Mark Griffin
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Despite the palpable tension on the set, dancer Nita Bieber remembered that Vincente enjoyed a harmonious working relationship with the equally exacting choreographer Jack Cole: “Minnelli really listened to him because Jack Cole had real insight into what was going on with that story and how the dancers could help bring the whole thing to life… . There may have been other problems going on but as I remember it, Minnelli and Jack worked together very well.”7
Others felt that on Kismet, Vincente was anything but a team player. When Keel observed Minnelli reviewing plans for Lust for Life on Kismet’s clock, Metro’s booming baritone lost all patience with the director’s supreme disinterest. Keel went to Freed and issued an ultimatum: “If Minnelli is on the set tomorrow morning, I’m not on it. So, pull whatever strings you have and get someone else. I am not finishing this picture with Vincente.”8 Minnelli obediently disappeared, and the equally talented Stanley Donen inherited the project for ten days.
Despite CinemaScope, Eastmancolor, and the talents of Tony Duquette, Kismet is an ill-turned rarity: an uninviting Vincente Minnelli musical. As Keel duly noted, much of the blame for the lackluster quality of the picture must rest with Vincente. If Minnelli’s work was indeed the story of his life, Kismet would rate only a telegraphic footnote. In fact, in the director’s autobiography, discussion of the film is relegated to a few dismissive paragraphs with a sobering moral included: “The experience taught me never again to accept an assignment when I lacked enthusiasm for it.”9
ON MAY 20, 1955—three days before Minnelli began shooting Kismet—his second child was born. Liza now had a half sister named Christiana Nina, who would later be called Tina Nina. Her formative years would coincide with the busiest period of Minnelli’s career. When Liza was growing up, virtually all of Vincente’s films had been shot on MGM’s Culver City soundstages. During Tina Nina’s childhood, Minnelli was frequently being whisked away to film on location (landing everywhere from Paris, France, to Paris, Texas). Although Vincente obviously loved Tina Nina, and indulged her in much the same way he had Liza, his time with his youngest would be limited.
“Liza was much more at ease, much closer to daddy than I was,” the adult Tina Nina recalled. “She had her mother, [and] although Judy had her ups and downs, Liza had her on a pedestal. But daddy was her stability and Liza was practically in love with him. She worshipped him and he worshipped her. He didn’t have a family, other than an aunt. All he had was Liza… . He was alone and she was alone. They only had each other.”10
The bond between Vincente and Liza was so strong and so special that Tina Nina, like Georgette before her, may have felt like an intruder at times. How could Minnelli’s “other” daughter ever hope to compete with Liza, who was not only a multimedia goddess in the making but, without question, the center of attention in Vincente’s life. Sure, Tina Nina would slip into Liza’s miniature Metro ensembles and attempt a Cyd Charisse-style pirouette, but this was just “play time.” It almost certainly didn’t fulfill the same need that it did for her older sister—or their father, for that matter. Vincente and Liza were dependant on the fantasy as a means of psychological escape, whereas Tina Nina, the daughter of practical, down-to-earth Georgette, was simply having a bit of fun.
Vincente made every attempt to make Tina Nina feel loved, and he went out of his way to bring his two daughters together. After Judy married third husband Sid Luft in 1952, Liza didn’t seem to mind sharing her mother with half-sister Lorna or half-brother Joey. But sharing her beloved father with another child was another matter entirely. As Tina Nina recalled: “Daddy and Liza were so close that she would get jealous when I arrived. Sometimes she pretended to be sick. Then daddy rushed into her room and comforted her. I remember her lying in bed and crying, ‘Daddy, you don’t care about me. You only care about Tina Nina. I’m jealous of Tina Nina.’ I felt so guilty.”11
Vincente would remember Tina Nina as “the brightest spot” in his four-year marriage to Georgette. While an introvert like her husband, The Second Mrs. Minnelli was grounded and pragmatic. Vincente, on the other hand, was dreamy, restless, and detached. At times, it seemed as though their daughter was one of the few things they had in common.
22
Maelstroms and Madmen
IF MINNELLI HAD SPED THROUGH the filming of Kismet with nearly complete disinterest, Lust for Life would engage him on every level. “It was the most thrilling and stimulating creative period of my life,” Vincente would later say of the production.1 The director’s affinity for his subject, Vincent van Gogh, would result in one of Minnelli’s most moving and psychologically intimate films. While it may be something of a stretch to draw parallels between Vincent van Gogh’s postimpressionist innovations and Vincente Minnelli’s unconventional filmmaking techniques, artist and director clearly had more in common than their first names.
