Though Gene tried his best to add realism to the picture, it still came across as a “cinematic time travel to a simpler, happier time . . . a happy dose of theatrical unreality.”50 Even the whorehouse seemed innocent. This is not to say those working on the picture (particularly Gene and Stewart) did not question its morality. In one scene, Stewart enters a girl’s room to find her in a see-through negligee. This would not have been an issue for most actors, but because of Stewart’s spotless image, the scene gave Gene some concern. “Jimmy and I felt it should come out. But the [film’s] owners, National General, insisted it stay in and I think that was a mistake.”51
The picture’s completion was jeopardized when James Stewart’s stepson, Ronald, was killed in Vietnam. The devastated actor returned immediately to Los Angeles to arrange the memorial. However, production resumed sooner than anticipated; Stewart returned to the set of The Cheyenne Social Club long before anyone expected him. But it was obvious to all that he was still deeply grieving. He was further saddened by the death of his beloved horse Pie during filming. Barrett believed that Stewart needed a tough-love director who would demand that he concentrate on the film, but Gene felt that it was best to accommodate the actor, shooting around him. Whenever he noticed Stewart looking especially gloomy, he would go so far as to cancel filming for the day and take the actor fishing instead. “Gene’s heart was in the right place. . . . He was a sweet guy,” Barrett declared.52
The Cheyenne Social Club wrapped in the fall of 1969 but was not slated to premiere until nearly a year later. Gene had plenty to occupy him in the meantime. In January 1970, he agreed to host and perform in a television special for NBC-TV entitled Gene Kelly’s Wonderful World of Girls. “The show,” Gene explained, “will reveal the foibles of the American woman. It will be satirical, done with love and affection in song, dance and comedy sketches.” Gene insisted the show be filmed without a laugh track. “We’re playing straight to the living room,” he said. “If you hear any laughter, it’ll be strictly because you thought it was funny.”53 Upon the show’s premiere on January 14, 1970, New York Times critic George Gant heralded Gene as a “free-wheeling and engaging link” between his guests and their antics. “While women were the butt of the show,” Gant concluded, “most would agree that it was a tasteful exploration of one of nature’s masterpieces.”54
The show so impressed the proprietors of the International Hotel in Las Vegas that they requested Gene adapt it as a live attraction for their establishment. Gene was reluctant, remembering the pact he had made with himself long ago never again to work in nightclubs. He still vividly recalled the humiliation of working cloops as a young hoofer and being ignored or talked over by inebriated audiences. After the International Hotel’s owners virtually begged him to come to Las Vegas, Gene relented, with two conditions. First, he demanded higher pay than any entertainer had ever received at the hotel. Second, he demanded that the date be set for the Easter holiday, which would allow his family to travel with him. After going on location for both Hello, Dolly! and The Cheyenne Social Club, he was reluctant to leave Jeanne and the children again even for a brief time. The proprietors agreed to his stipulations, and Gene signed for a four-week engagement.
His production was a novelty in town: he managed to make a “girlie show” kid friendly. He gave two performances nightly; the earlier show attracted entire families while the second attracted primarily tipsy gamblers. Frank Sinatra, a seasoned Las Vegas entertainer, sent Gene a fond telegram on his opening night, addressing Gene with the nickname he had given him: Shanty.
Gene’s show proved to be so popular that the hotel’s owners extended the engagement to eight weeks. His family returned to Beverly Hills while he fulfilled the rest of his commitment. Gene found that playing to a nightclub audience was not the demoralizing experience he assumed it would be. Gene even interacted with some of the theatergoers, “flirting with older women in the later show and playing with children in the earlier one.” During one week of the engagement, a hotel strike closed the production down. That same week, Jeanne fell ill with pneumonia. Gene rushed back to North Rodeo Drive to be at her side. When he returned to Las Vegas, he was homesick and exhausted. Because he did not gamble, he swiftly tired of Las Vegas. Nonetheless, at the close of eight weeks Gene came away grateful that he had at least overcome his “distaste for nightclub audiences.”55
Several months after his return home, The Cheyenne Social Club made its New York premiere, on September 16, 1970. It managed to make a small profit and won a nomination for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen from the Writers Guild. The film received favorable reviews, though critics noted its old-fashioned feel. An author for Time magazine called the picture “a wonderfully outdated odyssey of bawdy innocence.”56 Only after The Cheyenne Social Club aired on cable channels years later did it gain a larger appreciation. It was ultimately the last major motion picture Gene directed.
