by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Delaware Days
Chapter 2 - Window Dressing the World
Chapter 3 - A Glorious Garden of Wonders
Chapter 4 - “A New Genius Rises in the Theater”
Chapter 5 - A Small but Exquisite Talent
Chapter 6 - “A Piece of Good Luck”
Chapter 7 - “Honey in the Honeycomb”
Chapter 8 - 5135 Kensington Avenue
Chapter 9 - “A Joy Forever, a Sweet Endeavor …”
Chapter 10 - “If I Had You”
Chapter 11 - Dada, Dali, and Technicolor
Chapter 12 - Undercurrent
Chapter 13 - Voodoo
Chapter 14 - “I Am Madame Bovary”
Chapter 15 - “A Few Words About Weddings …”
Chapter 16 - The Time in His Mind
Chapter 17 - Tribute to a Bad Man
Chapter 18 - New Sun in the Sky
Chapter 19 - Almost Like Being in Love
Chapter 20 - Cobwebs
Chapter 21 - Stranger in Paradise
Chapter 22 - Maelstroms and Madmen
Chapter 23 - Sister Boy
Chapter 24 - “There’ll Be Some Changes Made”
Chapter 25 - Unacceptable, Objectionable, and Unclean
Chapter 26 - A Glittering Tiara
Chapter 27 - Some Came Running
Chapter 28 - “Minnelli’s Texas”
Chapter 29 - Better Than a Dream
Chapter 30 - Apocalypse
Chapter 31 - Don’t Blame Me
Chapter 32 - Happy Problems
Chapter 33 - Identity Theft
Chapter 34 - The Shadow of Your Smile
Chapter 35 - “At Best, Confused”
Chapter 36 - On a Clear Day
Chapter 37 - A Matter of Time
Chapter 38 - Lonely Feet
INTERVIEWS
ASSISTANCE & CORRESPONDENCE
NOTES
SOURCES
Acknowledgements
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Lester
INTRODUCTION
I WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD when I saw the movie that changed my life. During a summer vacation in which I was expected to evolve from sophomore to junior, I actually went a step further and found myself. My life-altering cinematic experience came courtesy of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the second-to-last directorial effort of the great Vincente Minnelli. This decidedly offbeat musical not only featured a time-traveling protagonist with paranormal powers but came complete with a poignant theme about the liberating effects of self-acceptance—a message all too eagerly received by St. Dominic Regional High School’s resident misfit.
I watched On a Clear Day over and over in the summer of 1984. I found it healing and empowering. My friends thought I had lost it. They began to look at me funny. In an era dominated by Return of the Jedi and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was I actually claiming to have achieved some sort of cosmic consciousness through repeated viewings of … a Barbra Streisand movie? It was suggested that I should try getting out more often or maybe join a rugby team … before it was too late. But after discovering that Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris had once referred to the object of my obsession as “an underrated masterpiece,” there was no stopping me. This high-level endorsement was the only excuse I needed to study said masterpiece with an even more attentive eye.
I was mesmerized by what Sarris had referred to as “Minnelli’s morbidly beautiful mise en scène,” and there was an unusual quality about the film that I was eager to reconnect with. Although On a Clear Day was a large and lavish major studio production, there was also something endearingly personal about it. Minnelli seemed to exhibit a genuine empathy for his heroine, who throughout the film grapples with the effects of a split self.
As I would soon discover, Daisy Gamble—the psychically gifted, identity-challenged chain-smoker at the center of On a Clear Day—was the kind of conflicted character that Vincente Minnelli had practically patented. Here was another engaging oddball to add to the director’s already impressive collection of visionaries, dreamers, artists, and outcasts. An awkward, un - assuming “go-alonger,” Daisy is so ashamed of her extrasensory abilities that she attempts to suppress this part of herself, terrified that someone will discover that she is (in her own words) “un-normal.” Besides her supernatural skills, Daisy harbors another secret—there is a more alluring, alternate identity buried within her. Several lifetimes ago, this neurotic wallflower from Mahwah, New Jersey, was Lady Melinda Tentrees, a clairvoyant noblewoman and 1814’s “It” Girl. Melinda’s captivating personality, regal bearing, and eye-popping ensembles effortlessly upstage Daisy’s modern-day existence.
