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

by Cynthia Brideson

  Part of the picture’s failure was due to MGM’s lack of buildup. It’s Always Fair Weather played as the second half of a double bill in many towns. Also, numerous exhibitors didn’t have the technology needed to screen the film in its wide-screen format; thus, the dancers’ feet and the sides of the scenes were cut off, negating the pains Gene and Donen had taken to tailor the choreography to CinemaScope. Even at the film’s first preview, the theater was ill equipped. Furthermore, as Comden explained, “I don’t think Gene was quite the star he was. I don’t think he was that popular anymore and neither were musicals.”21

  This being said, Guys and Dolls and the film adaptation of Oklahoma! ranked as two of the top five moneymaking pictures of 1955. Why were they popular when It’s Always Fair Weather was not? The answer lies in the fact that the vast majority of popular musicals in the mid- to late 1950s were adaptations of Broadway shows. When Arthur Freed first began producing musicals, his goal had been to create original films rather than rely on Broadway hits as movie material. When he did take from Broadway, he, with the help of artists like Gene, Minnelli, Comden, and Green, changed the shows enough to make them uniquely cinematic. However, screen musicals like Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls were virtual copies of their Broadway counterparts—yet they succeeded while Brigadoon, another virtual copy, did not. In the hands of another unit, perhaps Brigadoon would have done well. But Freed and his team were innovators who languished within the strictures of the stage-bound musical. The problem with the Broadway musical, done Hollywood style, was that the stories became watered down and cleansed, making for weak and uninspired films. Bland or not, audiences trusted Broadway adaptations over original Hollywood musicals because they were preap-proved hits.

  It’s Always Fair Weather, though not an audience favorite, resonated with critics who appreciated originality. A reviewer for Time magazine called the picture “a sunny example of a Hollywood rarity—a song-and-dance movie with enough plot to justify its dialogue and enough needling satire to make some points. . . . For its superb dancing, inventive musical numbers . . . Fair Weather rates as one of the top contenders for the year’s lightweight title.”22 Bosley Crowther gave Gene this stamp of approval: “[His] sly eyes and nimble feet are measured among the happiest adornments of the screen.”23

  On March 21, 1956, at the twenty-eighth annual Academy Awards ceremony, It’s Always Fair Weather was considered for one award: Best Story and Screenplay. However, it lost to the soapy MGM biopic of singer Marjorie Lawrence, Interrupted Melody. At the same ceremony, Betsy lost the Best Supporting Actress award to Jo Van Fleet, who portrayed a madam in Warner Bros.’s East of Eden. But Betsy felt like a winner; indeed, Marty swept the Oscars. It won in nearly every major category: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (not to be confused with Best Story and Screenplay). Betsy commented that afterward she became something of a favorite among the press. As her confidence soared, she increasingly longed for a divorce—to begin a completely new life, one that she might have had if she had not married Gene at seventeen.

  For ten years, gossip columnists had been dropping hints that Gene and Betsy’s marriage was in trouble. In 1945, a reporter falsely claimed that Gene had left his wife and baby daughter and moved to a hotel. Six years later, Hollywood columnists still remembered Gene’s livid reaction to the erroneous report. Reflecting on Gene’s reaction, writer John Maynard recorded: “Kelly exhibited the first pronounced symptoms of . . . Celt ferocity and independence. . . . One was an earnest effort to slug a widely read and heard commentator on movie doings. After which, Kelly proposed to stuff him into a wastepaper basket. . . . Gene knew exactly what he was doing. He was inviting professional suicide to preserve his conceptions of human dignity and integrity.”24 In 1954, one commentator asserted that though Gene was now “quieter, more dedicated—and more fulfilled—than when, ten years ago, he was charging everything from windmills to Sherman tanks with whatever lance he had in hand,” he was “in no respect . . . any different. The lance is still in the closet for the time being but he still keeps the grip oiled.”25

