Louis B. Mayer found Gene and Judy’s next number together, “Voodoo,” highly offensive. Freed and Minnelli were not thrilled with it either, describing the music as uninteresting and dissonant. Additionally, the filming of the sequence provoked intense paranoia in Judy, for it required her to dance around open fires. “I’m going to burn to death! They want me to burn to death!” she cried. Minnelli, rather than attempt to soothe her, watched passively as Judy—laughing and weeping at the same time—was led away by her on-set psychiatrist. Lela Simone went so far as to allege that when Judy fell into a frenzy, she heard the actress cry, “Give me marijuana!”15
Judy’s extremes of emotion both on- and offscreen, whether it was aggression, passion, or hysterics (including hair pulling and feet stomping) reflected her growing animosity toward MGM and Minnelli. In Judy’s mind, Minnelli and the studio had melded into a single ogre. Judy further communicated her increasing resentment toward her husband by asking Gene to stage her dance numbers exclusively, without Minnelli’s help. In another move against her husband, Judy purposely delayed filming, calling in for both real and invented illnesses.
Gene, who normally tolerated unprofessionalism from no one, remained nonjudgmental of Judy’s scattered work ethic. In the early stages of filming, he claimed, Judy was pleasant to work with. In a 1990 interview, Lela Simone provided a different view. She stated that Gene was aware of Judy’s issues but had decided to “shrug his shoulders” over them. “He had no choice. He had a choice to walk out or be philosophical about it.”16 However, after her hysteria during the “Voodoo” number and her repeated absences, Gene faced that his friend was really ill. He began to call in sick on days he knew Judy was going to be absent, just to relieve her of a portion of the blame. Gene’s absenteeism also may have been due to guilt he felt for monopolizing Minnelli’s attentions during shooting; he also sensed that Minnelli was emotionally closed off to his wife. “Judy . . . became jealous of the time Gene and I were spending together. We’d been so concerned with getting the choreography right and broadening the Serafin character that we excluded her from our discussions,” Minnelli confessed.17
For a woman with an unquenchable need for approval, watching Minnelli favor Gene acted like poison on Judy. Minnelli later stated that working with Gene “was the most intense professional association I’ve ever had with an actor.”18 And although film critics now agree that the film gave Judy a unique role showcasing her comedic talent, the truth was that at this time her screen career was declining from its zenith while Minnelli’s, and even more so Gene’s, were still ascending.
In spite of Gene’s insistence that he was secondary to Judy in the film, Judy felt that her character fell to the sidelines. Manuela’s scenes, while they did give Judy ample opportunity to prove her wit, were dependent on interplay with Serafin. Equally, without Manuela to play off of, Serafin’s comedy would have been lost. For example, when Manuela and Serafin first meet in the seaside town of San Sebastian, she gives him a caustic rejection that the cocky actor refuses to accept.
Serafin: I can tell you your past, your present, and your future.
Manuela: You don’t have to tell me my future; I know my future.
Serafin: Am I in it?
Manuela: No!
Serafin: Then you don’t know your future.
Later, when she tricks Serafin into believing that she has fallen for his masquerade as Macoco, she continually insults his acting abilities. “I should have known the minute I saw you on the stage that you didn’t know anything about acting. . . . I despise actors!” she says with an ironic chuckle and goes on to call the profession “unspeakably drab.”19 Serafin follows her as she leaves the room with a coquettish grin, believing her charade as much as she has feigned to believe his. As soon as he steps outside, Manuela attacks him with what seems to be every object in the room. She shatters a bust over his head, smashes a canvas across his face, and hits him with a sword.
Manuela’s tantrum was allegedly inspired by Judy’s real actions at home. Her daughter Lorna claimed that “she was amazingly strong. . . . She could hurl almost anything across the room with deadly accuracy.”20 To keep the scene comedic, Minnelli made sure that none of the objects actually hurt Serafin.
Gene was not afraid of filming dangerous scenes. He insisted on performing all his own stunt work. His impressive feats in the picture made him, as Judy intuited, the center of the film. His most nimble footwork, along with his catlike climbing of balconies in the “Nina” sequence, was his walk across a tightrope to Manuela’s room. Gene practiced for hours on the tightrope, but MGM was not about to jeopardize his safety. Wires were attached to his back and mattresses were beneath the rope at all times.
