Mark Griffin
Page 7
If At Home Abroad had offered audiences a picture-postcard tour of the globe, The Show Is On would make the theater itself the evening’s primary destination. “The thought just came to him when he was walking in Central Park one afternoon,” Marion Herwood said of her employer’s inspiration for his latest revue. “He wanted to do a bigger, newer, more unusual musical than had ever been done before. The subject he liked was the show game… . He thought of contrasting the old and new, of revealing scenes with the color and glamour of the ’90s and then following this with ultramodern jazz song numbers.”17
As for featured performers, Minnelli had very definite ideas: “I can think of only one leading comedienne, and that would be Beatrice Lillie. The comedian, of course, must be Bert Lahr. It is practically my life ambition to see them both on the same stage.” Lillie needed little convincing: “It may be safely concluded that when an invitation came along to play in a new musical under the direction of Vincente Minnelli, who handled At Home Abroad, I set off at a fast trot for cocktails at his studio. Vincente’s gentle salesmanship may have done it—perhaps he picked up the technique when he worked for Marshall Field’s Chicago department store.”18
Even the inimitable Lillie would have to be on her toes to keep up with her seasoned costar—one of the most original and outrageous talents in the business. Whether he was refining his trademark “gnong, gnong, gnong” in a burlesque house or delighting millions of moviegoers as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr was a certified showstopper. The master buffoon was also “the worryingest rehearser in the business,” according to sketch director Edward C. Lilley.19 A fidgety, neurotic button-twister, Lahr seemed light years away from the elegant, eternally composed Lady Peel. Yet they clicked, both on stage and off. And The Show Is On gave these two ingenious comedians ample opportunity to display their sublime chemistry and individual versatility.
Lillie was a caution as a nineteenth-century crooner perched high on a “perilously migratory moon,” warbling “Buy Yourself a Balloon” while flinging garters into the audience. Bert Lahr had them rolling in the aisles with “The Song of the Woodman,” Arlen and Harburg’s send-up of Nelson Eddy-style anthems such as “Stout-Hearted Men.” Appearing in lumberjack regalia and wielding a papier-mâché ax, Lahr offered an ode to deforestation: What do we chop, when we chop a tree? A thousand things that you daily see. A baby’s crib, the poet’s chair, the soap box down at Union Square. “That song was written specifically for Mr. Lahr’s talents—to point up his immense mimicry and range,” says Arlen scholar R. Bobby. “Minnelli said, ‘There’s a spot in the show where I need a great number for Lahr.’ Arlen and Harburg were in Hollywood and they came up with this hilarious song which shows how brilliant they were at writing material for a specific performer.”20
David Freedman, whom Vincente dubbed “The master of all sketch writers,” had been responsible for some of the wittiest material in Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. For The Show Is On, he managed to top himself, though it certainly didn’t hurt that his writing partner for “Mr. Gielgud Passes By” was none other than Moss Hart. In the sketch, Bea Lillie embodied the actor’s nightmare—a chatty latecomer who yaks her way through a performance of John Gielgud’s Hamlet. Reginald Gardiner’s frustrated Gielgud finds himself competing with her as he attempts to portray Shakespeare’s Melancholy Dane. Lillie’s thoughtless chatterbox explains that an opening night is the one place she’s certain to meet up with her friends and have a nice, long chat.
During rehearsals for The Show Is On, Minnelli was profiled by the World-Telegram’s William A. H. Birnie, who noted that Vincente looked “as if he had wandered out of an art gallery and wished he could remember his way back.” The reporter also observed Minnelli directing: “His remarks are low-keyed and polite, as if he were coaching a church benefit. But an attentive visitor notices that even such veterans as Bea Lillie and Bert Lahr pay strict attention to what he says.” Birnie’s portrait of Minnelli included a certified eyebrow raiser: “He shies away from any activity that might be considered effeminate.”21 This after Vincente had confessed an affinity for Tchaikovsky symphonies and Whistler etchings and owned up to taking dancing lessons at Arthur Murray’s.
