Fosse (66 page)

“I still have one artery partially clogged,”
Fosse admitted in November 1979. “I may get a slight chest pain. Then I just sit down and take a pill.”

Heim got most of his work done during the day, not cutting on the beat. “If you stay on the beat,”
he said, “it becomes too rhythmic. But if you go by the motions of the dancers or the dancers’ body parts, it becomes a different experience.” Their task was to find and refine visual rhythms and layer them on the eye like phyllo dough. Though confined by the script, Heim cut with New Wave curiosity, dodging time frames and mind frames and circumventing the linearity of the Hollywood musical so skillfully, one couldn’t be sure the whole of
All That Jazz
wasn’t a flashback confessed to Death in Gideon’s final moments or if the Angel of Death was merely another piece of hallucinatory razzle-dazzle he invented to comfort himself.

As they neared a rough cut, Fosse helped Gwen get the first national tour of
Dancin’
on the road. With Gail Benedict, Gwen had been overseeing the Broadway production since Kathryn Doby left for
All That Jazz,
and not always, Doby thought, with perfect results. “Gwen was trying to make it
a little easier on the national company,” Doby said, “and we came into a little conflict on that. She was practical. She wanted the shortcut. But I wanted it the way Bob wanted it.” Intent on derivations unknown to others, Gwen asserted, often correctly, her expert authority. “That’s not how we used to do
that step,” she said to Benedict on “Percussion III,” a number she said came from “Who’s Got the Pain?” Who could argue with her? In the absence of Fosse, Verdon was the law. “Gwen was obviously territorial
with her knowledge, which was considerable,” one dancer said. “That cut both ways.” She could share Fosse with other women, but she wasn’t prepared to cede his style; it was her bloodline. It was her legacy.

Despite mixed reviews,
Dancin’
was a smash hit on Broadway (and would run through 1982), an achievement Fosse attributed partially to discomania.
Thinking franchise, he considered making a documentary about the show, a hybrid half-performance, half-backstage account of the complete
Dancin’
experience. “I’d want to see your quick changes
and everything else backstage,” he said to Blane Savage, “the show behind the show.” And down to the smallest detail. “When I film the section when Charles
Ward is doing his solo,” he said to Wayne Cilento, “I’m going to film you in the bathroom taking a pee.” Fosse entertained the notion of doing
Dancin’ Too,
but got only as far as the studio before he concluded, “I’d never do that to a dancer again.”
Keeping the national and Broadway outfits at their best would be enough. He’d occasionally appear at the Broadhurst unannounced. Shows, like people, were capable of lying, but observing incognito, Fosse could catch them with their guard down. From their place onstage, dancers could see his ropey silhouette passing the exit signs. “That put the fear of God in us,”
dancer Bill Hastings said.

Fosse watched “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man,” a full-company number inspired by a classic Astaire dance in
The Belle of New York,
fall flat with the audience. Aggrieved to see his life’s motto in critical condition, he called a rehearsal for the next day.

Fosse began the rehearsal sharpening the company’s coordination, drilling the exact tilt of their heads into the neuronal grooves he’d designed for their safekeeping. But repeating the steps changed little; their “Dancin’ Man” was uninhabited. They weren’t dancing
from
anywhere, and clearly they had no idea what they were singing. Fosse swore aloud and stormed to the back of the studio. “How do I get you people to
dance?
” he yelled, and then, “Just play the song again. Just
listen.
” With piano:

I wanna be a dancin’ man

While I can

Gonna leave my footsteps on the sands of time

If I never leave a dime

Never be a millionaire

I don’t care

I’ll be rich as old King Midas might have been

Least until the tide rolls in.

“‘While I
can,’
” he insisted.

They didn’t speak.

“‘While I
can.’
”

Still nothing.

“Do you understand? The sand, the
tide.
Then what?
Sand.
It’s gone. The tide always comes in, okay?” He looked around the room to see if he was connecting. “This is
your
story,
our
story.”

They gathered with him at the piano. “He went through the song line by line,” Bill Hastings remembered, “and reminded us of how much we give up to dance. We give up family. We give up wealth. We take a brutal beating daily, physically, emotionally, and in the business. And the world thinks we’re crazy for doing it. Our time to do what we love is very short. Bankers do what they do until they’re eighty, ninety, a hundred. They get rich. Our legacy is the sand.” Beginning with the original company, dancers spoke of the verse containing the lyrics “the sands of time” as the prayer section. “He got introverted when he was
showing me those steps,” said John Sowinski. “It was a personal, almost private thing he was doing with his body. He was relating to himself.”

