REMEMBERING ALL THAT FOSSE : A Fond Look at a Dance Master Who Batted 1.000 on Broadway

Some people get away with murder. Bob Fosse was one of them. Operating out of addictions (“Dexedrine makes you care about the color of a hair bow”), Fosse was no role model. But the director was instructive nonetheless. Tennessee Williams wrote that people who are very beautiful make their own rules--and so do people who are very talented. Fosse’s was the kind of talent that springs from fear, that and a deep-seated belief in yourself. The talent develops, the fear sticks. I once asked him for six adjectives to describe himself, and Fosse didn’t miss a beat: “Eager, pushy, needy, scared, hungry, confident.”

Put the last two together, and you get a recipe for show business staying power. When Jerome Robbins found him (living in a 35-cents-a-day rooming house), Fosse felt “there was nothing I couldn’t do.” This was just before “Pajama Game” (the first of an unbroken string of 11 hits) and just after his failure in Hollywood. Bob Fosse had wanted to be a movie star. “Oh God, yes,” he would admit. “I wanted to succeed Gene Kelly, and I thought it was a fair bet. . . . But if I’d become a movie star I’d now be wearing a toupee.”

That was the self-deprecation. Fosse was almost always in black (in dress, if not in mood) and he was self-mocking in a way movie stars generally are not. Movie stars don’t talk about toupees. Fosse could talk about balding and amphetamines and death, and in the same conversation convince the Shuberts to put up $4 million for a musical. How did Fosse get away with it in an age of safe-everything? “He never believes anything will turn out right. He’s dark,” said his friend, composer Cy Coleman (“Sweet Charity”). “But out of the dark he lights a candle. Every time.”

Fosse’s was the kind of strength that didn’t take itself seriously, so he was always doubting everything, every dance, every second act, every piece of business. What he called “that thing in my head” was what he wanted to put on the stage. Offstage he wanted to be a friend, and was--but Fosse went beyond typical show business new-best-friends. Possibly because of the self-deprecation, he managed to keep close with different (and difficult) people, from writer Paddy Chayefsky to agent Sam Cohn; writers were his all-time favorites--Pete Hamill, Peter Maas, E. L. Doctorow. He also had solid friendships with Marsha Mason and Shirley MacLaine. Half of these people are Irish and so was Fosse, in part, and that’s another explanation for his melancholy.

“Obsessed leprechaun” is one of those glib problem-solving labels journalists dig for like gold nuggets: Two words to tell you who somebody was. Perfect, yet not really. Lots of obsessional people lack the drive to use the obsession; lots of leprechauns are mere charmers. Fosse delivered the promise of the show-biz twinkle. He took his South Side Chicago poverty to Culver City, where he lived in one room with a Murphy bed, and truly believed he’d be a star. “My parts were getting smaller,” he’d say of the second-banana dancing roles from the early ‘50s. “I knew what that meant.” It meant more grit, and going back to Broadway, where he’d been a chorus boy. Fosse in the chorus? It sounds as unlikely as Cassie in “Chorus Line”; Fosse, like Cassie, had too much style--the backward lean, the pelvic thrust, the locked ankles, the acrobatics.

The girls. One night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Fosse stood me up for dinner. The next night, he arrived with apologies, and the maitre ‘d winked, leading Fosse away from a side booth. “I only put him there when he has girls,” the host whispered. Fosse heard it, and did a double-take . . . Which girls, Where? Not that Fosse was seeking column space; most of his affairs were reported only after they ended. “I like this hotel because nobody sees you,” said the chameleonic Fosse.

There were the girls, and then there was Gwen Verdon, his third wife and dancing alter ego. In his autobiographical movie “All That Jazz,” Fosse displayed his unfaithfulness so nakedly that probably he was forgiven by fans and foes (if not Verdon)--and his excesses again were accepted. Why? Because Fosse confessed and didn’t hide it, didn’t stay protected in a marriage to a woman he idolized and loved. Very late one night he made a declaration about Verdon: “People ask if I created Gwen, but she was hot when I met her. Her in the leotard I will never forget. That alabaster skin, the bantam rooster walk. . . .”

Late the next afternoon, Gwen Verdon got on a rehearsal stage and danced a complete number from “Sweet Charity,” for Fosse’s eyes only. Both of them closing in on 60, both owning the stage. Less than two years later, Verdon would be at Fosse’s side when he died out-of-town with the show on opening night. It was a master irony: Bob Fosse staged his own death with a flourish even he wouldn’t have swallowed.

But what I remember is Fosse dancing with Verdon.

“You two should be together,” I said bravely.

“You believe in happy endings,” said Bob Fosse.