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

by Cynthia Brideson

  As the program opens, the camera shows dancers and athletes alike warming up in a gym with balletic movements. “All these men share skill and rhythm. An athlete’s goal is to win the game; his aim is competition. A dancer goes further, he conveys emotion, he tells a story visually. A dancer must have something to say or he’s in real trouble,” Gene explains as he walks through the gym.30 Again and again Gene, in one reviewer’s words, “returned to his thesis that the dance was the property and prerogative of men, not women, illustrating with the tremendously masculine and virile dances of Spain and Russia.”31 The show closes with a balletic vignette showing a group of street toughs fighting and loafing. Gene set his ballet to the music of Gershwin’s “Concerto in F.”

  Dancing: A Man’s Game was unanimously well received, with numerous critics hailing it as a masterpiece. The entire hour, as described by Variety, was a “stunning production, expertly directed and executed . . . as high on entertainment value as it was informative.”32 The St. Petersburg Times called it “a wonderful mixture of education and sheer visual fun, showing what TV can do in this line when it half tries.”33 In 1976, Gene still spoke with pride about his show, highlighting its honest acknowledgment of issues that hitherto had been carefully avoided in television and film:

  I talked about homosexuality—and this was before everyone went overboard with sexual frankness—saying that an artist in any form . . . is the custodian of a certain gift, and his sexual preferences have nothing to do with his art. I said that we in America are still afraid to say that a man is graceful, and pointed out that John Wayne is graceful. John phoned me the next day . . . and I wondered what was coming. . . . But he was grateful to me. I’d picked out the toughest guys I could think of at the time, and he saw the point I was making immediately.34

  Gene’s program went far in helping Omnibus earn an Emmy statuette as 1958’s Best Public Service Program or Series. Gene himself received an Emmy nomination for Best Choreography for Television and won Dance magazine’s yearly award for Best Television Program. (Incidentally, the show to receive the most wins—nine in all, including Most Outstanding Single Program of the Year—at the eleventh Emmy awards was a special by Gene’s colleague and alleged rival, Fred Astaire. NBC aired the musical variety program, An Evening with Fred Astaire, on October 17, 1958. The special was the first television program to ever be taped in color.)

  Even if his special did not receive the deluge of awards Astaire’s program had, Gene considered Dancing: A Man’s Game his first professional victory since Singin’ in the Rain. True, Flower Drum Song was a hit, but Gene’s television program was a product of his own creation and thus its success validated him on a personal and professional level. No longer wary of television, Gene accepted an offer from the Pontiac Star Parade to choreograph and perform in two specials, the first of which was to have the honorific title The Gene Kelly Show.

  Before production began, Gene went on his yearly holiday trip to Switzerland with Kerry and Jeanne. A disappointing bit of news, however, made the holiday less sweet. He received a phone call from the Rank Organization informing him that Gentleman’s Gentleman had been cancelled. Gene flew to London for two days, hoping that the project could be salvaged. But his hopes were fruitless, and he found himself on a plane to New York after taking a consolatory whirlwind trip to Paris.

  As Gene laid his head back on his seat, the plane suddenly dropped thirty thousand feet over the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Gene clutched his seat, certain he was about to die. “I felt as if all the blood was being drained out of my body and my lungs were tearing to shreds. . . . My first thought was ‘Should I pray or not,’ and I decided I wouldn’t because I hadn’t been in a church or prayed for several years, and the last thing I wanted to be was a deathbed Catholic and a coward. . . . My next thought was whether I’d paid my insurance and whether Kerry would be sufficiently provided for,” Gene recalled in 1974. In a Hollywood-style ending, the plane leveled out at six thousand feet—just in time—and was flown to Gander, Newfoundland, for inspection. The plane had apparently developed a fault in its automatic pilot setting while the captain was outside his cabin hobnobbing with the passengers. A second plane safely transported Gene and the 113 other passengers to New York within five hours. The same day, another plane had crashed into the East River and Jeanne Coyne, who was to meet Gene at the airport, was near tears; she was sure it was Gene’s plane and that he had been killed. “It was about the most unpleasant experience in my life,” Gene concluded.35

  Gene’s brush with death did not turn him into a religious man; nor did it make him believe in miracles. But his recent successes, his blossoming romance with Jeanne, and the fact that his plane had not crashed made him again believe he was, as he stated numerous times throughout his life, a lucky man. His next project also proved to be lucky, if not as prestigious as Dancing: A Man’s Game. The Gene Kelly Show, filmed in Hollywood, was a pleasant revue that gave Gene the opportunity to showcase almost every medium of dance.