  When new reports sprang up about Gene and Betsy’s shaky union in 1956, Gene did not pull out any lances. This time, he could not deny the gossip. In spite of Betsy’s discretion, Gene was aware of her affairs; however, he did not bring up the possibility of divorce and Betsy still kept her wish for one to herself. After viewing It’s Always Fair Weather, she wailed to her analyst: “How can I even think of resistance and rebellion, I mean divorce, when he’s [Gene] up there in close-up thirty-two times larger than life and irresistible?”26

  Asking Gene for a divorce, as Betsy well knew, would be no painless task—particularly because her husband was already depressed. MGM had finally decided to take the risk and release Invitation to the Dance to international audiences. When the film made its premiere in Zurich on April 1, 1956, audience reactions temporarily buoyed Gene’s spirits. One Swiss reporter called Gene the “Diaghilev of motion pictures” while a writer for London’s Daily Mirror declared that the film was not “merely art but sheer enjoyment. . . . The Technicolor perfection of [its] sequences represents an accomplishment that should rate serious Academy Award consideration.”27

  With such praise heaped upon the picture, MGM executives felt safe in releasing it to American audiences on May 23. But they realized immediately that they had waited too long. By this time, US television audiences had been inundated with dance shows and ballets, nullifying the enlightening effect Gene had hoped his film would have. In Europe, on the other hand, television was still in its infancy and Invitation to the Dance was a novelty. Decades after the picture’s release, reviewer Pauline Kael darkly observed: “The film bollixed the career of Kelly, and probably broke his heart as well. . . . Practically no one saw it.”28 The appeal of Gene’s work had long lain in the fact that it was accessible to the average Joe. The ballets in Invitation to the Dance, unlike those beautifully executed in On the Town, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain, made little sense to audiences, likely because they were not part of a fluid story. The picture, which had cost $2,822,000 to produce, made a dismal $615,000 at the box office, making it MGM’s biggest flop of the year.

  Though a financial disaster, the film did receive a degree of praise from US critics. Bosley Crowther wrote in his piece for the New York Times: “Mr. Kelly deserves some admiration. . . . This film represents a brave experiment, but it would have been more commendable if Mr. Kelly had been more fertile with ideas and less inclined to overdo.”29 Dance magazine complimented the film for its “obvious artistic sincerity” but concluded: “The librettos that Kelly has provided for his three ballets are of a kind that have long been superseded in the ballet, dance narratives designed to touch or amuse but affording no moments of either eloquence or revelation.”30

  Gene, seeing the success of Guys and Dolls and the failure of his own film, lost all loyalty to MGM. Fueling Gene’s anger at the studio was its refusal to cast him in two pictures that could have given him the chance to resuscitate his career: MGM’s Teahouse of the August Moon and a cinematic adaptation of Pal Joey for Columbia. The role in Teahouse of the August Moon, as in Guys and Dolls, went to Marlon Brando; the title role in Pal Joey went to Frank Sinatra. Gene requested to be released from his contract, but Nick Schenck refused. “They [MGM] had nothing on tap for me and I’d been sitting around for months [waiting] for an assignment. I couldn’t stand not working so I suggested to them that we come to terms,” Gene related.31 Arthur Loew, one of MGM’s highest executives, agreed to Gene’s terms: he would complete two more pictures. One would be a property of Gene’s choice in which he served as star, co-producer, and director.

  Gene’s selected project, The Happy Road, was a property he had originally hoped to independently produce and release in France. He had not planned to star in it. “The whole idea of making The Happy Road was that television had just come in and everybody was worried. They were saying they couldn’t make huge pictur
es any more, and it was true,” Gene explained. “So my determination was to show everyone in the business that I could do a nice, small-budget picture in Europe.”32 Gene’s second project, Les Girls, was not slated to begin until January 1957. The picture was to be directed by George Cukor, scored by Cole Porter, and choreographed by Jack Cole. Les Girls was the antithesis of The Happy Road—lavish, sophisticated, and Technicolored in comparison to the simplicity, innocence, and black-and-white photography of the other picture.

