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$32.00
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pr ai Se fo r
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more than a quarter
century a fter h is d eath, B ob F osse’s ἀn ger-
“Deep inside this comprehensive study, Sam Wasson uses a phrase to prints o n p opular c ulture r emain in delible.
describe the movie Cabaret: ‘the bejeweling of horror.’ Bob Fosse’s The o nly p erson e ver t o w in O scar, E mmy,
whole life was something like that, a man who created magniἀcent, and Tony awards in the same year, Fosse rev-
bejeweled art at personal cost. It’s an American story, powerfully told.” olutionized n early e very f acet o f A merican

FOSSE
— Paul Hendrickson , author of Hemingway’s Boat: entertainment, f orever m arking B roadway
Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost and H ollywood w ith h is i conic s tyle — hat
tilted, ἀ ngers s played — which w ould in flu-
ence generations of performing artists. Yet in
spite of Fosse’s innumerable achievements, no
accomplishment ever seemed to satisfy him,

FOSSE
and offstage his life was shadowed in turmoil
and anxiety.
“I tore through this masterful biography, loving it from beginning to Now, b est-selling a uthor S am Wasson
end. Wasson writes with a verve ideally tuned to his subject, spar- unveils t he m an b ehind t he s waggering s ex
kling with wit and fresh insight. Wasson consistently surprises you appeal, t racing F osse’s un told r einventions
with revelations and intimate details, and a h uge cast of richly re- of h imself o ver a c areer t hat w ould s pawn
sam Wasson is the author of the New York alized characters. He pulls you into a r iveting world of tormented ἀ e Pajama Game, Cabaret, Pippin, All ἀ at
Times bestseller Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey talent, the magpie mind that observed, borrowed, and re-imagined Jazz, and Chicago, o ne o f t he l ongest-run-
Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn to produce landmark entertainments. This is a life lived large — and ning B roadway m usicals e ver. D rawing o n
of the Modern Woman, as well as two works dangerously — amid c ultural c urrents t hat p ropelled a nd in spired a w ealth o f un published m aterial a nd h un-
of ἀlm criticism. A v isiting professor of ἀlm Fosse as a dancer, choreographer and director. In Fosse, Sam Wasson dreds o f sources — friends, en emies, lo vers,
at Wesleyan University, Wasson lives in New energetically a nd a uthoritatively b rings i t a ll in to s harp f ocus, w ith and collaborators, many of whom have never
uncanny depth and perception.”

fosse
York and Los Angeles. spoken p ublicly a bout F osse b efore — Was-
— sally Bedell smitH,  author of Elizabeth the Queen son i lluminates n ot o nly F osse’s p rodigious
professional lif e, but a lso h is c lose a nd c on-
flicted relationships with everyone from Liza
Minnelli to Ann Reinking to Jessica Lange to
© houghton Mifflin harcourt publishing coMpany

Dustin H offman. Wasson a lso un covers t he

deep wounds that propelled Fosse’s insatiable
appetites — for spotlights, women, and life it-
self. In this sweeping, richly detailed account,
Wasson’s s tylish, e ffervescent p rose p roves
Jacket design by Martha kennedy $32.00 Higher in Canada
the ideal vehicle for revealing Bob Fosse as he
Jacket photographs © norMan seeff isbn 978-0-547-55329-0
truly wa s — after h ours, close u p, a nd in v i-
author photograph © gary copeland brant color.
WaSSon
an eamon dolan book 1451364

HougHton mifflin Harcourt
www.hmhbooks.com Sa m Wa S S o n F A u t h o r o f fif th Av en ue , 5 A .M. 1113

Fosse_mechanical.indd 1 9/9/13 1:41 PM

 Fosse
Sam Wasson

An E amon D ol an B o ok
Houghton Mifflin Harc ourt
B o ston  New York
2 013

Wasson_FOSSE_int_F.indd 3 8/29/13 3:31 PM

 Copyright © 2013 by Sam Wasson
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wasson, Sam.
Fosse / Sam Wasson.
pages  cm
“An Eamon Dolan Book.”
ISBN 978-0-547-55329-0 (hardback)
1. Fosse, Bob, 1927–1987. 2. Choreographers — United States — Biography. I. Title.
GV1785.F67W37 2013
792.8´2092 — dc23
[B]
2013026082

Book design by Chrissy Kurpeski

Typeset in Minion and Knockout
Printed in the United States of America
DOC  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

“I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man” by John H. Mercer and Harry Warren © 1951, 1952 Warner
Chappell Music, Inc. 2013: Used by Permission of the Johnny Mercer Foundation, Inc.

