by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Despite the fact that he was best known for gritty action flicks like Little Caesar and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Mervyn LeRoy was asked to oversee this tune-filled remake. Although LeRoy was the credited producer on The Wizard of Oz and would go on to helm a splashy, widescreen adaptation of Gypsy in 1961, lavish musicals weren’t really the director’s bag.
Early into production, it was decided that although LeRoy would direct the majority of the picture, he would relinquish the directorial reins in at least two instances. Fred Astaire’s choreographer of choice, Hermes Pan, would direct the Champions as they swirled amid a starry, ethereal backdrop to the tune of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” For the climactic fashion-show finale, it was abundantly clear that the services of a director more intimately familiar with organdy were required. Enter Vincente Minnelli. “He came on because Mervyn LeRoy said, ‘I know how to direct Edward G. Robinson but I don’t know how to direct a fashion show,’” recalled Marge Champion. “He turned it right over to Vince Minnelli and to the brilliant Tony Duquette.”30
With Huckleberry Finn stalled and The Band Wagon still a year away, it seemed the perfect time to take on a project that was not epically scaled or too demanding. “I was between pictures and it sounded like a nothing assignment,” Minnelli would later remark. In tapping Vincente for his runway expertise, LeRoy very shrewdly downplayed the amount of work involved: “It’s just a little show. Shouldn’t take you longer than three days.”31
Minnelli, of course, was constitutionally incapable of doing anything halfway. LeRoy’s “three days” ballooned into three weeks. What had been a pleasant though pale musical for its first eighty-five minutes suddenly metamorphosed into something quite spectacular in its final fifteen minutes. In terms of pictorial composition, the transition from LeRoy’s bland settings to Minnelli’s ravishing set pieces is almost jarring.
“You have to cast directors almost the same way that you cast actors,” Champion says. “Mervyn was an absolute darling but I remember when he was shooting a scene, his only direction to us was, ‘Let’s have a lovely scene.’ Well, we were all very happy to have a lovely scene but [MGM’s resident dramatics instructor] Lillian Sidney had coached us in that same scene for weeks before we did it… . With the fashion show, we really needed something more.”32
Adrian, the celebrated costumer of everything from Garbo’s Camille to the winged monkeys’ stylish bell-boy attire in The Wizard of Oz, was pressed back into service after a decade-long absence from MGM. The bill for the forty-two costumes that Mr. Janet Gaynor designed for Lovely to Look At was a then impressive $100,000. The expense paid off handsomely. The fashion show is so sumptuously styled that the sequence could be an overdressed outtake from Ziegfeld Follies. The eye isn’t dazzled so much by the fashions themselves as by the way every extravagant ensemble is showcased. With Duquette’s harlequins and living chandeliers standing guard, each of the costumes, models, and performers is allowed to have a runway “moment.” Almost everyone emerges from a dramatically lit “tunnel of louvers,” a technique Vincente had employed to great effect on stage in At Home Abroad.
“The fashion show did credit to the picture,” Minnelli would modestly observe.33 In fact, it was singled out by most of the critics as the most noteworthy aspect of an otherwise uninspired movie.
“THERE WAS A THING HE DID that drove some people crazy,” remembers Farley Granger, who starred in Minnelli’s portion of the glossy, three-part episodic drama The Story of Three Loves:
He would stand right next to the camera and watch you while you were doing the scene and mouth every line of dialogue right along with you. I think he was doing it to try and infuse you with the feeling that he wanted from the scene. At first, I thought it was going to drive me mad and then I got used to it and I found it charming… . It was all a result of his passion and enthusiasm, really. To find a director who is that passionate and enthusiastic about what he’s working on was unusual.34
Vincente’s sequence was entitled “Mademoiselle,” a mini-fantasy in which a preadolescent Ricky Nelson, tired of being tutored by French governess Leslie Caron, enlists the aid of a benevolent witch to turn him into an adult. As a result of that special brand of wizardry that only Hollywood could conjure, Ricky Nelson isn’t only transformed into a grown man but an eye-filling Adonis in the form of Farley Granger.