  The show opens with Gene singing “I Got Rhythm,” appearing youthful and trim, dressed in a straw hat and bow tie and twirling a cane. “This is a dancing show with lots of music and lots of songs and we hope lots of fun,” Gene begins in a soft voice. “It comes to you from Hollywood, but it could be coming from anywhere, for every song and dance man is a traveling man.”36

  Gene then begins to sing “Les Girls” as ballerinas from France, Germany, and Sweden spring into view. Next, he does a soft-shoe with Cherylene Lee, a five-year-old girl who had appeared in Flower Drum Song. Next is the “Coffeehouse Ballet” (scored by Henry Mancini), which seemed like a burlesque of Fred Astaire’s “Girl Hunt Ballet” in Arthur Freed and Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953). Later in the show, Gene impressed audiences with a technically advanced, split-screen sequence that was a virtual reprisal of his acclaimed “Alter Ego” number from Cover Girl. In the most unexpected sequence in the special, Gene dances to a poem written for him by Carl Sandberg. Gene acts like Sandberg’s puppet, moving in whatever way the poet tells him to. The number is both childlike and striking in its originality.

  For the finale of the special, Gene surprised audiences by dancing with a teenage girl unnamed in the credits: Liza Minnelli. Gene had been intent on having Liza make her screen debut after attending a party at Ira Gershwin’s house at which the girl was singing. Minnelli was enthusiastic, but he advised Gene to obtain Judy Garland’s blessing first. Gene called Judy the next day. She agreed: “I’d like to see what Liza could do with the number.” Liza was thrilled; one of her lifelong dreams had been to dance with Gene. “I went to the studios every day [as a child], and I loved to dance.” Sometimes during breaks, she remembered, Gene would say, “C’mere, I’ll teach you a step.”37

  On the night of the special, Gene was stricken with anxiety that Liza would freeze. However, when the cameras started rolling, Liza was as calm as could be. Gene was the one whose stomach churned. “I was so concerned that . . . I almost blew it. But [it was] as if this was [Liza’s] fifty-fourth show. I don’t know where it came from. It had only been a couple of years since she’d come and played in our back yard.”38

  Gene and Liza performed a sweet, gentle tap dance to “For Me and My Gal,” a poignant choice, for it was the first dance Gene had performed on film with Judy Garland. Their routine was flawless, and Gene was swift to compliment his young partner: “Every once in a while, you see flashes of Judy [in Liza] that you can’t escape. . . . I don’t think it harmed her having two talented parents, but I don’t think you can say it gave her her talent.”39 Gene remained a mentor to Liza into her adulthood.

  After Liza and Gene’s dance, Gene closed his special twirling an umbrella while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain.” Hearty applause rang from the audience. The show, which had been prerecorded, aired on NBC-TV on April 24, 1959. It was nearly as well received as Dancing: A Man’s Game. Robert Lewis Shayon, a critic for the Saturday Review, had nothing but accolades for Gene
: “Mr. Kelly is a dancer who dares to have an idea. . . . He is an artful satirist with taste and distinction. . . . If he and Pontiac [the special’s sponsor] chose to be partners in a weekly dance show . . . they could make some very significant contributions to this nation’s understanding of the mind behind the dance.”40

  Gene had no intention of turning television into his primary mode of work yet. He held that “television isn’t really a dancer’s medium. . . . The limitation in the size of the screen is obvious. The viewer doesn’t want to see a close-up of the ballerina’s face: he wants to see the movement of her whole body, and her relationship to the other dancers.”41 Nonetheless, he did agree to do a second special for Pontiac in the fall.

