Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  After The Jazz Singer came out, the typical vaudeville bill, as if ashamed of itself, broke into a schizophrenic split of live theater and canned film, and as the pictures got livelier and lovelier, the stage acts got worse. Then they got perfunctory. Then, unable to fall any farther, the entertainers got desperate. So they got proud. No matter what the world was telling them, the old clowns told themselves they were the real show business, the real talent, the neglected heart of American entertainment. Embittered, envious, and losing their grip, they stood their ground on cranky floorboards and vowed to defend their corner of the trade long after the audiences went home and the lights went out. Hence the presentation houses. With the star acts gone to Hollywood, booking agents had to bring in movies to fill the Oak Theater, which boasted almost a thousand seats, its art deco flourishes curling away the spirits of a dreamier era.

  It was the only time Astaire ever opened for Fosse. As his image danced, towering twenty feet above him, Bob slipped behind the screen at the Oak Theater and followed Astaire’s supersonic feet. “He wanted to dance with him,” Grass said, “but the manager would come behind the screen and ask, ‘What’s all this noise back here?’ So he took his tap shoes off and put on his street shoes and followed Fred Astaire.”

  The Riff Brothers’ opening double, a light tap routine, gave way to Fosse’s solo, a dance set to the heart-rendingly topical (in 1940) “Stars and Stripes Forever,” in which Fosse, a soldier’s cap on his head, rushed the footlights and pantomimed gunfire at the audience using his taps for bullet shots (he’d seen Astaire do it in Top Hat). Grass did his “Blue Danube Waltz” solo, a classy respite, then the two segued into their challenge taps. Fosse did wings; Grass beat them with knee drops and splits; Fosse destroyed those with a round of backward pullbacks, kicks, leaps, leaps from squats, and so on. To “resolve” the challenge, the Riff Brothers came together for their finale. Here Weaver demonstrated a key lesson: Sell. Dazzle them in the end, and they’ll forget whatever tripe came before it. Thus, the Riff Brothers’ “Bugle Call Rag.” As one boy endeavored to do his trickiest, flashiest moves, the other, grinning, cheered him on, selling the performer to the audience and the audience right back, sending the room into a whistling frenzy. The whole act was eleven minutes. Bob Fosse was thirteen years old.

  Weaver and Comerford bought them sundaes after the show. Being bundled up against the snow and getting loopy on ice cream with a man who seemed to be around a lot more than his father—it felt so good. “Bob spent more time at the studio than he did at home,” Grass said, “and he thought of Mr. Weaver like family.” Man and boy were partners now. After class, when the other boys and girls went home to dinner, Bob and the Skipper huddled by the radio listening to the fighter Joe Louis dance loops around his kill. The two shared the shorthand jive of showbiz slang—flops and bombs and hits—and exchanged wordless signals across the studio. Best of all, for Fosse, was the pride. The look on Mr. Weaver’s face. Taking the money home.

  “Weaver didn’t care where he put Bobby and Charlie,” classmate Dorothy Kloss said. “As long as they were working, he had what he wanted.” The hotter the Riff Brothers got, the more they rehearsed, first regularly, then whenever they could grab an hour between long division and their evening shows. They were traveling more now too. “When we started performing, it was only every other weekend,” Grass said. “Then our parents gave the okay that we could perform every weekend Friday and Saturday and even Sunday. We’d do our homework in the back of the car. Sometimes we’d hop a train to do a theater and maybe a USO.” After piling into Weaver’s sedan, the boys ran the act in rapid dance-speak while Weaver, behind the wheel, inserted a thought or a correction when needed. He drove them to American Legion clubs, the odd novelty show. Bob and Charlie would be thrown in with the local whistler, tenor, comic, whatever, and sometimes a semipro act to class up the evening. But not by much. “I played every two-bit beer joint in the Midwest,” Fosse said, barely exaggerating—and many of those joints played him. Weaver booked the Riff Brothers into rigged competitions. But the act, Weaver assured them, was part of the act. Fosse remembered, “The booker would call you up and he’d say, ‘All right, on Tuesday you win second prize at the Belmont and on Thursday I’ll give you third prize at the Adelphi.’” At ten dollars a night and six bookings a week (at the Bijoux, there were five shows on Saturday alone), Bob was doing pretty well.

