeled back so many skins upon skins of tender self-delusion and so pitilessly whipped his brain down to new and still newer depths on his way up to epiphany, he had a heart attack before completing the final chapter and woke up in the hospital. His doctors wouldn’t let him near a typewriter, so he smuggled in a notebook and scribbled away when no one was looking, at last finishing
Altered States.
He was discharged. As he and Fosse yin-yanged across their table at the Carnegie—where both ordered the pastrami, though they weren’t supposed to—so did
Altered States
and
All That Jazz;
the two works traded chromosomes, as
Chicago
and
Network
had years before. The razzle-dazzle of American media culture became the condition of modern consciousness. Showbiz wasn’t just on TV and in the White House; it was in Americans’ brains.

In that spirit, Chayefsky rolled a fresh page into his Olympia manual and, with the haiku economy of a master screenwriter, put down a few words about his funeral. “Our family has never taken death
all that seriously, and the main point of this testament is I don’t want my death taken all that seriously either,” he wrote. “Do what has to be done to maintain tradition and then back to the comfort of somebody’s home where I honestly wish everybody a good time.”