At the show that night, as the orchestra played the entr’acte, the “Dancin’ Man” dancers took their marks behind the curtain. Hastings said, “Normally, we’d be relaxed,
some of us talking softly to one another. That night we were perfectly still. Then the curtain went up.” This time it was from the inside.

“In the end,” Reinking said, “no matter what it does to us, we’re lucky to have passion.”

A glass of white wine in his hand, Fosse presided over
All That Jazz
’s sound mix. He was in the booth with music editor Michael Tronick, who was seated at the console just above Fosse, awaiting the next take, his gaze fixed to the screen. They were working on a particularly challenging Trumpet passage in “Bye Bye Life.” If Tronick missed the cue by a quarter of an inch, Fosse would catch it. His hand would shoot up from below, signaling
too loud
with a friendly wave. “There’s a section,”
Tronick recalled, “when Ben [Vereen] is saying, ‘More! Give it to me! More! Give it to me,’ with a repeat of the brass. If I was off by one perf—and there are four perfs per frame and twenty-four frames per second, so there are ninety-six perfs a second—so if you’re off one-ninety-sixth of a second, Bob would hear it.”

Through twelve-hour days, he never flagged. Still dissatisfied with Scheider’s cough, which he had revised all through rehearsal and filming, Fosse announced, finally, he was going to record it himself. Ditto the foley work on Keith Gordon’s tap dance and the finger snaps in “Airotica.” His savage engagement with the subatomic captured their devotion. “Here I am surrounded by all these creative people,” he mused aloud, “why can’t we figure it out?” It was a genuine question, plainly expressed.
Really, why
can’t
it be perfect?
Does anybody here know?

Fosse’s early cast and crew screening of
All That Jazz
was an uncomfortable, revelatory experience for many, rife with pity and anger, for him and for themselves. Few saw it for what it was; they analyzed the picture as if it were Fosse. He/it was egomaniacal, narcissistic (an old favorite), courageous, immature, brilliant, fake Fellini—
4
¼! It/he was announcing suicide, crying out for attention, apologizing, pleading to be understood, asking to be crowned a genius. It was a Rorschach. “It gave him pleasure to feel that he was being betrayed. He wanted to be the victim,”
Fred Ebb reasoned. “It was all about Bobby pretending
to be honest,” Kander said. “He was saying, ‘I’m not worth much, but everyone around me is worth even less.’” “When I saw it, I was devastated,”
said Gordon Harrell, “I thought,
My God, I’ve been working for a madman.
But at the same time I suddenly understood his moody moments.” Harrell was too overcome to face Fosse after the screening. As the lights came up over the closing credits, he left through a side exit and ran into the street.

Fosse leaned in to Ben Vereen. “What do you think?”

Vereen said, “I have to go for a walk.”

Fosse anticipated extreme reactions, even backlash. Not just from the critics; from the people he worked with. Fred Ebb, Stephen Schwartz, Hal Prince, countless producers. “He felt guilty about some of
the putdowns he put into the movie,” Reinking said. “He knew Joe was going to be tough, and he didn’t want people to misread him.”

He implored Reinking to believe he didn’t intend it to hurt anyone. “I really am a nice guy,” he insisted. “I really, really am.”

She had seen him cry before, but never had she seen him break down. “
I
know you’re not that mean. Why didn’t you make him more like you?”

“I couldn’t make them like Joe Gideon because otherwise they wouldn’t get the moral of the story.”

Reinking did not need this explained. “
All That Jazz
is about show business can kill you,” she would say. “Devoting yourself exclusively to your craft is like an all-protein diet. You may not be hungry, but you’re going to starve to death. You need other things. And Bob knew it was killing him, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He was hooked. That’s why I think
All That Jazz
is very moral, because it says don’t do this. You’ll lose yourself.”

A private screening for Gwen, Nicole,
Paddy, Herb, and Sam amounted to a mixed reaction. Fosse was desperate for their feedback, but they were slow to offer it. Nicole hedged longest. She was seventeen now, old enough to have a serious opinion, to hurt and be hurt like an adult. Fosse waited for her reaction in the theater lobby after the screening, but she and Gwen evaded him that night. Overcome with feeling, they walked in silence all the way to Gwen’s apartment, unsure of what to think or say. Then Nicole stopped. She looked straight ahead. “You know,” she said, “the daughter was the only one who cared whether he lived or died.”

