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

by Cynthia Brideson

  To make his number in Deep in My Heart a retrieval of family life, so to speak, Gene requested his brother Fred as his dance partner. The brothers, as had been the case since childhood, felt no sense of rivalry. Fred’s career had progressed well, even if he had not won the international fame of his brother. Since 1948, Fred had been working in New York City, mainly for NBC to direct television shows. Additionally, he choreographed and directed the Ice Capades for three years and served as dance director at the Latin Quarter nightclub for star acts. Apparently, at the nightclub Havana Madrid, he helped to introduce and popularize the cha-cha.

  In Deep in My Heart, the two Kellys danced together for the first time since they had played in cloops nearly two decades before. The number begins with them wearing 1910s-style white pin-striped suits and straw boaters (garb almost identical to that worn by Gene and Fred Astaire at one point in their 1946 skit in Ziegfeld Follies). A crowd of bathing beauties surrounds them and they change into striped swimsuits, all the while zealously singing “I’d Love to Go Swimmin’ with Wimmin.” The number, strictly vaudevillian in style, did not require any great innovation, but it did require more than a little “expended energy and boisterous clowning.”62 As much as Gene enjoyed hoofing with his brother, the breathless pace of his work took its toll on him. He admitted that his body had given out, though his mind was still so active that at times it worked half the night.

  When Deep in My Heart premiered on December 10, 1954, Bosley Crowther claimed the picture “calls for a strong digestive system and a considerable tolerance for clichés.” However, he saved complimentary words for Gene and Fred’s performance as the high point of the film, deeming their number “just about as funny as it sounds.”63

  At the close of 1954, forty-two-year-old Gene had fallen to the lowest point of his career. He saw himself lagging behind as his friends and family diverged from him, going on to greater things. Stanley Donen thrived. Carol Haney was a star. Vincente Minnelli, with whom he never again teamed, went on to direct several masterful works in all genres of film throughout the latter half of the 1950s. And Betsy had come into her own as a screen actress, thanks to another sleeper hit: Marty.

  In February 1954, fan magazine columnists were all atwitter with the news that the Kellys were headed for divorce. Gene, most claimed, was straying—not Betsy. “The talk that he and his wife, Betsy, had separated and were planning to divorce because of his so-called extra-curricular ramblings, makes Gene laugh—and then get angry,” a writer for Movie Pix reported. The writer concluded: “Gene is as dedicated to Betsy as he is to his wonderful, creative work.”64

  Gene was indeed as dedicated to Betsy as ever. Indeed, had it not been for him, Betsy would not have landed her breakthrough role. After her small part in the Ethel Barrymore drama Kind Lady (1951), she had been blacklisted and unable to find work in American pictures. Now, hearing that she was being considered for the role of the awkward schoolteacher Clara in Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, Gene was determined to see that she got it—blacklist or no blacklist. His first step was to invite Chayefsky to dinner.65 After meeting her, Chayefsky knew Betsy was Clara. But there still remained the pesky fact that she was blacklisted.

  The film’s producer, Howard Hecht, asked Betsy to write a letter to HUAC that would clear her. She attempted to write one but realized that it would not “pass muster” because she had not named any names. Betsy was miserable—until Gene “rode to my rescue. . . . With kid gloves off [he went] raging into Dore Schary’s office; ‘You know her. You know she’s not going to overthrow the government. You have to do something. She really wants this part. . . . Do something, Dore or I’ll stop shooting.’”66 Gene was presumably shooting Deep in My Heart at this time. Schary heeded Gene’s request and called the American Legion in Washington, using his influence to remove Betsy from the blacklist. Betsy got the part and was spared writing the dreaded letter to HUAC.

