Mark Griffin

by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli

  “I think there’s probably a Minnelli autobiography in every one of his films,” says film scholar Beth Genne:

  Every movie probably contains incidents and bits and pieces from his life but I think in Father of the Bride—that was a life he really didn’t know at all. You can say that there’s a certain kind of yearning for that. It’s like what MGM did with [the] Andy Hardy [series]—Wouldn’t it be nice to be part of a family where things went well every single minute? It’s really interesting what he does in Father of the Bride. First, he suckers you into that comfortable little world. He wants to make you feel good. He also wants you to laugh at human foibles. Then he springs that nightmare on you. And it’s the nightmare that everybody has—of making a fool of themselves in public. Through the style, he tells you about the real horror of the situation. I love that sequence because it’s so human. And that’s what comes through in that film and in all of his films—his empathy. What Minnelli had was an artist’s empathy. I think that’s what the greatest artists always have—an empathy for people.7

  THE MOST ELABORATE Hollywood production that Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland collaborated on was not Meet Me in St. Louis or The Pirate but their own marriage. Surely the screen’s brightest star and MGM’s most gifted director would be able to create a life together that was as spectacular and stunning as anything they had produced on the screen.

  Their union may have been completely improbable, but as any screenwriter worth his salt knew, an unlikely love affair sold more tickets than Buck Rogers, Deanna Durbin, and Charlie Chan combined. Judy may have hoped that, as Vincente had helped her to blossom on film, he would aid her off-the-lot transformation as well. Courtesy of “the Minnelli Touch,” Mayer’s “hunchback” would disappear and a stylish and sophisticated woman of the world would emerge. And with a wedding ring on his finger and a precocious daughter who regularly turned up on his sets, perhaps Vincente was convinced that he would at last silence all the whispers about him. The marriage had been designed to save both of them, but in the end, it proved to be the one MGM production that was missing the studio’s essential component: a happy ending.

  Vincente and Judy in the late 1940s. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

  “Looking back on it, I think that marriage was just too much for both of them,” says MGM publicist Esme Chandlee:

  Of course, Minnelli was not the strongest figure in the world. Judy was tempestuous. He wasn’t. Though in some ways, you had two personalities that were so completely alike because they were both terribly nervous people. You could always sense the nervousness about Minnelli when you were talking to him. I think maybe Minnelli was “both ways” and that really tolled on him. It was always kind of odd that he got married and had a child to begin with. And with all that was going on with Judy, I don’t think that marriage was the happiest time of his life, either. Though I never heard one of them ever say a bad word about the other. Ever. I think they respected one another—both professionally and as people—but eventually, they realized that being married to each other just didn’t work.8

  Given his introverted nature and a need to frequently escape into his own inner world, Minnelli found himself overwhelmed by the torrent of emotion and expectation that his wife sent flowing in his direction every day. Despite Judy’s incomparable talents and widespread acclaim, Minnelli would recall that “her desire for constant approval was pathological.”9 How could Vincente ever provide all of the validation and reassurance Judy required? At times, it seemed as though Minnelli was tasked with undoing the years of psychological and emotional damage that had been done to Garland—by her mother, Mayer, the studio, and the vagaries of a life lived in the glare of the spotlight. No matter how much tenderness, support, and understanding Vincente could have offered, it would never be enough.

  Eventually, both husband and wife were harboring deep-seated resentments. To Minnelli, the fact that Garland lied to her psychiatrists (according to Vincente, she had seen as many as sixteen) was unforgivable. “Our relationship was drastically damaged,” he recalled.10 To Judy, the fact that Vincente seemed to side with the studio during her battles with Metro’s front office offered damning evidence that Minnelli wasn’t really married to her but to his own career.

  16

  The Time in His Mind

  IT STARTED WITH A TITLE. “Ira, I’ve always wanted to make a picture about Paris,” Arthur Freed said to Ira Gershwin one night in November 1949 after a pool game. “How about selling me the title An American in Paris?” Ira agreed, but only if the picture attached to the title contained exclusively Gershwin music. “I wouldn’t use anything else, that’s the object,” was Freed’s response.1 At that point, the producer wasn’t certain whether his next musical would star Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, but one thing was certain—with wall-to-wall Gershwin music, this latest Freed Unit endeavor was virtually a guaranteed success even if Bela Lugosi ended up belting “I’ve Got Rhythm.”

