Mark Griffin
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As the ballet was taking shape, it was easy to forget that there was another world going on beyond the one that had been carefully manufactured on the set, though every now and then reality would intrude. As Horosko recalls:
Underneath the joy and happiness and the good work, there was this undercurrent of unease with the House Un-American Activities. That whole business with the McCarthy investigations. You know those big gates that they have at MGM? They would close the gates at lunch time and Louis B. Mayer would come out and say, “If you know anybody who’s not loyal to the United States, come to my office. We understand these things and just come and talk to us about it.” And I thought, “Oh, boy!” To me, that was pure Nazi stuff. I came back to New York fast enough.13
The ballet would include some of the most indelible imagery in the entire Minnelli canon. The long, slow dissolve from the Dufy-inspired Place de la Concorde to the Renoir-styled flower market (“Marché aux Fleurs”) at dawn is gracefully synched to Gershwin’s music. The shot of Kelly and Caron intertwined on the Greutert fountain as John Alton’s fumata cascades over them is undoubtedly one of the most unapologetically erotic moments in all of Minnelli. As Kelly and Caron jump up and down on the fountain during the euphoric climax, their exuberance is not only about finding one another but about willing such a beautiful moment into being. For Vincente, the sequence was both a daunting challenge and the realization of many fantasies—suddenly his cherished art-book images were vibrantly alive, as they had been for so many years in his mind.
As the ballet dominated the second half of the picture and extended its running time, a number of deletions were deemed necessary. Although it was Kelly’s favorite of his own numbers, “I’ve Got a Crush on You” was excised from the release print along with two Guetary solos, “Love Walked In” and “But Not for Me.” However, the most poignant cutting-room floor casualty belonged to Nina Foch.
“I had a wonderful scene at the end of the movie where I sat with Oscar Levant and I was complaining and crying about losing Gene,” Foch recalls. “I think it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever done. I’m just buzzing, about to be a weepy drunk, half-laughing, and suddenly up comes this truly lonely, lonely little girl whose daddy never loved her.” Milo’s big moment was to have taken place in the midst of the black and white ball and included a brilliant bit of improvisation when a piece of confetti tumbled into Foch’s champagne glass—she retrieved it and knocked it back as though it were a pill. “Everyone who had seen it talked to me about that scene,” remembers Foch. “I got a letter from Arthur Freed afterwards saying, ‘We’re sorry we cut that wonderful scene out. We all loved it, but it made Gene look bad.’”14
Though studio insiders were already buzzing about how outstanding the picture was, one of the most important endorsements was phoned in from New York. “I’ve seen your little picture,” Judy told Vincente. “Not bad. Only a masterpiece.” And most of the critics would concur. “Brilliant is the word for MGM’s An American in Paris,” raved the New York Journal American. “Here’s a musical that’s out of the very top of the top drawer… . Its direction by Vincente Minnelli sets and sustains a sparkling tempo.”15 In Compass, Seymour Peck quipped, “Who knows, it may even put Paris on the map.”
MARCH 20, 1952. OSCAR NIGHT. Vincente’s “little picture” had been nominated for eight Academy Awards. Despite the fact that Arthur Freed was producing the 24th annual Academy Awards ceremony, An American in Paris seemed very much the dark horse in the Best Picture race as it was up against such dramatic heavyweights as A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun. “There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas,” Kelly told the press.16 His point was underlined by the fact that the last musical to snare the top prize had been Metro’s The Great Ziegfeld in 1936.
For the first time in his career, Minnelli was nominated as Best Director, an honor many in the industry felt had been deserved as far back as Meet Me in St. Louis. When the envelopes were opened, An American in Paris would not only prevail as Best Picture but collect six other Academy Awards. Arthur Freed would be honored with the prestigious Irving Thalberg Award, and Gene Kelly received an honorary Oscar “in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” The film’s director, however, would go home empty-handed. “How could anyone vote for [An American in Paris] as Best Picture of the Year and not recognize Vincente’s obvious contribution?” 17 Saul Chaplin would ask, echoing the feelings of many who had observed how tirelessly Minnelli had worked.
