He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics)

by Cynthia Brideson

  Gene and Minnelli were in sync in their vision for the film’s major ballet sequence. After Nina Foch caught chicken pox from one of the youngsters on the set, rather than shoot around her, Gene, Minnelli, and Freed used their time to discuss the ballet in detail. Freed insisted on placing it at the end of the picture because nothing else could top such a production number. Minnelli showed a rough cut of the picture, sans ballet, to Irving Berlin before proceeding. Berlin asked dubiously, “You say you’re going to film a seventeen-minute ballet at the end of the picture?” Minnelli nodded. “I hope you fellows know what you’re doing,” Berlin murmured.42

  Minnelli, Freed, and Gene received no more encouragement from Betty Comden and Adolph Green. After viewing the same rough cut as Berlin, they were full of accolades.

  “Release it now,” Comden insisted.

  “But the best is yet to come,” Minnelli told her.

  “Do you really think you need a ballet? I don’t,” she said.43

  Berlin, Comden, and Green had a solid foundation on which to base their doubt. In Yolanda and the Thief, Freed and Minnelli had included a sixteen-minute fantasy sequence using only the language of dance. The film had failed. But that was five years ago; since that time, the phenomenon of The Red Shoes had taken place, not to mention On the Town. Thus, Freed, Gene, and Minnelli were unmovable in their conviction to forge ahead with the ballet. Minnelli, Gene, and costumer Irene Sharaff for all intents and purposes lived in Minnelli’s office for a week making sketches and plans.

  Before long, head of production Dore Schary and other members of the art department joined the group’s meetings about the ballet. The non-combatant Minnelli had to “sell them” on the idea or admit defeat—which he was not willing to do. “It’s an emotional nightmare which alternates with great moments of joy,” he explained. “Then the hero returns to sad reality. He thinks of Lise. He searches for her throughout Paris. He finds her, then loses her again. Paris loses its color and excitement. The ballet doesn’t review what’s happened in the picture so far like On the Town. It shows the hero’s inner conflict.”44 Gene offered his own words of persuasion, explaining that their goal, through choreography, was to emulate what French Impressionist painters created through their use of color, light, and form. He insisted that the ballet must re-create the musical mood of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” The ballet should suggest rather than narrate. It was more abstract and Minnellian than concrete and linear, as was Gene’s style. This did not mean the ballet lacked Gene’s stamp. He planned to keep Leslie’s balletic style in the sequence strictly classical in order to accentuate his modern all-American moves.

  The man who ultimately convinced Metro’s executives to endorse the half-million-dollar experiment was none other than Louis B. Mayer. When Minnelli showed Mayer sketches for the ballet imitative of Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas works, Mayer declared, beaming, “My daughters will like that.” Alan Jay Lerner asserted that Mayer’s approval of the ballet “was probably one of the last major picture-making decisions he was to make.”45 Mayer knew that Schary and his New York boss, Nick Schenck, wanted him out of the studio. But as long as he held any power, he was going to advocate for Freed. One wonders if Gene would have revised his opinion of Mayer had he known of the mogul’s influence on the inclusion of the pivotal ballet. In 1994, Gene was still declaring he “hated the man. I thought he was bizarre, and he never liked me.”46

  With the ballet approved, Gene, Saul Chaplin, and Minnelli made themselves “thoroughly familiar with every note and nuance of Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris.’”47 Then the group held nightly meetings with Jeanne Coyne and Carol Haney during which they began to match the sections of the music with the painters who had been selected.

  The group decided to employ a single red rose as the starting and ending image in the ballet. The ballet begins with Jerry at the annual Beaux Arts Ball—a rowdy but colorless affair at which everyone is dressed in black-and-white harlequin attire. The rose, then, not only symbolizes Jerry’s lost love but acts as the springboard for Paris, a “fickle city” drained of color, to come alive.48

