Fosse (9 page)

The push to large-format choreography and the acclaim it brought Fosse he owed to Joan McCracken. “She’s the one who encouraged me
to be a choreographer,” Fosse said. “I was very showbiz, all I thought about was nightclubs, and she kept saying, ‘You’re too good to spend your life in nightclubs.’” Fosse thought of choreography as
a means to an end, something a dancer needed in order to dance, like a floor; it wasn’t a profession. The hoofer in him considered the work of the choreographer, paradoxically, both out of his creative range and a loser’s plan B. Who outside of Manhattan had ever heard of Agnes de Mille? If Fosse had asked that question, McCracken would have answered,
Just wait. They will soon.
“Joan was the biggest influence
in my life,” Fosse said. “She was the one who changed it and gave it direction.”

That she hung around with the likes of Truman Capote and Leo Lerman, read Rilke, and smoked cigarettes with gold tips made her seem, to the no-college Fosse, a storm of heady plenitude, exotic, distinctly unshowbiz. Whereas Mary-Ann reeked of tobacco, Joan bloomed with the scent of cypress
and bitter fruit, a perfume one of her fancy friends must have picked up for her in Paris or Berlin. And she spoke French.
And she knew about wine.
And she advised Fosse to enroll in
the American Theatre Wing. The GI Bill, McCracken assured him, covered a year’s worth of voice, dance, and playwriting classes; all he had to pay for was the bike to take him from one place to the next, from José Limón’s dance class to Anna Sokolow’s. “I was always very bad in class,”
Fosse said, “it was slightly humiliating . . . I had a great deal of trouble with turnout and extension. To compensate for this, I used to work on other areas, such as rhythm, style of movement, taking ordinary steps and giving them some little extra twist or turn.”

He took a course with Sanford Meisner, one of New York’s most celebrated acting teachers. Of course it was McCracken who made the introduction.

While Lee Strasberg sank his students in psychoanalytic mires, Meisner emphasized clear, task-oriented objectives, actions as simple as opening the door, closing the window—in his words, “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” It was simple to understand and difficult to execute. To a performer asked to play a character in fantastic or ridiculous circumstances, like those in musical theater—or, even more ridiculous, like those in musical comedy, with its cotton-candy logic—Meisner’s technique offered a way through: be you. Truth and simplicity were always there, and any performer, regardless of his gifts, could harness them.

Room 3B at the Neighborhood Playhouse
was, like Meisner’s technique, a model of simplicity. In the studio, beneath a window with a courtyard view, were twenty folding chairs for Fosse and his classmates—which included Gloria Vanderbilt, Farley Granger,
and James Kirkwood Jr. (future co-author of
A Chorus Line
)—ten in front, ten on a riser behind. Notebooks in hand, they faced a simple stage set: two twin beds and an empty bookcase. Meisner—Sandy, they called him—sat at a hulking gray desk midway between the students and the stage and watched them working.
Working
was what Sandy called rehearsing. “Who wants to work next?” he would ask. As soon as his volunteers began, he’d stop them. If you do something, you really do it!
he’d say. He told them a story about Fanny Brice,
about how she got nervous when she got onstage, so nervous, he said, her hands would actually shake. And this was at the end of her career, when she was already the biggest comic in the world—Meisner would spread his hands in the air to show how big—and still she thought she was going to die. “So you’re going to be nervous,”
Sandy said to the class. “
Be
nervous!” The real show, he encouraged them to see, was what was happening
within.
“You don’t have to play at being the character,” he would say, “it’s right there in your doing it.”

Artistically, this was a revelation to the burgeoning choreographer. Fosse said, “I think he had some sort of motto
on the wall, as I remember, saying ‘Don’t just say something, stand there.’ And I found out in choreography frequently that less movement, more economical movement, or no movement at all makes a stronger statement than fierce activity.” The concept was a salve to Fosse’s feeling of worthlessness. Knowing he did not have to transform himself was itself a transformative epiphany for him, almost spiritual in its emphasis on innate value and self-respect. For perhaps the first time in his professional life, he saw he could get by without irony, stolen goods, and flash. He was enough. Along with Joan, Meisner saw what few had seen:
The good
inside
Bob Fosse. The potential.

