by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Hiram Sherman, Grace MacDonald, and Eve Arden in Very Warm for May. Minnelli would write off the 1939 Broadway musical as “my first disaster.” In later years, Arden would refer to the show as “Very Cold for October.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Very Warm for May premiered at The Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware, in October 1939. The local press was encouraging, and the audience response was equally enthusiastic. The gorgeous ballad “All the Things You Are” seemed destined for the Hit Parade. It looked as though Minnelli had another hit on his hands. Then, producer Max Gordon arrived on the scene and decided it was time to produce.
Minnelli and choreographer Harry Losee were informed that their services were no longer required. Hassard Short (who had worked on some of Cole Porter’s musicals) and Albertina Rasch were called in to restage scenes and revise the choreography. Gordon began pressuring Hammerstein to drop the show’s gangster subplot. Although he initially resisted Gordon’s “suggestion,” Hammerstein eventually gave in. When Very Warm for May opened at the Alvin Theatre on November 17, 1939, it was a very different musical from the one audiences in Wilmington had enjoyed. Remarkably, even with a sizable chunk of its story missing, the show was well received. “Strangely enough, on opening night we were greeted with laughter, applause, and even bravos,” remembered Eve Arden, queen of the wisecrackers. “Max Gordon, our producer, was ecstatic. I had a chilling feeling that he was being premature, knowing the unpredictability of critics, and I was right.”7
Out of respect for Kern and Hammerstein’s previous achievements, the critics stopped short of savaging the show—though just barely. Although Max Gordon had expected an extended run to rival the 289 performances that Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms had racked up a year earlier, the Alvin’s box office remained unnervingly quiet. After a dismal 59 performances, the curtain came down on what Minnelli would dismiss as “my first disaster” and Arden would come to refer to as “Very Cold for October.” Only one element of Very Warm for May had a life beyond its final curtain call. The winsome “All the Things You Are” would be recorded by a host of popular singers, from Sinatra to Streisand.
Just up the street from the funeral atmosphere at the Alvin, the Booth Theatre was staging an original play entitled The Time of Your Life, which had opened to rapturous reviews. Heralded as “a prose poem in ragtime,” the drama had been written by William Saroyan—a bearish, hugely talented, and more than slightly eccentric true original. Unlikely as it seems, after Saroyan and Minnelli were introduced, they became buddies, though Saroyan biographer John Leggett believes that the playwright may have harbored some ulterior motives in befriending Vincente. “Saroyan was always imagining that by getting to know some influential person, that he would advance his career,” Leggett says. “Minnelli would have appealed to him simply because of his Broadway stature.”8
To Minnelli, Saroyan seemed a good choice as the book writer for a proposed all-black revue with no less than Rodgers and Hart furnishing the score. Minnelli and producer Bela Blau commissioned Saroyan to write the script, paying him $200 to begin the project, which was in some ways Serena Blandish revisited. “[Saroyan and Minnelli] took the subway to Harlem,” says Leggett. “They went to the Apollo Theatre and they were impressed by seeing the black male dancers there and out on the street. It pleased Saroyan’s imagination but I don’t think they every really got anywhere with that project.”t
At one point, Yip Harburg replaced Rodgers and Hart as the revue’s composer. Saroyan continued to churn out sketches at an incredible rate, amazing Minnelli with his swiftness. Despite the remarkable talents involved, the all-black revue never materialized. Even so, memories of his visit to the Apollo and the lindy-hoppers dancing in the streets would remain in Minnelli’s mind when it came time to direct his first film.
IT WAS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT introductions in the history of Hollywood: Arthur Freed meets Vincente Minnelli. In terms of movie musicals, it was almost as noteworthy as the day Fred met Ginger, though, in later years, nobody could recall the details of the meeting. Did Yip Harburg make the introductions, or was it Roger Edens? Minnelli remembered it happening in the spring of 1939, while others believed that the two first met during the run of Very Warm for May. Whatever the circumstances, the point was that Arthur Freed had come calling and Vincente knew that this could be opportunity knocking.
