When they arrived in Hollywood, Gene and Betsy discovered that all they had heard about the royal treatment movie stars received was true. Selznick had arranged for them to stay at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, site of the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. The producer met them armed with a basket of oranges for Gene and a bouquet of flowers for Betsy. “You’re both invited to my home for dinner and a movie screening tonight. And I’ve set up a membership at the tennis club for you,” he began. He then gave them a typed list. “Here’s the name of a bank manager, a doctor, a dentist, a place for Betsy to take driving lessons. . . . By the way, Betsy has access to the studio hairdresser . . . and here are the names of real estate agents to help you find a home.”7
The overwhelmed couple thanked Selznick, though neither had any intention of taking up the tennis club membership. Betsy later wrote that Selznick was a “generous man who spoiled us both for any future producer and we were about to embark on the ‘studio will take care of it’ syndrome.”8 Betsy, who had hitherto earned only $35 a week, now had a weekly allowance of $100 from Gene. Gene’s biographer Clive Hirschhorn wrote that if ever Gene felt Betsy was being a spendthrift, he lectured her on the “eternal verities,” but in general he did not question how she spent her money.9 In any case, Betsy’s spending spree was short-lived. The Marxist theories she had embraced in New York came back to her and she wondered how she could justify living in such an excessive manner. She began shopping, even at elite department stores, in blue jeans or a cotton skirt, as if her casual garb negated the fact that she was giving patronage to an upscale shop. She also began to donate her money to various charities, predominantly those that supported leftist causes. Gene, too, did not buy into the Hollywood system. To him, Hollywood was less a place than a state of mind—and it was a state of mind he refused to embrace. Betsy explained: “The studio system was geared to keep them [stars] childish. If an actor wasn’t as tough and intelligent as Gene, he was likely to believe his own publicity and lose track of himself.”10
Gene could easily have “gone Hollywood”; he and Betsy were receiving invitations from Hollywood’s royalty, including Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, and Lewis Milestone. Betsy recalled that at Shearer’s home, the actress urged her to come along with the other women to powder their noses while the men enjoyed brandy and cigars. Betsy said, “I’ll stay with Gene.” Gene “gave my hand a squeeze and sat me in a chair. I hadn’t meant to be rebellious . . . but Gene loved it. . . . He had no pretensions, no society aspirations.” According to Betsy, she and Gene were “in it together” during the difficult period in which he acclimatized himself to the world of film. They visited cutting rooms and watched movies being shot, tap-danced in Gene’s private rehearsal room, and viewed every picture released either in screening rooms or executives’ homes. However, Gene preferred attending local movie houses rather than hobnobbing with moguls. “He wanted to sit in the theatre in the dark with everyone else and experience the public reaction and his own.”11
Gene and Betsy’s first home was as free of ostentation as they themselves strove to be. They rented a furnished one-bedroom chalet in Laurel Canyon surrounded by wooded hills and wild lavender. They often woke to see deer in their yard. The major drawback to the home, however, was the series of ninety-nine stepping-stones they had to climb to reach the front door from the street. Its small size also posed a problem; Gene and Betsy’s ping-pong table took up the entire downstairs.
As Gene waited for his first film assignment, he and Betsy filled their time playing ping-pong—and playing house. Gene did most of the housework, including cooking and ironing. He told Betsy that all he wanted her to do was “pick flowers and read by the fireplace and sing around the house—my little white dove with the burnished feathers that wakes up every morning smiling.” The angelic image Gene projected onto Betsy was one that she accepted—for now. “He wanted to have and keep forever the girl I was, shaped by his care and love,” Betsy explained. “I spent my adolescence as a married woman and the inevitable forces of nature, growth and rebellion, were postponed.” As much as Gene had lectured Betsy on the “eternal verities,” he did enjoy “spoiling her.” On their first Christmas together, he gave her a bagful of fur samples. “I want you to pick out the style of the coat,” Gene told her. She burst into tears of happiness but could not help feeling that the coat made her a symbol of success—his success.12
Gene and Betsy, settled in their modest home, opened it up to fellow New York transplants. Writer Arthur Laurents, an acquaintance of the Kellys, facetiously dubbed the Kellys’ guests “the Real People.” “The Real People didn’t dress up, they sat on shaggy rugs; they talked politics as well as the movies (that was Betsy); they were liberal (also Betsy) and only the exception made a sexual pass (that was Gene). They were slapdash potluck meals for the faithful: writers and directors, actors and dancers.”13 Laurents’s claim that Gene made sexual passes is likely exaggerated or completely false; Laurents, a homosexual, harbored a personal dislike for Gene, alleging he was homophobic. Gene did make off-color jokes at times, often about homosexuals, yet many of his friends and the colleagues he admired most (for example, Charles Walters, Cole Porter, and Vincente Minnelli) were homosexuals.
