Fosse (28 page)

Fosse knew all about his Spender Girls, each locked in paradox, each in her own way. He knew them because he
was
them. On more than one occasion, his friend Kathy Witt accompanied him to the dime-a-dance places off Broadway. When a girl approached their table, Witt recalled, “Bob would say that he didn’t
wish to dance right then, but maybe one of the ‘gals’ would like to come and have a drink with us, some conversation? The interviewing would begin, their stories would unfold, and the night would always end in the wee hours with Bob writing most, if not all, of the ‘gals,’ fifty-dollar checks as tips.”

Neil and Joan Simon saw the product of that research—and they were hooked. They stayed up the rest of the night listening to Fosse go through the whole show, and four days later they were still talking about it. Simon knew the first act needed a rewrite that would ultimately change the course of the second act—in other words, he would have to start the script from scratch. He squeezed in what he could between
After the Fox
and
Barefoot in the Park,
writing on yellow pads he carried with him everywhere. Working with a score already established, Simon found the writing harder than the normal hard, but he was a comedy machine. Not that he was never unfunny, but he knew how to fail and recover, and working at top speed, he could fail faster than most. He was a pro.

Fosse returned to New York comfortably on edge. The pieces of the show were clicking into place, but with each click, the pressure rose. No matter how clever the book or brilliant Gwen’s comeback,
Sweet Charity
was going to be Fosse’s to destroy. He knew these days it was the director who really made the musical. Apologies to Abbott, but mere expertise and showmanship no longer sufficed. With so many moving parts and so much complex material to corral, a contemporary musical needed vision and cohesion to stick together. Without Gower Champion,
Hello, Dolly
would not have gone jumbo; without Robbins,
Fiddler on the Roof
could have fallen to kitsch. They—and others—heralded the era of the director-choreographer. “People have been toying with this
idea for years,” Fosse said, “but I think there’s been a kind of restlessness with our theater, a kind of groping around. And one of the things that we’ve started groping at is style. We’ve thought that we’ve become too conventional in the way we do things and that we should become more visual. And I think the first place you turn to then is someone who you believe has a keen sense of the visual . . . I think that turning toward the director-choreographer has come out of this restlessness.” Striking just the right note between light and dark, combining the satirical eye of
How to Succeed
with the blowout dancing of
Redhead
and the conceptual unity of
Little Me,
Fosse had to sync his interests and plug the whole package into Gwen.

“We went to a dance hall to observe
the girls,” Gwen said. “They still wear the old Lana Turner hairdos and wedgie shoes, 45-year-old gals dressing like it was 1942. Boy, are they tough. One saw me eyeing her and she said, ‘What are you starin’ at, sister?’” They visited half a dozen dancehalls in the porniest quarters of Times Square. By his own calculations, Fosse spent about $150 on girls at $6.50 an hour; on one occasion he observed the scene with and without Gwen for well over twenty hours before realizing he was getting more groping than dancing. His wife could be conspicuous in a roomful of dancers, so Fosse set out with company member Eddie Gasper to tour the city at night. “They saw kids doing the Jerk
, the Swim, all that sixties stuff,” said dancer Diana Laurenson, “and then, when the clubs closed, they’d go back to the studio to work, staying sometimes to two or three in the morning lacing all those trends together.”

Arthur, the most exciting new club
in New York, had opened only months earlier at Fifty-Fourth Street. Proprietress Sybil Burton, recently separated from Richard Burton, had invited her friends, many of them from Broadway, to invest in her idea—novel at the time—to transfer Mod from London to New York. It was a big hit. Everyone from Warhol to John Wayne was seen against the frosted mirrors in blue-yellow-green lights. Sometimes Paddy joined Bob. Gwen said, “[Arthur] was supposed to be
a disco—rock ’n’ roll. Well, it was so gentle. We went there and we saw all of these people—Mrs. Kennedy, Sybil Burton—this funky music was playing, but they were so elegant. They really thought they were swingin’ it around like the kids did. Well, Bob thought that was funny.” A caricature of their snooty groove would go into the Aloof section of “Rich Man’s Frug,” a number quite like
Little Me
’s “Rich Kid’s Rag” about upper-class hipsters besotted with the latest dance craze. “That’s how Bob really developed
his style,” said Tony Stevens. “He kept reusing and improving on what he had already done.
Charity
was the pinnacle of that. Dances he had been working on since
Pajama Game
and probably before were taken to their musical-comedy height.”

