“She’d always talk about him. Even in front of him, like his mother. She’d brag about him and then she’d get embarrassed and cut him down. She was drinking so much in those days, drinking like a fish, drinking every night.”
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, early fans of Fosse and Niles, had gone to see them at the Pierre, where they were all officially introduced. “I want you kids to choreograph my show,” Lewis said, and they did.
The Colgate Comedy Hour,
a variety program on NBC, was an hour long, roomy enough to accommodate a couple of dances, including a featured spot for Fosse and Niles. Here was a challenge: The show required Fosse to stage, for the first time, an entire ensemble. From his tiny repertoire, Fosse picked the Jack Cole–inspired “Limehouse Blues,” which he (in white tux and turban) and Niles danced before a giant Shiva as half a dozen others twirled around them. To downplay his lack of experience in the production department, Fosse broke the ensemble into pairs and choreographed them as duos—easier to manage that way. Sometimes the duos merged; that was about it. But, significantly, the group number showcased Fosse’s details, like wrist isolations, limp hands held up high in the air, flopping like the teeny-weeny wings of a fat bird. Martin and Lewis were pleased enough with it to invite them back to choreograph another
Colgate Comedy Hour,
at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater, not far from Martin and Lewis’s engagement at the Chez Paree. Late in April 1951, Fosse cast a company that included his Riff Brother, Charlie Grass, for “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” a white-tie-and-tails homage to Astaire. Again, the group work was generic, but the number showed an increased awareness of background and foreground space, which Fosse used to contrast grand acrobatics with cinematic close-ups of nondancers; in this case, a man in a top hat blowing cigarette smoke into the camera.
The push to large-format choreography and the acclaim it brought Fosse he owed to Joan McCracken. “She’s the one who encouraged meto be a choreographer,” Fosse said. “I was very showbiz, all I thought about was nightclubs, and she kept saying, ‘You’re too good to spend your life in nightclubs.’” Fosse thought of choreography asa means to an end, something a dancer needed in order to dance, like a floor; it wasn’t a profession. The hoofer in him considered the work of the choreographer, paradoxically, both out of his creative range and a loser’s plan B. Who outside of Manhattan had ever heard of Agnes de Mille? If Fosse had asked that question, McCracken would have answered,
Just wait. They will soon.
“Joan was the biggest influencein my life,” Fosse said. “She was the one who changed it and gave it direction.”
That she hung around with the likes of Truman Capote and Leo Lerman, read Rilke, and smoked cigarettes with gold tips made her seem, to the no-college Fosse, a storm of heady plenitude, exotic, distinctly unshowbiz. Whereas Mary-Ann reeked of tobacco, Joan bloomed with the scent of cypressand bitter fruit, a perfume one of her fancy friends must have picked up for her in Paris or Berlin. And she spoke French.And she knew about wine.And she advised Fosse to enroll inthe American Theatre Wing. The GI Bill, McCracken assured him, covered a year’s worth of voice, dance, and playwriting classes; all he had to pay for was the bike to take him from one place to the next, from José Limón’s dance class to Anna Sokolow’s. “I was always very bad in class,”Fosse said, “it was slightly humiliating . . . I had a great deal of trouble with turnout and extension. To compensate for this, I used to work on other areas, such as rhythm, style of movement, taking ordinary steps and giving them some little extra twist or turn.”
He took a course with Sanford Meisner, one of New York’s most celebrated acting teachers. Of course it was McCracken who made the introduction.
While Lee
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, early fans of Fosse and Niles, had gone to see them at the Pierre, where they were all officially introduced. “I want you kids to choreograph my show,” Lewis said, and they did.
The Colgate Comedy Hour,
a variety program on NBC, was an hour long, roomy enough to accommodate a couple of dances, including a featured spot for Fosse and Niles. Here was a challenge: The show required Fosse to stage, for the first time, an entire ensemble. From his tiny repertoire, Fosse picked the Jack Cole–inspired “Limehouse Blues,” which he (in white tux and turban) and Niles danced before a giant Shiva as half a dozen others twirled around them. To downplay his lack of experience in the production department, Fosse broke the ensemble into pairs and choreographed them as duos—easier to manage that way. Sometimes the duos merged; that was about it. But, significantly, the group number showcased Fosse’s details, like wrist isolations, limp hands held up high in the air, flopping like the teeny-weeny wings of a fat bird. Martin and Lewis were pleased enough with it to invite them back to choreograph another
Colgate Comedy Hour,
at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater, not far from Martin and Lewis’s engagement at the Chez Paree. Late in April 1951, Fosse cast a company that included his Riff Brother, Charlie Grass, for “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” a white-tie-and-tails homage to Astaire. Again, the group work was generic, but the number showed an increased awareness of background and foreground space, which Fosse used to contrast grand acrobatics with cinematic close-ups of nondancers; in this case, a man in a top hat blowing cigarette smoke into the camera.
The push to large-format choreography and the acclaim it brought Fosse he owed to Joan McCracken. “She’s the one who encouraged meto be a choreographer,” Fosse said. “I was very showbiz, all I thought about was nightclubs, and she kept saying, ‘You’re too good to spend your life in nightclubs.’” Fosse thought of choreography asa means to an end, something a dancer needed in order to dance, like a floor; it wasn’t a profession. The hoofer in him considered the work of the choreographer, paradoxically, both out of his creative range and a loser’s plan B. Who outside of Manhattan had ever heard of Agnes de Mille? If Fosse had asked that question, McCracken would have answered,
Just wait. They will soon.
“Joan was the biggest influencein my life,” Fosse said. “She was the one who changed it and gave it direction.”
That she hung around with the likes of Truman Capote and Leo Lerman, read Rilke, and smoked cigarettes with gold tips made her seem, to the no-college Fosse, a storm of heady plenitude, exotic, distinctly unshowbiz. Whereas Mary-Ann reeked of tobacco, Joan bloomed with the scent of cypressand bitter fruit, a perfume one of her fancy friends must have picked up for her in Paris or Berlin. And she spoke French.And she knew about wine.And she advised Fosse to enroll inthe American Theatre Wing. The GI Bill, McCracken assured him, covered a year’s worth of voice, dance, and playwriting classes; all he had to pay for was the bike to take him from one place to the next, from José Limón’s dance class to Anna Sokolow’s. “I was always very bad in class,”Fosse said, “it was slightly humiliating . . . I had a great deal of trouble with turnout and extension. To compensate for this, I used to work on other areas, such as rhythm, style of movement, taking ordinary steps and giving them some little extra twist or turn.”
He took a course with Sanford Meisner, one of New York’s most celebrated acting teachers. Of course it was McCracken who made the introduction.
While Lee