Gene’s reading material now included Yeats, his favorite poet. His choice is not surprising; Yeats, like Gene, was of Irish descent and politically minded. According to a reporter in 1943, Gene was “a poetry addict.”10
One would not immediately assume that a poet would be a varsity letter winner on the gymnastics and football teams. But Gene had not neglected his first love, sports, during his years at Peabody. He may have ceased attending formal dance lessons, but his teachers and classmates recognized his superior ability in movement. He was a self-proclaimed “Mozart” in hockey, gymnastics, track, football, and baseball. Because of his relatively short stature (he did not reach his full height of five feet nine until his senior year in high school), he was deemed unfit for basketball. Yet he excelled at that sport as at all others. “He was in a furious rush to . . . become a 130-pound, tough-as-wire high school athlete. He made his letter as a peewee half-back at Peabody High, and by the time he was fifteen, he was working out with a semipro ice-hockey team, the Pittsburgh Yellow Jackets,” wrote a journalist for the Saturday Evening Post in 1950.11
While Gene worked at honing his athletic skills, Harriet still held high hopes that her sons would continue to perfect their dancing skills as well. Noting the downturn in James’s phonograph sales, Harriet took an administrative job at Lou Bolton’s Dance Studio on 5858 Forbes Street in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh. Bolton was no stranger to Harriet; Fred had been taking lessons at his studio ever since he outgrew the offerings at Blinsky’s Dancing School. Fred was still demonstrating the most promise in the world of show business; in addition to performing in amateur nights, Fred danced every summer from the time he was thirteen to eighteen (1929–1934) on a showboat that toured the Mississippi and Ohio River ports from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Though Bolton was not a dancer himself, his school offered lessons superior to those at Blinsky’s. Bolton knew how to judge a good dancer and thus hired the crème de la crème of teachers. Yet the establishment was failing to turn a profit. Harriet initially received no salary for her work at Bolton’s, but Fred earned free lessons in return for her work. “This was 1928, and there was no general Depression yet. Everything was going well,” Fred explained. “People wanted to take dancing. When the arts do well, it means the country’s doing well.”12
Though the country was in an upbeat period, the Kellys were beginning to experience financial worries. The two eldest children were in college and Gene was about to matriculate. He would major in economics at Pennsylvania State University before proceeding to law school at the University of Pittsburgh. Gene graduated from Peabody with honors in spring 1929. A class questionnaire amusingly summarized the impression he left on his classmates: he won third place as wittiest and first prize for boy who thought he was wittiest. Most tellingly, he tied with two boys as best dancer and was “destined to be a great entertainer.”13 Gene’s yearbook as well as all source material available about his youth list 1929 as his graduation date, indicating that he graduated a year early. No previous biographer has illuminated how this happened; it is possible he began school early or that he took a heavier course load than his classmates to graduate in 1929.
The semester Gene entered college, his family and the country at large suddenly and irrevocably changed. Gone was the ebullience that characterized the Jazz Age. On October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed. Gene may have been majoring in economics, but no amount of education on the subject could remedy the national financial crisis. Americans did not need another economist or lawyer. They needed “a great entertainer.”
In 1931, historian Frederick Lewis Allen asserted that prosperity was more than an economic condition; it was a state of mind. Americans’ “compulsion for idealism was gone and realism was in the ascendant.” They were sickened by President Herbert Hoover’s erroneous statement that the country had “passed the worst and would rapidly recover.”14 Hoover’s pronouncement rang especially false for James Kelly. He lost his job with the Columbia Phonograph Company after the Crash. James attempted to work solely on commission, selling everything from hammers to hats, but each night he came home penniless. Gene remembered that his father’s permanent unemployment left him so depressed that outwardly, he appeared to have had a stroke. Gene’s first wife, Betsy Blair, explained her impression of James nearly ten years later. The Depression had weakened him, but not broken him. He was “old before his time, defeated. . . . But he was loving and gentle with wit in his blue eyes and the Irish gift of the gab. . . . He sat in his kitchen, clean shaven and well-dressed, with a constantly renewed pot of tea for most of the rest of his life.”15 But the tea came later—immediately after the Crash, James’s drink of choice was alcohol, a habit that revolted his daughters and wife.
