by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Years after its initial release, Tea and Sympathy would resurface in theatrical resissues and on television. Many of Minnelli’s fans were curious to know whether the director thought his once controversial melodrama still had something meaningful to say to audiences in a post-Stonewall world. While fielding questions from journalists at the Athens International Film Festival in 1978, Minnelli announced to the press corps: “I made the first homosexual picture while I was at MGM. That was Tea and Sympathy.”19 And he said it with what sounded like enormous pride.
24
“There’ll Be Some Changes Made”
IF MGM’S PUBLICIST, Howard Strickling, was the keeper of the studio’s darkest secrets, Metro’s house designer, Helen Rose, was privy to what many leading ladies considered far more privileged information. Rose, who had costumed Minnelli’s Father of the Bride and The Bad and the Beautiful, knew which bras required significant padding or if an Oscar-winning waistline had suddenly expanded. From three-piece suits to birthday suits, Rose had certainly seen it all. As film historian David Chierichetti recalls, “Helen said Cyd Charisse was the only woman who looked as good naked as she did dressed.”1
Like her better-known rival, Edith Head, Rose had a talent for accentuating nature’s gifts and downplaying the defects. In 1953, the two-time Oscar winner put down her measuring tape long enough to submit a simple yet irresistible scenario for a movie: Fashion maven weds sportswriter. Although Rose’s Designing Woman seemed to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle Woman of the Year, studio chief Dore Schary was so taken with the concept that he decided to produce the movie himself. Metro executives agreed that a lighthearted comedy would offer a refreshing change of pace from Schary’s deadly earnest, socially conscious “message pictures,” such as The Red Badge of Courage and The Next Voice You Hear.
Screenwriter George Wells fashioned a slickly witty script from Rose’s original scenario. The paper-thin plot concerned the connubial collision of chic fashionista Marilla Brown (caught up with her fittings and fall collections) and avid sportsman Mike Hagen (whose Runyonesque world is populated by punch-drunk middleweights and guys with names like “Charlie the Sneak”).
In terms of casting, Schary’s initial idea was to reunite the stars of Hitchcock’s Rear Window—Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly—as the squabbling newlyweds. Joshua Logan was slated to direct. However, when Kelly abdicated her Hollywood throne in favor of the real thing by marrying the Prince of Monaco, Schary’s production was suddenly without its Designing Woman. Minus her majesty, the project didn’t seem as appealing to either Stewart or Logan and both bowed out. The directorial chores were then shifted to Minnelli, fresh from Tea and Sympathy. It seemed that the director couldn’t completely shake his high-minded exploration of gender roles, though, and some of that “sister boy” stuff would spill over into Designing Woman’s riotous battle of the sexes.
Gregory Peck, who inherited the role of the newspaperman, had contractual approval over his costar. He green-lighted Minnelli’s choice: Lauren Bacall. Though Humphrey Bogart’s better half had displayed her comedic abilities in How to Marry a Millionaire, the sultry star usually found herself cast in dramatic roles. There had been a string of hard-boiled, noirish dramas at Warner Brothers. But by the mid-’50s, even those were hard to come by. “My career had come to a dead stop,” Bacall remembers. “No one offered me anything… . So I called Dore, told him I could play it, wanted to, and when I cut my salary in half, he finally said yes.”2
The supporting cast would include two Kismet survivors: Dolores Gray as Peck’s brassy former paramour Lori Shannon, and choreographer Jack Cole, in a rare before-the-cameras turn, as dancer Randy Owen, a flamboyant friend of Bacall’s uptown girl. The initially reticent Cole was persuaded to take the role by his analyst. “He told me this might help bring me out of myself,” Cole said.3
Shooting began in September 1956 and both leads eagerly threw themselves into their work. Since Roman Holiday, Peck had subsisted on a steady diet of somber dramas (Night People, The Purple Plain, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit). The stalwart leading man relished the opportunity to flex his comedy muscles and he marveled at Minnelli’s “wonderful sense of pacing … of not letting things get boring, keeping it dancing along.”4
Bacall was coping with the failing health of her real-life husband, Humphrey Bogart (who would die of throat cancer the following year). The virtually carefree set of Designing Woman proved to be the perfect refuge. “The whole experience for me was absolute heaven,” Bacall says:
