“The day I handed [Freed] the final script he said, ‘Gene Kelly broke his leg last night,’” Sidney Sheldon explained. “I thought it was a joke. It only happens in movies that the leading man breaks his leg.”41 In truth, Gene only broke his ankle, not his leg. But this still meant he would not be able to work for six to eight weeks. Freed managed to remain calm even after Louella Parsons gossiped that Gene’s doctor was not very encouraging, claiming that he might never dance again.42 Freed did not listen to such speculation. However, one wonders if he would have remained cool had he known the true cause behind his leading man’s injury. Gene later explained that he told Louis B. Mayer he had hurt himself practicing a complicated dance step “because I didn’t think he’d respond too well to the truth.” In reality, Gene broke his leg in a fit of temper during a volleyball game. Arthur Laurents described how the accident happened in his memoir:
The more points we [Gene’s volleyball team] missed, the more infuriated he got. . . . But the tension was too great and we began to laugh like bad kids. . . . Laughing made it difficult to score. . . . Then the ball flew off the court and hit him [Gene]. That ended the game and life in his backyard. He sprang up like a geyser. We were a bunch of lousy spoil sports! . . . Roaring at the top of his high tenor, he thrashed his way back to the house, flung open the kitchen door, and swiveled for one final curse . . . and like Rumpelstiltskin stamped down so hard on the doorsill that he broke his ankle.43
Easter Parade, already exorbitant in budget, could not wait six weeks or longer to get under way. Gene, trying to atone for his unfortunate and inconvenient loss of temper, suggested, “How about getting Fred Astaire to take my place?” Fred was hesitant to accept the role. He telephoned Gene and asked him if he was absolutely sure he could not do the picture. “You’ll be doing me a favor ’cause they think I’m a bum,” Gene said. “L. B. Mayer thinks I broke my [ankle] on purpose. Please do it!”44 Fred accepted the role, and the experience was ultimately a rewarding one for him.
Gene, though highly disappointed to lose the chance to work with Judy, Irving Berlin, and Charles Walters, kept himself occupied while his leg healed. As he had done immediately following the war, he made politics his full-time job.
According to Betsy Blair, the Red Scare had been slow to fully take hold of Hollywood. But, by late 1947, it had become all encompassing. “In hundreds of homes . . . there were fears, tears, battles,” Betsy described.45 Vincente Minnelli recalled an evening he and Judy Garland were guests at a masquerade party hosted by Groucho Marx. “[It was] bizarre to say the least. . . . Here we all were dressed in clown costumes talking of our imminent death . . . [and what] the implications the House Un-American Activities Committee held for . . . us.”46
In spite of repercussions they might face, Minnelli and Judy, along with Gene, joined the Committee for the First Amendment. The CFA was established by screenwriter Philip Dunne, actress Myrna Loy, and film directors John Huston and William Wyler in response to HUAC’s allegations against the Hollywood Ten. Other members included Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Ira Gershwin, Kay Thompson, Katharine Hepburn, Lena Horne, Danny Kaye, and Frank Sinatra. On October 27, 1947, a number of the group’s members—Gene included—boarded a plane bound for Washington, DC, to support the Hollywood Ten during their HUAC trial. Judy and Minnelli were not among those on the plane. Neither was Betsy. She was in the midst of shooting The Snake Pit, a film in which she had a small part as a defensive mute girl in a psychiatric ward.
At every stop the plane made en route to Washington, photographers flocked to snap shots of the stars. The flight and its coverage became less like a political crusade and more like a press tour for an upcoming movie extravaganza. Speaking to the press, Gene tried to draw attention to the group’s purpose rather than its members’ celebrity status and, as he had during the 1946 union workers’ strike, willingly served as the CFA’s leader and spokesperson. However, in Pittsburgh (the last stop before Washington), Gene dropped his leadership role. His family was the first to greet him at the airport, and he decided at the last moment to leave the group for a visit. His brother Fred, now out of the army, and sister Louise were still running the Gene Kelly School of Dance. Gene planned to catch up with them and stay with his parents overnight, thus arriving in Washington on Monday morning. His decision concerned the rest of the stars. He was the most persuasive speaker in the group and if he were not present, journalists and radio listeners would be more apt to condemn the Hollywood Ten. Gene’s flight, as his colleagues feared, did arrive late, so late, in fact, that he was absent when photographers took a group shot of the CFA. The photograph quickly spread to newspapers across the nation and became the poster representative of the committee. Betsy, seeing the picture sans Gene, was angry that he had “missed it for Mama.”47 Still, Gene arrived in ample time for the hearings.