  Marty was in production from September to November 1954. The picture was slated for release in March 1955. At this point, Gene was vying for a role in a new picture—one that he felt would do for his film career what Pal Joey had done for his stage reputation. The part was that of professional gambler Sky Masterson in Samuel Goldwyn’s film adaptation of the Broadway hit, Guys and Dolls. “I was born to play Sky the way Gable was born to play Rhett Butler,” Gene declared. All he needed was permission from MGM. “It was a part that would have meant a lot to me. But . . . those new bastards at MGM refused to loan me out.”67 Goldwyn was unhappy about losing Gene, but he recovered faster than the actor. “If I can’t borrow you from MGM then I’ll get the best actor I can get,” he told Gene. “So he got Marlon Brando! I was very sad I wasn’t able to do it.”68 Gene was so devastated by MGM’s inconsiderate treatment of him after his years of loyalty that he began to make serious plans for leaving the studio. Fourteen years later, reflecting on this, one of the darkest periods of his life, Gene remarked, in a wry understatement, “I’ve had my fair bundle of disappointments.”69

  17

  The Unhappy Road

  It’s Always Fair Weather, the title of Gene’s next film, in no way reflected the climate in the actor’s professional or personal life in the fall of 1954. MGM offered the picture as a consolation prize to Gene after denying him the part of Sky Masterson in Samuel Goldwyn’s Guys and Dolls. At the outset, It’s Always Fair Weather seemed a worthy prize; in fact, Gene’s reformed heel character in the new film heavily resembled Sky. Overall, the picture was more a quasi-sequel to On the Town than MGM’s answer to Guys and Dolls. Like On the Town, It’s Always Fair Weather boasted Arthur Freed as producer, Betty Comden and Adolph Green as screenwriters/songwriters, and Stanley Donen as Gene’s co-director. Gene, who had professed that he wanted to stay away from directing after the debacle of Invitation to the Dance, embraced the distraction from his personal woes such responsibility would give him. In spite of its sunny title, It’s Always Fair Weather is largely considered a “downbeat” film. Green explained the premise: “Three guys meet during the war, they think they’ll be friends forever, and years later, when they’re reunited for a day, they have to deal with a lot of disillusionment, in the others and in themselves.” Comden elaborated that it “just seemed like a wonderful theme—the corrosive effect of time.”1

  The harsh toll of time was all too evident both in Gene’s marriage and on the set of his new picture. Stanley Donen summarized the experience as a nightmare; off set, Gene’s daughter Kerry described her father as a shattered man.2 Gene went through the “nightmare” alone; when the film went into production on October 13, 1954, Betsy was in New York doing on-location shooting for Marty. Though Gene immersed himself in the making of It’s Always Fair Weather, his colleagues failed to approach it with the same dedication. Arthur Freed, finally losing the optimism that had kept him so prolific for over a decade, had come to the realization that musicals would never hold as high a place in the entertainment industry as they had in his heyday, from the Depression through the postwar years. Like Louis B. Mayer, who had turned his attention to racehorses when he fell from his throne at MGM, Freed began to disengage, focusing on his impressive orchid collection. He did not have to answer to orchids as he had to answer to studio head Dore Schary, a man Adolph Green termed “uncivilized.”3

  While Freed chafed under Dore Schary’s authority, Donen chafed under Gene’s. “I really didn’t want to co-direct another picture with Kelly at that point. We didn’t get on very well and, for that matter, Gene didn’t get on very well with anybody.”4 Gene may have been irritable but, according to Gene’s biographer Clive Hirschhorn, Gene was eager to start the project and claimed it was “what he had been searching for during the last few years.”5 He envisioned making the picture as magical as their previous joint efforts, On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain.

  It’s Always Fair Weather certainly had the potential for magic, given that it was essentially a combination of those two films. In Singin’ in the Rain, Comden and Green had satir
ized Hollywood and the film industry; now, they were ready to poke fun at what they termed “the dreaded tube”: television.6 Still, the picture more closely resembles On the Town. Like the earlier film, the plot centers around three buddies and their adventures during a twenty-four-hour period—but ten years have passed since they last met. Originally, Comden and Green hoped to see Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin return as Gene’s costars. However, Sinatra, now an Oscar winner, had outgrown his naïve, boyish persona and Munshin had simply lost popularity. The actors who filled their places, though not big names, were both talented dancers. Michael Kidd plays the Sinatra character, Angie. Kidd, who had choreographed Seven Brides for Seven Brothers with Donen only months before, was a fine choice for the part because he could match Gene’s dancing skills. Portraying the Munshin character, Doug, was tap dancer Dan Dailey Jr., most famous for his screen musicals with Betty Grable at Twentieth Century-Fox. Gene was delighted to have Dailey on board for the picture. “Fred [Astaire] and myself were pretty good at comedy,” he later said, but “Dan Dailey was far better than we were—he was just marvelous.”7 Gene portrays Ted, a no-account gambler and playboy. The three men are forced together by a female TV producer, Jackie (Cyd Charisse), who works in the same office as Doug. Ted eventually falls for Jackie and “goes straight,” despite the fact that she tricks them all into walking on her show’s set, where their reunion is caught on candid camera.

