Fosse by Sam Wasson Read Free Book Online Page A

same kind of popular theater: pure entertainment. “I thought plays were effete,plays were sissy,” Papp said. “What I liked was vaudeville, skits, singing, and dancing.” Papp brought that sensibility to the sailor shows, which he would write and direct. They had everything. Fosse said, “One guy would sing Irish songs, somebody would sing hillbilly songs, there was a tap dancer and a guy who did impressions of James Cagney.” It was vaudeville on the beach.
    Touring the Pacific with Papp’s show
Tough Situation
was a kind of paradise for Fosse, his first time on the road with a regular, respectable gig. Palling around with guys who didn’t have to hide their dance shoes, playing to grateful soldiers on warm South Pacific evenings, he felt like a man of the world, a part of something. They played ships, aircraft carriers, officers clubs, parade fields; it felt legit. “We played a different base on a different island every day,” Fosse said, “places like Hawaii, Guam, Chuuk, Okinawa, Wake, all the way through to Tokyo. The guys preferred the shows with girls in them, so we had two strikes against us there, but still we were successful. We’d do sketches with a lot of inside jokes about the navy, like if an officer and a Wave got married, what would their life be like after the war. I played a girl in that skit—I was in drag with wigs and everything.” Papp would toss in a ballad or tap number to break up the yocks. But no matter how crude the acts or how casual their conceptualization, Fosse and Papp took their work, and each other, very seriously.
    Papp was only six years older than Fosse, but as their ship neared Japan, the end of their tour, the two developed a mentor-apprentice relationship. As the outfit’s leader, Papp had an automatic authority, and Fosse, who decried his lack of education, paid very close attention to his superior’s riffs on acting, literature, politics (which didn’t interest Fosse), and whether Fosse was destined for film or theater. Flagrant intellectuals cooled Fosse, but Papp never went to college, and he talked as much about how to throw a custard pie as he did about psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Papp supported him through his self-described “semi-fake-arty dance period” (“with twenty thousand sailors in the South Pacific looking at me, I’d be dancing Ravel’s
Bolero
”) and wowed him with tales of Gene Tierney, whom Papp claimed to know personally. That amazed Fosse. He’d never met anyone who actually knew a movie star, not to mention such a hot one (“that overbite,”Fosse said, “just knocked me out”).
    Fosse was like an ever-expanding sponge, and whenever he felt deficient, which was often, especially in the presence of an intellectual, the sponge would absorb a little more, retaining it for later use. From his front-row seat, Fosse listened intently, recording Papp in pictures that he filed away in a personality catalog he would add to consciously and unconsciously for the rest of his life, a folder for everyone. He was always filing. When rehearsal arguments broke out among cast members and Papp intervened, Fosse filed away a major lesson about directing. “If we went too far or started to get physical,” Fosse said, “he would step in, as any good officer in charge of men should do. But up till then he would not only watch but also stimulate the situation a little bit.” What Papp incited offstage, the performers carried into the show. People had buttons, Fosse saw, and Papp knew how to find them and when to push them.
    Papp and Bill Quillin,another sailor in the outfit, sat patiently as Fosse told sad stories of a girl he loved back home. Months earlier, on leave in Chicago, Fosse had eloped with one of his high-school girlfriends—a secret he kept from everyone except one person. “I heard about it later,”Grass said, “from Mr. Weaver. The girl must have told her parents because Mrs. Fosse found out about it and had it annulled after Bob left