The worst behavior in which Gene engaged at this time was related to alcohol, not sex. He went on occasional all-night drinking binges with Selznick, often running up liquor tabs of $200. Betsy would awaken when he arrived home at dawn and brew black coffee for the drunken men. She later stated that she ignored or denied what she called “the manly side” of Gene, instead choosing to recognize only “the tender, indulgent side of him.”14
The fantasy life Gene had created with Betsy could not go on indefinitely. He needed a creative outlet; if he did not find one soon, would he become like his father, defeated and reliant on drink? It took a tragedy of epic proportions to push the movie industry into an unprecedented period of productivity that ensured Gene would not be idle in the near future.
Early on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The toll was severe: 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 wounded. What President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “a day that will live in infamy” shook America from the neutrality it had maintained since World War II began in 1939—Roosevelt declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, and three days later on Germany and Italy.
Hundreds of actors and behind-the-scenes artists were eager to enlist. Among those to don uniforms were top box office attractions Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and James Stewart. Directors Frank Capra, John Ford, and John Huston also enlisted. In less than a year, 12 percent of all employees in the film industry had entered the armed forces. Other Hollywoodites, including Hugh Martin and Mickey Rooney, wanted desperately to fight but were rejected for health reasons—the army deemed Rooney’s blood pressure too high and Martin’s weight too low. Stars who did not enlist helped the war effort by selling war bonds, performing in USO shows, and participating at the Hollywood Canteen, an organization that provided food and entertainment to servicemen. Judy Garland was among the first Hollywood entertainers to sing for enlisted servicemen at camps across the country.
Gene’s daughter Kerry explained in 2014, “The way it was always described in the family was that he had wanted to enlist [in the navy] early on.”15 He was dissuaded by Selznick, who claimed he was more useful on the home front, boosting morale through films. Gene accepted the argument, but it did not fully ease his agitation as he watched his friend Dick Dwenger enlist in a navy combat unit and his brother Fred join an army entertainment unit. Fred eventually became a sergeant.
Betsy, though she had initially planned to pursue serious acting either on the stage or screen in Hollywood, did not join in the entertainment industry’s boom. In January 1942, she discovered she was two months pregnant. “I never lost my dream of becoming a serious actress, but the time for that was not now.”16 Gene, delighted at the prospect of becoming a father, discussed paren
ting plans with Betsy. She wanted a natural childbirth and no nanny to take care of the child; she and Gene would raise the baby themselves. The prospect of becoming a father alleviated Gene’s feeling that he should be overseas rather than at home.
As Gene and Betsy began to read books on childcare, Gene also began to read a script. He was relieved that Selznick was finally considering him for a role—the lead in The Keys to the Kingdom. The film tells of a young Scottish priest and his struggles to establish a Catholic parish in China. Selznick also told Gene in no uncertain terms that he was to be in Alfred Hitchcock’s next picture, but that never materialized.
