He gave us the old razzle-dazzle In life, as for stage and screen, Bob Fosse was all about showmanship by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 01-23-2003 We're in row five of a multiplex theater off Union Square, staring up at the movie screen, the odor of stale popcorn staining the air, our ears pounded by the endless commercials and public-service announcements. Then, at last, darkness. The movie begins, and we are caught in the first thrilling number of "Chicago" and there above us are Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger and all I can think about is Fosse. Bob Fosse was my friend. He was the man who in 1975 joined forces with Fred Ebb and John Kander to create "Chicago" on Broadway. The reviews were ho-hum, sneering or patronizing, and there were no awards. That was the year of "A Chorus Line." But 28 years later, here's "Chicago" — with director Rob Marshall's new choreography for the movie screen — still bursting with the dark glamour Fosse gave it, with Golden Globes in hand and the Academy Awards straight ahead. As I watch it now, and hear it, I also see Fosse. And hear Ebb and Kander. Give 'em the old razzledazzle, Razzle-dazzle 'em … We're walking from the Carnegie Deli after lunch, with dramatist Herb Gardner, the later thriller writer Noel Behn and the great Paddy Chayefsky. We turn east onto 57th St. Fosse is wearing black and a small crushed hat, and there's a dollar bet among the strollers about who will be recognized first. Nobody recognizes any of us, of course, and why should they? Then in the distance we see a young woman, bundled against the spring chill, walking with her feet splayed out. The feet of a dancer. As she comes close, Fosse stops, does a small dancer's move, rolls his hat down his arm as if it were a derby, and smiles. "Bob Fosse!" the young dancer says in astonishment, and the rest of us, locked in shameful and deserved obscurity, come across with the dollar bills. Give 'em the old hocus-pocus, Bead and feather 'em. How can they see with sequins in their eyes? Onscreen off Union Square, murder is creating fame, rescuing women from their own obscurity. This is a world where anything seems possible: Kill the right man on a slow news day and you will be famous very quickly (if not for long). "Chicago," as directed in this brilliant movie version by Marshall, is a fable about fame, notoriety and the press. Those themes were important in 1975. They were still essential concerns on Sept. 23, 1987, when Fosse died of a heart attack on a street in Washington, D.C. They are important today. Marshall's movie welds them together once more, in a fresh way (honoring Fosse by avoiding straight imitation) and showing us that even the most serious themes can be entertaining. And while I watch the lithe, knowing, cynical women in this film, in a movie house where the young audience is at times breathless, I can hear Fosse later, admitting (probably reluctantly) that the movie was terrific and the women glorious. As a choreographer and director, he brought a sensuality to his work that simply wasn't present anywhere else in the American theater: urban, erotic, occasionally lowdown and dirty, but relieved from cheap vulgarity by a whiplike elegance. In rehearsals, Fosse was a cruel taskmaster, insisting that the tiniest detail (for example, the crook of a finger) must be as precise as the high kick of a dancer's leg. He knew how to make that detail huge, just as he knew how to design what dancers call "a Big Mitt number." Give 'em the old flim-flam flummox, Fool and fracture 'em. How can they hear the truth above the roar? Fosse wanted shows as low as the Chicago strip joints that pointed him to a life (see his autobiographical movie, "All That Jazz"), but he wanted to do things nobody had ever seen before, too. He worried, of course, about success and failure, because his art could not be practiced in a lonesome garret. Both Broadway and Hollywood are tough rooms, and if you have too many failures, you might never have another chance to do your work. In 1969, his movie version of "Sweet Charity" was a terrible failure, driving Fosse into depression, even despair. Three years later, he won the show business triple crown: an Academy Award as best director for "Cabaret," a Tony for "Pippin" on Broadway, and an Emmy for the TV special "Liza with a Z," starring Liza Minnelli. "Even now," Fosse once told me, "I feel like I might never work again." When he said such things, he usually laughed. Fosse laughed at most things, including himself and, above all, death. Laughter, after all, is a sure sign of a serious human being. All over "Chicago," you still feel the spirit of a man laughing at death — deaths inflicted on others with guns, knives and poisons, and the state-inflicted death that comes from a hangman's noose. Death was always with him after his 1975 heart attack (while rehearsing "Chicago"). As with most things, he turned that into art too, in "All That Jazz," and after a while he was back on the Goddamned Camels. He had a death wish, I suppose, but it was not one that was encased in gloom. He was too busy putting on a show. Give 'em the old three-ring circus, Stun and stagger 'em. When you're in trouble, go into your dance … After the movie, my wife and I walked into Union Square among murmuring New Yorkers who were not yet born June 5, 1975, when the curtain first parted for "Chicago" at the 46th St. Theater. Fukiko and I had gone together to the memorial service for him at the Palace Theater on Oct. 30, 1987, the program adorned by a drawing of Fosse by Al Hirschfeld, who died just Monday. I was among a pile of Fosse's friends who were left money in his will: $378.79 each. We pooled our inheritance and threw a big party at Tavern on the Green and danced into the small hours, as Fosse wanted us to do. I also remembered sitting around one summer night with Fosse, screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg, Jose Torres, composer Cy Coleman and novelist Ed Doctorow, talking about the Mets and prizefighters and Fosse's plan to create a Dancing School for Writers (the most hopeless of projects), and, of course, the beauties and mysteries of women. I remembered him in the vast studio he'd built in Quogue, standing alone, scratching his beard, then turning in space and laughing. And I remembered him walking on 57th St. with an elfin grin on his face. Then I started singing Kander and Ebb too, along with Fosse: Though you are stiffer than a girder, They let ya get away with murder. Razzle-dazzle 'em, And you've got a romance …