After taking a short jaunt to London to promote The Cheyenne Social Club, Gene took a much-needed break. His vacation spot of choice was Ireland, which he decided his younger children needed to see as Kerry had when she was young. Before leaving the United States, Gene and his family stopped in Pittsburgh to visit his mother and siblings. The visit was one of the last times Gene ever saw Harriet Kelly. The woman who had virtually willed Gene to be a dancer passed away on June 1, 1972, leaving behind five children who all attributed the roots of their success and veneration for family to her.
Before Gene and his brood arrived in Ireland on June 15, 1971, Gene’s aide, a Mr. Tobin from Shannon Free Airport, sent him a humorous wire, assuring him that the Ballyvaughan area would be amply supplied with whiskey before Gene’s arrival. After a voyage around Loch Derg, the family rented a traditional Irish cottage in Ballyvaughan. The Kellys also made a stop in Portroe, a village in North Tipperary. There, Gene visited scenic designer Sean Kenny. The meeting proved to be more than a friendly one. As ever, even when Gene tried to rest, he could not keep his mind completely off work. Gene and Kenny had become acquainted in Los Angeles during early preparations for a live family theater show. Entitled Clownaround, it was to be imitative of Disney on Parade. The show’s producers and investors, Harry Lishinsky and Franklin Roberts, had approached Gene in early 1971 to act as director. Kenny, as set designer, had plans for “a giant ‘clown machine’ . . . in, on, and around which the entire entertainment was to take place. To Gene the idea was utterly irresistible. . . . The show had a circus feeling to it which he relished. . . . It appealed to his sense of fantasy and wonderment.”57
On July 3, the Kellys, refreshed and invigorated, left the scenic Emerald Isle, made a brief stop in London to visit Kerry, and then returned to Beverly Hills. The serenity of Ireland made the constant reports of violence in the American media all the more overwhelming. In December 1971, popular culture’s portrayal of the brutality that seemed to be the norm onscreen and off hit Gene at a personal level. Stanley Kubrick (once a guest at Gene and Betsy’s house parties and now a cutting-edge director) released his controversial dystopia of an ultra-violent future: A Clockwork Orange. The film is a veritable masterwork of dark comedy blended with nightmarish, surreal scenarios. The primary character in the film, a teen thug named Alex, is an aficionado of music and song, favoring especially Ludwig van Beethoven—and none other than Gene Kelly. In one of the first scenes of the film, he dances and croons to “Singin’ in the Rain” while his buddies brutally rape a woman and beat her husband. After each line of the song, Alex kicks the husband or cuts a piece of the wife’s clothing off. The scene came about in a moment of improvisation on the part of Malcolm McDowell (Alex). “I jumped up and started singing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ . . . on the beats, slapping, kicking, boom. And why did I do that? Because [that song is] Hollywood’s gift to the world of euphoria. And that’s what the character is feeling at the time.”58 The movie was the ninth-top-grossing film of 1971.
Gene was not thrilled with the use of “Singin’ in the Rai
n” in the film, but he was not one to stand in the way of creativity, whatever form it took. What he did object to, however, was any lack of compensation for the imitation of his song and dance moves in the film. In 1972, a year after McDowell had moved to Hollywood, the actor recalled that Gene “cut him dead at a party.” McDowell assumed that Gene was offended by the use of “Singin’ in the Rain” in such a perverse manner. Only after Gene’s third wife, Patricia Ward, addressed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the fortieth anniversary of A Clockwork Orange in 2011 did McDowell discover the true reason behind Gene’s snub. She explained that Gene was angry that he was not compensated for the use of his dance routine that accompanied “Singin’ in the Rain.” McDowell elaborated, “He [Kubrick] was cheap. . . . He thought it was enough that ‘Stanley Kubrick’ was going to use the song.”59
Gene, determined to create euphoria in a nondystopian sense, plunged into work on Clownaround with blithe enthusiasm. It tapped into his creativity for original concepts as no project had since Jack and the Beanstalk. But during rehearsals, suddenly a dystopia seemed far more real than the colorful world of entertainment he had been trying to create. Jeanne Coyne Kelly discovered she had leukemia.
