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

by Cynthia Brideson

  Reflecting on his experience in Anchors Aweigh in 1947, Gene did not comment on how it had advanced his career. Instead, he gave a very different reason for its importance in his life: “It gave me an inkling of how I’d look and feel in a sailor suit.”64

  Gene had yet to don an official sailor suit, but he remained politically active and socially conscious. Along with dozens of other performers, including Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, John Garfield, Jimmy Durante, and James Cagney, Gene was called upon by the Democratic National Committee to speak on a radio broadcast entitled The Roosevelt Train. The program aired on September 13, 1944, on CBS. Gene’s statement on the show was short and to the point but very aggravating to the ultra-conservative Louis B. Mayer. “This is Gene Kelly, Army bound, but not before I vote for Roosevelt.” Gene’s statement was a bit perplexing given his long-held plan to join the navy. Biographer Alvin Yudkoff hypothesized that Gene used the wording he did because the bluntness of “Army bound” was “quicker, faster, had more energy—Kelly hallmarks in any public presentation.”65

  The Roosevelt Train proved to be highly effective in helping win the president enough votes for a fourth reelection. Republican radio strategists were displeased with the broadcast’s threat to their own campaign and persuaded Jimmy Durante to withdraw from the show, thus leaving four minutes of empty airtime at the end of the broadcast. Gene and fellow Roosevelt supporter Humphrey Bogart believed that the result—four minutes of a “dreary medley of organ music” at the show’s close—would actually help their cause: listeners would turn off their radios before the Republicans’ scheduled hour of campaigning began.66 This is precisely what happened.

  On November 7, 1944, Gene and Betsy threw a special celebration of Roosevelt’s election win at their home (during which they actually refrained from playing their divisive game of charades). Judy Garland and Lena Horne sang, and everyone present enjoyed champagne. The guests were primarily Gene’s cronies; Betsy’s group would have considered Rooseveltians on the conservative side. She had begun attending performances at the Actors Lab in Hollywood, a far left theater group comparable to New York’s Group Theatre (whose famous members included Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller). Gene took his Hollywood work as seriously as actors in the legitimate theater, but when Actors Lab performers came to his parties, “it was difficult for Gene to debate the redeeming social value of Anchors Aweigh as against the urgent plays of Clifford Odets.”67

  Gene was dealing with his own personal sense of urgency. For nearly three years, he had been ready to join the war. Anchors Aweigh was not slated to premiere for eight months and Gene had no immediate assignments coming his way; now seemed the ideal time to enlist.

  Only a week and a half after Roosevelt’s victory in November 1944, Louis B. Mayer finally acceded to Gene’s insistent requests for a leave of absence. The delighted but anxious dancer told a Los Angeles Times reporter: “I’m asking for the Navy. Now the question is, will the Navy ask for me?”68 Fortunately, the navy did ask for him. Gene reported for induction at the end of the month. Appearing at the recruiting office, he still wore the bandage around his hand from the injury he had received from the rose stem in Anchors Aweigh. “I can just see the faces of those . . . guys when I walk in with my mitt all bandaged up,” Gene said, embarrassed. Jokingly, he alluded to the manner in which his character in For Me and My Gal evaded the draft. “They’ll take one look at my hand and say, ‘Oh, no ya don’t. We saw that picture!’ Any movie-going sergeant might, that is.”69

  Gene was assigned to thirteen weeks of basic training in San Diego. Betsy stated that he “didn’t want to be in the film unit or the entertainment group. . . . Gene was afraid Metro would pull strings to protect their property. He didn’t want that; he wanted to do his bit like everyone else.”70 Betsy and Kerry were also packing their bags, preparing to move in with Betsy’s parents in New Jersey for the duration of Gene’s service. It was painful for Betsy to sell their home and their “honeymoon car.” The Kellys also said good-bye to their beloved housekeeper, Mamie, who planned to go to work in a munitions factory.