Choreographer Randy Owen (Jack Cole) gets inspired as squabbling newlyweds Marilla (Lauren Bacall) and Mike (Gregory Peck) realize how very different their worlds are in Designing Woman. Back in the ’30s, Minnelli and Cole had worked together at Radio City Music Hall. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
I love that movie. Greg Peck, of course, became one of my dearest friends. We had a funny, wonderful script to work with. I had never played a part like that before, which I adored. And then we had Vincente as our director… . He was always very sure of what he wanted. I remember there would be a cigarette box on the table and he would come over and move it about an eighth of an inch to the left or to the right. I mean, he was cuckoo about that kind of thing. But even that was funny. He had his own idiosyncrasies but there was nobody like him. He wouldn’t let anyone run over him. Not that anyone ever tried. I certainly never tried.5
Like The Long, Long Trailer, Designing Woman was the kind of lighthearted romp that didn’t demand much of Vincente. He realized that he was there to shepherd his good-looking leads through a frothy comedy, and without complaint, he did exactly that—though just beneath the glossy veneer of Designing Woman is the kind of slyly cutting-edge, ahead-of-its-time exploration of gender roles that gets film scholars and academics salivating. And yet the yin-yang dynamics of the story aren’t exclusively concerned with a marriage of opposites.
Jack Cole’s character, Randy Owen, is the furiously theatrical ringleader of Marilla’s “show crowd,” which she describes as “a pretty neurotic bunch.” Randy is so flamboyantly effeminate that he makes Tea and Sympathy’s Tom Lee look like a Navy SEAL by comparison. Inspired by the notion of staging an undersea ballet, Randy offers a preview of his best seahorse. Marilla and her friends are delighted by the wild exhibition, though Mike and his Wednesday-night poker pals are speechless.
Later, when Randy overhears Mike questioning his manhood (“Is that guy for real?”), he immediately whips out photos of a wife and three sons and offers to beat both of Mike’s ears off. Randy can be considered something of a spokesperson for Minnelli, who was, as film historian Stephen Harvey diplomatically put it, “a somewhat suspect figure as well.”6
At first, the very presence of Randy Owen in Designing Woman seems rather daring (for 1957), but after the revelation regarding the wife and kids, it becomes clear that it’s all just another misunderstanding. As attentive audiences should have learned from Tea and Sympathy, appearances can be deceiving. Just because something looks one way doesn’t mean that it is that way. Randy Owen, like Vincente Minnelli, would appear to be the victim of his own artistic flair. Or maybe the character, like the director, needed the photos of the wife and kids to convince himself.
“That whole dimension of Vincente’s life interested me,” says writer William Gibson. “It did in John Houseman, too. Houseman had a reputation of being homosexual also. And yet, both of them were married and the fathers of young children. On the surface, everything was standard, but it was curious because you felt that there was also a need to display this picture of a young, happy family… . I had the impression that both guys were trying very hard to live a ‘normal’ American life.”7
Designing Woman opened in January 1957, and the picture was generally well received. As Time noted, “Director Vincente Minnelli plays his game of pseudo-sociological croquet with the careless good form of a man who does not have to worry about making his satiric points. H
e plays for the box office score instead, working the sex angles and the big names and the production values—yum-yum Metrocolor, flossy furniture, slinky clothes—with the skill of a cold old pro.”8 Thanks largely to its A-list star power, Designing Woman returned $3,750,000 to the MGM coffers.
There was also a surprise in store. When the Oscar nominations were announced for the 1957 ceremonies, Designing Woman netted a nomination for “Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.” In something of an upset, the George Welles script was awarded the Oscar over such strong contenders as Funny Face and I Vitelloni. As Welles accepted his statuette, he noted that “the suggestion for the screenplay came from one of our industry’s most designing women … Helen Rose.”
“THERE’LL BE SOME CHANGES MADE,” Dolores Gray belts out in Designing Woman, and by the time the picture was released, she could have easily been referring to the major transitions that had occurred in MGM’s front office. After a controversial eight-year reign as the studio’s production chief, Dore Schary was fired. “Dore Schary was a writer and a picture maker and he didn’t any more know how to run a studio than fall through the roof,” says MGM publicist Esme Chandlee. Schary was replaced by Joseph Vogel, who immediately set the tone for the new regime by announcing his plans to remake the 1927 silent epic Ben-Hur.