After coming to terms with her previous incarnations, Daisy experiences an exhilarating moment of self-discovery: The most important person you will ever be is the one that you are right now. As she begins to blossom as vibrantly as the azaleas, peonies, and posies that have surrounded her in virtually every frame, Daisy embraces her authentic self: “On a clear day … rise and look around you and you’ll see who you are… . On a clear day, how it will astound you that the glow of your being outshines every star.” I took the message to heart. And apparently so had Minnelli. On a Clear Day had inspired me to look at myself in a very different way. The gift of self-empowerment had been bequeathed to an insecure adolescent in need of reassurance. I was beyond grateful and very curious to know more about the man behind the movie.
I had been a card-carrying Judy Garland fanatic since childhood, and because I had seen all the films in which “the world’s greatest entertainer” had been directed by her second husband, I thought I was rather well acquainted with Vincente Minnelli. Largely because of Meet Me in St. Louis, I equated his name with an unmistakable style and the kind of exquisitely crafted extravaganzas that had long ago vacated the neighborhood movie house and taken up residence on the late show. Though, as I soon learned, there was more to Minnelli than what initially dazzled the eye.
During the remainder of my summer vacation, I ravenously consumed some of the other important titles in the director’s oeuvre: The Pirate, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, Tea and Sympathy, Gigi, and Minnelli’s tragically mutilated final film, A Matter of Time. While these movies were often boldly innovative, even ahead of their time, somehow they also felt strangely familiar. Despite the fact that almost all of these pictures had been produced long before I was born, it was as though Vincente Minnelli had somehow been eavesdropping on my dreams. No, better than that … he was telling the story of my life on film, and by this point, my friends were begging me to get out more often. Though I really didn’t care. Minnelli’s movies were taking me to important places within myself and that was all that mattered.
Eventually, I was able to see beyond my sixteen-year-old’s self-absorption and recognize that Minnelli wasn’t telling the story of my life on screen but his own. Or at least it seemed so. “My romanticism has never precluded me from my work which, in the final analysis, is the story of my life,” Minnelli observed in his 1974 memoir.1 A lifelong workaholic, the director was probably referring to the countless hours he put in on Hollywood soundstages over the years. Though I hoped that what he also meant by this was that his work actually contained the story of his life. For I purely loved the notion of Minnelli as a mild-mannered subversive who labored under the constraints of the studio system yet somehow managed to sneak autobiographical elements into his films … buried-treasure style.
If Minnelli’s movies are indeed autobiographies in code (and many can
certainly be “read” that way), his achievement is all the more extraordinary when one considers the fact that all but three of his pictures were made during his twenty-six-year association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood’s preeminent “Dream Factory”—but a factory nonetheless. I was intrigued. Just how had Vincente managed to produce such self-reflexive and personal work while toiling away at the most conservative and lockstep of the major studios? And what exactly was the work telling us about his life?
After scrutinizing the films, I started reading everything I could about Minnelli. I was interested in what made Vincente tick, not only as an artist but as an individual, though most of the information I could find about him focused almost exclusively on his directorial achievements. Before too long, references to auteur theories, surrealism, and Cahiers du cinéma began creeping into my conversation. I learned that although Minnelli had won an Oscar in 1959 (for his direction of Gigi) and several of his titles invariably turned up on lists of the Best Films Ever Made, he was more acclaimed in Europe than he was in his own country.
I now felt very protective, almost proprietary about my favorite director, and it irked me that he was sometimes treated like a second-class citizen. Although most critics and film scholars would readily acknowledge that Vincente Minnelli was “the master of the decorative image,” they seemed reluctant (until recently) to discuss his work in the same way one would approach Orson Welles, John Ford, or Jean-Luc Godard. Why? Did Judy Garland, Technicolor, and a score by Lerner and Loewe automatically disqualify Minnelli from being taken seriously as a director?
