The location shooting (all done with “New York, New York, It’s a Wonderful Town,” as an accompaniment) was, according to Simone, “the most important thing” to shoot because it packed a dizzying tour of New York into less than ten minutes. Gene later reflected: “When I think that we managed to shoot stuff at Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street, Chinatown, the Statue of Liberty, Greenwich Village, Central Park, Columbus Circle, Rockefeller Center, and Grant’s Tomb, I still can’t believe it.”21
Gene and Donen worried that they would not be able to complete the shooting in time partly because of issues involving Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin. Gene and Jules were always ready on time, but Frank “[held] up the parade,” often appearing so late that the sun had moved to an inopportune angle that made filming impossible. Though Jules Munshin was punctual, he refused to rehearse a scene atop the Loew’s Building because of his crippling fear of heights. Lela Simone recalled that Jules was “an absolute wreck. We finally had to put him on a rope . . . around his waist. . . . But in one [scene] . . . where we shot on a roof, I thought he was going to commit suicide. . . . This man suffered hell. . . . He got through it, but he was very unhappy on the picture, very unhappy.”22
Another reason for Jules’s unhappiness was that he found himself inexplicably shunned by Gene and Donen during the remainder of filming. Though the full explanation for the men’s shift in attitude toward their colleague is unclear, Simone asserted that much of it had to do with Donen, who “was impossible as usual.” Just as Donen and Gene had brought out each other’s immaturity on the set of Take Me out to the Ball Game, so did they again on the set of On the Town. Jules’s open display of vulnerability may have been at the root of Gene’s lessened regard for him. “I can’t explain why,” Lela Simone said. “They [Donen and Gene] are not very polite and nice people, you know.”23
Simone eventually had the opportunity to see Gene’s more generous nature. At the last minute, Gene and Donen decided they needed another sixteen bars for the “New York, New York” sequence atop Loew’s Building. Simone frenziedly supplied them with the extra bars despite the fact that she had no current playback with which to work. And yet, “it worked perfectly,” Simone said. She acknowledged that Gene was not “dumb technically. He realized that it was terribly difficult [to add the extra bars]. That is why he didn’t say anything [when I delivered them]. . . . He didn’t want to start discussing this . . . [but] he was delighted when I delivered them.”24
Gene had a different way of expressing his gratitude. “Would you mind going to the very top of the roof and be in the shot?” he asked Simone.
“Why? It’s so high that it’s like the Alps. What do you want me to do there?”
“I think you should be up there like a tourist would be and just turn around slowly as our truck with the camera goes by so that you can see that everything is okay.”25
Though at times Gene exercised his authority in negative ways, his demand for perfection had less to do with his ego and more to do with his mission to see everybody in the picture reach their full potential. Ann Miller recalled him being temperamental in a constructive manner; he expected nothing from others he did not expect from himself.
Gene could not be docile in his role as director. During the film’s brief one hundred minutes, he had to ensure that eleven musical sequences, which boasted “a bewildering variety of ballet, soft-shoe, ethnic, tap, and comic hoofing,” seamlessly moved the characters along in their adventures.26 Lennie Hayton, Johnny Green, and Saul Chaplin aided Edens, Comden, and Green in scoring the lively, humorous new songs for the film. Chaplin had just begun working for MGM after leaving Columbia, where he and Gene had worked together on Cover Girl.
Leonard Bernstein briefly came to Hollywood to help adapt his pieces for the film, but he found the entire experience of On the Town less thrilling than the rest of the musical crew. It pained Bernstein to see only a handful of his compositions make the cut. Three of his creations, however, accounted for the most important numbers in the film: “New York, New York” and two ballets, “Miss Turnstiles” and “A Dream Ballet.” “New York, New York” retained Bernstein’s music but the lyrics were cleansed to read: “it’s a wonderful” rather than “it’s a helluva” town. “Miss Turnstiles” was purely instrumental and required no changes to appease censors.
