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

by Cynthia Brideson

  Though Gene may have sounded curmudgeonly in his views of the youth-oriented musicals being churned out in the 1980s, he was optimistic that young dancers would “start going back to romantic numbers.” Romance was what he missed most in modern musicals, he insisted. “I keep saying this over and over again, but dance follows music. . . . And if the accent today is percussion and rhythm and loudness, then that is the way the dance numbers will be. . . . I love rhythmic dancing—I’m not derogating it at all. It’s just that sometimes you want to whisper, ‘I adore you.’ And for that you need strings and woodwinds.”8

  On December 21, 1983, a fire broke out in the Kellys’ home due to a faulty Christmas tree light. Tim was the first to notice it and roused his pajama-clad father from sleep. The blaze spread swiftly and destroyed their beloved home. Gene lost a lifetime collection of treasures, both expensive and intimate. Numerous works of art and a painting that Kerry had made for his fortieth birthday turned to ashes. His honorary Oscar from 1952 and an old French poster that had been a family joke were also lost to the flames.

  Kerry, who now lived in Michigan with her husband and children, called Betsy Blair with the news at two in the morning. Betsy, although still based in Paris, was in Beverly Hills at the time with her husband, Karel, who was shooting a film. Betsy decided she had to go to Gene. As she approached North Rodeo Drive, she saw Tim trying to get past the firefighters, begging to be allowed to enter the house to save things. The firefighters forbade him. Lois McClelland stood beside Gene with Bridget (who was home for the holidays). Gene caught sight of his first wife and said in a broken voice, “Oh Bets, oh Sweeney.” They hugged each other and both began to cry. “The 725 North Rodeo Drive that was part of me was gone. It was no longer ‘mine,’ but in its proper place as a memory,” Betsy wrote.9

  Though the fire was disastrous, Gene did not fall into despair: he and his children were safe. Asked what he would do now, Gene said without a pause: “Rebuild.” He did just that, ordering a replica of the home to be constructed. Unlike Betsy, he was unwilling to let the house be a memory. In coping with his staggering loss, Gene’s positive attitude and (if intermittent) faith remained intact. As he had said in 1980, “Cheerfulness and good humor have always been important values for me. Gloom doesn’t help anyone. My religious faith that God is good and doesn’t abandon his own—as well as my faith in life and in other people—sustains me in stormy times.”10

  Gene had reason to be cheerful as he watched his children flourish into adulthood. Forty-year-old Kerry now had two children and was a successful child psychologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Twenty-year-old Bridget was studying art in Gene’s beloved Paris. Twenty-two-year-old Tim, showing the entrepreneurial spirit Gene had exhibited as a young man beginning his own dance studio, operated his own nightclub. From June 1983 until late April 1984, Tim (who now bore a striking resemblance to his father) and a friend ran the Nairobi Room which, almost overnight, became the hippest spot in Los Angeles. One night, Tim asked Gene to come and see the club in action. “It was a big surprise to him,” he explained. “[He said] ‘Gosh, this is a great time, but some of these kids need dancing lessons.’”11

  Gene encouraged self-reliance in his children, but this did not mean he refused to help them financially. He lent Tim money to buy a used Porsche, but he made the boy sell it when he could not keep up with the payments. He paid Tim’s tuition at the University of Southern California’s film school while allowing his son to stay rent-free in a room above the garage. Tim did not let his father’s star status make him complacent. He worked two jobs, one at the Nairobi and the other as a production assistant. “I work twice as hard as anybody else. It’s best if someone doesn’t know who I am. When they do, they expect the worst from me, thinking ‘Oh, Daddy got him the job,’” Tim explained. Like Gene, he was more interested in working behind the camera. For a time, he dabbled in photography.12

  Tim ultimately pursued work behind the scenes in the film industry, as did Bridget. After graduating from the American College in Paris, she became a costume designer for motion pictures. The lives of Gene’s children were, for the most part, kept private from the public—just as he had always wished. The same could not be said for Gene.