“The curse of Vincente Minnelli is really the curse of eighty-five percent of Hollywood’s great artists,” says film scholar Jeanine Basinger:
Jerry Lewis is a great filmmaker but, you know, he just acts funny. Raoul Walsh is a great director but he just makes action and gangster films. It’s really the curse of people not taking Hollywood seriously. A lot of artists get dismissed on the basis of something like, “If it isn’t Ingmar Bergman, it can’t be good.” In some ways, people fear fantasy. They fear escapism. They’re afraid it’s trivial. And people don’t want to take film on it’s most artistic terms. They don’t want it to fly and soar and be visual and stunning. Because none of that is “serious.” All of this is reflected in the way people approach Minnelli, apologizing for him or downgrading him… . Say that someone is watching the dream sequence in Yolanda and the Thief and they’re easily dismissing it. Then suppose I told them that it had been directed by Fellini, would they still be so quick to dismiss it? Of course they wouldn’t.2
Whenever some shortsighted film authority attempted to write Vincente off as a glorified window dresser, I wanted to lead them (by the hand) to the nearest copy of Lust for Life. In Minnelli’s critically hailed 1956 biopic, Anthony Quinn’s Paul Gauguin lashes out at Kirk Douglas’s Vincent van Gogh. “You paint too fast!” Quinn’s fiery postimpressionist tells the mad genius. “You look too fast!” is van Gogh’s unforgettable reply. As the director’s most fervent followers have always maintained, it would appear that we’ve been looking too fast at the work of Vincente Minnelli.
For many Minnelliphiles, part of the mystique and fascination with his work is that it is so richly layered that a single film can be appreciated on many different levels. “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things,” the director once said.3 A well-dressed, thoroughly entertaining movie such as Gigi can be enjoyed as the tune-filled, sensory-rich experience that it is. Or, if one chooses to lift the ornate lid and peer inside, there are countless “hidden” elements to be discovered, including sharp-eyed social critiques, a feminist manifesto, and erudite references to great artists and their works. Oftentimes, the sumptuousness and sheer artiness of Minnelli’s presentation has tended to distract viewers from the fact that there was plenty going on beneath the elegantly appointed surface.
Though as Minnelli pointed out to interviewer Henry Sheehan, he always intended that the decorative trappings should be in service to the story: “Most people don’t realize that the décor, what [the characters] hold and the surroundings tell an awful lot about the character. And that’s what I’m concerned with—the character.”4
From Madame Bovary to Eddie’s father, the characters in Vincente Minnelli’s films are some of the most beloved in all of cinema, which is a bit surprising when one considers the fact that they are anything but your typical Hollywood heroes. Virtually all of Minnelli’s movies are stories about unconventional individuals who find themselves at odds with the world around them simply by being who they are. Their very identity is the source of their dilemma, and these nonconformists must seek refuge in fantasy, art, or an alternate reality in order to heal themselves. From Little Joe Jackson, whose soul is caught in a tug-of-war between heaven and hell in Minnelli’s first feature, Cabin in the Sky, to Nina, an impressionable chambermaid who lives vicariously through the memories of a faded courtesan in A Matter of Time, a Minnelli character is almost always a dweller on two planets. These are people who are not only displaced but split right down the middle. Without question, this was a recurring theme that Vincente had more than a passing interest in exploring. Why? Was the duality that turned up time and again in the films reflecting some part of his own experience?
After Minnelli’s death in 1986, suggestions that the director may have had a divided life of his own began to appear in print. Along with such iconic figures as James Dean, Cary Grant, and Rudolph Valentino, Vincente Minnelli has always been a sexually suspect character. Just consider the “evidence”: Minnelli was a former window dresser and costume designer. He had an unerring eye for décor. An alleged affinity for eye liner. A romantic association with Judy Garland. In the eyes of some, Minnelli was seriously overdue for his own float in a gay pride parade.