  The Happy Road centers on two children who run away from their Swiss boarding school and trek together to Paris in hopes of convincing their parents (the little boy has only a widowed father and the girl has only a divorced mother) to let them stay at home. In the parents’ joint search for their children, the mother and father fall in love, and the children find the home and security for which they have been searching. Gene returned to his first love—writing—when he also took on the role of songwriter for the film. During the picture’s opening credits, Maurice Chevalier croons Gene’s wistful, melancholic lyrics to the title song:

  Time hurries by

  Youth goes so fast

  Don’t rush down the road of life

  Soon youth will be past.33

  As preparation for filming began in the spring of 1956, Gene rented the same home he had used in France when shooting Invitation to the Dance. He scouted for children to cast as leads, ultimately choosing two relatively unknown actors: Brigitte Fossey (a French girl) and Bobby Clark (an American boy). Brigitte had won some notice in René Clair’s Forbidden Games (1952). She did not relish the prospect of having her hair cut for the film, but Gene, to assuage the pain of losing her locks, arranged for the deed to be done on her tenth birthday. Immediately after the haircut, Gene led her to a group of her friends surrounding an enormous cake, which she promptly dug into.

  The Happy Road was the closest Gene had yet come to his longtime dream of making a film for children. Shown from the viewpoint of the boy and girl, the film is unpretentious and even naïve yet still manages to be highly effective and poignant. Perhaps what lent the film its sincerity was the fact that Gene lost his own family unity during its production.

  When Betsy and Kerry joined Gene in France for a weekend, Betsy soberly asked Gene to meet her alone at her hotel in Paris. She had fallen in love with a French actor and socialist, Roger Pigaut, and was finally ready to ask Gene for a divorce. “I had found what I needed to give me the strength to escape,” Betsy explained.34 Gene and Betsy sat on the balcony overlooking the Champs-Élysées, he drinking a beer while she sipped hot tea. Such a romantic setting could have come straight from An American in Paris.

  “I want a divorce,” Betsy told him.

  Gene put down his beer and gave her a slight paternalistic smile, then surprised her by saying, “I’ve known about your affairs. I thought since you never had a true adolescence, it’d pass. I’ll wait it out.”

  They stayed up all night talking. “I cried, I thought about Kerry and felt that my heart was breaking,” Betsy said. “But I had to do it. We had to divorce.” Three or four times during their conversation, Betsy repeated: “But Gene, you couldn’t have been faithful these fifteen years. You’re a sexy movie star. You must’ve had all kinds of women throwing themselves at you.” Gene resolutely answered no each time she asked the question. “Come on, Gene,” Betsy prodded.

  “Never while you were there,” he told her at last. Betsy remembered, “Somewhere inside me I knew this was funny. At the time I only felt relief.”35

  No infidelity of Gene’s has ever been disclosed, and it remains a point of debate whether he ever had had any affair at all. It is possible that Gene told Betsy he’d been unfaithful merely to assuage her guilt.

  As the lights of Paris faded in the morning sun, they decided on a trial separation rather than immediate divorce. Betsy agreed to the plan, but she knew it would end in divorce. True, this would mean leaving behind her beloved Beverly Hills home, convenient charge accounts, and friends like Comden, Green, and Jeanne Coyne. On the positive side, however, the divorce and her planned relocation to Europe would be good for her career. She had been allowed to appear in Marty, but the entertainment industry still knew of her Communist sympathies, and future ostracism was a certainty.

  As Betsy had matured, she had become a far different woman than the one Gene had married. Though a private person like Gene, Betsy was more socially inclined, and Gene’s lack of deep friendships puzzled her. “I tried desperately to introduce him to people,” she recalled. “But . . . after fifteen years of marriage and hundreds of people passing through our lives, I had to face the fact that Gene was a loner and was somehow going to have to get through the divorce on his own.”36 Betsy concluded that “Gene’s character, the creator, the patriarch, the boss in a way, was too set. . . . He saw no reason to change.”

