Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen (27 page)

On September 27, 1975, Verdon was one of the Actors Equity members who spoke at a musical rally in Shubert Alley. They stressed the threat the continuing strike posed to the theater and allied industries, like charity organizations dependent on benefit parties to raise funds for the sick and aged and needy, and pressed demands for a speedy settlement. Musicians union Local 182 was seeking to raise their present salaries in a new three-year contract with the League of New York Theatres. The rally saw cast members of affected shows sing selections from their programs, without musicians. The crowd of almost 400 held placards that read “We Want to Work” and “Don’t Let Broadway Die” and circulated petitions urging the governor and mayor to intervene without delay in the contract negotiations. On October 11, Verdon undertook work to organize an ad-hoc committee of Actors Equity to enact a twilight street rally to again protest the continuing musicians’ strike which had left theaters closed for 24 days to date. The rally included a live a cappella performance by five Broadway stars on a stage in front of the Brothers and Sisters restaurant at 355 West 46th Street. The strike was settled on October 12th and the show performances resumed.

Verdon was back for her second guest appearance on
Captain Kangaroo
for the episode that was broadcast on October 22, 1975. On November 2 she was the hostess for a celebrity auction at the New York Public Library to benefit the library’s Performing Arts Research Center. One of the items for sale was the kimono worn by Liza Minnelli in
Cabaret
, which was originally Verdon’s. She and Chita Rivera appeared on the CBS comedy variety series
Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell
in the episode on November 8, 1975. The two stars performed “Nowadays” and “Honey Hot Rag” from
Chicago
. Verdon made her one guest appearance on Dinah Shore’s talk show
Dinah!
which was broadcast on November 11. It included a salute to
Chicago
from New York where she was joined by Rivera.

On November 13 Verdon was named one of the three 1975 Women of Achievement by the New York’s Women’s Division of the Anti-Defamation League Appeal of B’nai B’rith at the division’s luncheon at the Hotel Pierre. The benefit included a fashion show and a tribute to the charter members of the A.D.L.’s newly organized Women of Commitment. She went with Nicole and Paul Phillips to see Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev on Broadway during their farewell performance at the Uris Theatre (November 18 to 29, 1975). Verdon’s name had been imprinted on a flyer as one of the celebrities scheduled to appear at a rally at Times Square on November 24. The rally was organized to demonstrate against budget cutbacks in the city that had resulted from the presidency of Gerald Ford. Verdon did not appear for the event.

On January 7, 1976, she attended the opening of a new show at the Grand Finale in New York with Rivera. On April 12 it was reported in the
Times
advertising section that Verdon had become a spokesperson for the Shaeffer Pen with Doyle Dane Bernhach. Her hands and signature was used for a campaign entitled “Sign It with Shaeffer” where they were seen signing a program for
Chicago
.

Verdon was simply a present nominee for Best Actress in a Musical for
Chicago
at the 1976 Tony Awards held on April 18 at the Shubert Theatre and broadcast on ABC. She does the usual pleased reaction on camera where all the nominees are shown, and when the winner is announced: Donna McKechnie for
A Chorus Line
. Verdon would say that McKechnie could not act and that she was just playing her own story. A June 5, 1977,
Times
article by Patricia Bosworth told about the drama behind the Tony Awards. McKechnie’s position in
A Chorus Line
was viewed as being that of a featured player. When she was announced as being nominated for the Best Actress category with Verdon and Rivera, the two supposedly reacted with anger and refused to attend the Tony nominating party. McKechnie said that it was director Michael Bennett who demanded that the nominating committee put her in the Best Actress category, which she heard had enraged Fosse. She realized how political the awards were, with Fosse viewed as the older director-choreographer and the belief that his show should therefore be recognized more than Bennett’s. Any bad feeling that McKechnie’s winning may have caused seemed to be overlooked later when she was cast in the national tour of
Sweet Charity
.

