Read Online Fosse by Sam Wasson - Free Book Online

Deborah Geffner. “That’s what he wanted to sleep with. He wanted to get as far into it as he could.” Craving solace from his sense of inadequacy and adding value to his gifts, Fosse, for the rest of his life, would surround himself with an army of talent—talent of all kinds—using all means possible, including sex, to mine their value for his own. Niles was the first of many. He may even have loved her too.
    They decided to team up. As a double act, Fosse and Niles were twice as appealing to club agents, and with a lot of hard work, they could move up from night holes outside Newark all the way to the Plaza Hotel. Or so they dreamed. “No matter where the show took us,”Belkin said, “whether New Haven or Boston or Los Angeles, in the afternoons and on their nights off Bobby and Spooky rehearsed their tap routines.” Niles was more than a great partner; she gave Fosse a foretaste of a big future, the feeling of shared ambition easily confused with love. And she had something more tangible to offer him—a repertoire. “Limehouse Blues,”the jewel of her solo act, Fosse remade into a duet, heavy on drums, part tap, part Jack Cole–Oriental. It would be a Fosse-and-Niles staple. “She was a not too educated girl,”Belkin said. “Too in love to see how much she was giving him.”
    For the newcomer, the thin line between influence and plagiarism is difficult to see. For Fosse, who had spent more time watching than inventing, who was ashamed of his showbiz instincts—the vaudeville, the burlesque—that line was almost invisible. Fearing he had nothing of his own, he drew regularly, and reluctantly, from the offerings around him. (A year earlier, in
Ziegfeld Follies,
Astaire had also danced “Limehouse Blues” as a duet.) Fosse did not consider his chameleonism or the inventions it would spawn anything but a life jacket for a drowning man, which is how he danced. Despite his flash, when he danced with Niles, Fosse moved with an inwardness comparable to shame. She “had a lot of clarityas a dancer,” one dancer said, “with wonderful changes of rhythm. Bob just seemed detached as a dancer, as though he was choreographing himself out of the number.” How to open up, how to play off an audience—she gave him that too.
    During
Call Me Mister
’s five-week run in Boston, the company stayed at the Bradford Hotel, a few doors from the Shubert Theater. The weekend the Ice Capadescame to town, the Bradford’s every square foot was filled with smoke and the chatter of show folk. It was pandemonium, a cageless zoo. Instant lifelong friends threw their arms around each other, and all of them flooded strangers’ suites until the sun came up or a wife walked in. Buddy Hackett turned his room into an open bar, and girls peeled off the wallpaper. Marian Niles didn’t stand a chance. “Could you imagine,”Hackett said, “being twenty-one years old and you’re out with a musical and there’s sixteen girl dancers and sixteen girl singers plus the leads and semi-leads? What a candy store!” Late in the evening,Hackett’s room was mostly empty, so there wasn’t much of a need for Fosse to close the bathroom door behind him, which is how Hackett, looking up from his girl, caught Bob’s reflection in the medicine-chest mirror, jauntily fucking another reflection. Before Hackett had time to wonder how Fosse could have left the door open or how it was anatomically possible to achieve such an angle, Marian Niles walked in, burst into tears, and tore out of the room. (“We all knew about Bobby,”Belkin said. “But we kept our mouths shut.”) Hackett ran after her.
    Fosse and Niles married in Chicago. The tour brought them to town, so the time seemed right for Fosse to command center stage, a professional entertainer in full view of his high-school friends and family. On the morning of July 8, the wedding party arrived at St. Chrysostom’s Church, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Reiner appeared with an