He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics)

by Cynthia Brideson

  The audience met Hits and Bits with enthusiasm; nonetheless, Gene and Fred realized that its weakest points were Fred’s magic act and Gene’s comedy. They dropped both from future productions. Dancing was what made Gene’s shows exceptional; consequently, that became his sole focus. The manager of a theater in nearby Ebensburg was so impressed with the dancing in the revue that he asked Gene to open another branch of his school in town. Gene relished the idea and began to envision a chain of Gene Kelly Schools of Dance from coast to coast. He could not help but think of how Harriet would delight in the financial windfall such an enterprise might bring. Gene and his mother immediately rented a hall in Ebensburg and the best of the city’s dancing talents enrolled. However, two months later, only three students remained. Gene and Harriet were left scratching their heads. Gene closed the studio, but the failure did not leave him discouraged. The Pittsburgh location was “finally beginning to take off” and rival Johnstown in enrollment and profits.31

  In the early summer of 1932, Gene, tireless and soon to be twenty, returned to the Pittsburgh YMCA and produced a revue, Waiting for the Ships That Never Come In. He also staged another Cap and Gown show, Silver Domino. In addition to all his other productions, Gene added a second annual revue to the Kiddies’ Vodvil series titled Johnstown on Parade. In June, the show opened at the Nemo Theatre in downtown Pittsburgh. A local journalist noted the remarkable professionalism of all 150 children in the show. The first edition of Johnstown on Parade won such accolades that Gene raised his fee from $35 to $75.

  His confidence was higher than it had ever been thus far in his young life. He even began to think, “I’m better than that” as he took notes on professional acts. Now, when Gene frequented Bakey’s speakeasy with Jules Steinberg, he was less apt to engage in fistfights and more apt to launch into impromptu pirouettes. Steinberg recalled numerous occasions when, walking out of the establishment, Gene would leap, tapping into the street, much to the confusion of late-night pedestrians and the ire of drivers. Despite Gene’s sometimes flamboyant behavior and his nonexistent love life, his masculinity was now unquestioned. Steinberg stated, “There was something very private and secretive about Gene. He didn’t have many close friends—only acquaintances.”32

  Additionally, Gene was quite selective about the type of woman to whom he was attracted. In 1944, when columnist Helen Hover asked him what qualities he most admired in a female, he replied: “Sweetness and reticence, coupled with brains.” The trait he claimed he found most obnoxious in a girl was “a general air of loudness. That is, women who try to talk loud, dress loud or try to monopolize the attentions of everyone in the room by their conduct.” He disliked overdone lipstick and elaborate hairdos as well. Gene concluded that what he most hoped to find was a woman who was “a good sport.”33 He knew exactly the type of girl he wanted and he was willing to wait for her, so he did not engage in superfluous relationships he knew would have no future.

  In the later summer of 1932, work remained of utmost importance in Gene’s life. The Gene Kelly School of Dance went into recess, but he did not take time off. He and Fred drove the Chevrolet to Chicago where preparations were being made for the World’s Fair, set to open in May 1933. The fair’s opening was months away, but people flocked to the fairgrounds anyway to gawk at the construction. Already, producers and entertainers, Fred and Gene included, were giving audiences a preview of what was to come. The fair, titled A Century of Progress, was designed to give Americans hope for the nation’s future. When not at the fair, Gene and Fred tap-danced in six to ten shows a day at local cloops. Gene found he still had much to learn about pleasing an audience; his dancing had become so advanced in two short years that it was too highbrow for much of the clientele. They wanted a straight hoofer to come out, tell them dirty jokes, and sing an equally dirty song. Gene took it as a personal affront when the audience laughed, talked over, or simply ignored him as he performed.

