Gene arrived the next day in his customary clothes of a tight T-shirt, khakis, and moccasins. Lichine was not present, but the more genial company ballet master was there to evaluate Gene’s skill. “I could use you in the male ensemble once we go to Chicago in two weeks,” the master informed Gene. Gene, overwhelmed, thanked him and returned home to discuss the offer with Harriet. If he joined the ballet, he would only be earning, in his words, “two dollars a week and a donut.”12 He earned more playing at cloops. Like many young people, he was restless and forever changing the definition of his goals and tastes. He decided he did not wish to be tied to one form of dance for the rest of his professional life. Additionally, he recognized that the marriage of tap and modern dance he was striving to perfect was unique; his skill in ballet, on the other hand, was not. The Chicago Association of Dancing Masters recognized where his expertise lay and consequently asked him to teach his style of tap dancing to students during one of its annual summer workshops.
Gene now made it his primary aim to develop his own brand of modern movement. He could not envision “doing ‘Swan Lake’ every night.”13 He “wanted to dance to the music of Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, Irving Berlin and others. . . . I set out to find what I then called ‘American Dance.’”14
Gene had already integrated elements of modern dance into tap, incorporating an emphasis on masculine strength and jazz-inspired free movement; now, with his balletic skill, he saw no reason why tap and ballet could not be blended in some capacity. Gene saw that this was possible, for one popular tap dancer was already integrating the grace of ballet into his movements. “The only dancer in the movies at that time with any success was Fred Astaire. . . . He did very small, elegant steps in a top hat, white tie and tails,” Gene stated.15
Gene knew of Astaire from his fame on Broadway in, most notably, Gershwin shows. But Gene had not seen him dance until 1933 when Astaire appeared in his breakthrough film, RKO’s Flying Down to Rio. His dance partner in the picture was a bright young talent named Ginger Rogers. Like Astaire, Rogers had also made her name on Broadway through a Gershwin production, Girl Crazy (1930). Astaire and Rogers’s number, “The Carioca,” a new type of ballroom dance with a South American flair, invented for the film, electrified the nation. The most distinct part of the carioca was that the partners’ foreheads had to touch throughout the entire dance. What further prompted movie audiences to applaud after Astaire and Rogers performed in the movie was their “red-hot” chemistry. The duo starred together in nine pictures through 1939.
As well as performing innovative dances, Astaire and Rogers gave purpose to dance itself in their films. Astaire demanded that all his song and dance routines be used to move the plot along. In contrast, Busby Berkeley (who directed nearly all of the other most notable musicals of the early 1930s) created numbers filled with aerial shots, quick takes, and close-ups that, when put together, had nothing to do with the plot of the film. Though Astaire and Rogers’s romantic musical comedies were more sophisticated in fluidity, critics viewed them as lightweight because they, unlike many of Berkeley’s films, failed to make allusions to societal woes of the time. But as film studies professor Dr. Philip DiMare has explained, “Singing [in most musicals] is a joyous thing, not a political thing.”16
Gene found Fred Astaire’s screen work inspirational, particularly the solo numbers reflective of his character’s emotional dilemmas included in each of his films. Gene also admired that Astaire, like himself, was a choreographer as well as a performer. In his memoir, Astaire wrote: “When working on my own choreography, I am not always receptive to outside suggestions or opinions. I believe that if you have something in mind in the way of creation . . . you can have damaging results if you go around asking for opinions.”17 Despite arguments to do otherwise, Astaire insisted that his dance routines be shot with a mostly stationary camera that kept him and/or his partner in full view at all times.
