Four years ago director-choreographer Bob Fosse told his daughter Nicole he'd rather see her become a sword-swallower than a dancer. But with parents like Fosse and Broadway legend Gwen Verdon, how could Nicole stomach any career but dance? Last month she kicked off her life as a professional hoofer at Atlantic City's Tropicana Hotel in the chorus line of Cole Porter's Can-Can, an abbreviated version of the show that rocketed her mother to fame in 1953.
Admittedly, Can-Can is a far cry from the classical training the 5'2" 19-year-old received at the North Carolina School of the Arts and New York's School of American Ballet, but Fosse welcomes the change. "Ballet is so precise," she says. "Here, if your toe doesn't point, nobody is going to notice." Verdon agrees. "If you can learn to dance in high heels," she figures, "you can dance on pointe anyday."
Although Nicole considers this her first "real" job ("You know, where you sign a contract and get a paycheck every week"), she has appeared in TV commercials for Dr Pepper, Bubble Yum and Hallmark, and a brief cameo—"I have about three seconds"—in Dad's lushly autobiographical 1979 film All That Jazz. Last June she danced a contemporary version of Stravinsky's Firebird in New York that her father choreographed especially for her.
Verdon and Fosse split when Nicole was 7 but never divorced. "Neither of them has wanted to remarry," explains Nicole. "They are the best of friends. I don't feel like I'm from a 'broken home.' " Nicole has been living with Verdon in Manhattan but is sharing a six-room apartment in Atlantic City with two other chorines during Can-Can's three-month run. In the fall she plans to join the Cleveland Ballet. "Right now I'm trying to do as many different kinds of dancing as I can," she says. "You can sing at 65, and you can act at 65, but you can't kick your legs at 65."
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