by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Vincente’s obsession is readily apparent in Panama Hattie, which was released in 1942. Adapted from the Broadway hit that had starred Ethel Merman, this gobs-gone-wild extravaganza directed by Norman Z. McLeod would be utterly forgettable if it were not laced with Cole Porter tunes and graced with Horne’s two Minnelli-mounted production numbers. Lena’s all too brief rendition of “Just One of Those Things” is charged with more vitality and style than anything contained in McLeod’s uninspired footage, which was deemed so wanting that it was overhauled by Roy Del Ruth after an unsuccessful preview. Horne’s number, which is framed in adoring close-up, sets the standard for the way the star would typically be presented during her tenure at Metro—as a glamorous, almost ethereal songbird segregated from the movie’s main storyline. For “The Sping,” Horne is decked out in cockleshell accessories, costumed in a Carmen Miranda cast-off, and accompanied by the dancing Berry Brothers. Horne’s numbers here and her later appearances in I Dood It and Ziegfeld Follies are sort of cinematic second cousins to the stylish showstoppers that Minnelli had mounted on stage featuring Ethel Waters and Josephine Baker.
Vincente’s work on Panama Hattie would provide him with a crash course in movie making. “He didn’t know anything about the technique of motion pictures, and we couldn’t expect him to,” cinematographer George Folsey would later say of Minnelli’s first attempts behind the camera, not so fondly recalling Vincente’s “twenty-seven moves of the boom … up, down, in, out, dollying all around, panning and crossing over, and all of this on musical cues.”16 While his dazed colleagues attempted to keep pace with his hyperactive shooting style, Minnelli viewed this all as on-the-job training. “I was learning how to move the camera,” he would later remark.17 He was also learning that certain effects that had played well at the Winter Garden appeared one dimensional and stagy on film. Nevertheless, Metro’s newcomer had a few new tricks to teach those Technicolor bogeymen. Color and lighting—two areas in which Vincente excelled—would evolve under his unerring eye. But for the moment, it was small steps forward.
As was the case during his aborted Paramount tenure, Minnelli was called upon to conceptualize musical numbers that would enhance films by some of Metro’s veteran directors, such as Busby Berkeley. Vincente’s concepts, which had been considered too outlandish or artsy at Paramount in the ’30s, were eagerly incorporated at MGM in the ’40s. Strike Up the Band, the fifth screen-teaming of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, provided Minnelli with an opportunity to concoct a visually inventive sequence that would win him the right kind of attention. After giving him a tour of the set, Arthur Freed ordered Minnelli to hurry up and get inspired: “We need a big production number here. Mickey and Judy are in the house, and he’s telling her he wants to be a famous band leader like Paul Whiteman. Something big has to happen.”18
Minnelli sprang into action. Spotting a fruit bowl on the set, he was reminded of a recent Life magazine layout. Using these images as his inspiration, he devised a spectacular sequence built around the ballad “Our Love Affair.” Mickey and Judy would assemble an edible orchestra featuring a pear-headed violinist, a tangerine-topped percussionist (playing grapefruit drums), and a passionate, grape-headed conductor à la Leopold Stokowski. “All I did was supply the idea,” Minnelli would later say. “The studio did the rest.”19 The critics took notice: “The episode is an outstanding example of imaginative entertainment,” Variety raved.