  In terms of the score, the Gershwin songbook offered an embarrassment of riches. “During early meetings on the project with Arthur, Vincente, Gene and Alan [Jay Lerner] around the piano at my house, somewhere between 125 and 150 songs were played and studied as possibilities,” Ira Gershwin remembered.2 Among those tunes that would make the final cut were such standards as “’S Wonderful,” “Love Is Here to Stay,” and the rollicking “By Strauss,” which Vincente had introduced in The Show Is On.

  The story, however, didn’t come as easily. Ira Gershwin was reportedly disappointed with Rhapsody in Blue, the highly fictionalized, song-studded biopic of 1945 featuring Robert Alda as an ersatz George Gershwin. Taking a lesson from this well-intentioned Warner Brothers extravaganza, Freed decided that An American in Paris should not attempt another version of the George Gershwin saga set to the composer’s own work. An original story that somehow referred to the title was required.

  Both Freed and Kelly would later claim credit for discovering a Life magazine article about artists on the G.I. Bill of Rights who stayed on in Paris to paint after the war. The expatriate concept also melded nicely with the fact that in the 1920s, George Gershwin had studied art in Paris—his years there inspiring his immortal tone poem An American in Paris, which he described as “a rhapsodic ballet.” Gershwin musical plus the art world could only equal Minnelli, and in February 1950, MGM officially announced that Vincente would helm the production, which would star Gene Kelly, whose presence would be felt in practically every facet of the film’s development.

  “I think it was in the late spring of 1949 when Arthur Freed first mentioned An American in Paris to me,” Alan Jay Lerner recalled. “It must have been some time in November when I finally got some notion of what I was going to do. And that was a kept man falls in love with a kept woman. That was the problem that I started with and tried to develop.”3 Fresh from penning Metro’s effervescent Royal Wedding, Lerner was now tasked with creating his second original screenplay. During a Palm Springs retreat, he hammered out the first forty pages of what critics would later describe as a “wafer-thin story,” which focused on the romantic entanglements of Kelly’s brash American painter Jerry Mulligan.

  Residing on the Left Bank, above the quaint Café Hugette, Mulligan spends his days painting, trading quips with neighbor Adam Cook (the “world’s oldest child prodigy”), and supplying Parisian moppets with American bubble gum. An ex-G.I. from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Mulligan is torn between his chic benefactress, the mink-lined Milo Roberts, and pixyish Parisienne Lise Bourvier. Initially, he doesn’t realize that Lise is already engaged to his best friend, showman Henri Baurel, who selflessly cared for the orphaned l’enfant throughout the occupation.

  With Kelly in place and Gershwin confidant Oscar Levant essentially playing himself in the form of acerbic pianist Adam Cook (“the only Adam in Paris without an Eve”), Minnelli and company next focused on filling the role of the sprightly nineteen-year-old ingenue who immediately captivates Mulligan. Contract players Cyd Charisse, Vera-Ellen, and Marge Ch
ampion were all briefly considered, but Freed was adamant that an actual Parisian mademoiselle be cast as the enchanting gamine who is “not really beautiful and yet has great beauty.” After viewing tests of French music-hall headliner Odile Versois and a teenager from the Ballets des Champs-Elyssées who had been featured in Roland Pettit’s Oedipus and the Sphinx, it was decided that the younger candidate possessed the freshness and spontaneity that the part demanded. She was eighteen years old, and her name was Leslie Caron.

  “I never thought this was serious,” Caron recalled of the studio’s interest in casting her as the thirty-eight-year-old Kelly’s love interest. “I thought, ‘Oh, well, I won’t say no to doing a test if they really want me to …’ and then I promptly forgot it. I didn’t see why I needed to go to Hollywood.” In fact, Caron had never even seen Kelly, her hypothetical leading man, on the silver screen.

