Fosse (21 page)

The search continued for a meaningful follow-up to
Redhead,
something important, a musical comedy of real substance. He knew that by turning humanity’s most profound dilemmas into sources of amusement, he might prove himself to be, maybe, deeper than a mere song-and-dance man. Reinking said, “He knew that in order to be
a great artist on Broadway, he’d have to have the dark as much as the light.” But how? Searching with Fosse was producer Robert Whitehead, recently appointed, with Elia Kazan, to establish a repertory theater at Lincoln Center. The combination of Whitehead and Kazan, who flooded Broadway with O’Neill, Odets, Williams, Inge, and Miller, made any project an artistic behemoth, resplendent with good taste and intelligence; without question, this new concern would be no exception. It was instantly proclaimed the most exciting development in American theater in a long time. Whitehead’s call must have surprised Bob Fosse.

Whitehead liked the idea of musicalizing
The Madwoman of Chaillot
with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Lunt and Fontanne didn’t, though,
and Fosse presented his benefactor with another idea: a musical of Preston Sturges’s 1944 film
Hail the Conquering Hero,
about a milquetoast ex-Marine mistakenly believed to be a war hero. The coupling of fraudulence and fame had strong personal resonance for Fosse. Played in the film by Eddie Bracken, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith spends the bulk of the picture imploring his family and the community at large to understand that he isn’t a war hero but regular old Woodrow, a loser who was discharged because of his hay fever and who never saw any action. Of course, no one believes him. Woodrow’s honesty is taken for extreme modesty, further proof of his nobility, which puts the poor “hero” in the front of a Kafkaesque victory march.

Whitehead got it. The story gave Fosse satirical opportunities from nearly every angle, and its attention to phoniness, to the idea of putting on a show, metaphorically speaking, was a handy entrée to song and dance. Music and lyrics went to Morris “Moose” Charlap and Norman Gimbel; book to comedy writer Larry Gelbart, who wrote Fosse’s episode of
Ford Startime;
and the lead to young TV star Tom Poston—all relatively new to their careers, the men would be easier for Fosse to command. Undoubtedly, Fosse’s star shone brightest. On
Conquering Hero,
only Whitehead stood above him.

In October 1960, after Fosse’s usual period of studio isolation, the company gathered for the first read-through at a rehearsal space on the top floor of the New Amsterdam Theater. Abandoned for decades, the main stage—once home to Fanny Brice and George M. Cohan—had deteriorated, lush clump by lush clump, splashing green and gold pieces of art nouveau into the rainwater that filled the orchestra pit. Upstairs in the limbo of chipped porticoes and forgotten props, Fosse apologized for the cold and dust and led the company through Gelbart’s book.

Gwen was there, watching them and watching Fosse. In the days leading up to rehearsal, he had been acting strangely.
The amphetamines made him jumpy and impatient, and there were, of course, his dark, dark nights, but by now those were par for the course. This Fosse was scaring her. Certain days he refused to go to work. He wouldn’t leave the apartment. He stopped sleeping. He was paranoid. He hallucinated. Pacing about the room, he had screamed at a cheap Mexican statue of Jesus, imploring it to save him: “
Why don’t You help me?
”

It was the amphetamines. Sitting in her seat close to the stage, Gwen watched, looking for signs of another outburst.

That day, Larry Gelbart arrived
halfway through rehearsals in time to hear Tom Poston reading lines—narration for a war ballet—that Gelbart, the writer, hadn’t written. Baffled, he approached Fosse the next chance he got and asked about the new stuff.

“You were off fucking around somewhere,” Fosse hissed. “
Somebody
had to make the changes.”

The Conquering Hero
was Gelbart’s first Broadway show; he didn’t know how things worked exactly, but he knew rudeness when he saw it. “Well, now that I’m back,” he said, “I’d like to do it myself. I see what you want.”

Slowly, Fosse turned away from the table
of actors. Gelbart saw his skin was white and wet. Fosse looked possessed. As he opened his mouth to speak or yell, a sick-sounding gurgle ripped from his body and he tipped backward in his chair, gasping and twisting as if having a seizure. The company froze. There were screams. Gwen raced to his aid; she scooped Fosse into her arms the way he had scooped her up a year ago, after the
Redhead
set crushed her foot, and rushed him from the room. “She saw it coming,”
said actor John McMartin. “Gwen could tell. I don’t know how.”

