Fosse (68 page)

N
ICOLE GREW UP
. Years of training had given her a ballerina’s credentials, but her body showed the biology of a Fosse dancer. The boys caught on. She had burlesquey curves, and a little Know cut behind her smile. Gwen, seeing all, went on red alert. She dug into the mother role and Fosse found himself playing good cop—a honey of a chance if he didn’t bungle it. “Gwen was careful with her,”
he said, “a little more strict than I am. I said, ‘I don’t have time to watch you. I have to go to work. So I just have to trust you. So if you’re anything like your father, you’re a pretty good liar, so you could fool me, but I don’t want a lot of dope in the house or anything like that.’” She moved in with him for a short span of high school, long enough to see his girlfriends, rapidly approaching her own age, close up. It gave her a new vantage point. They had certain things in common now; namely, her father. Taking their side, Nicole cross-examined him on ancient double standards and refused to let him off the hook. He told her what he told them: He had never claimed to be fair. A woman of the seventies, she cited him for chauvinism and won. She was the joy of his life.

“That’s the future,”
Dr. Sager had said, “and that’s where love is.”

On weekends, they drove out to Quogue.
Nicole running around Manhattan on her own challenged both sides, but by opening the beach house to Nicole and friends for some supervised messing around, Fosse could make her a kind of rehearsal space in which to grow up. One such weekend, he turned them all loose, whipped up a batch of margaritas, and receded into the background. Fosse watched her, drink in hand. If anyone asked how a guy like him had raised a girl like her, he would respond plainly, quietly, he hadn’t. Gwen Verdon had. He would say he had been there at the right times and did his best when he could, but the winning moves belonged to her mother. Nicole was only seven when they split up. “Do you want her for the weekend?” Gwen had asked, early in their separation. “I’m not a babysitter” was his reply. In those days, he was a guest in their home. He had to ring the doorbell. Now, sidestepping the girl talk on the back patio, he felt like a guest in his own home, and he was maybe a little drunk too. At least, Nicole thought so. “You shouldn’t drink,” she said. “You’re with minors.” She stopped him on his way to the car. “And you’re not driving.” With her friend to help her, she led Fosse back inside. There they discovered the pitcher of margaritas waiting for them, half full. Nicole’s mother heard about it the next day. “These two teenage kids started drinking his margaritas,” Gwen said. “They wound up drunk, sick all over the bathroom floor.”

He considered, again, doing a full ballet
for the Joffrey. There was still
Big Deal,
his musical adaptation of
Big Deal on Madonna Street,
a sentimental favorite for fifteen years. He could do it either for film or on Broadway. Then there was
Atlantic City,
Cy Coleman’s idea
for a panoramic lowlife musical. That could be for him. And Marty Richards and Alan Carr had
Chicago
’s film rights and interest from Liza Minnelli and Goldie Hawn.
But Fosse had made a resolution after
Sweet Charit
y never to do onscreen what he’d already done onstage. “Besides,”
he said, “I can’t get it up again for that material. It’s like trying to go back to an old girlfriend.” But how could the new girlfriend out-gorgeous Jessica Lange? He had already topped
Lenny
with
All That Jazz,
Chicago
with
Dancin
’, and truth with self-laceration. What else was there?

There was something, an idea, maybe more of a theme, about the need for the spotlight, within him, within those who
must
act or entertain. It’s the primeval hunger. Where does it come from? (Starvation early on?) Do doctors, teachers, and painters have it? Was theirs bottomless, like his? Put to the test, how far could it push someone? How far would it push him? Fosse understood Sally Bowles, Lenny Bruce, and Joe Gideon all ended badly—but why? Beyond
All That Jazz,
he knew, there was a still darker fathom of the performer’s consciousness. At their bottom-most floor, a lost harpoon stuck out of the sand. Fosse couldn’t know who or what shot it, only that it was in him too, and it hurt. A week after he appeared in Sager’s office to announce his win at Cannes, he asked him for psychological intel on the subject of entertainers; research, Fosse said, for a project he had in mind about “the need for attention.”
Perhaps this would take him past self-laceration into outright despair.

Atlantic City
wasn’t it, but Fosse met with writer Jack Heifner
through the summer, trying to fit into narrative shape the songs Coleman and lyricist Christopher Gore had given them. “Bob and I stared at each other for hours trying to make this work,” Heifner said, “but he seemed isolated, like his heart wasn’t in it.” They worked at Fosse’s apartment and sat on his deck at Quogue, tossing story possibilities back and forth. A decaying playpen of failed hopes,
Atlantic City
was turning out to be a loser’s
Chicago,
emceed by a couple that crawled up from under the boardwalk. “They were supposed to be like Pied Pipers,” Heifner said, “like the Leading Player in
Pippin.
” They sing “Toyland,” about how the Boardwalk’s funhouse became a sex shop; they sing about a dead-end chanteuse, who sang one song, year after year, her whole life; and how the Miss America pageants turn girls into automatons. Heifner said, “I finally put together something Fosse-esque, but more like a musical revue, a
Grand Hotel
in hell.” It fizzled soon thereafter, while still in the planning stage.