Although van Gogh’s fiery, volatile temperament could not have been more dissimilar from Minnelli’s dreamy passivity, spiritually the two would appear to be working from the same palette. Van Gogh’s Wildflowers and Starry Night radiate with an almost tangible electricity and intensity of feeling, and Minnelli’s Lust for Life is alive with the same kind of passion, sensuousness, and mastery of color.
The ultimate nonconformist in Minnelli’s long line of iconoclasts, van Gogh was profoundly talented, operatically tortured, and, like the director, chronically frustrated by his attempts to communicate his artistic intentions to others. “It is practically always so painful for me to speak to other people,” van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1883.2 Instead, he communicated on canvas, and the messages he left behind are hopeful, mystical, and heart breaking.
Virtually all of Minnelli’s movies had been influenced by painting to some degree or patterned after the works of specific artists. Meet Me in St. Louis paid tribute to the paintings of Thomas Eakins. An American in Paris and its climactic ballet allowed Vincente to honor the Impressionists. A Minnelli movie might contain a reference to Goya or a nod to Caravaggio. But never before had Vincente been so determined to present “art”—spelled out in reverent capital letters—on the screen. In a complete reversal from his calamitous approach to Kismet, Vincente’s total immersion in van Gogh’s story proved contagious. Despite the objectionable presence of CinemaScope (which practically screamed lurid spectacle), everyone involved sensed that this would be an inspired, faithful account of the last twelve years of van Gogh’s life. No Naked Maja was this Lust for Life.
Pointing to the success of John Huston’s Toulouse-Lautrec biopic, Moulin Rouge, Minnelli and Houseman sold Dore Schary on the idea of adapting Irving Stone’s semifictional 1934 van Gogh biography for the screen. And not a moment too soon. As a property under option, Lust for Life had been languishing on the studio shelf since 1946.
“They were in danger of losing their option,” screenwriter Norman Corwin recalls:
The studio’s ownership of that property was due to expire in a couple of months. So, this was a last-ditch effort. When John Houseman called me and asked if I would be interested, he told me they had struck out on two previous screenplays and would I like to see them? I said, “No, I’d like to read the book, however.” Let me confess that I was disillusioned somewhat by the book Lust for Life because there seemed to me to be areas of brilliant writing followed by some pretty plain Jane prose. I decided to turn to the letters of Vincent, which were beautifully written. I felt that if we based the picture on the letters rather than the book, we’d be on safer ground. Houseman agreed with me. So, the picture ended up drawing upon Vincent’s letters more directly than the book.3
Even as a secondary source, Irving Stone’s biography posed problems. Metro’s legal department had discovered that the studio’s ten-year option would expire in nine months. Stone was unwilling to grant an extension, so the race was on. From casting to cutting, Lust for Life would be an example of grace under pressure.
Two years earlier, Kirk Douglas’s production company (the Bryna Company) had an
nounced that Jean Negulesco would direct Douglas in its own van Gogh biopic. That project never materialized, and when Schary green-lighted Lust for Life, it was clear that the Russian-born Douglas, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Dutchman van Gogh, was ideal casting.
Van Gogh’s friend and rival Paul Gauguin had been convincingly played by George Sanders in The Moon and Sixpence in 1942. However, in bandying about casting suggestions for Lust for Life, Minnelli and Houseman decided that their Gauguin should be earthier, more physically imposing, and exhibit a smoldering sexuality. Paging Anthony Quinn. The Mexican-born actor had already copped an Oscar for his role as Marlon Brando’s brother in Viva Zapata . After casting Quinn as Gauguin, Houseman dubbed him “perfect in looks and manner,” though the actor’s seemingly endless Method preparations would later exasperate the producer.
If Minnelli had lost the battle to shoot Brigadoon on location, he was not going to make the same mistake twice. Director and producer convinced the studio that in the name of authenticity, a film biography of an immortal European artist must be photographed in a more naturalistic setting than Stage 29. Miraculously, permission was granted.