Wasson_FOSSE_int_F.indd 4 8/29/13 3:31 PM

 Contents

The End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Sixty Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Forty-Five Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Forty-One Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Thirty-Seven Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Thirty-Five Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Thirty-Three Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Thirty-Two Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Twenty-Eight Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Twenty-Seven Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Twenty-Four Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Twenty Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Sixteen Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Fifteen Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
Fourteen Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
Thirteen Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

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 viii Contents

Twelve Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407

Eleven Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
Nine Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 458
Eight Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485
Seven Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
Six Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513
Five Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
Four Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532
Three Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 540
Two Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547
One Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
One Hour and Fifty-Three Minutes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 586

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696

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 338 Fosse

The very next day, with no time to rationalize his partial triumph,
he flew to the Beverly Hills Hotel, his home base for the week ahead.
It was Oscar time and he was in Los Angeles ​— ​two distinct reasons
to move uncomfortably from party to party. But he had backup:
Paddy, Herb, and Herb’s girlfriend, Marlo Thomas. They’d all flown
out, checked in to the Beverly Hills Hotel in rooms a few doors down
from Fosse’s, and stood by, champagne on ice, ready to convince their
friend of his victory if he won or rage with him if he lost (and they
knew he was going to lose ​— ​to Coppola). The list of night-before-

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 Fifteen Years 339

Oscar parties was as long and dull as a tax return and offered multiple
opportunities for awkward run-ins between Fosse and the executive
element he despised, but producer Edgar Scherick’s cocktail gather-
ing at the Hotel Bel-Air, thick with the New York vibe of Elaine May
and the cast of The Heartbreak Kid, was the kind of evening Fosse
and the Carnegie bunch (and, as it turned out, Groucho Marx) could
get behind.
Janice Lynde was Fosse’s date. Weeks earlier, she had accompanied
him to the Directors Guild Awards (Fosse was nominated for best di-
rector of a feature film, but Coppola won, as expected). The night of
the Oscars, she met Fosse for a pre-awards party at Emanuel Wolf ’s
pink and green suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. All of the Cabaret
people were there: Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, David Bretherton, Geof-
frey Unsworth, and forty others. Lynde said, “He was really, really
nervous then, shifty and scared.” Shoring himself up with booze and
tranquilizers, Fosse got sweaty cold as Wolf took the floor for one
last go-get-’em-don’t-worry-have-fun speech. Both The Godfather
and Cabaret were tied at ten nominations each, but their little film
had started with so much less: in Munich, with a tiny budget, a di-
lapidated genre (the movie musical), and a director on artistic parole.
And yet here they were, about to go to the Academy Awards; that
in itself, Wolf reminded them, was a victory. In the limo to the cer-
emony, Fosse repeated a discouraging statistic about how reliably the
Directors Guild Awards predicted the Oscar winners. It was always
best to expect the worst.
They pulled up to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion ​— ​sitting in
downtown LA, like a beached whale doing a Lincoln Center impres-
sion ​— ​and out stepped Janice in a Greek goddess dress, cut flowingly
to the navel, followed by Bob Fosse in a three-piece tuxedo, his tight
vest cinching him smaller than ever.
Paddy had already delivered his wisdom, and Sam Cohn, having
seen many more clients lose than win, had already telegrammed a

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 340 Fosse

pat on the back. Variations on the good-luck theme, most of them

chips off the old bullshit Fosse had heard his whole life, passed his
ears; familiar and semifamiliar faces he knew (or claimed to know)
claimed to know him. Hollywood people were different. Whether it
was the product of more money or more sun, their alien cheer made
them, like a certain kind of musical comedy, easy to write off as
phony, which of course many of them were. There, Fosse’s cynicism
had its advantages. Broadway’s gripe against the film capital of the
world ​— ​based on decades of failed migrations as far back as Doro-
thy Parker’s ​— ​made LA the voodoo doll for Fosse’s pins, and it kept
him at a steely distance from the in crowd he always wanted to join.
And LA was clean. He didn’t trust clean. The people of Broadway
had a worn-in quality. They were troupers. They sweated and they
stuck together. Their many weeks of rehearsal, their eight shows a
week, the restrictive parameters of midtown, the small talent pool
and reteamings of favorite collaborators, and the ancient rites of old
theaters and restaurants made Broadway a place of tradition and fa-
miliarity. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion conveyed an unused qual-
ity ​— ​all sparkles and high ceilings.
Ten minutes before showtime the bell sounded; every cigarette
was extinguished, and the slow flood into the auditorium began.
The stage was spare. Gaunt stairways twisted behind the podium,
hiding in shadow like fire escapes with stage fright. Red, orange, and
blue lights peeked out from around them, as if curious to get a look
at the presenters or the black lacquered runway over the orchestra
and into the center aisle. The curtain bell sounded again, and the
Cabaret company found their section near the front of the stage, Liza
with boyfriend Desi Arnaz Jr. and her father, Vincente Minnelli; Joel
Grey with his wife; and Bob with Janice. Soon every seat was taken,
none of them in the smoking section. A man on the God mic kindly
asked for silence; silence was calmly granted; there was a countdown