Part 4
Ambassador of His Art
1972–Present
21
True Talent Shows Itself in Kindness
The early 1970s were a time of both loss and revival for Gene. While tragedy tainted his personal life, the rediscovery of his movie work, borne by a wave of nostalgia that swept over America, gave him hope and encouragement.
Such comfort, however, seemed a long way off in the spring and summer of 1972. Gene’s new pet project, Clownaround, was not living up to his expectations in spite of the great effort he initially poured into it. He spent weeks touring the country in search of dancers who were also gymnasts who could navigate scenic designer Sean Kenny’s intricate, multilevel set. The ingenious design was like a circus in and of itself; it could be transformed into a jungle, a ship, or a fairground if rotated.
On March 11, 1972, in the midst of Gene’s cross-country talent scouting, Jeanne grew concerned over several large bruises on her body. She showed Gene’s faithful secretary, Lois McClelland, the contusions, explaining that she had neither fallen nor bumped herself. Lois advised her to call a doctor, which she did. The following day, Gene returned home and drove to the studio as usual with Lois. Jeanne went to the doctor without telling her husband or children. Lois expected her to call a few hours later with news of the outcome of her exam, but it was not until two-thirty in the afternoon that the phone rang.
“I need to talk to Gene,” Jeanne said, frantic. Lois handed the phone to him. A few minutes later, she recalled, Gene “disappeared into a dark corner of the stage and wandered up and down. Jeanne had leukemia and could be dead within three weeks.”1
Gene tried to use work as a distraction but he could not think of anything but Jeanne. Clownaround became a chore rather than a joy. It pained Jeanne to see how fully Gene’s heart had gone out of the project; but it made her more determined to keep life as normal as possible. Frank McCarthy, who had become a friend of the family since producing A Guide for the Married Man, commented that her “spirit was incredible. . . . I never saw her with sadness in her eyes and I never heard her complain.”2 Nonetheless, Jeanne’s illness, compounded with injuries sustained by actors in Clownaround during performances, caused Gene’s faith in the show to all but disappear. Clownaround, which the producers had planned to tour forty cities until closing in New York’s Madison Square Garden, never made it out of California. It shut down after two weeks when the producers’ funds ran dry and Sean Kenny became ill.
Gene was somewhat relieved to be free of the show. All he wanted was to be close to Jeanne. He refused to accept any work more than thirty minutes from home. Jeanne had to cajole him into taking a supporting part in what would be his first film in ten years. Entitled 40 Carats, it was a cinematic adaptation of a popular Broadway romantic comedy about a forty-year-old woman who falls in love with a twenty-two-year-old man. When producer M. J. Frankovich approached Gene to portray the leading lady’s ex-husband (an aging, has-been actor), Gene remembered, Jeanne “said it would be good for me to get out and be occupied. She was right.”3 Another deciding factor for Gene was the opportunity to work with two top-notch actresses, Liv Ullman and Binnie Barnes. “I haven’t regretted a minute of the filming,” Gene told the Toledo Blade. He was happy to have only one role in the film—that of actor. “My God, it was nice to have someone else shouldering the responsibility [of directing]!” he exclaimed.4 Gene did not escape the film without performing an obligatory dance, however. The dance, which takes place in a hip nightclub, was unlike any he had ever done. Gene is hilarious trying to dress and dance like the paisley- and polyester-clad young people on the floor.
The picture was in production from October 1972 to January 1973. When released on June 28, 1973, it grossed a modest $2.1 million. The film received mixed reviews, but the majority of critics seemed to agree that Gene added vitality and humor to the endeavor. A reviewer for Variety stated that he “projects superbly the intricacies of a showbiz character, an aging gypsy so to speak, whose head and heart are together though his career is erratic. It’s made to order for his mature abilities in both comedy and drama.”5
Gene did not have the heart to start another project after finishing his work on 40 Carats. Illness and death seemed ubiquitous in his life. As he watched Jeanne rapidly weakening, he received news that the man who had made him a star at MGM—Arthur Freed—had died, on April 13, 1973. In May, Gene was honored to be the first recipient of an award named after the great producer. At the awards show, a series of classic film clips featuring Gene was screened.
