Fosse by Sam Wasson

ambled around the sound stages as if they were living people. Judy Garland. Gene Kelly making
Brigadoon.
Donald O’Connor. The Donald O’Connor knockoffs. The guileless Bob Fosse fit somewhere in there, though exactly where, no one knew for sure. He didn’t have Kelly’s hardy build or expansive spirit. He didn’t score high on the O’Connor scale of personality. Never mind that he was one of the best dancers on the lot. Close-ups didn’t care about that. Bob Fosse was mild of voice, limited of expression, and small onscreen. What did they need him for?
    Fosse endured many screen tests,innumerable changes of clothes, hairstyles, poses, and expressions, until the studio finally decided who he was. They would accent the trait Fosse’s women called his most compelling: his boyishness. They gave him a toupee.“That was a trauma for me,”Fosse said; at twenty-five, he was certain his thinning hair predicted a lifetime of impotence.
    Orders were always changing. MGM moved Fosse from the Donald O’Connor part in Stanley Donen’s
Jumbo,
which had been postponed, to the Gene Kelly part in Stanley Donen’s
Give a Girl a Break;
that is, the part Kelly was
supposed
to playbefore the picture was downgraded—thanks to the Schary regime—to a smaller-budget film. From there, more was compromised. Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich knew they had a turkey on their hands.The last-minute casting(to Fosse’s awe and consternation) of Marge and Gower Champion gave them only ten days to rewrite what years could not have improved. Unceasing revisions put a strainon a cast that now included Debbie Reynolds, fresh off
Singin’ in the Rain,
who quickly and accurately determined that Bob Fosse, a dancer nobody had ever heard of, was her director’s primary interest; she shared this gripe with the Champions, who also felt shortchanged. “They were Mr. Show Biz,and we were no talent,” Reynolds said. To be fair, Donen had to think fast. With the script in a shambles, he saw Fosse as a lifeboat on the horizon. “In my opinion,”Donen said, “he was going to be as good of a song-and-dance man, for lack of a better word, as any of the others—the only other two—as Kelly and Astaire. I thought, ‘This guy is going to be it.’”
    While the Champions worked with Reynolds, Donen and Fosse, in isolation from the company, began what would become a lifelong friendship. Like Joe Papp and Buddy Hackett, Donen shared Fosse’s hoofer ethic of hard work and good humor. At sixteen, Donen had been in the chorus of the original
Pal Joey,
a major feat, Fosse thought, as was Donen’s preternaturally fast transition from tap dancing to directing major MGM musicals—with Fred Astaire! Only a few years older than Fosse but with power and experience in the movie department, Donen rose quickly from friend to mentor/friend, as Papp had in the Pacific. All of Fosse’s relationships, erotic or platonic, generally began this way: a boy, eager to collaborate, seeking to learn from a master. These liaisons had a political benefit too: friending talent was never a bad idea. Especially when the friend was the director and the script was being rewritten daily.
    “Fosse and Donen were wrapped upin each other,” Marge Champion remembered. “They really didn’t give us the time of day.” When the two weren’t working, they were clowning. Donen was seen creeping up behindFosse to snatch a toupee from his balding head. Fosse was seen creeping up behindDebbie Reynolds, hoping for a kiss (he didn’t get one).
     
    The bright light might have been stunning that California afternoon as Fosse shuffled across the lot with Stanley Donen, but he wouldn’t have known it; the world, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, was something he’d have to crane his neck to notice. Naturally hunched, he had an almost collaborative complicity with the pavement, a rehearsal space he could engage at any time. All he had to do was look down, and he