A ’30s studio portrait of Minnelli by Arthur Ermates. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST (PHOTOGRAPHER: ARTHUR ERMATES)
The Show Is On opened at the Winter Garden on Christmas Day 1936, and Santa delivered a hit. The production continued Minnelli’s extraordinary winning streak. The misfit from Delaware, Ohio, was now the most sought after talent on Broadway: “It happened to me. I was a winner. The offers started pouring in. The re-creation of the War of the Roses using real roses? In time. A musical version of Medusa, starring Merman and the inmates of the New York Herpetological Gardens? Maybe next year. A Hollywood contract? Come now.”22
For some time, the same critics who had been heaping hosannas on Vincente for his work in the theater had wondered how long it would be before Hollywood’s “bogeymen of Technicolor” would scoop Minnelli up and carry him away. Already there had been one close call. Playwright Lillian Hellman was determined to bring her buddy Vincente and movie producer Samuel Goldwyn together. Hellman found that as moguls go, Goldwyn was straightforward and possessed of genuine integrity, and she believed Vincente could be a tremendous asset to the producer. But Minnelli wasn’t as taken with Goldwyn as Hellman was. “I have an offer from Sam Goldwyn, but he doesn’t seem to understand what my work is about,” Minnelli wrote to Yip Harburg in April 1936. “He seems to want me very much as a designer, and seems shocked and grieved to learn that this is only a part of what I am doing in the theatre and would want to do in pictures… . There must be some way for the movies to use my small but exquisite talent without labeling me as a designer or as a director.”23
It was clear that if Vincente did surrender to the silver screen, it would have to be on his own terms. And his employer would have to fully understand how truly unique that “small but exquisite” talent of his was. After instructing his agents to look into the offers from various movie studios, the highest bidder turned out to be not Goldwyn or MGM but Paramount Pictures. Terms were met. A contract was signed. Minnelli was going Hollywood at $2,500 a week.
“Just as he was conceded to be the one person who could return the musical stage to the glories of the Ziegfeld reign, Minnelli is snapped up by Paramount,” the Boston Traveler’s Helen Eager noted in an article headlined “A New Genius Rises in the Theater.” The newly anointed genius was surprisingly candid about his reasons for heading west: “He told us, quite frankly, that the money offered him by the film company was too attractive to turn down.”24
Paramount’s publicity machine kicked in before Minnelli had a chance to pack his bags. The October 30, 1936, edition of the Los Angeles Times carried a tiny, telegraphic item buried between stories about Binnie Barnes and Gloria Swanson that read, “Importance of musicals in present studio activities is stressed with the signing of Vincente Minnelli by the Paramount organization. This producer and director of footlight attractions will act as general advisor on the melodic features that are made hence forward at the establishment.”
5
A Small but Exquisite Talent
IN JANUARY 1937, Minnelli drove through the Paramount gates for the first time. Never one to start small, he proposed that his first production should be an innovative musical mystery entitled Times Square. Minnelli envisioned the film as an all-star extravaganza that would incorporate scenes from actual Broadway shows currently on the boards. In his pitch to studio chief Adolph Zukor, Vincente maintained that the expense of importing Great White Way headliners to Hollywood or dispatching a film crew to New York would be justified as moviegoers would be all too eager to spend their Depression-era dimes to see theatrical luminaries most of them had only heard about. Zukor listened, as did head of production William LeBaron. Still reeling from the losses on Alice in Wonderland, the lavishly mounted all-star epic gone wrong, Paramount executives were underst
andably leery about committing to anything as grandiose as Times Square. Nevertheless, Vincente continued to develop the screenplay with Russian writer Leo Birinski, who had scripted the Greta Garbo vehicle Mata Hari.
After studio executives expressed their doubts about Times Square, Minnelli shelved the project, and despite his great enthusiasm, it remained un-produced. Paramount then asked Vincente to turn his attention to Artists and Models, a picture he was assigned to serve in an “advisory capacity.” This breezy musical comedy was being readied for Jack Benny and Ida Lupino. The very definition of madcap, the movie represented a change of pace for irascible, one-eyed director Raoul Walsh, who later excelled at helming such gangster flicks as The Roaring Twenties and White Heat. “Public Melody Number One,” a witty spoof of the G-Man genre, would be the sole sequence that Minnelli conceived that would be retained in the final cut of Artists and Models.r
Collaborating with fellow New York transplant Harold Arlen, Vincente whipped up a frenzied pastiche featuring a characteristically manic Martha Raye and Louis Armstrong. Looked at today, “Public Melody Number One” might be considered a sort of rough sketch for the Jim Henry’s night club sequence in Minnelli’s first feature, Cabin in the Sky. But when Minnelli viewed the much-altered version of “Public Melody” that ended up on the screen, he dubbed it “a full scale mess, missing all the nuances we’d supplied.” 1 Vincente had also prepared an elaborate surrealistic ballet for Artists and Models, but it was deemed “too artistic” for a Paramount programmer and dropped.
