Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  But Ed said nothing. He ushered the couple from his office while inviting them to a party at his apartment after the show. I waited until the two were well away and we were alone. I shut the office door. “For God’s sake, Ed, what’s wrong with you? You let him think you were friendly with gangsters!”

  “Stein isn’t a gangster, Nora, and keep your voice down.”

  I hadn’t realized I was almost shouting. “And what are all those Chicago people doing out in Hollywood, anyway? I’ve heard rumors about the Pritzgers and Annenbergs and Korshaks…”

  Ed interrupted me. “Look, those families faced the same kind of oppression we did. The tsar and his Cossacks would have been happy to kill all the Jews in Russia, the same way the British wanted to get rid of us. They ran for their lives just as we did. Do you think Jake Arvey is going to tell fellows who saw their parents slaughtered to check the pedigree of every dollar? Do you think Rockefeller’s money was so clean, or Carnegie’s or Pullman’s or any of the men who made fortunes exploiting their workers? Grow up, Nonie. I’ve never taken a dime from the Outfit. They know I can’t be bought. Remember what Jesus said, ‘Judge not and you shall not be judged.’ Jake Arvey will be there tonight—Colonel Jake Arvey now, serving his country just like Captain Sidney Korshak. Grateful to the country that gave them incredible opportunities. Think of the influence they have in Hollywood. I got seven hundred fifty thousand votes in Chicago, the most of any mayor ever. But one movie is seen by fifty million people. That’s clout, Nora, and it’s no bad thing to stay in with the people who’ve got it.”

  Red Skelton, Virginia O’Brien, and Gene Kelly arrived the next day. The concert was scheduled for that evening, so Jim Williams set up an afternoon rehearsal. He’d booked a few local acts—the old St. Pat’s Choir, the five dancing Murphys, and a magician to fill out the hour.

  There were klieg lights in front of the Chicago Theater that night, as young people in uniform entered the ornate building. Ed and Margaret sat in a box to the right of the stage with Jake Arvey—every inch a colonel in his dress uniform, the gray-green wool so distinctively Army. Next to him, Marshall Korshak and a man who must have been his brother Sidney, both in uniform. Officers too, though fighting the war from Stateside bases.

  I was in the prompter’s box, ready to photograph everything on stage. Suddenly, there was Desi Arnaz next to me. “Nobody wanted me to play my bongo drums,” he said. “I guess this will be an all-Micks show with the Jews as the go-betweens. Business as usual.”

  “James Petrillo has forty in his orchestra,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll find a place for you if you ask.”

  “I don’t ask … I’m a bandleader myself. Had my own club in New York. I invented the conga line, you know.” He grabbed my waist and twisted my hips, pushing me forward as he sang “la da la da la da dig dig dig.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Hold on.”

  “Think you’re too old to have some fun? Don’t sell yourself short,” he said.

  “Desi. Desi.” Lucille Ball caught sight of us from the wings and gestured to him.

  “Babalou,” he said as he left. Catch yourself on, fellow, I thought.

  A minute later, I saw Desi put his arm around Lucy and whisper in her ear. Gene Kelly said something to Desi, and Red Skelton shook his head and shrugged. Kelly tapped Lucy on the shoulder. He sketched out a dance step and she imitated it. Kelly shook his head and did the step again.

  In short order, the choir from old St. Pat’s sang, the Murphys danced and the magician actually pulled a rabbit out of his hat. The audience was getting restless. Finally, the orchestra played the opening notes of “Friendship.”

  Before the cast of Du Barry took the stage, Kelly made Lucy do the step one more time, then led the four performers on. Kelly whirled Lucy around then passed her off to Red, who grabbed Virginia O’Brien’s hand. The four belted out “Friendship, friendship, the perfect blendship.” The audience responded to the energy onstage and stood, clapping in rhythm. I was so glad they were having a good time, and wondered how many of these young men might soon be headed for combat.

  “Hoo-rah,” somebody shouted.