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 Fifteen Years 341

from five; and the house lights, instead of going down, went up for
the cameras. Should Janice hold Bob’s hand? Was this a good time to
say something? Janice decided to say nothing; she would simply be
there with him.
Now things would get bad for almost everyone. The pre-show
charge that people and their dates felt in the lobby was the happiest
most of them were going to feel all night. Rather than picking up
momentum, the Academy Awards invariably cool down as they pro­
gress, leaving behind each winner four bodies, and then four more
and four more, so by the end of the evening, the dead so outnumber
the living that most people are happy to flee. That evening was no
different.
Except Cabaret was winning. Joel Grey heard his name and got up.
One of the show’s hosts, Charlton Heston, got a flat tire and missed
his entrance, so Clint Eastwood, pulled from the audience, got up.
The editor David Bretherton heard his name and got up, and Geof-
frey Unsworth, who took Fosse’s side in the darkness, got up. It was
happening, and with each win, the next win seemed more likely; the
next loss more humiliating. But they didn’t lose; they kept sweeping:
best score, best art direction, and best sound, which made it difficult
to completely discount the possibility that Fosse might win, although
he wouldn’t. Coppola would. “He was very still,” Emanuel Wolf said.
“He was somewhere else.” They had lost best adapted screenplay to
Coppola, but the tally showed Cabaret was quietly, and strangely,
ahead of The Godfather. As the bodies piled up and the ceremony
approached its end, The Godfather had only two wins to Cabaret’s
seven.
George Stevens and Julie Andrews, at the podium, announced the
nominees for best director.
“Bob Fosse for Cabaret.”
His head was down. Janice was not with him. The show’s directors

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 342 Fosse

had removed the pretty girl from the edge of the frame to make for a
better, more intense close-up of Fosse. Surrounded by men, seat fill-
ers he hadn’t met before, Fosse looked much more alone.
“John Boorman,” Andrews said, “for Deliverance.”
“Jan Troell for The Emigrants.”
“Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather.”
“Joseph Mankiewicz for Sleuth.”
Then the envelope and Bob Fosse heard his name again, and he
was onstage, taking a cold statue from George Stevens. “My legs were
like cooked spaghetti,” he recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘What am
I going to say? I should be bright, how am I going to look on TV? I
wonder if Nicole is watching? Don’t make an ass of yourself. Show
enough emotion. But don’t slobber.’ ”
“Thank you,” he said at the podium. “Thank you very much. Thank
you. I must say I feel a little like Clint Eastwood, that you’re letting
me stand up here because Coppola or Mankiewicz hasn’t shown up
yet.”
Unsteady laughter from the house.
“But being characteristically a pessimist and cynic, this and some
of the other nice things that have happened to me the last couple days
may turn me into some sort of hopeful optimist and ruin my whole
life.”
Steady laughter.
“There’s so many people to thank. You’ve heard a lot of the names,
but it’s important for me to say them, and I’m sure I’m gonna miss
some of the ones and regret it tomorrow. Of course Liza, and Joel,
Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Marty Baum, Manny Wolf, Kander
and Ebb. A terrific guy by the name of Doug Green. A dear friend of
mine by the name of Gwen Verdon. And I’d also like to mention Cy
Feuer, the producer, with whom I had a lot of disputes. But on a night
like this, you start having affection for everybody. Thank you.”
Fosse was escorted backstage for the hailstorm of press and pho-