  In Jerry’s first reverie, he sees the bustling Place de la Concorde, one of Paris’s major public squares, appear in the vibrant style of Raoul Dufy. Jerry appears doing what Freed insisted be a “George M. Cohan strut” that would immediately identify him as American. Jerry attempts to join the crowd but goes unnoticed. Suddenly, Lise appears in the throng. Jerry dodges past cars and people only to find that she has disappeared. The scene then dissolves to the quiet flower market of Madeleine at dawn, executed in the style of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet. Lise appears, ethereal, and she and Jerry dance together around a fountain bathed in blue light. The scene is more fantasy than reality; Lise is still unattainable. The dance is infused with a feeling of emptiness. Here, Gershwin’s haunting instrumental “Blues” plays from a lone trumpet in a style Gene insisted must be “sexy and sensuous.”49

  The stillness of the scene is immediately juxtaposed by the next image, done in the style of Maurice Utrillo, a French painter specializing in bright cityscapes. A group of American servicemen dancing down the street cheers Jerry. He joins them until they come to the Zoological Gardens, styled after Henri Rousseau. Jerry, “purged of sadness and resentment,” again finds Lise and they dance together in a carefree manner. Paris pulsates with vibrancy as Jerry’s “dream expands.” He indulges in fantasies reflecting “temptations that mirror [those in] the plot,” including becoming a café singer at the Moulin Rouge. He is dressed in a skin-tight, flesh-colored body suit like one pictured in Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster Chocolat Dancing in Achilles’ Bar. Emanuel Levy claimed that the scene evoked the plot point that money “turns artists into gigolos.” In a surreal twist, Lise appears as a provocative can-can dancer as the scene changes to the Place de l’Opéra, shown in the style of Vincent van Gogh. “Their hysteria becomes an orgy of fulfillment when, without warning, the nothingness returns. . . . Color drains out of everything. . . . He’s left again, hopeless and alone.”50 Jerry stands with only the red rose in his hand. The camera zooms in close to the bud before he drops it on the ground amid piles of confetti and streamers thrown by the revelers at the ball. Among the only gloomy faces at the party are Milo, Lise, Adam, and Henri, whose paths cross unexpectedly.

  The camera shows a trail of cigarette smoke and follows it to the smoker’s face (Henri), revealing that he has overheard Lise tell Jerry she loves him but cannot be with him (a confession she made immediately before he falls into his reverie). Jerry looks over the balcony moments later to see Henri’s car, which he assumed had left earlier with Lise in tow, pull up downstairs. Henri emerges and kisses Lise good-bye; she runs up the stairs to Jerry. They embrace and walk off together into the night as the camera pans upward to show a panoramic view of Paris.

  The original screenplay included a scene to wrap up the stories of Milo and Adam. Immediately before the ballet, the scene showed the two “slightly drunk, feeling sorry for themselves” and suggested “that [Milo] would go on to sponsor him after [Jerry’s] defection.” In a rare case of poor judgment, Minnelli ordered the scene cut, feeling that it ruined the flow of the film and made Jerry’s character less likeable. One critic claimed it was omitted because of Minnelli’s devotion to his “morbidly beautiful mise en scène. In other words, the unresolved feeling we’re left with . . . is an expression of Minnelli’s essential melancholy.”51 The lack of closure for Adam and Milo is one of the picture’s major weaknesses; the other is the fact that Lise’s character is not intriguing enough to convince audiences that Jerry’s desire to win her would be so intense. Director Stanley Donen summed it up: “You look at the movie and you just don’t care.”52

  Though the screenplay had its flaws, the ballet saved the production from being, as Dore Schary put it, “just a cute and nice musical.”53 The ballet remains the primary reason people still watch An American in Paris today, and yet it is not essential to the momentu
m of the plot. In fact, few of the musical sequences are fully integrated into the story line. Roger Ebert remarked in 1992 that the picture “was essentially a clothesline on which to hang recycled Gershwin songs.”54

  Though no one in 1951 could guess how critics and audiences might react to the picture, Gene and Minnelli had the approval of at least one viewer: Judy Garland. Shortly after the movie completed principal filming in January 1951, Judy caught a preview of it. She put in a call to her ex-husband in spite of the late hour. “Well, I’ve seen your little picture,” she said. “Not bad. Only a masterpiece.”55

