Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen (16 page)

Danny Kaye and Verdon in a still for her guest appearance on the February 10, 1965,
Danny Kaye Show
.

Paul Gardner interviewed Verdon for the article at the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel, where she wore a puffy badger cap, mink coat and mink jumper. She explained her fondness for mink by telling him that when she first came to New York it was so cold that a policeman had to help her off the street so she was determined never to be cold again. Verdon also smoked during the interview. She told Gardner that she knew that she couldn’t keep dancing forever but she kept her legs in shape with daily ballet lessons and let Sanford Meisner worry about her dramatic motivations. Verdon admitted that being a happy-go-lucky person made her want to avoid tragic acting parts that other actresses seem to want. The Actors Studio had refused her admission and also refused to let her audition, possibly because they felt that she hadn’t suffered enough on the musical stage.

Verdon revealed that she planned to return to Broadway in the fall in the two one-act musicals, which may be called “Two Choruses of Melancholy Baby.” The following year she would probably have her own television series, which she described as a situation comedy where she would play a married woman. Verdon said that it was necessary to make the character married because that was the only way she could play a seduction scene, since she felt that you could do anything as long as you were married on television. She bemoaned the fact that television seldom allowed time for perfection and that even the dancing on television was a lot better than it looked but so much of it looked alike. This was because you always had to wear black to get a clean line, and you were photographed from the same angle and never in profile. Verdon commented that dancing before a camera only becomes interesting when the camera is part of the number. Dancing was action and she thought it should be photographed like a fight or a Western. Verdon felt that some of the best television dancing was done on the new ABC musical variety series
Shindig!
(She never appeared on the show, which ran from September 16, 1964, to January 8, 1966.) The star said that after she finished
Redhead
she had a minor knee operation. She also had taken a vacation from work after marrying Fosse and having Nicole because she felt that she couldn’t do two things at once.

Fosse held a backers’ audition at Delmonico’s with a reading of the material for the unnamed two-act musical. This revealed that Elaine May had barely completed her half of the show, which had an alternate title of “Robbers and Cops.” Apparently in May’s musical, Verdon was to have played a cat burglar and would wear suction cups on her hands and feet which would have allowed her to crawl straight up a wall. Naturally such a stunt would have been extremely dangerous, which probably insured that it would be abandoned. Another reason given for the loss of the piece was that it too strongly resembled another Broadway-bound musical,
Drat the Cat!
, which had a society jewel thief as its heroine. That show had book and lyrics by Ira-Levin and music by Milton Schafer, and would open at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre on October 10, 1965. It lasted eight performances.

Fosse’s
Nights of Cabiria
was further along though the presentation still gave the impression that it had been rushed. It was apparent that Fosse’s draft needed more stage time than a one-act piece allowed to explore the relationship between Cabiria and her beau, Oscar. In May 1965 Fosse turned for help to David Shaw, one of the book writers on
Redhead
; Shaw’s ex-wife had suggested
Nights of Cabiria
to Fosse in the first place. However this didn’t work out. Neither did approaching Abe Burrows, the director and book writer of
Can-Can
. Fosse next tried Hugh Wheeler with whom he had worked on the abandoned
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Wheeler rewrote the first seven scenes and then told the director that he didn’t think that he was a good match for the material.

In the summer the Fosses rented an East Hampton cottage which was only a few steps away from the beach. He had decided that he now did not want a collaborator and he wrote alone for five days. Then he got a call from Robert Fryer who had approached another writer—Paddy Chayefsky. Fosse went back to Manhattan for a meeting. Chayefsky had a surprising interest in musical comedy and he had written the book and lyrics of the musical
No T.O. for Love
which had been produced in London in 1945. But then Fosse gave up on the idea of working with Chayefsky on the project and he returned to Long Island to finish the show’s book on his own. He even came up with a pseudonym for himself, “Bill Lewis.” But neither “Bill Lewis” nor Fosse would end up as the credited author on the project.

