Nice Bob in appropriate attire; Scary Bob in scarier attire

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I’ve spent the better part of ten days immersing myself in Bob Fosse’s life and films and, to be honest, at times the waters have been brackish.

Certainly, I respect and enjoy his films now as much as ever. In particular, both Lenny and Cabaret seem even better films to me now than before. This time around, I was struck by how lightly Lenny carries the devices it’s borrowed from Citizen Kane and how beautifully wrought and emotionally strong the film is. I’d call it the most artistically accomplished biopic of all time.

Cabaret, which I’ve seen many times, was a nicer, funnier film than I remembered when I saw it last, probably six or seven years ago. It’s not that the film ignores the vast darkness of Nazi Germany, and it certainly conveys Fosse’s suspicion of the seemingly impassive audience (his shots of spectators in both Lenny and Cabaret are studies in misanthropy), but what surprised me this time was its respect and affection for its characters, and a lingering sense of hope for humanity, despite the decadence and fear underlying the whole story. I suppose Christopher Isherwood, whose autobiographical stories are the original source material for Cabaret, deserves some of the credit for that, even if it’s true that his only reaction to the film was that it was “a goddamn lie.” (He’d never slept with a woman.)

Moving on, All That Jazz may be less than entirely honest, but for all its dark wit, tragedy, and satire, it’s a vastly entertaining and even loving film that invites us to take stock of our lives. Just as important, it contains three marvelous dance scenes — not including “Air-Rotica,” which has its moments, but is also the only time Fosse ever really let himself got pretentious on film. The ending of the dance is particularly silly — using the child’s trick of lighting below the face in order to make a point about alienation and casual sex. Otherwise, All That Jazz is a suitable final bow for the musical Fosse, the ultimate goodbye for the entertainer, even if he wasn’t sure he was going away yet.

The two biographies I read were a different matter. For one thing, I can’t entirely trust either of them. Among other concerns, both read as if they were rushed out to capitalize on the interest in Fosse following his not too surprising death in 1987 at age 59.

Dance writer Kevin Boyd Grubb’s slim 1989 Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Work of Bob Fosse, is pleasant, sloppy, and far from essential, though it paints in the broad outlines well enough. Drama critic Martin Gottfried’s 1990 All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse is the closer to being a definitive work, but it’s not a pleasant place to spend 460 pages worth of reading time. My impression is that, somewhere along the way, Gottfried turned against Fosse — which may or may not be a legitimate approach, but as the writer of the closest thing there’d ever be to an authorized biography, his disapproval gets communicated through the force of unpleasant anecdotes, piled one on top of the other.

To be more specific, Gottfried’s prissy and exaggerated description of “Air-Rotica” and of other allegedly “pornographic” dances in Fosse stage shows worries me. He seems personally offended by some of the onstage dance. Could his repulsion be coloring his reporting of the rest of Fosse’s life, or is there something else other going on? At certain points, Gottfried is almost as hard on Fosse’s semi-estranged widow and lifelong friend and collaborator, Gwen Verdon, who he interviewed in preparation for the book. That must have led to some interesting reactions.

The people Gottfried interviewed told him many things, but he seems to emphasize the tawdry aspects, including Fosse’s near addiction to sexual threesomes, which even worked their way into Lenny. (According to Gottfried, the episode in the film where Honey Bruce is manipulated into a bisexual menage with another woman is an invention of Fosse and screenwriter Julian Barry, not an episode from Lenny Bruce’s life.)

And then there’s this bizarre quote from Herb Schlein, an enthralled fan of Fosse and other show business types, who eventually became a host at the Carnegie Deli, where Fosse and his writer friends Herb Gardner, Robert Aurthur, and Paddy Chayefsky, regularly held court. Gottfried quotes Schlein describing Fosse as “the only human being that I did have a little friendship with. A little bit. And who was never mean to me.” Gottfried, not afraid to rub anything in, it seems, repeats the quote later on. If the quote is correct, and Schlein meant it as it sounded, then my heart goes out to him. But it’s hard to take any quote in the book as literally accurate.

Aside from whatever personal or aesthetic axes Gottfried may or may not have been grinding, there is at least one genuinely startling inaccuracy that makes me wonder what others I might be missing. At one point, Gottfried discusses an early eighties lunch that involved Elia Kazan, Fosse, and Chavefsky, who was writing an article bucking Cold War-era liberal orthodoxy regarding a controversy from some three decades prior:

“Most people disagreed with me about the testimony I gave in the Alger Hiss case,” Kazan remembered, “but Paddy supported me, and Fosse agreed with him.”

I think I must have reread this quote ten times. It was so outrageously wrong that I was sure I was missing something. Of course, Kazan had testified and named show business names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the early fifties, but he had nothing whatever to do with the Hiss case, which occurred a few years prior.

Either Kazan’s memory of events was severely faulty, or Gottfried was the most politically ignorant writer in all of New York City. The Hiss case and Kazan’s testimony were no footnotes in political or entertainment history. Admittedly, the book was written in 1990, when fact checking was a bit harder than in our own wired time, but this point is so glaringly elementary, that, even assuming that a harried Gottfried had lost his grasp of well known facts, I wonder how Bantam’s editors let such a massive error through. Either that, or there’s an important missing chapter of history where a respected theater and film director somehow gave testimony in a spy case involving the U.S. State Department.

(I should mention that I’ve been reading a library copy of the initial hardcover edition. I don’t know if it was corrected for the current paperback edition, though my hunch is it hasn’t. It stands as is on Google Books. Also, my thanks to Campuspe for reassuring me that I hadn’t gone insane on the Hiss/Kazan error.)