  Gene Kelly waved, then suddenly was upside down, walking on his hands and bouncing across the stage while the other three shuffled from side to side. Kelly flipped back up to his feet and held out his hands to Lucy, Red, and Virginia. They moved in for the big finish, slapping their knees, throwing their arms in the air, the audience with them hooting and shouting. The orchestra finished with a flourish, the performers took their bow and ran off, but the applause brought them back a second and then a third time.

  The stage filled up as the local groups joined the stars. Lucille Ball took the hand of the choir director, and Gene Kelly brought the five Murphys forward, four young sisters with their brother. The orchestra played the song Kate Smith had made a hit. “God Bless America,” we all sang.

  Through the night, with a light from above.

  Please God.

  * * *

  “Schmaltz always works,” Gene Kelly said to me. I found myself standing next to him at the party after the concert in Ed and Margaret’s apartment.

  “I thought the concert was very moving,” I said. You jerk, I thought.

  “It was. It was,” he said. “It’s just I’m getting sick of all this safe patriotism when there are fellows out there risking their lives. I want to enlist.”

  “Well what’s stopping you?”

  “Louis B. Mayer. The bastard won’t let me. He says I’ll do more for my country by making pictures to boost morale.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I know. It’s a lame excuse and I could just walk down to the recruiting office, and then MGM would sue me and I have a wife and a daughter to support.”

  “Well you’re no kid, Mr. Kelly, I suppose…”

  “I’m only thirty.”

  “But not eligible for the draft.”

  He nodded over to where Desi Arnaz was talking to Margaret and the wives of Jake Arvey and Sidney Korshak. “The Latin lover over there got his induction notice and then conveniently broke his leg right before his induction physical.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You don’t like him?” I asked him.

  “I like him alright. Who wouldn’t? He’s fun. He’d show up on the set while we were shooting Du Barry, usually near the end of the day when everyone was exhausted, carrying those bongo drums. He’d start playing and pretty soon he’d have the whole place laughing. Even got me to dance with him, but the guy has a chip on his shoulder. He’s an aristocrat in his own mind. I guess his family had money in Cuba. His father and grandfather were in politics and when Batista came in, they had to run for it. They arrived in Florida broke. Though Desi will tell you how he went to the finest Catholic schools and was on his way to becoming a lawyer.” Kelly laughed.

  “But then, so was I. In my first year of law school, when my father lost his job and the family needed money. My brother Fred and I worked up a dance routine. We’d perform at local talent shows. Won a hundred dollars one night and that was big money in 1932. Of course most of the time we danced in joints. Cloops, I call them—a combination of clubs and chicken coops. All of them run by the Pittsburgh version of the mob. What is it about show business that attracts gangsters?”

  “Prohibition, cash, and chorus girls,” I said.

  “I guess so. I suppose Desi and I have a lot in common. He went to work to support his family too, except I’m in love with my wife and I’m not about to ruin my marriage by screwing around.”

  “And Desi will?”

  “Mmmm,” Kelly said. “None of my business. But Lucy’s got so much talent. She’s not really a glamour girl. She can make people laugh. Take them out of themselves. That’s a rare gift.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Dance is unique. You train like an athlete. Very physical. Learning the steps, making your muscles respond, forcing
flat feet like mine to point and move. You know I have no instep.”

  He did a quick pirouette. “But then the music starts and it takes you over. The physical and the spiritual all connected and the audience knows it. Something very elemental in us all that wants to move. The crazy rhythm.” He stopped. Shook his head. “Why the hell am I going on like this to you? I sound like some professor or something.”

  “Maybe I remind you of your mother,” I said. He laughed.

  “Harriet Curran Kelly. Quite a woman my mother. Got my middle name from her father. Wild Billy Curran came from Derry to New York with nothing. Ended up in the coalfields of West Virginia. Wouldn’t go down into the mines. Opened up a general store instead. Married my grandmother who was from Alsace-Lorraine. My mother said she got her business sense from her. Old Billy did alright then lost everything. Yet my mother married another Irishman, Joseph Patrick Kelly, who also made a good living for a while. The biggest seller of phonographs in the Midwest but he lost his job when the Depression hit. She saved us. Got a job as a secretary/receptionist in a dance school. Ended up employing all of us kids. We made a bundle. I was good if I say so myself. I directed local shows and revues. The toast of Pittsburgh. Sometimes I think I should just go back there. Then I could enlist and not be controlled by Louis Bastard Mayer.”

