Fosse (74 page)

In January, Chayefsky was among
the Television Hall of Fame’s first spate of inductees (a list of seven that Lucille Ball, Norman Lear, Edward R. Murrow, and William Paley), and Fosse broke from his Long Island seclusion to brave Los Angeles and accept the honor on Paddy’s behalf. Facing a black-tie audience at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, he told a Chayefsky story. “This is a very fickle business,”
Paddy had said to Bob one day. “I’ll be lucky if they remember I’m the guy who wrote the lines ‘What are you doing tonight, Marty?’ and ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.’” Fosse said, “Paddy, you are wrong. You are remembered. Some of us will never forget you.”

In Quogue, he threw the Doctorows a dinner party
for their thirtieth anniversary. “Bobby was so taken with the idea that two people could be connected that long in marriage,” Doctorow said. When they were certain Fosse had disappeared to the kitchen, Peter Maas, Cohn, and Doctorow hurried into the studio and took their places at the barre. The whole thing had been prearranged. Fosse would come in and find them standing in first position, tutus pulled over their khaki pants, as Nicole, acting as their dance mistress, called out for pliés and arabesques. “It was all very funny,” Doctorow explained, “except Bob didn’t respond that way.” He cried. “I couldn’t understand that,” Doctorow said. “He sort of smiled through his tears, but he was just so totally wiped out that his three friends would horse around like that.” It was as close as they’d get to Dancing for Writers.

Later that evening, good-natured marriage jokes flew around the room and Fosse took offense. “He got pissed,” Doctorow said. “We weren’t taking the occasion seriously enough. He thought we should be a little more respectful of the achievement. It turned out he had almost religious respect for the institution.” Writing and marriage both. “He actually interrogated my parents,”
actress Deborah Geffner remembered. “Here’s the hippest person maybe ever, and he wants to know how my mom and dad managed to stay together so long. It was like anthropological research.” The Geffners weren’t the only ones he interviewed. Fosse regularly opened up his Quogue parties to his friends’ parents, and the longer their marriages the better. Commitment was too exotic a blossom to treat casually.

“He was the ultimate host,”
Laurent Giroux said, “and a worrywart too. He threw those parties like they were Bob Fosse shows. He was going to make sure you were entertained!” He put out cigarettes, and when
the cigarettes were smoked, he passed around cigars; he kept the fireplace burning and the booze flowing; dashing from kitchen to deck, he hand-delivered shrimp cocktails and bites of buttered lobster; when it got dark and cooled down, he set up tables for dinner and passed around sweaters; and if he ran out of propane, he could call Gwen a few towns over to bring reinforcements. She always did.

And after dinner, he might scrounge up some entertainment.

After the meal one night, he said, “Come on, we’re going to do
an old vaudeville number. You do
this
”—a quick step—“then I’ll do—wait, we need a third!” He yanked a body from the couch, gave the steps, and then he asked to see it. “Good, good, good . . .” He looked up. “Larry,” he said to Giroux, “why are you dancing so slinky and mushy?”

“You’re giving me notes at your own fucking party?”

“Oh, shut up.”

Fosse wouldn’t go to New York, so he brought New York to Quogue.

His current girlfriend, Phoebe Ungerer, was by his side throughout. As Verdon well knew, she had to accept her, or seem to. Blocking his libido would block Gwen from Fosse, so when the crowd looked for her reaction, Gwen shifted into high doyenne, taking Phoebe by the arm and introducing her to guests around the grounds like Fosse’s place in Quogue was Gwen’s second home. But it was Phoebe’s now.

Bob and Phoebe met at one of Doctorow’s garden parties,
in East Hampton, the summer of 1984. Phoebe came with her mother, Miriam, and stepfather, the writer Wilfrid Sheed. They were old friends of the Doctorows, old friends of everyone’s, really, from Kurt Vonnegut down to Truman Capote. At ease with the big time, Phoebe looked like a girl Truman would have written about. She had the warmth of a country morning and a face so pretty it practically pinged. Fosse heard the ping from across the Doctorows’ back lawn and turned to look. She was an actress, but she could have been a dancer, or at least Fosse thought so as he cut through the crowd and interrupted her conversation to introduce himself.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Bob Fosse.”

She had heard of him. “Phoebe Ungerer.”

They shook hands. She was twenty-three; he was fifty-seven.