Facing Gwen now at Variety Arts, seeing his steps on her body, Fosse discovered afresh how it felt to watch Gwen Verdon, his wife, become Gwen Verdon, his dancer. “When he and Gwen were working
on
Sweet Charity,
” Ann Reinking said, “Bob said, ‘It was like our love was rekindled.’ He just couldn’t believe how talented she was.” Watching her dance was admiring a spinning zoetrope of all they had achieved together. Lola,
Redhead
, Nicole. Now Charity. His eyes lit and she saw he wasn’t grinning at her work but at her. And yes, her work too. She saw he was proud of her,
and pleasing him was more stimulating than rousing an entire audience.

They worked after work.
Over a sandwich at Dinty Moore’s, as waiters stacked the chairs on empty tables, they talked through steps in a fevered ping-pong of what-ifs and maybes. Then something would ignite and they would have to move. Having only half finished their food, they would stride hand in hand into the kitchen, spread out over a fresh patch of floor, and finesse those what-ifs and maybes into movement while the cooks and busboys mopped the tiles around their feet. And then it would get late, later than late, and remembering life, Bob and Gwen would return home.

In those days,
Sweet Charity
was new and every discovery was an aphrodisiac. Waking with ideas or images, they’d throw off their blankets and dance out the solution on the mattress, bouncing together, high above the darkened studios of Robbins and de Mille. Gwen was tired, but it didn’t matter. She was a Bob addict and always would be.

“I don’t know if this is
any good,” she would say.

“On you, everything looks good.”

Even what didn’t look good. They decided Charity would be pigeon-toed and knock-kneed, like the young Verdon in orthopedic braces. It would give her a broken look that said: resilience.

Fosse was learning to choreograph people instead of patterns. Character had always been essential to his dances, but on
Sweet Charity,
whose broken types he knew more intimately than those of any other show, conveying personality took on added importance. He gave his dancers images to help them feel. He said, “It can be as pedestrian
as toothpaste coming out of a tube, or you’re a snake here, or your arm isn’t an arm, it’s a whip.” Each “Big Spender” dancer had her imaginary circumstances, her wants and backstory. Each was different. “Bob never treated us like a chorus,”
Kathryn Doby said. “To Bob, we were all actors.” The dancers loved it. “He didn’t just want to put something
on top of us,” one said, “he wanted to bring something out of us. That’s a great feeling for a performer.” He found isolating inner characteristics was like isolating body parts: the right choice, the right abstraction, and a whole life came forth. In “Rich Man’s Frug,” each of the girls had to extend a foot while leaning back and shooting her arms down at her sides. Fosse’s image helped them see
exactly
how. “Ladies,”
he said, “it’s like a man is holding out a fur coat for you and you have to drop your arms in.” There was a shoulder roll at the top of “Big Spender” when the girls came downstage. “Ladies,” he said, “it’s like when your hands aren’t free and you have to use your shoulder to get your bra strap up.” Other directors might give their dancers images for every scene; Bob and Gwen had one for just about every step. These were the lines the dancers’ bodies had to speak.

Gwen was always there, watching by his side. “She wasn’t
the star,
”
said dancer Lee Roy Reams. “She was part of the company as much as she was part of Bob.” There was no set delineation of responsibility, but certain natural tendencies emerged. Where Fosse, the director, kept watch over the bigger picture, Verdon, the dancer, homed in on the details. “Gwen would break the steps
down in a way Bob couldn’t always,” one dancer said. “Having done Bob’s shows for so long, she had an eye on how to do the steps technically.” He was captain and she navigator—he knew what he wanted; she knew how to
get there.