Understandably, Minnelli was frustrated. After being hailed as Broadway’s new genius, he found that Hollywood was oddly indifferent to him. Imaginative concepts that had been eagerly embraced by Minnelli’s New York colleagues didn’t inspire anywhere near the same enthusiasm in Tinseltown. With his cryptic communication style and sketches for dream ballets tucked under his arm, Minnelli was considered too avant-garde, too cosmopolitan, and, well … just too much for Hollywood. Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic choreography for Footlight Parade was one thing, but a Jack Benny vehicle taking time out for a surrealistic ballet was simply going too far. It will never go over in Duluth, kid, one can almost hear the cigarchomping producer say.
When Lee Shubert offered Vincente a return to Broadway in the form of a new musical entitled Hooray for What! the unhappy transplant didn’t hesitate. After he wrangled himself out of his lucrative Paramount contract, his eight-month adventure in Hollywood was over. Although he would be missed by a small circle of West Coast intimates, the rest of the industry barely took notice of his departure. Little did they know that he would be back, and next time out, it would be to stay.
With the joyous sound of New York traffic once again ringing in his ears, Minnelli told columnist James Aswell: “I have just returned from Hollywood where all the world’s a succession of stages. After years spent working in the theater on one stage at a time, I found it just a bit terrifying to create a scene that covered almost a quarter of a mile… . In my opinion, the screen as a musical comedy medium has not as yet been fully and completely developed.” Even though he had just skulked away from Hollywood’s sound stages in defeat, Minnelli expressed very definite ideas about how screen musicals could be improved upon. He called for songs that actually advanced the plot and looked forward to “the perfection of color film.”2
Roy Roberts, Ed Wynn, and Vivian Vance in Minnelli’s Hooray for What! Vance replaced future MGM arranger Kay Thompson, who was originally cast as the show’s singing spy. “Kay Thompson was fired from that show,” remembers songwriter Hugh Martin, who was in the chorus. “She was fired not by Vincente but by the stupid Shuberts. Vincente was as horrified as we all were.” PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SHUBERT ARCHIVE
Less than a year after abandoning Broadway to teach Hollywood a thing or two, “the new genius of the theatre” was back with little to show for his trouble. While Minnelli was away, the Great White Way had matured. Star-driven, plotless revues like The Show Is On suddenly seemed extravagantly wasteful in F.D.R.’s New Deal America. Even musicals were expected to sober up and have something important to say.
As conceived by Yip Harburg, the antiwar extravaganza Hooray for What! would deliver first-rate songs (such as “Down with Love”) as well as political substance. Harburg had channeled his very real revulsion regarding the rise of fascism into a riotous farce. The musical’s plot concerned Chuckles, an amateur inventor who stumbles upon a formula for an all-powerful gas. (“This gas will revive the dead. I’ve got a big offer from the Republican party.”) After making his discovery, Chuckles is suddenly sought after by world leaders, munitions makers, and the glamorous international spy Stephanie Stephanovich. After secret agents get hold of the formula for the gas and sell it, each of the world’s great dictators all believe that they alone are in possession of the ultimate secret weapon. But one of the spies has scrambled the formula so that what is ultimately unleashed on the world is laughing gas.
Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, the talented team that would later give Broadway a record-breaking triumph in the form of Life with Father, were brought on board to assist Harburg with his scenario. Harold Arlen would write the music. Vaudeville veteran Ed Wynn was cast as Chuckles. Agnes de Mille would choreograph the show’s “Hero Ballet.” While Howard Lindsay was credited as the show’s book director, the entire production would be staged by Minnelli, who admitted, “I approached my first book show as if it were a revue… . The only difference to me was that one set of characters carried through from beginning to end.”3 Given the content of Hooray for What! and its very topical satire, Minnelli would not be able to rely solely on his designs to win the audience over. The scenic effects would be in service to the story this time, not the other way around.
