All that Fosse

in director/choreographer/hoofer bob fosse's movie starring roy scheider as a director/choreographer/hoofer, any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly intentional

When A Man has a heart attack, followed by a second heart attack, then by major surgery, and later makes a $10,000,000 movie about it, chances are good that the result is going to be controversial. When was the last time anyone made a big musical about a coronary seizure, especially one that proved fatal? The people who don't think Bob Fosse's All That Jazz is a flaming goddamned masterpiece are apt to tell you it's the worst piece of self-indulgent claptrap they ever sat through (claptrap it's definitely not, but see this issue's movie reviews for a fuller appraisal).

There is no question, however, that All That Jazz is all about Fosse, or at least about a Broadway director-choreographer so much like him that you'd need a lie detector to locate the very fine line between fact and fiction. Never far from the known facts of Fosse's life, the film's fiction is that Joe Gideon--a man with hit movies, a string of hit shows and many handsome women stacked up in the wings to keep him warm--succeeds at everything but his human relationship and finally manages to destroy himself with work, sex, drugs and liquor.

Unlike his doomed alter ego (a triumphant change-of-pace role for Roy Scheider), Fosse happens to be alive and well, still a confirmed workaholic who expresses genuine puzzlement when asked why he chose to waste his famous stylistic pizzazz on such a heavy trip. He deplores any suggestion that seriousness is a new element in the work of the man who made the successful film versions of Lenny and Cabaret--one a dark cinematic sonnet about the tragic life and death of Lenny Bruce, the other a great Academy Award-winning musical set against the decadence of early Nazi Germany.

What makes Fosse run? Seemingly indefatigable, he made showbiz history in 1973 by winning a TV Emmy (for Liza Minnelli's Liza with a Z), two Broadway Tony awards (as director-choreographer of Pippin), plus an Oscar for Cabaret. The triple-threat director shows comparable virtuosity and versatility in handling women. Thrice married, he is either in love with love or phenomenally foot-loose. One dancer in All That Jazz, under the cloak of anonymity, says of Fosse, "He wants to go to bed with talent, he's so turned on by it. He admits that when he sees you being really good, he wants to fuck that."

Other colleagues are equally outspoken but less skittish about their relationships with Fosse and his film.

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Roy Scheider, whose tough-guy image gained a new dimension after Jaws, proceeded from All That Jazz to star billing on Broadway in Harold Pinter's Betrayal. Says Scheider:

"When I first read the script, I thought: This is Bob Fosse's 8-1/2. We never discussed the Fellini film, yet Fosse has the same wonderful confusion about women in his movie. Joe Gideon's got his wife, mistress, child . . . and the desire to be worshiped and adored by all of them at the same time.

"Of course, many women in the cast were women whom Bob had gone with at one time, which I found very interesting, though, of course, all were hired strictly on the basis of talent. I've never in my life been surrounded by so many beautiful women. I didn't want the movie to end.

"I felt I was a good choice for the role of Joe Gideon. When Richard Dreyfuss dropped out of the project, Bob's agent, Sam Cohn, who's also my agent, told Bob, 'I think you should chose Roy.' And Fosse said, 'Holy shit, you're right!' The problem was selling me to the studio heads. They told Fosse it was commercial suicide. There were very heavy doubts, which makes this picture goddamned important to me, a real breakthrough, as a chance to prove I can be light, funny, romantic.

"Going through the script before we began to shoot, Bob would tell me what stuff was true and what wasn't true. But the stuff that was factual was the first stuff that went out of the script.

"The less people know about Fosse, the more they may be able to look at this film as a film. Those who know him well, or think they do, are too busy figuring out who's who . . . but the Joe Gideon we created is a combination of Fosse and myself and any other guys we knew who were like that. His whole life is like a number. When the girl played by Annie Reinking says to him, 'I wish you weren't so generous with your cock,' he immediately thinks, Hey, y'know, that's pretty good . . . I can use that later. He's guy who has removed himself several times, to watch his life unfold. So it becomes tough for him to see reality, to feel.

