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

by Cynthia Brideson

  After all the suffering involved in “Good Morning,” Gene was still unhappy with Debbie’s dancing and decided someone should dub her taps. He went into the recording room to dub the sound of her feet as well as his own. Gene’s lifelong drive for perfection and incessant dissatisfaction (which, Debbie intuited, was largely directed at himself) could not help but transfer to his costars. He did not take long to apologize to Donald O’Connor for using him as a whipping boy. “That’s okay, Gene. But next time you do it, I’ll kick you in the balls,” Donald told him, with no trace of his usual clowning.26 There is no record that Gene ever unleashed his frustration on Donald again.

  The friendship—and generosity—Gene showed to Donald O’Connor went far in compensating for his inconsiderate treatment of the dancer. The first musical sequence in the film, “Fit as a Fiddle,” does not spotlight either actor more than the other; they are completely equal. Dressed in gaudy, green, checked suits, they perform a comic number with violins that garner “boos” from their unreceptive audience. (The routine was a true joy for Gene. He later claimed it was almost autobiographical, reminiscent as it was of his and his brother Fred’s early attempts to please audiences.) But the best evidence of Gene’s thoughtfulness was his giving Donald a solo comic number that took up a considerable slice of screen time. Donald’s routine ultimately outshone all other sequences in the film with the exception of the title number. Gene’s need to be in the spotlight while playing charades or volleyball at his own home clearly did not always extend to his work on the Metro lot. “I had always felt badly for Donald. . . . Nobody before ever seemed to know how to show him off properly,” Gene explained.27 Gene sometimes exploded at Donald, yelling at him to stop clowning on the set. But he realized the value of Donald’s fooling around—the spontaneous stunts Donald performed whenever he saw Jeanne Coyne and Carol Haney kept them in constant hysterics. Gene noted what made the two women laugh most uproariously and employed Donald’s tricks into “Make ’Em Laugh.”

  “[Gene’s] main contribution [to “Make ’Em Laugh”] was his ability to see something very good and utilize it. And his only other contribution was where I hit the wall and screw up my face. He thought that was funny. I didn’t,” Donald recalled.28 Gene insisted that the sequence of Donald’s face contortions be in close-up; his knowledge of what would work not only in cinematic comedy bits but in cinedance proved just how much he had learned during his decade in pictures. Donald offered a concluding thought on his costar/director: “Gene and I had a relationship like George Burns and Jack Benny. We’d just look at each other and start to laugh.”29

  Donald performed the comic sequence to an original tune Arthur Freed had composed for the film. “Make ’Em Laugh” serves as Cosmo’s effort to cheer Don after a dismal rehearsal for his first talking picture. It employs nearly every slapstick gag in show business. One of the most amusing bits in the number is Cosmo’s use of a headless dummy as his “partner.” He pantomimes that he is flirting with it until the situation reverses and the dummy gets fresh with him. The scene also includes Donald’s trademark stunt of walking up a wall and doing a somersault.

  The cast and crew were amused that the melody of “Make ’Em Laugh” bore an uncanny resemblance to Cole Porter’s “Be a Clown,” which Porter had written for Freed’s The Pirate. The plagiarism was apparently unintentional on Freed’s part. Betty Comden recollected that on the day the number was to be shot, Freed brought Irving Berlin to the soundstage. “He [Freed] was very proud of both the song and the number,” she said. “[Then] Irving walks onto the set, and we were all horrified. We were all thinking, ‘My God, Irving’s going to hear the song and recognize the similarity! What’s going to happen?’ . . . So Irving’s listening, and he’s listening, and then you could see his face changing.”

  “Well that’s ‘Be a Clown,’” Berlin declared. Freed “suddenly got very flustered and said, “Oh, well, we . . . that is, the kids . . . we all got together and . . . Well, let’s move along!” Freed pulled Berlin away from the set, and everyone “fell on the floor laughing.”30 Lela Simone remembered that it “was one of those things Freed did not want to have anything to do with discussing. . . . It [just] slipped by.”31 Cole Porter never came forward with an accusation of plagiarism.