In creating a dance to accompany the music, Gene utilized a technique that set a precedent for future ballets he choreographed: a type of fantasy in which a boy describes to his friends how his love interest might behave in given situations. During his descriptions, the screen shows the girl acting out his visions through dance. The climactic number in the film, which Gene renamed “A Day in New York,” is a reverie recapturing the events of Gabey’s day, conveying the emotions he experienced in the short hours during which he met and lost Ivy. The number ends quietly with Gabey slumped beside the poster of Ivy he found during his first subway ride. The ballet follows the formula of Gene’s “Alter Ego” sequence in Cover Girl—it escalates in passion, color, and movement before concluding on an introspective note. The stage ballet was more abstract and symbolic than Gene’s, but the thesis of both was lost love.
Gene, taskmaster though he was, did not push Jules Munshin, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, and Ann Miller to work eighteen hours a day learning ballet. Rather, he engaged four professional dancers to stand in for them during the “Day in New York” sequence. He felt that only he and Vera-Ellen were experienced enough to perform the number. Betty Garrett’s stand-in was a pixieish, twenty-five-year-old dancer named Carol Haney. Gene fondly described her as “a clown with curves.”27 He saw Carol as a real asset and persuaded her to join him as a full-time choreographic assistant. Like Jeanne Coyne, Carol seemed to possess an almost telepathic knowledge of what Gene wanted from a scene. Though Gene’s decision not to use the film’s cast in the ballet led him to Carol, in hindsight, that choice was his primary regret concerning On the Town. “It [using stand-ins] never works in films,” he remarked. “The public won’t buy it.”28
The most effective part of the dance involves the two actual cast members, Gene and Vera-Ellen. The sequence uses a bright red background and a spotlight trained on Gene (in his sailor suit) and Vera-Ellen (in a tight black leotard). They continually elude one another in a pas de deux on either side of a ballet barre, and audiences can feel the romantic tension. The sequence fell under scrutiny from MGM’s censors. As Gene explained in 1979, “I never laid a glove” on Vera-Ellen. “There was nothing the censors could say. If they did, I could have said, ‘What? Do you have a dirty mind?’ But yes, it was very sensual, and the colors did it.”29
Viewing a rough cut of the film, Arthur Freed had no qualms about the ballet, which he thought was better than “The Red Shoes Ballet” in the 1948 picture. Despite the merits of Gene’s ballet, it was not an artistic breakthrough, nor was it integral to the plot. According to Donen’s biographer Stephen M. Silverman, it “emphasized the weak storyline” and served as a cue for the audience to go out and get popcorn.30
The remaining musical sequences in On the Town were less artistic but more entertaining. Two of the most notable songs were new compositions by Roger Edens, Comden, and Green: “You Can Count on Me,” a tune rich in wordplay emphasizing the teamwork theme of the picture, and the title song, “On the Town.” The latter follows the six principals from the top of the Empire State Building to the streets of New York. The execution of the number is reminiscent of “Make Way for Tomorrow” in Cover Girl; the camera remains trained on the cast members, linking arms as they rush forward toward the lens, singing:
We’re going on the town
New York
We’re riding on a rocket
We’re going to really sock it . . .31
Though Edens’s music is not as complex as Bernstein’s, it nonetheless captures the “get up and go” quality of the film. The screenplay, music, and choreography cooperate to such a degree that the frequent dance numbers and songs do not c
ause the audience to roll their eyes and shift in their seats, grumbling, “Get on with the story!” Gene expounded on how On the Town achieved this: “In the old musicals, they just said, ‘I love you’ and started singing. Finally, the public said, ‘This isn’t real.’ That’s something we changed a lot at MGM. You have to stay in character or come out of that character in some kind of fantasy way, but not lose the character.”32
Filming for On the Town wrapped in mid-July of 1949, totaling forty-seven days of shooting and $2,111,250 in production costs.33 After On the Town, Gene said, he and Donen were no longer teacher and pupil but co-creators. That assessment, as well as Gene’s reliance on others, like Roger Edens, Saul Chaplin, and Lela Simone, was evidence of how he thrived on collaboration. In fact, biographer Clive Hirschhorn asserted, without his colleagues, “Gene’s work would have come to a standstill. . . . He needed people behind the camera to make sure he hit a certain mark on a certain beat and this took expertise.”34