  In the meantime, Gene received the honor of sitting on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival during the summer of 1959. After participating, he and Kerry visited a family of genteel Greek ship owners they had met in Klosters at their home on an island off the mainland of Greece. However, even on a secluded island, offers of work still found their way to Gene. He welcomed one with unusual anticipation: Stanley Kramer asked him to appear in Inherit the Wind, a film based on the famed Scopes Monkey Trial. Gene would play the part of E. K. Hornbeck, a character based on reporter H. L. Mencken, who had covered the trial in 1925. “When I learned that Spencer Tracy and Fredric March were in it [the film] I didn’t even call my agent. I just scooped up my family and flew back” to Hollywood.42 Since entering the film business, Gene had often stated that Tracy and March were two actors he particularly admired and whose unpretentious styles of acting he strove to emulate.

  Gene seemed an unlikely choice for the part of the ironic Hornbeck, who professes that “it is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”43 When he announced Gene as his pick for the role, Kramer said it was “hard for some people to digest.” But Kramer had a precedent; the previous year, “against conventional wisdom,” he had placed Fred Astaire in a serious role in the dystopian drama On the Beach (1959). The director argued that he wanted Hornbeck to be a “complicated and incredibly vital character . . . in every way an American original. Gene Kelly . . . was an excellent actor who could convey the combination of intelligence and devilish humor the character needed.”44

  The Hornbeck character’s beliefs meshed well with Gene’s own agnostic convictions. The target of his unflinching monologues is Tracy, who portrays Henry Drummond, the man defending a jailed teacher’s right to teach evolution: “Why don’t you wake up? Darwin was wrong! Man’s still an ape,” he declares at one point. Hornbeck and Drummond’s love/hate relationship is one of the more intriguing aspects of the film, lending it depth and much-needed humor. Gene gets the last word in the picture as he and Drummond leave the sweltering, empty courtroom.

  Drummond: When you go to your grave, there won’t be anybody to pull the grass up over your head. Nobody to mourn you. Nobody to give a damn. You’re all alone.

  Hornbeck: You’re wrong, Henry. You’ll be there. You’re the type. Who else would defend my right to be lonely?

  Budgeted at $2 million, Inherit the Wind went into production on October 21, 1959, at Universal Studios and wrapped in mid-December 1959. It made its premiere seven months later, on July 21, 1960, in Dayton, Tennessee—the very state in which the film takes place. Reviewers were complimentary, but the film’s highly controversial subject matter caused audiences to stay away. Variety commented that a “good measure of the film’s surface bite is contributed by Gene Kelly. . . . Kelly demonstrates again that even without dancing shoes he knows his way on the screen.”45 Bosley Crowther of the New York Times summarized Gene’s performance in one line: “There’s a nimble newspaper reporter, played briskly and glibly by Gene Kelly.” Overall, Crowther hailed the movie as “a triumph.”46 Triumphant though it may have been, it grossed only $2 million, resulting in a loss of $1.7 million due to publicity and other overhead costs. “It was a very high class picture—for that reason, not too big a hit,” Gene stated in 1994. “But that was I think the great climax to my career, doing a straight part with these two guys [Tracy and March].”47

  Then and now, Gene’s brilliant performance as Hornbeck has been too little appreciated. According to his biographer Tony Thomas: “Some critics hastened to comment that Gene was miscast without explaining why. His Hornbeck is in fact precisely what the script calls for—a superficially amusing, hard-hearted, and somewhat lost soul.”48 Note that even Gene called the picture the climax of his career because he worked with Tracy and March—not because he thought his performance was special. Patricia Wilson, a Broadway performer, recorded in her memoir that when she complimented Gene on his acting in Inherit the Wind, he said, “I wanted to hide under the seat when I saw that film! I walked like a damn ballet dancer, turn-out and all!” “Well,” Patricia’s brother David remarked, “there goes the man’s credentials as a megalomaniac!”49

  At forty-seven, Gene had become a humbler and significantly mellower man. As Kerry Kelly had observed after her parents’ divorce, he was not as self-confident or social as he had been in years past. Jeanne Coyne’s constancy seemed to limit his famous temper. According to biographer Clive Hirschhorn, Gene, “the erstwhile innovator who had taken the movie musical by the scruff of its neck and shaken it free of cobwebs seemed content now to spend his time appearing in lucrative specials . . . recapping his career in musicals for the benefit of a new generation of Americans.”50