  Caron was not only a demure newcomer struggling with English as a second language but also a self-described “odd bird.” And one suddenly transplanted to a place as disorienting as Hollywood. Even so, the young actress received virtually no guidance from her tongue-tied director. “Vincente is not somebody who talks to actors very easily,” Caron observed. “In fact, I can’t remember him giving me more than one piece of direction in three films that we made together… . He stutters and puckers his lips until you try exactly what he wants, but he’s not going to tell you, he’s incapable of it.” According to Caron, Vincente’s only intelligible bit of direction to her throughout the entire filming of An American in Paris was, “Just be yourself, darling.”4

  Yves Montand was initially considered for the role of the dapper cabaret star Henri Baurel, but the actor was disqualified because of what technical adviser Alan A. Antik described as Montand’s “communistic tendencies.” Minnelli and Freed next hoped to persuade sixty-two-year-old Maurice Chevalier to accept the role as Caron’s fiancé. Chevalier passed, as his character didn’t wind up with the girl at the final fade out. Besides, the French crooner was “persona non-grata,” as there had been reports that he had performed for Nazi sympathizers during World War II. Ultimately, the more age-appropriate Georges Guetary won the role and one of the film’s showstoppers, “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.”

  In casting the pivotal role of Milo Roberts, the competition again boiled down to two contenders: Nina Foch and Celeste Holm, the latter having just snared a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s blistering bitchfest All About Eve. After hearing Foch read the scene in which Milo tells Mulligan that her family “is in oil—suntan oil,” it became obvious that no further testing was necessary. “It was decided that Nina had just the right amount of savoir-faire, worldliness, sweetness and bitchiness,” Gene Kelly would later observe.5

  “I’d already been a small-time movie star at Columbia,” Nina Foch recalled. “I was under contract and I made one picture after the other.” On the way up, the cool, patrician Foch had endured such low-grade schlock as The Return of the Vampire and Cry of the Werewolf:

  Milo Roberts (Nina Foch) hovers over her handsome, multitalented protégé Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) in An American in Paris. According to Foch, some of her best work wound up on the cutting room floor.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

  I hadn’t been happy at Columbia. I didn’t like the people. I didn’t like the movies. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. Most of the stuff you do, you do because you’re in the profession. I mean, all of this crap we talk about movies after we’ve made them… . Usually we’re trying to figure out something clever to say to the press that’s after you. Half of the time, we’ve made it up and then by the time we’ve said it twenty-seven times, we start to believe it. That’s not true about An American in Paris. That was an honor to be in. The Arthur Freed Unit, you know. This was a very classy thing. At the time, I knew I was in something special but I had no clue as to how special.6

  Musical supervisor Saul Chaplin, on the other hand, was all too aware of how unique Production #1507 was. “All I can say is that I never worked on any score that I had more respect for, and that I did so carefully,” said Chaplin, who combed through countless compositions in the Gershwin catalog, not only selecting numbers for musical sequences but also themes for the film’s underscoring. All the while, Chaplin was conscious of the specter of George Gershwin hovering over the project, “I must have chosen 50 songs that absolutely had to be in the picture… . I was careful and I was worried. I was careful because I wanted to make sure it came out to the best of my ability, to see if I could match the master. And worried that I might be doing something wrong.”7

  Chaplin said that he “considered George Gershwin ‘God,’” a reverence shared by Minnelli, Levant, and virtually everyone connected with the film. It almost went without saying that as a cinematic tribute, the climactic American in Paris ballet would have to be extraordinary. There had been ambitious, even groundbreaking ballets featured in Metro musicals before—Astaire’s surrealist spin in Yolanda and the Thief, Kelly’s memorable “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in Words and Music—but in retrospect, those efforts would seem like elaborate dress rehearsals for what would ultimately be proclaimed “MGM’s masterpiece.”

