Gene’s performance is as schizophrenic as the screenplay. For instance, when he first sees Constance through a crack in his upstairs floorboard, his exaggerated reaction to her beauty is almost cartoonish. He flails on the floor, bites a handkerchief, and audiences can all but see his heart pumping out of his chest. In other scenes, mainly those with Lady DeWinter, he performs with all seriousness. When he is with his fellow musketeers, the film becomes most appealing; in these sequences, Gene’s personality shines through. He is at once a ruthless competitor to his comrades and a loyal confidant.
In Gene’s dramatic scenes, he performed with perhaps more intensity than the light script called for. Lana Turner was at the receiving end of his overzealousness. Gene later explained how he inadvertently injured the actress: “I had a fight with her [Lana] in a scene. She said to throw her down harder. I said, ‘Lana, if I throw you down harder I’m gonna bounce you.’ She said, ‘throw me down as hard as you can.’ Like a fool, I broke her elbow. . . . We shot around her for six days, then she came back with a little cast on. Did she cry? Yes, but I cried worse. I worried a lot.”10 No evidence suggests that Lana bore a grudge. Gene often seemed unaware of his own strength with his female costars. Cyd Charisse, later his leading lady, once claimed that her husband always knew she had been dancing with Gene Kelly if she came home with bruises and with Fred Astaire if she came home unmarked.
Filming wrapped for The Three Musketeers in April 1948 (with some re-takes in May). The picture may have had its faults, but overall, it was a superior piece of cinema that allowed Gene to display his multifaceted talents. In later years, he named it as his favorite of all his nonmusical pictures. People around the world seemed to share his fondness for the film. During his world travels in the 1960s, he was surprised to find that many of his international fans remembered him most for Musketeers rather than for An American in Paris (1951) or Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
After the film premiered on October 20, 1948, Gene emerged as the victor in the all-star cast. According to Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “Not since Douglas Fairbanks . . . has a fellow come along who compares with that robustious actor in vitality and grace. And even though he [Gene] is given more than he should have to do and often is permitted to clown in a rather childish way, he carries his heavy role lightly.”11 Why did Gene find such success in Musketeers and not The Pirate when both were costume pictures heavy with displays of physical agility and satire? The Pirate was far more intellectual and subtle in its humor and avant-garde in its execution; The Three Musketeers was much more accessible to the mainstream. According to MGM accounts, Musketeers grossed $4,507,000, making a total profit of $1,828,000. It was the second-highest-grossing film of 1948.
On paper, 1948 appeared to be MGM’s most lucrative year in history, with total revenues amounting to $185 million. But in real terms, the studio made a profit of only $5 million due to excessive studio overhead. Nick Schenck, Mayer’s boss in New York, ordered the mogul to find himself a new head of production—a title no one had claimed since Irving Thalberg’s death a decade before.
Thalberg’s successor came in the unlikely form of RKO’s former head of production, Dore Schary. Schary, a vocal Democrat, had recently spoken before HUAC, declaring that RKO would never purposely hire a Communist. MGM, on the other hand, had a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Gene and Betsy invited Schary and his wife to one of their house parties and the couple played the Game, but Gene and Schary never became close. Schary was largely inaccessible to anyone but high-ranking executives and other Hollywood elite and held regular black-tie soirees at his home to which people were summoned, not invited.