  On May 7, 1985, he was again the center of attention when the American Film Institute chose him as the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Shirley MacLaine hosted the event, which was televised on CBS-TV. Guests included Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Cyd Charisse, Betty Comden, Betty Garrett, Kathryn Grayson, Adolph Green, Lois McClelland, Vincente Minnelli, Harold and Fayard Nicholas, Olivia Newton-John, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and James Stewart. Gene made his way through a cheering crowd to join his family; his sister Louise, his brother Fred, his nephew, Kerry and her family, Bridget, and Tim waited for him at his table. Gene’s two eldest siblings, Jay and James, were not present. Shirley MacLaine began by recollecting her first meeting with Gene after The Pajama Game and how he had encouraged her to persevere. Thirty years later, she asked him how long she should keep going; he advised her to remain active as long as she found fulfilment in helping others see their dreams become realities.13

  When Gene stood to receive his award, he was quick to deflect honor from himself. “You need a lot of talent around you. There are no auteurs in musical movies. . . . All these people [behind the scenes] who knocked themselves out so that we could look good. . . . They don’t get enough credit,” he said. “It [the movie business] was . . . fun, we had the best of times. And I think it was because we all thought we were trying to create some kind of magic and joy.”14

  In conclusion, Shirley asked everyone to join in singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” to Gene. Gene waved his award above his head and sang loudly with the crowd.

  Gene’s seemingly unflagging vitality began to wane as the 1980s neared their end. According to Kerry: “His last years were sad. Satisfying in some ways but also very sad. For someone whose physical prowess had been so central to his identity to be old . . . and not able to do all the things he loved doing was very limiting and very hard.”15

  One satisfying aspect of his later years was seeing the appreciation that continued to be accorded to his work. In July 1985, Singin’ in the Rain was adapted into a Broadway extravaganza. Transferring a cinematic musical to the confines of a stage was no easy task. Choreographer Twyla Tharp was at the helm of the production. The show ran for over three hundred performances but failed to garner positive notices. Frank Rich of the New York Times pointed out: “Once transposed to the stage in realistic terms, the fantasy evaporates. . . . Because Miss Tharp has failed to meet—indeed, even to consider—the central challenge of transposing a quintessentially cinematic work to the theater, her show usually flattens out in exactly this way.”16 Gene did not disapprove of Tharp’s attempts. He commented, “I [don’t] agree with everything she has done. . . . But Twyla’s still experimenting, probing new ground.”17

  Gene was now funneling less energy into show business and more into one of his first passions: writing. He began redrafting his autobiography, the first version of which had burned in the house fire. Throughout the process, he enlisted four different authors to aid him in writing the book, but all failed to meet his expectations. Then he met twenty-six-year-old Patricia Ward, a graduate student, Melville scholar, researcher, and author.

  They first met at Washington’s Air and Space Museum, where Patricia was working as screenwriter for a documentary on the Smithsonian. The documentary was supposed to be narrated by Gregory Peck, but when he withdrew from the project, Gene was asked to take his place. Apparently, Patricia was not sure if Peck’s replacement was a female Jean or a male Gene. She had never seen a Kelly film or heard his name, something Gene found quite refreshing. Gene, then seventy-three, liked the fact that the young woman could not compare him to his past celluloid image. They shared an immediate rapport, mostly over their shared love of languages and writing. Of course she went to the nearest video store and rented his m
ovies, but rather than becoming disenchanted with the Gene she had met compared to the young and vital dancer she saw on the screen, she only became more fascinated. Next, she read a biography of him, most likely the first comprehensive book written on Gene, by Clive Hirschhorn in 1974 (updated and re-released in 1984). The book, to her, failed to capture the essence of the man she had come to know.

  Six months after meeting Gene, Patricia was surprised to receive a call from Gene asking her to help him write his autobiography. The job was only supposed to last two weeks; she accepted. However, she swiftly found that the job would be far lengthier. It was no simple task to get Gene to open up to her, particularly when he saw her tape recorder continually running. After what turned out to be several years, Gene’s trust in Patricia grew, and so did the depth of his stories. He was not the easiest subject; his stories could be inconsistent, but they never bored his young biographer.

  As they worked together, Patricia and Gene fell in love. She saw him not as a man nearly eighty years old, nor as a young man. Rather, he was ageless. They paused their work to take time out for dates to “regular guy” activities such as baseball games, where they would enjoy hot dogs and soda pop.