Minnelli’s sequence was memorable, but even more important to the studio, it was economical. “This is the genius who took a bowl of fruit and made a big production number out of it,” Louis B. Mayer would proudly say whenever introducing Vincente to studio visitors. It was Arthur Freed, however, who orchestrated Minnelli’s most important on-set introduction—to Judy Garland, then eighteen years old and already a Top Ten box-office star. “I was attracted to her open manner, as only a man who has been reserved all his life can be,” Minnelli said.20
Vincente would work with Garland more closely on her next screen teaming with Rooney, Babes on Broadway. In a haunted-theater sequence, Garland and Rooney would pay tribute to “ghosts with greasepaint.” It was Vincente’s idea to have the film’s talented young stars impersonate theatrical luminaries of the past. Mickey would salute Richard Mansfield in his signature role as Cyrano De Bergerac, and Judy would offer an homage to Sarah Bernhardt as Joan of Arc in “L’Aiglon.” In musical moments, Rooney would portray George M. Cohan in Little Johnnie Jones; Garland would perform a sprightly “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers” as Blanche Ring. Minnelli’s impersonation idea was ultimately overruled by director Busby Berkeley, who underestimated his stars. Berkeley insisted that neither juvenile should attempt impersonations. Instead, they should simply play themselves, trying each role on for size. Although Garland and Rooney gamely gave it their all, the compromised approach threw the sequence off kilter. “It wasn’t very successful,” was Minnelli’s assessment of the finished version.21
It was while making uncredited contributions to Kathleen, Shirley Temple’s sole effort for MGM, that Vincente reportedly stopped the show with something other than his conceptual ideas for the film’s big production number “Around the Corner.” Several of the contract dancers who worked on the film claimed that Minnelli appeared on the set wearing cosmetics—lipstick, mascara, eye shadow—enough chemical enhancement that Max Factor should have been beaming with pride. As dancer Dorothy Raye recalled, “There was an absolute silence on the set. I mean silence! Nobody had ever appeared looking like that. None of us could think of what to say.”22
While the stories about Minnelli’s fondness for make-up would proliferate in the years after his death, Jess Gregg doesn’t buy it: “You hear people today say things about him wearing eye shadow and magenta lipstick and I think that’s a damn lie. Particularly in Hollywood, it would have been fatal. Not only fatal but worse than that—it was unfashionable. Drag was so out then… . I think people have made up a story to be shocking and to get people to listen. I really don’t think it’s true.”23
Though others insist it is. “He was very effeminate in many ways and he did show up wearing very pale lipstick,” says Judi Blacque, a contract dancer who appeared in multiple Minnelli productions, including Meet Me in St. Louis. “Of course, we never inquired. We just took it for granted. There were so many unusual people in Hollywood that it got so that you didn’t pay attention to those oddities.”24
While it was satisfying to see even some of his most offbeat ideas reach the screen, Minnelli was accustomed to directing full-scale Broadway productions with major stars. So far, his screen assignments at two studios had consisted of stylish segments inserted into movies directed by others who walked away with all of the credit.
Vincente’s year-long period of exploration and experimentation was coming to a close, and there were important decisions to be made. If he remained at Metro, would Minnelli find himself in the same predicament that Lena Horne was in, allowed to dazzle but only in small doses? What’s more, in New York, Vincente had been the ringleader of The Minnellium, his very own coterie of outrageously talented and erudite friends. In Hollywood, he was very much alone. Still something of a nonentity at the studio, Vincente was not yet being invited to the posh parties hosted by the wives of the studio moguls. And although a few of his New York friends also found themselves in California, they were either fully engaged with projects of their own or busy figuring out how to get back to Broadway.
7
“Honey in the Honeycomb”
HOW DID MINNELLI, an artist both unconventional and avante garde (even for Hollywood), ever hope to get anywhere at the most lockstep studio in town? He would adapt. He would dazzle them. It had worked in Chicago. They couldn’t get enough on Broadway. But if his ideas had been too extravagant and offbeat for Paramount, how would they ever find a home at MGM, the studio that touted all-American values in the form of Boys Town, Young Dr. Kildare, and the Andy Hardy series?
Fortunately for Vincente, he h
ad managed to ingratiate himself with Metro’s top echelon—Arthur Freed, Roger Edens, and even Mayer, who hadn’t forgotten Minnelli’s salvage efforts on Panama Hattie or his small but striking contributions to the Mickey-Judy musicals. The fact that Vincente had devised sequences that were inspired yet economical immediately endeared him to the front office. Such a talent could only be viewed as an invaluable asset to the studio, as MGM was preparing a seemingly endless roster of ambitious productions, most of them grand-scale musicals.