The assignment seemed made to order for Minnelli. And the director was genuinely inspired by the presence of theatrical grand dame Ethel Barrymore on the set. Playing the pivotal though relatively minor role of the sorceress Mrs. Pennicott, Barrymore nevertheless prepared for the part as though she were reprising her celebrated turn in The Lady of the Camellias. Vincente was awed and treated Barrymore like some dowager empress.
However, Minnelli wasn’t nearly as formal with actor John Angelo, who played a bellhop in scenes that were ultimately deleted from the “Mademoiselle” sequence. “He pinched me,” Angelo says of his director’s quite literal “hands-on” approach. “We were both Italian and he thought he was in Rome, I guess… . He cruised a lot of people, now whether they went with him or not, I don’t know. I wasn’t interested really. People said he was gay and yet he married four times. He kept his gayness in the shadows, I think. But he was always very nice to me. I never said ‘Yes’ to him … but I did get pinched.”35
Minnelli’s segment of The Story of Three Loves was originally envisioned as the centerpiece of the film. All of that changed, however, in the cutting room. “Much to Vincente’s dismay and mine, [“Mademoiselle”] was cut mercilessly by Gottfried Reinhardt, who produced the film and directed the other two segments,” says Farley Granger. “We were very disappointed.”36
What remained of the sequence was charming, but slight—Minnelli in miniature, as it were. Compared with other 1953 releases, such as From Here to Eternity or Pickup on South Street, The Story of Three Loves seems to have been produced on some very fey planet. As a result, the public stayed away, and the MGM ledgers showed a loss of $1 million.
The critics weren’t exactly swept away either. One reviewer wrote:
The Story of Three Loves is episodic by design and inconclusive by lack of it… . Earnestly directed by Gottfried Reinhardt and Vincente Minnelli and painstakingly produced by Sidney Franklin, the whole project suffers from pretentiousness and self-consciousness. Dragging out meaningless clichés beyond all endurance and relying heavily on MGM’s usual super-production, they have attempted to make drama without creating real character, authentic situations or believable narration. Artificial respiration does not bring the picture to life.
17
Tribute to a Bad Man
“CERTAINLY THE MOST UNEXPECTED and hottest teaming of 1952 (so far) will be Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas pitching woo in Tribute to a Bad Man at MGM,” wrote Louella Parsons in her syndicated column of January 28, 1952. The droning gossip columnist wasn’t the only one salivating over the project. As producer John Houseman noted, there was a “heady atmosphere of success that surrounded us from the first day of shooting; it also related to the amusement we all derived from so much ‘inside’ material—full of private and not so private jokes and references.”1
The juicy insider references originated with a short story by George Bradshaw entitled “Memorial to a Bad Man” that appeared in the February 1951 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Bradshaw’s ruthless protagonist, Gil McBride, is a dead ringer for irascible theater impresario Jed Harris, of whom it was said: “If Jed thought his mother was wrong for a part, and her life depended on it, he would still fire her.” Bradshaw’s description of his antihero—“He was admired, worshiped, adored—any superlative you can think of for his abilities in the theater, but for himself he was hated”—was worthy of both fictional counterpart and real-life prototype.
While Bradshaw’s Rashomon-style story and characters were certainly compelling, by the early ’50s there had been many memorable movies concerned with backstage intrigue, including Gregory La Cava’s S
tage Door, George Cukor’s A Double Life, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s recently released All About Eve.
Determined to avoid becoming a cinematic cliché, Houseman wisely decided to shift the story’s setting from Broadway to Hollywood. There may have been another reason for this transition, too, and it was called Sunset Boulevard. Billy Wilder’s sardonic masterpiece had copped three Oscars in 1950, and although Louis B. Mayer would berate Wilder (“You befouled your own nest”2), he and every other executive in town were keenly aware of how much acclaim the self-reflexive saga of Norma Desmond had garnered. Houseman assigned screenwriter Charles Schnee to rework “Memorial to a Bad Man.” In addition to making the story more cinematic, Schnee would also work in plot elements from Bradshaw’s similarly themed Cosmopolitan novelette “Of Good and Evil.”
