The scene continues with Danny nervously pacing back and forth on the sidewalk while his self-satisfied reflection looks on from a window, arms crossed over his chest. “Don’t be such a hard-headed Irishman. If you love Rusty you’ll let her go.” The real Danny ignores his reflection, provoking his twin to jump from the window and engage in a dancing duel.
Gene later said the number was “the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Technically nobody knew anything at the time, so it was done under very primitive conditions.”40 To create the number, Gene had to match one dance with another on a prerecorded sound track, synchronizing every muscle he moved to beats of music. Each time his feet touched the stage, they had to land on a certain spot marked off with chalk and tape “to a quarter-of-an-inch exactness.”
The scene ends with Danny throwing a garbage can through a window and shattering his inner self into shards. Columbia executives called in a glass expert, who warned that if Gene threw such a heavy can through the glass, it would “cut [him] to pieces” and “put out [his] eyes.” News spread around the studio that day, and all who had the chance slipped onto the set to watch “Kelly kill himself.”41 Gene came away unscathed by the glass.
During rehearsals, Donen acted as Gene’s alter ego, tirelessly helping him work out his moves in time to a “twin.” At times, Donen had trouble keeping up with Gene. He had the most difficult time during a shot in which Gene and his alter ego slide down a telephone pole. Gene reached the floor before Donen and shouted in front of the cast and crew: “Stanley, move your fat ass!”42 This exclamation may have been part of Gene and Donen’s well-known “put-down humor,” or it might have been an example of Gene’s temper. But, joke or not, at this time Donen was “the happiest guy in town” to be working with Gene.43 In 1943, Gene and Donen’s collaboration was in its “honeymoon phase,” so to speak. Donen’s biographer Stephen M. Silverman characterized Gene and Donen’s working relationship as indeed like a marriage. “While Stanley did have the technical prowess and knowledge, I think [the success of their work together] was really a magical combination of Gene Kelly’s charisma and Stanley Donen’s chutzpah.”44
By the time filming completed on Cover Girl in November 1943, Metro was already calling Gene for another loan-out assignment. Consequently, Donen spent seven days a week in the dubbing and cutting room, completing the “Alter Ego” number himself. The picture, slated for its New York release in March 1944, took several months to edit. Because of his intense involvement in the film, Donen termed it “his baby.”45 Still, Gene claimed the picture as primarily his creation. “I was captain. . . . He [Donen] was never a real choreographer in the inventive sense but he had a great faculty for criticizing,” Gene explained in 1980. “It’s good to have another opinion from a dear friend and a trusted colleague who’s not a yes-man.”46
Gene and Donen had created a dance that had initially been dismissed as impossible; now, all they had to do was wait to see if audiences and critics appreciated their efforts. The picture premiered at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on March 30, 1944. To the two men’s disappointment, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times did not so much as mention the “Alter Ego” dance, instead penning the dismissive words that the film “is so frankly familiar that it must have come from the public domain.”47 Crowther was in the minority. Other critics, not to mention audiences, met the film with overwhelming enthusiasm. A writer for Modern Screen recorded the tremendous response to Gene and Donen’s first collaborative effort: “When Gene Kelly’s amazing dance ended, and one of the biggest thunders of applause any Hollywood star has ever earned died down at last, an expert on the dance turned to his companion in the audience. ‘That’s the greatest dancing since Nijinsky!’”48 Critics also noted Gene’s developing acting skill. One critic raved: “Few cinema actors can match his reticence, exact evocativeness and sincerity, or carry such acting abilities into dancing and singing.”49
Cover Girl became the nineteenth-highest grossing film of 1944 and was one of the great morale boosters during the final year of the war. In England, the British Ministry of Information’s film division ran the picture every morning for their troops as a morale booster.50
Today, historians credit Cover Girl as the film that turned Gene into a top Hollywood star and marked his “promotion from hoofer to dancer.”51 Film writer Jeanine Basinger commented in 1985 that “before Kelly, whenever a dance number came along . . . it had somehow seemed extraordinary. There was a self-conscious quality to it, from the ‘here it comes’ opening music on through the ‘ta-da’ finale. . . . Kelly began to experiment with ways to bring the audience into the dance. . . . They felt the dance as movement, and thus became not just viewers of dance, but dancers.”52 As in his numbers with Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal, Gene employed the idea that dancers moving toward the camera provide a sort of 3-D effect that engages filmgoers. Cover Girl bore this signature trademark as well as two others: the use of a threesome to play off one another and a solo lacking a garish finale. The “Alter Ego” number set a formula for all of Gene’s future solos. Emotionally charged, it begins on a note of introspection, reaches an energetic climax, and ends in quiet sorrow with Gene alone in the dark.