  On Gene’s last night in Hollywood, he and Betsy threw a farewell open-house party. Saul Chaplin and Phil Silvers performed a forty-five-minute song recounting Gene’s life from his birth in Pittsburgh to his triumph in Anchors Aweigh. Phil then sang a song specifically for Betsy: “Betsy with the Laughing Face.” Chaplin claimed it was the type of memorable “entertainment that could not be paid for or planned.”71

  Chaplin admitted that other parties he had attended at the Kelly home had not been so touching. During the infamous “Game,” cracks often showed in the otherwise idyllic Kelly marriage. “Friends who had been chatting and laughing amicably five minutes earlier were now snarling at each other because of a missed word or phrase. . . . The reason for the hostility became obvious: the savage competitiveness of Betsy and Gene. . . . It was scary watching our easygoing hosts turn into veritable storm troopers right before our eyes. . . . It was as if we had suddenly been transplanted into a house of horrors.” On one occasion Chaplin and several other guests played a trick on Gene: as he acted out the song title “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching,” everyone on his team purposely shouted out wrong answers. Gene became so enraged that he pounded the floor. His opponents won the game, and Gene began rebuking his team members. They laughed, revealing that they had set him up to lose. He joined in the laughter, but not “very willingly. Our moment of glory was short lived. He reverted to his abusive attitude in the very next game. . . . [He was] the master of the merciless put down.”72 Gene was not without guilt over his behavior. Years later when he spoke of his regrets, he said: “I wish a lot of things I wanted to do could have been done with less temper, without so much fighting.”73

  Chaplin may have interpreted Betsy and Gene’s bitter rivalry as a sign of marital tension, but Betsy made no mention of such strife in her memoir. However, she did acknowledge that the reason she acted with such competitive zeal in charades or ping-pong was because these were areas in which she could compete. “My unconscious seems to have a strong realistic streak, and I think I recognized there was no contest in the movies or the theater if Gene were the competition. He would win.” She may have experienced a certain degree of relief to be apart from him during his training in San Diego. Without the studio and her husband “taking care of everything,” Betsy admitted that she felt she was “back in real life.”74 And back in real life, she wanted nothing more than to return to the theater.

  Based in New Jersey, Betsy found work in New York as an understudy to Julie Haydon, who was currently playing Laura in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Betsy’s “a wonderful actress,” Gene told Movieland, “and I want her to continue her career.” He paused and added, with meaning, “as long as she can manage her family along with it.”75 Gene championed and aided Betsy in her career ambitions from this time on. Their separation allowed her to grow up and prove she could be a homemaker and actress at the same time.

  Gene, on the other hand, could not be a sailor, father, and film star simultaneously. “I’m in the Navy now, the branch of the service I wanted. Sure, I’m going back to Hollywood someday, but right now, the business of becoming a bluejacket is all I can handle,” Gene told the San Diego naval newspaper The Hoist. “Hollywood, as far as I’m concerned, is in mothballs for the duration.”76

  If fans believed everything they read in film magazines, they would fancy that Gene relished every moment of boot camp. A reporter in Movieland quoted him: “It freed me from all responsibility. I had only to do what I was told to do without any initiative on my part. It was almost like being in school again, and I feel it was really a mental refresher.”77 In truth, Gene was horrified by the experience. Biographer Clive Hirschhorn recounted Gene’s real impressions: “He was shocked by the way the men were ‘dehumanized’ and treated like cattle. Worse, he was amazed at the complacency with which the men accepted their rough-house treatment.”78 The handling of low-rank
ing soldiers brought back disturbing memories of hazing rituals he had witnessed at college fraternities. He saw no justification for humiliating another human based on his rank.