When Schnee’s script was ready, Houseman summoned Minnelli to lunch at Romanoff’s. As Vincente later recalled, “The screenplay fascinated me. It told of a film producer who uses everyone in his rise to the top… . It was a harsh and cynical story, yet strangely romantic. All that one loved and hated about Hollywood was distilled in the screenplay.”3
What’s more, Minnelli recognized that the characters (now more Schnee than Bradshaw) would register as more authentic if they were patterned after real-life models: First there was Jonathan Shields, the unscrupulous producer who rose from the B-movie junk heap. Shields seemed to be a clever composite of Cat People producer Val Lewton and Louis B. Mayer’s former son-in-law, the fanatically involved David O. Selznick. Then there was Georgia Lorrison, the boozy has-been who deifies her dead father and scrapes her way to stardom, reportedly modeled on John Barrymore’s daughter Diana. Henry Whitfield, a British director with a taste for the macabre, could have been either Alfred Hitchcock or James Whale. The even more exacting auteur Von Ellstein seemed reminiscent of Fritz Lang or Erich von Stroheim. All of these roles were camouflaged just enough to keep everyone guessing with a general “Wait a minute, Is that supposed to be? …” effect permeating the entire picture—exactly the kind of illusion-on-an-illusion that Minnelli and Houseman had hoped to achieve.ag
In December 1951, Hedda Hopper had announced to her readers that MGM hoped to entice Clark Gable to play Jonathan Shields. When that casting didn’t pan out, producer and director had only one other actor in mind for the wily, backstabbing heel you love to hate: Kirk Douglas.
Tribute to a Bad Man: Ruthless producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) cops the Oscar in a sequence deleted from the release print of The Bad and the Beautiful. Douglas said of his director: “He was a genius and for whatever reason, that has never been properly recognized.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
“I was the teacher’s pet,” Douglas says of working with Minnelli on the first of their three pictures together:
We seemed to be on the same wavelength. We were so different but we seemed to understand each other very well. He told me something and I got it the first time. I never had such gratification making a movie than I did with Vincente Minnelli. You know, he was an unusual guy. He was always humming and he was always rearranging the props all over the set but he really knew what he was doing. He was a perfectionist—without question. And he was always annoyed with everybody but me. He would smile at me with approval and then he would snap at someone else. Sometimes he could be very impatient and irritable with incompetence in an actor. But we never had a problem.
In his own way, I think Vincente had a tremendous sense of humor, which would come out in some of the most unusual ways… . I liked him so much. He encouraged me in everything that I did and, as an actor, I think that I blossomed under his direction. He was a genius and for whatever reason, that has never been properly recognized.4
As Douglas began shaping his performance, Minnelli suggested that the actor soft-pedal his trademark intensity and “play it for charm.” The suggestion worked so well that Douglas, like his character, was charm personified. “Kirk’s behavior was exemplary,” Houseman would recall, refuting rumors that the photogenic leading man could be prickly and hot headed. “He was up on the lines of his huge role—indefatigable, intelligent and receptive to Minnelli’s direction.”5
Another surprise was leading lady Lana Turner, who campaigned for the role of Georgia Lorrison. After her latest outings, The Merry Widow, Mr. Imperium , and A Life of Her Own,ah all tanked at the box office, Turner knew that her career was desperately in need of rehabilitation. The role of the gin-soaked starlet who rises to fame seemed like just the ticket. “When the script reached me, I knew right away that I understood the character—a film star who is seen at first as a soggy mess and then is resuscitated by an unscrupulous producer,” Turner said. “I could believe in her. Moreover, the screenplay was a much better one than those I usually received.”6 And how.
For once, Turner’s costume changes would not be substituted for legitimate character development. This would be the “sweater girl’s” meatiest role since her memorable turn as the white-turbaned femme fatale in The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1946. And Minnelli was determined to extract a real performance from Turner—one that, ironically, called for her to strip away her movie star veneer in order to play a movie star. For her first scene in the picture, Turner is present only as a disembodied voice (as Georgia lurks in the shadows of Crow’s Nest, her late father’s decaying mansion)—a legitimate challenge for an actress accustomed to relying on her physical gifts to make an impression.