  He went to the movies. If they were showing Fred Astaire, he’d leave the theater dancing. If it was a Saturday, they’d run four features and he would go all day, from nine in the morning till nine at night, and if it was Fred Astaire and a Saturday, he wouldn’t get to bed until very late because he’d dance the longest possible route home—he wanted more surface area, and the more irregular the surface, the better. When the sidewalk felt too flat, he looked for fireplugs and garbage cans. He could get higher that way. Going back to the theater gave him another chance at a closer look at Astaire’s shoes, and leaving gave him another chance to take it from the top and this time, seriously, do it right.

  The grade-schooler took out a fresh sheet of paper and, in his best, most grown-up handwriting, penned a letter to Mr. Astaire, care of MGM. What kind of shoes did he wear? What size were they? If Bob figured that out, maybe he would know how to be good. If he could change the size of his feet.

  In 1941, having outgrown their former residence, the Fosse family moved up, slightly, to a larger house on Sheridan Road, near Lake Michigan. In the house were Edward’s wife and son (Edward had left for the war in France), Don’s wife and son (Don had been drafted too), and Bob’s sisters, Patsy and little Marianne. While the adults were tending to the grandchildren or talking about the war, while his father drank himself to sleep in the basement or his mother put herself to bed early with cardiac pain, Bob would see to it Marianne was happily entertained. In the summers he shaved down the family’s collie so that just the fur on its mane and the tip of its tail remained, and he told Marianne it had turned into a lion, and (after pouring blood-like ketchup all over his face) he wrestled it to the ground for a laugh. “He loved her so much,” Ann Reinking said. “She was like his little doll.” One Easter morning, Marianne awoke to a string tied to her smallest toe. She followed it out her bedroom door and found a matrix of twine cobwebbed around the house that led, finally, to an Easter basket of candy and painted eggs.

  Weaver upgraded that same year. He moved the academy to 1961 West Lawrence Avenue, a bigger studio with a stage at the far end of its largest room. After school got out, Bob and Charlie would dash over to dance class, then, when class ended, they would spend the rest of the evening working on their routines. With their own set of keys, the Riff Brothers could stay as late as their bedtime, around ten. For extra money, they taught classes five days a week, writing and printing out dance notes with stencil and rubber. On weekends Bob and Charlie would take a streetcar down to the Loop, home to Chicago’s theater district, to see the great acts that came to town and try to get backstage for photos and autographs.

  Charlie Grass wasn’t Fosse’s best friend, but he was just about the only guy who knew his secret. “In those days,” Grass said, “show people weren’t very popular. It was considered out of place to put on makeup and a costume and perform. So we kept it quiet between ourselves.” Fosse also kept quiet his crush on Beth Kellough, a cute blonde three years his junior—Kellogg, they called her, like the cereal. As Bob and Beth were about the same height, they were partnered for recitals year after year. They grew up together, changed together. “Dancing at that age,” Kellough said, “you look older than you really are. Your body starts to develop early and you have on all that lipstick, rouge, and mascara.” Fosse knew not to try anything. Disrespecting a dancer would be a direct violation of Weaver’s number-one rule. “He treated me like family,” Kellough said, “like his sister.”

  Miss Comerford disappeared. “All of a sudden, she was gone,” Kellough said. It was tuberculosis, some thought. “It was another man,�
� Grass recalled, “an earlier boyfriend from Iowa. He took her away.” Weaver, stooped from a lifetime of hunching over a piano, stooped even lower after she left. He let his cigarettes smoke down themselves. He’d put one on his lip and forget it was there, or forget he was. Fosse—always watching him—liked the look. He slipped the cigarette into his act. With the studio lights dimmed, Bob savored his reflection in the rehearsal mirror: a Camel drooping from his mouth, turning to ash, and his eyes cutting through the snaking wisp of white. Forget the steps; the effect worked. “Ever since I was young,” he said, “cigarettes were identified with work.” Weaver converted to Christian Science after Comerford left, and he gave up cigarettes. So Bob smoked his while hiding on the back stairs, afraid of getting caught. He didn’t want to be bad. But the mirror was right, and he loved looking good.

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  About the Author

  SAM WASSON is the author of five books, including the best-selling Fosse and Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. At Wesleyan University he joined the Desperate Measures improv troupe, cofounded its annual twenty-four-hour show, and earned limited admiration for his parody of Virginia Woolf. He lives in Los Angeles.

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