Gene later said that he was fully aware of the gravity of his family’s situation only in retrospect because at the time he was so occupied at college. Since Pennsylvania State was roughly 130 miles from Kensington Street, it was no simple task for Gene to commute home. He could not have known that James was resorting to borrowing on his insurance to make the monthly mortgage payments. Gene, still freewheeling, had “joined a fraternity and spent so much money that I wish my father had kicked me.”16
It was he who felt like doing the kicking when his fraternity refused admission to Eddie Malamud, one of his Jewish friends. Gene soon discovered that all fraternities were segregated. Pledges experienced discrimination from their “brothers” based on their social and financial status. Gene also found the entire system of initiation ceremonies disgusting. He promptly quit his fraternity and with Eddie and Johnnie Napoleon, a Protestant boy, banded together to fight against prejudice. They called themselves “rebel activists.”17 But they were before their time; their efforts ultimately bore no fruit and the fraternities continued as they always had. Gene claimed this experience did not affect his career, but it did deeply affect his outlook on life. If he could not help improve conditions on his college campus, he could at least help those closest to him. Learning of his family’s plight, Gene turned his efforts to earning whatever money he could. “I dug ditches. Puddled concrete. Laid bricks. Jerked sodas. Worked in gas stations.”18 He also found a job with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, where he “learned to roll as many as eight tires at once.”19
After only one year at Pennsylvania State, Gene transferred to the University of Pittsburgh. His two elder siblings then attended the university and the two younger would go on to graduate from there. Here, Gene was much closer to home and thus could help his family to a greater degree. “I could live at home and all I had to do was earn my tuition,”20 Gene explained. The summer after his freshman year, Gene found an ideal opportunity to earn tuition for the more expensive University of Pittsburgh: counseling children at the YMCA’s Camp Porter. Additionally, he was hired to stage weekly shows for the organization. He received $150 for his efforts. He saw himself in many of the reluctant boys at the camp who assumed dancing was for “sissies.” Gene knew it would not be simple to show boys that dancing was a sport, too, but his manner of convincing them was ultimately successful. He won the younger boys over by shooting baskets with them and persuaded the older boys that learning to dance would win them girls. Soon, “news got around that this Kelly guy was terrific.”21
Gene, discovering that he was a natural-born teacher, showed more interest in Fred and Harriet’s work at Lou Bolton’s Dance Studio. Somehow, the studio remained open in the economic crisis. Americans, it appeared, still had the enthusiasm to dance in spite of the national gloom. Indeed, before and immediately following the Crash, audiences could not get enough of the musical films released in swift succession with the advent of talking pictures. The first talking film to win Best Picture was in fact a musical; Metro-Goldywn-Mayer’s The Broadway Melody. The picture was not escapist—it contained enough realism and grit to be relatable to audiences. Yet its score, penned by future MGM producer Arthur Freed and his co-writer Nacio Herb Brown, was uplifting and allowed audiences to focus on
romance rather than finance. The same year The Broadway Melody premiered, MGM released the Hollywood Revue of 1929, a movie most notable for introducing Freed and Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain” to the American public. The tune was an optimistic melody that acted as encouragement to audiences during a challenging time in America’s history.
As much as moviegoers needed the reassurance musicals offered them, they no longer felt like laughing “at clouds so dark above” as the 1920s rolled into the 1930s. In 1932, movie studios released fewer than fifteen musicals, compared to seventy in 1930. Broadway shows, too, reflected a downturn in conventional musicals. Composer Alan Jay Lerner wrote that “the legitimate theater became a theater of protest and musicals became brash and satiric.”22
Gene’s confidence was high even if the nation’s was low—he had already gained a reputation among the young women at the University of Pittsburgh as the most entertaining boy and best dancer on campus. “Some of them thought I was bloody marvelous and pretty soon I began to believe them,” Gene said with a laugh years later.23 Not wishing to lose his reputation, he ensured that his talent did not stagnate. He began attending any show that passed through town. At Loew’s Penn Theatre, he was particularly enthralled by the performance of a black hoofer who called himself Dancing Dotson as well as by that of Bill Robinson, another black entertainer. Gene and Fred went to the local Stanley Theatre and Nixon Theatre and wrote shorthand notes of routines they liked. If Gene was going to imitate anyone, he only wished to imitate the best.
