by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Film audiences of the day may have relished what appeared to be a privileged glimpse of the world behind the screen, but it was “real life,” according to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Composer David Raksin, who would furnish the film with one of the most haunting themes in movie history, summed it up perfectly: “This is no mere photograph of Hollywood but rather a romantically diffused look into a mirror… . When it looks at scars and wrinkles, it is with a lover’s eye.”11
The sweet and sour tone sustained throughout The Bad and the Beautiful does feel authentic, and who better to direct a study of driven careerists in the business of manufacturing illusion than Minnelli, who by that time had seen more than his fair share of bad and beautiful. Although Vincente is adept at handling the cynical tone, it is the cynicism of a die-hard romantic who still believes in happy endings, Hollywood style.
On September 18, 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful was previewed in Pacific Palisades. Of the 160 preview cards returned, 44 audience members rated the film “outstanding” and 67 thought it was “excellent,” though many patrons grumbled about the film’s length. As a result, some footage was excised—including an elaborate Peter Ballbusch “star-seeing” montage—before the picture was released in January 1953.
“Let’s say that any resemblance to persons living or dead is hardly a coincidence,” wrote Josh Rosenfield in his Dallas Morning News review. “The picture is a directorial feat for Vincente Minnelli, who shows imposing stature. He holds all the strands of a complicated story in tight rein. He gives the whole a treatment of unexpected twists.”12
Nominated for several Academy Awards (including a well-deserved Best Actor nod for Douglas), The Bad and the Beautiful would ultimately earn statuettes for Charles Schnee’s screenplay, Robert Surtees’s moody cinematography, the art direction by Cedric Gibbons and Edward Carfagno, Keogh Gleason’s set decoration, and the costume design by Helen Rose—and Gloria Grahame’s brief but unforgettable turn as the doomed Rosemary Bartlow copped the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Among the nominees for Best Director were Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, and John Huston—but not Vincente Minnelli. But the overworked auteur barely had time to notice the oversight. Freed was already nudging his favorite director toward his next production.
18
New Sun in the Sky
IN 1931, THE NEW AMSTERDAM THEATRE had staged a new revue by future MGM publicity chief Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz entitled The Band Wagon. The headliners had been Fred and Adele Astaire. Two decades later, Freed decided that a film built around the Dietz-Schwartz songbook (which included such standards as “Dancing in the Dark” and “By Myself”) had hit potential—especially with Mr. Astaire back on the Wagon. As they had done with Singin’ in the Rain, Betty Comden and Adolph Green were ordered to fashion a story around a preexisting collection of songs.
Apart from the title,aj Fred Astaire, and a trio of tunes, there was little else that Comden and Green were able to retain from the original 1931 production. “That was a revue in the real sense of the word,” says Comden. “There was no plot. There were just some wonderful performers and charming numbers but it was not a musical that had any kind of linear story that you could base anything on. It was just a revue. Needless to say, we had our work cut out for us.”1
Eventually, they came up with a story about a washed-up movie star on the comeback trail. Hoofer Tony Hunter heads to Broadway to make a name for himself on the stage only to get mixed up with avant-garde artiste Jeffrey Cordova. Suddenly, Hunter’s unassuming little show has morphed into an overproduced musical version of Faust—complete with a classical ballerina as costar, a role that almost seemed tailor-made for Freed Unit favorite Cyd Charisse.
As always, Minnelli was very present during story-development sessions. “I discussed every inch of the script with Betty and Adolph,” Minnelli remembered. In fact, it was Vincente who encouraged Comden and Green (who were not married) to pattern the characters of Lester and Lily Marton (The Band Wagon’s wedded writing partners) on themselves. “Vincente was very involved in all of the details of our work,” Comden recalled. “We would write sections and then read them to him and he would make suggestions. I think he liked very much what we were doing. He was very brilliant, had some wonderful ideas, and almost everything he suggested to us ended up in the movie.”2
Apart from Minnelli’s core crew (which included dozens of Freed Unit veterans), some new talents would also climb aboard The Band Wagon. Clifton Webb passed on the role of flamboyant theater impresario Jeffrey Cordova but suggested British music-hall star Jack Buchanan for the part. This proved to be an inspired bit of casting. Buchanan was wonderfully versatile—able to spoof José Ferrer at his most megalomaniacal, match Astaire’s elegance, and even carry a tune. Choreographer Michael Kidd had made a splash on Broadway with his inventive dance direction for Finian’s Rainbow and Guys and Dolls. Minnelli asked Kidd to make the numbers for The Band Wagon “believable as theatre” yet “cinematic.” It was a tall order for a Hollywood newcomer, who was also tasked with teaching the master a few new tricks. As Kidd remembered it, “Astaire was at first suspicious of me—even though he requested me—because I represented an entirely different kind of work.”