Always a Metro specialty, musical films dominated the production schedule, and many were being specifically designed to boost wartime morale, such as the patriotic Judy Garland-Gene Kelly vehicle For Me and My Gal, for which Minnelli would conceive some of the vaudeville montages. Other musicals were of an even more escapist nature, and falling into this category was a promising though undeniably risky property: a film version of Vernon Duke and John LaTouche’s all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, which had a modestly successful run on Broadway, racking up 156 performances in 1940. A whimsical morality tale, Cabin concerned the forces of heaven and hell vying for the attention of shiftless gambler Little Joe Jackson. On the side of the angels is Little Joe’s devout wife, Petunia, who finds herself in direct competition with the vixenish Georgia Brown, a temptress sent direct from Hotel Hades.
For all his monosyllabic responses, Arthur Freed was a shrewd character who recognized that Vincente was perfectly suited to the story not only because of Cabin’s theatrical origins, or the fact that it contained elements of surrealistic fantasy, but because Minnelli, as the perpetual outsider, would readily identify with a cast composed of African Americans. Realizing how blissfully wed Minnelli and the material would be, Freed fought tooth and nail for Vincente to be named Cabin’s director. The producer even endured what was later described as a “fur-flying donnybrook” with Metro’s powers that be, all in the name of Minnelli. And it certainly wouldn’t be the last time Freed would have to go to bat on Vincente’s behalf. Though it was decided that Freed’s flamboyant protégé could be entrusted with the job, Minnelli knew that during the next three months the real trial would begin: “I’d have to prove my worth all over again in films.”1
The studio wasn’t only taking a chance on a first-time director, for, despite its Broadway pedigree, Cabin in the Sky was actually pushing the envelope. Metro executives knew that this type of “experiment” had worked before. King Vidor’s all-black musical Hallelujah had performed surprisingly well for the studio back in 1929. And Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Rex Ingram, and Oscar Polk—all set to star in Cabin—had previously appeared in the 1936 Warner Brothers fable The Green Pastures, which had also featured an exclusively African American cast. Even so, Freed had been forewarned that Cabin would do no business south of the Mason-Dixon line, which may account for the fact that the movie was one of the most conservatively budgeted of the producer’s career. The studio shelled out $40,000 to transport Cabin to the screen, though executives remained dubious about the film’s prospects, especially with no bankable stars above the title.
True, Ethel Waters brought her Great White Way cachet to the role of the eternally self-sacrificing Petunia Jackson, but prior to Cabin her most recent screen appearance had been in Cairo, in which she appeared as Jeanette MacDonald’s maid. That particular role had been refused by newcomer Lena Horne, who would land the role of the alluring Georgia Brown—though Horne’s name really didn’t mean anything at the box office either. Dooley Wilson had starred as Little Joe Jackson in the stage version of Cabin, and he had recently appeared in the Oscar-winning Casablanca, in which he crooned “As Time Goes By” for Humphrey Bogart. While Wilson was red hot, Freed was determined to secure more of a box-office draw for Cabin’s male lead. He decided on the gravelly-voiced Eddie Anderson, well known to radio fans as Jack Benny’s faithful sidekick, “Rochester.” A trio of black icons—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John W. “Bubbles” Sublett—would appear in supporting roles.
Only weeks after production launched in August 1942, Minnelli discovered that his first full-length feature was already generating considerable controversy. Almena Davis, a reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune, visited the set during the shooting of the dance-hall sequence and told her readers:
Everywhere you have been impressed with the complete absence of race pre - judice as such, on the set. No one here, you are convinced, would refuse to eat with anyone else on account of color, or work, or even sleep with dark skinned folk. The much vaunted liberalism of the artist is present, you realize, but all the while the consciousness that there IS something wrong with Hollywood faintly disturbs you… . You try and match the continual parade of stereotypes; the crap shooting scenes in Cabin In The Sky; the dialect, the traditional ignorant, supertsicious [sic] celluloid darky, with the camaraderie which the director displays with the colored actors. You try to match the so-called “progressiveness” of Borros Morros, Donald Ogden Stewart, Vincent Manilli [sic] with their reactionary, often vicious treatment of the Negro character. And it doesn’t match.v
Despite the dissenting voices—both in the press and at the studio—Minnelli found a source of unwavering support in Lena Horne. “Vincente and Lena were inseparable,” Horne’s daughter, Gail Buckley, recalled. “The coincidence of their simultaneous Hollywood careers strengthened their natural bond of sensitivity… . They dined together every night while Cabin was in preparation. Lena carried her lonely childhood everywhere and Vincente gave her the kind of brother-sister relationship she needed so badly. She was thrilled with Vincente’s Cabin concept. She thought he was a genius.”2
While it’s been suggested that Vincente and Lena may have been romantically involved, it’s more likely that Horne’s friendship with Minnelli was similar to the kind of closeness she shared with her gay friends: composer Billy Strayhorn and playwright Arthur Laurents. “Vincente Minnelli and I stayed friends,” Horne said of her fellow Manhattan transplant. “He and I were New Yorkers and we had that kind of empathy to draw upon.”3 While studio hairdressers—save for the legendary Sydney Guilaroff—refused to touch Horne’s hair and she was hardly welcome in the MGM commissary, Vincente treated Lena as an equal. Minnelli sought his star’s input on developing the Cabin screenplay, which differed from Lynn Root’s libretto. He even turned to Horne for assistance in downplaying any elements of the characterizations that might be perceived as racially insensitive.