Gene and Astaire had similarities as dancers, but Astaire lacked the athletic prowess Gene saw as vital to American expression. “I was too big physically for that [Astaire’s] kind of dancing, and I looked better in a sweatshirt and loafers anyway. It wasn’t elegant, but it was me,” Gene noted.18 According to writer Anna Kisselgoff, “Astaire came from the era of ballroom teams and was a class act. Kelly saw himself as a soloist and never identified with a steady partner.”19
Another male dancer in film in 1933 was, like Gene, muscular and more athletic than Fred Astaire. He paralleled Gene in a number of ways. His name was James Cagney. Cagney, the son of an Irish bartender raised in the slums of Manhattan, started tap-dancing as a boy. He was also a formidable boxer. By the mid-1920s, Cagney was a successful vaudevillian and had choreographed a few of his own revues. Additionally, he opened his own professional dancing school. Despite his musical talent, in his earliest screen roles, Cagney was typed not as a dancer but as a street tough. In 1933, he turned musical man in Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade. He brought the same brazen charm to his dancing style that he lent to his portrayals of gangsters. Cagney and Gene, unlike Fred Astaire, represented the working class and gave the impression that they had to fight for everything they got.
Gene, intently watching what these two men were accomplishing, hoped to meld Astaire’s polish with Cagney’s bravura. One thing he knew for certain: he favored basic time steps and Maxie Ford tap steps and was in his element when he was at his simplest, unhampered by partners, sets, costumes, or heavy concepts—when he could just create something himself.20
From 1933 to 1938, Gene proved to be a master of all trades, whether teaching, acting, dancing, choreographing, or learning. In the summer of 1934, he returned to Chicago to study with the dance masters and again perform at the World’s Fair. The fair had been such a success the year before that President Franklin Roosevelt requested it be brought back. Several promising performers aside from Gene performed at the event, including twelve-year-old Judy Garland and nine-year-old Donald O’Connor.
Back in Pittsburgh, Gene’s annual productions Johnstown on Parade and the Kiddie Revue (formerly called Kiddies’ Vodvil) remained major attractions. Audiences increasingly demanded that Gene not only choreograph but appear in his shows. Thus, he found ample opportunities to create dances solely for himself in a number of his revues. His equal talent as a director and a performer allowed his students to see him as both an authority figure and a trouper. He was as hard a taskmaster as ever, but he put as much pressure on himself as he did on those he taught. Commenting on a spring 1935 Cap and Gown show, In the Soup, one journalist said of a typical Gene Kelly rehearsal: “Rehearsals usually last about two hours and give a vivid picturization of a forty-man track meet, every man for himself.”21
When In the Soup premiered, the students evidently bore no grudges against Gene for putting them through endless rehearsals. After the final curtain, the cast carried him on their shoulders, cheering.
In his hometown as well as Johnstown, Gene had become well known as a “sort of an act doctor.” He claimed that established players “would call on me to spruce up their dancing, and occasionally, I would get as much as a hundred dollars to devise a new routine.”22 After watching them perform, Gene would silently rise and “present a version of the ‘disaster’ he had just seen.”23 He would exaggerate the dance moves that went wrong, even to the point of burlesquing them. The entertainers would bristle and prepare to leave, but then Gene would give them his winning smile and begin encouraging them with supportive suggestions and ideas for improving their acts. He even allowed them to borrow his favorite moves, such as handstands and airplane propeller motions with his arms. He would then rehearse with the performers for hours, without any concern if they went overtime.
Gene’s name became so prominent throughout the city that nearly every organization in town requested his services, including the prestigious Pittsburgh Playhouse, the prime symbol of culture in the city. The owners of the Playhouse asked Gene to prepare shows that combined the talents o
f amateurs and professionals. VIPs from Broadway began to take notice of the Playhouse, particularly of Gene’s offerings. One such person was choreographer Robert Alton, a foremost representative of American popular theater dancing. Thus, it was a great honor when Alton agreed to stage a Christmas show at the Playhouse.
One evening, after both he and Gene were done rehearsing for their respective shows, Alton visited Gene backstage and urged him to come to Broadway. “If anybody’s ready for it, you are.”24 Gene thanked Alton for his encouragement but said he was comfortable where he was at the moment. He did not want to give up what he had built in Pittsburgh. Furthermore, although the products of the Gene Kelly School of Dance were acclaimed in Pittsburgh, Gene’s efforts might pale next to the work of people like Alton and his colleague John Murray Anderson. Despite Gene’s refusal, Alton gave him his phone number and the two remained in contact for the next several years. Alton continually told Gene that if he ever decided to come to New York, he could be sure there was a job for him.
