HAD I NOT BEEN BORN ME...
THE BACKUP PLAN I WISH I HAD would be to have been able to arrive here on Earth on earth 9 years earlier than I did; become a guy who grew to manhood with a receding hairline, wore hats to hide his partial baldness; donned gloves in his performances, because he thought he had hideous hands; was a song-and-dance man; had a romantic attraction to death; found it impossible to practice the fine are of fidelity, in that there were too many beautiful women in his world with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery to live up to the demand of monogamy; most were dancers and actresses; and in the world where he worked they were the women he met.
He appreciated other things too: jazz; nightclubs; vaudeville jokes, the New York Mets; Fred Astaire; children; boxing and football and air hockey; New York Post headlines; his daughter; his cat; and, of course, cooking good food and bringing it to perfection; and while he was in the kitchen, inside of his head, he was creating songs like Steam Heat and Big Spender and Bye Bye Blackbird.
His rehearsal hall was up on the 11th floor of 850 Seventh Avenue at 56th Street, around the corner from the Carnegie Deli, where he'd have lunch almost every day with friends, mostly writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking tons of cigarettes; then go back and look down at the sleazy hamlet he liked to call his own, the one square mile of earth he cared for more than any other, with all the glitter and neon; and watch folks out for a stroll, thinking that every one of them must have some kind of story to tell, harder and meaner and more exciting than the fairy-tale Broadway of Damon Runyon. He once said, "I see a hooker on the corner, and I can only think there's some kind of story there. I mean, she was once six years old."
Quite simply, he wanted to be the best at what he did.
He arrived on the 23rd day of June in 1927, born in Chicago, Illinois, the second youngest of six children, moved to the City of New York with the ambition of being the next Fred Astaire. In the '50s and the '60s; when he was between women; he was usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss; no male friends were as important as women or the possibility of love. He then met one woman, and was swept away; one who combined humor, vulnerability, toughness, and sensuality, in shows he designed, choreographed, and directed; one of which was called Damn Yankees.
Her name was Gwen Verdon and his name was Bob Fosse.
They married, then separated in the 1970's, mostly due to his obvious flaws constant infidelities, but never divorced; and she would forever remain at the center of his soul as his inspiration for every venture after that, from Sweet Charity to Chicago, where she helped him develop and crystallize a jazz dance style that was immediately recognizable, exuding a stylized cynical sexuality of turned-in knees, sideways shuffles, rolled shoulders, and jazz hands. Even though it is impossible to separate the two of them, he was also a fine director of other women. Liza Minnelli and Anne Reinking did their best work for him; he was the first one to recognize that Jessica Lange could be a superb actress when he saw her in the movie King Kong and would eventually cast her as the Angel of Death in All That Jazz, which was appropriate for Fosse, who else could have imagined death as a bewitching women, one who could invite him into her loving arms when his time came to die?
THE BACKUP PLAN I WISH I HAD would be to have been able to arrive here on Earth on earth 9 years earlier than I did; become a guy who grew to manhood with a receding hairline, wore hats to hide his partial baldness; donned gloves in his performances, because he thought he had hideous hands; was a song-and-dance man; had a romantic attraction to death; found it impossible to practice the fine are of fidelity, in that there were too many beautiful women in his world with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery to live up to the demand of monogamy; most were dancers and actresses; and in the world where he worked they were the women he met.
He appreciated other things too: jazz; nightclubs; vaudeville jokes, the New York Mets; Fred Astaire; children; boxing and football and air hockey; New York Post headlines; his daughter; his cat; and, of course, cooking good food and bringing it to perfection; and while he was in the kitchen, inside of his head, he was creating songs like Steam Heat and Big Spender and Bye Bye Blackbird.
