The on-location shots added authenticity to the picture, but the casting of the title character did not. Twenty-six-year-old Barbra Streisand portrayed Dolly, a woman meant to be middle-aged. The actress was fresh from her success as Fanny Brice in both the stage and screen versions of Funny Girl (1968). “I suppose Barbra was a little young to play Dolly, but after she got through the first couple of reels she did a marvelous job,” Gene stated.20
Walter Matthau made it clear that he most definitely did not approve of Barbra. His and his leading lady’s first run-in occurred in Garrison on June 6, 1968. Only the previous day, the nation was stunned by the news that Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Sirhan had shot and killed Robert Kennedy after the senator won the Democratic presidential nomination in the California primary. Michael Crawford recalled that “Gene was crushed. . . . The set was closed down the day after the tragedy. . . . When production started up again . . . the mood was bleak for cast and crew. Yet Gene Kelly was able to handle it all with great equanimity.”21 Matthau also took the news especially hard, but he was angry rather than depressed over it. The heat of the sun and the overhead lights on the set only enhanced his self-described “mean, foul mood.”22
After the day of mourning, Gene called Barbra, Matthau, and several extras to rehearse a scene taking place outside Vandergelder’s feed store. As Gene explained how he envisioned the sequence, Barbra interrupted to suggest a comic exchange between the characters. Matthau found no humor in her ad-libbing and accused her of assuming the role of director. Gene took hold of Matthau’s arm and attempted to pull him away from the escalating argument, but the actor was immovable. He continued to tear into Barbra.
“Why don’t you learn your lines! You’re just jealous because you’re not as good as me!” Barbra shot back.
“Everybody in the company hates you! You’re dispensable!” Matthau yelled. Barbra began to sob and fled the set.
Ernest Lehman, Barbra’s greatest ally on the set, went to comfort her. Gene murmured, “Cut the lights.”23
Gene managed to gather the seething actors together again and “straightened it out” in three hours’ time. In an interview with columnist Joyce Haber, Gene downplayed the tension on the set. “There was only one major rift,” Gene explained. “Walter was saying a line and Barbra was nodding her head at the same time. He told her, ‘You’re doing that purposely.’ I dragged them both off the set and said ‘You’re not going to do this here.’ Walter apologized to her a few days later.”24 Whether or not Matthau actually apologized is uncertain. But tensions certainly remained.
Barbra called her confidant Lehman nearly each day after filming with complaints not only about Matthau but also regarding Gene. Though Lehman respected Gene’s work, he was not exactly his biggest fan and could commiserate with Barbra. “Who would get along with Gene Kelly? He’s a tough guy. He would grin and smile and laugh and all that, but he was no pussycat,” Lehman commented. “Once I made a suggestion to Michael Crawford about how he should play a close-up and Kelly said to me, ‘If you ever talk to another one of my actors on the set I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.’”25
If Gene displayed his temper to Lehman, he refrained from doing so to Michael Kidd. Nonetheless, the friction that had existed between Gene and Kidd on the set of It’s Always Fair Weather still remained thirteen years later. Lehman described their relationship as “eggshell time.” He would often find Gene “muttering away in the background about something he felt was wrong in the dance direction and I’d tell him to have a word with Michael about it. He said he couldn’t and that I’d better do it.” Gene held sincere regard for Kidd’s work and did not wish his colleague to assume otherwise. His primary concern was that viewers watching the film were likely to conclude that Gene was choreographer and so any imperfections would reflect badly on him. Lehman remarked that Hello, Dolly! was “not a happy film. . . . It’s quite amazing what people go through to make something entertaining for others.”26
Gene balanced his less than amiable moods with shows of gratitude and generosity. For the most expensive number in the film, which included the construction of an entire New York street and the use of thirty-eight hundred extras, Lehman wanted a “rolling shot that would leave Barbra in the center of the screen, and then go wide to show most of the parade around her.” Gene insisted on photographing “straight down so all you could see are a few people marching down the center.”27 Barbra and Lehman were adamantly against Gene’s plans, and Gene finally shouted over the phone to Lehman: “Why don’t you direct the scene tomorrow?” Lehman did exactly that. Viewing the results, Gene turned to him and declared, “Jesus, my shot was awful. I’m glad you redid it.”28
Gene later expressed regret at the lack of rapport he shared with his leading lady. “If there had been more time, I’d have tried to help her work out a clear-cut characterization. . . . She kept experimenting with new things out of sheer desperation, none of which really worked.” He admitted that he felt he had let Barbra down, and as a result the entire picture suffered.29