  Informing fourteen-year-old Kerry of their separation was more difficult than Gene and Betsy had anticipated. They told her the news one weekend at Gene’s rented home in the country. The girl broke down and fled to the bathroom, refusing to come out for twenty-four hours. She had had no clue there was anything amiss between her parents. She knew they were seldom home at the same time, but she had assumed it was due to their working schedules. “Would it help if I called Jeannie [Coyne]? Could you talk to her?” Gene pleaded through the closed door. Kerry murmured yes; Jeanne was, as she had been for most of the girl’s life, “like a second mother to me.”37 Jeanne arrived only a day later.

  Gene took the divorce as hard as Kerry. According to Kerry, he was “utterly helpless, couldn’t cope with the situation, and was of no use to anybody. [He never] quite regained his unassailable self-confidence. . . . He became much more reflective and down-to-earth, developed a sense of reality about life which he never had before.”38 Betsy offered further insight: “This [the divorce] was one of the few failures in Gene’s life, but it was a personal failure. Gene did not take well to personal failure.”39

  In the middle of such turmoil, Gene received more bad news: his father had died. Gene quickly traveled to Pittsburgh before completing The Happy Road, a film whose title seemed to become more mocking by the day. Before he arrived, Harriet was upset for more reasons than her husband’s death. She had read a piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporting: “If the story-book romance of Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair is heading for the rocks, it’s a complete surprise to his mother. . . . Kelly’s studio announced yesterday he and his wife, who are in Paris, are trying a trial separation. It gave no details. Mrs. Kelly scoffed at the report, saying, ‘I’ve been hearing that for ten years. . . . I think it’s just publicity.’”40 Not wishing to cause more upheaval in the family, Gene did not disclose that the report was indeed true.

  A despondent Gene returned to France a week later to complete The Happy Road. The picture was swiftly becoming a nightmare. Shot on location in the Burgundy wine country, the picture was subject to the whims of the weather. It rained incessantly for six weeks, holding up production on a film that MGM had explicitly instructed Gene to keep under its budget of half a million dollars. Additionally, technical problems cropped up almost every hour. Gene found himself overwhelmed without the help of a co-director behind the camera and second guessed his every choice without a partner to concur that a given scene worked or did not work. Biographer Clive Hirschhorn surmised that the movie failed to be the success it might have been because Gene’s “heart and soul” failed to match the light mood of the film.41 Gene’s performance comes across as uneasy and strained, unlike his breezy, confident performances in his best films.

  However, upon the film’s release on June 20, 1957, the vast majority of reviews were positive. Gene even began to feel fond of the project again, remarking, “I particularly enjoyed the making of The Happy Road. I liked being on location in the French countryside and meeting the people.”42 One of the most perceptive reviews of the picture came from the Age, a paper based in Australia: “Mr. Kelly’s is a world wher
e everyone badly needs each other. . . . It is a world of irony, in which the forces of law fluster and blunder and disorganize so fast that only an army of children are left to co-operate to a common humanitarian goal. . . . All the time, I was scared Mr. Kelly would go too far and consistently he managed to avoid doing so.”43 Gene’s “little film” merited a BAFTA United Nations Award as well as a Golden Globe for Promoting International Understanding. The film earned $325,000 in the United States and Canada and $625,000 internationally, thus losing $117,000. “It won all kinds of awards,” Gene reflected in 1968. “It was hailed as a sweet family picture—but nobody came to see it.”44

  Upon his return to Beverly Hills, Gene was immediately beset with more challenges. Among the first was the news that Kerry wished to go away to school. She could not cope with a broken household and felt she would benefit from attending a boarding school in Switzerland. Gene and Betsy did not argue with her; they enrolled her at the Geneva International School. “The hopes of their good friends that the meeting this week between Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair in Switzerland preparatory to entering their daughter Kerry in school there may lead to a reconciliation,” one reporter wrote.45 No such reconciliation took place; Gene realized their separation had become permanent.