In Shirley MacLaine’s book,
Sage-ing While Age-ing
, she reported that she brought Verdon into her rehearsals for her first one-woman show to teach her the new kind of dances. The show would run on Broadway from April 19 to May 1, 1976, and then July 9 to 24, 1976, at the Palace Theatre. The director was Tony Charmoli and the credited choreographer Alan Johnson. MacLaine says that Johnson had been hired on Verdon’s recommendation. On May 9, 1976, Verdon performed at the Star-Spangled Gala, a benefit revue at the Metropolitan Opera House. It was held to raise money for operating expenses for the Performing Arts Research Center which was part of the New York Public Library. The center had suffered from the evaporation of city government funds and had recently been forced to cut staff and hours of operation, and now appealed directly to the public for financial assistance. The event was produced and directed by James Lipton. Clive Barnes in the
Times
reported that Verdon and Chita Rivera “played it cool” in numbers from
Chicago
.

According to the May 23, 1976,
Times
, Verdon had agreed to be the ballet mistress for a project to revive and reconstruct the theater dances by Jack Cole by the American Dance Machine. It was to done under the auspices of the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theatre in Waterford, Connecticut. For the next eight weeks she was to lead special daily classes in the style of Cole’s choreography. Then there would be another eight weeks of reconstruction and rehearsal of the works which would be filmed and recorded in Labanotation. The 25- minute film
Recollections
would go on file in the Library of Congress and also clips from Cole’s films and TV shows as well as reminiscences by his dancers. On the August 25
Times
, Clive Barnes reviewed the American Dance Machine show held at the Newport Festival. The program Cole was said to be divided into three parts: “Vocabulary,”
Recollections
, and a reconstruction of dances from Kismet. Barnes wrote that in the film, Verdon talked beautifully about Cole.

In September the company would perform the dances in public in Connecticut and in New York, where lecture demonstrations would also be held on the whole range of Cole’s style. Verdon was one of the many dancers to bring their own memories to bear on the reconstruction of the very numbers that she herself had helped to create, like ones from
Magdalena
and
Alive and Kicking
. She said that it was time that ballet in Broadway shows received real recognition. Verdon felt that some of the production numbers were out-and-out masterpieces and most were far superior to what had been seen on the ballet stage. She said that she had had some of the greatest choreographers create dances on her body, and it was scandalous that she should be the only one who really remembered them. Verdon was grateful for the work of the American Dance Machine because she felt that if the dances and dance styles weren’t handed down to future generations, they would be lost forever.

In the summer of 1976 Fosse began working on a screenplay about his life and his own imagined death that would become the film
All That Jazz
(1979). He and writer Bob Aurthur interviewed everyone who had been around at the time of Fosse’s heart attacks and surgery. This covered almost a hundred people and included Verdon. She told Aurthur that she felt that Fosse hated her when they first met because he was jealous of her. Verdon felt that he was jealous of all his girls and that Death was the only real affair of his life. This was the reason she was never really jealous of the other women in his life. Verdon also told Aurthur that she was a magnificent tool for Fosse because she absolutely trusted him, and that he had confided to her about his demons which would make him angry and deranged. On the subject of marital fidelity, Verdon said that he didn’t take advantage of a double standard that saw her remaining faithful. Fosse was more the victim of the double standard. Interviewee Nicole expressed her dealing with her mother’s boyfriend Jerry Lanning when he sometimes acted like a father.

Fosse would deny that the film’s scenario was autobiographical, and the pseudonym Joe Gideon was used. Interviewed later in the
Times
by Moira Hodgson he would rationalize this by saying that he kept declaiming that the material was autobiographical to avoid people calling the film self-indulgent. However, he admitted that there was a lot of himself in Gideon, and that an artist should draw more from himself and less than others. The narrative included a character obviously based on Verdon, the estranged dancer-actress wife who the director-choreographer owes a show to. The production went ahead when Columbia Pictures agreed to finance it, with Fosse directing.

On June 11, 1976, Verdon appeared live on the WOR-TV charity benefit telecast “One on One” to aid the mentally retarded. She made her last guest appearance on
The Mike Douglas Show
in the June 14, 1976, episode. With Chita Rivera, Verdon performed “Nowadays” and “Honey Rag” from
Chicago
. For “Nowadays” they wore white top hats with silver trim, white tail jackets with a white flower in the lapel, white body suits, black semi-stockings and silver shoes, and used canes. The outfits lacked the heart shapes on the crotch that were part of the stage costumes, presumably because they were considered too racy for television. After “Nowadays,” the week’s co-host Hal Linden appears on stage for some patter and the women exit. They then return wearing white split skirts with a silver belt over their body suits to dance “Honey Rag.” Again the stage costume heart crotches were absent.