Gene was so eager to begin working that he finally agreed to a screen test. He reasoned: “I wanted to look at the camera to see what it was about.” Gene later admitted that the tests “weren’t very good; as a matter of fact, I think they were pretty bad.” Viewing the tests, Gene, as he was prone to do when nervous, began to giggle. He turned to Selznick, but the studio head remained impassive. A second later, however, he could not help breaking into laughter, too. Gene later remembered falling on the floor with the mogul in convulsive chuckles. “That’s the best comic performance I ever gave,” Gene concluded. Selznick, once he regained his composure, told Gene to see a coach to help him with the Scottish brogue required for the role. However, no amount of lessons could made the Irish American from Pittsburgh speak with a believable Scottish accent (the film was eventually released in 1944 by Twentieth Century-Fox with Gregory Peck in the lead). Selznick instead offered Gene the supporting role as the priest’s best friend, an atheist doctor. Although he was dropped from the project, Gene never resented the time spent on the lessons, believing it was “something well learned, if just for a nebulous future.”17
Excused from The Keys to the Kingdom, Gene’s future was again uncertain. Uncertain, too, was his and Betsy’s new home base. The ninety-nine steps leading to their chalet had washed away in a downpour. The mother of Betsy’s cousin, Lois Moran, provided the Kellys with temporary housing for eight weeks. At the end of that time, Gene found himself with not one new home but two: 506 North Alta Drive and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
If the Depression, as writer and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner explained, “killed the sentimental musical . . . WWII killed satire and revived the sentimental musical. The mood of the country switched like a traffic light to escapism, nostalgia, and fantasy.”18
Producer Arthur Freed had a new picture in mind for Judy Garland filled with plenty of nostalgia but also enough reality to make it relevant to wartime audiences. The film was of the utmost importance to Judy; she saw it as her opportunity to transition into adult roles. Thus far, almost every one of Freed’s vehicles for her had cast Judy as a teenager alongside Mickey Rooney. The duo’s backstage musicals, sometimes dubbed “Let’s put on a show!” films, were seemingly simple but had helped release pictures from the stage-bound look of early 1930s musicals. Also, they created characters that, according to Freed, were “real people.” Director Vincente Minnelli asserted: “The true revolutionary [at MGM] was Arthur. . . . Arthur’s desire to make musical pictures about back-home America with its homely values seemed to anticipate the public’s shifting interest. Suddenly the climate at Metro was ripe for innovation, and many of us were being given the opportunity to show our stuff.”19
Freed’s picture for Judy, an intimate black-and-white musical entitled For Me and My Gal, centers on three characters: an ambitious, egotistical heel, a self-sacrificing young actress, and a noble yet bland actor. Freed already had George Murphy for the latter character. But he knew of no one already under contract to MGM who could satisfactorily fill the part of the self-centered actor. “He [Freed] was not interested in the already established crop of Hollywood talent . . . their scope and style were rapidly becoming passé,” historian Hugh Fordin explained.20 Fifty years later, author John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, “In Hollywood it was producer Arthur Freed’s unit at MGM, staffed mainly by sophisticated refugees from the East that carried the torch [of New York’s cutting-edge strides in show business].”21
In Gene, Freed saw a leader—the best that Broadway had to offer to Hollywood. The producer wanted an unprecedented brand of leading man, not the one-dimensional hero of the old guard of musicals. Gene was a rogue, but a sensitive, charming, and even likeable one. This rascal with balletic skill was a man whom audiences could envision defeating the Germans with one high kick and the Japanese with a mad pirouette.
“He would be perfect for the role of Harry,” screenwriter Fred Finklehoffe commented to Freed, looking over his script of Gal one afternoon.
“I don’t see any motion picture potential in Kelly,” Eddie Mannix, MGM’s studio manager, argued. “He’s the wrong kind of Irishman.”22
“Everybody is telling me I’m wrong about Kelly,” a discouraged Freed told Louis B. Mayer later over lunch in Mayer’s private dining room.
“Do you still feel he’s the right man for the part?”
“I love him,” Freed said without hesitation.
“Well then, don’t listen to all those shmucks,” Mayer advised, grinning.23
Gene could barely restrain his enthusiasm when his agent, Johnny Darrow, called him with the news that he would be Judy Garland’s costar in Freed’s next musical. As he had nothing to offer, Selznick consented to loaning the rival studio his star’s services. Gene still bristled at the mere thought of Louis B. Mayer—a man he saw as a complete phony. Mayer, known for his over-the-top showmanship during conferences, demanded he have an office large enough for him to “do a proper act for the people of the studio . . . to convey to them his ideas and inspire them.”24 Carey Wilson, a writer at MGM, recalled that despite Mayer’s less appealing qualities, he “contributed a reasonable optimism, tremendous vitality, salesmanship . . . shrewd judgment of character.”25 In judging a picture’s merit as well as a potential star’s character, Mayer was equally shrewd—though he often needed the input of producers like Arthur Freed to stop him from relying too heavily on his own preferences. He liked “cornball pictures” and judged a picture’s quality based on its ability to bring tears to his eyes.26 Freed was the ideal liaison for Mayer because he too preferred sentimental stories, but he knew how to insert enough realism and humor in them to prevent them from being saccharine.