It was a grand-mal seizure. Later, Fosse would attribute his epilepsy to a head injury he’d sustained in a horseback-riding accident
many years earlier. The explanation wasn’t out of the question; he did love horses. He loved the way they moved. And it’s true he took Dilantin, an anticonvulsant.
“It was always controlled by something,”
Gwen explained. “Anyway, he had an allergy. He was on three different medications and apparently it didn’t mix.” In an unpublished interview, Fosse offered another explanation—barbiturate withdrawal. “I got hooked on Seconal and he
[Dr. Sager, Fosse’s psychiatrist] didn’t realize it,” he said. “He had prescribed it and he wasn’t aware what was happening. When I went cold turkey after I stopped using it, I had an epileptic seizure.” At the time, 1960, rumors that an individual had epilepsy and drug addiction
would provoke suspicious stares and put off producers, so Verdon and Fosse kept the truth to themselves and proceeded to New Haven in November, putting out fires as best they could.

The show itself was another matter. Fosse’s idea for a grand antiwar ballet laden with satire (and with narration Gelbart hadn’t written) disgusted Whitehead.
Musical comedy, he believed, was no place for commentary about, let alone critiques of, the American military or its policy of spinning truth. “That ballet frightened the management,”
dancer Dick Korthaze said. “It was heavily satirical with an underlying darkness.” Girl dancers played the Japanese soldiers; boys played the Americans. Dancer Margery Beddow remembered the antiwar ballet to contain “some of the most innovative work
Fosse ever did.” As they danced—the Japanese soldiers with knives in their teeth, the U.S. soldiers with gold glitter in their hair—Truesmith’s mother, almost offstage, bragged into the phone (in Fosse’s prose) about what she thought her son was doing in the South Pacific, as perhaps Fosse’s mother might have bragged about what she thought Fosse was doing in late-night dives decades before. With overt theatricality and broadly pantomimed stereotypes, the ballet gave voice to an uncomfortable irony: that wishful thinking, like propaganda, was in its own way a form of show business, a myth of virtue that the nation—personified by Truesmith’s mother—told itself. Whitehead rightly glimpsed, buried in the critique, a certain hostility toward the audience members who wanted to enjoy their entertainment guilt-free. Now Fosse was telling them they, like the rest of America, were fools to be duped so easily. Nor was Whitehead pleased with Fosse’s parody of a political rally, a number danced to a campaign speech written in political gibberish. “Every time a word [of Truesmith’s]
was emphasized,” Beddow said, “we’d take up the cry and start a different kind of dance to it. Even when he sneezed, we began a Spanish heel dance as we chanted, ‘Ah-choo, ah-choo, ah-choo.’”

Here was Fosse’s opportunity to make a meaningful statement and become a serious director, to show that war, media, and political personas were nothing more than show, an arrangement between foolers and fooled. Televisions in every home blurred the lines between news and entertainment, content and image; the censuring of Joseph McCarthy and the recent quiz-show infractions of NBC precipitated concerns over what really
is.
Fosse would have agreed with Daniel J. Boorstin, whose book
The Image
appeared that very year and bore out the national taste for razzle-dazzle and flimflam or, as Boorstin put it, “the thicket of unreality which stands
between us and the facts of life.”
The Conquering Hero
shouted out its cynical assent; razzle-dazzle was its medium and its message. “I’m not bothered when people refer
to the razzle-dazzle aspects of my work,” Fosse said, “though I think sometimes I put so many coats of paint on a thing that nobody looks to find out
what
I’ve painted. I mean, I stick on bugle beads and sequins until people don’t see what I’m saying.”

Joining Whitehead against Fosse, Gelbart shrugged off
Hero
’s quote-unquote big ideas. “Bobby was getting ideas
for the first time,” he said. “Ideas that had been around a long time . . . but he was very enamored of them because they were new to him.” Yet in musical comedy, there was no precedent for protest in choreography or for Fosse’s antiwar, anti-razzle-dazzle view of national procedure. In the early sixties, dissent was not yet the fashion.