Just to be fair and because it’s fun to be mean sometimes, the shorter biography, Razzle Dazzle, has a pretty egregious error of its own. At one point, trying hard to sound a scholarly note, author Kevin Boyd Grubb says that All That Jazz “has often been compared to Fellini’s 8½ and Woody Allen’s Love and Death….Allen’s Love and Death, like Fosse’s film, finds obvious connections between falling in love and dying.” If you’ve seen the film in question, you know how ridiculous the statement is, (Love and Death is one of Allen’s “early, funny movies,” an over the top spoof of Russian novels and Ingmar Bergman films.) Perhaps he was thinking of Stardust Memories, which really does have something in common with the Fosse and Fellini pictures. In any case, this is the point where I bring out Woody Allen from behind a movie theater standee, and he slaps Kevin Body Grubb with a fish.

So, it’s high time someone else took a crack at a Fosse biography. Sadly, it won’t be easy. Most of Fosse’s closest friends and family are long gone, most importantly Gwen Verdon, who died in 2000. To make matters worse, both for biographers and for Fosse, a shocking number of Fosse’s friends, lovers, and close colleagues died during Fosse’s lifetime, including his second wife, dancer-actress Joan McCrackin, and performer-choreographer Carol Haney — best known today for her role in the stage and film versions of The Pajama Game.

Carol Haney, with John Raitt

That backlog of pain leads to the real subject of this post: if only half of the incidents that Martin Gottfried described were true, Fosse was not only in love with death, he was an embittered and often cruel human being to just about everyone he was close to, with the possible exception of nerdy Herb Schlien and raunchy comic Buddy Hackett (an old army friend who’d occasionally swoop into his life, I’m guessing way too blithe to be aware of any dark clouds). Gottfried even has Paddy Chavefsky, possibly his best friend, describing him as a bully.

I don’t think I could be good friends with someone I thought of that way and, reading one sad, sordid incident after another started to wear me down. I’ve never equated an artist’s dark works with a dark soul, and I wanted to like Fosse and was starting to, just a little. This will sound incredibly naive — I know he was acting — but the Bob Fosse I recently discovered in My Sister Eileen seemed to reveal something of the shy, seemingly self-effacing Fosse that surprised many new acquaintances. I still can’t figure out how to reconcile that Bob Fosse with the manipulative, vicious egomaniac I’ve also been reading about.

The person I saw on-screen was believable as the busy show business success who nevertheless had time to listen to Herb Schlein discuss his problems with living with his mother. He wasn’t the guy who demanded an opinion about an early cut of Lenny from writer Julian Barry — just after he’d gotten word that his wife had left him. Completely beside himself and unable to concentrate, Barry confessed that he couldn’t remember the film he had just finished watching, and told Fosse about the break-up. Fosse’s response,per Gottfried: “I don’t give a shit about your wife! I want to know what you think of our movie!”

That’s the Bob Fosse I’ve been living with for most of a week, a man who only became more viciously insecure after winning the show business triple crown — a Tony, an Emmy and, in a major upset during the year of The Godfather, an Oscar for Best Director. It’s almost endearing that he was the poster boy for impostor syndrome, but it’s not endearing that he would ask people what he thought of his work and then go into a rage if they criticized something he happened to like.

Nor is there anything charming about his seemingly irrational sudden coldness towards some in his circle. After his longtime friend Robert Alan Aurthur, ironically enough, died during the post-production of All That Jazz, Fosse expressed little grief. Aurther was the co-writer and producer of Jazz and they had quarreled bitterly. Even in death, Fosse was, we’re told, unable to forgive him. When Paddy Chayefsky died not long after, however, Fosse nearly broke down completely. As described, Fosse’s reaction was beyond grief. Maybe he was finally starting to fear his own death a little.

And how much of his crazed emotional life, to whatever extent it really was crazed, was due to his briefcase full of amphetamines and barbiturates? I can well understand addiction, but I’m not sure Fosse was really that much of an addict to anything in particular, except his overall lifestyle. If he cared about people, he could have tried to modified his behavior, but he never seems to have even considered giving up drugs, or anything else.

Gwen Verdon

Still, in some ways, the world was strangely merciful to Fosse. He somehow kept most of his friends. While his later works on stage as well as the screen were a mix of success and failure, his batting average remained acceptable (not that he saw it that way). And, though he didn’t get quite the send-off Joe Gideon gave himself, when his final moments came, he was with Gwen Verdon. Despite decades of separation, they had never divorced and continued working together, most recently on a revival of Sweet Charity. I don’t want to romanticize his death, which was painful, but she seems to have been the person who, with the probable exception of his daughter, he cared the most about. How many of us get to die in the arms of someone we really love? I hope he appreciated it.

The good news is that none of this is our problem. Fosse might or might not have been miserable, and miserable to be around a lot of the time, but as an audience, we get to let ourselves be wrapped up in stories and illusion. And that’s how Fosse has, time and time again, made me very happy. He crafted four great films and was the creator of the best post-Astaire popular dances of the twentieth century.

And, finally, it’s the dances I can’t help thinking of, both from his own films and those directed by others. And now, through the miracle of YouTube, any time I feel a bit bored or down, I can enter “Bob Fosse” in the search, and finding something new — possibly a stage dance from that will make me chuckle a little and get me tapping my feet.

Fosse wasn’t a particularly spiritual or sublime artist, and that’s part of what I love about him. He engaged his audience at street level and got right down into the gutter with the rest of us humans. In his own, dark, grungy way, he nevertheless got to us to look up at the stars, even if we all knew they were just made of Styrofoam.