Most strenuous physically for Gene were the two musical sequences he choreographed: “Be a Clown” and “The Pirate Ballet.” Both were among the last parts of the film to be shot and proved to be the most time consuming to complete. To perform with him in the clown number, Gene engaged a pair of light-footed African American dance stars, the Nicholas Brothers, who were popular even in parts of the South, where their films were screened illegally. (Incidentally, the Nicholas Brothers were the act for which Gene and his brother Fred filled in at Cab Calloway’s club over ten years before.) “Be a Clown” was a landmark number not only because it introduced Porter’s new song (one that was destined to become a show business staple), but also because it marked the first time a white man and black men danced together onscreen. Louis B. Mayer’s objection to the routine did nothing to soften Gene and the mogul’s tense relationship. “It [dancing with blacks] was strictly taboo in those days. L. B. Mayer was really upset about it,” Gene reflected.21 Mayer finally consented but warned Gene that the number would be cut in many southern cities. He proved to be correct, much to Gene’s chagrin.
It was the South’s loss. “Be a Clown” begins with a delightful bit of juxtaposition. A hangman’s noose, awaiting Serafin after his performance, remains at the center of the dance floor. The three dancers pirouette about it with carefree steps as if the prospect of death is something comedic. “No noose is good noose!” Serafin quips only moments before launching into his performance. The number employed more athleticism and gymnastics than any Gene had yet achieved, utilizing “splits, handsprings, and turnovers” and Gene’s trademark move in which he “bounces sideways on his hand and toes—body extended in push up position.”22 Harold Nicholas asserted that Gene had learned this move from him and his brother in New York. In actuality, Gene had developed the move with the Revuers in 1939 before he ever saw the brothers perform it.
The weight disparities between the three men posed problems when they danced together. Gene was so much more muscular that in one part of the dance when he and the brothers are holding hands in a circle and take turns “being lifted off the studio floor, Kelly seems to be leaping to help the struggling Harold pull him along. In contrast, Fayard seems to fly off the floor when Kelly pulls him pretty easily.”23
The challenges the brothers faced in “Be a Clown” notwithstanding, Harold allegedly deemed the routine “too simple” and consequently “slacked off.” Such behavior infuriated Gene.
“Harold, what are you doing? Your brother and I are rehearsing like mad and you are just there moping around.”
“Oh, I already got it,” Harold insisted.
“Alright, let me see you do it.”
Harold went through the entire routine without one mistake. Fayard recalled that “Gene was so mad . . . he [said]: ‘Stop everything, let’s go to lunch.’”24
Gene may have become impatient with his dancing partners in The Pirate (with the exception of Judy Garland), but he did take pleasure in designing collaborative dances almost as much as solos. Novelist and critic John Updike claimed that Gene, “as the middle son in his own family enjoyed dancing in the middle of three men in the many numbers throughout his films. . . . Male partners seemed to free him up to be his most cheerfully spectacular and inventive self.”25 C
omposer André Previn concurred: “Kelly always liked to dance with a trio of men; they could play off of each other but preferably [they did] not dance better than him.”26 “Be a Clown” was an impressive example of Gene’s work with male colleagues, but even he admitted it was perhaps an example of too much “vanity.” Remembering “Be a Clown” in 1994, Gene admitted, “The mistake we made was that . . . we did enough bravura endings for fifty numbers.”27
Gene and Minnelli decided to reprise “Be a Clown” for the film’s finale—sans the overblown endings. This time, Serafin and Manuela perform it together after the real Macoco is arrested and Manuela joins Serafin’s troupe as his wife and stage partner. The sequence is the only part of the film in which Judy truly enjoyed herself. She wore huge, baggy pants, a cap that covered all her hair, and a black painted smile on her face. She so loved performing in the inelegant costume that in her famed concert tours in the 1950s and 1960s, clown garb became a staple in her act. Gene shared Judy’s fondness for the persona and later professed that he had always wanted to be a clown. The reprise included a number of slapstick tricks, most conspicuously when eighteen Indian clubs pop out one by one from the wings to hit Serafin on the head. Then, all at once, they cascade upon him and Manuela as they duck for cover. Critic Joel Siegel commented in 1971, “Suddenly their eyes meet and both dissolve into gales of what must be unrehearsed laughter. This final shot, which combines the statement that the artistic imagination is the source of happiness with Garland and Kelly’s very obvious love of performing together ends the film on a blissfully high note.” In 1989, film curator Stephen Harvey provided a unique insight into the ending of the picture: “It’s teamwork not passion that is celebrated in The Pirate’s upbeat fadeout.”28 Such a message seemed to be a running theme in the best of Gene’s films and one that he could personally espouse.
