Walters dealt with Gene’s temperament on Summer Stock with great diplomacy. Gene rearranged many dance sequences so that he would never be dancing beside Carleton Carpenter, a young and handsome member of the theater troupe who happened to be six foot three. “Gene is quite short, so I went through the entire picture never standing up straight,” Carpenter recalled.67 “Mr. K. didn’t like me and was mean to me for [the] entire film. Always with a strange smile! Very odd. Judy loved me.”68 (Nevertheless, Gene admired the young man’s talent. Forty years later, Gene came backstage to congratulate Carpenter on his performance in Crazy for You.) Walters recalled that Gene and the film’s official choreographer, Nick Castle, engaged in such heated arguments that he thought they would come to “fisticuffs.” But in the end, Lela Simone asserted, “Kelly did what Kelly wanted.”69
Gene was not always in an argumentative mood. During Judy’s frequent absences, he kept busy organizing brisk games of basketball in the rehearsal hall or concocting ideas for a solo dance. The solo he eventually produced saved the picture from being what he termed “a piece of crap.”70 As was his custom, Gene created a dance inspired by the environment in which it takes place (a barn). He employed a squeaky floorboard as a basis for his rhythm. Then, he stepped on an old newspaper and experimented with the sounds it made. The number grew in complexity when Gene noticed that the newspaper he used did not tear easily and could not be synchronized with his dance steps. He became obsessed with finding just the right consistency of paper and spent hours on his quest. “We found one year [of newspaper] that was perfect and we sent the poor prop man around town looking for something like 1935 copies of the L.A. Times. . . . They thought we were crazy,” Gene recalled with a grin.71
Kerry Kelly explained the ingenuity behind her father’s routine: “He would make music out of objects and space. . . . It was weeks and weeks of experimenting . . . to make it work . . . [but] all that behind the scenes work [made it look] fortuitous and easy.”72 Like the “Day in New York Ballet” and the “Alter Ego” sequence, the “squeaky floor” routine ended quietly with Gene as a lone, lit figure. A prime example of cinedance, the number would lose all effectiveness if performed on the stage not only because of its subtle use of sound but also because of its camera angles. From the back row of a theater, no one would be able to see Gene dividing newspapers into smaller and smaller squares with his dancing feet. Years hence, Gene chose the dance as his favorite of all his solo routines.
The part of Joe Ross in Summer Stock proved to be superior in more areas than dance. It gave Gene an opportunity to play a character with a job that mirrored his own. As dance director of his company, he puts his troupe through grueling rehearsals—demanding perfection even if it takes all night. In one scene, viewers can see hints of Gene the notorious taskmaster. “Your job is to do what I tell you and do it right for a change. . . . You’re gonna buckle down and get to work like everybody else. You’re gonna play it the way I want it if I have to drag a performance out of you with my two hands!” Joe yells at a whining Abigail.73
Composer André Previn described the real-life Gene as a man almost identical to Joe Ross: “I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he was wrong.”74 However, Joe and Gene were not without their tender sides. Before a nervous Jane goes onstage for opening night, Joe is much like Gene in his treatment of Jane/Judy. He rubs her feet, gives her a bouquet of wildflowers, and softly says: “Remember, if you get nervous, I’ll be there right by you . . . every second.”75
Gene’s soft side was also apparent in his generosity to Jeanne Coyne. Still in a fragile emotional state after her separation from Donen, Jeanne found welcome diversion as Gene’s assistant and an extra in the film. She is present in almost every scene in which Joe’s troupe is featured. Always clad in either rehearsal shorts or a pair of denim pedal pushers, she is seldom far from Gene. He even takes her on his left arm during “Dig Brother Dig” (the film’s obligatory teamwork number).
After the principal photography was completed in spring 1950, Judy Garland left Hollywood for a vacation in the rarefied resort town of Carmel, California. Under the guidance of a holistic healer, she took a rest cure at a spa and after only three weeks had shed twenty-five pounds. Her miraculous transformation coincided with the creation of what became one of her most iconic numbers, “Get Happy.” Vincente Minnelli suggested that for the number Judy dress in a black tuxedo jacket, a man’s fedora tipped over one eye, and black nylon stockings. The number was a smash.
