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

by Cynthia Brideson

  15

  Laughing at Clouds

  Gene Kelly had grown from child to man during what F. Scott Fitzgerald fondly dubbed the Jazz Age. In his formative years, he absorbed the vivid characters that flickered on the silver screen: swashbuckling pirates, cowboy heroes, fearless aviators, and mustachioed matinee idols. Young Gene heard American music find its own sound and saw American dance break free from European influences. After World War I, his country became a world power and trendsetter. Flappers and philosophers danced side by side, artifice and realism commingled. Gene had lived through all of this; thus, in the summer of 1951, he delved into his next project, Singin’ in the Rain, with added gusto. In its final form, the screen musical was less a fond look back at the 1920s and more a modern satire with the 1920s as a backdrop.

  The moment Betty Comden and Adolph Green finished their script in October 1950, they clearly saw Gene as the leading man, Don Lockwood. In an earlier draft, they had made the main character a cowboy screen star and had considered Howard Keel for the role. But in the final draft, the cowboy was instead a hammy matinee idol much more suited to Gene’s talents than Keel’s. Indeed, the part bore similarities to that of Serafin in The Pirate. According to Green, “Gene was not afraid of ridiculing himself. That is one of the wonderful qualities in Singin’ in the Rain. He caught the spirit of the spoiled movie star and exploited it like mad. He loved every second of it, I know he did.”1

  Gene’s role in Singin’ in the Rain has become so iconic that it is almost impossible to imagine him not being part of the picture. But Gene initially could not even consider participation in the film—at the time of the script’s completion, he was still entrenched in An American in Paris. Nevertheless, Comden and Green as well as director Stanley Donen had Gene in mind as they formed the scenario. Green recalled, “We were running old movies, things of that sort, saying, ‘Gee, how about doing this?’ Stanley was in on the genesis, in that sense, worrying along with us both, as friends, and hopefully as a future co-director with Gene of whatever evolved.”2

  At first the story wouldn’t come together. As Comden and Green recounted: “We had endless conferences [with Arthur Freed] the first month and a half. We were tempted to go up to the front office and say, ‘Here’s your money back. . . . The whole thing’s off. We can’t write this god-damned thing.’” But finally, with the aid of Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown’s catalogue of Jazz Age hits, Comden and Green hit upon an idea of making the picture the story of a matinee idol’s (and his leading lady’s) struggle to make the transition from silents to talkies. The rest of the plot flowed easily. “It’s a conglomeration of bits of movie lore.”3

  “We did an ‘audition’ for him [Gene], and we read him the script. . . . He fell in love with Singin’ in the Rain right away,” Comden said. It was now January 1951 and, with An American in Paris completed, Gene could not wait to get started on Singin’ in the Rain and reunite with Stanley Donen as his co-director. With Comden and Green, the two men did extensive rewrites that greatly improved the final script. (Gene’s personal copy of the script with his edits was burned in a 1983 house fire, so his precise contributions to the film have been lost to history.) “I can’t complain; the studio . . . let[s] me act, direct, design dance numbers, everything else. It could hardly be said that I’m suffering from a lack of variety,” Gene told a Los Angeles Times reporter, leaning back in a contour chair Betsy had bought him for his office at MGM as a gift for their tenth wedding anniversary.4

  Singin’ in the Rain gave Gene the job of actor, director, choreographer, dance coach, singer, and screenwriter (to an extent). From his first time as director in 1949, Gene admitted, “I never prided myself that I could jump in front of the camera and direct a whole picture alone.” Now, as then, he found Donen invaluable. “When I am in front of the camera, Donen . . . directs. His is the last word. If he doesn’t like a bit of business, particularly comedy, out it goes. . . . Stan and I divide the work when I am not in the scene. Then I direct the actors and he the lighting and camera angles.”5

  Though Gene and Donen could still bring out the worst in one another personally, in their work, they continued to achieve new levels of excellence. In the case of Singin’ in the Rain, they toned down the more obvious comedy evident in On the Town to create an unflinching yet warm satire. “I think its uniqueness is the comedy,” Betty Comden commented in a 2002 interview. “Most musicals aren’t very funny at all.”6