"Fosse, I think, came to a high point in his life, with an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy, and asked himself, Do they think I'm really that good? They don't know I'm really a sham, a hoax, a phony, a lousy human being, not much of a friend to anybody and a flop . . . they don't know I'm covered with flop sweat. That's an expression Bob uses a lot--flop sweat. That's what you get when you think you're bombing out. That's the real autobiographical link between Fosse and his film--that doubt. The creative doubt, which I think all great artists have."

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Executive producer Daniel Melnick rode to the rescue of All That Jazz, which was over schedule and over budget when Columbia Pictures decided that enough was enough. "They were going to pull the plug. So I got together 40 minutes of film and went around Hollywood one weekend like Willy Loman with samples in my suitcase. And by Monday, I'd made a deal with Fox to lay off half the cost of the picture.

"I consider All That Jazz a master-piece against which all musical films will be measured from now on, in the same way that Citizen Kane determined what film makers would dare to try thereafter."

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Featured dancer Sandahl Bergman returned to the road company of Fosse's smash hit Dancin' after All That Jazz, then settled in L.A. to try her luck in films--and lucked out with a role in Xanadu, starring Olivia Newton-John. Bergman's topless body English in a tour-de-force number titled N.Y. to L.A. makes All That Jazz look very much alive. "While I felt funny at first about taking my clothes off--because I'm from Kansas--it was handled in such a fashion that it was no big deal," she says. "People say Bob's work is so sexual, yet the sex always has a great sense of humor in it. Bob is such a genius. I love him and trust him so much, I would just do anything he told me to do.

"Lots of people think now they're going to find out about the real Bob Fosse, but I think he's going to fool them. They won't get what they're expecting. Bob is possessed, I'd say, totally into his work. But Bob Fosse will never have a total relationship with a woman. He has tried, but he gets off on so many things that take him away from one of those you're-mine-and-I'm-yours situations. That's why he destroys so many women. Though they had broken up at the time we made All That Jazz, Annie Reinking was with him for about five years. They'd do such numbers on each other. Can you imagine going with a guy and you open up a newspaper and there he is with Jessica Lange? Bob loves all that stuff happening.

"In the movie, Jessica plays Death and offers the kiss that asks, Do you choose to come with me? And he chooses to die after a kiss from a beautiful woman, which is interesting, and that's where his head is."

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Deborah Geffner, after hoofing in A Chorus Line for more than three years, got her first film job from Fosse--as Victoria, an ambitious, sympathetic chorine who winds up on the hero's casting couch. Disconcerted when one of the girls in the chorus of All That Jazz kept insisting that she was the real-life counterpart of Victoria, Debby found Fosse in person a different breed of cat. "He's charming, he's adorable and to work with him is fantastic. It's completely alien to him to do anything that lacks showmanship. He wouldn't even try anything that doesn't dazzle and sparkle.

"He's a perfectionist and you'll do something for him 20 times that you'd hate repeating for another director. Bob makes you want to help him achieve perfection. He'll say, 'I can do better than that for you,' as if it's his problem. Then there's nothing you won't do, because you know in the end he'll make you look better than you ever imagined you could be."

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Dancin's vibrant star Ann Reinking made a career out of Fosse shows on Broadway, with Pippin, Cabaret and Chicago behind her prior to her stunning film debut in last year's Movie Movie. As Kate in All That Jazz, Ann allows that she initially saw several parallels to her own past relationship with Fosse: "I felt it wasn't a good idea to begin with, and I can't deny the role was set up to resemble someone very much like me. The structure is true to life, yet we elaborated and changed a lot. Sometimes you catch a golden thread, so you're suddenly outside the role, looking in. I mean, I wasn't put out to lunch by the experience. Did you think I was being a nice person in the film? Then it's me.