His rehearsal hall was up on the 11th floor of 850 Seventh Avenue at 56th Street, around the corner from the Carnegie Deli, where he'd have lunch almost every day with friends, mostly writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking tons of cigarettes; then go back and look down at the sleazy hamlet he liked to call his own, the one square mile of earth he cared for more than any other, with all the glitter and neon; and watch folks out for a stroll, thinking that every one of them must have some kind of story to tell, harder and meaner and more exciting than the fairy-tale Broadway of Damon Runyon. He once said, "I see a hooker on the corner, and I can only think there's some kind of story there. I mean, she was once six years old."
Quite simply, he wanted to be the best at what he did.
He arrived on the 23rd day of June in 1927, born in Chicago, Illinois, the second youngest of six children, moved to the City of New York with the ambition of being the next Fred Astaire. In the '50s and the '60s; when he was between women; he was usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss; no male friends were as important as women or the possibility of love. He then met one woman, and was swept away; one who combined humor, vulnerability, toughness, and sensuality, in shows he designed, choreographed, and directed; one of which was called Damn Yankees.
Her name was Gwen Verdon and his name was Bob Fosse.
They married, then separated in the 1970's, mostly due to his obvious flaws constant infidelities, but never divorced; and she would forever remain at the center of his soul as his inspiration for every venture after that, from Sweet Charity to Chicago, where she helped him develop and crystallize a jazz dance style that was immediately recognizable, exuding a stylized cynical sexuality of turned-in knees, sideways shuffles, rolled shoulders, and jazz hands. Even though it is impossible to separate the two of them, he was also a fine director of other women. Liza Minnelli and Anne Reinking did their best work for him; he was the first one to recognize that Jessica Lange could be a superb actress when he saw her in the movie King Kong and would eventually cast her as the Angel of Death in All That Jazz, which was appropriate for Fosse, who else could have imagined death as a bewitching women, one who could invite him into her loving arms when his time came to die?
Fosse was 47 years old in 1974, when he had his first ferocious heart attack, was in critical condition in bed, trapped in a ganglia of tubes and wires. He was competitive, and cared, perhaps too much, about the way he stood in relation to other directors; and because he worked so hard, and because he knew how much pain was involved in the making of a show or a movie, Fosse generally despised critics, believing that their sensibilities were blunted, so much so, that he thought of them as unable to respond to amazing theatrical moments; that they were responsible for the failure of his movie Star 80, which was about the death of the former Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratton; and said, "Maybe all they want is shit. Maybe it's over for people like me."
He was still working at the end; trying to choose between a movie about Walter Winchell, a movie version of Chicago, or something completely new, based upon his experiences in the Second World War. He had gone to war and was a 17-year-old sailor working in an entertainment unit in the South Pacific; was with the first Americans to enter Japan at the end of the war and remained horrified at the scale of destruction in Tokyo and the stupid brutal way so many American soldiers treated the Japanese, particularly the women, and would one day say, "That was the first time I was really ashamed to be an American." The contrast between the idealism of fighting the war and the morally corrosive realities of victory was a splendid setup for a Fosse movie, but he was uneasy about it, "That world is gone, that music, the way people were...Most of the country wouldn't know what I was talking about."
He closed out of town on the 23rd day of September in 1987 at the age of 60. Gwen Verdon was with him when he lay down for the final time on the grass of a small park in Washington D.C. after suffering another attack to his heart; was sent to the George Washington University Hospital; gave his final goodbye with her by his side; they had both had been there to see a revival of Sweet Charity at the National Theater. His ashes were then taken by his wife and daughter to Quogue, New York, where they were scattered into the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, with the two of them watching, as his remains were gently swept out to sea.
Toying with the notion of his own death, he had created a semi-autobiographical film, All That Jazz, about a womanizing, drug-addicted, choreographer-director; which was, in reality, not so much about his attraction to death, but the impossibility of fidelity; and it became his masterpiece, winning the Palm d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980; he also garnered an Academy Award as Best Director for his second film Cabaret over Francis Ford Coppala for The Godfather; captured two Tony Awards for Pippin and Sweet Charity; and polished-off one Emmy Award for Liza with a Z...
Not a bad track record a balding guy who didn't like his hands all that much...
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