  The television program inadvertently bonds the three friends. Not only do they share disgust for the show but during the live recording, they join forces to defeat a gang of thugs with which Ted is involved. The overzealous, insincere champion of the TV program’s sponsor, Klenzrite, is convincingly played by Dolores Gray. During the unexpected mayhem, she remains ridiculously buoyant and ingratiating. Perhaps the most comical aspect of the film is encapsulated by her character—in Comden and Green’s merciless satire of TV they capture the “bread and circuses” feel of the medium and take glee in portraying advertisers as little more than glorified snake oil salesmen. Gene’s character makes a speech while on camera dripping with facetiousness: “I’m mixed up with some of the shadiest characters in town. As a matter of fact, knowing the inspiring and uplifting work you do on this program, I—I feel terrible showing my face in decent homes across the country. Boys, don’t be like me. Live clean. Use Klenzrite.”8 At the film’s conclusion, Ted, Angie, and Doug walk off the television set to share a last drink together. Though no longer bitter, they all know they will never see each other again as they part.

  From the moment shooting began on the picture, few on the set felt as if they were making a comedy. Stanley Donen stated, “We had to struggle.” Though Gene was pleased to be working with Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse, he butted heads with Kidd. He was especially unreceptive to a ten-minute solo Kidd had planned for himself and a group of children entitled “Jack and the Space Giants.” A melding of the Jack and the Beanstalk story with space exploration, the fantastical sequence shows Angie explaining how he escaped being devoured by giant space ants by cooking a gourmet dinner for them. “It doesn’t come across,” Gene argued. Donen and the composer of the film’s score, André Previn, felt otherwise. Previn believed Gene’s distaste for the number was born of jealousy. He, after all, was usually the one to dance with children. Gene ordered the scene cut, which Kidd took as a “personal insult” that afterward led him to “vehemently criticize Gene as a dancer, actor, and person.” According to film historians Earl Hess and Pratibha Dabholkar, Gene’s call was judicious. The number was “less a dance and more of a comic shtick with none of the comic genius of [Donald] O’Connor, and complete lack of chemistry between Kidd and the three children.”9 Additionally, the number was unrelated to the plot of the film. In truth, the film has few integrated numbers.

  Gene’s cutting of the number, according to Hess and Dabholkar, resulted in the “breaking off of his collaboration and friendship” with Donen. Donen took Kidd’s side in this and other disputes, and both men made “repeated sophomoric reactions to Kelly’s attempts to direct the film in serious and thoughtful ways.”10 For instance, Kidd and Donen banded against Gene in what they deemed his overattachment to the film’s climactic scene during the TV program. Donen complained that Gene talked about it “ad nauseam . . . until we were all sick of hearing about it.” When the time finally came for the scene to be shot, Donen said, Gene was again “espousing lofty homilies about [its] motives and meanings.” Kidd asked Gene what he should say when he finds that one of the thugs has beat up his “beloved friend, Ted.”

  “You just look at me and you say ‘Ted!’” Gene told him.

  Kidd looked at Gene with disbelief that, after all Gene’s buildup of the scene, all he wanted from Kidd was a single word to declare his character’s regard for his friend. “Can I spell it?” Kidd asked sarcastically.11

  Gene was not completely unreceptive to his colleagues’ ideas. He accepted one of Donen’s brainstorms that used CinemaScope technology to its best advantage. Donen, who had already proved his finesse with the wide-screen format in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, devised a completely original idea for a musical number that takes place when Doug, Ted, and Angie are dining together. He split the screen into three blocks, with each of the three star’s faces filling one. Each man’s inner thoughts are musically articulated in his own block to the tune of the “Blue Danube Waltz.” Comden and Green did not fail to give their lyrics much-needed comedy:

  Old pals are the bunk

  This guy’s a cheap punk

  And that one’s a heel

  And I’m a schlemiel.12

  The scene is not only the best integrated in the film, it also set a precedent for the use of a split screen. Avant-garde in 1954, the method became ubiquitous by the 1960s and 1970s.