In spite of the film’s old-fashioned story line, Gene’s and Judy’s irrepressible screen presences and the film’s above-average dance routines made Summer Stock surprisingly successful among both critics and audiences. Upon its premiere on August 31, 1950, Bosley Crowther claimed that Gene’s squeaky board dance was the “best spot in the show” aside from Judy’s “Get Happy,” calling the dance “a memorable exhibition of his beautifully disciplined style.”76 Budgeted at $2,025,000, the picture grossed $3,357,000, but overhead costs resulted in an $80,000 loss.
Sadly, Summer Stock was Judy’s last film for Metro. “They [at the studio] loved her and they wanted her to be happy, to be able to go on to bigger, greater things [so they severed her contract],” Joe Pasternak wrote. “And she did go on, and her appeal has become even more universal.”77 Gene and Judy’s relationship had come full circle; she had seen him through his first film at MGM, and he had seen her through her last. Judy’s marriage to Vincente Minnelli ended shortly after her break with the studio. For the next four years, she found a new beginning through her record-breaking concert tours at such prestigious venues as New York’s Palace Theatre and London’s Palladium.
Gene, too, went on to greater things. His next assignment put him under Vincente Minnelli’s direction for the third time in his career. The picture, a Technicolor Arthur Freed production entitled An American in Paris, boasted a full George and Ira Gershwin score and an original screenplay by the young writer and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner. Lerner had won acclaim as the writer and lyricist of the 1946 Broadway hit Brigadoon.
The promise of his new screen project reinvigorated Gene and he approached the assignment with as much, if not more, excitement than On the Town. He explained to biographer Clive Hirschhorn: “I combined the energy I still had with an intelligence and an awareness of my capabilities that I certainly could not have had when younger. . . . Not only did I know exactly what I was striving for in pictures, but I felt that I now knew how to achieve it. . . . I can only be grateful that when I finally matured as an artist . . . I had the physical stamina to explore my ideas to their fullest.”78 Gene saw An American in Paris as his opportunity to achieve the level of perfection he had been seeking for nearly a decade in Hollywood.
14
Who Could Ask for Anything More?
In 1950, Gene fell in love, a passion akin only to “art or faith; it can’t be explained, only felt.”1 The object of Gene’s ardor was a locale synonymous with love: Paris. Gene’s words could not have been more eloquent had they been penned by Alan Jay Lerner himself as part of the screenplay for An American in Paris.
Klosters, Switzerland, had been the Kellys’ only intimate experience with Europe before 1950. Gene and Betsy had seen Paris only briefly when they had attended a ballet two years before. In 1950, they finally took the grand tour of Europe. Betsy reminisced: “We were out for culture and history. We weren’t corny enough to say it out loud, but that’s what we were doing.” The couple went on their tour alone, leaving Kerry with Betsy’s mother in New Jersey. They sailed from New York on the Queen Mary, bound for Southampton. Among the sites on their itinerary were the Stratford Theatre in London and the city’s bombed-out East End. Then came Paris. Gene “adored Paris and learning French and learning French songs,” Kerry later reminisced. Betsy fancied the city just as much as her husband. “It is now, has been, and always will be the most beautiful, romantic place in the world. . . . We knew we’d come back often.”2
In Italy, the
couple admired the beauty of Venice and Rome. Gene and Betsy were both surprised by the class disparity they witnessed: less than a mile from the pope’s opulent summer residence, Castle Gondolfo, the people in the surrounding countryside lived in poverty. Gene had witnessed similar excess in the Catholic Church during his trips to Mexico in the late 1930s. Indeed, the disparity was what had led him to embrace atheism in college. Still, Gene claimed that his mother would never forgive him if he went to Rome without seeing Pope Pius XII and obtaining a medal for her blessed by His Holiness. Betsy could hardly conceal her disdain. She recalled, “Good little Marxist that I was, the Pope himself represented the enemy.” When the pope blessed a silver medal for Kerry, it gave Betsy pause and she found herself thinking: “If I am wrong about everything [her political ideologies], at least Kerry will be okay.”3
The pope and Gene shared a genial conversation while Betsy stood back, medal in hand.