  Though Gene tried to mold his dances to audiences’ preferences, there was only so far he was willing to stoop. He was not about to halt the evolution of his skill to cater to base tastes. He returned home to Pittsburgh with plans to travel to Chicago the following summer and take lessons there from great dance masters. In the 1930s, Chicago was the dance hub of America, primarily due to a cluster of Russian refugees who had set up several academies in the city. Gene reapplied at the prestigious Chicago Association of Dance Masters and this time was accepted. (Coincidentally, the association was formed in the month and year of Gene’s birth: August 1912.) His teachers there included Serge Diaghilev of the Bolshoi and Ballet Russes, Alexander Kotchetovsky, and Angel Cansino, the uncle of Rita Hayworth, who specialized in Spanish dance. Gene Kelly held the distinction of being the youngest member ever accepted by the association.

  Over the course of 1933, business at the Gene Kelly Schools of Dance continued to flourish. The Depression was still in full swing, but Americans’ desire to dance and watch others dance became unquenchable. After a three-year slump, the Hollywood movie musical returned, reinvented and full of fresh, exciting talents both onscreen and behind the scenes. On March 11, 1933, Darryl Zanuck of Warner Bros. released a new type of musical that was both stylistically innovative and tailored to Depressionera audiences. The film was 42nd Street. Starring young hoofers and singers Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, 42nd Street appealed to the masses due to its relatable depiction of men and women absorbed in working their way out of poverty. What truly set 42nd Street apart, however, was its cinematography. The musical numbers—and the camera—were in constant movement, unlike the stagnant production numbers of early musicals.

  The man responsible for freeing film from the confines of a stage was thirty-eight-year-old dance director Busby Berkeley. According to Berkeley’s biographer Jeffrey Spivak, “Dance was an end to itself in Berkeley’s films. He didn’t choreograph . . . the ‘purpose’ of a Berkeley number was to escape reality with an imaginative tableau with canted angles.”34 Berkeley’s numbers, because of their focus on interesting formations and angles, actually did not include a great deal of dancing in them. The title number, with its vivid depictions of “naughty, gaudy, bawdy, sporty” 42nd Street, was a realistic rendering of blue-collar life in the big city.

  Musicals’ shift toward stories about working people rather than socialites was a reaction both to the Depression and to the inauguration of America’s new president from the Democratic Party: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt did not whitewash the fact that the nation was still far from recovery. He stated in his inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, that “only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment” but stressed the importance of unity if America hoped to rise from the economic crisis.35 Roosevelt’s plans for revitalization included federal work programs, including the Works Progress Administration, which employed artists, actors, and musicians. Partly due to Roosevelt’s work programs, the entertainment industry survived and actually experienced a renaissance during the Depression. Gene, as a liberal, was an adamant supporter of the new president and for the next decade proudly called himself a “Roosevelt Democrat.” He believed in Roosevelt’s philosophy that giving people meaningful work rather than handouts was the best way to end the Depression.

  Gene continued to work, both at school and at his studios. Though an instrumental part of his family’s dance enterprises, Gene did not know how much revenue the studios were actually bringing in. Like Gene, Harriet was secretive, and she maintained a “none of your business” attitude about the financial side of the schools. She still doled out allowances to Gene, Fred, and Louise. Still, Gene could deduce that the studios were reaping more income than the Kelly family had ever enjoyed before. For the first time in his memory, Harriet hired a housekeeper.

  The bulk of Gene’s allowance went to tuition; he was now nearing the end of his senior year at the University of Pittsburgh. In April 1933, he staged and appeared in another Cap and Gown show. Off campus, he put together a new production with his Johnsto
wn pupils. The revue included a rendition of “Young and Healthy” from 42nd Street. Gene also won a small role in On with the Show, a revue at Pittsburgh’s Florence Fisher Parry Theatre. A local reviewer wrote: “Last night’s star was a young dancer, Eugene Kelly. . . . Unfortunately we saw no more of him, and that was a pity, for the moment he sprang upon the stage it was electrified. Now I hope I have his name right. His smile was dazzling and his body was one with the music, quite free of the shackles of self-consciousness.”36