  Gene’s primary contribution to the film was no less original. As usual, he created a standout solo for himself. This time, he roller-skates down the streets of New York singing “I Like Myself.” The number immediately follows his realization that he loves Jackie and no longer wishes to lead the seedy existence of a gambler. The idea of having Gene roller-skate through busy city streets came to Comden and Green after they witnessed him skating on the tennis court in Comden’s backyard. “We’ve got to use that in the movie somehow,” Comden said.13 But it was Gene’s refinement that elevated the roller-skating idea to something remarkable: he tap-dances while wearing the unwieldy footwear.

  Gene designed another particularly inventive number for the film, this time involving himself, Dailey, and Kidd. It, too, used another unique form of footwear: tin garbage can lids. The lids, strapped to the men’s feet by their handles, seemed as if they would create only dissonant noise. However, Gene perfectly synchronized the beats of the dancers’ feet so that the noise was more akin to cymbals in a parade. The number takes place near the beginning of the film when the three men, playful after a drinking binge, celebrate the end of World War II. Their conflicts are in the future; their bond is intact and joyful. In execution, the number is typical Kelly in that it showcases a threesome and makes ample use of props (similar numbers include “Make Way for Tomorrow” in Cover Girl and “New York, New York” in On the Town).

  Though Gene again found Donen’s expertise in the wide-screen format invaluable in choreographing the number, Donen still felt that Gene minimized his efforts. “Co-directing . . . is a nightmare,” he stated. “To work with somebody, particularly somebody who is so concerned with his image, was impossible.”14 However, Donen finally won his moment in the spotlight after years of being outshone by Gene. At the Academy Awards, held on March 30, 1955, his Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was up for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Score, and Best Film Editing; it won for Best Score. Brigadoon was nominated for Best Sound Recording, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design but took home no statuettes.

  Betsy Blair also finally achieved renown for her own work. Two weeks after the Academy Awards, her picture Marty was rel
eased to overwhelming acclaim. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote, “Miss Blair is wonderfully revealing of the unspoken nervousness and hope in the girl who will settle for sincerity.”15 The picture, budgeted at $350,000, grossed $2 million. The film was received just as warmly at the Cannes Film Festival. It took home Golden Palms for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Actor. Gene and Kerry caught a plane to Paris late on the night of April 8, 1955, in order to be present at the ceremony. “I just can’t find words to tell you what it meant to me. . . . Gene gave a press conference [while in Cannes]. . . . You know how he started it off? ‘I am the husband of Betsy Blair.’ . . . Everyone smiled and the tears came to my eyes and I thought I’d just pass out with happiness,” Betsy told a reporter.16 In her memoir, she deemed her triumph with Marty as “one of the most wonderful times of my life.”17

  While Betsy may have been enjoying the best of times, Gene was still in a slump—and he was fast realizing that It’s Always Fair Weather was not going to pull him out of it. The picture completed filming in May, one month after Marty premiered. Gene and Donen did not part on amicable terms. Donen reflected in 1992: “I’m grateful to him [Gene], but I paid the debt ten times over and he got his money’s worth out of me.”18 Gene never spoke with such antipathy about Donen. In 1979, he reflected, “I thought we complemented each other very well. On the last picture we made . . . we were . . . so used to each other, that we didn’t need each other. It was almost dull . . . we could have phoned the shots in. It wasn’t a bad picture . . . [but it’s] the only picture we didn’t have fun on.”19

  The film’s final budget was $2,771,000, an amount that, only five years before, an MGM musical seldom failed to recoup. But the picture, meant to be a satiric romantic comedy, came across as bitter and hard-edged. It was devoid of the light touch and escapism audiences expected from a Kelly film. Gene commented: “We wanted to make an experiment by treating a serious subject in the context of a musical comedy. It was a good story for which we needed a little bit of realism, but we missed our goal, because we didn’t succeed in giving it the feeling of nostalgia.”20 Unfortunately, Gene’s words were all too true. Upon its release on September 2, 1955, the film grossed only $2,374,000. In total, MGM’s ledgers revealed that the film lost over $1 million.