  Gene and Patricia’s budding romance may have been one of the forces behind his buoyed spirits and subsequent flurry of professional activity in the mid-1980s. He made several forays back into television. He appeared on two episodes of the popular sitcom The Love Boat in 1984, and the following year, he appeared as a senator in six episodes of a Civil War miniseries on ABC, North and South. In 1986, he costarred in a soapy Joan Collins miniseries on CBS, Sins, as a Gershwinesque composer. On the big screen, he hosted a film documentary entitled That’s Dancing! (1985). An attempt to recapture the magic of That’s Entertainment! it was yet another retrospective produced by Jack Haley Jr. for MGM. The picture traces the origins of dance for the camera, starting in the late 1920s and ending with break dancing and the rise of music videos in the 1980s. Other hosts included Ray Bolger and Liza Minnelli.

  Gene also acted as host for local events, including the annual Beverly Hills St. Patrick’s Day Parade in 1986. The parade rolled down thirty-two hundred square yards of kelly green carpet before 250,000 spectators and TV cameras. “For twenty years I’ve had a house party on St. Patrick’s Day,” Gene said. “This is just a bit more involved.”18 Though the day of the parade was besieged with rain, Gene refused to perform “Singin’ in the Rain.” Parade spokeswoman Gail Block asked Gene whether he would sing the iconic tune, but Gene snapped, “No, no, no,” and declined to comment further.19

  Though at times frustrated by such incessant expectations that he relive the past, Gene ultimately relished being the “elder statesman of his genre,” a role he took on after the deaths of his beloved friends and colleagues Vincente Minnelli and Fred Astaire.20 Minnelli succumbed to pneumonia in July 1986; Fred died of the same ailment the following year.

  As his social circle shrank, Gene began to entertain ideas of marriage. In 1990, after five years of working with Patricia on his manuscript, Gene caused a minor sensation by marrying his thirty-one-year-old girlfriend. Gene and Patricia’s wedding ceremony, held in Santa Barbara, was a small one. His children did not attend. However, Betsy Blair stated that Kerry, Tim, and Bridget welcomed Patricia “as an intelligent companion for him.”21 Gene, still a romantic at age seventy-seven, left Valentine’s cards and love notes around the house at midnight for Patricia to find the next morning. “It was the epitome of romance,” she said. “He’d wake me up in the middle of the night just to go outside and look at the full moon.”22

  Ten years earlier, Fred Astaire had caused a similar sensation by marrying Robyn Smith, a female jockey forty-five years his junior. Also like Gene, he had remarried after the devastating loss of his beloved wife, Phyllis, to cancer. However, the two men’s marriages to much younger women did not receive negative press—probably because both dancers had such spotless reputations that it seemed almost libelous to speak against them.

  Though Gene seems to have genuinely loved Patricia, his union with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter also gave him much-needed companionship and someone to look after him in his old age. In his new marriage, there was also the Pygmalion-Galatea dynamic he had enjoyed with seventeen-year-old Betsy Blair. As he had done with Betsy, he molded Patricia into his ideal woman. She appeared to be patient and adaptable to Gene’s likes and dislikes. One of his first orders of business was teaching her how to dress. He advised her to wear glasses and to never leave the house without a stylish scarf and hat. After his death, she looked back at the gowns she wore during this period as matronly. Not that Gene forced Patricia to be a plain Jane. Several photographs of Patricia on Gene’s arm at black-tie events show her in strapless gowns, her brown hair long and arranged in curly buns, her face fully made up. Many women might have bristled at having such alterations imposed upon them. But Patricia seemed amenable to Gene’s “teachings,” accompanied as they were by his warmth and trust.

  Gene was content to stay home with Patricia, as had been the case with his two other wives. He was still an intensely private person. When he and Patricia did go out, Gene was often barraged by autograph seekers at restaurants, but he dealt with the attention with great modesty. He obliged fans, but would try to turn attention from himself if he was present at someone else’s performance.