  The other original tune composed for the film bore no similarities to any existing compositions: “Moses Supposes.” Roger Edens wrote the music and Comden and Green supplied the tongue-twisting lyrics. The song, performed by Cosmo and Don, takes place in an elocution classroom and acts as a springboard for the young men to lampoon the professor’s pretentious verbal flourishes. The two dancers behave like naughty schoolboys throughout the entire number, rolling the puzzled teacher about in his chair, dumping over his trashcan, and putting a lampshade over his head. The energetic number is a textbook example of synchronized dance onscreen.

  The most intricate number in the picture was a ballet. By 1951, ballet in musicals had become virtually mandatory though, in Comden’s view, the medium “didn’t really fit in [Singin’ in the Rain]. But we had no control over it.”32 Gene and Donen managed to make it fit. As a lead-in to the sequence, Don and Cosmo approach R. F. Simpson to explain their vision for the big production number in Don’s first talkie: it takes place before the film’s hero is knocked on the head and dreams that he is living during the French Revolution (a scenario strikingly similar to that in Du Barry Was a Lady). Rather than employ a dialogue-dense explanation of all that occurs in the ballet, Gene and Donen followed the first rule of good writing—show, don’t tell. Thus, they treat viewers to a twelve-minute ballet depicting their conception. Immediately after Don and Cosmo’s description of the number, R. F. states: “I can’t seem to visualize it, I’d have to see it on film first.” The line was an in-joke; Arthur Freed often spoke such words when listening to ideas for production numbers.

  Freed was, however, able to visualize one idea for the sequence. Cyd Charisse had recently returned to MGM after a maternity leave, and he wanted her to appear in the ballet. “Gene wanted [Carol Haney], but Arthur asked me if I’d do it. . . . I told Arthur I’d be delighted,” Cyd wrote in her memoir. Gene and Cyd began rehearsals with Carol Haney as an assistant. “She [Haney] was the epitome of unselfishness. Even though she must have been consumed with disappointment, she did everything she could to make things easy for me,” Cyd recalled.33

  Cyd Charisse’s experience on the set of Singin’ in the Rain was far different than Debbie Reynolds’s. She concurred with her peers that Gene “was such a hard worker, such a perfectionist. . . . He was always intense. Everything was just the way he wanted it to be.”34 However, she saw this as a plus, later calling Singin’ in the Rain “the justification of my career as a dancer.”35 Lela Simone once asserted that Gene did not take well to leading ladies outshining him; Gene refuted her statement. “I believe it’s my duty and also the way the film should be that you direct everything toward the girl, make her look good. If she looks good, the pas de deux looks good,” he explained.36

  Gene’s relationship with Cyd was not compromised by her stunning looks or her size. At five feet seven, she was at or above Gene’s height in heels. In a 1972 interview, Gene said of Cyd: “Now there was a big girl. We had a beautiful relationship, but she was a big girl. Every time I lifted her over my head Fred Astaire would say: ‘How can you do that, kid? That’s the way you get a hernia.’”37 Cyd declared that when Gene “lifts you, he lifts you! Fred [Astaire] could never do the lifts Gene did and never wanted to.” Gene “didn’t want” Cyd to “look like a ballet dancer on the screen.”38 This was quite the opposite of Gene’s methods when working with Vera-Ellen or Leslie Caron, whose balletic styles he endeavored to enhance. Gene’s intention was to bring out a sexier side to Cyd’s dancing because her character was a sensuous vamp.

  The ballet, like the film, is a hodgepodge of movie lore. Historians Earl Hess and Pratibha Dabholkar described it as “a purposely designed kaleidoscope of show business clichés, p
articularly those relating to early sound pictures.” The ballet follows a naïve young dancer’s climb to stardom; when first seen, he is dressed in a suit too small for him, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and a straw boater, all of which bring to mind silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. He pounds the pavement of New York exclaiming, “Gotta dance!” or “Gotta sing!” until one agent finally likes what he sees and pulls the dancer into a speakeasy to negotiate a contract.39 The dancer’s eyes are drawn to a mobster’s girlfriend (Cyd), who sports the angular brunette bob of 1920s actress Louise Brooks. The mobster, who has a prominent scar on his cheek and flips a coin in his palm, resembles George Raft in his early gangster pictures. The girl rejects the young dancer and teases him in an alluring dance during which she takes off his glasses, polishes them on her stocking, and kicks them across the floor. The dancer dejectedly leaves the speakeasy and pursues his career, but he does not forget the girl.

