Just as Gene was enjoying the latest appreciation of his legacy, he suffered a serious stroke on July 24, 1994. He was hospitalized for seven weeks. Betsy Blair related, “Kerry and Tim called and left messages of love and concern. They had the impression Gene didn’t know about these calls”—Patricia, Betsy alleged, kept the messages from him. “Bridget was told that her presence in the hospital was ‘embarrassing’ for him. But she could see the joy in his eyes when she arrived, so she just showed up every day.”30 Gene remained largely homebound for the next eight months and received few visitors. He did not wish for anyone, even his family, to see him in such an altered state. In February 1995, he endured a second stroke. He was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center under an assumed name. “He is neurologically stable,” Ron Wise, a hospital spokesman, said. “He’s aware and conversational.”31
After his second stroke, Gene was bedridden for a year and a half—a nightmare for a man who had been active his entire life. Betsy asserted that Patricia made the difficult situation an impossible one: “[He was] paralyzed down one side. He was cut off from everything familiar: Lois, his secretary for fifty years, was no longer welcomed in the house; the locks were changed, there was a new housekeeper. His doctor, his business manager, and his lawyer were fired and replaced. The telephone was never answered. Old friends who left messages over a period of months received no calls back. They assumed he was too ill and therefore incommunicado.” Betsy claimed that Gene’s children had only limited information on their father’s state. Betsy further alleged that Patricia required the children to make an appointment if they wished to see Gene. “But [Bridget] has her mother Jeannie’s spirit—she could not be stopped so she barged in anyway,” Betsy wrote.32 Though Gene was half paralyzed, he was still able to speak. It is unknown whether he asked Patricia to dismiss his longtime staff and keep his family and friends at a distance. Gene had a strong sense of pride, and, as after his first stroke, it is likely he did not wish for anyone to see him incapacitated. Gene’s brother Fred did state that Gene did “not want anybody to see him unable to walk and in poor health.”33 Betsy commented, “I’m sure he wanted no pity. . . . He never complained.”34
Among the few people who did see Gene was Betsy Blair. Hearing of his “incommunicado” status from Kerry, she determined that she “would not be stopped. I was going to see Gene.” She was surprised to receive an exceedingly formal invitation from Patricia inviting her for tea at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Gene, paralyzed only on one side, was able to sit up in a chair to receive his guest. “All his old charm was there in a low-key way. . . . He was wry and funny,” Betsy recalled. “Tea was served to the three of us by a uniformed housekeeper. . . . When he saw my empty cup, good old Gene said with an Irish brogue, quoting his father and grandfather as he always had ‘A little hot, hon.’”35 Gene and Betsy shared a fond laugh, and Betsy held out her cup for a refill. Patricia did not take it; instead, she rang a bell on the tea trolley beside her and the little group waited in awkward silence for the maid to come from the kitchen to pour.
Betsy drove home from the visit blinded by tears. Gene extended several more invitations to Betsy after that occasion, asking her to come by and bring old friends to visit. Betsy claimed that Patricia cancelled each one, leaving terse messages that it was “too much for Gene.”36 Betsy never saw Gene again.
Betsy, as well as all three of Gene’s children, had permanent homes outside of California; Gene had no family close at hand. His eldest sister, Jay, still lived in Pittsburgh, and his younger sister, Louise, was in Alabama, where she had set up a new location of the Gene Kelly School of Dance. His elder brother, James, had moved to California and become an aeronautical designer before his death in 1989. His youngest brother, Fred, had retired in Tucson after a fruitful career as a dancer and producer. Fred, who lived nearest to Gene, came to visit him in January 1996 when he heard of his brother’s rapid deterioration. “All the life supports had been removed,” Fred remembered. “The last day we saw him, we shared about a half-hour of wonderful chatter.”37
Facing his own mortality, Gene gave directives for his burial—or lack thereof. According to Patricia, he did not want his grave to be a stop on a bus tour; consequently, he wrote out notarized instructions that his ashes not be placed anywhere public. Gene’s mind remained sharp, and he was more intent on preserving his memory through words than through an urn or a tombstone. After his strokes, he was still dictating notes to Patricia for his autobiography.