“I understand you are an actor and dancer and you bring happiness to people in your work. For that, heaven awaits you.”
“Thank you, your Holiness,” Gene replied and went on, “I think a friend of mine came to see you last year. Frank Sinatra.”
The pope gave him a blank stare, at which point a cardinal whispered, “He’s a singer.”
“Yes, my son. I love the opera,” the pope replied obliviously.
Before leaving the castle, Gene bought a medal for his mother, murmuring to Betsy that she would never know the pope had not actually blessed it. “I wasn’t about to give up Kerry’s,” Betsy concluded.4
Although Gene was not a regular churchgoer, both Betsy and Kerry emphasized that he lived his life free of scandal and upheld moral and ethical convictions. “He felt very deeply and strongly about women and children . . . and for anything that was threatening to them . . . he would be very fierce about,” Kerry explained in 2015.5
Gene and Betsy’s trip was all too brief, for Gene had to return to Hollywood to fulfill two minor obligations. He had agreed to make a cameo appearance in Stanley Donen’s second solo screen project, Love Is Better Than Ever. Gene also served as advisor for sequences in the film set at a dancing school. The picture went into production in December 1950 but was not released until March 1952. The lightweight romantic comedy starred a teenage Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Stanley Donen allegedly had an affair during filming, though his and Jeanne Coyne’s divorce was not yet final. In Gene’s cameo, he runs into Taylor and her beau (Larry Parks) at the restaurant 21 and patiently listens as Parks brags about Taylor, proclaiming her to be the best dancing teacher in New England. Unfortunately, Gene’s cameo did little to boost the film’s popularity at the box office. It lost $362,000.
Next, Gene appeared in It’s a Big Country: An American Anthology (filmed from April to September 1950). The patriotic film, a series of eight unrelated stories, was designed to showcase the diversity of the nation. Boasting a star-studded cast including Gary Cooper, Ethel Barrymore, and Van Johnson, the ambitious film was marred by a weak script and flawed execution. Gene’s “chapter” in the film, “Rosita, the Rose,” placed him in the role of a breezy young Greek named Icarus Xenaphon. He has a longstanding dislike of Hungarians until he falls in love with Rosa (Janet Leigh), the daughter of a Hungarian shopkeeper. As Rosa’s little sister was Sharon McManus, who had so memorably danced with Gene in Anchors Aweigh. However, even the considerable talents of Gene, Janet, and Sharon could not make the tale of love triumphing over prejudice effective. The film was a major financial disaster, grossing only $655,000 when it had cost $1,013,000 to produce.
Gene, because he had no creative influence over Love Is Better Than Ever or It’s a Big Country, easily put their failures behind him. His only thought now was how best to pour his newfound love of Paris into the production awaiting him.
From its inception, an unparalleled amount of creativity, innovation, and camaraderie infused An American in Paris. The idea for the picture came about during one of the many evenings Arthur Freed spent dining with Lee and Ira Gershwin. Over dessert, Freed asked Ira if he would sell him the title “An American in Paris.” “I’ll sell it to you under one condition—the picture uses only Gershwin music,” Ira replied. Freed readily agreed. Very early in the project’s evolution, Freed considered it as a vehicle for Fred Astaire, but after formulating a plot around which to center Gershwin’s music, Gene Kelly emerged as the more appropriate candidate.
The story, about a former American GI turned painter, was a concept for which both Freed and Gene Kelly took credit. The two men had read the same article in Life magazine detailing the lives of painter-soldiers living in Paris to study art, thanks to funds from the GI Bill of Rights. Alan Jay Lerner, with Gene’s personality and sex appeal in mind, added much-needed romantic elements and intrigue to the story line. As he explained, he decided to write of “a kept man [who] falls in love with a kept woman.”6
The film tells the story of Jerry Mulligan (Gene), who, after years as a struggling artist in Paris, finds a patron in the person of wealthy heiress Milo Anderson. She is interested in him for more than his art and proceeds to buy him a private studio. In short, she plans his life for him. Jerry has other ideas. He falls in love with a young shopgirl, Lise, who happens to be engaged to his friend Henri, a popular musical performer. Inevitably, Henri discovers Lise and Jerry’s love for one another and gives them his blessing. Milo is left crushed and without a struggling artist to indulge. An objective observer of all the drama in the film is Jerry’s confidant, Adam Cook, who dubs himself the world’s “oldest child prodigy” on the piano.