A New York Herald Tribune writer best summarized Gene’s fine piece of work: “The human race has been having trouble with its conscience since time immemorial. It remained for Gene Kelly, however, to get his still, small voice out into the open and dance with it.”53
After Cover Girl, Louis B. Mayer fully realized what an asset he had in Gene Kelly. He would no longer be so willing to loan his new star to other studios, despite frequent requests for his services. Harry Cohn was so pleased with the box office returns for Cover Girl that he called Metro asking for Gene every three months for several years. He often discussed pairing Gene again with Rita Hayworth in a screen version of Pal Joey. However, Mayer demanded an exorbitant sum of money for Gene’s service and thus the project was continually put on hold. Much to Gene’s disappointment, he never reprised his role as Joey Evans (the picture was finally made, with lackluster results, in 1958 with Rita Hayworth as Vera Simpson and Frank Sinatra as Joey). Mayer, before he knew how successful Cover Girl would be, had made another loan-out agreement he now could not break. Gene was to work for Universal Studios in a straight dramatic picture starring Deanna Durbin and directed by Robert Siodmak, Christmas Holiday. Though Gene’s next film was a project for which he had no enthusiasm, Mayer told him he would be suspended if he did not agree to do the role. Gene, who saw unemployment in wartime as unpatriotic, acquiesced.
In November 1943, Gene reported for work on Christmas Holiday. Based on the 1939 short novel by W. Somerset Maugham, the picture tells the story of Abigail, a woman who marries a southern aristocrat, Robert Manette. Manette is a seemingly weak yet malevolent character who is dependent on his possessive mother. Abigail goes into the marriage oblivious that he has inherited his family’s streak of mental instability. After discovering that Manette has committed murder and his mother helped him cover it up, Abigail runs away, gets a job as a hostess in a brothel, and changes her identity for her own safety.
Christmas Holiday is notable in that it cast both Gene and Deanna Durbin against type; Gene was an unusual choice for the disturbed southerner Robert, while Durbin was the last actress one would consider to play a fallen woman. Up to 1944, Durbin had been primarily an operatic musical star in Joe Pasternak’s confectionary musicals. She almost single-handedly saved Universal from bankruptcy due to the success of her films. Not to disappoint Durbin’s fans, she did sing two songs in Christmas Holiday, “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” and “Always,” though they were torchy rather than classical in style. Upon its release on June 28, 1944, Christmas Holiday went on to gross more than $2 million. Durbin considered it her only film of any true merit.
The fact that it, one of the darkest film noirs of the 1940s, was so popular during wartime is a testament to both Gene’s and Durbin’s star power. This is not
to say that film noir pictures were unpopular in the 1940s. On the contrary, the genre saw a renaissance. Film noir of the 1940s, unlike the crime films of the 1930s, did not glorify criminals or loose women. Instead, detectives, policemen, or victims of circumstance were the heroes. Humphrey Bogart’s films best typified the genre, namely, The Maltese Falcon (1941, in which he plays a detective) and To Have and Have Not (1944, in which he portrays a fishing boat captain drawn into the French Resistance movement). Noirs spoke to the disillusionment and dark introspection of World War II–era Americans, thus providing a different kind of release than musicals and romances.