The Band Wagon is so much fun to watch that it’s almost shocking to discover that one of the most joyous and exuberant musicals in cinema history was abject misery to create. “It was one of the most unpleasant things I think I’ve ever done,” Nanette Fabray would say of her experience on the film:
It was a very cold atmosphere… . Astaire’s wife was either ill or had died. He was very aloof. He wasn’t being unfriendly but he was just not in a position to take anybody on as a friend. Oscar Levant had just gotten out of a mental hospital and he was a real pain in the neck. I mean, he had nobody to pick on. He picked on me. Every day he kept saying, “Oh, I’m having a heart attack …” Nobody paid any attention to him but it turned out he really was having little mini heart attacks, but because he was such a nut nobody paid much attention to him. Most of the time, Jack Buchanan was out having his teeth fixed. He came to America to have his teeth done. Of course, Judy was so ill that Minnelli was in no shape whatsoever to be friendly to anybody. He just came in and did his work and that was it… . So, it wasn’t that anybody was being mean to me except Oscar, it’s just that nobody was in an emotional position to reach out.ak
Jack Buchanan, Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray, and Oscar Levant belt out the show business anthem “That’s Entertainment!” in The Band Wagon. One of the most joyous and exuberant musicals in cinema history was abject misery to create. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
It had been fifteen years since Fabray had appeared opposite Bette Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Fabray had found the formidable Davis to be surprisingly helpful; the same could not be said of the director of The Band Wagon. “It was a very, very stressful time and I got no help from Minnelli at all,” Fabray says. “I didn’t get any sort of mean attitude from Minnelli, it’s just that I don’t know that he even recognized that I needed help. He was there to do his job and that’s what he did.”3
Dancer James Mitchell, who had appeared in the original Broadway production of Brigadoon and made one of his earliest film appearances in the Maria Montez cult extravaganza Cobra Woman, also encountered a cast of highly accomplished yet profoundly unhappy professionals. “It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” Mitchell says. “Minnelli kind of trod on Cyd. I don’t know why but he wasn’t pleasant with her. He left Cyd in tears for no good reason. I have to say, I don’t remember him very kindly.” Although The Band Wagon is wall-to-wall production numbers, Mitchell—a protégé of choreographer Agnes De Mille—was never called upon to do what he did best. “I didn’t have much to do in the picture, really,” Mitchell says ruefully. “I didn’t dance. I wasn’t in any of the numbers. I mean, what do you do with Astaire in a film … dance around him?”4
Despite the strained atmosphere on the set, The Band Wagon is sheer movie joy. The mus
ical offers up one unforgettable sequence after another—the kind of pulse-quickening moments that cinema buffs live for: Astaire, Fabray, and Buchanan as squabbling toddlers in the delightful “Triplets”; the spellbinding “Dancing in the Dark” with Astaire and Charisse in crisp summer whites, whirling through Central Park while accompanied by Conrad Salinger’s sweepingly romantic arrangement; “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan,” presenting Astaire and Buchanan—all easygoing elegance in top hat and tails—before Oliver Smith’s minimalist backdrop; and, of course, “A Shine on Your Shoes,” in which Astaire’s newfound exuberance is matched by the vibrant attractions he discovers in a Times Square penny arcade—including dancing partner LeRoy Daniels.