Meanwhile, Tom Poston was falling flat. “Tom wasn’t right for the part,”
said Patricia Ferrier. “There was a weakness about him, a kind of vanilla thing. He was a good second banana, but this required more.” Fosse grew furious at his leading man. (John McMartin said, “I thought, watching him,
Is he going to have another seizure?
”) As if to compensate for what wasn’t happening, which was everything, Fosse—already at the brink—pushed his company even harder, right over the edge, almost losing them completely. For he had not only the power to make incredible demands but also, with the Dexedrine, the physical strength and mania to shout anyone with opposing views out of the theater. “His behavior became so erratic
and energetic,” Beddow said, “that nobody could keep up with him.” They went to war. Fosse argued that rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing ad infinitum even the smallest detail, like a twitch or the tiniest back bump, improved the dance; dancers saw diminishing returns. “If you watch what happens to rats
when they’re given stimulants,” said Dr. Robert Bilder, professor of psychiatry and psychology at UCLA, “you can see as you increase the dose, they become more and more active, but in a reduced number of categories of behavior. So at low doses they may run more on the wheel or check out the water bottle or groom themselves, but when the dose gets higher, they spend all their time just licking their forepaws, licking and licking and licking and licking, over and over and over again. They don’t do anything else. So it’s not that they’re being more productive, it’s that they’re spending more of their time engaged in a reduced subset of all the possible things they could be doing.” Whitehead, Gelbart, Charlap, and many of the dancers who would ordinarily jump to Fosse’s aid were mowed down by his oblique and tireless intractability.

“This is a busy bee among musicals,”
wrote the
Hartford Courant
the night of the first preview. “Twenty-five scenes, a cast as long as your arm, a tootling score, an atmosphere of brass bands and cheering crowds, dances that prance from Guadalcanal to Election Eve, and everybody on stage all the time.” Problems with the book were manifest, and Gelbart considered himself available
for revisions, but his instructions to revise never came. They didn’t come for Whitehead either.
Or Poston.
Fosse was either deaf to their pleas or off with Verdon, fixated on minutiae.

What to do?
Gelbart mused at one point. He and Whitehead were at a bar, drinking for ideas. Whitehead hung his head and changed the subject, slightly. “I wonder what the Israelis are
going to do with Adolf Eichmann after the trial is over.”

“They ought to send him out of town with a musical.”

Out of town in Washington, late in November 1960, revolution seemed inevitable. But which side would shoot first? “That’s when people started to
get replaced,” McMartin said. “They even auditioned me to replace Tom [Poston], though at the time, I had no idea that’s what they were doing. I just did a few things for them out in the hall. I was too green to know that they didn’t want us knowing that they didn’t know what to do.”

I want to do it, Fosse told
Whitehead on the evening of December 1.

They had just endured another horrific preview performance and could think of no one else to replace Poston.

Whitehead laughed. “You?”

Somewhere near midnight, both sides drifted into the darkened theater and waited—Fosse in the wings, the rest in the house. It was probably what Fosse had wanted all along:
The Conquering Hero—
conceived, directed, choreographed, written by (in part), and starring Bob Fosse. And, in a perverse way, it was probably what Whitehead and the rest had been waiting for: the moment when their maniac got so high on himself, they had no choice but to overthrow him.

Gwen sneaked into the back, and a light dropped down to the stage, revealing Fosse, hunched forward, turned inward, hat tilted over his eyes like a bandit, dancing alone, as if to a mirror in himself.

Gelbart leaned to Whitehead. “He’s doing
Pal Joey.
”

They were flabbergasted. Joey Evans had nothing to do with Woodrow Truesmith. Fosse’s “audition” was pure showcase, outside their crisis, unrelated to anything.

Not to Gwen. She laughed through it all.
“It was a folie à deux,”
Whitehead observed, “absolute madness, and Gwen almost seemed to be feeding it.”

The next day, Fosse rehearsed the company in the opening number, a parade. “He was more intense than usual that morning,” Beddow remembered. “We killed ourselves.”

Afterward, he and Verdon gathered the company onstage for an announcement.

“I’ve been fired,”
Fosse said.

Some of them knew. He had called them personally, that morning or the night before. Others gasped.

“I wanted a show with edge,” he said, “a funny show that really said something, and the producers wanted something different. They wanted it softer, nicer. I don’t know. Please give your all to Albert Marre and Todd Bolender”—the new director, the new choreographer—“you’ve all done a terrific job here and I want you to keep doing a terrific job.”