They were brought out again to be interviewed by Douglas and Linden. Verdon wore a black suit with white polka-dot blouse, a black polka-dot bowtie, a sparkly headband, and black earrings. Douglas told about his admiration for dancers because of the physical injuries they could sustain, and Verdon commented that often an injury resulted from the fact that you couldn’t walk but you could still dance. When he mentioned Fosse having an individual style, she said that the really good choreographers demanded that you act the dancing. Verdon added that a shoeshine and smile would get you nowhere in the dance field. She also talked about her experience of doing
Children! Children!
Verdon said that at a Saturday matinee of Chicage the youngest women in the audience were 45 and they would scream all the Women’s Lib expressions like “Right on!” She felt that ladies were a much better audience for the show because it was very naughty and risqué, to put it mildly. However Verdon had seen men and women in the evening (whom she assumed were married) who enjoyed the show, with one man in particular who seemed to enjoy Rivera too much and was punched in the face by his wife. Verdon also told how audiences sang “All That Jazz” along with Rivera but in a very syncopated way, so that when she paused, they would sing the “jazz.”

On June 21, 1976, the
Times
’ Bernadine Morris reported that Verdon had recently been one of the models at a showing of Israeli fashions, organized by the National Women’s Division of State of Israel Bonds. The luncheon was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. On November 24, 1976, Verdon was the guest on the WNYC-AM radio show “Conversations from Circle in the Square.”

After she left
Chicago
in 1977, Verdon sometimes joined Fosse and Reinking for dinner after the show. The dance assistant Tony Stevens commented on her friendliness towards her professional and personal replacement, saying that the peculiar extended family was very sophisticated and very New York. He also felt that Verdon lived with the situation, whether she was happy about it or not. By now Nicole was attending the Dalton School in Manhattan. As the girl became a teenager, she apparently began to resent what she saw as her mother’s overprotectiveness. An example was when she put her daughter into a taxi, she would take down the name and hack number of the driver. When someone else sent Nicole home in a taxi, Verdon would insist that they do the same. She also became aware of her daughter’s physical development. Although she had trained in ballet for years, Nicole had the biology of a Fosse dancer with burlesquey curves and a knowing smile. This attracted boys, which added to her mother’s concern.

Verdon made her second appearance on
The Dick Cavett Show
which was broadcast in two parts on December 5 and 6, 1977. It focused on the American Dance Machine and she appeared with dancers Debbi Bier Prouty, Morgan Richardson, and Amy Levine. Verdon wore a black long-sleeve leotard with black tights and a silver belt throughout the entire show, and had her hair in a ponytail. She looked uncharacteristically thin, perhaps even underweight. The performances took place on a bare stage with back lighting with an unseen band. The lighting was dimmed when Verdon sat with Cavett on canvas chairs to talk.

Cavett asked her about her past as a dancer, which segued into her talking about Jack Cole as the first choreographer to bring jazz to a Broadway show and his influence on ethnic dancing. Verdon and the dancers demonstrated an African ritual dance and then Cole’s 1942 number “Wedding of a Solid Sender” which was based on a real Watusi ritual dance. She next talked about Agnes de Mille as the first to bring ballet to musical theater to have the dancers perform as characters in the show as in
Oklahoma
! Before Cole and de Mille, dancers would just do maid-dusting numbers or Tiller dancing with high kicks in a chorus line. In
Carousel
, de Mille had dancers combine ballet and soft-shoe. Verdon does dancing walks from Michael Kidd’s
Guys and Dolls
and Fosse’s
Damn Yankees
, and Chaplin’s dancing walk. She also does a Jack Cole Cuban walk. Verdon and the dancers do “The Telephone Song” from the stage show
Cabaret
, which was choreographed by Ron Field who worked with Cole, and then Cole’s East Indian dance. She continued her history of dance influences on musical theater with modern dance which was used by Cole, de Mille, Kidd and Jerome Robbins, talking through the moves that the dancers make when they perform de Mille’s funeral dance from
Brigadoon
and Kidd’s mute dance from
Finian’s Rainbow
. Verdon next demonstrates stripper movement that was used by Cole and Kidd for Eve in the “Garden of Eden Ballet” from
Can-Can
.