Nevertheless, during the show’s pre-Broadway tryout in October 1937, critics couldn’t help but notice how pretty political satire could be. “An air of luxury predominates, for Vincente Minnelli has outdone himself in providing beautiful costumes and backgrounds,” Elinor Hughes noted in her Boston Herald review. Also singled out for praise was “a striking blonde girl with a husky voice and an original style.”4 Her name was Kay Thompson. Although Thompson was clearly a rising star and had walked away with some of the best notices in Boston, it was not long after her out-of-town triumph that she was informed that her services were no longer required.
“Kay Thompson was fired from that show,” says composer Hugh Martin, who was also in the cast. “I was outside her dressing room when it happened and I never heard such sobbing in my life… . She was fired not by Vincente but by the stupid Shuberts. Vincente was as horrified as we all were… . But Kay lost her job in Hooray for What! and it was given to Vivian Vance, who later played ‘Ethel’ in the I Love Lucy series.”5 Despite the raves Thompson had received, the Shuberts suddenly decided that their leading lady was too angular and bony. Vivian Vance (Thompson’s understudy) was the kind of voluptuous Joan Blondell type that the Shuberts found sexy. Vance, who idolized Thompson, suddenly found herself in a very awkward position, but at Kay’s urging, she went on.
Along with Thompson, Agnes de Mille was ousted. She was replaced with future MGM choreographer Robert Alton. During its out-of-town overhaul, Hooray for What! suddenly became less about Harburg’s antifascist themes and more about Ed Wynn’s off-the-wall buffoonery. There were reports of friction between Wynn and Minnelli. Other roles were recast. But despite all of the backstage bedlam, Hooray for What! was pronounced a hit when it opened on December 1, 1937.
IT WAS COMPOSER VERNON DUKE who suggested that Minnelli next direct a musical version of the S. N. Behrman play Serena Blandish. Minnelli liked the idea but took it a step further—a musical version of Serena Blandish—but with an all-black cast. He envisioned Cotton Club headliner Lena Horne in the title role of a young woman being groomed to meet high society. And if Minnelli had his way, Ethel Waters would strut her stuff as the irrepressible Countess Flor Di Folio.
In April 1938, it was announced th
at S. J. Perelman would be tackling the adaptation, and the incomparable Cole Porter was set to compose the score. It seemed that Serena had all the makings of another Minnelli-designed blockbuster. But then, as quickly as the project came together, it began to unravel. In September, the New York Times broke the news: “Not that anyone ever took it too seriously, but Vincente Minnelli has dropped his plan to present a Negro version of Serena Blandish, leaving Mr. M. to consider other ventures.”6
Mr. M. had also been toying with the idea of mounting “a surrealistic fantasy set to jig time.” Tentatively entitled The Light Fantastic, the new show was being planned as a third collaboration for Minnelli and Bea Lillie. Vincente also hoped that for this outing, his friend Dorothy Parker would contribute a sketch or two. All of this was put aside, however, when legendary impresario Max Gordon offered Minnelli an opportunity to design a new musical. With a score supplied by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (the same team that had revolutionized Broadway a dozen years earlier with Show Boat), there were great expectations for the new production, Very Warm for May.s
Advance publicity promised that the musical would be “reminiscent of the song and dance fun-fests that used to tenant The Princess Theatre.” The story, which concerned young performers in a summer stock theater getting mixed up with gangsters, was infused with the kind of “let’s put on a show!” exuberance that would soon become a trademark of the Mickey Rooney- Judy Garland musicals of the ’40s. Needless to say, this was material that a fugitive from the Minnelli Brothers Mighty Dramatic Company Under Canvas could relate to completely.
Hammerstein would direct the book, and Minnelli would stage the musical numbers. The cast included future stars Eve Arden, June Allyson, and Vera-Ellen. In the role of “Smoothy Watson,” a handsome young dancer named Don Loper was cast. He would become one of Vincente’s closest friends and a fixture in the Freed Unit at MGM. “Don Loper’s big claim to fame was that he danced with Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark,” remembers Tucker Fleming. “In later years, he became quite a designer and he had a big house in Bel Air and he used to entertain a lot—straight parties and gay parties. Even at the gay parties everybody had to wear black tie. He was very pretentious. Wore patent leather shoes… . He was very social and the type of guy that would have appealed to Vincente.”