by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
In terms of the various screen adaptations of Flaubert’s story, Robert Ardrey’s treatment for MGM’s version was surprisingly sympathetic to its doomed heroine, and much of this can be directly attributed to Minnelli: “Madame Bovary has always been one of my favorite novels… . I developed an attitude about the character that I wanted to convey.”2 In Vincente’s reading of the novel, Emma is not simply greedy or sexually rapacious but desperately attempting to manifest the dream image of herself that she’s harbored since her youth.
“I am Madame Bovary,” Gustave Flaubert reportedly said of himself in later years, but such a revealing admission might have come directly from Metro’s house director. In fact, Madame Bovary would emerge as one of Minnelli’s most personally revealing films. In the early scenes, in which Emma Rouault is glimpsed in her farmhouse bedroom, Vincente’s camera lingers over the illustrations torn from the pages of Les Modes decorating the walls. These are “images of beauty that never existed,” images that “taught a lonely girl to live within herself.” This is the first clue that Minnelli, an inveterate collector of beautiful images, has aligned himself with his main character; beneath the sudsy surface of a Jennifer Jones melodrama, there lies a poignant autobiography in code.
“My point of view is that she wanted everything to be as beautiful as possible, yet everything that touched her was ugliness. But she never lost her desire to have beauty around her,” Vincente would say of his discontented protagonist.3 According to film scholar Drew Casper, the director could have been talking about himself:
It’s very self-reflexive, his work—in that he was a man for whom the outside world was always not to his liking. He always wanted to thrust his own inner world out there. And there was a good deal of oppression in the outer world… . The projects the studio wanted him to make, his own homosexuality and having to appear straight, the challenges with Garland … all of this kind of stuff. What Minnelli did was he went inside himself to create his own world … the way the world should be. That was what movies represented to him—a way to present his own vision. The film itself was this other reality that he had created and it was an escape from his own reality.4
Jennifer Jones and Vincente welcome three-year-old Liza Minnelli to the set of Madame Bovary. The title role was originally slated for bombshell Lana Turner but the censorship office warned that the combination of the screen’s most scintillating sexpot and an allegedly obscene novel was too erotically potent. Jones was cast instead. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Or, as Flaubert wrote of Emma Bovary:
As for the rest of the world, it was nothing, it was nowhere, it scarcely seemed to exist. Indeed, the nearer things were, the more her thoughts turned away from them. Everything in her immediate surroundings, the boring countryside, the imbecile petits bourgeois, the general mediocrity of life, seemed to be a kind of anomaly, a unique accident that had befallen her alone, while beyond, as far as the eye could see, there unfurled the immense kingdom of pleasure and passion.5
Just as Emma is forced to hide her financial dealings with the unscrupulous moneylender Lheureux (the magnificent Frank Allenby), she must also keep secret her pursuit of illicit passion. For some observers, direct parallels can be drawn between the scandalous Emma and a director constantly whispered about and branded as sexually suspect. “Look at what society felt about her and Minnelli didn’t care because she managed to realize her inner self,” says Drew Casper. “The fact that she wants to escape that humdrum life that she was living with the kid and the doctor… . In the end, Minnelli puts it in this framework, which exonerates Flaubert for writing this story. What Minnelli is saying is that none of what she’s done is immoral.”6
It’s not surprising that the most memorable moment in Minnelli’s third melodrama is a musical one. “The waltz in Madame Bovary is terribly important because that’s the biggest scene in the book,” Vincente told interviewer Richard Schickel. “The waltz itself is her one moment of gratification. Things are the way she expects them to be.” In staging this elaborate sequence, Minnelli created one of his most sublime, transcendent set pieces. Working closely with composer Miklos Rozsa and choreographer Jack Donohue, he designed the waltz so that it matched Flaubert’s vivid description in the novel: “Everyone was waltzing. Everything was turning around them … the lamps, the furniture, the paneling, the parquet floor, like a disc on a spindle.”7
The mood achieved is so deliriously giddy and exhilarating that it’s obvious that Madame Bovary isn’t the only one enjoying a transportive experience. One can feel Minnelli’s rapture whenever a scene he was directing allowed him an opportunity to unleash some deeply held belief or an emotion he may have been too accustomed to keeping in check. In Madame Bovary, it is the sequence Minnelli dubbed “the neurotic waltz” that radiates with that peculiar power, signifying that the director was not only fully engaged with the scene but living it right along with the characters.