One of the most talked about sequences in The Band Wagon was shot last and in only seven days: “The Girl Hunt Ballet.”al In this hilarious, visually inventive spoof of pulp mysteries, Vincente Minnelli meets Mickey Spillane. Astaire is gumshoe Rod Riley, a distant cousin to Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. “I wrote Fred’s voice-over narration to the action,” Minnelli claims in his autobiography, taking credit for such howlers as “She was scared … scared as a turkey in November,” and “She came at me in sections. More curves than a scenic railway.”5 Given the specificity (and hilarity) of the language, it’s more probable that Minnelli supplied a thematic outline for the ballet before enlisting the aid of one of his sharpest collaborators to supply Astaire’s tongue-in-cheek dialogue. According to Hugh Fordin,
Alan Jay Lerner was at the studio working on Brigadoon. He had lunch with Freed, and Minnelli joined them. Looking very pointedly at Lerner, Minnelli said, “We need a narration in The Band Wagon.” For ethical reasons Lerner was very reluctant, after all this was Comden and Green’s picture; but Freed and Minnelli gently pressured him. “No conditions, no money—I’ll do it for fun,” Lerner said. Minnelli even promised he would claim to have written it himself.6
True to his word, in the years following the film’s release, Minnelli took full responsibility for authoring the Spillane spoof—though now he seemed to have convinced himself of his sole authorship as well. When MGM Records released an abbreviated version of the original soundtrack from the film, “The Girl Hunt Ballet” was credited to Lerner and Roger Edens. Displaying what Judy Garland had once described as his “dago temper,” Minnelli demanded that Metro recall the soundtrack and redistribute the record with his own name replacing Lerner’s on the album jacket.am It was the kind of backstage backbiting that seemed to come straight out of The Band Wagon.
Nevertheless, “The Girl Hunt Ballet” is an exhilarating knockout, thanks largely to Minnelli’s scenic effects and Michael Kidd’s imaginative choreo - graphy. Kidd borrowed Jimmy Cagney’s trademark shoulder-hitches and twitchy mannerisms and gave them to his dancing gangsters. The result is the most highly stylized swagger the screen has ever seen. And in Cyd Charisse, Astaire found a dancing partner even more ideal than Ginger Rogers—for Charisse is really Astaire’s female equivalent: elegant, graceful, and beamed direct from Planet Flawless.
Production wrapped in January 1953, and for most of the principals, the end came not a moment too soon. During post-production, it was decided that The Band Wagon needed to be trimmed. Along with a portion of “The Girl Hunt Ballet,” several production numbers were deleted. The most intriguing of the excised sequences was Charisse’s “Two-Faced Woman,” a lavish dance number built around one of Minnelli’s favorite themes—the exhilarative effects of a split self. “Someday I will wake up, find out what is wrong … With my dual make-up, I don’t belong …” trills India Adams, the voice double for Charisse. As Cyd obliges with one sultry pose after another, a flock of chorus girls flit by—one half in virginal white, another brigade decked out in Minnelli red.
Dubbed “The Manic Depressive’s National Anthem,” the sizzling “Two-Faced Woman” may have been a casualty for The Band Wagon, but a power house Adams vocal backed by a superb Roger Edens-Conrad Salinger arrangement was too good to dispose of entirely. A year after the release of The Band Wagon, Joan Crawford starred in Chuck Walters’ Torch Song, a film that practically defines camp. At one point, Crawford appears in a night-club sequence in “tropical make-up” and a carrot-colored wig, lip synching along to the resuscitated “Two-Faced Woman” audio track. The spectacle is so gloriously over-the-top and unintentionally hilarious that it could have been masterminded by Jeffrey Cordova himself.
Reviewing The Band Wagon in The Nation, Archer Winsten summed up the feelings of many when he concluded his unqualified rave by declaring Minnelli’s movie “the best musical of the month, the year, the decade, or for all I know of all time.” Reviewing a reissue of the film decades later, even the hard-to-please Pauline Kael conceded that “there have been few screen musicals as good as this one.” While applauding Buchanan’s “rosy-ripe way with the lines” and the fact that Levant was featured “in one of his best movie roles,” Kael also noted that “when the bespangled Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around Astaire, she can be forgiven everything, even her three minutes of ‘classical’ ballet and the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically.”7
For those who horde their Playbills, worship Carol Channing, and have blazing marquee lights permanently reflected in their eyes, Minnelli’s movie radiates with the soul of showbiz. “The movie is timeless in the way it depicts show business,” says entertainer Michael Feinstein. “When Vincente watched the film, he was just beaming with pride. He was not critical. He was just enjoying it… . I never heard him say, ‘Gee, I wish I had done that better or done this better.’ But evidently, he got everything he wanted on the first try, and that’s the way you leave a legacy.”8
IN 1951, CLINTON TWISS PUBLISHED The Long, Long Trailer, a bestselling rib-tickler that chronicled the author’s misadventures tooling across the country in the company of Mrs. Twiss and an enormous “twenty-eight foot aluminum whale of a trailer.”
