Fosse (64 page)

After the final shot of the day, Fosse poured himself an ice-cold glass of Pinot Grigio—a signal to all that land was in sight. A round of tired applause followed Fosse and his A-team into a van that took them to dailies, where more wine awaited them—but not to party with. “Dailies are for work, not for popcorn,”
cinematographer Giuseppe Rottuno said in his rickety English. To protect his focus, Fosse sequestered himself with Heim in the back of the theater, behind Rottuno, a bite-size giant renowned for his work with Visconti and Fellini. Fosse’s “Peppino, what would Fellini do here?”
was met regularly with Peppino’s “Bob, what would
you
do here?” “No one was even allowed to laugh,”
Lynn Lovett said, “not even at the funny parts. Fosse thought dailies were where you went to learn what you were doing wrong.”

While Fosse filmed, Heim and associate editor David Ray synced dailies in their editing suite in the Brill Building, directly across from 1600 Broadway, where Fosse had cut
Lenny
and
Cabaret.
At some point or another, virtually every editor and every director in New York made that square block of midtown his or her home away from home, but only Fosse’s team was working with shooting ratios of twenty to one,
more than Fosse had ever shot on a single picture, and far more than Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese, or Robert Benton—neighbors and hall mates—ever expected to.

But all that film did not necessarily grant Alan Heim freedom to discover. Unlike
Lenny,
written linearly in large, spacious scenes that allowed Heim to jazz freely from sound to image and unearth his own hidden links,
All That Jazz
’s script, which had been written with Fosse time already built into it, somewhat constricted Heim. “It made it difficult to move
things around,” Heim said, “to discover, the way we had on
Lenny.
” Assistant Wende Phifer sensed his frustration. “At times, Alan felt like he was
working as a pair of hands,” she said. Why shoot so much film if you’re not going to use it? Why get all those angles if the picture’s already cut on paper? Having lived with
All That Jazz
in some form for so long—to some degree, his whole life—Fosse found that releasing it from his imagination to the noisy rewind wheels of Heim’s Moviola was, as David Ray said, “a process of slowly waking up
from the dream where everything’s possible.” That was a death Fosse had to grieve. “When I was younger, the ideas would just come naturally to me,” he told Ray late one night in the Brill Building. “Now I have to struggle. I have to think things through. It’s like a deadness.”

Fosse’s despair bewildered Ray. He thought
All That Jazz
had the best footage of Fosse’s career, some of the best film he had ever seen—gorgeous, layered, tough, ecstatic, funny, depressing. But Ray wouldn’t show his enthusiasm. “Bob wanted you to be hard on him,” he said, “so it was difficult to say you liked it, and I really liked it. I loved it.” On guard for yes men, Fosse was near inconsolable. “There’s no dress rehearsal for life,”
he told Phifer. “This is it. Every day, every moment,
this
is the show.” Biographical incisions crosscut Fosse into his own life, from the screen to his past. “Everyone left in my family has heart disease,” he confessed as they cut the open-heart-surgery footage. Outside their window, the lights came on over midtown, and he sang the blues about his father, a slumped, potato-faced runner-up who used to dress in drag and sing and dance at family gatherings. “That unnerved Bob,” Phifer said. “Talking about his dad made him uncomfortable.” Cutting the flashback scene of the young Joe Gideon, backstage, ensnared by strippers, he said, “That’s exactly what it was like.”

They shot the scene in the cramped underground dressing room at the Village Gate, mostly unchanged since the forties.
Keith Gordon played the young Joe Gideon (Danny Ruvolo, originally cast in the part,
had been killed in a car crash). This was Gordon’s biggest and best role yet, and he was incredibly nervous the day of the shoot.
On top of the nervousness, he felt unworthy. And he sensed Fosse was doing it—
he
was making him feel bad. He hadn’t said anything to Gordon all day, and the kid was beginning to blame himself. Had he done something wrong? Wasn’t Fosse supposed to be engaging him, pushing him farther and deeper, the way he had, so famously, pushed Valerie Perrine to her Oscar-nominated performance in
Lenny
? Gordon knew better than to interrupt Fosse, who was whispering to Peppino in a corner of the set, but if he didn’t ask for direction, he might fumble the scene and end up alienating his director even more.

