Fosse Read Free

you want to be in show business,” he told the kids, “don’t get married.” He played the violin, but he’d lost his touch after the accident, he told them in his thin British accent (from central Illinois), that damaged the fingers on his left hand. That put a crimp in his piano playing too, but Mr. Weaver still played, standing up over the keys the way he’d learned to do as a pit player in silent-movie orchestras. From monocle to faded spats, his costume suggested an ersatz sophistication somewhere between Fagin and Fred Astaire, a goodhearted opportunist and an all-purpose codger who tap-danced the children in with a low bow, a straw hat in one hand and an agent’s contract in the other. “I, the undersigned,”it read, “offer to employ you to be my sole and exclusive personal representative and manager.” Here was Weaver’s way out of the Depression: turn a good kid into a good dancer, and everyone got a percentage.
    His students loved him. Weaver was their mentor, their father figure, and he gave them their first taste of meaning—life lessons of the show-business world. First and foremost, he made sure they understood respect: respect for others, respect for yourself. “Mr. Weaver taught us howto act like professionals,” said Charlie Grass, a classmate of Fosse’s at the Chicago Academy of Theater Arts. “He told us Eddie Cantor believed in being good to the people going up the ladder of success because you’re going to need them on the way down.” A sign on the wall said YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE, TREAT IT AS SUCH . And that meant no smoking, Weaver explained, lighting another cigarette as he spoke, and no hanky-panky. Respect one another’s bodies. Be
professional,
Weaver had said, with
each other.
    “And remember this:There’s always someone better than you. Remember that. You’re not the best. There’s always someone better than you, and everything’s been done before.”
    To prove his point, Weaver told them about vaudeville, about Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor and the Nicholas Brothers, who leapfrogged each other down flights of stairs, came up from splits with no hands, and tapped better than Fred Astaire, who could tap better than anyone. Weaver told them a great act was a performer’s ticket to the top, and his signature novelty was his secret weapon. “If you do the time step,” he said, “put a twist on it.” Durante had his “ha-cha-cha” exit. Pat Rooney hiked his pants up and did the clog. Joe Frisco popped his derby off his head like a champagne cork as he tumbled a cigar in and out of his mouth. Groucho Marx bent his knees and zigzagged across the stage. Weaver told them about the magicians and the comics and whiz dancers and the Palace Theater in New York City and the feeling of being center stage, the volcanic high one gets after years of nights of practice when, finally, the hat falls at the right time, at just the right angle, and the cane seems to dance on its own. Once he got going, after a swig from the bottle, there was no doubting Fred Weaver’s love of entertainment, of movies, opera, dance, ballet, tap . . .
    Bobby Fosse fell in love with Mr. Weaver. He called him Skipper. No one else did.
    The academy had a good dance floor and a ballet barre and a few small holes in the brick that could pass for windows. That was about it. Behind Weaver’s desk,a cramped hallway led off to someplace the students were not allowed to investigate, but if they stayed late after class and hid behind the piano, they could hear Weaver and Marguerite Comerford, dance teacher and Weaver’s sometime lover, hollering at each other from the back rooms.
    Comerford knew ballet, but as a former Tiller Girl, her claims to fame were her high kicks and precision tapping, the sort of chorus choreography that would one day roll through Ziegfeld’s theater and eventually influence the Rockettes. Miss Comerford was nothing special to look at—long legs and black hair—but she