Years later, Vincente seemed to even the score in his autobiography. Despite the fact that Lerner was solely responsible for the script, the Gershwins had furnished the score, and Kelly and his assistants handled the choreo - graphy, Minnelli assigned credit where he thought it was due: “Though I don’t minimize anyone’s contributions,” he wrote, “one man was responsible for bringing it all together. That man was me.”18
“I GREW UP WHERE EVERYBODY’S PARENTS were movie stars,” Liza Minnelli once said of her Beverly Hills upbringing—though even in the land of Lanas and Hedys, Liza’s household was unique. For “Mama” was Judy Garland, “Daddy” was Vincente Minnelli, and everything they did kept Leo the Lion roaring. After school, most kids rushed home for milk and cookies. Not so for Liza Minnelli, who raced over to her own personal playground, which the rest of the world knew as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was here that she rode the boom with her father, mesmerized by the sight of Gene Kelly being pursued by a bevy of Sharaff-styled furies as Gershwin pored over the playback machine. And even after Daddy called “Cut!” the magic didn’t end. For at home, Vincente was aiding and abetting the creation of a mini movie star.
Party Girl: “The Oscar for Best Birthday Given by a Parent went to Vincente Minnelli for Liza’s sixth,” said actress Candice Bergen, a childhood friend of little Liza May. Two years earlier, for Liza’s fourth, Judy and Vincente gave the birthday girl a puppy. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
As Liza remembers it: “I would stand there and he would create these costumes on me, just with safety pins and crepe paper. And I could watch and see myself becoming this Spanish dancer. And he would watch me dance for hours. He was just wonderful because he fed my imagination.”19 And then some. If Mama attempted to play disciplinarian, Daddy encouraged Liza’s incredible flights of fancy. Well versed in the art of wish fulfillment, Vincente understood the need to dream. And nobody dreamed bigger. In Hollywood, over-the-top occasions were standard, but Liza May’s star-studded birthday parties were so extravagantly lavish that they could have been produced by Arthur Freed.
“Most seemed to agree that the Oscar for Best Birthday Given by a Parent went to Vincente Minnelli for Liza’s sixth given at Ira Gershwin’s house in Beverly Hills,” remembered actress Candice Bergen, who, along with Mia Farrow, was one of Liza May’s childhood playmates. According to Bergen, Vincente made sure that Hollywood’s crowned princess was dressed appropriately for the part: “I remember always asking to go to Liza’s to play dress up because in her closet hung little girl’s dreams. Vincente Minnelli had seen to that. In her dress-up closet glowed tiny satin ball gowns embroidered with seed pearls, wispy white tutus… . You could choose between Vivien Leigh’s riding habit from Gone with the Wind or Leslie Caron’s ballerina costume from An American in Paris.”20
It’s no wonder that Liza considered Vincente her own personal Wizard of Oz. He was the master magician who could transform her into a can-can dancer or a pint-sized Cyd Charisse. While others in the movie colony turned their children over to overburdened nannies so that someone else could do the entertaining, Vincente seemed to revel in the fantasy as much as his daughter did.