By the spring of 1951, Fosse had become Joan’s creation. When he heard of an upcoming summer-stock production of
Pal Joey,
he went straight to her for counsel. Would taking the part (Joey, of course), if he got it, be a good next step? Or was summer stock, no matter the part, a step back
?
Joey
was one of his favorite shows, and the part was perfect for him; it would be a real chance, his first chance, to sing and dance in
character.
He could use the Meisner technique. Weren’t Joey’s circumstances—smalltime con artist, bound to an older woman, stopping at nothing to push his nightclub career over the top—nearly identical to Fosse’s? McCracken thought yes. Take it, she told him, if you get it.

He got it (despite Richard Rodgers’s objections
to Fosse’s small size, small voice, and light complexion). Fosse and Joan were preparing the car to go to Bucks County, the first stop on
Pal Joey
’s ten-week tour, when Fosse got a call from Maurice Lapue. MGM wanted to screen-test him. MGM: The studio of Astaire and Gene Kelly. Apparently, one of Metro’s scouts had seen him
in scenes from Saroyan’s
The Time of Your Life
—Fosse played Harry, whom Saroyan described as a “natural-born hoofer
who wants to make people laugh but can’t”—at an American Theatre Wing showcase. Fosse shot the test, and the MGM execs must have loved what they saw because on April 16, 1951, Fosse signed the standard seven-year contract for five hundred dollars
a week, effective as soon as his summer-stock tour ended in September of that year. Overjoyed, McCracken and Fosse hit the road. Niles was left behind.

The
Pal Joey
tour took Bob and Joan through Cape Cod and Maine and the most glorious seascapes of the Northeast. It was severely romantic. Her face to the moon, Joan spoke about cherishing every moment, and she gripped his hands tight, too tight, as if she were holding on to more than just his fingers.

She had diabetes.
That had been her secret, and now it was theirs—to know, not to discuss. Driving from inn to inn, collecting seashells and wet twinkling things from the sand, they often stopped and stared far out over the water, into charcoal sky, never too far from the thought of the day, years from now, when her body would break down.

As Joey Evans, Fosse didn’t have Gene Kelly’s self-satisfied smile, and he did not attempt Kelly’s signature acrobatics. Fosse’s Joey was, instead, like Fosse himself, more contained, subtler, a dagger to Kelly’s broadsword. Of course, Fosse’s presentation was less a matter of art than of necessity. He simply wasn’t good enough to put the depths of character across. But he was bashful, good-looking, and a devil of a dancer. He moved with a sense of inwardness both inviting and exclusive, almost private, like he was alone, flexing naked in front of a mirror; it made his audiences lean forward, as if by getting closer, they could see more, or even see into him. “Bobby was great in the show,”
said
Pal Joey
dancer Phyllis Sherwood, “because Bobby
was
Joey.” But he wasn’t an actor.

That is, he played a Joey better offstage, after the curtain fell. One night, perhaps with Joan away, and perhaps not, Fosse went up to Sherwood’s hotel-room door
and gave it a confident knock, as if she were expecting him.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Bobby.”

“Bobby?”

He opened the door himself, but he didn’t come toward her. Like a good boy about to do wrong, he held his hands behind his back, peeking over what could have been his hundredth cigarette of the day.

“Hiya, Phyllis. May I—”

Pal Joey
was Sherwood’s first show, and Bob Fosse was its star, clearly the most gifted dancer in the company, so she was thrilled by his attention.

She invited him in. Standing there, he was nothing but sweet and charming, as he had been in every rehearsal and every performance. At sixteen, Sherwood wasn’t quite old enough to sense what was coming; then again, she wasn’t too young to guess. But never would she have imagined that Bob Fosse would calmly unzip his pants and expose himself.

“Get out!” she screamed. “Just get
out!
Now!
”

He left.

“We laughed about it afterward,”
Sherwood remembered. “He was such a sweet guy—no matter what he did, you couldn’t stay that mad.” She could be speaking for any number of women, arguably every single one. “He never had a sleaziness about him,”
said dancer Candy Brown. “He was always—I don’t know what else to say—
dear.
” Self-denying, vulnerable, soft-spoken, adorable, truthful about his lies. For men and women alike, he was impossible to refuse. “He always sort of tucked his head
into his shoulder,” remembered dancer Blane Savage. “You had to be so close to him to hear him talk.”
Help me, come closer:
tender was what he was
and
what he needed to be.