On Friday, February 2, 1996, Gene suffered a third massive stroke and died in his bed with Patricia by his side. On the night of his death, the lights of Broadway, where he had first become a star, were dimmed. “There can only be one Astaire in a generation, maybe in every several generations,” Adolph Green remarked. “And one Gene Kelly.”38
Gene Kelly’s death was peaceful, but it was followed by pain and controversy. Patricia notified Kerry, Tim, and Bridget in their respective homes in Michigan, New York, and Montana. “Gene’s widow told them there was so much to do that she couldn’t have them stay in the house they had all grown up in. Besides there was no reason to come—it was all over,” Betsy related in her memoir.39 Patricia had had Gene cremated the very day he died. The children insisted that they were going to fly to Beverly Hills anyway, and Patricia agreed for them to come to the house on Saturday evening.
Grieving and in states of shock, the children (in Betsy’s words) “passed a most bizarre half hour. There were no friends, no food, no tears, and no embraces. They were given a tour of flowers from famous people as if they were strangers. . . . Kerry later told me that they all felt as if she [Patricia] threw him away—as if he were garbage. . . . His children, who loved him, never got to say goodbye to their father.”40 They turned to Lois McClelland for comfort, as Betsy was living in London at the time. Because there was no marker for Gene’s remains, his children planted a tree in his honor in the Will Rogers Memorial Garden on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
Betsy asserted that the lack of closure for the children would have saddened and “I imagine enraged [Gene] because he loved his children deeply. . . . I cannot forgive his widow, not because she got almost all of the children’s inheritance, but because I don’t think he had the happy ending he deserved.”41 Twenty years after Gene’s death, his children still hesitate to speak of Patricia Ward. Though Patricia’s decision to have Gene cremated was apparently in keeping with his wishes, the speed with which she had it completed was understandably upsetting for his family. The impersonal way Betsy claimed Patricia acted during the children’s visit may have been due to shock and was her way of maintaining composure during the grieving process.
Patricia did not arrange a formal memorial for Gene, but his death did not go unnoticed. Hundreds of news broadcasts showed clips of him singing and dancing, and movie channels ran marathons of his work. Dozens of his friends and colleagues gave interviews expressing what Gene had meant to them. His closest collaborator, Stanley Donen, offered effusive words about Gene’s talent and infectious optimism.
Yet sadly and, according to Betsy, “mysteriously . . . Stanley, over the years, has been less than generous about Gene.”42 In the years after Gene’s death, Donen often spoke disparagingly of him as a tyrannical co-director and egotist. When director Robert Trachtenburg contacted him to speak about Gene in a 2002 documentary, he “essentially . . . relayed a message saying he had nothing nice to say, so he’d rather not say anything at all.”43 Donen had been nonplussed by the speech Gene gave when the two met at the event honoring Comden and Green at the Kennedy Center in 1991, resenting Gene’s words: “Stanley needed me to grow up with. He came to me when he was . . . maybe sixteen,” even though Gene went on: “I always wanted to be a . . . choreographer. I needed Stanley behind the camera.”44
After Gene’s death, Donen took his place as elder statesman of the genre that he, Gene, and their colleagues had helped to create. With the deaths of virtually all the members of the Freed
Unit, the golden days of the MGM musical have passed into legend. From 1998 to 2008, five people who played major parts in Gene’s career passed away. Frank Sinatra was the first to leave, in May 1998. Adolph Green died in October 2002, followed by Donald O’Connor in September 2003. Betty Comden passed away in November 2006 and Cyd Charisse in June 2008. Debbie Reynolds died suddenly in January 2017. Gene’s siblings also died within this period: Fred in 2000, Harriet Joan Kelly Radvansky in 2002, and Louise Kelly Bailey in 2008. Betsy Blair died in March 2009—but not before, at Kerry’s urging, she penned a candid memoir. “I wanted to write something that tells Gene’s children [especially Tim and Bridget] about our life, to give them something about the time of Gene Kelly,” Betsy explained.45 Her honest and tasteful book, The Memory of All That, was released in 2003.