But Gene could not be certain that the film was his and the Freed Unit’s “apex” until he witnessed its reception. At the movie’s first preview in Pacific Palisades, moviegoers began applauding at the film’s finale. Freed turned to the relieved Gene, Edens, and Donen and declared, “If it were a show, it’d run a year!”35 (An ironic statement, considering that On the Town had been a show, and it had actually run for two years.) The picture was experimental in a sense, yet it was successful because, unlike The Pirate, it was “ambitious [but not] spoiled by any signs of ambitiousness.”36
When On the Town was released at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on December 8, 1949, New Yorkers met it with the same enthusiasm as preview audiences. The line waiting outside stretched for nine blocks. With a gross of over $4,428,000, the picture broke box office records and more than recouped its budget. The film proved to be just as much a critics’ darling as an audience favorite. Even Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was ecstatic: “Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen . . . have cleverly liberated action . . . and . . . have engineered sizzling momentum by the smart employment of cinema techniques.”37 A critic for Time magazine deemed the “Day in New York Ballet” as “clumsily inserted,” but otherwise considered the picture a breakthrough in its genre. The reviewer credited Gene and Donen with turning “out a film so exuberant that it threatens at moments to bounce right off the screen. . . . It also leaves a happy impression that MGM has hit upon a bright new idiom for cine-musicals and a bright new directing team that knows how to use it.”38 On the Town set a precedent not only for future pictures in the Freed Unit but for later on-location musicals such as The Sound of Music (1965), Sweet Charity (1969), and other dance-heavy films, including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and West Side Story (1960). Louis B. Mayer, who had been against the project since its inception, stopped Gene one day at the studio barbershop and murmured: “I was wrong about that picture. You fellows did a good job.”39
On the Town earned only one Oscar nomination, but it took home the award at the twenty-second ceremony on March 23, 1950. The statuette went to Lennie Hayton and Roger Edens for Best Scoring of a Motion Picture. Fred Astaire, though deserving of the honorary Oscar he earned this year, stole the spotlight from Gene and Donen’s choreographic achievements. Gene and Donen’s superior cinematography received a nomination at the Golden Globe Awards, but did not win the prize (which went to Walt Disney’s animated The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad). On the Town earned Betty Comden and Adolph Green their first Writers Guild Award for Best Written American Musical, sealing their futures as Hollywood screenwriters. Adolph Green wrote to Leonard Bernstein, “I hate people who go to Hollywood” but, he confessed “I have a grisly feeling that we’ve [he and Comden] really got a future in this place, Lord help me.”40
The success of On the Town established Gene as a formidable director. Because it was the first film to truly give him the opportunity to do what he loved best—direct—he never lost his regard for the milestone On the Town marked in both his career and the history of film. “It’s a bit dated now, but that film still has a warm place in my heart,” he said decades later.41
How to follow the success of On the Town was no easy question for thirty-seven-year-old Gene Kelly. If he believed he had reached the height of his talent in the picture, then the only direction to go, he feared, was down. Gene’s daughter Kerry recalled her impressions of her father at this time: “Though he was always surrounded by people who believed him to be as outgoing in his private life as he was on the screen, he was very complex and really rather lonely. He was always restless, trying to prove something to himself all the time. . . . He wanted to make one perfect film, and then he would be happy.”42 Gene loved On the Town, but he did not see it as the perfect picture, particularly because of the ballet stand-ins and a soft shoe between him and Vera-Ellen, “Main Street,” which he believed never came to life. “When I see myself on screen,” Gene explained, “I’m never satisfied.”43
Though the ability to completely relax seemed perpetually to evade him, Gene’s home life remained a haven to which he could retreat and enjoy the privacy he rarely found elsewhere. He was still the content family man he had been since marrying Betsy Blair and was never above pitching in to help with household chores. “One of Gene’s characteristics is neatness,” Betsy explained in a 1949 article. “Whenever he leaves a room, it’s infinitely more orderly than when he entered. . . . He’s always been a spic-and-span gentleman.” Gene kept his intellectual pursuits as well ordered as his home. “Gene seems to remember every book he has ever read,” Betsy said. “[He] loves to read in bed, mostly biographies [and history]. He’s a restless sleeper . . . and keeps chocolate bars on his night table to munch on when those tossing periods start.”44 Gene was also interested in fine art and began collecting impressionist paintings.