  A montage follows, showing him climbing the show business ladder, always performing the song “Broadway Rhythm.” Adolph Green credited Gene and Donen for the concept of showing “the hoofer go[ing] from vaudeville to the Palace to the Ziegfeld Follies . . . and [having] the costumes and arrangements [get] classier and classier though [he is] singing the same lyric.”40 Also attributable to Gene and Donen are the film’s costumes, shown most vibrantly in the ballet. Arthur Freed apparently hated Jazz Age garb and suggested that the picture instead use “interpretations” of 1920s clothing. “Gene and I stuck to our guns and went for the real look of the times,” Donen explained.41

  The scene then shifts to the dancer attending a high-class speakeasy, apparently for a party held in his honor. Upon entering, he freezes in the doorway. At the top of a staircase leading into the dining room is the girl from long ago. She appears angelic, clad in white. He drifts into a “fantasy within a fantasy” in which he and the girl are separated by a long billowing scarf later dubbed “the crazy veil.”42 They dance in each other’s arms for a moment, only to be separated again by the lengthy veil. Gene later claimed the dance with the veil was among the most challenging he ever created. The wind machine used to make it billow was so strong that Jeanne Coyne and Carol Haney had to (out of the camera’s view) hold down Cyd’s ankles to prevent her from being knocked over by its force.

  As the dancer comes out of his reverie, he sees a coin flipping before his eyes. Scarface extends a diamond bracelet to the girl, and she promptly follows him out the door. The dancer is left in the dark, his back to the lights of Broadway flashing merrily behind him. Suddenly, a hoofer identical to himself when he first came to the city waltzes by. “Gotta dance!” the boy exclaims. The dancer shrugs, snaps back into reality, and animatedly follows the young hopeful. He launches into “Broadway Rhythm” and is soon surrounded by a chorus of brightly clad flappers amid the neon marquees of Broadway’s most iconic theatres. The ballet’s thesis is the age-old adage “The show must go on”—most appropriate for a film that is all about how show business must continue in spite of love woes, changing times, and technology.

  Though cleverly inserted in the film and one of Gene’s finest pieces, the “Broadway Ballet” strays from his long-standing stance that dance must further a film’s plotline. The ballet is, as historians Hess and Dabholkar describe it, “a self-contained entity, complete with its own story and characters.”43 Researcher William Baer noted that it “doesn’t fit that well into the narrative of such a tightly-structured and fast-paced film.”44 Gene and Donen had their own qualms; they considered the piece too long. The sequence was expensive: it cost $100,000 more to put on film than the “American in Paris Ballet.”

  In direct contrast to the lavish ballet is the simplest, least assuming number in the picture: “Singin’ in the Rain.” It consists of one performer—Gene—using an umbrella, rain puddles, and a streetlamp as props. Gene had devised the number to come after Don and Kathy’s first kiss, the point when his character is most blissful. “The idea was to be so much in love and so ecstatic and joyous that you reverted to childhood and splashed about. You know all kids do that,” Gene explained in a 1975 interview.45

  To fluidly transition into the number, Roger Edens wrote an introduction to the song that served as a bridge. Don dreamily strolls down the street, looks at the rain, shrugs, and closes his umbrella before quietly singing Edens’s interlude: “Doodle, doo, doo, doodle, loodle, doo, doo . . .” Next, he tap-dances—one foot on the sidewalk, one in the gutter—stands under a spurting drainpipe, and swings off the side of a lamppost. As the scene’s climax, he jumps into the biggest, deepest puddle he can find in the middle of the street and proceeds to twirl in a circle with his open umbrella held out before him. He stops abruptly when he comes face-to-face with a somber policeman. He looks sheepish only for a moment, then smiles and sings an explanation for his behavior: “I’m dancing and singing in the rain.” The number closes on a quiet note, as do all Gene’s best solos. He silently turns, heads down the street, and hands his umbrella to a grateful man hurrying past him. The policeman stares after Don, crossing his hands behind his back in puzzlement.

