Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen (40 page)

At a production meeting, Fosse made the suggestion that
he
replace the leading actor, Tom Poston. He was even prepared to do an audition after the show. That night as Verdon sat in the theater’s back row, Fosse began. She supposedly roared in approval at his performance, although it seemed to be done to sell the casting since what he was doing was unfunny. Producer Robert Whitehead knew that they couldn’t cast Fosse and that he could not continue as Poston’s director since he had no faith in him. Whitehead spoke to Fosse and he agreed to leave, with two conditions: He wanted to finish his choreographic duties and he also wanted to have the company alone to say goodbye. At the last rehearsal Beddow said that Fosse acted more intense than usual. She commented on it to Verdon, who told her to just do whatever he said and that she would understand the reasons later. After the rehearsal Verdon sat on a stool looking somber, dressed in a mink coat that came down to her ankles over her usual black pants and sweater. Fosse told the company that he had been fired and then he took Verdon’s arm and walked off the stage, pausing to turn to say goodbye.

The show opened on Broadway at the ANTA Playhouse on January 16, 1961, and was a flop, only running for eight performances until January 21, 1961. Fosse and Verdon attended the last performance, curious to see what had become of the work. They apparently stood behind the last row. After the show Fosse is said to have grabbed the show’s composer Moose Charlap and held him against the back wall, swearing at him and demanding to know how he could have done this. Verdon is said to have pulled her husband away and taken him into the lobby. The man accosted turned out to be Robert Griffith, the co-producer of
Damn Yankees
. Another version of this story has Fosse grabbing Griffith from his seat in the audience after the show, asking him if he had come to gloat. Griffith did not answer and Fosse walked away. The first version had Griffith going after Fosse, and Harold Prince, who was seated next to Griffith, followed. Prince found the men in the foyer smiling and embracing with Verdon’s arm around both of them. In the second version it was Prince who went after Fosse with Griffith close behind. They supposedly found Fosse on the floor of the lobby in a curled-up position, almost catatonic. Verdon was beside him, stroking his head and telling him that the man he had attacked was Griffith. This comment of hers suggested that Fosse mistook him for someone else.

Verdon’s supposed performance retirement ended when she was a guest star on NBC’s
Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall
, broadcast on January 18, 1961. In the show she makes several appearances. To the song “Flamboyenco” she does a flamenco dance with two guitarists and a dance chorus. She wears a black polka-dotted layered dress with train and black hat tied under her neck. The guitarists are revealed to be Como and George Gobel, also wearing the same black hats. This isn’t a great surprise given that they are placed closest to the camera, sitting in front of the dancers and blocking our view of Verdon. The number stops when she points out that Como has made a mistake in his playing, but she states she will go on and “dance louder.” The number stops a second time when the guitarists play another bad note and Verdon and the dancers walk off the stage, after she states that she has never been so humiliated in all her life.

She returns to dance again, wearing an oversized coat over a black sweater and pants. Before the number, Como asks her how she remembers all the steps for a dance number, and she replies that it is the same as remembering all the lyrics of a song he sings. When Como says that he has cue cards, she says that she has the same and Como displays a cue card with dance labanotation. Verdon demonstrates some of the movements when Como points to spots on the card. After she removes her coat, Verdon appears on a white set that has the optical effect of giving her body a white outline and she dances a solo of “Doodle Town Fifers.” Then there is a sudden cut to her wearing a topcoat, white blouse and tie and hat. She is joined by the Peter Gennaro Dancers and they dance the “Mambo Jubilo.” Another cut has Verdon and Gennaro dressed in formal clothes. She wears a sparkly corset with a long-backed skirt over tights; she has long black gloves and a feather in her hair. The couple dance to “The Wistful Waltz.” Another cut has Verdon seen back in black sweater and pants with a hat with a flower attached to it, joining the dancers for the finale of “Mambo Jubilo.” After the number, Como tells her that Gennaro has described her to him as a “dancer’s dancer” and Como adds that he thinks she is also a “singer’s dancer.” She replies that that is very sweet and she thanks him. Gobel joins them and the three sing and dance to a Miracle Margarine song. Verdon kicks and bumps Gobel at the end.