A native-born South Carolinian, Freed had tirelessly scaled the show-business heights, first as a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith. In collaboration with composer Nacio Herb Brown, Freed would make his mark supplying lyrics for such sublime standards as “You Were Meant for Me,” “Good Morning,” “The Wedding of the Painted Doll,” and one of the most enduring and instantly recognizable tunes in the history of popular music, the unforgettable “Singin’ in the Rain.”
Just as the movies were beginning to talk, Freed found himself at MGM, and his songs graced the soundtrack of 1929’s Best Picture Academy Award winner, The Broadway Melody. A decade later, Freed served as the uncredited associate producer on The Wizard of Oz, one of the finest films (musical or otherwise) to come out of Hollywood and the movie that made Judy Garland, “the little girl with the great big voice,” a major star.
“Yep,” “Nope,” and “Terrific” were considered unusually long-winded responses for Arthur Freed, so he got right to the point: “How would you like to work at Metro, Vincente?” Minnelli was ordinarily as tongue-tied as Freed but his answer came quickly: “I’ve been there.” Vincente explained that his experience at Paramount had soured him on the movies. Freed persisted. “They simply didn’t understand you. Come on out for five or six months, take enough money for your expenses… . If you don’t like it at any time you can leave.” Minnelli would be working for Freed but without a title. He’d be devising musical numbers, maybe even directing some. What’s more, he’d be doing it at the biggest studio in Hollywood. Said Minnelli: “Before I knew it had happened, I had already started.”9
Suddenly, Minnelli found himself going Hollywood all over again, but this time there was a significant difference: The movies were ready for Vincente Minnelli. “I was getting a fraction of my salary at Paramount,” he noted with obvious disappointment. But otherwise, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would prove to be a gold mine for Arthur Freed’s colorful new protégé.
As Minnelli was packing his bags, he received word that his mother had died at the age of sixty-eight in St. Petersburg, Florida. After Mina’s death, Vincente’s elderly father and his brother, Paul, would be cared for by his Aunt Amy. While Vincente would keep up a correspondence with his relatives and he provided for them financially, his new employer would keep him so busy that extended visits were out of the question. Besides, Minnelli had a new family now. It was called the Freed Unit.
MGM’s Dream Team: Minnelli and producer Arthur Freed on the set of The Clock, 1945. Director Stanley Donen said of his Metro colleagues, “Arthur Freed thought Vincente Minnelli was remarkable. He gave him anything he asked for… . He fought for it and got it.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
6
“A Piece of Good Luck”
MINNELLI ARRIVED IN CULVER CITY on April 22, 1940. According to the terms of his contract with the studio, he’d be serving in a “general advisory capacity in connection with the preparation for and production of photoplays which contain musical numbers” as well as “the creation, preparation and direction of musical numbers.”
As he didn’t have a title and wasn’t assigned to a specific picture, Minnelli was encouraged to roam around and observe the inner workings of the massive studio, which churned out fifty-two pictures a year. MGM may have been an assembly line like every other studio in town, and perhaps the most conservative of the majors, but it prided itself on producing gleaming Rolls-Royces, not Fords. If 20th Century Fox featured Alice Faye as Lillian Russell, MGM could claim Greta Garbo as Queen Christina. Sure, Paramount may have had Gary Cooper, but Metro had “The King,” Clark Gable. Even when an MGM film (say, one produced by Joe Pa
sternak) wasn’t legitimately top of the line (say, Song of Russia), it was always slicked up so that it appeared so. With what seemed to be infinite resources at its disposal, Metro had the ability to conjure up Paris in 1883, Oscar Wilde’s London, the San Francisco earthquake of 1903, or Munchkinland.
