Fosse by Sam Wasson

and produce quickly, in styles not necessarily to his taste.But limitation was adaptation. Added dance modes increased Fosse’s ever-expanding choreographic vocabulary, and the fear of deadlines (and public failure) whipped him on. (Gwen Verdon: “Interviewers would say,‘What is your motive? What drives you?’ He would say, ‘Fear.’ And everyone would laugh, but Bob was telling the truth.”) Flop sweat—one of Fosse’s favorite expressions—was the stick he beat against his own ass. It had to hurt; stress was his muse. “Take care of myself?”He would laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
    With Joan McCracken appearing (not too far away) at Connecticut’s Westport Playhouse, her day- and nighttime assignations with Fosse slid easily into the cracks between rehearsals. They carried on as McCracken’s current show,
Angel in the Pawnshop,
toured New England for the rest of the year; it arrived, finally, on Broadway on January 18, 1951, only a day before Fosse and Niles returned to the Cotillion Room. With little left to call a marriage, they danced better than they ever had. “Since last caught,”
Billboard
said, “the kids have improved so much there’s hardly any comparison. Today they are one of the freshest acts to hit the classroom circuit in many a long month. The tow-headed, boyish Fosse is more than a hoofer, tho [
sic
] he’s excellent in that department; he’s now a comedian with a sly approach that builds, if not for yocks, then certainly for healthy enough laughs.” The place was so full, chairs had to bepushed against the walls. “The kids’ walk-off, a strawhatted old vaude exit, complete with sand-steps and deliberately corny chatter, almost stopped the show.” They were held over.
    Club owner Marty Proser signed Fosse, and Niles, to a production in his café theater, a midsize saloon that specialized in recycling Broadway musicals into dinner-theater revues. This particular retread, a tongue-in-cheek montage of 1920s America, which cut song to song from Texas Guinan (“Hello, suckers!”) to the stock-market crash of 1929, was carved from the carcass of
Billion Dollar Baby,
a hit show on Broadway. Dancer George Marcy said, “There wasn’t much choreographyon [that show], so Bobby did his own dances, but they weren’t much, not like they became. He gave me the Charleston. He did his knee slides, his tricks, his Fred Astaire and the commercial Gene Kelly kind of thing.” Marty Proser was in the consignment business. If it’s all been done before—and it has, many times—then showbiz is the act of hocking used for new, and the guy under the top hat is Elmer Gantry, at least on his best day, when they buy it. When they don’t, which is most days, he’s only Willy Loman, overselling to a basement of jerks. “We’re all here to woo you,”Fosse said of his profession. “God, it’s disgusting.” In early April 1951, Proser swappedout a couple numbers and retitled the show
The Roaring Twenties
so he wouldn’t have to pay any royalties.
    At night after the show, Fosse would leadthe peach-faced boy and girl dancers out of the theater to a bar on the other side of the block to carouse in rounds of liquor dreams until late into the morning. They wanted Broadway and Hollywood. They couldn’t wait anymore. “I remember going therepractically every night with Bobby,” said dancer George Marcy. “He would sit there and talk about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. We all loved listening to him, the girls especially. He had ideas, ideas about directing and choreographing. It was so good to be around him because whatever we were feeling about ourselves, which was generally not so good—we were so poor and young and we worked so hard—Bobby would make us feel good about show business again. ‘It’s a wonderful thing,’ he’d say. He made me believe it.” And wherever there was Fosse, there was Mary-Ann. “Jesus, she was so in lovewith him,” Marcy said.