Looking behind Fosse, Phoebe could see the faces, many she’d known her whole life, turn toward them to watch. They looked concerned, like they knew more about what was happening, or going to happen, than she did. And they did. By then, the major plot points of a Bob Fosse affair were a sad sitcom most Page Six readers had been following for years. They knew it always began like this, with a pretty young girl at the beginning of her career. They knew it always ended. Phoebe was too green to see any of it, but she saw that others could, and it gave her a chill.

One night later, Fosse was serving her lobster and Cristal, his favorite champagne. Quogue brought out the romantic in him. Bustling about the kitchen, lighting tall candles around the table, and dishing out the meal, he was at his best, onstage at home, high on a cozy buzz. Phoebe too.

Six months later, she moved in.

At first, there were few surprises. Off amphetamines (he promised), Fosse watched his days in wide shots and long takes. They took it easy. “I’ve spent my whole life working on holidays,” he explained. Now he had the time to relax.

Quogue lent itself to the comforts of habitual living, to walks with Phoebe, bicycle rides into town to collect ingredients for the evening meal, then the meal. They ate at the Laundry with Sam Cohn and his girlfriend, Dianne Wiest. They watched movies, whatever was on TV. He told her about Kubrick, more of an idol now than Fellini, and together they swooned over
The Shining,
the Steadicam work in particular. “Bob would teach me about movies and how they were made,” Phoebe said. “He thought so much about editing. And where the light comes from. He would always get annoyed when the whole room was lit, or when he saw an establishing shot. He hated that! Who needs that?” When it came time for the Oscars, he let her choose his votes.

He missed his friend. “Losing Paddy,” Phoebe said, “was the hardest thing he ever had to do.” When Paddy’s name came up, Fosse seemed to disappear from his body. “It was like he went to wax,” Phoebe said. He got the same look the night they turned on the TV and found that Truffaut had died, of a brain tumor, at fifty-two. Fosse was horrified; he didn’t even know Truffaut had been ill. Now there would never be another Truffaut movie. Not eventually, not possibly at some point—
never.

“Did you know,” Phoebe said, “that I grew up at the White House on Eighty-Sixth and Central Park West?”

Fosse turned to face her.

“On the twelfth floor, the same floor as Paddy. I grew up right across the hall from him.”

“What?”

“And it was just us and Paddy. There were only two apartments on each floor.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“I
grew up
there. I don’t think I ever spoke with him but I remember I’d see him coming home and leaving. I saw him so many times.”

F
OSSE REVISED HIS WILL
for the last time on March 28, 1985. For a man who once carried around a pocket-sized notebook of famous last words, touching up bequests was as much a matter of closing his affairs, of bringing the record of his loves up to date and seeing them provided for, as it was the last shot of the movie. It had to be perfect. Like any memorable ending, it had to be poignant, amusing, revelatory, entertaining, and a touch eloquent.
Poignant
would be easy: he would be dead. For
amusing,
Fosse left his share in the Laundry, by then a flailing, irritating venture, to Sam Cohn, the man who had roped him into it in the first place. For
revelatory,
he left $100,000 to establish a theatrical scholarship
in his name “for deserving students in the theatrical arts,” and he left $15,000—here everyone’s eyes would widen—to Mary-Ann Niles.
Entertaining:
As original a number as he’d ever choreographed, the big $25,000 dinner party Fosse had been imagining since his bypass surgery in 1974 would be his masterstroke, an evening people would remember until their own deaths. As for the rest of his money, pieces were scattered to the usual suspects (Herb Gardner, Phoebe, his sister Marianne), but the largest amount, an estate that totaled around four million dollars, Fosse left, naturally, to his wife and daughter. Everyone would see that one coming. But the direction he had in mind for his body—to be burned to ash in a
Pippin
-like immolation and the remains divided between earth and sea—had the surprise inevitability of real eloquence.

His year of semiseclusion ended quietly as he paid a house call to Hal Prince’s
Grind,
a life-versus-showbiz musical about racial tension at a burlesque theater in Chicago in 1933. Choreographed by Lester Wilson, the show suffered from an overcomplicated story and false start sadly typical of the mid-1980s: too much money. Budgeted at five million and paid for
in part by Texas oilmen,
Grind
needed a star to be fiscally secure. One of the Shuberts, Bernie Jacobs, eased Prince
into casting Ben Vereen, precipitating an involved series of rewrites to turn an ensemble show into a star vehicle.
Grind
never recovered. “It became for me the most painful
working experience of my life,” Prince said. Fosse went to Baltimore for a look.