If Gene was already uncertain he had what it took to make it anywhere other than Pittsburgh, any hopes along those lines were completely dashed in the summer of 1935. While he and his family were visiting relatives in Southern California, an executive at RKO Studios (who, like Alton, had given Gene his contact information when passing through Pittsburgh) arranged a screen test for Gene. Gene was firmly against the idea; he was a dancer, not an actor. But the moment Harriet heard about it, she insisted he do the test. Gene, who could seldom say no to his mother, agreed. In Pittsburgh, reporters blew the test into a greater event than it was, claiming that Gene was going to undergo not just one, but an entire series of screen tests. When Gene arrived at RKO, he found the preparation for the test more taxing than the test itself. He was ushered into the makeup department and by the time the technicians had finished working on him, Gene claimed, “I looked like a raving fag. . . . I’m sure they [studio heads] just took one look at it and laughed.”25
Indeed, RKO executives never contacted Gene again. Gene stated that the only enjoyable part of the entire humiliating experience was meeting actor Fredric March. Pittsburgh journalists, ever loyal to one of their favorite sons, wrote that Gene turned down Hollywood rather than the other way around.
Gene found more than enough work awaiting him upon his return home. The combined number of students at his two schools had reached 350. Though both studios had always attracted a high rate of preadolescents, in the mid-1930s this age group saw the largest increase in enrollment. Why the uptick? Beginning in 1934, Americans found a new obsession in the form of singing and dancing child actors after the appearance of a six-year-old Shirley Temple in the musical Stand Up and Cheer. Franklin Roosevelt hailed her as “Little Miss Miracle” for raising the nation’s spirits during the Depression. Her success resulted in dozens of imitators who, according to columnist Hedda Hopper, descended on Hollywood “like a flock of hungry locusts.” From all the young hopefuls, a handful of enduring stars were born, including Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, and Mickey Rooney.26 Shirley Temple mania was not infecting just stage parents in Hollywood; plenty of ambitious mothers and fathers in Pittsburgh also imagined their children were going to be the next big thing—with Gene’s help. “By the mid-1930s, every time Shirley Temple made a movie, our studio enrollment doubled,” Fred Kelly recounted. “We had a hundred girls in our studio who all looked exactly like Shirley Temple!”27
The nearest Gene’s pupils came to movie stardom was when the star of 42nd Street, crooner Dick Powell, honored Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatre by acting as master of ceremonies for Gene’s annual Kiddie Revue. The show, due to the combination of Powell’s presence and the town’s loyalty to Gene, found eager audiences. When Powell called for Gene to take a bow at the end of the show, Gene “was in a spot. He had no tie. A stage-hand gave the embarrassed Kelly one of Dick’s ties and Gene went on.” In a 1943 article for the Pittsburgh Press, a journalist recorded that when Gene reunited with Powell for a radio broadcast, he “came to the first rehearsal tie in hand, and returned it to its owner. ‘It took eight years and a film contract to make this possible,’ [he said].”28 In 1935, Gene was still far from winning a film contract. For the time being, he contented himself with doing what he did best: teaching young performers.
All things connected with Gene and his studio seemed blessed. Maybe, Gene decided, he would try Broadway. Then, as if to renew his doubts, two catastrophic floods hit Johnstown. The disaster destroyed entire neighborhoods, killed twenty-five people, and displaced hundreds of families—among them some of Gene’s students. During the emergency, Gene suspended all classes and turned his studios as well as his family’s home on Kensington Avenue into “emergency hostels” for the families of his students. Still a firm believer in omens, Gene saw the floods as confirmation of “the utter unpredictability of life. It reminded him starkly that there was no guarantee he could gradually rise in show business and achieve his ambitions.”29
Gene remained in safe territory, staging yet another Beth Shalom revue and Cap and Gown show. The latter, titled Trailer Ho! was so successful that the company took its title literally and “[hit] the trail to Johnstown, Bradford and Erie.”30 It was the first University of Pittsburgh show to tour since 1930—a testament to Gene’s ever-growing popularity outside of his hometown.
