Fosse/Verdon: How Bob Fosse's Near-Death Experience Inspired All That Jazz
Tuesday's episode, "All I Care About Is Love," tackles the heart attack Fosse suffered while editing Lenny and staging his adaptation of Chicago.
Roy Scheider and director Bob Fosse on the set of All That Jazz, 1979.© 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.
In 1974, Bob Fosse was keeping an impossible schedule. He was editing Lenny, his first film since winning the best-director Oscar for Cabaret, and simultaneously staging Chicago, the Broadway-bound adaptation of Maurine Dallas Watkins's play starring his estranged wife Gwen Verdon as Roxie Hart.
Lenny had a troubled production; Fosse butted heads with his star, Dustin Hoffman, and forced his workaholic nature on his cast and crew, often demanding about 25 takes per scene. Hoffman would later complain to Fosse biographer Sam Wasson that the filmmaker—who still craved the spotlight himself—"wanted to be Lenny. . . . when he'd give you a direction—it was him doing it." The shoot had ballooned into an approximately 100-day affair, leaving Fosse with miles of excess film. Fosse wasn't happy with Hoffman's portrayal of stand-up Lenny Bruce—and was feverishly attempting to salvage the film in the editing room just days before its release.
Verdon, meanwhile, was more interested in Chicago than Fosse was. But he still felt compelled to devote his energy to it—as Wasson wrote, "After all [Verdon] had given him and all he had taken, Chicago was his way—his only way—of giving back." As further consolation for the marital hell to which she had been subjected, Verdon had extraordinary control over the production—getting star billing, prominent promotional placement, and approval of all creative elements.
To maintain this feverish pace, Fosse was popping pills and ignoring new, troubling physical symptoms—a hacking cough, cramps in his hand, a tightening chest. Fosse's family had a history of chronic heart failure, so Fosse was aware of his risk for heart attack—but the workaholic choreographer-filmmaker was more focused on other concerns. "If you want to make something good," Fosse once rationalized, to New York magazine, "like a movie, it matters more than your health. So you trade a couple of years."
But on the day of the first table read for Chicago, Fosse was so uncomfortable that he agreed to see a doctor. Shortly after, he suffered a massive heart attack. It wasn't necessarily a shock: "I always thought," Fosse would later tell Rolling Stone of his one-track mind and work ethic, "this was the way to do important things. If you're not willing to put your life on the line, how can you do important things?"
Fosse's doctor recommended immediate open-heart surgery, and production on Chicago was postponed while Fosse underwent the operation and recuperated. It was excruciating for him to be away from work, off the pills, and without the steady flow of cigarettes. But there was one vice in which Fosse could still indulge from a hospital bed: sex.
"Fosse made a pass at almost every nurse who came in to see him," wrote Wasson. The lustful patient was also visited by a stream of concerned lovers. Ann Reinking, who was dating the lothario at the time, told Wasson, "It didn't bother me that Bob's girlfriends came to the hospital. Bob was sick. I worried about him. That's all that mattered." But the rotating female visitors confused the hospital. Fosse's doctor, according to Martin Gottfried's Fosse biography, once walked in on the coronary patient in bed with a female visitor. The physician, Dr. Ettinger, had also assumed Reinking was Fosse's wife—and was dumbfounded when Verdon revealed she was actually married to Fosse.
"I had never met a show business personality close up," the doctor told Gottfried, "and I was absolutely amazed at what was going on. . . . I would make my rounds and see Gwen and Ann—as if they were sisters. It was unbelievable . . . And then Nicole [Fosse], she was like a daughter to both of them. I couldn't believe what was going on."
Fosse ended up mining the experience—open-heart surgery and confusing romantic entanglements included—for his semi-autobiographical opus All That Jazz. The film, co-written by Robert Alan Aurthur, follows protagonist Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a pill-popping, cigarette-smoking, sex-loving director, as he struggles to finish editing a Hollywood film and stage a Broadway musical. Sound familiar?
Speaking about the genesis of that not-so-thinly-veiled feature, Fosse explained: "I was in the hospital myself, and had been ill—I had a heart attack and open-heart surgery, and I became very interested in death and hospital behavior, and the meaning of life and death and those kinds of subjects." Fosse said that he contemplated another screenplay grappling with death, but it was "just so down." Fosse wanted to explore the subject while using "the tools I could use best, which [are] song and dance." In another interview, he explained, "Joe Gideon . . . is a man who just never stops directing, even when he is having an argument with somebody that is very important to him . . . he's the total director. He even fantasizes his death as this elaborate concert with music."
"Is there any of that inside of you, Bob?" the interviewer asked.
"Oh yeah," Fosse replied.
"It's kind of like you did it for us," the interviewer said of the elaborate adaptation of his near-death episode. "You said, 'I took charge of death, and I did it [my way].'"
"Well, if you're gonna go," Fosse said, smiling, "That's the way to go, I must say."
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