“MGM was self-sufficient in that it had the best of everything,” says actress Marsha Hunt, who made several pictures for the studio. “You had the feeling that [studio chief] Louis B. Mayer, who surely had his faults, was not a man to sneer at because he really understood motion pictures. He loved them passionately and he had an ability to find and bring onto the lot the very finest talents from anywhere.”1
If MGM was able to boast that it had the most impressive collection of artists (both in front of and behind the camera) in all of Hollywood, Arthur Freed would eventually siphon off the cream of the crop. As Metro scholar Hugh Fordin points out, the producer knew exactly where to go to import such top-of-the-line talent: “Freed didn’t want anybody from Hollywood. Freed wanted everybody from Broadway … Minnelli, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Chuck Walters, Robert Alton, Connie Salinger, Betty and Adolph … all of these people came from New York.”2
When Broadway’s dynamic duo, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, first landed at MGM, they were informed that they had been assigned to the Freed Unit. “We didn’t really know what ‘the Freed Unit’ was,” Comden admitted. 3 What it was has been described as “Broadway-on-Hollywood.” Part artist’s colony, part repertory company, it was a collection of diverse, remarkably talented artists who all had one thing in common: Arthur Freed. The producer, who was known for cultivating prize-winning orchids and amassing works by French Fauvist Georges Rouault, also had a knack for collecting the best in the business.
“It was called ‘the Freed Unit’ but there never was a unit,” says film historian Richard Schickel. “It was just a bunch of artists clustered around Arthur. They were just over in a corner by themselves making movies and I don’t think there was as much oversight on that group of actors and directors and writers as there was in other areas of MGM’s production… . That was almost like a piece of good luck.” Typically, an MGM movie was created by a committee or micromanaged by an omnipresent producer, but, true to form, Arthur Freed would buck the trend. He allowed his writers, directors, and choreographers almost complete autonomy. And the results spoke for themselves. “You can immediately see the difference between a musical from MGM and those done at Paramount and Fox,” says actress Betty Garrett. “There’s just something different about an MGM musical. Somehow they’re more professional, more sophisticated. There was just a touch that Arthur had that nobody else in the business really had.” Some believed that Freed’s greatest gift was simply knowing who to hire.4
“The thing that has been said most often about my father was that he was a great finder of talent and an appreciator of talent and he gave all of these artists a chance to do their thing,” says Arthur Freed’s daughter, Barbara Freed Saltzman. “He talked MGM into hiring a lot of these people, and once he had them, he let them do whatever they did best. So, that was really one of his greatest talents—finding talent, encouraging it and not just doing it all by himself, but letting other people come up with their own ideas and then he’d go to bat for them.”5 Even by MGM’s standards, the team that Freed assembled was truly extraordinary.
First and foremost, there was composer-arranger Roger Edens. Ethel Merman’s one-time rehearsal pianist, Edens was brought to Metro by Freed, who put the tall, well-mannered Texan to work as a musical adaptor. Before Judy Garland ever attempted “The Boy Next Door” or “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” Edens would have tried those tunes on for size first, determining how Garland’s powerhouse pipes could be shown off to best advantage on each note. Almost immediately, Edens became indispensable to Arthur Freed. In fact, many believed that Roger Edens was the Freed Unit.
“I can tell you that one of the greatest advantages my father had in life and throughout his movie career was Roger Edens. He was a lovely man and a great assistant to my father in everything,” says Barbara Freed Saltzman.6 Just how essential Edens was to the Freed Unit was spelled out later in his career, when he produced two musicals—Funny Face and Hello, Dolly!—at studios other than Metro. Although they were made elsewhere, both films exhibit an unmistakable Freed Unit sparkle from start to finish.