From the moment Schary took office as vice president and head of productions at MGM, on July 1, 1948, Louis B. Mayer’s position became increasingly honorific—a job in name only. Mayer and Schary were on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to moviemaking. Mayer was all about spectacle and showcasing star quality. Schary preferred featured players over movie stars and, according to Esther Williams, liked “bizarre message pictures.” If Mayer had seen Schary’s preferred type of films, she argued, they would have sent him “rolling on the floor in one of his famous tantrums.”12 Schary surprised everyone by allowing Freed, Joe Pasternak, and Jack Cummings to operate independently, claiming he knew nothing about musicals and would leave their production to the experts. Freed’s assistant, Lela Simone, recalled of Schary: “As far as the Freed Unit went, he didn’t exist at all. . . . I can tell . . . you that nobody functioned [over] the Freed Unit. Nobody.”13
Gene was quick to remark that musicals were not without the social relevance and deeper meaning Schary sought in message pictures. “The way I look at a musical, you are commenting on the human condition no matter what you do.”14 Fortunately, Schary approved of Gene’s type of work. “It’s fantastic! We’ll make more like it,” he told Gene after viewing The Three Musketeers. In spite of his success as D’Artagnan, Gene intended to keep musicals rather than dramas as his primary work. The future of the genre looked bright: the top-grossing film of the year was The Red Shoes, a British picture about a ballerina. Its US premiere in October 1948 was met with overwhelmingly positive public and critical reception, particularly for its twenty-minute ballet sequence. The sleeper hit ushered ballet into the mainstream and left film audiences clamoring to see more—a desire Gene would jump to fulfill if given the chance.
Gene managed to find time between projects to take a much-needed vacation. Precipitating the trip was MGM executives’ rejection of a project he had been determined to make his next starring vehicle. Gene was so pleased with the outcome of The Three Musketeers that he thought it would naturally segue into another period piece, a musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac. However, the studio argued that an unattractive role such as Cyrano would destroy Gene’s box office appeal. When Schary had declared, “We’ll make more like it” after Musketeers, Gene had been certain that the new head of production would back his plans for Cyrano. But such was not the case. In 1950, Columbia Pictures adapted Cyrano de Bergerac into a straight drama with José Ferrer in the lead; he won an Academy Award for his performance.
After filming on Musketeers finished in April 1948, a disgruntled Gene took ship with his family for what would be the first of their many European excursions. “We were in the most luxurious cabin, we had consommé served in our deck chairs at eleven each morning, we dressed up for dinner and danced in the ballroom every night,” Betsy recalled in her memoir.15
The destination was Klosters, Switzerland. There, Gene braved ski slopes and mingled with literary elites including Irwin Shaw, author of The Young Lions. Shaw introduced the Kellys to the “Klosters that counts”—creative, talented people who “firmed up Gene’s intention to be treated as a serious filmmaker.”16 He made ample use of his French during the vacation and enlisted local tutors to teach Kerry the language. Graham Fuller, in an interview with Gene in 1994, stated, “Kelly, of course, is a Francophile. . . . I’d contend though that the French respond to something in the Kelly persona . . . that, emotionally and intellectually, reminds them of themselves. . . . His pushiness, his sexual vigor, and his nervous energy are redolent of the boulevardier or the testosterone-driven matelot.”17 Gene would have liked to make the jaunt from Switzerland to fully explore France, but the holiday ended all too quickly. He had to be back by mid-April to begin work on a new picture and finish re-takes on The Three Musketeers.
Gene’s imminent work did not keep him from remaining attentive to his friends and family. Indeed, they became his primary concern in spring 1948. All at once, he had to face a rapidly emptying house. Lois McClelland was the first to go, moving into a small cottage of her own. She was sorry to leave her roommate at the Kelly home, Jeanne Coyne, who had become a close confidante over the past two years. Jeanne had confessed to Lois that she had been in love with Gene since her adolescence in Pittsburgh. Lois was startled, then, by the news that Jeanne Coyne was going to marry none other than Gene
’s friend Stanley Donen on April 14, 1948. The sudden union of Gene’s two most valued assistants seemed to come from nowhere. “You know it was a close-knit group, a very affectionate group; I don’t think there was anything going on, as it were,” Kerry Kelly recalled of her father, mother, Jeanne, and Donen. “It was very proper, actually. There was a very fast crowd in Hollywood, but my parents and their friends weren’t among them.”18 Gene still treated Jeanne like a daughter; indeed, he gave the bride away and threw a champagne-soaked party to celebrate her wedding.
“Proper” though Gene and Betsy were with their shared friends, both Lois and Jeanne had been conscious for some time that Betsy was becoming interested in other men outside of her and Gene’s circle. Gene’s biographer Alvin Yudkoff alleged that she and Anatole Litvak, director of The Snake Pit (1948), were lovers. However, in Betsy’s candid memoir, she did not admit to engaging in any affairs until 1953.