While the waltz brings out the best in both Minnelli and star Jennifer Jones, they are aided immeasurably by Miklos Rozsa’s masterful score. “Minnelli was a sensitive artist and director and he made a masterpiece of Madame Bovary,” the Hungarian-born composer recalled:
Flaubert describes the waltz in detail and Vincente wanted to recreate it accordingly… . I was able to write the music to match and in a spirit of dedication, knowing that in this instance the camera would be following my music, not my music following the camera. Minnelli was so excited by the waltz that he asked his wife, Judy Garland, to come over to hear it. There is a sudden modulation in the piece where the big tune lurches into an unexpected key, and at that moment, Miss Garland gasped in thrilled amazement and goose pimples appeared on her arms. Always the actress!8
Rozsa’s waltz is so electrifying that it was later recycled for The Seventh Sin, but it was never used more effectively than it was in Bovary.
Thankfully, Minnelli and Pandro Berman did not succeed in casting Lana Turner in the lead, as Jennifer Jones is unusually well suited to the title role. Restless and a bit neurotic off screen, Jones had left her husband, actor Robert Walker, for producer David O. Selznick. The detail-obsessed Selznick seemed almost single-mindedly determined to turn Jones into a star of the highest magnitude. It was exactly the kind of Faustian exchange that Flaubert would have appreciated. The Song of Bernadette may have netted Jones the Oscar as Best Actress, but her Madame Bovary is a much better fit: the half-mad gleam in her eye during the waltz; her look of supreme disgust as the town clock strikes “the death of another hour;” her agonized expression as her lover’s carriage rides off without her. Time said: “Miss Jones, in her best picture to date, manipulates Emma’s moods and caprices with sensitive dexterity. Hardly ever out of sight of the cameras, she gives a performance that is hardly ever out of focus, a feat that even the finicky Flaubert could admire.” 9
And what would the author of Madame Bovary have thought of Minnelli’s sympathetic take on his heroine? “You could argue that the film is not really Flaubert,” says historian John Fitzpatrick. “Though it’s a good film on its own terms. In many ways, Minnelli has this very florid and romantic sensibility, whereas Flaubert is very often ironic and distant. The tone of the film is really quite different from Flaubert’s tone. It’s not that Minnelli gets it wrong, it’s just that it all came out rather differently.”10
Even so, most of the critics would praise Vincente’s direction. As the New York Times noted in a review: “The high point of his achievement, indeed, is a ballroom scene which spins in a whirl of rapture and crashes in a shatter of shame. In this one sequence, the director has fully visualized his theme.”11
IN MAY 1949, Judy checked into Peter Brent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where she would undergo treatment for her dependency on prescription medication. She had just been suspended by the studio after failing to make it through her latest picture, Annie Get Your Gun. Although Arthur Freed had purchased the rights to Irving Berlin’s Broadway smash with Garland in mind, his would-be Annie O
akley was in no condition to headline another mammoth musical. As Minnelli recalled, Judy was down to a dangerously thin 90 pounds. As she struggled to make it through yet another production that was totally dependent on her for its success, she appeared wild-eyed and manic one day, practically sleep walking the next. Her addiction, coupled with exhaustion from years of overwork, had managed to immobilize the ordinarily unstoppable Judy Garland.