Gene’s third wife and widow, Patricia Ward, had similar plans for a memoir. As of 2016, she has not completed it—or the biography of Gene for which she took such assiduous notes. But she has made it her career to protect, celebrate, and preserve Gene’s legacy. As the sole owner of the Gene Kelly Image Trust, she has been for the most part successful in keeping Gene’s image and name untarnished.
However, in 2005, Volkswagen released an advertisement for the newest model of Golf GTI that bordered on defaming Gene’s most enduring creation: the “Singin’ in the Rain” dance. The advertisement “metamorphosed” the original footage of Gene’s dance to make it look as though he were “rapping and breakdancing to a club-mix of ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’” The ad remastered the scene “using masks, wigs and digital techniques to impose Kelly’s face on the dancers.” The ad ended with the slogan: “The original, updated.” Advertising agent Martin Loraine defended the commercial: “Even though [Gene] was from the 1940s he was very interested and approved of modern dance.”46 Loraine’s assertion is specious; Gene did approve of modern dance, but he deemed certain styles uncreative and undisciplined. Additionally, many rap songs boast lyrics that glorify drugs or use derogatory terms for women. Gene was adamant against drugs and even more ardent in his views of protecting women.
The explosion of the Internet from the mid-1990s to the present day has inevitably given Patricia less control over information about or photos of Gene. Hundreds of fan sites have popped up, the vast majority harmless. The largest is a beautifully designed, comprehensive archive entitled Gene Kelly: Creative Genius. The founder of the website, Susan Cadman, had the opportunity to meet Betsy Blair in London during an open-air showing of Singin’ in the Rain. The show was sold out, but “I was very surprised to get a phone call from Betsy, asking if I would like her to secure tickets for my friends and myself for the film!” Cadman stated. “Betsy was so warm and funny and actually seemed interested and thrilled that people still loved Gene so much. . . . It was clear that Betsy still loved Gene very much, and had no bad word to say about him.”47
After Betsy’s death, Patricia became Gene’s primary publicist and spokesperson. Though Kerry has given countless interviews about her father, Gene’s other children have mostly remained silent, although Tim made an appearance in the 2002 PBS American Masters special, Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer. Patricia, on the contrary, is seldom out of the public eye. She has traveled the world giving talks to audiences of all ages about her late husband’s life and work. Beginning in 2012 for the centennial of Gene’s birth, Patricia launched a one-woman show titled Gene Kelly: The Legacy that has been a sensation in every town it hits.
The show consists of Patricia’s memories of Gene, film clips, a display of memorabilia, and a discussion of his impact on film. She stresses his wish to be remembered not as just a dancer but as a pioneering choreographer. The show also seeks to continue Gene’s lifelong goal of passing a love of dance to younger generations.
Audiences young and old flocked to see Singin’ in the Rain upon its rerelease in 2012. In the mere eighteen days it played in select theaters throughout the country, it grossed nearly $2 million. As the only surviving members of the cast and crew, Debbie Reynolds and Stanley Donen were present at its screening in Los Angeles for Turner Classic Movie’s Annual Classic Film Festival. Though Gene feared his work would become dated and forgotten, audiences are still responding to his films as though they were new.
In spite of the controversy surrounding Patricia before and after Gene’s death, she has stayed fiercely dedicated to him and has not remarried.