If Gene knew of his wife’s infatuations, he gave no evidence of it, unless one views his increasingly violent competition on the volleyball court as an expression of anxiety over his marriage. The games now began sometimes as early as eight a.m. Gene’s newest competitors were basketball players from nearby colleges. Though all of them were taller and younger than he, Lois recalled that Gene more than held his own and “ran them ragged.”19 Frequent guest André Previn stopped attending Gene’s parties, claiming that the incessant “competition for center stage . . . precluded having fun, and I realized . . . it was an expendable part of my life. . . . He [Gene] always had this desperate need to be the best.”20
For the most part, however, Gene’s increasing competitiveness did not drive away his guests. Those closest to him saw through his narcissism on the volleyball court and knew of his deep-seated modesty and even shyness in social situations. When he had first arrived in Hollywood, Gene shunned the nightclub scene and still rejected it nearly a decade later. “I’ve always been awkward at them [Hollywood parties]. They bring out the worst in me,” he explained.21
Lois believed that the endless activity at the North Rodeo Drive home was Gene and Betsy’s way of avoiding one another. In Betsy’s memoir, she asserted that she seldom voiced or even consciously felt any discontent. Gene continued to encourage what he hoped would keep her from brooding: her fledgling acting career. Though proud of Betsy’s accomplishments, Gene did at times inadvertently minimize them. Betsy recalled that at the November 1948 premiere of The Snake Pit, “just before the lights in the theater came up, when Anatole Litvak and I would have taken a bow, Gene grabbed my hand and said to Litvak, ‘Tola, we have to run. I’ll be mobbed. See you at ’21.’ And we ran. . . . It was years later in my analysis that I allowed my anger for that moment I’d missed to come up to the surface, the moment I would have stood up to the sound of applause.”22
Gene’s point of view was likely that he was trying to protect his wife as well as himself from being mobbed. And in some situations and to a certain extent, Betsy still relished his protection. It relieved her of everyday responsibilities. Lois described Betsy as captivating and generous but disorganized and unpunctual. Lois and the Kellys’ housekeeper, Bertha, took care of what Betsy overlooked. Often, when Betsy was involved in political or theatrical activities, six-year-old Kerry saw more of Lois than of her mother. But she was by no means neglected; in interviews as an adult, Kerry had nothing but positive memories to share, though she seemed to have more memories of her father than Betsy. Gene’s relationship with Kerry reveals a touching, gentle man free from the volatility and anger he expressed in other areas of his life.
After dinner every night, his daughter reminisced, Gene would help her with her homework and they would often choose a topic and read about it together in the encyclopedia. If he used a word she did not know, he would ask her to look it up in the dictionary and explain it to him. “We [would] talk about whatever it was he thought I ought to know. . . . We were a great family for discussing things from volleyball to the more abstract qualities of life. . . . I was always treated like a ‘little adult.’ He always thought of me as someone he could reason with. . . . He never talked down to me,” Kerry remembered.23 As much as Gene treated Kerry like an adult, he was determined that she have classic childhood experiences as well. He shared his love of the outdoors with her, giving her a taste of the idyllic summer vacations he had spent on the lake as a boy. “I remember a lot of trips to the mountains where we would go fishing and do some climbing. He would take me roller skating and skiing.”24 He even invented “father-daughter work days” when Kerry would accompany him to the studio and watch the activity on the set before lunching with him at the commissary. “If it was school vacation, I’d be around a fair amount. I think he kept professional and personal separate in the sense that being a movie star wasn’t how it felt around the house,” Kerry explained in 2015.25 Gene’s biographer Clive Hirschhorn said that Gene “was determined to become a model father” and, in Kerry’s words, “he was. . . . I had a great gift from my father in the sense he really enjoyed doing stuff with me. It was very lucky for me. It was a very strong relationship.”26
Gene kept Kerry in mind when it came to his visions for future film projects. In an interview with Hedda Hopper, he explained: “One of my pet projects is to direct a series of films for children between the ages of four and ten. Except for occasional cartoons, they have almost nothing in the way of film fare. . . . The graphic quality of the screen medium could be turned to advantage if we made films especially for children.”27
Gene’s ideas for making children’s pictures showed no signs of becoming reality in the immediate future. His work in his next picture, Arthur Freed’s revue-style biopic of Rodgers and Hart entitled Words and Music (1948), was not family-centered entertainment. Gene got his chance to bring more ballet to the moviegoing public, but the concept he had in mind was far from the fairy-tale dancing of The Red Shoes. Indeed, the modern ballet Gene created for the production was, by 1948 standards, the most provocative and sexually charged dance ever to be caught on film.