  The film tells a well-drawn story of an egotistical screen actor, Don Lockwood, his obnoxious leading lady, Lina Lamont, his clever but down to earth pianist friend and former partner in vaudeville, Cosmo Brown, and Kathy Selden, the young ingénue who threatens to take Lina’s place when talkies come into vogue in Hollywood in the late 1920s. Like An American in Paris, the picture introduces the primary characters in a novel fashion: via a live radio broadcast at the premiere of Lina and Don’s latest picture at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Over the air, Don narrates for his fans a falsified account of his rise to stardom. He declares that his life’s motto has been “dignity, always dignity”—though, in truth, his career has been strewn with indignity.7 As he speaks, the camera shows scenes of him and Cosmo performing in shoddy vaudeville houses, followed by Don taking any and every bit of degrading stunt work film studios offered him. The fact that Lina does not speak for the entire sequence only heightens the shock—and ensuing laughter—when she utters her first words at a post-premiere party, revealing that she possesses a truly ear-splitting voice.

  On his way to this party, Don leaps into Kathy’s passing car to escape a group of rabid fans. Kathy feigns disgust for the movies, though she actually adores pictures and wishes to be in them herself. Don falls in love with Kathy, much to Lina’s dismay. An exasperated Don tells her: “Now Lina, you’ve been reading all those fan magazines again! . . . Try to get this straight: there is nothing between us. There has never been anything between us. Just air.”

  At the height of Lina and Don’s screen success, The Jazz Singer (1927) is released and suddenly, the powers that be decree that their present picture must be turned into a talkie. Lina’s screechy voice jeopardizes the film’s success—and Don’s future if she remains his leading lady. The first-night preview of Lina and Don’s talking picture, The Dueling Cavalier, is a debacle. The sound is out of sync on several parts, making it sound as if Lina is speaking the lines of the film’s villain and vice versa. Cosmo and Don decide to reshoot the entire film as a musical with Kathy dubbing Lina. When the jealous Lina discovers their stratagem, she does not want to share credit with Kathy. Nonetheless, she tries to force the studio to use Kathy’s voice in all her future productions. “What do they [Don, Cosmo, and studio executives] think I am? Dumb or something? Why, I make more money than—than—than Calvin Coolidge! Put together!” she shouts.

  At the premiere of The Dancing Cavalier, the audience demands a speech and a song from Lina. Don and Cosmo are delighted at this opportunity; they gleefully lift the stage curtain to reveal Kathy singing into a microphone behind Lina. A distraught Kathy tries to flee the theater but Don cries: “Ladies and gentlemen, stop that girl. . . . That’s the girl whose voice you heard and loved tonight. She’s the real star of the picture. Kathy Selden!” He launches into “You Are My Lucky Star.” Next, the camera cuts to a movie poster depicting him and Kathy as costars, in love on- and offscreen; it is, presumably several months later.

  In writing the script, Comden and Green were not exaggerating when they said it was a conglomeration of movie lore. Freed provided a number of tidbits, including the awkward positioning of microphones to capture the actors’ voices in the early days of talkies. Lina Lamont’s painful transition from silent movie queen to talking picture actress was based on Mae Murray’s fall from stardom—not, as is commonly believed, John Gilbert’s decline. Still, Comden and Green included an allusion to John Gilbert in Don Lockwood’s character. In one scene, Don ad-libs dialogue during a first recording for his and Lina’s pi
cture. Kissing her arm, he repeatedly says, “I love you,” just as Gilbert did in his first talkie, His Glorious Night (1929).

  Directing the new flurry of talkies, including Don and Lina’s, is a spastic, eye-patch-sporting director, Roscoe Dexter, a character Comden and Green modeled after both Busby Berkeley and Erich von Stroheim. Other characters were also based in reality. The sometimes-indecisive studio head, R. F. Simpson, is modeled after Freed himself, though Comden and Green claimed this was unintentional. The female lead, Kathy Selden, falls into the mold of the innocent troupers portrayed by Ruby Keeler in early musicals, though her wit and ability to supply quick comebacks closely parallel Ginger Rogers’s roles in the early 1930s. Cosmo, Don’s sidekick, had no real-life counterpart.

