wanted to be. Dancing was the easy part. Sitting by the phone took work. It took cigarettes and cheap wine and skipping meals. Talking about it made it worse, but not talking about it gave them nothing to do but think about what wasn’t working, and Fosse blamed himself. Never mind what was good for their feet; they should be going through the routine again. Somewhere some team was doing just that, getting better. “Bob likened show business to boxing,”said Ann Reinking. “He said, ‘If you can stay in the ring it will turn your way again.’” Or: What doesn’t kill you will kill you later.
Winter hit. Waiting outside the theaters for their names to be called, Fosse and Niles huddled close, massaging each other’s muscles to stay loose.
She couldn’t leave him. They needed money, and Fosse was the closest thing she had to a chance.
He couldn’t tell his mother and father what he’d told Mr. Weaver, that he’d spent all their money. “He had a drug problem,”Charlie Grass said, “and Mr. Weaver helped carry him through.” The maestro put tens and twentiesin an envelope and directed his best and favorite student to spend the money on doctors and drug counselors. Weaver knew the signs. He had seen the top talents in vaudeville waste their lives circling the drain, and he sensed that Fosse watched them witha kind of envy. He had the jazzman’s crush on burning out. “I always thought I’d be dead by twenty-five,”he said. “I wanted to be. I thought it was romantic. I thought people would mourn me: ‘Oh, that young career.’”
Then one day the phone rang. Lapue had booked them into the Samovar—in Montreal. In a flash, Marian changed her name to the much tonier Mary-Ann; they got on a bus and played the club on March 23, 1948, where they were, according to a local paper, “the most promising young dancers. . . in many months.” A week later, they were at the Boulevard in Elmhurst, Long Island. Niles recalled, “When we got off the floor someone said,‘Did your husband hurt himself?’ I said, ‘What d’you mean?’ She said, ‘Well, he fell.’ . . . He fell and got up and never knew it. Literally fell and got up.” Rest was unthinkable. “They would do their nightclub act somewhere,”said dancer Eileen Casey, a friend of Niles’s, “and then, that night, go back and rehearse parts of the act that weren’t working.”
“I get terribly involved in my work,”Fosse later said, “and everything else goes.” Nothing was ever good enough because it came from him, and when he wasn’t fooling them, he was no good. “He thought he was the best andhe thought he was terrible,” Ann Reinking said.
In May, Fosse and Niles played Miami’s Clover Club. Onward to the Dominican Republic, to the Hotel Jaragua, where they appeared for the first time as top-liners. Then north to the Embassy Club in Jacksonville and, finally, back to New York on September 15, 1948, for Bob Fosse’s first appearance on a Manhattan stage: the Belmont Hotel’s Glass Hat. Then October: one night at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. November: a week in Norfolk, Virginia. Come December, they were back in New York for their first TV appearance.
Kobb’s Korner
was a hillbilly jamboree as stupid as it sounds, but it was also CBS and free advertising for their upcoming tenure at the Pierre Hotel’s Cotillion Room, one of the most romantically appointed nightclubs in the city.
The Cotillion. Fosse and Niles could take a deep breath. They’d made it, almost.
Well located at Sixty-First and Fifth Avenue, the Cotillion was only a few steps—and, for the lucky ones, a few bookings—away from the Plaza’s Persian Room, where the Champions cut the parquet for the city’s most fashionable grownups. Fosse and Niles were ready. Refined over the past year, their mélange of tap, ballroom, and East Indian styles had been universally well received. It had spunk. While most café performers built their acts on a kind of pop ballet,
Winter hit. Waiting outside the theaters for their names to be called, Fosse and Niles huddled close, massaging each other’s muscles to stay loose.
She couldn’t leave him. They needed money, and Fosse was the closest thing she had to a chance.
He couldn’t tell his mother and father what he’d told Mr. Weaver, that he’d spent all their money. “He had a drug problem,”Charlie Grass said, “and Mr. Weaver helped carry him through.” The maestro put tens and twentiesin an envelope and directed his best and favorite student to spend the money on doctors and drug counselors. Weaver knew the signs. He had seen the top talents in vaudeville waste their lives circling the drain, and he sensed that Fosse watched them witha kind of envy. He had the jazzman’s crush on burning out. “I always thought I’d be dead by twenty-five,”he said. “I wanted to be. I thought it was romantic. I thought people would mourn me: ‘Oh, that young career.’”
Then one day the phone rang. Lapue had booked them into the Samovar—in Montreal. In a flash, Marian changed her name to the much tonier Mary-Ann; they got on a bus and played the club on March 23, 1948, where they were, according to a local paper, “the most promising young dancers. . . in many months.” A week later, they were at the Boulevard in Elmhurst, Long Island. Niles recalled, “When we got off the floor someone said,‘Did your husband hurt himself?’ I said, ‘What d’you mean?’ She said, ‘Well, he fell.’ . . . He fell and got up and never knew it. Literally fell and got up.” Rest was unthinkable. “They would do their nightclub act somewhere,”said dancer Eileen Casey, a friend of Niles’s, “and then, that night, go back and rehearse parts of the act that weren’t working.”
“I get terribly involved in my work,”Fosse later said, “and everything else goes.” Nothing was ever good enough because it came from him, and when he wasn’t fooling them, he was no good. “He thought he was the best andhe thought he was terrible,” Ann Reinking said.
In May, Fosse and Niles played Miami’s Clover Club. Onward to the Dominican Republic, to the Hotel Jaragua, where they appeared for the first time as top-liners. Then north to the Embassy Club in Jacksonville and, finally, back to New York on September 15, 1948, for Bob Fosse’s first appearance on a Manhattan stage: the Belmont Hotel’s Glass Hat. Then October: one night at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. November: a week in Norfolk, Virginia. Come December, they were back in New York for their first TV appearance.
Kobb’s Korner
was a hillbilly jamboree as stupid as it sounds, but it was also CBS and free advertising for their upcoming tenure at the Pierre Hotel’s Cotillion Room, one of the most romantically appointed nightclubs in the city.
The Cotillion. Fosse and Niles could take a deep breath. They’d made it, almost.
Well located at Sixty-First and Fifth Avenue, the Cotillion was only a few steps—and, for the lucky ones, a few bookings—away from the Plaza’s Persian Room, where the Champions cut the parquet for the city’s most fashionable grownups. Fosse and Niles were ready. Refined over the past year, their mélange of tap, ballroom, and East Indian styles had been universally well received. It had spunk. While most café performers built their acts on a kind of pop ballet,
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