After “Be a Clown,” Judy’s work was basically done on the film. The rest of the work fell to Gene and Minnelli as they prepared the “Pirate Ballet.” The ballet is a prime example of Gene and Minnelli’s joint ingenuity. Minnelli’s taste for the bizarre and his flair for awesome color meshed with Gene’s sense of excitement and athleticism to create a “psychologically charged, surrealistic framework” for the ballet.29 The sequence depicts Macoco’s ruthlessness in an indirect, stagy manner that leaves no doubt it is a product of a young, repressed, and enamored girl’s (Manuela) fantasies of a pirate’s life. Jeanne Coyne, along with a troupe of five dancers, helped Gene rehearse the ballet. Jeanne did not appear in the film, but by the end of production she had become Gene’s full-time assistant.
The number was the most elaborate in the picture, requiring the use of explosives, smoke canisters, swords, and swinging ropes. The “Pirate Ballet” drew heavily from Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate (1926), particularly in a shot where Serafin slides down a rope in the same manner Fairbanks had employed when “sliding down the sails of a ship by slicing them with a knife.” His costume, too (a short black tunic) was almost a replica of Fairbanks’s. The number, however, departs from The Black Pirate in its incorporation of dance as a storytelling device. The ballet begins when Serafin twirls around a white mule, the only being left in the town square after Serafin (pretending to be Macoco) scares away the villagers and policemen. Manuela watches him from her window. She sees the mule transform into herself; its ears morph into the points of a headdress. She then envisions Macoco waving a sword as he dances around her, cutting off the points of her headdress, climbing up a mast of a ship, and swinging on a rope toward the camera. Minnelli held that the stunt was the most dangerous of Gene’s feats in the film and, as expected, he insisted on doing it himself. The stunt was all the riskier because it required him to throw fiery clubs to the deck below him, setting off explosives. “We pretty near burned down the studio putting it on,” art director Jack Martin Smith recalled. “It was a helluva number, savage, beautiful, piercing music.”30
Choreographer Beth Genné wrote that Gene conceived the dance completely “with the camera in mind,” which allowed the scene to transport the audience “freely through a space that seems almost limitless.”31 The primary innovation in the number was Gene’s use of a device called a Ubangi—a long, mechanical arm that placed a mirror at a desired location. The camera then could shoot into the mirror, recording its target image from a much lower angle than would normally be possible. The device became essential equipment for musical routines thereafter.
The ballet was striking in its technical innovation as well as in its use of color, especially a purple/scarlet shade that MGM later christened “Minnelli red.” The director had first used the hue in a fantastic toreador ballet titled “Death in the Afternoon.” The ballet, which had appeared on the Broadway stage in the revue At Home Abroad (1935), was widely lauded, though it did contain a controversial element of “homoeroticism.”32 Hints of homoeroticism are also evident in the “Pirate Ballet”; Sheryl Flatow of Biography magazine wrote that Gene “was aware of his sex appeal and consciously exploited it . . . in black cut off shorts and black t-shirt that showed off his compact muscular body.”33
Gene’s costume, which just barely passed the censors, was completely Minnelli’s design. The fact that Minnelli gave such a suggestive costume to Gene only heightened Judy’s jealousy of her husband and Gene’s “chummy little club,” as she called it. Members of the cast and crew noticed “the crush” Minnelli had on Gene. At several open-house parties at the Kelly home, Judy and others noticed that Minnelli would stand very close to Gene, looking “straight into his eyes” when they talked, and that he seemed to be “always embracing him.”34
Gene’s heterosexuality has seldom been questioned; modern scholars hold that Gene had no problem with the concept of gayness, but he did fight if anyone cast doubt on his masculinity. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents, who carried on a semi-open affair with actor Farley Granger, wrote in his memoir that Gene constantly made “faggot jokes” yet “flirted with men as well as women—which, never mind unfair, was disgusting, however much due to his overblown narcissism.” Laurents believed that Gene felt he had to act more “macho than John Wayne” because many men in his profession were deemed “sexless . . . [like] Fred Astaire.”35
Gene’s other homosexual (or possibly homosexual) friends, such as Danny Kaye, Charles Walters, and Minnelli, never spoke of being offended by him. Minnelli had only awe for his colleague. His marriage to Judy had become quite uncomfortable long before The Pirate. Still, Judy and Minnelli had no plans for a divorce yet. Minnelli’s primary concern was that Judy regain her health. After her nervous breakdown during The Pirate, Judy entered a sanitarium where she received help for her depression as well as addiction to barbiturates.