Harriet encouraged Gene and Fred to create a routine they could perform at theaters or country clubs. Sometimes Gene performed with Fred; other times he danced with his elder sister Jay. Gene and Jay danced the “obligatory ballroom bit and then a kind of jazz ballet item” that Gene recalled as “pretty awful.” Audience members often asked if they were brother and sister like the Astaires, but they replied: “No, we’re a professional dance act touring the country.”24 The self-proclaimed professionals made as much as $150 a night. When Gene performed with Fred, he styled their act less in the ballroom and more in the vaudeville style. They staged one ill-fated routine on roller skates: though they landed on “their rear bumpers . . . they did some pretty astonishing back-flips and nip-ups,” a journalist wrote in 1950.25 Though vaudeville virtually died on the professional circuit during the Depression, theater managers kept it alive via amateur nights that they hoped would attract more people to movie showings following the live acts. If Fred ever felt unsure of his chances at winning an amateur contest, he would bring in Gene as his partner and they would invariably merit first prize. Gene and Fred’s performances brought in up to $15 per engagement, much less than the $150 Gene earned with Jay, but the brothers welcomed any income.
Gene and Fred performed in every venue, from mob-owned nightclubs to clubs with flooded dressing-room floors. Gene dubbed both substandard locales “cloops,” a combination of “club” and “chicken coop.” At one particularly seedy cloop, “ringside drunks would snigger ‘Hello, honey,’” to Gene and toss coins at his feet.26 Gene stated that he felt like a prize cow on display. It humiliated him to stoop and retrieve coins, especially as accusations of being “a fag” drifted to his ears. In 1990, Gene recalled: “You can do two things [when heckled]: shout back at them, which is undignified, and not particularly satisfying; or you can belt them, which isn’t very dignified either, but very satisfying. . . . One night . . . I jumped off the stage and hit [a guy]. But I had to make a run for it, because the owner of the place and his brother took after me with a couple of baseball bats.”27 After Gene suffered a broken finger as a result of punching an agent who demanded more than his share of commission, he realized he was losing as much money as he was earning due to medical bills.
The cloops were degrading, but nothing now could move Gene from his interest in dance. All he needed was a more appropriate venue and people who would appreciate his and his partners’ efforts. Harriet was of the same mindset. Seeing the talent her two sons possessed, she realized it had been her foresight and determination that made them such promising entertainers. Harriet, always enterprising, was aware that Lou Bolton had an offshoot of his dancing school in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, sixty-five miles from Pittsburgh. She also intuited that Bolton was growing weary of the commute. Her brother Gus, who lived in Johnstown, asserted that the city needed a good dance school; if she were to take over Bolton’s, she would likely find willing pupils. Harriet convinced Bolton to “put up the capital” for the enterprise and opened the new school (though it was still under Lou Bolton’s banner) in the American Legion Hall on Main Street. Staffing the school posed no obstacle. Harriet decided Gene would be the school’s primary teacher. Gene, looking at his resourceful, deceivingly diminutive mother, marveled: “She has more energy than any of us.”28 Gene seemed to have just as much energy; he managed to maintain his grades at college while teaching dance, devising new steps for his routines, and working odd jobs about town.