  “We had no definite plan for the ballet all the while we were shooting the book,” Minnelli told author Donald Knox:

  We knew in a vague way that it had to incorporate parts of Paris that artists had painted, but we had no time to figure this out until Nina Foch came down with chicken pox. There was nothing left to shoot whatsoever, so Irene Sharaff, who I had hired to design the costumes, and Gene Kelly and I locked ourselves in my office for hours and hours and hours on end. We worked out the entire ballet during those days. It was the luckiest chicken pox I’ve ever known.8

  At first, an all-too-literal Parisian ballet was proposed. Kelly would romp through the City of Light’s most enchanting boulevards in a variation on his on-location ramble through Manhattan in On the Town. To Freed, this seemed redundant. And to Minnelli and his colleagues, it was clear that something more psychological was in order—which is what George Gershwin appeared to have in mind to begin with: “The individual listener can read into the music such as his imagination pictures for him,” Gershwin said of his orchestral tone poem, which had debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1928.9 For Minnelli, reading into the music resulted in plenty of pictures—all of them by the Impressionists. Cued by the varying moods of the music, each section of the ballet would feature settings, costumes, and styles of dance inspired by masterworks by Henri Rousseau, Raoul Dufy, and Vincent van Gogh.

  Having settled on the visual look of the ballet, Minnelli and company next turned to the matter of theme. “Gene thought you had to have a story,” Vincente remembered. “I said, ‘You can’t have a story because if it’s a new story, that’s bewildering… . I said, ‘It has to be something to do with emotions, the time in his mind, the way he feels having just lost his girl, and a whole thing about Paris.’ Everything had to become a jumble in his mind, a kind of delirium because Leslie’s leaving him hits him so hard.”10

  Once the production team convinced themselves that their idea for an Impressionistic ballet was sound, they had to turn around and sell it to the powers that be. As Gene Kelly recalled, “Dore Schary had now taken over Mayer’s job as head of production, so we brought all the sketches to him and gulped and cleared our throats and said, ‘You know, we want to do this ballet …’ and I described it. He finally said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute! I don’t understand one word that you’re all talking about but, you know something, it looks good and I trust you people… . Get out of here and go and do it.’”

  For the reunited team of Minnelli and Kelly, the division of duties that existed on The Pirate continued through An American in Paris. For Kelly, as both star and choreographer, the film—and particularly the ballet—provided an opportunity for the kind of virtuosic tour de force that he’d been building toward since his debut in F
or Me and My Gal nearly a decade earlier.

  Whereas other directors would brook no interference from some actor, Minnelli was smart enough to know when to let a collaborator do what he or she did best for the benefit of the picture. As Alan Jay Lerner expressed it, “Vincente doesn’t try to do your creating for you… . Vincente knows the direction, but he will let you drive.”11 Relinquishing the reins to Kelly was also a practical necessity, as Minnelli was contractually obligated to direct Father’s Little Dividend,ae the pleasant though pedestrian sequel to Father of the Bride, at the same time.

  Dividing his attention between a routine vehicle that failed to inspire him and a Gershwin-scored ballet that paid homage to his Impressionist idols was the sort of situation that would reemerge later in Minnelli’s career. To some extent, it was also the kind of psychological predicament that Vincente struggled with on a daily basis. Reality, like some colorless, uninspired screenplay, always seemed to be tugging him back from a place he’d much rather be—namely, wandering through his own mind, the ultimate MGM musical.

  “MY FIRST DAY ON An American in Paris, I looked around and I thought, ‘Wow! This is a really good group,’” says dancer Marian Horosko, who appeared in the ballet:

  Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in the ballet from An American in Paris. Minnelli decreed: “It has to be something to do with emotions, the time in his mind, the way he feels having just lost his girl, and a whole thing about Paris… . ” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

  You could tell that this was not your cute little Hollywood number… . I remember Gene Kelly had a sweetness about him that you would just do whatever he wanted. He was your baby brother. He was jazzy and he had a good sense of humor and he sometimes looked concerned but not worried. The constant worrier was Vincente Minnelli. He always had a frown on his face and a twitch around his mouth and you wondered, “Does he hate us? … Are we all going to get fired?” Some of his physical tics were off-putting but if you could see through that, you found that he was a very intelligent man and his involvement was thorough. It was not just a director directing. He used fewer words than any director I’ve ever known except Balanchine… . He was always thinking and shaping things in his mind.12