  Gene’s back-to-back movie projects, as ever, did not impair his active social life. Leslie Caron, now a regular guest at the Kelly house parties, never failed to be surprised at the simplicity of her hosts’ abode. The front door opened straight into the living room, which featured an L-shaped sofa, a baby grand piano, and a bar. The bar was “a serious affair with barstools, professional enough for the real Irishman Gene was. The back wall was all glass and looked over a volleyball court. . . . There were no locks on the front door—you just walked in—and you never locked your car either.”56 Kerry, now age eight, had become more interested in her parents’ parties. “I was around all the time. I would help set the table . . . and get the food organized. . . . Then it would be my bedtime and I’d pretend to be asleep and then I’d sit on the stairs and peek through the banisters because I could see the piano from there. Very fond memories.”57

  Some aspects of the parties, however, were strictly for the adults, particularly when a guest was outside the Kellys’ normal social circle. One such guest was a young San Francisco filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, who had written a letter to Gene about his recently completed sixteen-millimeter movie entitled Fireworks. Sundays were typically reserved for screenings of films at the Kellys’, so one weekend Gene invited Anger to show his film. “I don’t know how he [Anger] happened to write to Gene,” Betsy Blair commented. “I do know that none of us had any idea what we were about to see. . . . We watched in stunned silence this fascinating, surreal, homo-erotic essay on film.” At the film’s conclusion, Gene “leapt to the rescue, put his arm around Kenneth Anger’s shoulders, and took him into the study, where he congratulated and thanked him.” Anger shook Gene’s hand and left the house, at which point the rest of the guests fell into hysterical laughter “at the memory of the cascades of candle sparks from the sailor’s crotch” in the film.58 Everyone fell silent in embarrassment when they glanced up to see that Anger was in the hallway, having forgotten his overcoat. He left with a backward wave of his hand. He never appeared at another Kelly party. Betsy claimed that Gene was the politest to Anger of the group and found it difficult to restrain himself from lecturing his guests about their childish behavior.

  Gene could have lectured himself for his own unfortunate behavior one evening when Noël Coward was the guest of honor. Arthur Laurents, who persisted in sarcastically calling Gene and his friends the “Real People,” claimed that when Coward arrived, the guests “sprawled on the floor more than usual, ostensibly to make us more Real than ever by displaying indifference to superficiality.” Coward, according to Laurents, was not a Real Person because he represented the upper classes. But once Coward began to engage in self-deprecating humor and satiric song, he turned Gene’s “plaid-and-shag rumpus room into his own elegant drawing room [and] he turned us into his guests, then he turned the room into his shrine and us into his worshipping sycophants.” Gene could not stand Coward’s dominance; before the applause had ended, he “was on his feet, taking over the floor . . . in his own house on a shaggy rug he knew was not for dancing . . . but he tried to dance because that was what he could do best and Noel Coward couldn’t do very well.” Jeanne Coyne and Carol Haney, whom Laurents called Gene’s “secretary-fans,” danced with him. Laurents elaborated that Coward “wanted it to work. . . . Gene was so needy that even I wanted it to work. If it weren’t for the rug it might have. . . . It was very embarrassing.” Betsy finally “saved him” by calling it a night, and the party ended.59

  More successful, if odd, was a special dinner the Kellys’ housekeeper, Bertha, suggested they host. “I know a salesman—you have to invite him. He sells waterless cookers. He’ll prepare dinner for twenty people. . . . All you have to do is provide drinks, dessert, and coffee,” Bertha declared. Betsy agreed. But, not trusting that the waterless cookers would produce edible food, she surreptitiously informed her guests that the affair was a potluck. The salesman—a fellow navy veteran, much to Gene’s delight—appeared to have no knowledge of the movies. He failed to recognize Gene or any of the guests he saw, including Hedy Lamarr, John Garfield, and Lena Horne. Only a few moments after the salesman arrived, Gene opened the door to two unexpected visitors: George Cukor and Greta Garbo. A flustered Betsy, “grinning ear to ear,” ushered the luminaries into the already crowded kitchen, where the salesman was “extolling the merits of cooking without water and the wonders he was going to perform when he finally got around to cooking our meal.”60 Garbo seated herself on the counter next to the sink. The salesman did not recognize her either, so, unlike the other partygoers, he was not dumbstruck by her presence. In blissful ignorance, he prepared a giant rice pancake full of nuts and mushrooms that was “unsalted, oversteamed, and tasteless.” Garbo was the only one to eat the pancake with relish. Then the salesman urged everyone to buy “Reverewear.” Garbo bought the whole set of his waterless cookers for $150. Hedy Lamarr and Gene, “out of embarrassment,” took sets of their own. When the salesman left, Betsy recalled that a general uproar arose over the hideous meal and the overpriced cookers. “This brought on one of Gene’s lectures—they were quite well-known and regarded with tolerant amusement by our friends,” she said. “Don’t laugh at a fella trying to earn an honest buck!” he chided.61