Gene remains vital today, serving as an inspiration and driving force behind Broadway’s most successful shows. Ironically, classic movie musicals dominate contemporary Broadway rather than Broadway dominating Hollywood (as had been the case in Gene’s heyday). In 2014, On the Town returned to Broadway, blending elements of the original 1944 show with Gene and Donen’s 1949 adaptation. The show had been revived twice before, once in 1972 and again in 1999; however, both previous revivals failed, each running under 80 performances. The most recent revival ran for a laudable 368 performances. New York Times critic Ben Brantley (a bit unfairly) called Gene and Donen’s film “winceably antiseptic,” but claimed that director John Rando’s stage version “has grown up quite nicely.”48
Another Broadway artist Gene inspired was director and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, who is also a gifted ballet dancer. In 2015, he brought An American in Paris to Broadway. Unlike Twyla Tharp’s Singin’ in the Rain in 1985, An American in Paris met with rave reviews. “Musicals based on classic movies, or not-so-classic movies, have become a familiar staple on Broadway. . . . Dance, on the other hand, has become the wallflower at the Broadway prom in recent decades, which makes Mr. Wheeldon’s triumph all the sweeter,” New York Times critic Charles Isherwood wrote.49 As a sort of cherry on top for the show, it opened at the Palace Theatre—the very locale at which Gene and Judy Garland aspired to play in Gene’s first film, For Me and My Gal.
The dance musical is thriving on the stage, but the cine-musical has yet to be resurrected. With a few exceptions, such as The Artist (2011), any musical that makes it to the screen is still based on a stage show. Jean Dujardin, star of the (mostly) silent Artist, claimed that he took inspiration from Gene Kelly for his character’s energy and smile. Screen musicals such as Newsies (1992) and Chicago (2002), both of which were based on Broadway hits, contain a substantial amount of dance but are highly stage bound in execution. Original dance is more ubiquitous on the small screen. Programs such as So You Think You Can Dance? and Dancing with the Stars have made the medium more accepted commercially. Both shows premiered in 2005 and, as of 2016, are still running. Both programs, however, fail to demonstrate Gene’s thesis that dance should be a means of expressing emotion, character, or storytelling. Thus, he may have regarded the programs with some wariness. But, because the shows do acknowledge the medium as an art, he would likely appreciate their success at getting people to move in new and creative ways.
Whether or not the film musical ever returns, it is apparent that audiences still have an appetite for song and dance Gene Kelly style. The twenty-first century has brought unprecedented changes in technology that have alienated people from each other to a great degree. Warfare and the constant threat of terrorism have dampened spirits—but, unlike in the World War II era, the entertainment industry offers no obvious escapism to boost morale. “Boy do we need it now,” the slogan for That’s Entertainment! would be a most appropriate slogan for the twenty-first century—and this is indeed why Gene Kelly’s work has not fallen into obscurity. Gene once said his real challenge was to make something contemporary and yet timeless. If the enthusiastic response each new generation has to Gene’s work is any indicator, he overcame his challenge. He danced character, he danced emotions—and neither can ever go out of date.
Epilogue
Think of Him and Smile
Gene Kelly holds the special distinction of being one of the few song and dance men whose films are enjoyable not only to fans of musicals but to those who normally dislike them. He holds an even more exceptional place in the history of film as
one of the few entertainers who was talented in almost every aspect of filmmaking and performing. Documentarian Robert Trachtenberg explained his reason for choosing Gene as his subject thus: “I’m . . . drawn to someone who can get up and go to work decade after decade, plugging away at trying to do something fresh and new. When you really look at it . . . there is no precedent for this career.”1
Another precedent Gene set was his international appeal; he is a uniquely American dancer who is equally revered in his native country and abroad. At Gene’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in 1984, actor Yves Montand described Gene’s unique appeal: “When an artist is as good as Gene Kelly it makes us forget about language. He shows how to find the road to joy in your hearts and that is international. . . . He is in people’s hearts everywhere, an American for the whole world.”2
The world embraced Gene and he, in turn, embraced it. He was never still in his quest to attain more experience and knowledge of people and things. Seldom did a year pass when Gene failed to go abroad and gain new perspectives. Just as he is loved by filmgoers of all different tastes, he is respected by Americans of all different political affiliations because of the honesty and high principles he espoused. “He is a liberal in politics, and when he states his own convictions it sounds as if he were a rebel also,” columnist W. H. Mooring observed in 1946. “He is smart enough to make his way on his own merit and Irish enough to command attention whether or not his ideas are approved or disapproved. He is not the kind of fellow who gets ignored.”3
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 53