As proceedings commenced, Gene and his friends’ enthusiasm for their cause began to sag. The leader of the Hollywood Ten, John Howard Lawson, was in fact a Communist Party member. The missions of Lawson and the Committee for the First Amendment were no longer in alignment; the people from Hollywood were for free speech, not Communism. Lawson found more disfavor when he engaged in a shouting match with Chairman Parnell Thomas. According to director Edward Dmytryk (one of the Ten), his haranguing alienated the support of those in the CFA.
Though the careers of a number of the CFA’s members, such as John Garfield, Larry Parks, and Edward G. Robinson, were nearly destroyed by their political involvement, Gene emerged unscathed.
A depressed Gene flew back to California after the HUAC trial. Though he remained politically conscious, he again made work his primary focus. He already had another project lined up at MGM with the reliable director George Sidney and producer Pandro S. Berman. The picture allowed him to actually reprise a role Douglas Fairbanks had played in 1921, that of D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers. The lush, Technicolor remake was to go into production in January 1948, giving Gene’s ankle ample time to mend.
Betsy, meanwhile, had no intentions of distancing herself from leftist causes even if Gene appeared to be pulling out. “Don’t waste your fire. Save it for a big issue, and then come on with your big guns,” Gene advised his outspoken liberal colleagues.48 Even though Gene managed to escape formal accusations from HUAC, both he and Betsy were investigated by the Tenney Committee (a fact-finding group for HUAC that was active from 1941 to 1949). Beginning in 1949, the FBI kept files on Betsy and Gene’s activities. Not until 2004 were their files declassified. According to Gene Kelly researcher Susan Cadman, the contents of the files make “very interesting reading,” but the lack of incriminating evidence in them “does not inspire confidence” in the FBI.49
Betsy, to a certain degree, did hold her fire, as Gene advised. “The Cold War was real,” she wrote in 2003. “There were spies and stolen atomic secrets. . . . Perhaps we were ‘useful idiots’ as Stalin so disdainfully labeled the left outside the Soviet Union. But, I believe we were a force for good and that what we were fighting for still needs to be fought for today.”50
In September 1947, Gene, Judy Garland, Vincente Minnelli, Arthur Freed, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter united to view a rough cut of The Pirate. “We shall see,” Porter murmured the moment the film ended. What Porter really thought was that the picture was “unspeakably wretched, the worst that money could buy.”51 However, Berlin as well as Lee and Ira Gershwin, who saw the movie shortly afterward, thought The Pirate represented the best work anyone involved in it had ever done. It remained to be seen what critics would say about the project.
If the reactions of preview audiences were to be believed, the filmmakers had little to worry about. According to one comment card, MGM had “a terrific team in these two [Gene and Judy].” On November 7, 1947, at another Los Angeles preview, viewers praised Judy’s comedic skill, but Gene emerged as the undisputed favorite. One enamored filmgoer gushed: “I want Gene Kelly for Christmas!”52
Tho
ugh MGM’s profits were still down at the close of 1947, cinema attendance was again rising—a promising sign for The Pirate’s box office potential. After its premiere on June 11, 1948, the film actually broke records during its first four weeks on the screen. But few people went to see it a second time, which resulted in a highly disappointing net loss of $812,496. The picture marked the first time a Judy Garland vehicle did not yield a profit. But this did not mean The Pirate was an artistic failure. On the contrary, reviews, like preview comment cards, were mostly positive. A critic for the Hollywood Reporter wrote: “The simplest way to describe The Pirate is wow! . . . Bright, fast, witty and wonderfully entertaining.” Other critics liked the film but pointed out its flaws. A writer for the New York Times considered the story “larded with bizarre production qualities.” James Agee of the Nation deemed Gene’s Barrymore-Fairbanks imitation “ambitious but painfully misguided.” Overall, reviewers concluded what Judy Garland had seen from the beginning: the picture “is Mr. Kelly’s . . . and he gives it all he has, which is considerable and worthy of attention.”53
