Mark Griffin

by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli

  Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Dean Martin in Some Came Running. Film scholar Joe McElhaney hails the 1959 melodrama as “one of Minnelli’s great films, perhaps even his masterpiece.” Variety noted: “The most impressive thing about Minnelli’s direction is his ability to hold a concept of the picture as a whole… . The story never wavers nor diffuses its intensity.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

  Sinatra’s costars seemed to flourish under Vincente’s hands-off directorial approach. “For me, Vincente Minnelli was an excellent director, simply because he didn’t direct much,” Shirley MacLaine observed. “He ‘let’ us actors find our own characters and our own way. Dean thrived on the freedom he felt with Vincente—one reason his character of Bama was the finest of his career. But Frank was threatened by this way of working because the freedom of choice exposed him too much.”4

  Like MacLaine, Martha Hyer would emerge from Some Came Running with an Oscar nomination. If Sinatra was left to his own devices, Hyer was kept under close surveillance: “I loved working for Vincente Minnelli. His direction was personal, sensitive. He was a perfectionist and even suggested how the character might stand or move in a certain way. A lot of actors don’t like that kind of direction. I do.”5 Other cast members admitted that they needed all the help they could get.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” says actor Denny Miller, who appeared in Some Came Running a year before landing the title role in MGM’s Tarzan, the Ape Man. “Even though I rehearsed my two or three lines about 738,000 times, I’m sure I made Mr. Minnelli’s life miserable for a few hours, but I was frightened to death and a misplaced basketball player from UCLA.”6

  Miller was witness to a mind-boggling incident that has passed into the annals of Minnelli lore:

  We were to work from sundown to sunrise on the carnival scene and the guys that were in charge of putting up the Ferris wheel had just finished it. Everything was ready to go. There were hundreds of extras standing around waiting… . Mr. Minnelli came out and looked at the Ferris wheel and studied it from several angles. He then told his assistant director to tell the crew to take the whole thing down and move it a foot. When Sinatra and Dean Martin showed up on the set and heard about that, they rented a Lear jet and flew home. We didn’t do any work that night. It took Minnelli at least an hour to convince the crew that he was not joking. After they realized he was serious, they took it down and moved it.7

  It seemed an extraordinary indulgence, even for Minnelli. But he had been saving himself for this. If Vincente had exercised admirable restraint in terms of the visual composition of the rest of the picture, he would make up for it with the climactic carnival sequence. “I said it should be like the inside of a jukebox,” Minnelli remembered telling the crew.8 As Steven Peck’s deranged Raymond Lanchak stalks Sinatra and MacLaine with a loaded gun, the film’s naturalistic colors turn lurid. Elmer Bernstein’s score is suddenly shrill and foreboding. Bill Daniels’s camera races to keep up with Dave and Ginny while being barraged with bright lights and revelers in every direction. Editor Adrienne Fazan’s cuts come fast and sharp. Shots of boys taking aim at a shooting gallery are intercut with glimpses of the armed madman surveying the frenzied scene from an upstairs window.

  From Spencer Tracy’s nightmare in Father of the Bride to John Kerr’s bonfire initiation rite in Tea and Sympathy, Minnelli’s movies throughout the 1950s had been building up to this moment of almost operatic hysteria. “Some Came Running is certainly one of Minnelli’s great films, perhaps even his masterpiece,” says film scholar Joe McElhaney:

  It comes at the end of a year of enormous creative intensity for him, with a major work in each of the three genres at which he excelled—the musical [Gigi], the domestic comedy [The Reluctant Debutante] and the small town family melodrama [Some Came Running]. Each of these films deals with fragmented families who are the products of mesmerizing, decadent, hypocritical worlds—worlds that continue to observe certain rules of social conduct and ritual, regardless of whether these make anyone happy or not. For me, there are few sights in cinema more moving than the final shot of Some Came Running . The camera slowly tracks around a small group of mourners for Ginny before it ultimately moves toward a clearly devastated Bama Dillert as he finally removes that sacred hat of his, a gesture of respect toward a woman he had called “a pig” only a day or two earlier… . The camera ultimately tracks past him, past all of the human beings gathered there, and opens out onto a shot of the Indiana landscape in the background, with the stones of the cemetery visible in the bottom foreground and a statue of an angel at the far left of the frame—an image of hope and despair.9