  The number was not simple to create even if it appeared so onscreen. MGM used so much water to simulate the rainstorm that the water pressure in Culver City was lower for a few hours because of it. To create a night sky, a black tarpaulin was stretched across the set—creating a greenhouse effect. Watching the exuberant Gene in the number, one would not guess that he was in fact suffering greatly during the filming. He had recently caught the flu and had a temperature of 103; the humid air under the tarpaulin must have been torture. Gene was able to stay on beat thanks in part to Stanley Donen’s strategic placement of rain puddles as markers for his feet. On a lighter note, the moisture in the air caused Gene’s tweed suit to grow tighter and his pants shorter as the scene progressed. Donald O’Connor remembered that it was “really hysterical.”46

  With Gene’s illness, “the studio will take care of it” phenomenon sprang into action. The day after filming the title number, Gene had Betsy call the first assistant on the film to alert him he would not be coming in that day. Before long Betsy spotted MGM’s doctor coming up the front path. “Ah they’re spying. Lock the door and tell Bertha not to answer it,” Gene said. He and Betsy giggled while the “poor man knocked and rang and rang.” When the doctor started to move toward the rear entrance, Betsy made a mad dash to lock the back door. Gene smiled weakly and told her, “Good work.”47 The next day, he was better.

  Filming, complete with re-takes, for Singin’ in the Rain came to a close on December 26, 1951. As soon as shooting completed, Debbie Reynolds fled to Lake Tahoe and promptly slept for eighteen hours. The cost of the production totaled $2,540,800, $620,996 over budget. The final print of the movie was delayed several weeks because the technicians working with the footage “were so confused by the non-synchronization” scene. “They kept trying to make it match. . . . They finally admitted, ‘We can’t get this thing in sync,’” Betty Comden recalled. “So Gene and Stanley had to explain to them that that was the point. It shouldn’t be in sync!”48 Such was the comical end to Gene Kelly’s most comical film.

  At the time Singin’ in the Rain was being shot, genuine storms brewed behind the scenes at MGM. Tensions between Dore Schary and Arthur Freed had escalated after Louis B. Mayer’s exit from the studio, which occurred during production in August 1951. The end came for Mayer after Schary received one hundred thousand shares in the Loew’s corporation—more than any other employee. Mayer gave Metro’s New York boss, Nick Schenck, an ultimatum: either Schary went or he would. Schary won the showdown. Mayer resigned with the declaration: “I shall pursue projects at a studio and under conditions where I shall have the right to make the right kind of pictures.”49

  Many believed that when Mayer left, Freed would follow him. Though Freed stayed, his assistant, Lela Simone, recalled that “ice cold air blew through the third floor [of the Thalberg Building]. Freed detested Schary . . . and vice versa.”50 Under Ma
yer’s reign, the name of MGM was synonymous with elegance and taste in all genres, but above all in musicals. When Mayer left, leading man Turhan Bey claimed, “In every meaningful way, it was the end of Hollywood.”51 Schary succeeded in temporarily keeping the studio solvent, but overhead costs remained high and, with his lack of finesse, the quality of future Metro productions was in severe jeopardy. How the Freed Unit would continue under Schary’s aegis left all its members unsettled. Schary’s preference was for films that, rather than being sheer escapism, contained social content. “He would sell his soul for a pot of message,” one detractor grumbled.52

  Arthur Freed still operated more or less independently at MGM. As long as he could, he was going to keep his “little Camelot” together. He went forward with plans to produce a musical adaptation of what he considered the greatest American novel, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck had been on Freed’s mind since 1945, but the project had been continually shelved. Now, in 1951, Freed resurrected it. He hoped to make the film, in his words, the “kind of picture Mark Twain would have loved.”53 He wanted it to be a Gene Kelly picture, and Gene was eager to do it. After all, the dancer had long expressed his wish to make films that would appeal to children.

  Freed chose composer Burton Lane to pen music for Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics. He had already tapped Vincente Minnelli as director, Irene Sharaff as costume designer, Gene as “the Duke” and choreographer, Danny Kaye as the King, Dean Stockwell as Huck, William Warfield as Jim (Warfield had played Joe in Freed’s Show Boat, 1951), and Margaret O’Brien and Louis Calhern as two members of the Grangerford family. Suddenly, plans for the production came to a standstill. Freed called Minnelli to his office and somberly informed him that Gene Kelly had decided Huck Finn was not going to be his next project. Still, Freed, Lerner, and Minnelli planned to resume the film at a later time when Gene told them he was ready.