Although Liza and her chums were thoroughly enchanted with such exquisite make-believe, actress Nina Foch thought Minnelli had gone too far:
One thing he did that I didn’t like wa
s when he asked Irene Sharaff to make Liza little copies of all of Gertrude Lawrence’s costumes from The King and I. And she did. It was this incredible, unbelievable set of costumes. They even came in this little Siamese trunk. I chastised him for that. I said, “Jesus, Vincente, you shouldn’t be giving this little girl all of this stuff. She’ll grow up thinking the entire world works this way. It’s entirely too much. You’ll have a child who doesn’t have a proper set of values.” It’s not that they weren’t simply incredible, beautiful things. They were… . It was the thought of giving this small child a completely distorted view of life. But I guess you still have to hand it to him in a way… . He may have spoiled her, but he did it to perfection.21
TOWARD THE END OF JUDY GARLAND’S long and often stormy association with MGM, the Hollywood trade papers seemed to be constantly reporting that the increasingly fragile star was being replaced in one elaborate production after another: The Barkeleys of Broadway (Ginger Rogers would reteam with Fred Astaire instead of Judy), Annie Get Your Gun (Betty Hutton took over the title role after the studio suspended Garland), and Royal Wedding (Judy filled in for an expectant June Allyson until Jane Powell had to fill in for Judy). Though she made it through Summer Stock, MGM began to view Garland, once their most valuable asset, as an increasingly costly liability. Whereas Mayer may have buckled and given Judy another chance in a smaller-scale Joe Pasternak production, Dore Schary was apparently not as forgiving. On September 29, 1950, the studio announced “with reluctance and regret” that Judy had requested a release from her Metro contract, and that they had given in “with a view to serving her own best interests.”
A few months later, another noteworthy separation was announced. On December 21, 1950, the world received the news that the marriage of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland appeared to be over. “Climaxing a turbulent two years of career and personal problems, actress Judy Garland announced through the William Morris Agency that she and her director husband, Vincente Minnelli, have separated,” the Associated Press reported.22 Flying in the face of countless rumors, the separation was termed “an amicable arrangement.” In the wake of some of Judy’s very public calamities, press sympathy seemed to lie with Minnelli. “Perhaps Vince was too easy and too gentle with her,” mused Louella Parsons.
Minnelli seemed to agree: “I’d been too sympathetic, too ready to see it her way, when I should have been more assertive,” he wrote. Ever the gentleman, Vincente attempted to end his marriage to Judy on a dignified note: “I was glad she was happy and functioning, and would do nothing to cause her a moment’s concern. Peace and freedom was something we both wanted.”23 Decades after the divorce (which became final in April 1952), Garland’s friend June Allyson was more matter-of-fact about the demise of one of Hollywood’s more unconventional marriages: “It was no surprise that it couldn’t work out. He was wrong for Judy. Totally wrong.”24
AT LEAST ON THE WORK FRONT, things were looking brighter for Minnelli. Arthur Freed was interested in reviving an ambitious project that he had launched back in the ’40s and then abandoned: a musical version of Huckleberry Finn. Freed considered Mark Twain’s classic “the best book ever written in America,” and the impressive array of talents the producer had initially lined up for the project said plenty about his level of commitment. From the beginning, there seems to have been a conscious attempt to recapture some of the magic of Meet Me in St. Louis. Freed had hired Sally Benson, the author of the original St. Louis stories, to transport Twain’s enduring book to the screen. He had also hired St. Louis songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane to compose the score for Huckleberry Finn. It was Freed’s hope that the songs Martin and Blane whipped up for Twain’s riverfront waif would be as memorable as the ones they had written for Garland’s lovestruck teenager. Although everything about the project seemed promising, by the mid’ 40s Freed’s plate was brimming over—the producer was readying several elaborate musicals for the screen, including Minnelli’s The Pirate. With Freed unable to give Huckleberry Finn the attention it needed, the project was temporarily shelved.
Freed started over in the ’50s with a whole new creative team: writer Donald Ogden Stewart, lyricist Yip Harburg, and composer Burton Lane. At the height of the Red Scare era, left-leaning progressives Stewart and Harburg were suddenly deemed unsuitable and ousted. Alan Jay Lerner was then assigned to both book and lyrics. “Alan had a great love for Huckleberry Finn,” says Lerner’s assistant Stone Widney. “He thought the book was one of the seminal works in American literature. He really, desperately wanted to get that made and he and Burton Lane wrote about five or six songs.” (They included “I’ll Wait for You by the River” and “The World’s Full O’Suckers.”) “Alan had very high hopes for that project,” Widney added. In fact, Lerner would refer to the material he created for Huckleberry Finn as “some of the best stuff I’ve ever written.”25
In early script conferences, it was decided that Metro’s musical version of Huckleberry Finn should not attempt to dramatize every episode in Twain’s sprawling saga. Instead it would focus primarily on wily orphan Huck Finn’s adventures with Jim, a runaway slave. But it would also reserve a considerable amount of screen time for a pair of scene-stealing supporting characters, two vagabond gamblers known as the Duke and the Dauphin. These roles would be tailored to the talents of Gene Kelly (also on board as choreographer) and Danny Kaye (on loan out from Samuel Goldwyn). In large part, the project would also be dependent on the star power of Kaye and Kelly to lure moviegoers into theaters.