  The reviewer would have been disappointed to learn that Gene still had law in mind for his career. After his graduation with a degree in economics, he was accepted into the University of Pittsburgh Law School. He met the news of his acceptance not with happiness but with doubt. He had made a name for himself as a dancer and knew his schools were reaping more money than he could ever hope to make in the near future in another endeavor. His economics degree suddenly seemed irrelevant, but Gene did not regret the years he spent earning it. Reflecting on his time in college, Gene stated: “It not only made me more of a person, but it aided me in everything I did as a creative artist.” He quipped that his economics degree, if nothing else, would allow him “to discuss intelligently certain things with the IRS.”37 Gene held true to his belief that real-world experiences were more valuable than mere study. “People can’t give you education. You can’t get knowledge or learning by having it stuffed down your throat. You have to want to know things.”38

  At age twenty-one, Gene thirsted for more knowledge—about dance, that is. Before his acceptance to law school, he had been toying with the idea of pursuing a career as a choreographer or a serious ballet dancer. His imminent return to Chicago to study with the dance masters only furthered his conviction that law would not be part of his life. Gene claimed the creation of his own dance studio in the midst of the Depression had made him a man. If he was truly to become his own man, he had to decide what he wished to do, even if it clashed with his mother’s long-held vision for his future.

  4

  “It wasn’t elegant,

  but it’s me”

  “Dedicated to the elevation of the art of dancing and the promotion of the welfare of the profession.” So read the mission statement of the Chicago Association of Dance Masters upon its founding in 1912. The association also sought to give its members “a guide to the fundamentals and correct methods of teaching dance . . . [and to] promote good will and mutual help among its members.”1

  Such a description could have well applied to the Gene Kelly School of Dance or, later, to the Arthur Freed Unit at MGM. Thus, Gene’s studying in Chicago in the summer of 1933 was the first step on a transformative path that directed the rest of his life. “I got some of my best dance training in Chicago,” Gene stated in 1970.2 “I . . . found a good teacher, and in my spare time read every book on the ballet that they had in the Chicago Public Library. Yeah, I even read the ones that were in French, and that was strictly labor because my French is just school French.”3

  Gene had to pack a semester’s worth of reading into a very limited time frame. The association convened for only two weeks each summer and allowed members to take as many classes as they wished for a few dollars. Beginning in 1933 and continuing throughout the 1930s, Gene attended every summer’s meeting. To earn money for food and board, he performed many gigs at local clubs, which were inundated with customers now that the Chicago World’s Fair was in full swing.

  Gene, though his physical build did not mesh with the ideal for ballet, spent the bulk of his first year’s two weeks perfecting his balletic skill. One of his favorite ballet teachers at the association was Berenice Holmes, who had danced with Adolph Bolm’s companies in the United States. Bolm, a former member of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, “epitomized the kind of virile Russian male ballet dancer Diaghilev had unleashed upon Paris in 1909,” wrote journalist Anna Kisselgoff in 1985. “Berenice Holmes was really remarkable,” Gene recalled. “She could do double tours en l’air better than a man.”4 Gene also remembered her as a kindly and patient teacher—and found the blond, graceful, and intelligent twenty-eight-year-old woman very attractive.

  Gene had a fine rapport with the rest of his teachers, though some were less innovative than others. One instructor, an eighty-year-old man known simply as Senor Gambelli, drilled all of his pupils solely in the Cecchetti Method. This method, developed in the early nineteenth century, held that students could best learn to dance by studying and absorbing the fundamental principles in an effort to become independent rather than imitative of their teacher’s movements. Aside from Gambelli, Russian ballet master Alexander Kotchetovsky (a colleague of Nijinsky) further helped Gene refine his balletic talent. “A lot of them [my teachers] . . . were real down-to-earth, even tough guys,” Gene explained. “We used to go out and drink together in Chicago and have a ball. They were terrific men, and at the same time their whole life was the dance.”5

  Aside from ballet, Gene learned another form of movement new to him: Spanish dance. His instructor was Angel Cansino, uncle of future film star Rita Hayworth. Cansino taught ballroom dance as well as flamenco. As a tap dancer, the rhythm and footwork necessary for Spanish dancing came easily to Gene. Cansino was so pleased with Gene’s performance that he gave the young man lessons for free. Gene learned two more European dances as well while studying in Chicago: the Rumanian chain dance and Polish mazurka. As adept as Gene became in European folk dances, however, he still found himself more absorbed in the world of ballet.