Verdon is back to join Como, Gobel and Paul Anka, and she wears a white evening gown with white gloves. She sings a few lines of “Heart” from
Damn Yankees
, with Anka on piano, and the four laugh in reaction to the unseen audience screaming at Anka as he is about to sing. Verdon faux screams in reaction to Gobel’s singing “When the Red Red Robin” and he shakes her hand, and she joins all of the others singing “My Home Town.” Como asks Anka to compose a new song and Verdon suggests the line “When the moonlight is bright,” before Anka gets taken away by a group of screaming girls from the audience. When Como sits at the piano to compose a song, Verdon suggests a line about a Kraft’s noodle chicken dinner which makes the screaming girls return and leads to an advertisement for Kraft. Verdon comes back for the finale of the show, dressed in an elbow-cuffed and belted gray dress. She contributes to the joke that the show is running overtime by saying that they cut five minutes from her dance number, and she, Como and Anka and Gobel all agree to do the cut pieces. She does a few seconds of a dance, then Verdon joins the others to sing Anka’s “When the Moonlight Is Bright Tonight.” She takes a bow as Como and the chorus sing “I Feel a Song Coming On” and joins Como and his guests dancing under the show’s end credits.

The star is said to have toyed with the idea of co-starring with Fosse in a revival of
Pal Joey
at the New York City Center of Music and Drama, but decided against it. However Fosse and Verdon did work with Eileen Heckart on her “Zip” number. The show opened on May 31, 1961, and the planned engagement of ten days was extended by two weeks so that the show closed on June 25.
Can-Can
producer Cy Feuer contacted Verdon to ask Fosse about a new choreography job for the show
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
, then in tryouts in Philadelphia and scheduled to open on Broadway in three weeks. The original choreographer Hugh Lambert was found to be unsuitable. Fosse agreed to supervise him and leave the Fosse name off the show, restaging the musical numbers. Verdon said that Fosse didn’t want Lambert fired, particularly not after
he
had been fired from
The Conquering Hero
. Verdon accompanied Fosse to Philadelphia and again acted as his dance assistant as well as his gofer, shopping for costumes and props. The company stayed at the Warwick Hotel and Donna McKechnie, one of the dancers, was told by Verdon how she and Fosse would jump all over their bed rehearsing steps in preparation for the next day. The show was the Broadway debut for McKechnie, who said that Verdon was one of her heroes and that she used to wear black velvet ribbons tied around her neck just like Verdon did. The dancer also said that when she first came to New York she found out where Verdon had her dance boots made because she had to have the same boots. Verdon and Fosse prepared and presented a reworked version of the song “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” both wearing identical tight black pants and sweat socks and sneakers. She also wore a heavy white ribbed wool sweater and he a loose white shirt.

The show opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre on October 14, 1961, and was an enormous hit, running until March 6, 1965. Verdon next assisted Fosse on an hour-long ABC-TV musical Timex special, “The Seasons of Youth.” Dancer Barrie Chase rehearsed with Verdon and said that it was obvious that she was madly in love with Fosse. Verdon helped him work out an audition number for Chase and also gave him notes as the program was being filmed. She was not being paid to assist him, but Verdon would come in every day to line up chairs and clean up the space at New York’s Variety Arts studio. When a costume ripped, she produced a needle and thread to sew it together. “The Seasons of Youth” aired on October 25,1961.

Verdon made the first of eleven appearances on the comedy-variety hour
The Garry Moore Show
in the episode that was broadcast on October 31, 1961. It was filmed at CBS studios in New York and in it she is said to have done a song-and-dance version of “Daddy.” On November 1, 1961, Joan McCracken died of a heart attack in her sleep. She was only 43 years old. A friend of McCracken, Patton Campbell, telephoned Verdon when he heard the news and asked to come to Verdon’s apartment. When he arrived he told her what had happened and then she told Fosse. Verdon said that the sorrow of McCracken’s death affected him so deeply since he felt, of all the women in his life and despite all of his success, that only she enhanced his life.