In March 1951, Minnelli was announced as director. Rehearsals began and Kelly found himself working on Huckleberry Finn in the morning and then dashing off to codirect his other important picture in production, Singin’ in the Rain, in the afternoon. Things seemed to be progressing smoothly when suddenly the studio pulled the plug. “MGM announced that it will postpone production of Huckleberry Finn until next year,” the Independent Film Journal reported in October. “This was made necessary because of the impossibility of completing rehearsals and filming in time for Danny Kaye to report back to the Samuel Goldwyn Studios [to begin shooting Hans Christian Anderson] by December 15. Gene Kelly, Kaye’s costar, still has work remaining on his current film, Singin’ In The Rain, until Oct. 15th.”26
The need to honor preexisting commitments was the official reason given for shutting down Minnelli’s latest production, though it’s been suggested that Kaye may have felt that his role as the Dauphin (“son of Looy The Sixteen and Marry Antonette”) was simply not substantial enough. According to Kelly, “Danny quit the picture because he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. He saw that the two vagabonds were not as important as Huck and Jim… . He was delighted to leave it.”27
There may have been another reason behind the studio’s decision. Even before Vincente had shot a single frame, Huckleberry Finn had already garnered the wrong kind of publicity. As the Associated Press reported, the Independent Progressive Party had loudly protested the inclusion of a blackface sequence in the musical: “Party officials said a blackface dance number with Danny Kaye and Gene Kelly ‘tends to degrade and vilify the role of the American Negro and to portray them in a vicious, stereotyped manner.’”28
But as Vincente remembered it, the abrupt shutdown had more to do with money: “A provision in the federal tax law then permitted an American to avoid paying taxes if he spent eighteen calendar months working outside the country… . Gene would be allowed to take advantage of this provision for his contributions to An American In Paris and the up coming Singin’ In The Rain.” Whatever the case, not long after Huckleberry Finn was scrapped, Kelly set off for England to work on his pet project Invitation to the Dance.
After months of preparation, Huckleberry Finn was permanently shelved.af Minnelli gamely attempted to rise above the disappointing developments: “These were the breaks of the profession and not worth moping over,” he wrote.29
ALICE DUER MILLER’S 1933 BESTSELLER Gowns by Roberta became Jerome Kern’s Broadway musical
triumph Roberta, which introduced such evergreens as “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Lovely to Look At,” and “Yesterdays.” In 1935, RKO filmed Roberta with an all-star cast. The exuberant Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance sequences upstaged the flimsy plot, which concerned Randolph Scott as an all-American halfback turned couturier romancing Irene Dunne.
In November 1948, the Los Angeles Times published an item trumpeting MGM’s plans to remake Roberta featuring four of its top stars: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Garrett. Nothing ever came of it. Then, in 1950, producer Jack Cummings announced that he would produce his own version of Roberta. Retitled Lovely to Look At, the now familiar story was redressed in more contemporary couture and billed as “MGM’s Technicolor Spectacle.” This refurbished Roberta would feature a stellar array of Metro contract players: Kathryn Grayson (“thrills you with her golden voice!”), Howard Keel (“his romantic singing!”), Ann Miller (“gorgeous stepper!”), and the studio’s answer to Fred and Ginger—Marge and Gower Champion. If all that weren’t enough, Lovely to Look At also marked the film debut of Miss Hungary of 1936, the irrepressible Zsa Zsa Gabor.