Fosse Read Online Free PDF

Miriom Wilson, “the more I realized it was a lifestyle I wasn’t interested in. Bob was exposed to things most of us weren’t. Today’s young people think nothing of promiscuity, but I knew little about nightclubs and such, places where that sort of thing went on. And so Bob kept that part of his life from me—and probably a lot of people at school—because he knew we didn’t understand it.”
    This was not the burlesque of Gypsy Rose Lee. It was not, as today’s feather dancers would have modern audiences believe, an unorthodox form of female empowerment. It was a living, and a bad one. “There wasn’t much dancing,”Grass said. “They just peeled it off.” And it made people mean. Some came in already mean, but the real porny dives—the sort of places Fosse moved around in late at night, with no one looking out for him—made mean meaner. “These people wanted to make money,” Grass said. “They didn’t care if you were twelve or fifteen years old. If you looked seventeen, fine.” Old toilets overflowed. Dark halls smelled of stale greasepaint and piss. In the men’s room, Bob and Charlie had to walk around on their heels, and when they needed to change into their tuxedos, they had to put a piece of cardboard down first. “When we played the low-class clubs,” Grass said, “we knew not to ask who was running the thing.” If they had to, the club managers could mess up the girls, and the girls’ boyfriends could mess up the managers, but the Mob had the final say on who came back to work. (Grass said, “You didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother you.”) It was rough on adults, but for Fosse, a kid, it was hell aboveground, and in some cases not even aboveground. His mother and father didn’t really know,or seem to care, what it was doing to him. Neither did he, for the moment.
    For the rest of his life, he would never let go of the girls, the failures, and the slimeballs. The dreck, the
true
showbiz—he understood their estrangement from the world’s Astaires. In a way, he loved them. He admired their losers’ tenacity. Soon, he would share it. In time, they would be Fosse’s dramatis personae. The bumps and grinds would be the prepositions of his dance vocabulary, and the whining horns and beat-up drums thumping from offstage would live in his ear forever, as unforgettable as original sin, screwing him up, but screwing him up good. And something else too: there was a philosophy here. Seeing firsthand the human component in sleaze, Fosse felt the beginnings of a question he would ask his audiences, and himself, for the rest of his life: What is filth? If it makes them smile and hard, how bad could it be? Weren’t the lowest common denominators what universal appeal was all about? Didn’t the whole of show business, of humanity, really, come down to wanting a little peek?
    Bob Fosse was the best thing ever to come out of burlesque, and he would pay for it forever.
    The nights Weaver didn’t send him out on his own, he appeared with Charlie Grass. Mrs. Grass, their stage mother,drove the boys from show to show, made them complete their Latin assignments in the back seat of her sedan, and advised them not to mix with the strippers. “They’re not nice girls,”she warned. The warnings hardly mattered. When the toilet doors in their own changing rooms wouldn’t open, Bob and Charlie were detoured deeper in, to the big ladies’ den, where not-nice Amazons powdered up, the boys repeating to themselves the mantras of professional conduct Mr. Weaver had been drilling into their heads for years. “Always refer to the conductor as Maestro . . .”
    Strippers—twice Bobby’s size in two directions, and twice as sharp—preyed on him before the showas he stood in the wings about to go on. That was the worst part, waiting for them to call his name, breathing into a moldy moth-eaten curtain and trying not to think of the twisted faces or what they would yell at him tonight. It was