Meanwhile, Minnelli was involved in a takeover of his own. He was summoned to replace director Ronald Neame on The Seventh Sin, an updating of the 1934 Greta Garbo vehicle The Painted Veil, which had been adapted from the Somerset Maugham story of the same title.
“The enterprise was sour from the beginning,” Minnelli recalled in his autobiography. “The company didn’t get along with each other and the producer and director were having battles royal with the front office. They’d struggled through most of the filming when matters finally became untenable.”9
Fifty years after he walked off the troubled production, Ronald Neame wasn’t forthcoming about why his set had become such a fierce battleground, but he remained grateful to Vincente for stepping in and wrapping up the rest of the picture.
If walking on to a contentious set was not something Minnelli relished, at least he wouldn’t have to be there for long. With most of the picture in the can, Vincente would only have to shoot some retakes and a few additional scenes. Although most of The Seventh Sin belongs to Neame, the finished film contains some distinctive Minnelli flourishes. The opening scene begins with ravenous close-ups of shoes, silk stockings, and jewelry—all obviously shed in the midst of an adulterous interlude. When the nervous lovers, played by Eleanor Parker and Jean Pierre-Aumont, are first glimpsed together, they’re posed before the inevitable Minnelli mirror. A later sequence features a sweeping boom maneuver; the camera sails up to Parker’s bungalow and then right through an open window. Must be Minnelli. The visual ingenuity distracts from the low-budget look of the film and lines such as, “I’ve never been to an epidemic before. I hope it’ll be fun.” And just in case audiences weren’t hip to the fact that Parker’s character was a slave to her own desires, Miklos Rozsa recycles his Madame Bovary waltz to tip everybody off.
Regardless of which moments were attributable to Neame and which to Minnelli, the critics could find little to praise in The Seventh Sin, with the reviewer for Cue noting that the picture “meanders after Maugham but never quite catches up with him.”10
25
Unacceptable, Objectionable, and Unclean
“WHY DOES ARTHUR want to make a picture about a whore? …” That question was reverberating through the executive boardroom of Loew’s, Inc. The assembled suits, though not a prudish group by any means, were nevertheless dumbfounded. Why did Arthur Freed, the esteemed producer of such family-friendly fare as The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis, want to sully his cinematic reputation with a movie about a young girl groomed to be a perfectly mannered prostitute? After the disappointments of Brigadoon, It’s Always Fair Weather, and Kismet, naysayers were already wondering if Freed was losing his touch. Or had that enigmatic collector of Roualts and prize-winning orchids discovered a diamond in the rough in the form of the semi-scandalous Gigi?
“You know, basically, it is awfully good,” Minnelli would say of Colette’s original short story. “She wrote it as a kind of throwaway. She never considered it one of her major works, like Cheri. But it’s the one that has endured.”aq
For all its wistful charm and Gallic whimsy, Gigi was written in the midst of agony and despair. During the French Occupation, a sciatica-plagued seventy-year-old, Colette, tormented by the Gestapo’s arrest of her Jewish husband, produced what many consider to be her most unapologetically romantic work. Gigi was inspired by the real-life May-December marriage of Yola Henriquez and the much older Henri Letellier, editor of France’s popular daily Le Journal. In 1926, Colette had an opportunity to observe Yola and Henri together as the novelist and the newlyweds happened to be staying in the same hotel on the French Riviera. Colette discovered that the proprietors of the hotel were two aging courtesans who had raised Yola and tutored the young woman in the fine art of snagging a millionaire. All of this formed the basis for the story that ultimately became Gigi.