No matter how much tension existed on the set, whenever Walter Matthau brought his eight-year-old son to work, the cast and crew could be assured that Gene would be relaxed and affable. “Let’s let Charlie direct today,” Gene would say as he took the child’s hand. Lehman and Barbra had their issues with Gene, but Matthau claimed that he liked having him as director. “Gene Kelly . . . is charming, intelligent, and has an inordinate amount of patience.”30
Perhaps the most genial relationship on the set was between Gene and Michael Crawford. Again contradicting his earlier statement that he “hated amateurs,” Gene was, according to newcomer Crawford, “enormously understanding and empathetic to his artists.” Crawford had come to Gene’s attention after Roger Edens arranged an audition for him. Three decades later, Crawford still recalled with remarkable clarity the day he met Gene. “The doorbell rings. . . . I open the door and see that famous genial Irish grin. . . . ‘Let’s cut the small talk,’ he said. ‘Can you dance? . . . Just get up and do something. Try this.’ He cleared the coffee table, got up on it and did a couple of tap steps. . . . His compassionate eyes were glued to the human rubber band who helplessly flailed away in front of him.”31
Gene did not shower compliments on Crawford; instead, he used a bit of “put-down humor” on him, which was actually Gene’s way of showing esteem. “Siddown,” he said to Crawford. “What I’m looking for is someone to play Cornelius Hackl. . . . He’s an attractive idiot. Now my wife, well, she thinks you’re attractive, and I think you’re an idiot.”32
From that point on, Crawford made Gene his idol. After singing his solo in the picture, “It Only Takes a Moment,” Crawford remembered, he glanced at Gene to see his reaction. Gene “was in tears. He came over and put his arm around me. ‘That’s my boy.’”33 Crawford never forgot Gene’s impact on his career. In 1990, on Crawford’s opening night in the legendary Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, he stated that he owed “his success to Gene Kelly.”34
Filming wrapped on Hello, Dolly! in summer 1968. Then the agonizing editing process began. Gene took bits and pieces out of the film after its sneak preview but declared, “I wish we could cut more, but we’ve taken all we can.” He found it a challenge to portray on the big screen what he saw as a “very intimate story.” “It wasn’t the best picture I ever directed, but I was pleased with what we did.”35 The almost workmanlike quality of Gene’s solo directorial projects is evidence that he clearly thrived on collaboration and would have benefited from being able to bounce ideas off another, as he had with Stanley Donen. The overlong Hello, Dolly! was ready for release, but it sat on the shelf for a year while Twentieth Century-Fox waited for the stage production’s run to end on Broadway. Finally, the studio managed to negotiate the release date to December 16, 1969.
On November 24, 1969, shortly before Hello, Dolly! premiered, Gene was invited to place his foot- and handprints in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood—an honor
long overdue. His spirits were high and he was confident that his mammoth picture would break the string of flops Twentieth Century-Fox had produced over the last two years.
At first, it seemed Hello, Dolly! would indeed break the curse. In its first two weeks of release, it actually grossed more than The Sound of Music had in the same amount of time. A writer for Time magazine noted: “If the echoes sometimes blend into a solid chorus, credit must be divided between director Gene Kelly and his choreographer Michael Kidd. . . . The . . . dancing is happily reminiscent of the old MGM musical.”36 As the film continued to sell more and more tickets, Fred Astaire sent Gene and his wife a congratulatory greeting with an effusion of enthusiasm about the film.
What looked like the biggest sensation since The Sound of Music plummeted as quickly as it had risen. Vincent Canby of the New York Times likened the extravagance of Hello, Dolly! to relics such as “D. W. Griffith’s Babylon on a Hollywood back lot in 1916.” Canby elaborated, “Gene Kelly . . . and Ernest Lehman . . . have . . . been reverential [to the Broadway show] to the point of idiocy, since, by preserving something basically thin and often witless on a large movie screen, they have merely inflated the faults to elephantine proportions.” Canby concluded with the remark that “Gene Kelly and Michael Kidd . . . [have] added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.”37
In order to make a profit, Hello, Dolly! would have had to earn at least $60 million. Though it was ultimately the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year, earning $38 million in the United States and $20 million internationally, it was still not enough. The film’s backers lost approximately $10 million on the venture. Nevertheless, it was not the critical and box office disaster that Doctor Doolittle or Star! had been. It won Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, and Best Score (and won the latter three).