Gene, despite his lack of enthusiasm about Christmas Holiday, gave a convincing performance. A critic for the Evening Independent wrote that he “plays naturally and with sincerity.”54 Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was less complimentary: “Gene Kelly performs her [Durbin’s] no good husband in his breezy, attractive style, which is thoroughly confusing, considering the character that he is supposed to be.”55 Gene’s performance has become more appreciated with time. Biographer Clive Hirschhorn commented that he brought an intriguing, “slightly homosexual” quality to the role.56
After finishing Christmas Holiday, Gene received a wire from the Hollywood Victory Committee telling him to report to its headquarters in New York. Assuming that they planned to send him overseas to entertain, he “was a pretty excited fellow.” He discovered the organization had only a home-front project for him. “I was deeply disappointed at first,” he admitted. “Having set my heart on going overseas. But then I realized it was a terribly important and worthwhile job they had selected me for.”57
From the beginning of the war, Gene had found much fulfillment in his USO activities. He helped at the Hollywood Canteen as well, where hundreds of other stars performed and served complimentary doughnuts and coffee to servicemen on leave. In early 1944, Gene had completed a successful tour for the Hollywood Victory Committee, garnering favorable reports. In several, columnists noted that Gene attracted squealing audiences of girls and autographed bonds, which sold before the ink on his signature could dry.
For his latest home-front project, the committee asked Gene “to organize a unit and go out on a planned itinerary of Army and Navy hospitals.” Gene enlisted several entertainers to go on tour with him and “built the show so that the boys in the hospitals could feel that they were seeing a regular Broadway revue. I sang with the girl singer and danced with the girl dancer, and I played in sketches, and M.C.’d the whole show.” Gene worked as hard as a traveling vaudevillian, playing up to three shows a day in hospital auditoriums for an average of 550 servicemen per show. Then, he and his team would perform in all the wards for soldiers who were unable to leave their cots. “Their enthusiastic applause did my hammy heart good. After playing to the electricians in Hollywood for two years it was swell having a real audience, not that I don’t like electricians.” There was no publicity in connection with the tour—just as Gene wanted it. “The hour it would have taken us to give interviews to the local press in each town, we could use to much better advantage by giving a show to the wounded,” he explained.58
Gene’s return to New York and live entertainment reminded him how much he missed the theater. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times quoted Gene as saying: “Sometimes I get the urge to . . . direct dance numbers in a play like I used to. But I realize a big movie corporation can’t adjust its schedules to suit me. . . . Maybe Freddie March can do it, going back and forth, but I couldn’t. The economical dent,” he grinned, “would be too big.”59
However, his return to Hollywood in May 1944 did not seem so dismal a prospect. MGM had major plans for him in two upcoming pictures. Both films were again replacements for active service in the military: morale-boosting, big-budget, Technicolor musicals as only MGM could produce them. One of the films, Anchors Aweigh, would reunite him with producer Joe Pasternak, director George Sidney, and leading lady Kathryn Grayson. He was pleased to find that the other film, Ziegfeld Follies, was to be produced by Arthur Freed with Vincente Minnelli acting as director for the skit in which Gene would perform. He had watched what the Freed Unit had produced in his absence and itched to be a part of it again. Freed’s most recent release was a simple story set in 1903, following a year in the life of an ordinary family. The film, titled Meet Me in St. Louis, starred Judy Garland, was directed by Vincente Minnelli, and included original songs by Gene’s friends Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. The picture marked the beginning of the Freed Unit’s golden period. The circle of people with whom Freed was working, some since his beginnings as an MGM producer, was now a cohesive team, dedicated and faithful to one another. He had Vincente Minnelli and Charles Walters as directors, Lennie Hayton, Conrad Salinger, Roger Edens, and Kay Thompson as musical arrangers, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane as songwriters, and Gene Kelly and Judy Garland as his leading stars.
“Arthur Freed was such a brilliant man to establish a cabinet around himself like a president. He had the most money to spend. Other producers didn’t get that kind of attention,” actress Ann Miller later remarked.60 To work for Arthur Freed was not just a job; it was an appointment to join a royal family. Freed’s brilliance also showed through his consistent production of films that suited the precise need of the nation at any given time. Though the Allies were closer to winning the war with the triumph of D-Day on June 6, 1944, the loss of over ten thousand lives that came with it left theatergoers in need of a film depicting happy endings in a peaceful era of American history—like Meet Me in St. Louis. The film’s theme of fondness for one’s childhood home touched the nation, Gene included.