The sexual nature of the scene intensified Gordon’s anxiety. Of the three naked strippers, one was actually a man, and one—a haggard, drunken actress in middle age—told him, between takes, exactly how she was going to fuck him when the shoot was over. Reporting this to Fosse would only make him look even more like an amateur, so Gordon had to keep it to himself and roll with the punches like a pro. But he wasn’t a pro. At seventeen, he hadn’t had any real sexual experience—less, in fact, than most boys his age. Really, he knew more about acting than girls.

Gordon looked up. Fosse, stepping through a cloud of smoke, was coming toward him. Finally, he thought, peace of mind. The guidance he was looking for.

“It would be great,” Fosse murmured, “if you could really get hard in this scene.”

Gordon said nothing.

“It would look more real that way.”

Fosse walked away.

He’d failed before he had even begun. Even if he could get an erection, which he surely couldn’t under those hot lights and with the entire crew watching him, the fear of humiliation would destroy his concentration. So either way—pleasing Fosse or disappointing him—Gordon would be failing, as an actor and as a man. The scene was ruined. “Looking back,” Gordon said, “I realize that was exactly what he was going for—getting that panic on my face.”

“That’s exactly what it was like,”
Fosse had said to Phifer. “It was too much for a kid.” And yet he never spoke of Gideon as “me,” and he recoiled when Heim pointed out the obvious similarities. Preempting charges of egomania, Fosse encouraged people to think of his creation as just that—a creation. But his artistic principles undercut the impulse; obsessed with truth, he invited the comparison, even welcomed it, down to the address on Joe Gideon’s bottle of Dexedrine—61 West Fifty-Eighth Street—a made-up address three numbers from 58 West Fifty-Eighth Street, his own.

More footage came in all the time. Struggling to lead his crew through a particularly tricky shot, Fosse called for ten and excused himself from the set to visit the lucky dancing shoes he kept in his dressing room. On his way back he ran into sound mixer Christopher Newman. “What’s going on here?
Why can’t we get this?”

“The crew’s tired,” Newman explained.

“Why are they so tired?”

“They don’t take the same kind of pills you do.”

Genuinely surprised, Fosse asked, “How do you know about the pills?”

“I read the script.”

“Well, don’t let it get around.”

Delays persisted to such an extent, Sidney Lumet had to drop out to keep his own film on schedule, and Sam Cohn kept an eye out for replacements. In dailies with Robert Young’s
Rich Kids,
Cohn tugged at John Lithgow’s sleeve. “Hey, could you do this role
for Bobby?” Lithgow didn’t hesitate. “Fosse loved the character of Lucas Sergeant,” Lithgow said, “because it was a devilish parody of every one of his rivals: Mike Nichols, Hal Prince, Michael Bennett, Gower Champion. He would make wonderful withering jokes at their expense as he was directing the scenes.” Rehearsing one of Lithgow’s two scheduled scenes, a “seduction” of Sergeant by a traitorous producer, Fosse caught Lithgow lasciviously drumming his fingers as he contemplated the producer’s offer. “That was great,” Fosse said after the run, “make sure you drum your fingers in the shot.” No one in Fosse’s shot, Lithgow realized, was exempt from choreography. Even sitting, actors were dancing.

“Hey, John,” Fosse said at the end of their second scene. “Do you think you might be able to come up to SUNY Purchase with us?”

“Sure. What for?”

“‘Bye Bye Life,’” Fosse said. “The big rock number in the end. I want you to be in the crowd.”

He wanted everyone to be in the crowd—everyone important to Joe Gideon and, in most cases, important to Bob Fosse—to watch Gideon, hallucinating in reality, sing goodbye in his mind, absolved by all for all in his last moments of consciousness.

There was no time to skip shooting
on New Year’s Eve 1979. In between gifts and champagne, the crew filmed every variation on Joe Gideon’s bathroom ritual. Fosse staged his daily round of pills, Alka-Seltzer, eye drops, and—hands out in front—“It’s showtime, folks” directed at a mirror framed in lights, evoking an actor’s dressing room before he hits the stage, and a stage is what Gideon’s life is, where his performance of lies, charm, and denial—of his condition, of reality—rivals the razzle-dazzle it’s his job to create.

Fosse’s clever arrangement of musical numbers describes a feature-length surrender of outer razzle-dazzle to inner. From the opening cattle-call number, “On Broadway,” to Gideon’s imagined “Bye Bye Life,”
All That Jazz
fades from stage-bound numbers set in naturalistic theatrical environments to performances staged in the cluttered proscenium of Gideon’s mind, a descent from consciousness to the surreal. As
Cabaret
twisted entertainment to show corruption (and vice versa), and
Lenny
structured Bruce’s monologues to better “sing” his life (and vice versa),
All That Jazz
slowly erases the line between onstage and off-, bullshit and truth, finally wedding the creative impulse to death. Death, Fosse’s entertainment says, actually gives life; so-called life is just a vaudeville. And vice versa.