Harriet was highly pleased with her middle son’s success and was now almost glad that he had rejected law school. However, in one aspect, Gene was a disappointment to her. He was twenty-four years old, yet he had not brought home one girl to introduce to her as a potential fiancée. She wanted him to reach his highest potential in both his personal and professional lives. Failing to find a nice Catholic girl and maintaining the status quo in Pittsburgh did not mesh with her ambitious visions for him. She feared he was “drifting in a sea of passivity” too similar to that of her husband’s after the Crash of 1929.31 But, as those closest to him knew, Gene was difficult to know on an intimate level. He had a secret inner life he shared with no one. He had not dismissed pursuing a career outside of Pittsburgh, nor did he dismiss the possibility of falling in love.
One day, Harriet Kelly overheard that Gene and a lovely, dark-haired showgirl in the cast of his latest production for the Pittsburgh Playhouse had been seeing quite a bit of each other. Harriet set out to find out who this girl was and what her family was like. The only information Harriet could glean was the girl’s name: Helene Marlowe. She waited, feigning patience, for Gene to mention Helene. Weeks passed without a word. Finally, Harriet resorted to asking a gossipy neighbor for the reason behind Gene’s taciturnity. Helene was of Russian Jewish heritage, the neighbor informed her, and the Marlowes wished Helene to marry a Jewish boy, preferably a lawyer, doctor, or banker. An Irish Catholic dancer and law school dropout was completely unsuitable. The Marlowes’ disapproval of Gene infuriated Harriet. Still, she proved to be more intolerant than the Marlowes. When at last she broached the subject of Helene to her son and discovered that their relationship was far more serious than she’d imagined, she advised that Helene convert to Catholicism if she had any intention of marrying into the Kelly family. Gene bristled at his mother’s assumption that a wedding was imminent and, for the present, ignored the subjects of marriage and religious conversion.
Helene Marlowe, though four years Gene’s junior, was a strong personality who, unlike his other girlfriends over the years, did not submit to his usual role as director in a relationship. Betsy Blair later wrote: “I admit he was old-fashioned and paternalistic, but then so were most men at that time.”32 After hours at the Playhouse, they would dine together and practice modern dance to the music of Gershwin. Helene told Gene that she was ready to try her luck in New York, even if he was not. She urged him to come to the city and study with her, but he still wished to remain in Pittsburgh. Harriet was relieved to see the girl go; however, unbeknownst to her, Helene and Gene’s relationship was far from over. According to Helene’s son, Bruce, his mother and Gene were e
ngaged for five years (1937–1942). “It was a long romance.”33
Gene never hurried relationships, and his affair with Helene was no exception. If they were engaged, Gene’s behavior in 1937 gave no clue to anyone that this was the case. That summer, he did find himself in New York City, but not because of Helene. Rather, he traveled to the city to accept an offer for what could possibly be the most important job of his career thus far: choreographing a specialty number in a new Broadway revue. Gene was thrilled. Harriet shared his excitement and bought him a round-trip ticket to New York. But Gene’s anticipation turned to disillusionment. On his first day of work, he was bewildered to find that the producer of the revue looked at him with puzzlement when he introduced himself as the choreographer from Pittsburgh.
“What? You’re not choreographing. You’re here to work as a chorus boy,” the producer told him, barely restraining laughter. Clenching his fists and fighting the desire to hit the producer or anyone else within arm’s reach, Gene stormed from the theater. His first impulse was to see Helene, but he took a train back to Pittsburgh without so much as calling her. The disheartening New York trip plus the disappointment of the failed RKO screen test made Gene again doubtful of Robert Alton’s claim that if anyone was ready for the big time, it was Gene Kelly. His neglecting to see Helene hurt her, but he did not feel ready to face her after the blow of losing the choreographing job. Also, she was beginning to pressure him about setting a date for their marriage. Gene was having second thoughts; he did not like being rushed or nudged into things, and he was not altogether certain he was ready to take such a step.
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 7