  Gene’s second Pontiac special included recaps of dances he had been performing throughout his career. He enlisted Carol Lawrence (who originated the role of Maria on Broadway in West Side Story, 1957) and, in a much-anticipated reunion, Donald O’Connor as his partners. Filmed entirely in color, the Pontiac Star Parade aired on NBC-TV on November 21, 1959. The finale was a “sit down dance medley” which favored O’Connor, who professed to primarily use his feet rather than his entire body while dancing. After engaging in comedic banter, they challenge each other in a sort of “name that tune” game, tapping out rhythms with their feet.51 Throughout the entire number, Gene and Donald seem to be holding back sincere laughter, infusing the number with an air of spontaneity and camaraderie. In truth, Gene, his costars, and the dance chorus had rehearsed for a month to ensure the numbers were perfect.

  Most critics admired Gene’s second Pontiac special. A reporter for the TV Radio Mirror deemed the show “light-hearted, light-footed magic.”52 However, Jack Gould of the New York Times thought the show fell short of expectations. “Mr. Kelly’s singing voice is extremely husky and limited in range. . . . With so much singing he left little time for dancing, most of which did not seem blessed by the verve and imagination the occasion warranted.”53

  To his detractors, Gene may have seemed content to revel in nostalgia rather than create imaginative new dance concepts, but when the right opportunity came along, he had as strong an urge for innovation as ever. In April 1960, Gene found himself again an American in Paris, this time at the request of the Paris Opera Ballet. The company had not yet explored any style but classical and feared it was falling behind the times. Gene accepted the assignment to choreograph a modern ballet with alacrity. Before leaving for his beloved European city, he grinningly told columnist Hedda Hopper: “The French said at one time we [Americans] were ten years behind in dance. Now they say we’re ten years ahead.”54

  The last time Gene had worked in Europe, Betsy had accompanied him and he had been intent on creating an all-dance picture. He had come home from that trip with an air of defeat; both his career and his marriage had all but fallen apart. Now, Gene returned to Europe with Jeanne Coyne on his arm, set on choreographing the first jazz ballet ever staged at the Paris Opera. In Europe, Gene had never lost popularity as he had in America. Thus, it was with a feeling of triumph that he, whom director/performer Jean Louis Barrault fondly termed “the most French of Americans in Paris,” took on the most challenging assignment to come his way in almost a decade.55

  19

  “I
wear so many hats”

  Professional ballet dancer, writer, choreographer, director, and priest: at various times in his life, Gene Kelly had considered all of them as viable career paths and had already mastered three: writing, choreographing, and directing. By 1962, he would essentially master or remaster all five paths through the mediums of stage, film, and television. “I wear so many hats that sometimes I forget where I’ve been and where I’m going.”1

  He won the position of ballet dancer first, if only in an honorary capacity, via choreographing for the Paris Opera Ballet. Adamant that America now held the lead in dance, he boasted, “Our New York City Ballet is the best in the world.”2 Eager to prove the truth of his claim, Gene now sought to bring New York excellence to Paris. He held an exalted position: he would act not only as choreographer for the ballet company but also as writer and musical supervisor. Gene flew to France in February 1960 to begin preparing the show, although rehearsals did not commence until April 1960.

  As late as March, he still had no clue what the plot of the ballet would be, but he kept busy creating dance steps. By May, he had finally devised a story. “[It’s] just mythology as written by me. Sort of Amphitryon in reverse. Silly but fun.”3 The tale he created depicted a sort of lovers’ quarrel between Aphrodite and Zeus and the drastic means it takes to reconcile them. Aphrodite was portrayed by French ballet star Claude Bessy, whom Gene had used in Invitation to the Dance. The story “was good clean naughty fun and Mr. Kelly could use all the flying machines for clouds and chariots that a 19th-century opera house can provide,” a reporter for the New York Times remarked of the ballet, which Gene titled Pas de Dieux (which cleverly substituted the French word for “gods” in the ballet term pas de deux, a duet in which two dancers perform steps together).4 Among the visual effects Gene employed was a large traffic light directing the clouds. Its flashing colors of red, green, and yellow also served to indicate Aphrodite’s moods.