  To depict the boom of musical pictures that accompanied the advent of sound, Singin’ in the Rain uses a lively montage set to a medley of Freed’s tunes including “Wedding of the Painted Doll,” “I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Fooling,” and “Beautiful Girl.” The latter number depicts a series of chorines posing as life-size cover girls, a device that had been popularized in the sensational Ziegfeld Follies revues of the 1920s and had often been used in film, including Gene’s 1944 Cover Girl. The number concludes with a Busby Berkeley–inspired aerial view of the girls in a kaleidoscopic configuration. Adolph Green rightly stated that Singin’ in the Rain was particularly beautiful to look at. “They [Gene and Donen] were in charge of the entire project, [and] they were naturally involved with visual design as well.” In the evenings, Gene, Comden, Green, and Donen would meet at Gene’s home to discuss “structure and go over the film shot-by-shot.” “Everything pulled together perfectly,” Comden recalled.8 Roger Edens, assigned by Arthur Freed as associate producer and musical arranger, was also integral to the making of the picture.

  All was not perfect for one person: Jeanne Coyne, who worked on the film as Gene’s dance assistant. Her divorce from Donen had just gone through, and she could not have found it easy to be in such close proximity to him. By this time, Donen was already planning a second marriage, to actress Marion Marshall. However, no accounts exist of tension between the former spouses during filming. Gene, a friend to them both, maintained an air of neutrality. Jeanne had the moral support of Carol Haney, Gene’s second assistant, throughout the filming.

  Gene was nonplussed by Freed’s casting suggestions of Oscar Levant as Cosmo and Nina Foch as Lina Lamont. Casting Levant and Foch would make Singin’ in the Rain virtually a remake of An American in Paris. “I don’t want to work with Oscar again. This is a different kind of movie, and I need somebody who’s more of an entertainer—somebody I can dance with,” Gene told Freed.9 Gene got his way. Twenty-six-year-old dancer Donald O’Connor won the role of Cosmo. Gene’s choice was somewhat unusual, considering that Donald’s previous work had been mostly in B pictures for Universal Studios. A talented performer of tap, ballroom, and eccentric dance, Donald O’Connor never aspired to be balletic. His zany yet wholesome persona lent itself well to straight hoofing and tap dancing.

  Comden and Green (if not Levant, who was extremely distraught not to be chosen for the role) came to agree that Gene was wise in insisting that Donald O’Connor play Cosmo. Donald had a far lighter style of humor than the mordant Levant. As well as being a hoofer, he was also an acrobat of sorts. He could contort his face in seemingly any expression and could climb up a wall and do a somersault in the air before landing on his feet. Donald later stated that Gene “tried to incorporate a lot of my personality outside his own, and then he got himself in there as Kelly. I think that’s the great director that he is.”10

  Freed also heeded Gene’s request to replace Nina Foch with Jean Hagen. Jean was primarily a dramatic actress, having made her name in The Asphalt Jungle (1951), but she had also proven herself a fine comedienne in the Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn vehicle Adam’s Rib (1949). Jean had a rich and deep voice, but she perfectly put on a Judy Holliday–like shriek as Lina. Stories conflict as to who chose Debbie Reynolds, a nineteen-year-old starlet, to play Kathy. Debbie had most recently appeared as Jane Powell’s kid sister in the period musical Two Weeks with Love (1950). Debbie outshone Powell in the film and made a hit singing the popular tune “Aba Daba Honeymoon” with Carleton Carpenter. Her performance in the picture was what made Louis B. Mayer decide she should have the part. He called her into his office and told her: “You are a very talented little girl and I have a surprise for you today. You are going to make a movie with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor.”11 Debbie was thrilled because every picture she had seen and loved most as a girl had starred Gene.

  When Mayer called Gene to his office one afternoon, the actor did not know he would be meeting Debbie.

  “So here’s your leading lady,” Mayer told him.

  “Whaaat?” Gene cried and stared, scrutinizing Debbie.12

  Debbie remembered that Gene opposed her casting. Gene’s and Stanley Donen’s remarks on the subject are contradictory. In 1974, Gene asserted that after seeing her in Two Weeks with Love he immediately knew he had found the right girl to play Kathy. Donen agreed: “We couldn’t wait to get her. . . . I thought she was adorable.”13 Yet in a 1991 interview, Gene claimed that after the meeting with Mayer where he met Debbie, he recalled thinking: “What the hell am I going to do with her?” And Donen called Debbie “a royal pain in the ass” who “thought she knew more than Gene and I combined.”14