The weeks Judy spent at the hospital offered her an opportunity to completely decompress. This was the first time she’d had to unwind since she and Vincente had honeymooned in New York four years earlier. While at Peter Brent, Judy would endure the agonizing nightmare of withdrawal, and by June she could proudly report to the press that she was “learning to sleep all over again.” Within a few weeks, Judy’s doctors had guided her back to a regular sleeping and eating routine, but it was her visits to a neighboring children’s hospital that proved to have the most therapeutic effects. “If I was cured at Peter Brent Brigham, it was only because of those children,” Judy would later say. “They were so brave, so darling.”12
Once her appetite and health were restored, Judy traveled to New York, where she was reunited with three-year-old Liza, who was accompanied by a nurse. Vincente had remained in California, though he called regularly. He was thrilled to hear that Judy was on the mend but concerned that his marriage—which had been rocked by recent events—would not recover so neatly.
15
“A Few Words About Weddings …”
“IT’S A COMEDY-DRAMA about a man whose heart breaks because he loves his daughter and is about to lose her. It’s not a joke. The laughs come out of sadness and reality. We could never do it with Jack.” So said producer Pandro Berman as he attempted to dissuade Dore Schary from casting comedian Jack Benny in Father of the Bride.
Schary, who would soon succeed Louis B. Mayer as MGM’s production chief, had offhandedly promised Benny the lead in MGM’s screen version of Edward Streeter’s bestseller. The comic novel concerned the father of a bride-to-be. Stanley T. Banks is overwhelmed by the seemingly endless pre - parations for his daughter’s wedding as well as his own feelings as he realizes he’s losing his beloved “kitten” to holy matrimony. As Minnelli and Berman immediately realized, with Benny in the title role, Father of the Bride might be an entertaining diversion, but it wouldn’t be infused with the warmth and dimension that a legitimate actor could bring to it.
Minnelli shot a screen test of Benny as Stanley Banks out of professional courtesy to “the world’s oldest thirty-nine-year-old.” “It was a fine test and technically correct,” Minnelli pronounced. “It had only one failing. His reading lacked the conviction underneath, that only a highly gifted actor like Spencer Tracy could supply.”1 And who better than Spencer Tracy to play the hapless head of the Banks household? Husband and wife screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who had scripted The Pirate) admitted that they had nobody but Tracy in mind when they were working on their adaptation. And yet, the word around the lot was that the actor wasn’t interested in the part.
After Minnelli pleaded his case to Katharine Hepburn, a dinner was arranged. Vincente put his cards on the table, telling Tracy, “With you, this picture could be a little classic of a comedy. Without you, it’s nothing.” As Minnelli later recounted to Richard Schickel, this very personal appeal made all the difference. “Well, [Tracy] blossomed like a rose… . He had heard that we were testing people and had other people in mind and he was just one of the boys, and that hurt his ego… . He simply wanted to be wanted, and loved the project and agreed to do it. It was as simple as that.”2
Without question, Tracy was the perfect embodiment of Streeter’s aisle-shy patriarch who comes to discover that he’s fonder of his first born than he realized. Throughout the relatively stress-free shoot, Minnelli found Tracy to be “an inspiration,” and he wasn’t the only one who was impressed. Others who worked on the picture recall that Tracy was both accessible and unfailingly professional.