“Bob didn’t throw out the choreography,”
recalled dancer Valarie Pettiford. “He finessed it.” Yet his touch was indubitable. In the usual Fosse way, he inflated “New Man,” Vereen’s solo, with novelty beats, adding percussion wherever he could.

“Mike, do you think we have
too many accents?” he asked drummer Mike Berkowitz.

“Nah, there’s an eighth note in bar seven we haven’t used yet.”

His wittiest save was “From the Ankles Down”: The curtain rises on act two, and up in an elevated corner of the stage, a knot of naked limbs curl through a lather of golden darkness. What is this? A bit of brass tells us they’re strippers—we’re in their changing room. But rather than stripping, they’re sliding up their stockings, gliding on gloves, dressing with the studied languor of a striptease in reverse. They’re getting
dressed,
sexy dressed, but there’s a bitter edge to it; even when they’re not working, they’re working. Frank Rich wrote, “The interlude gives
rueful life—but only brief life—to the show’s subsidiary point that grind-show performers are never free of the brutal daily grind that they allow their Depression audiences to escape.”
Grind
closed on June 22 after seventy-one performances.

As he worked on
Grind,
Fosse kept thinking about
Big Deal,
considering the rights and wrongs of a Depression-era race musical with an old-fashioned bent. At the height of the civil rights movement, when Fosse first thought of adapting
Big Deal on Madonna Street,
he imagined an all-black show set in Harlem—if it didn’t work in Tijuana. Omitting any cultural indicators, Fosse prepared
Big Deal
to go either way, New York or Mexico, film or stage. Now, fifteen years later, preparing to adapt a book from his adapted screenplay
and
musical book of 1969, Fosse decided to make
Big Deal
a predominantly black show. But not in Harlem; in Chicago. And instead of finding new songs, Fosse would build the story on period classics, like a revue. With no composer, songwriter, or co-author,
Big Deal
would be, like
Star 80,
pure Bob Fosse, a single-voiced entertainment unhindered by auxiliary influence. As with
Dancin’,
Fosse would answer to no one, not even stars.
Big Deal,
he said to Vereen
during
Grind,
would be an ensemble piece. No leading parts, just one exquisite company. Vereen turned it down.

While Fosse wrote, Sam Cohn dealt with Bernie Jacobs. Like an unhappy couple, Cohn and Jacobs were both interdependent and alone; Cohn had the talent, Jacobs had the theaters (seventeen Shuberts, to be exact, more theaters than anyone else on Broadway). Their negotiations were marked by irritation and the sort of squinting that made even the finest-print decisions, like where to eat, a matter of strenuous compromise. (On the issue of lunch, they each refused the other the comfort of his home turf, which disqualified the Russian Tea Room for Sam and Sardi’s for Bernie; splitting the difference, they ended up with Joe Allen’s.) Cohn hated deliberating. He liked to work fast (he sold the rights to Doctorow’s
Ragtime
to Dino De Laurentiis, who hadn’t read the book, in three minutes, and over the phone
); and described dealing with Jacobs as “the worst migraine you’ve had
in your life.” Jacobs accused Cohn of demanding perilously high royalties for his clients, and Cohn asserted that shows like
Annie
made everyone a winner. But they both knew a good thing when they saw it. When Cohn offered him the chance, Jacobs invested in the Laundry.

Big Deal
was gestating while Joseph Harris, producer of
Sweet Charity
and
Chicago,
prepared a
Sweet Charity
revival for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera’s summer season. Fosse never liked going back, especially now that his mojo was pushing him forward again, so he shrugged off the revival and sent Gwen instead. “He knew there was never going
to be any chance in the world, even if he put his imprimatur on it, [that the revival] ever could be the way it could be, the way it was,” said Gordon Harrell. But now that the
Dancin’
tour had ended, Fosse’s bank statements had lost a certain something,
and in the era of revivalist Broadway, a
Sweet Charity
with Debbie Allen (star of TV’s
Fame
) seemed a feasible replacement. In lieu of Fosse, director John Bowab was installed to work the book scenes, while Gwen coached Allen, as she had Shirley MacLaine, and supervised the choreography. Fosse’s credit read simply, and obscurely,
production supervisor
. While
Charity
got off the ground, he toiled over the
Big Deal
book.