In July 1947, the tumultuous voyage of The Pirate finally came to an end—a quarter million dollars over budget, with a final cost of $3,768,014. Even the indefatigable Gene was glad to see the strenuous project come to a close. “Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t become a bus driver.”36
Arthur Freed looked past the difficulties involved in making The Pirate; he had such confidence in the Minnelli-Kelly-Garland triumvirate that he had already assigned them all to another project together before The Pirate even finished filming. Entitled Easter Parade, the new film would boast a score entirely by Irving Berlin. Freed again assigned Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett as screenwriters and Robert Alton as choreographer. Judy, who felt stronger after her rest, was ecstatic about Easter Parade. “Her resentment over the time Gene and I spent together had long since dissipated,” Minnelli wrote in his memoir. “I know you two have something great going,” Judy told him.37
What everyone thought was going to be a trouble-free film swiftly became muddled. Shortly after Easter Parade went into production in November 1947, Freed received a phone call from Judy’s analyst informing him that she did not wish Minnelli to act as director because he symbolized “all of her troubles at the studio.” Minnelli was devastated. He had become engrossed in Easter Parade and envisi
oned making it into a “kind of Tin Pan Alley Pygmalion” while also “imbu[ing] it with the same emotional nostalgia” as Meet Me in St. Louis.38 With or without Minnelli, Freed forged ahead with his expensive new project.
He enlisted as director Charles Walters, who had just completed a film that brought Gene’s friends from the Revuers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, to Hollywood. Good News, a collegiate romance set in 1927, had come in under budget and on time due to Walters’s streamlined yet exceptional directorial skills. Walters commented that after working on the comparatively small Good News, landing a picture with Judy and Gene was “like passing one day to the next from the Bronx to the Palace Theatre.”39 Gene and Judy were as pleased to be working with Walters as he with them. Walters sealed Gene and Judy’s approval by inserting a “fun” number in Easter Parade that was similar to “Be a Clown.” Set to Berlin’s new composition, “A Couple of Swells,” the sequence allowed Gene and Judy to wear their favored garb—tramp costumes. They sing in feigned high-society accents about their imaginary life among the “swells” on Fifth Avenue.
To further lighten the film, Walters demanded that Gene’s character be softened. In the initial script, Walters claimed, Gene “verbally beat the shit out of Judy,” and he feared the audience would hate him for it. Over lunch, “the trio charted a plan of action” and put in a call to Freed, to whom Judy and Gene “fed lines” provided by Walters. “The ploy worked,” Walters’s biographer Brent Phillips wrote.40 With the help of a third screenwriter, Sidney Sheldon, the film subsequently became lighter in tone.
Gene could not wait to begin working with Robert Alton on staging his dance routines. In August 1947, two months before Judy was ready for filming, Gene began choreographing his solos. The first routine he tackled accompanied another new Berlin song, “Drum Crazy.” Gene used many elements of his signature style in the routine. The setting of the number, a toy store, allowed him to use various props as springboards for dance moves. Additionally, the scene involved children, as had his most successful numbers in Anchors Aweigh and Living in a Big Way. Easter Parade appeared to be progressing exactly on schedule—and then a setback far worse than the sudden replacement of Vincente Minnelli occurred.
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 25