(concluded on page 250) All That Fosse (continued from page 178)

"The best part of Bob is working with him, and working with him here was just as personal and professional as always. He's masterful, and you learn things from a master. He's been very important in my life. What more can I tell you? He's in love with talent. He's one of the most interesting, exciting men I've ever met, and I have unbelievable respect and empathy for him both as a person and as a great director."

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Melanie Hunter, a professional stripper over six feet tall, learned some of what she knows from such seasoned ladies as Rose La Rose and Tempest Storm. While auditioning for All That Jazz, she found Fosse an appreciative audience. "In my act, I do curtain work . . . I do tassels and the flapper. When I did my act for Fosse, he fell in love with it. He said he considered me too elegant for the places I worked. He said I was like the Queen of Burlesque."

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Although he officially dislikes being interviewed, Fosse on Fosse is pungent, amiable, frank, self-deprecating, energetic, wryly amusing, a little apprehensive but easy to talk with after brief warm-up exercises:

"You gonna write about my sex life? There ain't much left of it, though I started big. I was named in a divorce suit during the war, when I was a kid of about 15, working in a club in Springfield, Illinois. I'd had an affair with a waitress whose husband came back from overseas, started checking around the club and charged her with adultery, naming four or five guys, including me. I was panicked at the time, still in high school and afraid my mother would find out. As I got older, it made a good story.

"I'm vulnerable when it comes to words like self-indulgent. I'm sensitive when Life writes about the movie and headlines it 'Fosse's Ego Trip.'

"I'm no longer suicidal, but I'm schizophrenic. Half Irish, which I suppose is my up, cheery, drinking side. And half Norwegian, which is very dark. I always work on everything like it's going to be my last job. In sheer desperation. You reach out, try to grow. I'll never be a Bergman. I'll never be a Fellini. Nor am I a Jerry Robbins, who is probably the only genius I know in the American musical theater. I can tell you he's the champ, he's the best. But that doesn't mean I should stop working.

"I'm not bothered when people refer to the razzle-dazzle aspects of my work, though I think sometimes I put so many coats of paint on a thing that nobody looks to find out what I've painted. I mean, I stick on bugle beads and sequins until people don't see what I'm saying. But I like those sequins. That's show business, and I've been a showbiz person my whole life.

"I'm being defensive now, in case someone attacks me for it, but casting my former girlfriends in this film does not mean that I hire untalented people. The role played by Annie is actually three or four girls in one, highly fictionalized. I remember offering the part Leland Palmer plays, as Joe Gideon's ex-wife, to Shirley MacLaine. Shirley didn't want to do it, because she felt having a star in that role would throw the balance of the picture off. I never even thought of offering the role to Gwen Verdon, who was my third wife and had a lot in common with this character, of course.

"Casting Jessica Lange as the Angel of Death comes from a personal fantasy. For me, many times, Death has been a beautiful woman. When you think something's about to happen to you in a car, or on an airplane, coming close to The End, this is a flash I'll get--a woman dressed in various outfits, sometimes a nun's habit, that whole hallucinatory thing. It's like the Final Fuck.

"You collect little moments from your life and use them. Like the bit about being generous with your cock. I still identify with Joe Gideon in that area.

"I was in analysis for five years. I don't think it solved the real basic problems, but it allowed me to go to work. I was very shy when I started choreographing and had more talent than I dared to show. I'd get a crazy or abstract idea and wouldn't do it, for fear of failing or looking foolish in front of people.

"Now I realize I don't have so much to lose. At my age, you take more risks. I've never lost that part of me that gets hurt, though. I used to dream that one day I'd grow up and be Fred Astaire . . . or John Garfield or Alan Ladd, or even Dennis O'Keefe. I always liked Dennis O'Keefe. But lately I see that this is my life and I've got to do the things I want to do as long as people will let me. And I'm not afraid of slipping, because I've never really believed I was there. Deep down, I don't know where I am."

" 'I was named in a divorce suit when I was a kid of about 15. I'd had an affair with a waitress.' "