Gene was ecstatic to resume his fruitful professional relationship with Vincente Minnelli. He also found a new friend in Alan Jay Lerner, whom Minnelli deemed “an artist with none of the artist’s pretensions.”7
The film, because it was directed by Minnelli, was more dreamlike and subtle than Gene’s cocksure, literal execution of On the Town. Gene had hoped to film on location, but the mayor of Paris as well as the city council imposed so many restrictions that shooting would have been impossible. Minnelli biographer Stephen Harvey considered it a blessing in disguise that the picture was filmed instead on the MGM lot. “Had they [the film’s creative team] been bound to the notion of dancing through a succession of Parisian parks and boulevards, the result might well have been . . . a kind of On the Town in berets. Instead, the need to conjure up a dream Paris with lights and canvas prompted a far bolder leap of the imagination.”8
As imaginative as the picture promised to be, Minnelli realized it had to be approached as a commercial entertainment free of the pretensions that marred Yolanda and the Thief and The Pirate. But being commercial did not mean the film lacked ingenuity—or talent. Those engaged for the picture so far were only the best. They included Johnny Green (head of MGM’s music department), Conrad Salinger and Saul Chaplin (both musical arrangers), Irene Sharaff (as costumer for the dance sequences), and Jeanne Coyne and Carol Haney as Gene’s choreographic aides.
Though casting posed some challenges, Minnelli had only one man in mind to play Adam: Oscar Levant. Levant, the foremost player of Gershwin songs in America and one of Gershwin’s closest friends, “lent the enterprise a sort of legitimacy.”9 According to Arthur Freed’s assistant Lela Simone, Minnelli and Freed “adored Oscar. . . . [Freed] absolutely worshipped Levant and vastly exaggerated his talent.” Simone claimed that Freed paid for Levant to live in a mansion in Beverly Hills with three servants on the premises.10 Minnelli called Levant “a sponger of the first order . . . and the second and the third.”11
The rest of the cast members were newcomers to the Freed Unit. Cool blond Nina Foch was placed in the role of Milo, winning the part over Oscar nominee Celeste Holm. Minnelli had originally envisioned Maurice Chevalier as Henri. When the actor proved to be unavailable, suave French entertainer Georges Guetary, younger and far more believable as Lise’s fiancé, was cast.
For the role of Lise, Gene made one thing clear: he wanted a genuine French girl. Fr
eed tried to persuade him to accept either Cyd Charisse or Vera-Ellen, but Gene was adamant. He already had one dancer in mind as his leading lady: Leslie Caron. He had first seen her two years before when he and Betsy had attended the Ballets des Champs-Élysées. As casting was under way, he flew to Paris and arranged a meeting with her at the Hotel Plaza Athénée. “He was gentle and respectful and spoke of doing a film test,” Leslie later wrote.12 Of Gene’s choice, Lela Simone said: “Leslie is not exactly a beauty, you know? . . . But [for the ballet technique needed in the film], she knew a great deal . . . and was able to do that very well.” Aside from her ballet training, the nineteen-year-old’s broken English and hesitant manner perfectly suited the shy, unassuming girl Lerner had characterized in his script. Simone remarked that Gene often preferred working with beginners whose looks and abilities did not detract from his own. “[He] shied away successfully not to get into people who were shining above him. He never sought after a star.”13 Simone’s observation is consistent with Gene’s pattern of working best with young and impressionable female partners. Though his previous leading ladies Kathryn Grayson and Esther Williams had been ten years his junior, both were their own bosses; they did not need, nor did they want, Gene as their supervisor. Leslie Caron, nineteen years younger than Gene and completely new to America and films, did not balk at Gene’s guidance.
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 32