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 Fifteen Years 343

tographs, and then he returned to his seat, woozy, for the rest of the
show. Liza Minnelli heard her name, squeezed her father’s arm, and
got up. Then Marlon Brando’s name was read and Sacheen Little-
feather, new to show business, got up. When the best-picture enve-
lope was opened, Cy Feuer got up. Then he heard that The Godfather
won and he sat down.
As soon as he could, Fosse called home; that is, he called Nicole at
Gwen’s in East Hampton.
“Hi, Dad.” She was distant.
“What did you think of the show?”
“Nice.”
He asked her about her new bicycle; she answered about her new
bicycle; and she handed the phone to Gwen. “You should have been
here,” Gwen said. “When you won it, she screamed so loud she said,
‘I think I broke something in my throat.’ ”
Somewhere around midnight, Fosse and Janice and the Academy
Award for best director returned to the quiet of the Beverly Hills
Hotel, where Paddy, Herb, and Marlo were waiting up for them.
They convened in Fosse’s suite and opened bottles and windows and
looked over the one or two swimmers flying over the pool below. The
occasional clink of crystal on crystal or sound of a pretty girl’s laugh
curled its long way up through the palms to Fosse’s balcony, where
he sat, smoking, laughing, unbelieving, with his friends. It was a cool
evening. Nothing lasts, but Fosse knew these stubborn wisecracking
maniacs belonged to him for life. “I’ll walk you one more block,” he
had said to Herb and Paddy after lunch one afternoon, “and then I
have to go back to work.” “Don’t you remember,” Paddy shot back.
“You have no work. You’re finished in this business.” Fosse nodded
slowly. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “I forgot.” They had loved him
before he won and they would love him after he won and with a fer-
vency no critic, not even him, could ever corrupt.
The next morning, Fosse ordered room service and climbed into

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 344 Fosse

the shower. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Janice standing
before the mirror, looking at herself holding the Oscar as if she’d won
it. “Would you do anything to win one?” he asked.
The next week was terrific. Glorying in the attention satiated
Fosse. But then the accolades passed, and he came down. “I couldn’t
understand why I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Instead of jumping down
the street and being all smiles, I’d find I was badly depressed.” Once a
drug, the thrill of winning was starting to feel merely good; in a way,
it didn’t feel like winning anymore.

Then the Emmys came around. Fosse flew back to LA and won the
best director award, his third, for Liza with a Z. He was now the only
person in history to win the Tony, the Oscar, and the Emmy ​— ​the
Triple Crown ​— ​in a single year. Which made him the only person
in history to follow that victory with the most terrible depression of
his life.
There was no achievement that could be better than winning
everything, which he had just done. Here he was, a record-breaker,
again: He was here. Where was he? He was alone. Public triumph
brought Fosse a magic wand with a surprise curse ​— ​against him.
Whenever he decided to tap it on a project or a person, to make a
dream come true, there appeared from somewhere else ​— ​poof ​— ​a
rejected individual furious at Fosse for not alchemizing him. There
were just too many against him now, more every day. The pressure to
please everyone, to share his freshly notarized genius and personally
return every phone call (and happily) and weather everyone’s retalia-
tory anger without absorbing that blame into blame against himself
led Ann Reinking to observe that success for Bob Fosse was harder
than failure. “He didn’t understand why people seemed to be trying
to tear him down,” she said. “It confused him. He’d ask, ‘Why am I so
miserable when everything’s going right?’ ”
He knew he couldn’t complain. Discussing this sort of high-level

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 Fifteen Years 345

heartache with anyone outside of Reinking (or Paddy and Herb)

would further estrange him from his friends and his “friends” and
those aspirants in between, so Fosse, at the pinnacle, called off the
parade. He withdrew. And withdrawing, he drew more criticism.
Now, they said, he thought he was too good for them. “Bob couldn’t
win that one,” Reinking said. “He lost a lot of friends.”
“His pain was extreme,” Lynde said. Was this supposed to be as
good as he ever felt? Was this the dream? Because if it was ​— ​and
it was, or at least it had been ​— ​then his whole life was behind him.
Except for decline.
Decline was still ahead.
“He was afraid he would not be able to figure out what to do next,”
Lynde said. “Nothing would ever be as good again.” It would seem
he had given all he had to give. Creating a new dance vocabulary, re-
inventing the television special, reinventing the movie musical, and
dragging all those genres to hell, both onscreen and onstage, Fosse
had raised the bar on blackness impossibly high. And now he would
have to raise it higher. But how? What human truth was darker than
Nazism or suicide? What was darker than pitch-black? “There’s this
Looney Tunes cartoon,” Ann Reinking said, “called Show Biz Bugs,
with Daffy and Bugs Bunny in competing acts. The audience loves
Bugs, and Daffy keeps trying to outdo him and he can’t. Daffy figures
out the only way he can upstage him is to blow himself up. When he
finally does, the audience goes wild. Bugs loves it and claps for an
encore. Daffy, his ghost floating up, says, ‘I know, I know. But I can
only do it once.’ That’s Bob.” At the end of May, he checked in to the
Payne Whitney psychiatry clinic.

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