One of them was contract player Carleton Carpenter, who can be glimpsed throughout Father of the Bride, first appearing as a “be bop hound” in a delightful montage featuring Elizabeth Taylor’s rejected suitors. “All told, I have an elbow or an ear lobe in every other shot in the picture,” says Carpenter, who managed to make an impression on the film’s legendary star. “I only had one little scene with Spencer Tracy but he was very nice to me,” Carpenter recalls. “At one point, he said, ‘You’re from New York, aren’t you, Carp?’ And I said, ‘Yeah …’ and Tracy said, ‘I could tell. You don’t seem like a movie actor. You seem like a stage actor.’ And I thought that was very sweet. It just started things off in the right way.”3
Russ Tamblyn made one of his first film appearances in Father of the Bride as Tracy’s youngest son. “It was an incredible experience,” Tamblyn says of being part of an ensemble that included Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Bennett, Billie Burke, and Leo G. Carroll. Though duly impressed with the star power, Tamblyn says he was unaware of the stature of their director. “I was so young, I really didn’t know who he was.” Though even as a teenager, Tamblyn recognized that there was something different about the man at the helm: “He seemed to pay unusually close attention to details—the way a suit looked on an actor and that sort of thing. What I remember about Vincente Minnelli is that he was very gentle, very quiet, very calm… . I guess he’d have to be, being married to Judy Garland.” Four years after the release of Father of the Bride, Tamblyn would star in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, directed by Stanley Donen, MGM’s other important director of musicals. Tamblyn noted that Metro’s preeminent pair seemed to have more than just a studio in common: “Both had an effeminate side that I wondered about, quite frankly.”4
Stanley T. Banks (Spencer Tracy) about to lose daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) to holy matrimony in Father of the Bride. Minnelli’s movie made the New York Times Ten Best List for 1950 and it was in the running for Best Picture but lost to All About Eve. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
The film was a turning point for third-billed Elizabeth Taylor, seventeen at the time and transitioning to more adult roles. If the plots of Taylor’s movies often seemed to mirror her off-screen exploits, Father of the Bride was no exception. On May 6, 1950, just days before the premiere of the movie, Taylor would marry hotel heir Nicky Hilton in a star-studded ceremony that seemed executive-produced by MGM’s front office. Taylor’s screen mother, Joan Bennett, remembered: “The whole more-stars-than-there-are-in-the-heavens crowd was out … and you’d jolly well better show up, because the studio sent out invitations, promoting Father of the Bride.”5
Though the first of Taylor’s many marriages would fail, the movie was the kind of gargantuan hit that studio executives sell their mothers for. In its initial release, Father of the Bride earned $4,150,000, making it one of the top grossers of the year. The picture ranked third on the New York Times “Ten Best Films of the Year” list. And for the first time, a Vincente Minnelli production was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (though it would lose to the more cynical and sophisticated All About Eve). Spencer Tracy was nominated as Best Actor for a role that he had initially resisted (he lost to José Ferrer’s bravura turn in Cyrano de Bergerac).
Spencer Tracy and Vincente receive a visit from Judy Garland on the set of Father of the Bride. At the time, Garland was shooting Summer Stock, her final film for MGM. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Boxoffice bestowed its “July Blue Ribbon Award” on the film and gushed: “As blithe and breezy as spring itself is this comedy which goes with the season like orange blossoms and tulle.” Entitled “Gay Occasion,” Otis L. Guernsey Jr.’s review summed it up nicely: “The occasion is well ordered, the people charming, the lapses not serious and the end achieved before the conviviality is exhausted.”6
Those who regard MGM as a factory that cranked out motion pictures the same way that General Motors made Frigidaires would scoff at the notion that a domestic comedy like Fat
her of the Bride could have been attempting to “say” anything. But for Minnelliphiles, who believe his work is layered so that it can be appreciated on many different levels, Spencer Tracy’s separation anxiety goes deeper than “Who giveth this woman?”
From the moment Kay Banks announces her engagement, her hapless father is simultaneously pulled along and shut out of the preparations for her impending nuptials. Stanley Banks is lost—and not only in terms of his encounters with caterers and prospective in-laws: He is suddenly displaced within his own family.
As the father of the bride, Stanley is asked to do his bit in carrying off many time-honored traditions, even though the role he’s been thrust into seems alien and uncomfortable to him. While his wife and daughter are actively engaged in planning the wedding, Stanley is a detached observer, playing a role that is as ill-fitting as his twenty-year-old cutaway. Stanley even has a nightmare (complete with surrealist imagery straight out of German Expressionism) in which he single-handedly destroys his daughter’s wedding. He’s late, doesn’t know his lines, and isn’t as well rehearsed as the rest of the wedding party. In Streeter’s novel, Banks is jeered by his friends and relatives: “How could a man like that have such a beautiful daughter? They say she isn’t his. It’s a joke. He’s a joke.” There in the midst of a wedding ceremony—one of society’s sacred rituals—Stanley T. Banks is revealed as a fraud.