  28

  “Minnelli’s Texas”

  VIRTUALLY EVERYONE IN THE INDUSTRY agreed that Gigi and Vincente Minnelli had been the perfect union of sumptuous subject matter and inspired direction. It appeared that anything MGM threw at Vincente, from musicals to melodramas, turned to gold—though the owner of the Academy’s 31st Best Director statuette would later concede, “Many things I’m not right for. I don’t think I could do a Western, though lots of people think Home from the Hill is one… . I liked the Home from the Hill story right away because it was about people.”1 Minnelli may have responded so strongly to the people in Home from the Hill because, all references to “Westerns” aside, the characters are actually far more Tennessee Williams than Louis L’Amour.

  At first glance, the story’s small-town Texas setting, wild boar hunts, and bastard-son subplot seemed better suited to tough guy directors John Ford or Howard Hawks than to an auteur more accustomed to turning out Judy Garland in Victorian lace. Nevertheless, only a few days after his triumph at the Academy Awards, Vincente found himself on location in Oxford, Mississippi, preparing to shoot a picture that would practically ooze testosterone from every frame. Based on William Humphrey’s 1957 debut novel, Home from the Hill, was MGM’s latest contribution to the neurotic southern-family soap-opera genre (which included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and the unintentionally hilarious Written on the Wind).

  At the center of Home from the Hill is seventeen-year-old Theron Hunnicutt, another of Minnelli’s mossy green, soft-spoken misfits with his manhood in question—a sort of second cousin to Tom Lee in Tea and Sympathy. Theron is caught in the middle of his parents’ long-simmering feud. The boy’s father, Captain Wade Hunnicutt, is both a red-blooded he-man and notorious ladies’ man who is as well known for his extramarital exploits as he is for bagging the last wild boar in northeastern Texas.

  Wade’s long-suffering wife, Hannah, distances herself from her husband after his “poaching on the preserves of love” results in his siring several illegitimate children. After this betrayal, Hannah devotes herself to Theron, raising him to be a mild-mannered, sensitive young man (note the butterfly collection adorning his bedroom wall). As a result of Hannah’s coddling, Theron is nothing like his father. The youngster is derided as a “mama’s boy” until Wade agrees to take his son under his wing and tutor him in the fine art of manliness.

  With Home from the Hill, Minnelli would once again present a character torn between two sharply contrasted worlds: the cultured, civilized realm of the mother, and the almost savage universe inhabited by the father. Divided right down the middle, Theron is in conflict over which side he should surrender to. “What every man hunts out there is himself,” Wade proclaims before Theron embarks on his journey of self-discovery.

  Husband and wife writing team Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch (who would later share an Oscar nomination for scripting Hud) crafted a screenplay with “almost Biblical simplicity,” according to Vincente, who judged their work flawless. “Minnelli was a gentleman but he was remote from us on this project, not by design but by circumstance,” says Frank, who recalls meeting with Minnelli only once before the director was whisked away on location.2

  Left to their own devices, Frank and Ravetch shifted the story’s setting from the 1930s’ Depression era to the 1950s. Wade’s several illegitimate
offspring in Humphrey’s novel were blended into a composite character: the faithful yet forsaken Rafe. All of this met with Minnelli’s approval. “I’m pleased and flattered that he approved of our work, but if you asked me what my favorite films of mine are, that one would not be first and foremost,” Frank says.3

  Though the final film would prove to be something of a disappointment for its authors, the chain smoker in the director’s chair made a favorable impression. “All I can say is that Minnelli was gracious,” says Frank. “I hear people say things to the contrary but with us, he was a very mild-mannered man. He was pleasant to talk to but our meeting didn’t have that—what shall I say?—the heated exchange that sometimes happens with directors or even an imposed point of view… . It sounds condescending but he was a nice man and I think he had a kind of tenderness for the projects that he chose for himself.” Stetsons and sulphur bottoms aside, it’s no surprise that Minnelli would gravitate toward Home from the Hill. A poignant coming-of-age tale with an outcast at its center was by now as much of a Vincente Minnelli specialty as a lavish musical.