How to get
him
there, to Hollywood. He wanted to direct movies.
Broadway belonged to New York alone, but Hollywood was for everyone. Fosse knew a well-publicized effort as choreographer on a major movie would launch him to a higher plane, and in August 1965, he entertained an offer from George Cukor, the hottest film director of the summer. In April, Cukor’s
My Fair Lady
had swept the Oscars, and his proposed follow-up,
Bloomer Girl,
would be a big-budget costume musical in the same tradition, prestigious and highly visible. Shirley MacLaine, a friend of Fosse’s since
The Pajama Game,
had signed on to star—a good hook for Fosse,
Cukor thought. But Fosse didn’t need the hook. He was interested and would be available in February, a few weeks after the opening of
Sweet Charity.

Privately, though, Fosse worried about the offer.
Accepting it meant leaving Gwen and Nicole in New York. The excitement around
Charity
and the creative efficacy of rehearsals had made home life a joy he could not bear to disrupt. What’s more, Fosse worried that taking the job would offend Agnes de Mille, whose ballets for the original production of
Bloomer Girl
he felt he could not improve upon. As ever, he overidentified with the loser’s position. Had Warner Brothers passed him over for the films of
Pajama Game
and
Damn Yankees,
he would have been devastated, and he refused to subject de Mille to the same disappointment. And yet, bearing all that in mind, the undying gypsy in Fosse was ready to accept whatever they offered: If
Sweet Charity
was not a success, he would have to do
Bloomer Girl
for the money.

All this Fosse confessed to Fox executive
Robert Linden at a lunch meeting in New York. That Gwen Verdon attended the meeting surely surprised Linden, but it was Fosse’s open emotionality and pleas to remove himself from every advantageous opportunity that shocked him. So disarming was Fosse’s vulnerability, Linden actually found himself arguing
against
Fosse’s choreographing
Bloomer Girl,
assuring the man he was trying to hire that money was no reason for him to take the job. A professional of his stature would easily get work elsewhere. Fosse wasn’t as sure, and with Gwen’s nod of approval, he stuck to his original plan. They’d wait on
Charity.

In the fall of 1965,
Charity
moved to Philadelphia for tryouts. As the first preview drew near, rumors began that Gwen—who hadn’t led a show since
Redhead,
more than six years earlier; who was approaching forty-one; and who, as Charity, was on stage singing and dancing and acting virtually the entire evening—wouldn’t be able to get through the night. “It was one of the hardest shows,”
she said, “because you never had a chance to get offstage and sit down. So the stage became the stage
and
the dressing room. [At] the dressing table for the girls who were in the ‘Big Spender’ number I used to put on real makeup for the next number.”

The company knew Gwen was insecure about her singing. She didn’t have Merman’s belt or Barbara Cook’s range; she had more of a novelty voice, quivery and dear. “Gwen hated singing ‘Where Am I Going?’”
Lee Roy Reams said of
Charity
’s soaring cri de coeur late in the second act. “One day she started crying and said, ‘Bobby, please, please cut the song.’” Cy Coleman wrote, “I think the true reason was
that she didn’t like the idea that Barbra Streisand had already recorded it before the show opened, and people might make comparisons.” It was Fosse’s job to differentiate between Gwen’s needs and the show’s, to know when she was seriously unable to sing or just afraid to, and it was Gwen’s duty to take all of it, at least publicly. Privately, Fosse knew his show was hers
to commandeer.

She had power and she used it. “Gwen was out from time to time,”
said actor Ruth Buzzi. “We would always hear that she maybe had a cold or something was wrong with her voice, but you never really know why someone’s missing a show.” There were theories. “I went on a hundred times for her,”
said Helen Gallagher, Gwen’s standby. “Because she had a little girl. And if you know anything about Gwen’s life, she had a boy when she was very young, and she was a non-present mother. And she never forgave herself for that, and so with this baby, because she was so madly in love with Bob, she said, ‘I will be her mother.’ And she was.” How much motherhood would
Sweet Charity
allow? How much life would Fosse permit? Their negotiations took place in hotels out of town, where the plaited strands of work and marriage twisted untold resentments into new assertions of power. Fortunately, unfortunately, Verdon and Fosse needed each other.

They previewed well in Philadelphia.

On December 23, the morning after their first Detroit preview, an ebullient Neil Simon set out
for the theater. The reviews had been good for both Simon and Fosse (perhaps slightly better for Simon), and though there was clearly more work to do, he anticipated a short celebration before they buckled down.