The
New York Times
of July 8, 1965, reported that Elaine May said that her half of the two-act musical had been withdrawn. Robert Fryer is quoted as saying that the adaptation of
Nights of Cabiria
had developed into a full evening’s presentation, which is why May’s contribution was dropped. She also reported that she was planning to do a screen version of her piece, which never eventuated. It was reported that Fosse was the adaptor of the Fellini movie and that the name of a collaborator would soon be announced. The title of the show was for the first time given as
Sweet Charity
and the Broadway opening date was now December 28, 1965. On July 22, 1965, the
New York Times
reported that the Palace had been booked to host the show and it would be the first legitimate attraction at the former vaudeville house since it was built in 1913. It had been recently been purchased from RKO Theatres by David Nederlander of Detroit and his sons and they planned an extensive reconstruction job.

In July 1965 Fosse telephoned his friend Neil Simon who was in Rome for the shooting of his screenplay
After the Fox
. Fosse had by now completed a first draft for the two-act musical and asked Simon to read it and for help in making it better and funnier. One source claims that Simon agreed to help because he had no other writing assignments to complete at the time, but others, including Simon, say that he was too busy to take on anything else. Therefore Simon agreeing to look at Fosse’s draft was done as a favor out of their friendship. The draft was reportedly posted to Simon by Fosse the day after their telephone call and marked for urgent delivery since rehearsals for the show were scheduled to begin in August 1965. The script arrived eight days later, despite the urging packaging, and Simon read it. He felt that Fosse was wrong. It didn’t need humor—it
desperately
needed humor. And given the start date for rehearsals, it needed it fast. Simon made a few suggestions, like removing the lines he felt didn’t work and inserting what he hoped were funnier ones. The script was sent back to Fosse. Three days later Fosse called again and told him that he loved the new lines and wanted more.

To press his point, a week later the director arrived in Rome accompanied by a tape of the score. In Simon’s hotel room Fosse moved the furniture against the wall to free up dance space. He then played the score and performed the proposed dances to the audience of Simon and his wife Joan. When the writer saw what Fosse had done he was hooked. Fosse left the next morning and Simon structured a schedule so he could work on
Sweet Charity
. He had difficulty with it because it was not the kind of book he would have done, and therefore to work further on it required him to start from scratch—a total rewrite. Verdon would say that one of Simon’s greatest additions to the book was the idea for “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” to give the first act something pleasurable and uplifting for Charity. Presumably it was Fosse who added the scene’s hat and cane.

Other sources, like the
New York Times
, give a different timeline to Simon’s working on the show. They say that the original rehearsal book was credited to Fosse’s Bill Lewis aka Robert Lewis Fosse, and that Simon was brought in on October 1, 1966. Simon’s commitment led to his logically asking for full credit for his work. Having become the most popular playwright on Broadway, he did not want to be a co-author and he had the clout to make such a demand. What had begun as a friendly favor was now a business relationship where theatrical billing and credit was essential to justice and ego. Fosse agreed to the demand although he believed that he had done the major effort on the script. He also knew the commercial sense in having a show advertised as having a book by Simon.

To research
Sweet Charity
, Verdon accompanied Fosse to Times Square dance halls to observe the girls. The palaces were open from noon to four a.m. and the girls ranged in age from 18 to 50. At one place the women were in their forties and dressed in the past. Verdon sensed that some seemed trapped back in the ’30s. Others must have thought it was still 1942, with Lana Turner hairdos and wedgie shoes, or Veronica Lake with that hairdo. Another thought she was Joan Crawford with those plastic shoes. They were tough and Verdon was a little scared when one caught her eyeing her and asked what she was staring at. She approached one who was knitting, who explained that she took the job to pay for the baby that was due in five months. Her husband was in Korea and she became a hostess because she didn’t know to do anything else. If the women made dates after work as prostitutes, Verdon never found out about it, though Fosse said that he saw more groping than dancing. He paid for their time and found them interested in him and attentive; he told the women how he was doing research for a show and listened to their stories. Fosse found that he was more successful when he went without his wife since she was more conspicuous in a room full of dancers. Fosse also observed the 1960s dances that were performed in the clubs and after his tour he would go to his studio to work, lacing all of the dancing threads together.