Historians Earl Hess and Pratibha Dabholkar were of the same mindset. The Pirate “proved Gene Kelly’s ability to dance any possible mood on the screen” and marked his “coming of age as a dancer, choreographer, and innovator.”54 Gene himself did not feel he had yet come of age. In his view, there was still much work to be done in mastering the blend of dance and story onscreen. In a later interview, Gene took the bulk of the blame for The Pirate’s failure to click with a wider audience: “We [Gene and Minnelli] just didn’t pull it off. . . . The sophisticates grasped it, but the film died in the hinterlands. It was done tongue in cheek and I should have realized that never really works.”55
Audiences of 1948 had trouble accepting such a sophisticated satire, but modern critics consistently rank the film among the top ten products of the Freed Unit. In a 1985 interview with American Film magazine, Gene explained: “Vincente and I felt that we had the world licked on that [The Pirate]. [The humor] . . . was an inside joke, but we thought the public would grab it. . . . Now, when The Pirate plays, it is a cult picture.”56 To be sure, the film is a cult favorite, particularly in the gay community. “[The film is] loopy, knowingly campy, brightly colored, ambitious, and absolutely unique,” historian Victoria Large commented. Film curator Stephen Harvey saw The Pirate as the best of Gene and Minnelli’s collaborations. In 1989, after the film had undergone decades of analysis, Harvey concluded, “There’s an innocence to The Pirate’s artifice that Minnelli never quite summoned up again. [The film] represented Minnelli’s last moment as a freewheeling fabulist, and for all the backstage angst and turmoil, it was a lovely time while it lasted.”57
Yet despite critical appreciation for the film and its merit on artistic fronts, postwar moviegoers continued to favor more conventional musicals like Good News and Easter Parade. The latter picture became the sixth-largest grosser of 1948, bringing MGM $5,803,000. Fred Astaire now had no intentions of going back into retirement. After the enormous success of his comeback film, he good-naturedly told the press: “My compliments to Gene Kelly. I’m glad he broke his ankle last year.”58 Gene took the loss and the fact that he again had formidable competition with grace. “I was pleased to be responsible for getting Fred back,” Gene told the press. Then, with a wistful grin, he added, “But every time I see him and Judy singing ‘A Couple of Swells,’ I do get a twinge of regret.”59
After the lackluster reception of The Pirate, Gene realized that his greatest immediate challenge was to redefine his screen persona in a world that was less innocent and more guarded after the war. What he needed were projects that drew upon his own personality. The Three Musketeers again placed him in a historical time, but it provided him with a part, like that of Serafin, that reflected his own brashness and athleticism. The picture’s similarities to The Pirate make it seem an unlikely follow-up picture for Gene. However, the movie bore no artistic pretensions or sophisticated, witty repartee as did the former film. Also, it was a classic, tried-and-true tale audiences still responded to, even though it had already been adapted to film four times. Writing of her impressions of Gene in 1948, journalist Alyce Canfield did not miss the signs of strain the unusually stressful past year had put upon him: “There is only one change in Gene Kelly from the man of a few years back that you wish could have been averted [and that is] a certain weariness when speaking of the past few years.”60 Gene’s secretary, Lois, was also attuned to the serious bent her boss’s personality had taken. “He would just sit there in one of the two large red chairs in the living room . . . just thinking and thinking. That’s how I remember him.”61
12
The Renaissance Man
Over the course of 1948, Gene embarked upon three demanding but vastly different projects that utilized every talent he possessed: acting, dancing, singing, choreographing, and even writing. “When Gene Kelly says, ‘The thing I like to do most is work,’ he’s not kidding,” a columnist remarked in September 1948.1
Gene’s year brimmed with work as well as changes and transitions in his personal life. Betsy became increasingly involved in her acting career and political causes while Kerry, now six, was away for much of each day at school. He also faced changes in his professional life; at MGM, Gene and his colleagues grew anxious over the news that Louis B. Mayer was soon to be dethroned as head of the studio. It was uncertain what effect such a change would have on the Freed Unit.