As Minnelli later observed, “Once we decided to go ahead with the film, we gave no thought to public reaction. We would never knowingly affront blacks … or anyone else for that matter.” One larger-than-life force of nature would remain perpetually offended, however. “When we made Cabin in the Sky, there was conflict between me and the studio from the beginning,” Ethel Waters admitted. “For one thing, I objected violently to the way religion was being treated in the screenplay.”4 Others felt that Waters wasn’t so much rankled by the script as by how much attention Vincente was lavishing on his third-billed star.
Early on it became more than clear that there was only room for one star in an Ethel Waters production—and her name was not Lena Horne. “Miss Waters considered herself quite rightly, to be an enormous star and [she] regarded Lena as an upstart and her enemy on every front,” Gail Buckley noted.5 If Waters had once enjoyed Vincente’s undivided attention during the staging of At Home Abroad, Minnelli now only seemed to have eyes for Horne, and he took great pains to make sure that her striking looks were photographed to best advantage. Needless to say, this did not sit well with Waters, who had convinced herself that Minnelli was developing a star at her expense. “I guess she’s just jealous ’cause she ain’t got what I got,” Lena’s Georgia Brown says of Ethel’s Petunia Jackson, and many close to the production were convinced that the sentiment didn’t only apply to the characters.
Even musically, Cabin’s leading ladies were at odds. Waters had introduced Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather” at the Cotton Club in 1933, though Horne offered the defini
tive rendition of the song in a 1943 film of the same name and claimed the tune as her own anthem. Waters fumed when she heard Horne croon “Honey in the Honeycomb” in a sassy style that to Ethel’s ears sounded like an imitation of her own distinctive delivery. “All through that picture there was so much snarling and scrapping that I don’t know how in the world Cabin in the Sky ever stayed up there,” Waters recalled, conveniently forgetting that she had instigated most of the snarling and scrapping.6
All of the pent-up rage and resentment that had been smoldering within Ethel for years—dating back to her unhappy upbringing in a Chester, Pennsylvania, ghetto—detonated on Minnelli’s set, with a petrified Horne the object of Ethel’s unrestrained fury. As Gail Buckley described it, “[Waters] flew into a semi-coherent diatribe that began with attacks on Lena and wound up with a vilification of ‘Hollywood Jews.’ You could hear a pin drop. Everyone stood rooted in silence while Ethel’s eruption shook the sound stage… . She was still more or less raving when Vincente dismissed the company and suspended shooting for the day.”7
Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, “Bubbles” (John W. Sublett), and Lena Horne in Minnelli’s first full-length feature Cabin in the Sky. Waters and Horne were at war on screen and off as Minnelli played referee. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Despite all the behind-the-scenes bedlam and a mercurial leading lady with a hair-trigger temper, Vincente’s first full-fledged directorial effort bears no evidence of all the discord. What emerges is an enchanting musical fable—a kind of African American answer to The Wizard of Oz, complete with recycled tornado footage from that 1939 classic.w The tight budget ($662,141, compared to the over $2 million lavished on Oz) resulted in what seemed like cramped quarters in many scenes, but this actually worked in Minnelli’s favor, as a genuine sense of warmth and intimacy was created.