Metro veteran Walter Pidgeon convinced Minnelli that he could check his Brooks Brothers persona at the door and play the penny-pinching producer Harry Pebbel, who only wants “pictures that end with a kiss and black ink on the books.” Originally, Barry Sullivan was cast as southern novelist James Lee Bartlow and Dick Powell was scheduled to play director Fred Amiel. Powell (who was still an important marquee draw at that time), immediately realized that the gentrified novelist was a better part, and he asked Minnelli and Houseman to cast him as Bartlow and reassign Sullivan as the director. They complied. The one and only Gloria Grahame (she of the insolent pout and bee-stung lips) was cast as the writer’s wife, “a modern day Southern belle,” at the suggestion of Houseman, who said of the actress: “She had an instinctive talent complicated by a number of peculiar aberrations—including a taste for facial surgery that she did not need.”7
Kirk Douglas, Paul Stewart, Vanessa Brown, Barry Sullivan, and singer Peggy King in a party sequence from The Bad and the Beautiful. King’s bit part was inspired by Judy Garland’s impromptu vocal performances at Hollywood parties. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Even with his formidable line-up of stars in place, Minnelli continued casting—supporting roles, bit players, and walk-ons. In a Vincente Minnelli production, there was no such thing as a small part. “I was doing a cameo in the picture but he directed me as if it was the most important scene in any film he ever directed,” says singer Peggy King, who performs the haunting ballad “Don’t Blame Me”ai in a party sequence. “It was very strange being a starlet at Metro in those days. Everybody was doing stuff behind everybody else’s back. But not Vincente. He was so wonderful. He treated me as if I were on an equal footing with Kirk and Lana and the other stars… . Wasn’t I lucky that if I was going to do a cameo in a picture that it turned out to be that one and with Minnelli as the director?”8
Houseman fought to have the film photographed in color and to retain the story’s original title, but he lost the battle on both counts. With Turner receiving top billing over Douglas, it was suggested that a more romantically attuned title was in order. MGM’s chief publicist, Howard Dietz, suggested The Bad and the Beautiful, and despite Houseman’s very vocal objections, it stuck. Production began on April 9, 1952.
Musicals aside, The Bad and the Beautiful would contain some of the most indelible images that Minnelli would ever capture on film, including Shields paying off the mourners-for-hire at his despised father’s funeral (“He lived in a crowd, I couldn’t let him be buried alone …”) and Georgia’s ascent
to superstardom, which Minnelli accomplishes in one magnificently fluid transition: After capturing Georgia’s performance on the set, the camera sails all the way up to the soundstage rafters, where several seen-it-all grips and electricians are beaming with pride: a blazing arc light that one of them is operating morphs into a blinding klieg light on the eve of Georgia’s big premiere. The star trip in shorthand. This is followed by Lana’s gloriously over-the-top vehicular nervous breakdown, which critic Tom Shales would salute as “one of the great melodramatic arias ever staged for a film.”9 And who can forget character actor Ned Glass as a grizzled wardrobe man peddling some unintentionally hilarious cat suits (“lots of character in the tail …”) for Jonathan’s low-budget horror flick The Doom of the Cat Men.
“If you look at the cat man sequence in The Bad and the Beautiful, nobody else would have done that in quite the way he did that,” says writer and Minnelli enthusiast Sir Gerald Kaufman:
Or that scene at the end with all of them clustering around the telephone, listening to what was being said by Jonathan Shields on the other end—I can’t imagine another director staging it that way. Despite the difficulties of the Hollywood studio system, it’s perfectly clear in my mind that Minnelli put an enormous amount of himself into his films. I can’t think of another Hollywood director, except, say, John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, whose films were theirs in the same way that Minnelli’s films were his. I mean, let’s face it, MGM was there to make films to make money… . They wouldn’t have kept him as long as they did or allow him to make all kinds of films—a western like Home from the Hill or a comedy like The Long, Long Trailer—if they didn’t have enormous confidence in him. He wasn’t just a journeyman director. He was a totally unique director. And you can see that in every frame of The Bad and the Beautiful.10