  For the part of Theron, Minnelli was instrumental in casting handsome newcomer George Hamilton. The eternally tan heartthrob had recently signed a seven-year contract with MGM but so far had only one prior film to his credit. Hamilton would describe his director as “an autocrat” who micromanaged every aspect of his performance—from lightening his hair to dictating his line readings. “If he could have wired you up and put you on remote control, he would have been much happier,” George Hamilton says:

  I learned the trick to Minnelli and that was to watch him, not watch myself. Not study the part but study Minnelli. You had to figure out what it was that he was trying to articulate—get it and do it quickly. And he’d give you plenty of takes to get it… . I learned fast because he was a mentor and he wanted me to deliver and he was incredibly helpful to me, but you had to get over the ego because he was a tyrant on the set. If you’re a sensitive actor and you didn’t give him what you wanted, you felt like you had just committed suicide and Minnelli’s at your funeral. You’d be wondering … What have I done wrong?4

  It was clear that the character of the uber macho Wade Hunnicutt required an actor who could be commanding, complex, and sexually charismatic without breaking a sweat. Robert Mitchum, anyone? The actor (who quipped that the title of the film should be Minnelli’s Texas) signed on after Clark Gable proved unavailable. More than a decade had passed since Robert Mitchum had swapped banalities with Katharine Hepburn in Minnelli’s Undercurrent. In the intervening years, the heavy-lidded actor had become a bona-fide movie star and tabloid staple, but his unfailingly professional, fuss-free approach to acting hadn’t changed.

  Like Gene Kelly and Kirk Douglas, Mitchum had an alpha male persona that meshed surprisingly well with Minnelli’s nervous-Nellie aestheticism. “He loved Mitchum for what he was,” George Hamilton says. “Mitchum was this Mount Rushmore and all Vincente wanted him to do was be in the middle of the action, deliver his lines, and then [Minnelli] could do the whole ballet around it. He loved that force of Mitchum. It was a power for which other things could vibrate. You can’t create that. You couldn’t have added menace or power to Mitchum. Mitchum was Mitchum. And Minnelli loved that about him.”5

  The sailing wasn’t as smooth with third-billed newcomer George Peppard. A graduate of the Actor’s Studio, Peppard would be making one of his first important screen appearances as Mitchum’s illegitimate son, Rafe. “Minnelli had big problems with George Peppard because George was this Method actor,” remembers George Hamilton:

  He had to arrive at his performance. He kept asking about motivations and reasons for this and that and finally Vincente went up to George and said, “I know inside you’re a seething volcano with lava about to pour out but trust me, nothing is happening on your face.” And Peppard just lost it. He could never be the same after that … and Minnelli just couldn’t compromise. He had a vision. He was painting it. And people just got in the way of it all.6

  Both Georges—Hamilton and Peppard—were awed by industry veteran Mitchum, who could not have been less impressed with his own legend. As Hamilton remembered it, when Mitchum wasn’t tanked or toking up, he’d be “ramming away at a lovely townie whom he had splayed over a chair.” When Peppard clashed with Minnelli regarding the way the final cemetery sequence should be played, Peppard took his complaint to Mitchum. Expecting sympathy from the screen’s iconic rebel, Peppard announced that he planned to walk off the picture. “It’ll be a very expensive hike,” Mitchum cautioned. “I’m certain that it will be your last job. I’m sure the studio can sue you. Even though you think Minnelli is wrong, do it his way.”7 Peppard complied.

  Doing things “his way” applied not only to the performances but to even the most microscopic elements of the production. George Hamilton vividly recalled the day Vincente pointed toward some leafy underbrush and informed a slack-jawed assistant, “I want more of this.” As tactfully as possible, the assistant attempted to explain, “But Mr. Minnelli, that’s poison ivy.” “Plant it!” Minnelli commanded.8 So what if it was poison? It was pretty and it fit with the picture that Minnelli was painting in his head.