  What Gene found of equal difficulty was the regimentation of his schedule, which he likened to living “in a police state.”79 Ever since he had left home in 1938, Gene had been his own boss in all aspects of his life and work. It is no surprise, then, that the strict schedule of the military chafed him. According to his daughter Kerry, Gene found release through physical activity. “He was an extraordinary all-around athlete and very strong and vigorous . . . pretty much a guy’s guy. And so one of the things he did at boot camp was he boxed. And, of course, the studio was horrified that he was boxing.”80

  One might think Gene would have rejoiced to leave boot camp, but he departed with some trepidation. “It was a big discussion about where he was going to be posted,” Kerry recalled. “And they decided to put him in the Navy photographic unit to make training films. And he, . . . I think, had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand it was a proper use of his talents and capacities and he wasn’t that young at that point.”81

  Gene’s new post put him in a photographic division of the Naval Air Force in Washington, DC.82 Now that he was so close to Betsy and Kerry, they decided to again live under the same roof. “Gene was . . . very dashing in his uniform. We were together whenever it was possible. . . . The Navy assigned him to the film unit [based in the Anacostia district of] Washington, D.C. . . . Kerry and I were going with him. He could live off base, and there was a house for us in Georgetown,” Betsy explained in her memoir. The Kellys’ new home was elegant but infested with fleas. The navy promptly sent an exterminator. Gene and his family stayed at the house for six months, long enough to warrant Betsy giving up her job as understudy in The Glass Menagerie. Though disappointed, she planned to return to work after the war ended. Observing established actors perform gave her a “new modesty and seriousness” in regard to her own abilities, forcing her to shed what she called her “vainglorious” ideas about herself.83

  Betsy again took on the role of homemaker, keeping “house like a new bride. I burned biscuits, I cried over lumpy gravy.” Gene did all he could to help. He fixed breakfast most days and did the dishes while Betsy bathed Kerry.84 She admitted that “it was bliss” being with her daughter full-time again. Stanley Donen, who was 4-F on account of hypertension, came east to visit Gene and Betsy and, for a few weeks, “dedicated his life to helping them out.”85

  Gene, though happy to be with his family, was “utterly disgusted” with his assignment to a film unit. He could not help but notice as well that his fellow servicemen were disgruntled over what they saw as his easy assignment. “He had thought that at least the hellish [boot camp] training had qualified him to fight his country’s enemies in the Pacific. Had he known his military service would consist of making movies, he would have stayed in Hollywood and made them for a lot more money,” historians James E. Wise and Anne Collier Rehill remarked.86 Musicals may have been selling in Hollywood, but if Gene thought that he was going to fulfill his term in the navy through singing and dancing, he was mistaken. He soon discovered that the films he was commissioned to produce were of “critical importance.” “They [Gene’s peers] were making the same mistake I made to begin with. I also thought that what I was expected to do was ‘cushy.’ But I was wrong,” Gene stated. “Boy, was I wrong.”87

  10

  The American Line

  Gene Kelly once called himself the “Brando of dance.” Without bragging, he could have taken his statement one step further and named himself one of the first Method actors. His work in the Naval Photographic Unit required him not only to play parts in his given assignments but to actively inhabit his roles. Thus, his duties in the unit became not only a service to his country but also a training ground for his future as an accomplished actor/director.

  After he realized the true value of the training films he was commissioned to produce, Gene’s initially negative evaluation of his assignment changed. His first film, Combat Fatigue Irritability (1945), was a thirty-five-minute docudrama dealing with a sailor undergoing therapy for what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. Gene did not feel he could give an accurate depiction of PTSD if he did not gain a comprehensive understanding of the illness first. “In order to get authentic material for this one I lived, for some weeks, in Swarthmore Convalescent Hospital, near Philadelphia, where many of the combat fatigue cases are treated.” An opportunist at the hospital took a picture of the celebrity, and the shot found its way into the papers with a story alleging that Gene had fought overseas and was now suffering from battle fatigue. “Imagine my poor wife’s consternation when she heard the rumor that I was at Swarthmore suffering from psycho-neurotic trouble, due to too many shells in my ears!” Gene told a reporter for Movie Show in 1946.1

  The misunderstanding aside, Gene’s research for the film paid off handsomely. Combat Fatigue Irritability is now regarded as one of the highest-quality military productions of World War II. It boasts an above-average script, score, and direction, as well as seamless editing and convincing acting by an uncredited cast (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister, portrays Gene’s girlfriend). Gene plays the lead role of Seaman Bob Lucas, a troubled and angry fireman (a sailor who works belowdecks in the boiler room). When Lucas’s ship is torpedoed, he witnesses his shipmates burning or drowning as the ship sinks. Subsequently, he suffers from “survivor’s guilt” and PTSD; his symptoms are a burning feeling in his guts, shaking hands, and an easily ignitable temper.