  The rest of the evening became a dedication to Garbo. Comden and Green did numbers from their nightclub days with the Revuers for her, plus “assorted bits of indescribably cuckoo nonsense.” Garbo laughed during their performance. As always, the Kellys’ party, according to Comden, “winded up with everyone who felt like it getting up and performing, not to be ‘on,’ not to impress anyone, but out of sheer exuberance and just for the hell of it.”62

  On March 21, 1951, Gene, Vincente Minnelli, Arthur Freed, and Lela Simone paced the lobby of the Crown Theatre in Pasadena. The first preview of An American in Paris was under way—and people were filing out of the theater halfway through the film. Minnelli declared he felt “downright suicidal.” With his colleagues, he went to a bar across the street and drank several martinis. Fortunately, Minnelli’s death wish vanished after he discovered that the reason for the audience’s mass exodus was that the projectionist had neglected to raise the volume to an audible level. “The second preview at Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades was a triumph,” Minnelli reported.63 Satisfied movie patrons called the picture “outstanding” and the controversial ballet garnered a round of applause at the film’s close.

  Critics and moviegoers shared the enthusiasm of preview audiences when the picture opened in New York on October 4, 1951. After its nationwide release, An American in Paris became the sixth-highest-grossing film of the year. The production received mixed reviews, but Freed, Minnelli, and Gene all considered themselves victors where the ballet was concerned. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times commented: “[The] ballet . . . is, beyond question—a truly cinematic ballet—with dancers describing vivid patterns against changing colors, designs, costumes and scenes. . . . It is the uncontested high point of the film.”64

  Though Crowther did not single Gene out for praise, the vast majority of other critics named him as the artist who elevated the film. A reviewer for Time magazine rhapsodized, “Throughout, the film breathes the buoyant spirit of Gene Kelly. In 1949’s On the Town . . . Kelly staked his claim as the most original talent in Hollywood musi-comedy; the new picture makes his claim secure.”65

  The success of An American in Paris acted as a sor
t of barometer of the country’s growing hope for the decade. True, it had begun on a black note, but it could still have splashes of color. As shown, albeit symbolically, in the “American in Paris Ballet,” it was possible that a colorless world could come back to life. An American in Paris, then, was a most timely film for the country in 1950–1951. According to author Barbara Wolf in a 1976 critique, the picture’s “setting of idealized artifice [was] a never-never land of sheer delight and wish-fulfillment. . . . Yet the sunny surface of the film is a veneer. Its underlying story tells of compromised lives and hopes, amid false promises of fulfillment.”66

  Gene’s life, too, concealed an underlying tension. Outwardly, he was at the top of his art and enjoyed a steady home life. But twenty-eight-year-old Betsy Blair was no longer the child-wife he had taken in 1942. She had grown up and no longer needed Gene’s guidance and protection. Though she was still very much a part of the Kellys’ everyday family life, more and more often she was receiving offers to further her career that she could not resist—and sometimes they required her and Gene to be a continent apart.

  Gene’s next picture, Singin’ in the Rain, a virtual ode to optimism, was precisely the film he needed at this point in his life. Arthur Freed commissioned Betty Comden and Adolph Green to write the screenplay. He gave them no instructions except to use his and Nacio Herb Brown’s tunes of the 1920s and 1930s and take the film’s title from their cheeriest composition, “Singin’ in the Rain.”

  No one involved in the project foresaw that it would take on more significance than their previous efforts. Gene later claimed that if he had had to guess in 1952 which of his pictures would endure through the decades, he would have chosen An American in Paris, The Pirate, or On the Town. “We [the Freed Unit] did our best on every picture,” Gene declared. “But we never said, ‘Now this one will last.’”67