It was a busy summer. Fosse and Sam Cohn invested in the Laundry,
an East Hampton restaurant of the grilled-meat-and-fish variety. To the original brick (the Laundry began as an actual laundry), architect Norman Jaffe added sleek cypress ceilings, skylights, and a bar—said to be the longest in the Hamptons—of strawberry travertine marble. With its wooden chairs and see-through fireplace, the restaurant was informal chic, an Elaine’s from the future. It opened on July 12, 1980, with a big, small gathering that included Liza Minnelli, Lauren Bacall, Brooke Shields, Louis Malle, and, of course, Fosse and Cohn.

As he agented deals to clients, Cohn agented his clients to each other, packaging them socially and professionally in town or country. On summer Saturdays, he made a habit of inviting the select to his house on Lily Pond Lane, where he ruled the grill and the tomato and onion salad (inspired by the same at Peter Luger’s) while his wife, actor-producer Julia Miles, poured the wine. Fosse was a table regular. So were Roy and Cynthia Scheider and the writers Peter Maas, Steve Tesich, and E. L. Doctorow, all clients Cohn had introduced to one another. “Bob always needed to be around writers,”
Doctorow said. “I took that as a need to be around people with a formal education.” One evening after dinner, Fosse initiated a lightning round of the truth game. When did you lose your virginity? The question circled the group and at Doctorow’s response—“I was eighteen”—Fosse’s jaw dropped. “He began to get hysterical that it happened so late,” Doctorow said. “He took off on that.”

The Scheiders were often in Quogue for a weekend with Fosse. Lunches consisted of big bowls
of tuna fish (mixed with grapes, raisins, and onions) served with lettuce and Jack cheese on buttery baguettes. They’d talk movies, actors, women, dancers. Dinners ran long and late. “I didn’t buy Bobby’s dark-guy thing,”
Cynthia Scheider said. “I really believe he was a sweet, kind, gentle man.”

Though the American musical had been sparring with pop since rock ’n’ roll, the rise of Michael Jackson made clearer the coming defeat of Broadway. It happened by way of MTV, an up-to-the-minute feed of dance and music far more sophisticated than
American Bandstand
or any concert television that had come before it. Combining the best of Broadway and Hollywood with the newest in pop, MTV held the young spirit of musical theater, and all at home, available most any time, for free. It aged the whole business
.
By 1980, few Broadway trusts seemed more passé than Gower Champion, former king of the Persian Room. Weaned on the sixties ethic of musical gargantuas, Champion made his reputation as a director-choreographer of sober spectaculars, Busby Berkeley the morning after. From
Bye Bye Birdie
to
Hello, Dolly!,
his old-fashioned extravaganzas were half a great thing, hardly new, simply classic, ideally suited to
42nd Street,
which Champion revived that year under the aegis of legendary producer David Merrick.

Fosse was in the Winter Garden opening night,
August 25, 1980, when, after the cast took ten curtain calls, Merrick appeared onstage in the midst of the applause. It had been a fun night and the crowd was pleased to see Merrick enjoying his well-deserved triumph. As the roar escalated, TV crews rushed down the aisle and up to the foot of the stage. Merrick, they had been told, would have
an announcement after the show.

Raising a palm to the clamor, he began. “I’m sorry to have to report . . .”

The applause continued.

“No, no, it’s very tragic.”

You couldn’t hear him.

“You don’t understand. Gower Champion died this morning.” He turned to embrace one of the dancers. It was very effective.

At the party, certain facts emerged. No one but the family,
the hospital, and David Merrick knew Champion had been suffering from Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, a rare blood disease. And only they knew he had died that afternoon before the curtain went up on
42nd Street
. Which meant Merrick delayed the announcement all evening and through the show, presumably waiting for his big reveal in front of TV cameras, where the grief-stricken real-time reaction of the cast (he kept it from them too) could be captured, broadcast, and spread through the airwaves that very night—an estimated value of one million dollars in free advertising. Jammed with the likes of Fosse,
Neil Simon, Ethel Merman, Joe Papp, and Woody Herman’s band, the Waldorf-Astoria’s Starlight Roof overheard more talk of Merrick than of Gower Champion. “There were so many rumors that
Merrick was just making this announcement as part of his great showman routine,” Carolyn Kirsch explained. “Some wondered if it was even true that Gower died that night.”

Fosse’s reaction was difficult to untangle. “That night my sons told me
Bob kind of took them under his wing, trying to shield them from David Merrick,” recalled Marge Champion, Gower’s former wife. “That son of a bitch,”
Fosse said to Lee Roy Reams at the party, “I just filmed my own death, and he had to do me one better by doing his live on opening night.” A day later, Gower’s widow, Karla Champion, asked Fosse if he would speak at Gower’s memorial. He replied, “Why would I do that?
We were competitors.”