Though 1948 was a year of uncertainty in many respects, Gene did not let its ambiguity taint his zeal for his work. Indeed, he was so eager to begin on his first project—a straight dramatic picture, The Three Musketeers—that he began preparing for it six weeks in advance of its January 25 starting date. He welcomed a second chance to “be Douglas Fairbanks” and remedy any mistakes he may have made in his homage to the actor in The Pirate. Gene told journalist Alyce Canfield: “If I’m half as good as he was, I’ll be satisfied.”2
The Pirate had proven that Gene’s sense of rhythm, graceful movement, and bravura were appealing traits. All he needed to learn was to emote with more sincerity and tone down his tendency to overdo satire. Going into The Three Musketeers, Gene recognized the task before him. Though described by numerous colleagues as an egotist, Gene was aware of his shortcomings and honest about them. “My main fault is, I still act as if I were on the stage,” he said. “I’m still too broad in gestures and facial expressions. Same way with the voice. I hit the back row in a close-up. Keep forgetting there’s a microphone that catches every whisper.”3 Further, Gene had the self-awareness to know that he could not “register his satisfaction after completing a dazzling trick without . . . being smug about it. . . . It always came out taunting.”4
As well as working to perfect his acting, Gene tackled the physical training required for the swashbuckler role. Each day, he had a two-hour session with Jean Heremans, five-time national fencing champion of Belgium, followed by hours of acrobatic work in the studio gym. As in The Pirate, Gene refused to use a double. “I think up a lot of those stunts,” he said. “I feel responsible.”5 One stunt, however, was beyond Gene—and that was the seemingly relatively easy task of riding a horse. “The horses threw a lot of the riders. I was too chicken to get on a horse, so I used a double,” he admitted.6 He knew that if he were thrown, he could sustain injuries that would prevent him from ever dancing again.
Gene’s training in swordsmanship offered him valuable skills. Dueling came easily to him; he likened the sport to balletic dancing. In dueling and ballet, he argued, “the feet are always placed outward, making it possible to move quickly from side to side” so that the body is not exposed and the dueler has a long reach.7 One duel between Gene’s character, D’Artagnan, and Jussac, captain of the guard, ran five minutes (the longest filmic duel on record at the time). Gene’s exertions in the art of dueling proved to be so demanding that he lost twelve pounds before Musketeers went into production. “I’d just like to see the guy who says acting
isn’t strenuous work,” Gene told columnist Dorothy Kilgallen.8
His training completed, Gene was ready to begin filming. The picture was a typical star-studded MGM extravaganza with a near-record budget of $3 million. Van Heflin, Gig Young, and Robert Coote played the three musketeers. Heflin was the only actor to give a lively performance; the other two are pallid spectators for much of the film. The glamorous Lana Turner appeared as Lady DeWinter, the mistress of the Duke of Buckingham who endeavors to discredit the queen. Aiding her in her plot is Prime Minister Richelieu, portrayed by Vincent Price. June Allyson played Constance, one of the queen’s wide-eyed ladies in waiting and D’Artagnan’s love interest.
The basic plot of the picture follows the chaotic adventures of D’Artagnan, a noble youth from the French provinces who travels to Paris to become a musketeer. His self-assurance and impetuosity complicate his missions, but throughout his travels, he learns of love, hate, loyalty, and friendship from the three musketeers (Athos, Porthos, and Aramis), who help him successfully thwart the villains’ plans to usurp the king and queen’s power.
The adaptation, though handsomely mounted, suffered from a case of schizophrenia. As Gene’s biographer Sheridan Morley put it, the picture could not decide “how seriously to take itself” due to the “comedic, tongue-in-cheek slant that screenwriter Robert Ardrey took.” Biographer Tony Thomas asserted that musical arranger Herbert Stothart’s decision to use Tchaikovsky’s popular theme from Romeo and Juliet as a “surging accompaniment” to love scenes between D’Artagnan and Constance made for a “ludicrous” effect. The scenes of swordplay also have comedic elements: the tumbling, leaping, and flipping “tended toward burlesque.” For all its shortcomings and attempts at clever comedy, the film did not cross the line into highbrow satire as did The Pirate. Overall, Tony Thomas claimed that under George Sidney’s direction, the picture offered excellent pacing of action to counteract the “languid dialogue passages.”9
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 26