Fosse by Sam Wasson Read Free Book Online

to do the kid act, too young to pull off the big time, Fosse spent his six-month reprieve playing the Midwest’s remotest shitholes, lonely and far from home. Stealing, selling, and being sold, he was getting cynical about his trade, the people in it, and the places it was taking him. “I hate show businessand I love it,” Fosse often said. Fortunately, unfortunately, it was in him, an affliction he would never be without.
     
    In the summer of 1945,Weaver’s enrollment dropped, the academy shut down, and Bob began his nine months of boot camp. With no sense of his future, Seaman Second-Class Fosse surely felt frightened and out of place, like Eddie Bracken with a machine gun. He wrote to Mr. Weaver for help, and Weaver, mercifully, came to his aid, not for the first time or the last. The old man arranged a meeting with the training center’s base commander, “a kind of audition,”Grass said, bringing with him music and headshots and an agent’s prayer he could somehow save Fosse from combat. On the day of the meeting, Weaver hunched over the piano and played “Stars and Stripes Forever” while Bob, in navy blues and sailor’s cap, machine-gun-tapped his way to a new assignment. “That might have saved Bob’s life,”Grass said.
    But if Weaver hadn’t rescued Fosse, the subsequent world events probably would have. In September of 1945, shortly after Fosse arrived for duty, Japan surrendered, and World War II went to the Allies. Though the fighting had ended, troops held on to their Pacific island posts, keeping watch and awaiting relocation. For their amusement, Bob Fosse was transferred to the entertainment branch’s Navy Liaison Unit in New York City, where the man behind the desk directed him upstate, to a naval training station in Sampson, New York. There he met former vaudevillian Tommy Sternfeld (late of Tommy Stern and His Girls), who was preparing
Hook, Line, and Sinker,
a sailor show stitched together with help from
Joe Miller’s Joke Book
(“What did one wall say to the other? I’ll meet you at the corner”) and the talents of whoever was available. “It was songs and sketchesand they threw mops on their heads and dressed up as girls,” said Sternfeld’s daughter Buzz Halliday. The show rehearsed, and then Fosse and his company packed up their collapsible stage and hit the Pacific in November of 1945, flying and boating from one forgotten barracks to the next.
    Months later,
Hook
came to an end and Fosse resurfaced in New York City. There he met chief petty officer Joe Papirofsky, newly appointed head of yet another in-service entertainment division. Assembling a company of twelve or thirteen performing sailors, Papirofsky held informal audition/interviews at Rockefeller Center, where he encountered an unassuming,“very thin, Irish-looking kid”—Bob Fosse. Though Fosse liked Papirofsky, it took him time to feel genuinely at ease with new people. He could be shy, and his life so far had been full of vulnerability—to older siblings, older strippers, clueless parents—making distrust his default. Cigarettes gave him a comfortable piece of business. And they looked good, which was nice too. The swirl of smoke suited Fosse’s natural hunch and made him seem, to all who didn’t really know him, cool, out of reach, in want of nothing—which he wasn’t. But it was a useful pose.
    At twenty-five, Papirofsky, with his streetwiseBrooklynese and hot-blooded charm, had an older brother’s appeal for Fosse and cleared his trust test far quicker than most. Lifting a wave of black hair from his eyes, Papirofsky—or Papp—could quote Shakespeare easily and in an unpretentious way that brought down Fosse’s guard. They shared a devilish sense of humor. “I saw at once that he was footjoy,carefree, jaunty,” Papp said. “He loved to dance. On some islands he would perform in the hot sun for five or six hours. He’d go on until he nearly collapsed from the heat.” They were both devoted to the