Despite Gene’s fame, he and Betsy remained down to earth, as did their daughter. She was untainted by the Hollywood lifestyle. “They had a very conscious attitude about it and they talked to me about it growing up . . . the phrase was that I was not going to be allowed to become what they called a Beverly Hills kid,” Kerry explained. “That meant I had chores and much less allowance than most kids I knew. Shopping was not what we did together. It was a real conscious effort on their part for me to have an ordinary upbringing. We climbed trees, we ran up and down the alley, and had a gang of kids who built forts and stuff.” Kerry also recalled “another ordinary family thing” about the Kellys: their many pets. “We had a lot of dogs and cats and fish and hamsters, a horned toad and god knows what. . . . We had a lot of pets! [Our] cats . . . started having babies and they kind of took over my playhouse in the backyard. . . . We gave them to some of the neighborhood kids.”45
Gene passed on his love for reading and culture to Kerry as well. He told her stories of his own invention each night, which he made either frightening or romantic, depending on the girl’s mood. They maintained their nightly reading of the encyclopedia, but now that Kerry was older, Gene and Betsy took her on educational field trips. “My parents took me to a lot of museums and historical places. . . . I really enjoyed [doing] that stuff together, but, you know, sometimes I thought it went on a bit long,” Kerry said with a chuckle. Added to outdoor sports such as roller-skating, bike riding, camping, and skiing, Kerry summarized the activities she did with her parents as a “pretty well-rounded set.”46
Gene’s insistence on keeping Kerry and Betsy safe from the prying eyes of columnists grew in the wake of his elevated success. In a revealing interview, Gene told journalist Alyce Canfield that he was now “more of a recluse. I notice that I sometimes dodge public eating places. . . . My life is out of my hands. The moment you step out of the house . . . you’re public property.”47 Ben Novick, Gene’s grandson, reflected that Gene “resented the fact that the public, perhaps understandably, portrayed him or saw him only through his roles.”48 Most reviewers assumed that the extroverted personality he projected into his roles was his own. Asked what act
ing method he used, Gene simply replied that he pretended to be as much like his character as possible. Thus, the conception that he was the same person onscreen as he was off was in truth a testament to his remarkable ability to make his characterizations believable. The extroverted, dominant behavior Gene often displayed at house parties or at MGM was possibly his way of denying his shyness or the feelings of inadequacy that he dealt with through his work.
Betsy, unlike her husband, enjoyed getting out of the house. Her social activities kept her away from home a great deal. Her friendship with screenwriter/actress Salka Viertel had intensified; Betsy explained that, having “withdrawn from the volleyball games [at the Kelly parties], I was free to jump in my car and spend the afternoon at what I was sure was the most fascinating place in the world [Salka’s home]. Sometimes Kerry would come with me, but mostly she chose the fun of [Salka’s] backyard.”49 At Salka’s home, Betsy found an ideal outlet for her interest in socialism and enjoyed innocent flirtations with Salka’s guests, including playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht.
Gene accepted Betsy’s increasingly independent life outside the home, although it made him uneasy. But having witnessed the dissolution of Jeanne Coyne and Stanley Donen’s union, he put more effort into keeping his family together—even if it meant resigning himself to the fact that Betsy’s outside interests at times outweighed her domestic ones.
The root of the problem in the Donen-Coyne marriage was Donen’s immaturity and callousness, characteristics also evident in his behavior with colleagues at MGM. He eventually married four times, admitting that his motto may as well have been “Eat, drink, and re-marry.” Jeanne later called her years with Donen the “black spot of her life.”50 In an article describing the couple’s divorce proceedings, one reporter recorded: “Miss Coyne testified that she had wanted a home and children, but that they [she and Donen] only had dinner alone at home about three times during their three-year marriage.”51 The couple separated in December 1949; their divorce was not finalized until 1951.
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 30