In the same spring, Gene watched Liza Minnelli take home an Oscar for Best Actress in Cabaret. The previous year, shortly after Gene had discovered his wife was ill, he had turned down the tantalizing offer to direct and choreograph Cabaret, which was to be shot on location in Berlin. He wanted neither to leave Jeanne nor take his family with him, as that would mean uprooting the children. Gene recommended Bob Fosse (who used to be a frequent visitor at the Kelly house parties) for the job. The innovative young choreographer had found success in his work with the stage and movie versions of The Pajama Game (1957, film) and Sweet Charity (1969, film). According to Cabaret’s producer, Cy Feuer, Gene “could have made the movie, but it wouldn’t have been the same picture. It would have been more . . . frivolous. It wouldn’t have Fosse’s dark side.”6
The morning after the Academy Awards ceremony on March 27, 1973, “one of the earliest calls” Vincente Minnelli got “was among the most heartwarming.” “It was Gene Kelly, who’d been a part of Liza’s life for such a long time. . . . His cheery voice gave no indication he’d been under the weather. ‘Wonderful! Judy would have been thrilled!’ he said.”7
Liza’s victory was one of the few positive events that dismal spring. Jeanne spent her days in and out of hospitals. She had been trying to keep her illness secret from Tim and Bridget, but after Christmas, that had become impossible. Tim, looking through a magazine one day, stumbled upon an article on leukemia and asked Gene if it was what his mother had. The eleven-year-old had heard the word whispered around the house and make the connection. Tim then asked Jeanne if leukemia was fatal. It was, she told him. “Is there any medicine to make you better?” Tim asked, staring at the many prescriptions on her nightstand. Jeanne admitted there was nothing that could make her better, but that her medicines would keep her around a bit longer. Though Jeanne rarely allowed her fear to show, Tim once saw her in her bedroom, looking out the window and sobbing.
Jeanne was eventually confined to the house to prevent her from catching infections. The Kellys’ social life, already limited, dwindled even further. Jeanne remained very practical and discussed with Gene whether the children should be allowed to see her “when the end came and the sort of services she wanted he
ld. She did not, she said, want an open casket and everything was to be as simple as possible. In truth she did not want a service of any kind, but because her children attended a Catholic school, she felt she would have to have one ‘as a gesture.’”8 She even gave Gene specific instructions about which of her friends would be best to take Bridget shopping, how to put corrections (such as arch supports and heel wedges) in the children’s shoes, and even what placemats should be used for what meals. Basically, she wanted the house to continue running as it always had.
Jeanne Coyne passed away on May 10, 1973—nine years to the day after Gene’s onetime assistant Carol Haney’s death. Her strong will to live and her unflagging optimism went far in allowing her to live fifteen months although her doctor had projected three weeks. The death of the woman many deemed Gene’s one true love—sweet, selfless, intelligent Jeanne—was the “sad climax” to the most depressing year of Gene’s life. From spring 1972 to summer 1973, he saw the death of his mother, Arthur Freed, Jeanne, and Sean Kenny (in June 1973). A despondent Gene termed the next two years of his life “a siege. I didn’t feel much like working or doing anything.”9 Kerry Kelly recalled that Gene’s everyday existence became a struggle. The loss changed his life “enormously. . . . He was a quieter guy.”10 Tim elaborated, “He was crushed. Later in life he would get psychosomatically sick around the time of her death. It was like clockwork.”11
For weeks after Jeanne’s death, Gene spent the early morning hours watching television and drinking beer, which he termed his sleeping pills. He went into professional seclusion, devoting himself to being both a mother and father to his two young children. He had enough in savings to live on for the rest of his life and could, if he chose, never work again. When asked about raising Tim and Bridget alone, Gene replied: “I don’t think I had any choice. I never felt sorry for myself. It was a very tough job, but it made me appreciate the woman’s role in the house. Anyway, sing no sad songs for me.”12
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 49