Verdon supposedly also went undercover and worked as one of the girls. Despite being in her forties and a grandmother, her firm and supple body made her fair competition to the ones half her age. Verdon worked in a tiny, dark upstairs hideaway dance hall on Broadway as a dance hostess; she and the others were protected by wooden dividers from the men until one of them paid for a dance. She felt that the younger women found something romantic in the faded grandeur of the dance hall, an attitude that was presumably lacking in the older women.

Fosse had taken an apartment on the eleventh floor of 850 Seventh Avenue to get away from Verdon’s ménage and the toddler Nicole at 91 Central Park West. He worked at the Variety Arts rehearsal studios on the dances for
Sweet Charity
though sometimes he would drag Verdon to the studio in the middle of the night to help him realize steps he had dreamed up in bed. She would say that he tried to get her up, but when she was out, she was out, and the next morning Verdon had usually forgotten everything. After that, Fosse would just let her sleep.

In the summer the couple holidayed in their Amagansett beach house which was their first substantial financial investment. Verdon also used their considerable earnings in more real estate in one of the most expensive resort communities in the country. Fosse would joke that he paid the bills and she bought houses but he was wise enough to recognize that she had the greater head for business. Verdon also liked to socialize in the area, to go to and to give parties. The latter had her supply beer, corn on the cob and filet mignon cooked on the charcoal grill, while Fosse would instigate a ping-pong tournament. Among the guests were the Simons with their daughter Nancy, who lived just up the street.

Fosse had gotten past any hard feelings over the
Sweet Charity
book which Simon had pared down to a series of scenes that resembled comic sketches, which after all was his specialty and which served to link the songs. The only two long scenes had Cabiria renamed as Charity hiding in the closet of the Italian movie star where she spends the night as he entertains his girlfriend, and the elevator scene with Oscar. Verdon would say that the movie star scene including the closet scene came from Fosse. The movie star scene is in Fellini’s original, although Cabiria hides in his bathroom and not his closet. Simon also retained Fosse’s original opening image of Charity being shoved into the orchestra pit (representing a Central Park pond) by her purse-snatching date.

The decision to change the prostitute Cabiria into the dance hostess Charity was made as a concession to modern morality although the implication that she is also a prostitute remained. This plot point allowed for Oscar’s eventual rejection of her because he cannot accept her sexual history. Making Charity a hostess also permitted Fosse to show the sleazy Broadway dance hall where she worked and the seamier side of show business that he knew so well. The expected lighthearted entertainment for a musical comedy had an underbelly of sadness since its heroine was a victimized innocent loved by what Fosse called an emotional pacificist, i.e., someone afraid to feel.

The book cut some of the even darker material from the screenplay, like Cabiria being pushed into the river at the beginning which nearly causes her to drown and how in the climax she asks Alberto to kill her. Fellini’s Cabiria was a tough, abrasive and rather unlikable Roman streetwalker who behaved more aggressively than Charity, evident by her general attitude and her attacking a prostitute who makes fun of her. This was changed since Charity had to be likable for us to empathize with her as a girl who wanted to be loved. The film’s plot point of Cabiria as an aging prostitute was an issue that was not carried over into the book, and the ambiguity about whether Oscar marries Cabiria was also not repeated. In the film he revealed that he only wanted the money she obtained from selling her house as a dowry, and he did not express a disapproval of her life as a prostitute. Another lost plot point is the idea that she was short of stature which was highlighted when she and Alberto Lazzaril—the Vittorio Vidal character—danced together. This loss is a surprise given the difference in heights between the 5-foot 3 Verdon and the 6-foot John McMartin who was cast as Oscar.