  For Minnelli, the decor helped shape the story as much as the dialogue or action—even in a “Western.” “I spent ages on that room. I’m a great furniture mover,” Vincente said of designing Mitchum’s over-the-top hunter’s den.9 Surrounded by bear-skin rugs, bloodhounds, and mounted trophy heads, Theron is carefully framed by Minnelli as though he’s about to become his father’s next prey. As the camera pans across Mitchum’s lair, one can sense Vincente’s delight in decorating a room in such a flagrantly barbaric style. And there’s no way to miss the point that Theron is about to be indoctrinated into the world of Real Men.

  Three’s Company: George Hamilton shares a blanket with co-star Luana Patten and director Minnelli on location for Home from the Hill, 1959. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

  Is it purely coincidental that Tea and Sympathy, Some Came Running, and Home from the Hill all focus on men grappling with what might be termed “male identity issues”? Those who consider studio system directors like Minnelli nothing more than factory foremen would dismiss the similar storylines as pure happenstance—the sort of thing that was “in the air” at the time. Auteurists, devotees of Cahiers du Cinéma, and Minnelli disciples prefer to see the links as part of a grander plan. It would appear that Vincente was seeking out and shaping properties that explored his theme of choice: a repressed misfit, unable to seek solace from his family or from the world around him, must go within in order to heal himself. This would be the sort of thing writers David Siegel and Scott McGehee would describe as “the peculiar sub-genre of the Minnelli Male Melodrama… . Perhaps it is something about the weird genre/gender conflict of a man telling a story about men in this particularly feminine idiom that gives these films their disturbing and psychotic beauty.”10

  For everything that works in Home from the Hill (Mitchum, Bronislau Kaper’s moving score), there are key elements that do not (the contrived story line is simply too much, and there’s a tendency toward pop-eyed melodramatics). Although Minnelli’s direction is assured and he’s clearly interested, it takes an awfully long time—150 minutes, in fact—to tell a story that could have easily been wrapped up at the two-hour mark. But this Southern Gothic soap opera seemed to encourage Vincente’s penchant for excess.

  “Under Vincente Minnelli’s direction it is garishly overplayed,” wrote New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, who dismissed Home from the Hill as “aimless, tedious and in conspicuously doubtful taste,” while Commonweal found Vincente’s staging throughout the film “particularly uneven.” “Some scenes,” wrote the reviewer, “are straight overacted melodrama, and then again, some, like the hunting and chase sequences in the woods … are done with extraordinary strength and beauty.”11 Despite the mixed reception, Home from the Hill would prove to be the last Minnelli movie to turn a respectable profit
($5,610,627).

  29

  Better Than a Dream

  “NOTHING EVER TERRIFIED ME as much as that switchboard,” Judy Holliday would recall of her days keeping up with the calls as an operator at Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Despite her on-the-job jitters, Holliday’s switchboard experience (such as it was) would prove invaluable years later when she opened on Broadway in Bells Are Ringing.

  The hit 1956 musical was written by Holliday’s old friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with music composed by Jule Styne. In a Tony Award- winning tour de force, Holliday starred as Ella Peterson, a kind of answering-service oracle who is everything to everybody. On the front lines at the Manhattan-based “Susanswerphone,” Ella not only fields calls and relays messages but serves up a dazzling array of over-the-phone alter egos to keep her subscribers happy. If some mother’s little darling refuses to eat his spinach, Ella slips into her most convincing Santa Claus and gives junior a talking to. If playboy playwright Jeffrey Moss is sleeping off a severe case of writer’s block, Ella turns herself into the unfailingly supportive “Mom” and makes sure Shakespeare gets his daily wake-up call. But when it comes time for the unconfident Ella to deal with people face to face, it’s one wrong number after another.

  According to Betty Comden, the idea for the show was inspired by a rude awakening:

  I didn’t have an answering service and I asked Adolph what his service was like and he said, “I don’t know. Let’s find out where it is!” We found out it was just around the corner from where he lived on East 53rd Street. We pictured that it would be this sort of shiny, stainless steel place with rows and rows of telephones and glamorous girls sitting at them. Instead, it was in this terrible ramshackle building, down a couple of little cellar steps, and it was really depressing as hell. We walked into this incredibly messy room that was unpainted and peeling and in the middle of all of it sat this one very fat lady at a switchboard saying, “Gloria Vanderbilt’s residence… .” We looked at each other and said, “Now here’s an idea for a show!”1