Although inspired by more contemporary events, Colette pushed the setting of her story back to the more picturesque Paris of 1899 or La Belle Epoque. The saga of a courtesan-in-training created quite a stir when it was published as a novelette in 1944. Seven years later, there would be a Broadway incarnation starring a luminous twenty-two-year-old newcomer named Audrey Hepburn, hand-picked to play the title role by Colette herself. Though the Anita Loos adaptation was judged “slight but diverting,” Hepburn was acclaimed as “the acting find of the year.” In November 1953, Hepburn’s Gigi was staged in Los Angeles, and among those in attendance were Arthur Freed and Vincente Minnelli. While Freed was charmed, Minnelli dismissed the production as “too farcically played” and, Audrey aside, “not very good.”1
Nevertheless, Freed decided to submit Colette’s story (and the Loos script) to Geoffrey Shurlock and the Motion Picture Production Code office. Freed knew full well that Colette’s courtesans would have the censors swarming, but he was curious to know how many code commandments Gigi was actually breaking. Did a prospective producer have any hope whatsoever of getting the property passed? The initial response was not encouraging. Joseph Breen made it more than clear that the story of a “kept woman” was unacceptable, objectionable, and unclean: “This play is so basically opposed to everything the Code stands for, that any attempt to bring it around to conformity with the Code would prove futile,” he cautioned in his response.
A year passed as Freed turned his attention to other projects. Then he received a telegram from Anita Loos. The playwright responsible for putting Colette’s characters on stage now wanted to turn Gigi into a big-time Broadway musical. Would Freed be willing to let Loos see the censor’s report, so that she’d have some idea of what she was up against? The Loos inquiry reignited the producer’s interest in the property. A musical version of Gigi … of course. It almost seemed tailor-made for Minnelli.
For two years, Freed and the censors went back and forth on Gigi. The one element the code office most strenuously objected to was the fact that the story seemed to glorify the “system of mistresses” that existed in Gigi’s family. Metro’s story editor Kenneth MacKenna argued that despite her family’s notorious history, Gigi herself is a moral girl “who simply wants no part of this shabby way of life.” Code administrators stood firm. The story put “an illegal relationship in the same class as marriage.”2
Freed and his team then made all sorts of suggestions regarding how the story might be sanitized in order to obtain code approval. Instead of a “grand cocotte,” what if Gigi’s Aunt Alicia had been a former chorus girl? Or perhaps Gigi was not descended from a line of courtesans, but instead, her family operated a matrimonial bureau that introduced middle-aged men to “lonely women”?
Eventually, Freed and his associates seemed to wear the censor
s down. By July 1957, MGM’s scripted version of Gigi (then titled The Parisians) met “the basic requirements of the Production Code.” After hurdling that obstacle, Freed found himself facing another challenge. After Colette’s death in 1954, her widower, Maurice Goudeket, had sold the musical adaptation rights to Gigi to both MGM and the Broadway-bound team of Anita Loos and producer Gilbert Miller. When the studio trumpeted its forthcoming production of Gigi, Loos and Miller cried foul. It would cost Freed a pretty penny (some $87,000) to prevent Gigi from lighting up the Great White Way.
With code administrators at last appeased and would-be competitors paid off, Freed could finally turn his attention to artistic matters. Although Minnelli had been unimpressed with the stage version of Gigi, he greatly admired Colette’s work, and the prospect of bringing turn-of-the-century Paris to life with musical accompaniment was irresistible. He signed on to direct. Freed and Minnelli agreed that their An American in Paris collaborator Alan Jay Lerner (who owed Metro another script as part of a three-picture commitment) would be the ideal choice to handle the adaptation.
In February 1956, Freed surprised Lerner by turning up backstage during the Philadelphia tryouts for the composer’s new show, My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. Freed wanted to discuss the composer’s next assignment for MGM. Although Lerner expressed interest in scripting Gigi, he initially resisted the idea of furnishing lyrics as well.
A month after Lerner’s meeting with Freed, My Fair Lady landed on Broadway. It would be hailed as one of the finest achievements in the history of the American musical theater—a triumph and then some. As a result, Lerner was now in a position to make a few demands. First, he did not want to write Gigi in some cramped cubicle in a corner of the MGM writer’s building. He wanted all of Europe. Freed agreed. Next, Lerner insisted that Minnelli’s movie must include some kind of substantial role for his idol—the ever-debonair Maurice Chevalier.ar Freed agreed to this condition as well. Lerner also requested that the studio engage Cecil Beaton to design the sets and costumes for Gigi, as Beaton had graced Fair Lady with one outlandishly elegant, astonishingly beautiful design after another. Like Minnelli, Beaton expressed himself visually, and his unique talents were perfectly suited to an opulent Impressionist fable.