“I hate show business,” Joe says to Katie.

“But, Joe, you
love
show business.”

“That’s right.” He tips his hat. “I can go either way.”

As Gideon comes to his end and his numbers leave the stage, the “Showtime!” affirmations begin to lose their pep, one by one. Slight variations in tempo and imagery convey the physical breakdown Fosse pairs to Gideon’s mental breakdown, the stripping away of pretense that leads him to recognize the bullshit in his own work. Gideon’s deconstruction of his “Take Off with Us” number—adapted from the airplane orgy ballet Fosse considered mounting for Joffrey—shows his creative and destructive processes to be one and the same, a Möbius strip of relief and despair, death and imagination. Beginning as a light, family-friendly frolic (“Thanks a lot, but it’s not exactly over yet”), “Take Off with Us” shatters into “Airotica,” a dark burst of sexual fragments (“Now Sinatra will never record it”). Death brings him to the light.

With “Airotica” choreographed and ready to shoot, Fosse announced, in front of the dancers, that he wanted the number to climax with Cheryl Clark taking her top off and writhing on the scaffolding. Clark was stunned; she’d already screen-tested in a sexy black top; she’d already recorded the vocals. No one had said anything about nudity. “This was Friday night,”
she recalled, “and the number was going to be shot Monday. That was like having a gun to my fucking head.” When she resisted, Fosse escorted her to a back office at Astoria Studios where he could attempt to manipulate her in private. She cut him off before he could.

“Bob, there’s no nudity clause in my contract.”

“There isn’t?”

“You know there isn’t.”

He tried to whimper. “But it will save the number . . .”

“I’ve seen you exploit girls since I was twenty-one years old and you’re not going to exploit me.”

She walked off the picture. With no time to lose, Fosse called Sandahl Bergman
in LA and convinced her to get on a plane, right away (“I need a favor,” he said), to dance the topless lead in “Airotica.” It was a bittersweet offer. Bergman had grown up with Cheryl Clark in Kansas—they had had the same dance teachers; their moms were best friends—and she knew filling in for her would be seen as a kind of betrayal. “It was a horrible situation,” Bergman said. “I felt bad for Cheryl, I felt bad for me.” The next morning, a car picked her up at JFK and drove her to Astoria, where she learned the number in three days.

After they shot it, Fosse took Bergman out to a thank-you dinner. Early in the meal, he put on his little-boy face.

“The dailies, they’re really stunning. Everyone thinks you’re really good.”

She nodded, smiled.

“Sandahl, I’m behind schedule. They’re on me.”

This was not a lie. He had shut down production for three full weeks to rehearse “Airotica,” running up further delays and expenses. It was extreme even for Fosse; he used over twenty-five setups to shoot the number, vowing to an incredulous Albert Wolsky that each would
make its way into the final cut (they all would). And now he was paying for all of it. Or, rather, Melnick was.

“I’d like to call up Danny Melnick,”
Fosse told Bergman, “and I’d like to invite him to dinner with us. I think maybe . . . you and he—”

She knew then he was pimping her. “Bob, if you call Melnick, I’m leaving.”

(Fosse didn’t call Melnick. He didn’t get more money.)

The film’s finale—opening night of Gideon’s
NY to LA,
which debuts, appropriately, after Gideon’s death—was scheduled to film at the grand concert hall at SUNY Purchase toward the end of the shoot. It would follow “Bye Bye Life.” The film’s sendoff, the opening-night number needed to up the ante on all that had preceded it, and as Gideon’s last testament (for which Lucas Sergeant gets the credit), it needed to be a tour de force for maximum irony. Fosse and designer Tony Walton had the whole thing figured:
NY to LA
would begin as a Flentrop tracker organ, one of the largest portable organs in existence, is rolled onstage, completely concealed by a scrim of the New York skyline, with a skyscraper hiding every pipe. A dramatic cross-fade would reveal the organ, transforming it into the city, and then, with a mighty chord, the organ was to slide offstage, revealing LA, this time a palm tree hiding behind every pipe. All hail Lucas Sergeant, genius of Broadway.