  Debbie was aware of Gene’s and Donen’s ambiguous feelings about her. “I soon found out I should have been thinking ‘just go take gas, turn on the carbon monoxide and just close the door.’ Because I was about to start something more difficult, more exhausting, more horrendous than any experience I’d ever known,” she reflected in her memoir in 1988. In a mere three months, she had to become a dancer who could hold her own against Gene and Donald O’Connor. Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyne worked with her for up to eight hours a day. Unlike he had with Leslie Caron during shooting of An American in Paris, Gene did not seem to relent in his role as taskmaster over Debbie. “Gene would come into rehearsals, look at . . . the steps they were teaching me. He was never satisfied,” Debbie explained. “I never got a compliment. Ever.”15

  Debbie offered a different perspective on Gene in a 1996 interview. “He taught me how to dance and how to work hard, to be dedicated and to be loving—as he was to his family and friends.”16 Kerry Kelly recalled that Gene did in fact appreciate Debbie’s efforts and even included her in his social life. “She [Debbie] let me come with her on a cookout trip. I . . . thought that was so great.”17

  In one respect, the dueling stories regarding Debbie match: Gene enforced almost impossibly high standards on the ingénue. He was the first to admit it: “I can be very mercurial, but also patient with slow learners. . . . It is only when they are dogging it that I can become mean. I don’t like amateurs.”18 However, Kerry was quick to remark that her father “never asked anyone to work harder than he did.”19

  On one especially demanding day, Debbie became so dispirited that she crawled under the rehearsal piano and cried. Fred Astaire, passing by, found her there and invited her to watch him practice. She discovered that he too grew frustrated and tired, but he was able to keep calm. “His gesture was an enormous help to me.”20 In part thanks to Fred’s encouragement, Debbie threw herself back into rehearsals with Gene.

  The situation improved by the end of the filming; Debbie grew to have a friendlier relationship with her costar/director. When she had difficulty with a dance step, rather than lose his temper with her, “he’d just smile and say ‘I guess we’ll have to work a little harder.’ . . . I owe more to him than I can ever repay. He literally willed me to dance.”21 Years later, Gene declared that he was surprised Debbie would still speak to him after the harsh drilling he put her through.22

  After weeks of preproduction and grueling rehearsals, shooting began in earnest on June 15, 1951. The dialogue sequences were simple to film; the majority of shooting time was spent on the s
ong and dance portions of the picture. Stanley Donen observed that part of what made Singin’ in the Rain different was that more than half its running time was composed of musical sequences. Debbie’s dance numbers, “Good Morning,” “All I Do Is Dream of You,” and “You Were Meant for Me,” required the most rehearsal time due to her inexperience. In execution, the latter scene harkens back to a sequence between Gene and Judy Garland in Summer Stock, “You Wonderful You.” In both films, Gene’s character uses stage scenery, lighting, and props to create a romantic setting, and the scene begins “tentatively” and ends with a “comfortable parting.”23 Though the number appears calm and romantic onscreen, an unfortunate mishap occurred during its filming. Before the cameras began to roll, Debbie remembered she had forgotten to remove gum from her mouth. She quickly did so and stuck it under the ladder on which she was to stand during Gene’s serenade. “When Gene leaned back, his head somehow caught the gum, and when he straightened up, he left a nice clump of hair behind. Well, he let out a yell, and I just turned pale. . . . That was very nearly the end of me,” Debbie recalled.24

  Another flare-up took place after Gene relentlessly went through a tap routine with Debbie and Donald that was to accompany “Good Morning.” The scene takes place at Don’s mansion and depicts him, Cosmo, and Kathy brainstorming ideas of how to save Don and Lina’s disastrous talkie. To cheer themselves, they sing and dance everywhere from the counter of Don’s bar to his sofa. As Debbie and Donald rehearsed, Gene continually told them they were out of step. “You’re so stupid, you’re not doing the step right. You’re stupid,” he told Donald. Thirty-five years later, Donald told Debbie that Gene picked on him because he was in fact always mad at her. But Gene knew that if he kept yelling at the young actress, she would hold up production with her tears. “So he screamed at Donald, who wouldn’t cry,” Debbie concluded.25 Finally, Gene realized it was he who was tapping the dance steps incorrectly. This only fueled his temper; he chided his costars, who had noticed his fault all along, for not informing him of it.