God knows why I spent one evening several years ago watching All That Jazz. I didn’t like to watch people dance. My taste in musicals stopped at Little Shop of Horrors and the South Park movie. Perhaps it was because I was aware of Bob Fosse as a Director of Note, at least according to the criticism of the 80s, and had the opportunity to watch it.
All That Jazz is a film I can only recommend to myself, or at least someone just like me. It’s an odd film, well-produced all around, with good cinematic style and confidence but it’s just so...about Bob Fosse. One thought kept going through my mind: “How did this get made?” What was the thinking that led to a major-budget picture about the near-death crisis of a successful director-choreographer?
Fosse answers that question and it’s unfortunately anticlimactic. The 70s were just a different time in Hollywood. After the old studio system collapsed, there was a brief era of auteur-driven pictures. Studios didn’t find directors for films, they found directors and the directors had their own films in mind. Fosse had a solid hit with the Oscar-winning Cabaret and believed in old fashioned razzle-dazzle--something the money men could understand. The studio wanted to make a movie with Fosse and Fosse wanted to make All That Jazz. The money came together and the film was made.
The Fosse portrayed in the book is in line with the fictionalized Fosse in All That Jazz: exacting, passionate, adulterous and guilty. In the biography, he’s an interesting, if mostly static, character to follow around during two major transitions in musical theater.
Wasson keeps Fosse in the foreground and the shifting tides in the background, but I found it interesting to learn how significant Oklahoma was in creating what we now think of as the musical. That play integrated the story with the songs, using them to illustrate deeper characterization and plot points. Seems like it should have been obvious, but every good insight looks that way in the rearview mirror.
Oklahoma came right at the beginning of Fosse’s career as a Broadway dancer; Cats came towards the end of his life. Musicals shifted from focusing on song and dance to spectacle--think Phantom of the Opera’s crashing chandelier.
Wasson doesn’t shy away from including a solid critical appraisal of Fosse’s position in Broadway musical history. In fine journalism form, he quotes rather than editorializes, citing critics that point out that Fosse didn’t innovate the musical as much as he refined the post-Oklahoma innovations with style and further enrichment.
This makes sense. In the book, Fosse is intent on creating meaning in every aspect of his work. This step is supposed to communicate this feeling, etc. His shows were sexier and about darker subjects, veiled prostitution and murder and the like.
That’s not to say that Fosse’s stature has waned over the years. He seems to be a unique figure in the annals rather than a game-changer. He’s certainly fared better than his rival Michael Bennet, whose A Chorus Line was Broadway’s longest running show for a time and subsequently disappeared down the memory hole. Fosse’s style was enthusiastically embraced by Michael Jackson (and thus countless others, though none as thrillingly as Corey Feldman) and lives on whenever someone talks about “jazz hands.”
Fosse may serve as inspiration to creatives in that he pushed and used his limitations and that he worked tirelessly. Perhaps they should avoid, however, his massive inferiority complex and decades-long use of Dexedrine.
But Fosse is useless as a model for creatives because his success was based on so many destructive qualities, unique to him in a big, needy vortex. His work ethic, like everything in his life, was driven by compulsion, not devotion. His style was a product of making his limitations work, from his dancing to his shows. He made them work because he had to be successful.
Wasson does a good job drawing out how profoundly he was affected by his experiences as a child dancer in vaudeville. He specifically highlights how the advent of the talkies changed entertainment. Why go to see some no-name hoofer who was probably the 1,304th best dancer in America when you can watch Fred Astaire perform flawlessly on the big screen? The last days of vaudeville, as Wasson illustrates, stank of desperation, with dwindling crowds in the seats and never-will-bes on the stage. (This adds another shade to the aura of Jerry Lewis, whose parents were performers during this time.)
Hungry for disappearing stage time, Fosse started working in burlesque houses before he’d even graduated from high school. Here he saw old fashioned showbiz at its lowest level. The experience affected him in two ways. For one, he always had a store of old school razzle-dazzle to lean on. For another, the, er, experienced women he encountered in those places took him into the world of sex too fast and too soon. (A promotional picture taken at the time of these tours shows Fosse looking more like a child than an adult; he mentions how scarring it was throughout the book, and in All That Jazz.)
Fosse isn’t especially salacious but Fosse approached women the same way he did his work--compulsively. Wasson discusses four major relationships in the book and each one ends because Fosse couldn’t remain faithful. The last, Ann Reinking, later played a fictionalized version of herself in All That Jazz, which bespeaks of the incredible devotion he inspired in others. What struck me about these--typically showbiz--indiscretions was how guilty Fosse felt about them.
The Rawness has made a strong case for drawing the line between guilt and shame. Fosse didn’t dress up his infidelity with theories about modern sexuality or cry out, “How dare you judge me!” He beat himself up about his failures as a husband and a father then buried himself in, yep, more work and sex. He didn’t hide it or justify it--managing shame--he just knew he wasn’t doing the right thing--guilt. Reading about someone famous who feels bad because he did bad things, well, it’s like seeing a polar bear walking down Main Street. It’s just not part of the environment.
Wasson doesn’t assert himself into the prose, which I always see as a positive, and does a good job of pacing the book. Too many biographies wallow in early-life minutiae, but Wasson brings us into Fosse’s relationship with show business right away. We follow Fosse from job to job, with the rest of his life coloring the story, which is both a natural fit for the subject and the most effective biographical approach. The book does drag a bit at the end, if only because the cycle of work-> sex-> smoke-> drink-> ponder inadequacy is so incessant that even Fosse found it exhausting.
One element I was surprised that Wasson didn’t introduce was how the overwhelming rejection of his last film, Star 80, and the failure of his last Broadway show seemed to put a button on his career and, afterwards, he seemed defeated but satisfied. Fosse is presented as being driven by a fear that he wasn’t good enough to be where he was. He thought of himself as a fraud, and says so in many different ways, who only got by with a few showbiz tricks. Yet he had success after success with only minor stumbles on the way. Even All That Jazz, which comes to the edge of complete self-indulgence, was lauded critically and successful financially. Then came the vitriolic reaction to Star 80 and the (minor) flop of Big Deal and, though he kept working maintaining revivals, he seemed satisfied. The obvious arc is that he was searching for rejection and, getting it, figured that his work was done. For a man whose films ended with the rise of the Nazis, a comic’s heroin overdose, the murder of a starlet and his own death, that sounds about right.
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