Fosse

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Authors: Sam Wasson
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8-millimeter camera and pointed it at ushers Hackett and William Warfield, a beaming Sadie Fosse, and the happy couple. Backstage, Fosse pouffed his ascot,and Niles, on the opposite end of the church, slipped taps onto her wedding shoes. “She was just a very sweet girl,”Reiner said. “Really very in love with Bobby.” When the organ sounded, she made her entrance, shuffling down the aisle.
    Frederic Weaver was not in attendance. Days earlier, he warned Charlie Grass he had no intention of standing by as one of his best pupils destroyed the career he had been working toward for a decade. “Mr. Weaver was a hundred percent against marriageif you’re in show business,” Grass said. “It was somebody pulling you back. And family too. Bob knew how he felt about that. He’d made it very clear to us early on that you’ve got to be completely dedicated to show business. You’re married to show business.” Hackett was certain Niles was pregnant—either again or for the first time—and that the groom, wanting to do right by her, had no choice but to make it official. “He was very, very nervousand not cool at all,” Hackett recalled. “That was not a guy who wanted to get married.”
    There was a reception that afternoonat the Fosse family home. But Fosse and Niles couldn’t stay long. That night they had a show.
    Call Me Mister
closed in San Francisco in October 1947 and Fosse posted his final review in the scrapbookhe had been keeping since the show opened. He underlined (with the help of a ruler) in red pen every mention of his name, whether good or bad, clipped every article out, and attached it to the page with long strips of tape he laid down at perfect right angles. Even duplicates were included, as though Fosse had to prove not once but twice that it had actually happened. Beside the final review (which heralded Fosse as “awfully good”) he wrote, “End of ‘Call Me Mister.’ Also end of Bob Fosse.”
     
    Fosse and Niles arrived in New York with an agent but no money and no job. In the uneasy months to follow, which Fosse and Niles spent glaring at the phone and imploring it to ring, Maurice Lapue reached out to nightclubs as near as Long Island and as far as the Dominican Republic. But no one was buying.
    Most of what they had been rehearsing was old stuff in new clothing, ballroom-type numbers with a youthful touch. Where he could, Fosse threw in a little taste of vaudeville, but nothing too crass; he and Niles were going for the uptown crowd, the Marge and Gower Champion set. Elegant and smiling, the Champions—she had her first tutu before she turned one; he signed with MCA before he graduated high school—had mastered the look of class and good breeding that Fosse feared he couldn’t even fake. But he tried. With no money for studio space, the newlyweds rehearsed their act in the tiny one-room they rented above Times Square, careful not to twirl into the furniture or leap into a wall.
    When they weren’t rehearsing, which was rarely, they traveled with packs of other dancers, musicians, and novelty acts, hopeful that someone with an ear to the ground would bring them news of an audition before it hit the papers or they lost the job to another agent’s dancers. The jobless assembled at Hansen’s drugstore and the nearby Charlie’s Tavern, a convenient few paces from Roseland. Those with money for a meal could find seats at the bar or in booths under the headshots Charlie hung on the peeling paint. If the place needed a little work, Charlie could turn to the young and hungry, to Fosse and Niles and the legions of unemployed comics and jazzmen of New York who stood in that patch of turf like it was their office, waiting all day (and, if they didn’t have gigs, all night) for some guy who some other guy knew to show up with a lead.
    In a business of lucky breaks, where the revolving door of chance turns for jerk and genius alike, patience, not talent, would get Fosse and Niles where they

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