  He recounts to his psychiatrist in the navy hospital the troubles he encountered visiting his parents and his girl while on leave. Over the course of the home stay, he lashed out, accusing them of treating him like a stranger. He reached a crisis point when his father took him rabbit hunting, and he found that he could not pull the trigger. The moment he raised his gun, the rabbit seemed to disappear, and instead he envisioned his mates drowning in the water all around him. “For Christ’s sake, what’d you bring me out here for? Goddamn it! Goddamn it! Goddamn it! Goddamn it!”2

  Lucas is at first resistant to treatment, although he eventually agrees to share his story with his fellow sailors. While speaking, he breaks down in tears—the first time he has been able to release his emotions since his trauma. The film then cuts to the doctor giving a lengthy summary of what led to Lucas’s breakdown and what he can do about it. Occupational therapy and physical training, he explains, will provide Lucas with outlets for his feelings and teach him that he can work while solving his problems. Here, the film shows Lucas first woodworking and then happily goofing around with his fellow sailors in a pool. The doctor concludes, somewhat simplistically, “When you can do with your problems what Lucas has done with his, you will be free of all your symptoms.”3 The film’s portrayal of PTSD may seem quite mild compared to more extreme depictions in modern movies, but one must keep in mind that Combat Fatigue Irritability was unusual in its time in even addressing the problem.

  The film’s message that the war was not an individual but a group effort harkened back to Thousands Cheer, in which Kathryn (Kathryn Grayson) told the nonconformist Eddie Marsh (Gene) that nothing was difficult “if we all work together.” In Thousands Cheer, as well as in previous roles in For Me and My Gal, The Cross of Lorraine, and Christmas Holiday, Gene played lone wolves who, according to Kerry Kelly, “were all guys with at the very least a chip on their shoulder or a nasty side or a shady side.” Gene’s real-life shoulder chip may have been only a small one, but he did share other commonalities with the shadier men he portrayed: he was a rugged individualist and had a temper. However, unlike his “nasty” characters, he cared a great deal about others even if, when his temper flared, he verbally abused them (most conspicuously during “the Game” at his house parties). Gene may have drawn upon his own moodiness in his portrayal of Seaman Lucas, but more so, he used the frustration he had felt with MGM for deferring his enlistmen
t. Kerry believed her father was able to get into the part because he well knew “what it feels like to not be sure that you’re completely pulling your weight or doing what is expected.”4 That being said, Gene never went so far as to play himself in any picture, no matter how much he drew upon his own feelings. “Professionals are acting,” Kerry remarked. “It’s not them.”5

  Kerry, a clinical psychoanalyst, offered unique insight and concluding thoughts on her father’s involvement in Combat Fatigue Irritability. She was quick to note that Gene was the only adult she knew during her childhood who was not in analysis. “He was certainly not opposed [to therapy], but he was a very self-sufficient, active person. . . . I think that he was busy with his creative work and his various hobbies of sports and reading and history. So, he basically had no need or no time,” she explained. “I think the context and content of the film was what was significant to him, more than the making of [it]. . . . But I think he really enjoyed the experience of directing the film. He was a very take-charge sort of person.”6

  Along with his performance in The Cross of Lorraine, Gene considered his acting in Combat Fatigue Irritability the best he had ever done. One would be hard-pressed to disagree; his performance is heartrending and natural. Modern audiences may find it bizarre to hear Gene Kelly, star of squeaky-clean MGM musicals, literally cursing like a sailor. But he performs this and the scenes in which he breaks into tears without self-consciousness or exaggeration. Betsy described the film as “beautiful . . . simple, compassionate, and hopeful. It was another side of Gene, and made us both believe that after the war he should try his hand at serious drama.”7