In our postmodern, politically correct world, everything—and everybody—must be clearly marked with a very precise label. “Bisexual” is the one usually hung on Minnelli, though it was generally assumed that despite his marriages to four women (some of whom were also rumored to have been bisexual), Minnelli was a “closet case”—an essentially gay man who, due to societal conditioning and career pressures, felt compelled to marry and procreate. Denying who he really was would at least satisfy society, a politically conservative studio, and Modern Screen subscribers.
In Jon Marans’s recent play The Temperamentals, “Vincente Minnelli” appears as the physical embodiment of the closet. Marans concocted an episode in which Minnelli is approached by gay activist Harry Hay and asked to lend his support to the Mattachine Society. “I have Minnelli using this metaphor about homosexuality,” says Marans. “He talks about a woman’s perfume and how it will lose all of its heavenly aroma once you open up the bottle. In the same way, he thinks you shouldn’t open up the bottle of homosexuality. Minnelli has this theory that ‘You should never discuss it for fear of making it mundane and letting it all out into the open.’”5
In this out and proud post-Stonewall age, it probably wouldn’t take most observers long to do the math and consign Minnelli to the closet. But then again, hadn’t some of Minnelli’s own movies, most notably Tea and Sympathy and Designing Woman, pointed out that just because something looks one way doesn’t necessarily mean that it is that way? Was it possible that, just as people had looked “too fast” at Minnelli’s work, snap judgments had been made about him as a person? Had Vincente been stereotyped into a corner? Minnelli may have been effeminate, androgynous even, but did this automatically add up to gay? Even in our more socially conscious times, there are some observers (including an exceedingly sequined relative) who seem convinced that everyone is barking up the wrong tree.
“My sister, Liza, passionately resents the suggestion that her father had a secret gay life,” Judy Garland’s daughter, Lorna Luft, wrote in her 1998 family memoir. “The Vincente I remember had a roving eye and a weakness for beautiful women, some of whom he married. Granted, one marriage might be a cov
er, but three?”a Those closest to Minnelli seemed to be contradicting the frequently repeated rumors about him. Or was this denial in the first degree?
When my longtime dream of writing a Minnelli biography became a reality, I knew that my subject—while colorful and endlessly fascinating—was also a complete enigma. “Vincente Minnelli was Hollywood’s great mystery man,” Garland confidant Tucker Fleming told me. “I think he’s quite a complex figure and there have always been so many question marks about him… . You really have your work cut out for you.”6 Though who was I to go rummaging around in somebody else’s life? Especially when that someone had been so guarded and self-protective? Then I reread Minnelli’s 1974 autobiography, I Remember It Well, and came to regard the title as something of a challenge. In Gigi, Maurice Chevalier croons a wistful tune by the same name, in which he misremembers some of his romantic interludes. By borrowing the title of the song, Minnelli seemed to be winking at the reader—these are the memoirs of a notoriously forgetful man. In other words, this autobiography is my version of events. What I choose to remember. The truth may be a very different story.
So I began searching for the real Vincente Minnelli. Before too long, I found myself playing a variation on “Limehouse Blues,” the celebrated sequence in Minnelli’s 1946 revue musical Ziegfeld Follies. In this indelible production number, Fred Astaire is in pursuit of Lucille Bremer—first while fully conscious and then when he’s in the midst of a delirious dream. Astaire is lured into the darkened depths of his own subconscious by the most Minnellian object imaginable—an Oriental fan. As Bremer disappears into the shadows, the fan she clutches seems self-propelled, flitting about like an unusually beautiful butterfly. Although Astaire makes several attempts to capture the fan, it’s always just out of reach. I knew exactly how Fred felt, for trying to find Minnelli was like chasing after that fan.
My subject practically defined “elusive.” Minnelli may have been a public figure, but the most important parts of his life had been locked away deep inside of himself. How do you go about finding someone who really knew a thing or two about staying hidden? Early on, I realized I wouldn’t be able to find Vincente on my own. So I organized a search party. I knew that it would be necessary to conduct as many interviews as possible and get people talking. As Vincente had been the subject of so much speculation and rumor, hearing directly from those who actually worked with or knew him would be absolutely essential. Only this posed another set of challenges that I had been warned about.