  “You can’t go back to Pittsburgh,” I said. “It’s like that song ‘How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree.’”

  “Never made it there,” he said.

  “It’s an extraordinary place,” I said. “Truly the City of Light. Awful to think of the Nazis covering it in darkness.”

  “And what am I doing to stop them? Running around a sound stage. Clowning in front of an audience in Chicago.”

  “We appreciate you taking the time,” I started. He waved me silent.

  “I suppose I do owe your city something. The first real training I ever got was here at the Chicago Association of Dance Masters. Spent two summers studying with some of the best teachers in the world. Crazy, though, mornings I’d study ballet with Diaghilev and afternoons Spanish dance with Angel Cansino. What a juxtaposition. His niece Rita was in the class. They changed her name to Hayworth in Hollywood.”

  “That’s our town for you.”

  “It was during the Century of Progress. Plenty of work. My brother and I would appear in the clubs inside the Fair and then dance at the after-hour joints around the edges,” he said.

  “Too bad I didn’t know you then. I could have taken your pictures.”

  “Are you a real photographer? I saw you shooting photographs backstage but I figured you were, well…”

  “Somebody’s elderly aunt with her Brownie?” He shrugged. “Ed Kelly is my cousin. I work for him. The official photographer.”

  “Well that figures. In the city that invented patronage,” he said.

  I wasn’t going to let this fellow from Pittsburgh patronize me. “I’ve studied with some pretty good teachers myself. The camera I use was a gift from Eddie Steichen and it was Matisse taught me about light.” I stopped. No reason a hoofer would even know these names.

  “I bought a few Stieglitz prints when I lived in New York,” he said. “But I would need a couple of box-office smashes before I could get near a Matisse. Funny thing though, Mayer brags about his Cézannes and Matisses and Picassos all the time. As far as he’s concerned, that’s real art. But you know, Miss Kelly—”

  “Nora.”

  “The movies can be as much an artistic expression as the greatest paintings or opera or ballet, and for the first time in history millions of ordinary people can experience what only the rich could.”

  “Spoken like a true Kelly. Did you know our ancestors were famous for the great parties they threw? Open to everybody. With poets and harpists and singers and dancers. The entertainment lasted for months. Failte Uí Ceallaigh—the welcome of the Kellys. Still a phrase used in Ireland to describe a really extravagant occasion.”

  “Sounds good. Though I have to tell you I’m not one of those ‘shure and begorrah’ Irishmen.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Gene, nobody is. The English created the stage Irishman. We saved our souls with music. Dancing when we had no instruments at all, lilting for rhythm. Nothing could stop us. And talk about warriors. The name Kelly means contention, and for that matter Eugene comes from Eoghan, Prince of the O’Neills, who ruled Derry and Tyrone where the Currans lived.”

  Gene Kelly held his hands up. “Okay. Okay,” he said. “You win. I do know that when Irish step dancers met Negro shufflers that tap dancing was born.”

  While we were talking, the rest of the party had moved over to the piano. Jim Williams introduced Eddie Burke from the Sixteenth Ward. He was an unlikely musician, but he knew how to plunk out a tune that would get people to sing along. He sat down at the piano and started with a sure-fire favorite, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Lucky Davis began conducting the group while Ed, Margaret, and Lucky’s husband, Loyal, stood to the side watching, smiling. Trust Lucky to outshine the stars with swooping gestures that sent the phrases up and down.

  “Who’s that?” Gene asked me.

  “Our actress-in-residence. She was a professional once but now she plays her most demanding role—respectable wife with just a little whiff of the wicked stage.”

  The group finished with a great big “Shout it now” and applauded themselves.

  Jim Williams said, “How about another song from the movie?”

  “Why don’t you do the ballad, Gene?” Red Skelton suggested.

  “No, I’m not a real singer,” Kelly said.

  “So you just pretend to be one in the movies?” Skelton said. “Come on, Gene, it’s a great song. One of Cole Porter’s best.”