Gene added a grain of authenticity to the otherwise fictionalized Words and Music. Not a decade ago, he had worked intimately with the film’s subjects in New York. The same could not be said for the cavalcade of other performers in the production. Like The Three Musketeers, Words and Music was studded with stars. Tom Drake portrayed Richard Rodgers and Mickey Rooney was Lorenz Hart. Perry Como, Mel Torme, Lena Horne, Cyd Charisse, June Allyson, and Judy Garland were among the many guest performers.
For his segment in this music biography film, Gene chose to dance to the bluesy instrumental “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” The number had originated in On Your Toes (1936) as a darkly comic ballet in which Ray Bolger dances with the corpse of a girl to avoid being shot. With the aid of Robert Alton and Roger Edens, Gene transformed it into “a jazz ballet tale of Love and Death set among Manhattan’s demimonde . . . a raw, exciting, and sexy dramatic scenario.” In a discussion with a reporter for Interview magazine in 1994, Gene concisely explained the story as one of a “girl vamping the guy, and the bad guy coming in trying to get the girl and shooting her.”28 The number, at seven and a half minutes, was among the first “attempts to show a lengthy stretch of ballet, indeed a complete dramatic story, in a major Hollywood film” since Fred Astaire, Robert Alton, and Vincente Minnelli’s “Limehouse Blues Ballet” in Ziegfeld Follies (1946).29
To play the femme fatale of his piece, Gene selected a dancer he had first noticed in New York when she hoofed with Betsy in 1940’s Panama Hattie. Vera-Ellen had since found modest success in Samuel Goldwyn screen musicals featuring Danny Kaye. The blond, lithe ballerina was an unlikely choice given her relative inexperience in film, but Gene insisted MGM give her a screen test.
Vera-Ellen welcomed the challenge. “Until I got the part of the Bowery girl in the number with Gene Kelly, I had just danced in a thoughtless, easygoing way.” Gene also revamped her look, teaching her to showcase what she termed “a sort of earthy, sexy quality
toward modern [dance].”30 Gene and Vera-Ellen both departed from their wholesome images in their costumes for the number. Gene dressed in a skintight purple T-shirt, formfitting black pants, and a beret. Vera-Ellen wore a platinum blond wig (almost identical to Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity, 1944), a tight yellow and red striped blouse, and a red skirt with a long slit running up the side.
“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” is supposed to take place on a stage; thus, Gene tried to make the scene look as if it were in an actual theater. To accomplish this, he utilized a revolving set rather than cutting from scene to scene. However, to ensure the dance was also cinematic, Gene employed risky camera angles. At one point during the fight scene, Gene hurls a chair that lands within inches of the camera, “almost in the viewer’s face.”31 For the final shot, Gene used a wide-angle twenty-eight-millimeter lens—a technique unprecedented in a musical number. Cinematographers generally agree that a forty-millimeter lens shows what the human eye perceives as the most correct perspective; anything less appears warped. Undeterred, Gene placed the camera with the twenty-eight-millimeter lens in a pit at the bottom of a staircase. When Vera-Ellen falls to her death, she lands close to the camera, which shows her face distorted in a sort of fishbowl effect. “There was a rule at MGM that you could not shoot a woman star with less than a 40mm lens. . . . It was a good rule: MGM was thinking commercially. The executives raised a little hell about it, and then they forgot about it,” Gene explained in 1979.32
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 27