Gwen called Bob to tell him that.

The most trying screening of all still lay ahead of him. That summer, Fosse flew to California to watch the film with the executives at Fox. By then Laddie had resigned, leaving a new team in charge. “I can’t walk into one of those
offices without feeling twelve years old,” Fosse said. “Those guys intimidate me, they all have Gucci shoes.” Fox’s most powerful “guy” turned out to be Sherry Lansing, Melnick’s protégée, and they got on instantly. “Bobby had this boyish charm and enthusiasm,”
she said, “and his pain and vulnerability were right out there for you to see.” Sharp, accomplished, humble—a math teacher before she became
a model—Lansing was now the president of 20th Century Fox, which made her the first female head of production at a Hollywood studio.

Fosse was late the day of the screening. His wingman Dan Melnick took the floor and smiled at the silence. “Bob’s in the bathroom,”
he announced, “throwing up.”

By the end of the picture, Lansing was in tears, “probably the only studio president ever,” she would say, “to sob at a screening.” She declared
All That Jazz
an absolute masterpiece, said she thought it was one of the best pictures she had ever seen and one of the greatest in the history of film. (“I still do. It still is.”)

With nothing to do but wait, Fosse’s pre-release terror turned to depression. “I really think Bob Fosse thought
he was going to die after
All That Jazz,
” Lynn Lovett said. “I think afterward he was sort of like, ‘I already died. I wrapped it up.’ I’m sure he enjoyed the rest of his life, but I think he was almost embarrassed to still be alive.” He disappeared to his apartment, then turned on the TV and disappeared again.
“I guess I’m very tired,” he told a visiting reporter. “I sit in there like some brainless thing watching game shows. People win prizes and jump on each other and kiss, and it makes me sad that they’re so happy. I get all weepy. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. It suddenly breaks my heart, like there’s something I’m missing out on.” He wasn’t with Annie, he wasn’t with Jessica, he wasn’t with Julie. “You always think, this will be the one—the one who’ll alter your life. With [Julie Hagerty], I tried harder than I used to.” He was fifty-two. That was too old. “Julie seemed depressed
and hopelessly in love,” Lynn Lovett observed. “Fosse would say, ‘You need someone younger. Someone who isn’t going to die on you.’ But she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.”

While Janice Lynde was in town
for a TV show, Fosse let her (and her dog) use his office as a temporary apartment. To make her early call in Brooklyn, Janice had to get up at 4:30, hours before anyone at 850 Seventh even thought about coming in. One morning, she heard a scratching at the door.

“Hello?”

“Janice, are you awake?” It was Fosse.

She opened the door to find him leaning against the frame, smoking and crying.

“I’ve done the worst thing in the world,” he said, referring to
All That Jazz
. “They’re going to call it Fosse’s ego trip. Why did I do this?” The film was opening the following day.

“It may get mixed reviews, but it’s brilliant.”

“They’re gonna kill me, they’re gonna kill me, they’re gonna kill me . . .”

Janice looked at the clock. “Come on,” she said. “You’re going to Brooklyn with me.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You’re not going to sit here and drink all day. Come on.”

She packed him in the limousine, and together they drove down to the studio. While Janice filmed, he waited in her dressing room, his cap pulled over his eyes.

As expected, the critical response to
All That Jazz
verged on manic depression. But it made headlines. Listening to his advisers, Fosse toured talk shows with uncommon compliance (
Today, Dick Cavett, Tomorrow with Tom Snyder
) and granted bashful interviews to almost any journalist, fearing the exposure but savoring the attention. (One interviewer, disturbed by young Joe Gideon and the strippers, asked about the effects of burlesque on Fosse’s life. “Tragic,”
he replied. “Absolutely tragic . . . I haven’t recovered since.”) The publicity worked. The controversy around
All That Jazz
built the film an unexpectedly strong box office and elevated Bob Fosse from famous director to pop-culture personality. The picture couldn’t make him a star but it did bring Fosse’s life and likeness increased visibility, perhaps even infamy. Joe Gideon and his absorbing mix of vice and self-disclosure would forever be mistaken for the complete Bob Fosse.