Vincente Minnelli was disappointed that the Academy failed to nominate him as Best Director or the movie for Best Picture at the 1945 ceremony. Gene was so indignant about the snub that he called Judy Garland and Minnelli (who were engaged to marry by this time) after the nominees were announced, declaring: “Goddamn it, they don’t appreciate what a fine thing it is. They don’t realize all that went into it.”61
Gene was as much a perfectionist as Vincente Minnelli when it came to his own work, and he was ready to bring such preciseness to his upcoming assignments. As had been the case since US involvement in the war, his new projects helped assuage the pain he felt at not fighting overseas. “He managed somehow . . . to focus fiercely on his work. I think now that his work was never out of his mind. . . . For Gene, his work was the most important part of his life,” Betsy Blair commented in 2003. She was quick to add: “This is not in any sense a complaint.”62
Gene’s work was in truth the center of his life, but the devotion he showed to Betsy and Kerry indicate that they were vital parts of his existence. Betsy strove to keep her marriage as idyllic as fan magazines made it out to be. When she and Gene first met, she was five feet five, but she continued to grow for the first two years of their union, reaching her full height of five feet six and a half inches. In three-inch heels, she was “no longer looking up to Gene.” She later wrote that she “liked looking up to him. . . . So, I sadly put my high heels in the closet. It was flats and sneakers from then on. I think Gene noticed, although it was never mentioned. I know he was glad. . . . I think he liked me to look up to him—actually and metaphorically. Perhaps it was even a necessary element for us as a couple.”63
Gene, both consciously and subconsciously, did not want Betsy to grow up and become a sophisticated (and perhaps cynical) woman of the world. Many reports noted that Gene preferred her to wear almost no makeup. Following a snide remark “to the effect that it was about time Mrs. Kelly started using make-up and dressing smartly to keep from hurting her husband’s reputation,” Gene replied. “Of course my wife doesn’t use makeup. She doesn’t need to.”64
Columnists allowed Gene to have human weaknesses but seldom made Betsy out to be anything but a saint—a characterization that secretly chafed her. Commenting on Gene’s shortcomings, one reporter wrote: “He won’t write letters. Would love to live on meat, potatoes and thick slabs
of white bread. He demands candy for breakfast and a heavy meal at bedtime. He stays awake all night and sleeps till noon. ‘He’s impossible,’ Betsy tells you. But for her dough, he can boss her into endless sweaters and skirts, bawl her out for making the car gears grind and forbid her wearing any make-up but just a little lipstick.”65
Though Betsy scoffed at Hollywood’s notions of glamour and thus willingly gave up high heels and makeup, she did not know how long she could remain the bobbysoxer Gene had married. “He treated me like a little angel, like his beloved playmate to share his bed and his life—and perhaps the eldest daughter in a motherless house,” Betsy commented. “Gene paid the bills. Gene took care of everything.”66
In her memoir, Betsy claimed to bear no grudges over her delayed maturation. She confided that at age twenty she needed and welcomed the protection and guidance Gene offered. “I had no responsibilities except for the one I’d chosen: taking care of Kerry. . . . I know now that it was the most wonderful thing of all. . . . She was always central to our happiness.” Nonetheless, Betsy did not plan on being a docile wife and mother forever. When Kerry was old enough to enroll in school, she planned to pursue her dream of becoming a serious actress. In the meantime, she attended auditions “just for fun,” but her unconventional beauty and understated quality fit few producers’ notions of the ideal actress. She remained a spectator of the theatrical world, Gene’s booster—her “growth and rebellion” dormant.67
Gene provided a sort of “hothouse environment” for Betsy, but he too lived in his own glass house. At times, the all-powerful studio system became suffocating. Gene later called it “a form of serfdom.” He continued without any apparent bitterness: “At the same time we were able to create a musical repertory group at MGM unlike any other in the world. . . . We had advantages working in musicals—all the script would say was ‘A dance number follows.’ We had the freedom to make it up as we went along.”68
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 18