  After his two weeks of study in Chicago were over, he vacationed in a cabin on Lake Erie. The locale, which reminded him of his idyllic lakeside summers as a boy, was a perfect, distraction-free environment in which to reevaluate his future. He decided he would attend law school in the fall but still devote all his spare time to honing his dance skills at the Kelly dance studios. By this time, Gene had found a trustworthy staff of instructors to take over his classes on weekdays. In Harriet’s view, the most important thing for him to do now was to earn his law degree in order to be a part of a reliable and “proper profession.”6

  Gene purchased the pricey textbooks for his first semester and spent almost two months pretending to be enthusiastic over lectures on corporate and mercantile law and torts. However, when his professor informed the class that they’d be using their books on torts for the rest of their lives, Gene snapped out of the half-anesthetized state into which he tended to fall during law classes. He could not, in any capacity, imagine spending the remainder of his life trapped with dense books of legal jargon. With his mind firmly settled on dance as his chosen profession, Gene sold his textbooks at a loss. Harriet was crushed that Gene quit law school; no reports exist that James Kelly disapproved. He remained, for the most part, a passive presence in the Kelly family after the Crash of 1929. Harriet granted Gene her approval only on the condition that he become the best dancer and teacher in the country. Gene felt more than prepared for the challenge. In 1958, Gene reflected on the motivation behind his decision: “What drives a man to take dancing as a profession? The same things that drive painters, sculptors—he wants to express himself and he has a basic love of movement.”7

  Gene still took no part in the business end of the family dance schools. Gene, who so easily mastered almost every other subject, admitted that when it came to law and business dealings he was “lousy.” In an interview with Edward R. Murrow in 1958, he elaborated: “I’m pretty much bored with business. . . . I guess I am at the creative end of doing just about anything I can get my hands on.”8 All he had to do was what he loved—dance, teach, and choreograph. Gene’s future costar Frank Sinatra later voiced his opinion about Gene as a teacher. His words reflected the feelings of nearly all those Gene taught. “He was a born teacher,” Frank said. “I felt really comfortable working for him and enjoyed his company in spite of his manic insistence on hard work.”9

  Gene endeavored to infuse his schools’ annual revues with more inspired movement than ever before. Addi
tional opportunity to flex his teaching/choreographing skills came his way when the University of Pittsburgh asked Gene back to stage the yearly Cap and Gown show. When not otherwise occupied, Gene spent an hour each day after classes rehearsing the ballet steps he had learned in Chicago. He had come to see it as a form of self-expression that nonetheless had a universality about it. Gene held that ballet “leaps over boundaries of language and politics; it is a language that can be understood by anyone, anywhere.”10

  Gene rarely needed sleep at this point in his life, nor did he crave it. Even if he had wished for it, rest would have eluded him. He was far too excited about an upcoming performance the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo was to give in Pittsburgh. Gene attended the recital dressed in unusually formal attire for him. Garbed in a smoking jacket, polished black shoes, and slacks, he looked as dapper as John Barrymore. After the performance, Gene went backstage to speak to David Lichine, the company’s lead dancer. “Is there any chance I could give you an audition tomorrow morning?” Gene asked. Lichine looked him over with much scrutiny. “I cannot tell if you have the build of a dancer under all those clothes,” he commented.11 He advised Gene to come the following morning wearing a simple outfit.