With its raucous slapstick episodes, The Long, Long Trailer seemed custom built for television’s first couple of comedy, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The stars of the phenomenally popular CBS series I Love Lucy had conquered the small screen but a feature-film success remained elusive. After Arnaz read an abridged version of the Twiss novel in Reader’s Digest, he attempted to acquire the rights to the property but found himself outbid by MGM producer Pandro Berman (rumored to have been a Ball beau back in her starlet days at RKO).
Berman was convinced that the story had the makings of another Father of the Bride-sized smash and went to work assembling much of the same team that had brought Bride to the screen. The inevitable Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett would handle the adaptation, while Vincente agreed to direct. Ball and Arnaz signed on to star, preparing to shoot Trailer while on summer hiatus from their series. Everything had fallen into place, with one exception: MGM was dead set against the idea of a Lucy-Desi movie.
I Love Lucy was a weekly must-see event for virtually everyone in America with a television, but Metro executives didn’t think people would leave the comfort of their living rooms (where they could enjoy Lucy and Desi’s zany antics for free every Monday night) to pay to see them at the local movie house. But Berman was banking on the fact that Ball and Arnaz, then at the height of their unprecedented popularity, would make for “boffo boxoffice,” and he ultimately persuaded the studio to see things his way. Television’s Lucy and Ricky Ricardo morphed into Trailer’s Tacy and Nicky Collini.
Once Lucy and Desi had signed on, MGM’s initial trepidation about casting the couple evaporated. The studio rolled out the red carpet for Ball and Arnaz, both returning to the studio they had called home as contract players a decade earlier. In addition to their combined $250,000 salary, the couple were showered with star perks. Lucy would be occupying Lana Turner’s former dressing room (rumored to have been the busiest on the lot), while Desi would make himself at home in Clark Gable’s old quarters.
For Minnelli, guiding Ball and Arnaz through a widescreen variation of t
heir weekly sitcom shouldn’t have been too taxing. After all, he had just helmed one of the most memorable musicals of all time and skewered his own industry in the film preceding it. And yet, Ball recalled that as filming began in June 1953, Minnelli was “a basketcase.” According to Ball, it wasn’t the logistics of the shoot that were agitating Vincente but an especially bad case of ex-wife: “He was a great director. It was Judy who was making him crazy. Judy made everybody crazy. They were already divorced. But Judy was going through one of her crazy times. God, that woman was impossible. He was trying to take care of Liza and Judy wanted her, but Judy was so drunk and full of pills that he didn’t want Liza to be with her. Jesus, it was a mess.”9
When Ball offered to take seven-year-old Liza in to live with the Arnaz clan, Vincente was beyond grateful. “He grabbed my hand and just kept saying, ‘Will you? Will you?’” recalled Ball, who would play surrogate mother to Liza for nearly a year.
Nicky and Tacy Collini (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball) and the forty-foot monster that comes between them in The Long, Long Trailer. Tacy’s Aunt Anastacia happens to reside on the Meet Me in St. Louis street and her cousin, the painfully shy “poor Grace,” was based on Minnelli’s Aunt Anna. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
With his domestic situation settled—at least for the time being—Minnelli could concentrate fully on the film. Despite all of the chaos on screen and some rigorous shooting on location in Yosemite National Park, Vincente would recall the shooting of The Long, Long Trailer as “painless.” Even Ball, who in later years would gain a reputation as a hard-nosed taskmaster, seemed to be enjoying the ride. “I didn’t find her controlling at all,” says Perry Sheehan Adair, who appeared in the film as one of Ball’s bridesmaids. “In fact, she seemed quite nice. I think she and Minnelli really clicked on that picture, too. They brought out the best in each other and it really showed on screen.”10