Pal Joey
was a success, and the show transferred to Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater—with Harold Lang in the part of Joey. Reluctantly, Fosse dropped to understudy, and MGM postponed his official start date, banking on the chance, however slight, that Fosse might go on for Lang one lucky night, show his star to the world, and soar up, raising his stock from contract player to extremely valuable dancer—much more valuable than the old Bob Fosse—and for the bargain price of five hundred dollars a week.

But Fosse never did go on for Lang. Instead, he did a lot of waiting backstage, fooling around—dancing, that is—with chorus girls Norma Andrews
and Patty Ann Jackson to keep his mind and body limber. Here and there he went out on the nightclub circuit, now as a solo, without Mary-Ann. “When he fell out of love with her,
she couldn’t stand that,” said her friend George Marcy. “She was so much in love with him. He was her big thing in life.” She talked about him so much after they separated, some wondered if Niles really understood
he wasn’t coming back.

For Christmas, he shared the Roxy with a Clifton Webb movie, as in the old presentation-house days. In January 1952, weeks after
Pal Joey
opened on Broadway, he appeared on the bottom part of a bill at the top part of the Waldorf-Astoria—the famed and glamorous Empire Room—with a new solo act that showed the bottom part of his heart. Reaching for pathos, he cut out the flash and “added a lot of talking to his act,”
and “a tragic-comedy number of the stage-struck kid auditioning was very moving.” It wasn’t a love story but a showbiz story that Fosse wanted to dance, and not all of it was original, which Fosse openly and apologetically acknowledged in the act. He performed his showcase, scenes from
The Time of Your Life,
and for his finale, he selected “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” Balanchine’s famous ballet-jazz duet. Fosse turned it into a scene-stealing single and tried to shine it up with jagged lights and the rumble of a jungle timpani, but he couldn’t fool them into thinking it was anything new. “Fosse’s ‘Time of Your Life’ bit,
a la Gene Kelly, seems too palpably a concoction to suggest to the audience (any producers present?) that here is another prospect for Gene Kelly roles,” stated
Variety.
“Fosse’s dance interpretation of ‘Slaughter on 10th Ave.,’ which Kelly did in the Metro musical ‘Words and Music,’ emphasizes that thinking. This is not to discredit Fosse’s ability; it’s just that he should rely on new material to stress his own individuality.”

Backstage at the Broadhurst, he was visibly restless.
Andrews and Jackson suggested
he work out a number for them, anything he wanted, for
Talent ’52,
the upcoming stage managers’ benefit at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater. This was one night Lang couldn’t steal; eligibility was limited to nonfeatured players and understudies. Until then, Fosse’s dances, which he hardly considered serious, had been confined to smaller spaces—nightclubs, mostly, as well as a TV episode or two and some regional theaters. He had merely slapped steps together and seasoned them to taste.
Talent ’52
threatened to expose him. The thought of having his dances performed before an audience of his peers and New York’s most discerning professionals at one of Broadway’s largest theaters filled his stomach with that sour,
throw-uppy feeling he got before auditions.

Although parody, no matter how refined, felt to him less like art than theft, he understood that by giving it “style” and wearing his hat at a jaunty tilt, cocking it to the side like an adventurous adulterer, he could get away with murder. At least, that was the hope as he gave Andrews and Jackson moves from famous choreographers of the day. Fosse couldn’t borrow their work outright; this crowd was too hip for that. Instead, he let them in on the joke. Using his Empire Room idea, he set the pastiche in an audition sequence, each dancer appearing before an unnamed master choreographer. Based on the dances, his audience could tell whether the auditioner was dancing for Robbins or de Mille or Robert Alton. For the crowd, it was like a guessing game; for Fosse, it was a mirror trick. Had he given them Robbins or had he given them him?

The night of April 28, 1952,
director Stanley Donen, whose
Singin’ in the Rain
had opened two months earlier, recognized a singular voice in the chorus of styles—Fosse’s. Returning to Hollywood, to MGM, Donen learned
this dancer-choreographer was soon to be officially under contract. That was good; he could use him. While casting
Jumbo,
his upcoming film of Rodgers and Hart’s musical, Donen ordered up Fosse’s screen test, liked what he saw, and called him into the studio.