Critics and historians largely consider Hello, Dolly! the Hollywood musical’s last hurrah. The younger generation’s idea of what constituted a musical left Gene nonplussed. One of the most popular original musicals among young Americans was the 1968 Broadway hit Hair, an antiwar play revolving around a group of hippies and their clash with “normal” society. Gene claimed that the authors of the show approached him about directing a film version. “I said, ‘Send me a script.’ A script? They had no script. So they finally typed up what people say to each other and they had about three pages. There is very little to say, just . . . some action and yelling against the establishment. And some mild, very mild I thought, put-downs of the middle class and the middle-aged. But it depressed me very much that movies are only making adaptations of old Broadway shows. By the time Hair is put on the screen,” he said with irony, “it may turn out to be Blossom Time. Musical styles change, the world moves so fast now.”38 Gene further stated that the music did “not lend itself to dramatic treatment . . . and you can’t adlib a movie musical. . . . You need discipline and coordinated teamwork to make musicals—it’s one area of filmmaking where the now popular auteur theory just does not make sense.”39
In 1969, the trend in cinema, whether the work was a drama or musical, was toward realism—not nostalgia and eye-dazzling spectacles. As the Vietnam War dragged on, a blossoming counterculture (as depicted in Hair) infused with ideas of free love, nihilism, and rejection of tradition left no place for Hello, Dolly! Gene was not immune to the controversy of the era; in a 2001 interview, his daughter Kerry explained that she had many heated discussions with her father about the war and other major events of the 1960s.40 Gene continued to be a staunch Democrat and supporter of the Kennedy family in particular. However, one achievement by the US space program John F. Kennedy had supported so strongly was one that weighed heavily on Gene’s mind: the moon landing on July 20, 1969. While the bulk of the nation rejoiced over the fantastic achievement, Gene looked upon it with sadness, claiming that the landing took away from the moon’s romance. With the mystery of the moon lost, Gene saw yet another ending of innocence and wonder for the younger generation. “Every day was a happy day when I was growing up,” Gene later told reporter Nancy Anderson. “Now not even the kids are happy.”41
The Best Picture winner of 1969 reflected the bleak mood of the times: Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated film about a gigolo. The same year saw the release of Easy Rider, a dark picture with themes similar to Hair. The film became the most iconic counterculture film of the 1960s. Its glorification of drug use and depiction of small-town Americans as little more than prejudiced savages would have sent Louis B. Mayer into seizures if he had been alive to see it (he died in 1957, mercifully before the evolution of hippie culture). Gene saw merit in the picture, however. “Easy Rider is a musical,” he asserted. “Just because they weren’t doing numbers didn’t make it less a musical. . . . Although I can’t like two bums who bring cocaine into the U.S. to ruin lives, I thought Easy Rider added up.”42 Overall, Gene did not favor the new trend of musicals, which all but negated the decades of work he had done refining the genre at MGM.
Another event in 1969 was a poignant symbol of the passing of the Hollywood musical. On June 22, Judy Garland was found dead in her London apartment from an accidental overdose of Seconal. Her funeral, held in Manhattan, attracted twenty-two thousand people. Mourners lined the streets; two thousand were eventually turned away for lack of space. Gene was unable to attend his beloved colleague and friend’s funeral because he was preoccupied with finishing Hello, Dolly! This did not diminish his sadness over her passing, however. “We loved each other,” Gene said in 1990. “She was a deep friend. . . . We were very, very close.”43
Gene’s Hello, Dolly! can justly be viewed as a tribute to the era in which Judy Garland had been synonymous with the Hollywood musical. In the judgment of Gene’s biographer Clive Hirschhorn, the film “brought to life something of the enchantment and innocence of a world since departed. . . . Hello, Dolly! has the joyous appeal of Vincente Minnelli’s [and Judy Garland’s] Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). . . . [It] combines all the best elements of the Metro musical and Gene . . . made a contribution to the film whose excellence cannot be overestimated.”44
The Hollywood musical may have died, but many of the greatest stars of old Hollywood had plenty of vitality left. Gene’s next directorial project starred two of the silver screen’s most iconic leading men, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, serving as proof of their enduring audience appeal. The National General film, a quasi-Western entitled The Cheyenne Social Club, tells the story of an older cowboy, O’Hanlan (Stewart), who inherits his brother’s property. With his pal Sullivan (Fonda), he travels to survey the land only to find that a brothel stands on it. At first, he plans to shut it down but eventually sees the essential goodness of the girls living there. In the end, he writes the deed to the property over to the madam, Jenny (Shirley Jones), with whom he has formed a special attachment. He then, in classic cowboy style, rides off into the sunset with Sullivan.
The picture was unlike other Westerns of the era such as Hombre (1967) with Paul Newman or The Man with No Name trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, which all had cynical undertones and antiheroes as the main characters. “I don’t see any purpose in the modern Westerns where they try to apply things today to the way they were. They’re trying to excuse the violence by equating things now with things then. This really bores me,” Jimmy Stewart declared.45
Though The Cheyenne Social Club was not typical of its genre, Gene initially did not want to do the picture. “But I’m a pushover for performers, and how could I go through the rest of my life realizing that I had turned down an opportunity to work with two people [Fonda and Stewart] like that?” He added that he was more than flattered that Fonda and Stewart had handpicked him as director—he was “ecstatic.”46
Writer James Lee Barrett had infused the screenplay with plenty of “charming” banter between Fonda and Stewart that fully exploited their real-life affection for each other. Still, Barrett believed that “something [about the film] was not working.” And the flawed fac
tor in the production was, he claimed, Gene Kelly: “You’d think that with two actors like James Stewart and Henry Fonda a director would find it hard to make a poor Western. I don’t say it was a poor film, because I think it had its virtues. But as a Western it pretty much stank.”47 Henry Fonda conceded that Gene “blocks out the scenes like a chorus.” But he did not see this as a negative thing. “We had a location scene in which Jimmy and I are doing laundry alongside a track. It called for coordinating action, dialogue, sound, etc. as a train, starting from half a mile away, passed by. Gene worked it like a countdown, with everything happening on count.”48
Gene endeavored to make the picture as authentic a Western as possible. He used the time spent shooting on location in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to question local cowboys about how to brand cows and saddle horses; he also read thoroughly about the period (1860s) in which the film took place. The assistant director, Paul Helmick, claimed that Gene had not known “a damn thing about Westerns or the West when he started but when he finished there wasn’t much you could tell him he didn’t already know.”49
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 48