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since I was young,”he said, “cigarettes were identified with work.” Weaver converted to Christian Scienceafter Comerford left, and he gave up cigarettes. So Bob smoked his while hidingon the back stairs, afraid of getting caught. He didn’t want to be bad. But the mirror was right, and he loved looking good.

Forty-Five Years
    G IRLS. HALF THE STUDENTS at Amundsen Senior High School fell into that category, and half of that half fell for Bob. He had grown into an attractive young man. He was always running track or dancing, and his seemingly guileless smile (practiced but sincere) made them forget everything but that smile. “As a teenager in high school,”Kellough said, “some people thought he was gay. He wasn’t effeminate, but people thought any boy who was a dancer was not right. He may have gone out of his way to be a womanizer to prove to people that he wasn’t.” There was Marion Hauser and Miriom Wilson. There was Mary Vagos, Mary Farmakis, and Melvene Fitzpatrick.And there was only so much Bobby could tell them about what he did at night. He kept the same policy with the swim team, student government, and his teachers: he talked like a normal guy who knew nothing about show business or dance. At proms and school socials he had to be relatively well behaved when the music started. Rhythm would bring out the truth. Of course, Fosse couldn’t afford to be
too
clumsy in a roomful of clapping girls enthralled with his vulnerability and charm. “He had two lives,”Grass said, “a normal life, then the nightclub life.” A showman in more ways than they knew, he presented beautifully.
    Fosse knew right awayhe would be a dancer, and rather than dream big, he dreamed real. Astaire was a god and he was a mortal, and the godliest mortals danced in supper clubs—hotel ballrooms with fancily dressed couples at little tables around a dance floor—so Fosse would too. His newer models Fosse took from the middle shelf. The convenient thing about dancers Georgie Tapps and Paul Draperwas they tapped to classical music, matching pirouettes and ronds de jambe to the syncopation of earthbound hoofers. It didn’t get any classier,fifteen-year-old Fosse thought, than shuffling off to Bach. Years earlier, Mr. Weaver and Miss Comerford had taken him to see Draper play the Mayfair Room of Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. “I think that [Draper] was probablythe most elegant performer that I had ever seen,” he said, “and in subsequent performances I saw later, he maintained that elegance. For me, he created a kind of magic, and I think for everyone in the room also, a kind of enchantment that stuck in my head for a long, long time.”
    Elegance was only half of the equation. Filth was the other half.
    “When the war came alongand so many men got drafted, I became the youngest M.C. in Chicago,” Fosse said. “I was sixteen years old and I played the whole burlesque wheel.” But this wasn’t the belle époque burlesque of parody and sexual innuendo; by the time Fosse appeared at places like the Silver Cloud and Cave of Winds, that burlesquehad lost to its grimier twin. This one grew in the dank back rooms of abandoned storefronts and had no compensatory cultural merit—another way of saying it was pure entertainment, tits and laughs and that’s about it. But no one watched it for the laughs. The guys who hung around the Roxy at three and four in the morning weren’t there to see a couple of clowns twirling plates. At that hour, they came to see girls who couldn’t cut it as actresses, didn’t want to be typists, and, in some cases, had no place else to go; girls who had good enough bodies to make okay money plus kickbacks on booze; girls who could give those guys a good bad time for an hour and a half. This was not art. Art would not be out of a job when the strip joints and porn palaces moved in, but burlesque was.
    “The more we talked about himwanting to be an entertainer,” said a high-school girlfriend,