Gene, in spite of his street-smart exterior, was also easily moved by nostalgia. He saw that MGM was in truth better equipped for his talents than Selznick’s much smaller company, though he still disliked Mayer. Working at MGM did not mean he would have to be “chummy” with Mayer. “I never had any creative contact with Mayer. I don’t know anybody who did, except when he told them not to write about toilets or bathrooms because it would offend some mother in Illinois!” Gene declared in 1974.27
Even more than Selznick International, MGM took the “we’ll take care of everything” syndrome to a new level. Among MGM’s first orders of business was to find Gene and Betsy a new home. The house, located at 506 North Alta Drive in Beverly Hills, was leased from lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg (composer of “Over the Rainbow”). The abode was considerably roomier, allowing Gene and Betsy to expand their open-house parties and keep their ping-pong table in a more convenient place outside. The studio also set the Kellys up with a housekeeper, a plump and cheerful black woman named Mamie who, Betsy claimed, “cooked up a storm.”28 Between Mamie’s meals, Gene snacked on “a steady supply of [his] favorite chocolate peppermints [shipped] from his favorite candy store in Pittsburgh.”29 At the same time the Kellys moved into their new home, Betsy passed her driving test and received a gift from Gene that served as both a Valentine and a congratulatory present: a blue and white Pontiac convertible.30
As Gene and Betsy were settling into their new house, Gene explored the sprawling MGM lot in Culver City, approximately half an hour by car from the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. (Most major studios were not in Hollywood; Warner Bros. was in Burbank, and Universal was in Universal City.) Alan Jay Lerner d
escribed Culver City as “a town of well-to-do squalor, gas stations, and oil derricks.”31 The communities of stars and moviemakers in the Hollywood area functioned, for all intents and purposes, like company towns. “When I say . . . company town, I mean that everything revolved around the filmmaking,” Betsy explained. “Social life was dictated by shooting schedules. . . . It was only natural and sensible to eat early and be home in bed by ten.”32
MGM itself was like the land of Oz—a strange place that nevertheless had all the amenities necessary for living. Actress Debbie Reynolds described her initial impressions of the studio in her 1988 memoir: “It didn’t occur to me then but being at MGM was like going to a university. You could get out of college in four years, but some of us were at this university for ten or fifteen. . . . It was a small town of very creative people.”33 The self-contained lot included a main street that even accommodated a trolley to shuttle its employees from one end of the lot to the other. The thoroughfare fed onto other streets, which housed rehearsal halls, a hospital, a fire station, and a schoolhouse. Studio gatekeepers monitored the moment each employee arrived and left. If an actor was late more than once, he or she received a visit from the studio manager, who was comparable to a school principal in his disciplinary talks. MGM was magical, but studio executives made it difficult for stars to forget that they were in essence pieces of studio property, used only for as long as they were profitable.
Gene still believed Hollywood was only a state of mind; he was not about to adhere to its cliques or be infantilized by the studio system. His and Betsy’s Saturday night parties became a sort of rebellion against the notion that actors must abide by a child’s bedtime. They lasted into the early hours of the morning and were a welcome change from the formal gatherings at the homes of Norma Shearer or Louis B. Mayer and at swanky nightclubs where conversations were drowned in superficial amiability. In an interview for Screenland, columnist Paul Marsh made an observation that held true for Gene’s entire film career: “There’s one Hollywood institution he’ll [Gene] have no part of—nightclubbing. ‘Too rugged for me,’ [Gene said]. ‘I can’t take all that bumping and pushing in noisy little rooms filled with smoke. I’d rather stay home.’”34 Gene’s home was his nightclub and, as much as he professed to hate cliques, he made his establishment as select as Hollywood’s most exclusive social circle. Johnny Green, director of music at MGM, stated that “if you didn’t possess . . . ‘special abilities,’ he [Gene] found it difficult to have time for you . . . a lot of people disliked him for this, but that didn’t bother Gene. . . . [He] demanded nothing from anyone that he didn’t demand from himself—perfection, whether in the studio during the week, or on Saturday night at home.”35
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 14