  “Alright, alright,” Kelly said as he moved around to the piano bench. Eddie got up, bowed to Kelly. “This is one of the songs we kept from the Broadway show. I sing it to May Daly, Lucy’s character. Come on over here, Lucy.”

  “She’s fine where she is,” Desi answered from the couch where the couple was seated.

  Mmmm, it was a love song, and I suppose it’s one thing to sing it on screen to her and another …

  “Easy, Desi,” Gene said. “Lucy and I are pals.”

  But Lucy didn’t budge. “Well then, Aunt Nora,” he said to me, “will you stand in for her?” So I did. Taking a place at a curve of the grand piano as Gene Kelly started playing and singing.

  A pleasant voice. How a regular guy would sound singing to his girl. He delivered the words. No frills.

  “Do I love you, do I?” he began. “Doesn’t one and one make two?”

  Do I love you, do I.

  Does July need a sky of blue?

  He was mugging a bit. Not being serious. Winking at me but then he turned his head to look out the window. The night sky had absorbed the lake. A hard-edged moon stuck in the center.

  “Would I miss you, would I?” He was singing, more softly now, not fooling around.

  If you ever would go away.

  If the sun would desert the day.

  What would life be?

  I wondered if he was thinking of his wife and that baby daughter. Did he realize that if he did manage to enlist and get into combat he might never see his wife and child again?

  “Will I leave you? Never. Could the ocean leave the shore?”

  Except tens of thousands, millions of men were leaving.

  “Will I worship you forever? Isn’t Heaven forevermore?”

  Do I love you, do I?

  Oh, my dear, it’s so easy to see,

  Don’t you know I do?

  Don’t I show you I do,

  Just as you love me?

  Quiet in the room now. Everyone here had someone on the frontlines. And heaven no consolation.

  He almost whispered the last words and for a moment nobody spoke or applauded and then Lucky Davis shouted, “Terrific,” and started everyone clapping.

  I’ve had only one love in my
life. Peter Keeley and, even if he were dead, he still had my heart. “Could the ocean leave the shore?” Somewhere right now a woman was writing a letter to her husband with his photograph propped up before her. A fellow in a sailor suit smiling back at her. She doesn’t know that his ship has been torpedoed and that he is dead. Would she stop loving him when she found out?

  Ed walked over to the piano. Shook Gene Kelly’s hand.

  “That was really beautiful,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Gene Kelly struck a chord on the piano and began “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” Ed joined in. “K-E-double-L-Y. Has anybody here seen Kelly? Have you seen him smile?”

  “Come on, Nora,” Ed said. “You’re a Kelly, sing.” So I did.

  Sure his hair is red and his eyes are blue,

  And he’s Irish through and through.

  Jim Williams was singing with me. Lucky moved in front of us and conducted the group in the last of the song. “Has anybody here seen Kelly? Kelly from the Emerald Isle.”

  Eddie Burke sat back down at the piano and pounded out “McNamara’s Band.” Then “My Wild Irish Rose” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Even Desi Arnaz was singing. Red Skelton and Virginia O’Brien danced in the middle of the group.

  Gene Kelly leaned over to me. “Shure and begorrah,” he said.

  “Just sing,” I said. Because no one could be sad while belting out these songs. I mean here we were only one generation away from starving to death and our Irish eyes were smiling. Now, Blessed Mother, the saints and the God who is love, hurry up and end this goddamn war.

  9

  JANUARY 1943

  A quiet Christmas. I did all my shopping at Kroch’s Bookstore where a clerk helped me find something suitable for each member of the family. I bought the new novel Laura for Margaret and a very serious book on economics by a fellow called Schumpter for Ed, and the latest C. S. Lewis for Rose. I chose a selection of Agatha Christie mysteries for Mariann and the Kelly girls, and a book by the French flyer Saint-Exupéry for Mike. We had no big gathering, with so many of the family away. Rose and I had dinner with Margaret and Ed at their apartment. Margaret and I often had our meals together, now that Ed was working so late. And most days I rode with Ed to city hall in order to be able to take the photographs that had become a kind of historical record.