After her abrupt dismissal from Minnelli’s Hooray for What! Kay Thompson reinvented herself as a vocal coach and arranger, landing at MGM in the early ’40s. Thompson could always be counted on to fire up a number with her own distinctive brand of “bazazz.” For Garland’s “A Great Lady Has an Interview” sequence in Ziegfeld Follies, Thompson would not only provide the number with a scintillating, ahead-of-its-time be-bop sound but also help Judy find the comedic nuances of the piece. “Kay would write twenty ideas while I threw out nineteen,” says composer Ralph Blane, who collaborated with Thompson on The Harvey Girls. “They would just come to her like that, she was so fast! As a matter of fact, Kay could have been a great composer had she settled on one theme or idea.”7
Orchestrator Conrad Salinger was, in the opinion of André Previn, “the greatest arranger of American musical-comedy that ever lived.”8 Salinger could take a well-worn tune, such as “Limehouse Blues,” and turn it into a masterpiece that not only shimmered and soared musically but also brilliantly underscored the emotional content of the sequence it was accompanying. “He knew orchestration absolutely,” says Freed Unit musician-librarian Frank Lysinger. “He could take something like a very simple kind of English folk song and arrange it in a quiet way, and then, when the same tune is reintroduced later in the film, he could build it up practically into a symphony. He was just brilliant in so many ways.”9
Choreographer Robert Alton would showcase Ann Miller’s trademark hundred-taps-per-minute in the memorable “Shakin’ the Blues Away” in Easter Parade and even made Peter Lawford look relatively graceful doing “The Varsity Drag” in Good News. “Everybody deferred to Robert Alton,” says writer Jess Gregg. “He was the master but he was also a very droll man. He was married and had a son but he confessed to us that sometimes when he was sitting in the park, the other men who used the park would call him Evelyn.”10
Combining their talents and expertise, the members of the Freed Unit would create some of the finest musical films Hollywood ever produced. “These people were all geniuses,” says Michael Feinstein. “They all created a unique voice and they were a unique part of an era of American music that is largely gone, largely lost and so special in the end result. When I listen to the achievements of Conrad Salinger or of Roger Edens or the dance arrangements of Saul Chaplin—like his arrangement of ‘Get Happy’—or the exquisite music for Summer Holiday that Salinger orchestrated, I hear something that is never going to happen again… . The team that was assembled at MGM was just a stellar array of talent.”11
While Edens, Thompson, Salinger, and Alton would form the nucleus of the Freed Unit, the circle would eventually widen to admit the likes of writer-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, choreographer-director Charles Walters, orchestrators Lennie Hayton and Johnny Green, and designer Irene Sharaff. Soon to be included in this incredible mix of artists was Vincente Minnelli, whose work would call upon all of these remarkable talents at one time or another. “Arthur Freed thought Vincente Minnelli was remarkable,” says director Stanley Donen. “He gave him anything that he asked for… . He fought for it and got it.”12
While Arthur would always have his back, Minnelli may have also felt at home in the Freed Unit for personal as well as professional reasons. As writer Matthew Tinkcom says, “I think there was a kind of community there that was receptive both to his aesthetic and to whatever kind of ambiguous sexuality we’re talking about… . At least on the Metro lot and especially in the Freed Unit, there was a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward there being queer employees. The Freed Unit was, in fact, a kind of place where queer talent could flourish.”13
The unusually high concentration of gay artists in one department led to disparaging remarks about “Freed’s fairies,” homophobic jokes, and no end of salacious stories about many of the principal players. As the rumor mill had it, Conrad Salinger was a giant talent—and in more ways than one. “The reputation about him was that he had a basket to gasp at,” says Jess Gregg. “And of course, he was into fellas. I mean, that whole MGM crowd was—people like Connie Salinger and Bob Alton—everybody was gay and everybody took it for granted. There was no need to advertise the fact. People suspected that you were—whether you were or not.”14
AT VIRTUALLY THE SAME TIME Minnelli landed at the studio, so did a fellow New York transplant—the luminous Lena Horne. Among Vincente’s initial, usually uncredited assignments at MGM were shooting Horne’s “specialty numbers” in musicals helmed by other directors and otherwise exclusively populated by white performers.u “I never felt like I belonged in Hollywood,” Horne remembered. “At that time, they didn’t quite know what to do with me—a black performer. So, I usually came on, sang a song and made a quick exit.” Despite the fleeting nature of her appearances, Horne was well teamed with Minnelli, who made no secret of his fixation on the star. “He was obsessed with Lena in that period, and I would have thought doing everything he could to help her,” says illustrator Hilary Knight, an ardent Horne devotee in his own right. “What’s so interesting to me is why there’s this heavy concentration on blacks as exotics that runs through his involvement with [Horne] and in other movies like I Dood It and The Pirate. There’s that whole exotic black thing that he was completely obsessed with.”15