  According to Stanley Donen, Gene was not always so gracious to fans. In 1991, Gene and Donen were both present at a ceremony honoring Betty Comden and Adolph Green at the Kennedy Center—the first time the former co-directors had seen each other face-to-face since their bitter experience on It’s Always Fair Weather. As Gene made his way into the center, fans waving poster and autograph books bombarded him from the sidelines. Gene was annoyed. “I’m late,” Gene shouted, and, in the words of Donen’s biographer Stephen M. Silverman, was “loud and ferocious enough to send chills through the bones of bystanders.” “L-A-T-E,” Gene rat-tatted. “Late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late!”23 Silverman did not mention if Patricia was present to see Gene’s display of anger. Indeed, Patricia seems to have rarely seen Gene’s temper; no stories exist of any friction between the couple.

  Betsy Blair’s memoir painted Patricia and Gene’s union in a far different light. Betsy only met Patricia a few times. She suspected the younger woman of gold-digging: “It’s hard for me to believe that Gene with his realistic attitude and his discerning insight could have turned into a vain old man, but perhaps he did. He would not be the first man to believe that a clever young woman loved him for himself alone.”24 Friends noticed with some concern that Gene, whom Phil Silvers had once chided as being “tight fisted” with money, bought his new wife an expensive car and, it was rumored, a separate condominium for her use alone. According to Gene’s biographer Alvin Yudkoff, Patricia was not a gold digger and “turned out to be a sturdy support for him and his cronies.”25 One evening, Patricia found herself responsible for getting a tipsy Frank Sinatra, with whom she and Gene were dining, home. Frank cried that he loved Gene, and told her that they were just like brothers.

  In 1993, Gene agreed to make one last contribution to the cinema. He signed to host a second sequel to That’s Entertainment! His desire to keep the art of dance and the musical film alive became more ardent as honors continued to be bestowed upon him. In 1991, his alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, created an annual Gene Kelly Award for outstanding high school musicals in Allegheny County. In 1994, the same year That’s Entertainment! Part III premiered, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts at a ceremony held in the White House.

  When That’s Entertainment! Part III went into production in spring of 1993, columnist Kevin Thomas described Gene as “[making] light of the passing years. . . . [He was] the model of polite professionalism. . . . The sense of camaraderie was very much like that on his own sets.”26 The third installment of the series proved far less effective than its predecessors. New York Times c
ritic Caryn James said of the picture: “With the best material used up, That’s Entertainment! Part III cleverly focuses on outtakes. . . . Many of the clips are extremely short. . . . Over the course of a two-hour film, the effect is jarring, like stop-and-go driving in heavy traffic.”27

  Although the movie did not match the quality of the first two, it achieved the series’ goal of introducing new generations to classic movies. As they had in the 1970s, young people responded. Nostalgia was back in the 1990s, especially for the big band era. New groups, particularly the Brian Setzer Orchestra, released albums of neo-swing tunes, and films such as Swing Kids (1993) and The Mask (1994) featured swingy soundtracks that became best sellers. Classic movies were more easily accessible due to the expansion of video rental stores and the creation of Turner Classic Movies in 1994. The channel, whose owner, Ted Turner, had acquired Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in 1986, screened nothing but uncut and commercial-free films from Hollywood’s golden age.

  Classic style was also revived in the early 1990s—perhaps as a rebellion against the grunge look that also dominated the era. In 1993, Gap introduced a series of advertisements for khakis that showed vintage artists including Marilyn Monroe and Rock Hudson wearing khakis. The tagline for the ad featuring Gene was misleading in that it was in the past tense (“Gene Kelly wore khakis”), leading some to assume he had passed away. Gene insisted during an interview: “I’m alive all right, as you can tell. . . . I have a pair [of khakis] on right now.” Gene’s Gap ad was done in good taste, much to his approval. “I won’t do anything peddling anything,” he declared. “[But] this is very classy, and I like it.”28 Gene, who had referred to himself as a “walking slum” throughout his life, suddenly found himself a fashion icon. Columnist Hal Rubenstein stated, “In his wardrobe’s renewed popularity, Kelly sees a hopeful sign that men’s wear is maturing.” Gene expounded on his distaste for contemporary trends. What most disgusted him were baseball caps worn backward. “On grown men, it’s so stupid.”29