The boy who was supposed to be on the road to law school was drifting further and further away from anything college had to offer. “The more you do, the more you learn,” Gene claimed, and he decided he could do more and learn more off campus.29 Though he had no intention yet of dropping out, his primary focus at the university shifted to staging Cap and Gown shows rather than honing his skills at economics and law. Cap and Gown, an all-male organization, wrote and produced musical variety shows each year at the university. Gene began to see the Depression not as a time when there was no place for music and dance but rather as an era that needed a new style to reflect the changed mood of the nation. “When I was growing up, dance in movies was a means of expression for the wealthy,” said Gene in 1994, his eyes still flashing with wry disdain at age eighty-one. “But I didn’t want to wear rich people’s clothes and become a victim of the shiny-floor syndrome. I wanted to dance like the man in the street, like the ones I met while working my way through college, pumping gas in Pittsburgh.”30
Yet as Gene leapt from one activity to another, his path for the future remained uncertain. In a 1974 interview, a reflective Gene observed: “I’ve never had a plan in my whole life.”31
3
Kelly Mania
In 1931, nineteen-year-old Gene Kelly already had more responsibility than many grown men. “It didn’t take the Depression to make a man out of him [Gene], but it certainly rounded him out,” a journalist later noted in 1945.1
On top of his full load of classes at the University of Pittsburgh, Gene was performing in clubs with his brother Fred nearly every night of the week and instructing students on weekends at Lou Bolton’s Dance Studio. Despite moviegoers’ ongoing apathy toward musicals, Gene was able to rally interest in dance. At both the Pittsburgh and Johnstown locations of Lou Bolton’s studios (the latter run by Harriet), it was Gene who drew in clients. Parents wanted him to teach their children and children wanted him as their teacher. Gene put as much—if not more—effort into his work at the dance studios as he did into earning his bachelor’s degree.
“My extra-curricular activities were curtailed . . . the only study group I was connected with in my college days was the French Club,” Gene recalled. As was becoming his modus operandi, Gene sought to learn more by doing than by passively studying. Observing people from all different social worlds taught him more than any class in sociology. In the precious little time Gene had to relax, he snuck to a nearby speakeasy, Bakey’s, with his friend Jules Steinberg. Steinberg remembered that Gene found people-watching at Bakey’s more diverting than flirting with girls or seeing a show. By spending time there and engaging in conversation with the dominantly Italian clientele, he claimed to have learned the language more quickly than he could have at school. By the end of his college career, he could carry on conversations in Italian as well as Yiddish, French, and Latin.
Gene remained remarkably levelheaded during the relentless activity of his college years. Perhaps because he’d seen his father overindulge in drink, he ne
ver used excessive alcohol intake to decompress. However, Gene did not always exert the same control over his temper. The only instance in which Steinberg saw Gene get his “Irish up” was one night at Bakey’s when two traveling salesmen began to disparage priests. He promptly gave them black eyes. He then left the bar and, as he did most nights, attended an early-morning Mass.
Gene’s adoring pupils were not subject to his temper. They saw only his affable side, and it was not long before he became a sort of Pied Piper. Part of the key to Gene’s success was that he allowed the students to choose what type of dance interested them. If they wished to learn the jitterbug, he would teach them the jitterbug. If they wished to learn a Viennese waltz, he would oblige them accordingly. “Plenty of times I was only one step ahead of my pupils; I’d go to a nightclub, watch the routines, pick up a couple and teach them the next day in class,” Gene explained.2
Gene further utilized the routines he learned when staging the university’s Cap and Gown shows. “He had a burning desire to put on better shows than . . . previously produced. . . . Gene made them [members of Cap and Gown] sweat,” one journalist wrote.3 The college’s twenty-fourth annual show, entitled What’s Up? premiered on April 20, 1931, at Pittsburgh’s Nixon Theatre and ran for one week. Gene choreographed the production and appeared in two numbers. The show was a hit and won unanimous praise.
The leaders of the YMCA’s Camp Porter asked Gene back in the summer of 1931 to again stage and write the organization’s annual revue. He enlisted the aid of Fred for several numbers. The show, High, Wide, and Handsome, debuted at Conneaut High School on August 14, 1931, with Gene acting as emcee and Fred as a drummer and dancer. Gene seemed to have had as much fun acting in the show as his pupils. Gene performed “a challenge tap” with Fred and then appeared in two more numbers, both of which required Gene to dress in drag. Despite Gene’s quickness to fight when accused of being effeminate, he did not have any qualms about appearing fey for theatrical, comic purposes. Gene was comfortable in his own skin and did not need to prove his masculinity.
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 4