Fosse and Verdon did not attend the funeral service held on November 3 at the Walter B. Cooke Funeral Parlor. He supposedly watched from across the street, repeating the alleged behavior he had of watching his former wife from afar after they had divorced. Unlike the later friendship that eventuated between Verdon and Fosse’s girlfriend Ann Reinking, she had never managed to form one with McCracken, which makes her absence at the funeral more understandable. At one time Fosse had supposedly offered McCracken the chance to substitute for Verdon in one of their shows. McCracken came to see the show but declined. It was said that the reasons were a resentment of Verdon, whom she felt had taken Fosse away from her, and the sight of Verdon dancing at a level that McCracken could no longer achieve. McCracken was also said to have gone to great lengths to avoid encounters with Verdon. Apparently, once when she was in the city with a friend, she thought she spotted the red-haired Verdon on the street wearing heavy makeup and a blond mink coat. She had her friend hide in a storefront with her until the woman passed. It turned out that the woman was actually Dolores Gray.

In November 1961, Verdon appeared on the
Perry Como’s Kraft Musical Hall
Thanksgiving show. Sources differ as to the date of the show—some say it was November 22; others November 26. She is first seen arriving in a truck with the other guest stars, and joins Como to be introduced, wearing a white dress with white hand gloves and a white scarf. She sings “Howdy Neighbor” with the cast who move to a barn set with a haystack. She and Dorothy Collins go to Como and talk about Thanksgiving as a segue into a Kraft commercial. Verdon then pop ups to camera and is joined by Collins to perform “Make Mine Country Style” as a duet. The number has both women wearing overalls over short-sleeved plaid shirts and white hats and white shoes. Verdon has a handkerchief hanging from a back pocket which she proceeds to tie around her neck. The couple dance around a barn set. At one point, Verdon strums a pitchfork as if it is a guitar, and she is shown to be less afraid to pet a horse than Collins. Verdon returns later in her white dress to dance with four male dancers of the chorus to “Skip to My Lou” on a raised platform on the barn set. Regrettably director Dwight Hemion has some of the chorus blocking our view of Verdon by having two of them standing on either side of the camera, although their presence is rationalized as she jumps into their arms to camera at the end of the number.

She returns for a skit with Paul Lynde with him as the Thanksgiving chef. Taking orders for the meal, he asks Verdon if she is anybody and she replies, “I’m beginning to wonder.” In her white dress and scarf she is next alone on the haystack, where she places a flower in her hair, finds a boot which she throws away and then a white balloon on a string. She dances on the floor holding the balloon, and runs behind a truck and out of camera range. The number then changes to Verdon in a dark field running in slow motion with the balloon seen as bigger than it was before. The images are distorted with soft focus and extended vertical lines, and Verdon sits in a tree. There is a closeup of her smiling to the camera before she jumps out of the tree and runs again, stopping to dance among trees in a forest. After she jumps again we see her return to the barn set: she is lowered from the ceiling by a string onto the haystack, still holding the balloon. Verdon removes the glove from her hand that holds the balloon and it floats away. She waves goodbye to it with the same hand and the number ends. Verdon is then part of a “Sing a Song” medley. She sings “Buffalo Gals” as she walks among the male members of the chorus on the raised level of the barn set. She dances with two of the men arm in arm on either side of her, moving up and down stairs and comes down to the floor. Verdon joins Como and Collins sitting on the haystack for “We Were Looking Through This Barn” to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” After the number, Verdon asks about the promised dinner and comments that Thanksgiving only comes once a year “but it doesn’t seem to be coming here at all.” The cast sit at a table for the meal.

Verdon returned for her second
Garry Moore Show
(December 19, 1961), which had a Christmas theme. The choreographer may have been Kevin Carlisle. She appeared in four of the episode’s musical numbers. In the entrance number, Verdon wears a mink coat and walks through a department store’s swivel door carrying presents. Dressed in a sparkling white dress and feathered cap, she then dances to “Greensleeves,” with the song’s lyrics changed to “The Beautiful Trees of Christmas” and sung by an unseen chorus. The set features three Christmas trees which transform into three female dancers, and they and Verdon are joined by four male dancers. She returns for a second musical number with Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews. The three ladies are dressed in sweats and together they sing “Everybody’s Doin’ It” on gymnasium equipment, and Verdon scores a laugh from her use of a rowing machine. The skit climaxes with the three dressed as Santa Claus, ringing bells, and getting money donated into a box by the passing Garry Moore. Verdon’s final appearance comes within a montage of carol singing. She sings the French version of “The First Noel” as she stands against a window frame, dressed in black and with a glittering necklace