With production on Lust for Life limited to basically five months, the shooting schedule redefined breakneck. Minnelli landed in France on a Saturday and cameras were expected to roll on Monday. The rigors of commanding an ambitious, on-location production—and one barreling ahead at warp speed—immediately agitated Minnelli. According to Houseman, even before shooting a single frame, the director was already “exhausted, harassed and vile-tempered.”4
In some ways, the whiplash-inducing pace of the picture harkened back to Minnelli’s frenzied days at Radio City Music Hall. Or perhaps even further back than that. As the crew dashed from one location to the next with an array of costumes at the ready, Vincente likened the experience to “the travels of a third-rate repertory company.”5 It was the Minnelli Brothers Mighty Dramatic Company all over again, and everything Vincente had learned about redressing reality back in Delaware would prove invaluable as the company sped from one picturesque location to another.
As Minnelli later revealed, “Houseman and I had the script but when we saw the real settings, we changed everything in response to them”: “We went to Paris, Arles, St. Remy and Belgium. We shot in Amsterdam and in the actual coal mine in which van Gogh worked.”6 Along the way, Minnelli, Freddie Young (later to become David Lean’s cinematographer of choice), and Russell Harlan captured some breathtaking images: Upon his arrival in Arles, Vincent throws open his shutters to reveal an orchard with row upon row of fruit trees in full bloom. Van Gogh, sporting a straw hat rimmed with illuminated candles, captures the shimmering waters in Starry Night over the Rhone, the fierce autumn winds stirring up the crimson-colored brushwood—and Vincent’s restless psyche.
On location, Minnelli prepares Pamela Brown for a scene in Lust for Life. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
When he wasn’t protesting the rearrangement of his script, Norman Corwin had an opportunity to witness much of the shooting in progress as well as to observe collaborators Houseman and Minnelli up close. “I knew John Houseman from the Mercury Theatre days. He had a patrician quality. He had very expressive nostrils and he used them to good effect. An unusual intellect. Perhaps the best intellect of any film producer of his time, in fact.”7
While Corwin remembered Minnelli as an “impeccable” director, he also glimpsed the overworked auteur in a less composed moment. “I would say Vincente was punctilious to a point of distress at times. For example, I heard him roundly ball out a routine actor who was playing a small part. My sympathy is always with the man who is trying. This poor guy shriveled under Minnelli’s attack. But then I realized that Minnelli was a perfectionist. If something didn’t go well, he looked around for a target to blame.” As for Minnelli’s rapport with the French-Anglo crew, “he drove them half-mad with his exacting and often unreasonable demands,” Houseman noted. Usually they caved into the director’s requests but when Vincente ordered that a standing bridge be razed and then reconstructed elsewhere, they drew the line.8
Just as there had been a friendly rivalry between van Gogh and Gauguin, so there seemed to be some professional competitiveness between the actors inhabiting those roles. “Ever since I’ve arrived here, I’ve been hearing nothing but how great Kirk is,” Quinn lamented to Minnelli. “I’m beginning to feel like Gauguin must have felt when he came to Arles.”9 It wasn’t long before Quinn claimed to be communicating with the spirit of Gauguin, who made a point of letting the actor know he was holding the paintbrushes all wrong.
Minnelli’s leading man had some hair-raising encounters of his own. “I evidently have a marked resemblance to van Gogh,” says Kirk Douglas:
One day, when we were shooting in Amsterdam, I went to the van Gogh Museum and the room was filled with self-portraits. I was made up as van Gogh and looking at all those paintings. Suddenly, it seemed very still and I turned around and about a hundred people were just quietly watching me. It startled me because they were all just staring at me. They said I had this uncanny resemblance to van Gogh… . When we were at Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent van Gogh committed suicide, there was an old lady there. When she saw me she said, “He has come back!”
I began to have an experience on that picture that I’ve never had in my life and that was where I felt that the character had completely taken me over. In acting, you should be taking the character over, but Vincent was such a powerful figure and such a mythic guy and so poignant and his life was so sad that it really took hold of me completely. You know, when I finished the movie, it was hard to watch it. I never had that kind of experience with any other movie.10
Is it any wonder that Minnelli couldn’t wait to get to Lust for Life? An American in Paris aside, this was Vincente’s first real opportunity to explore the life of a painter. Since he had picked up Whistler’s biography in Paul Stone’s studio, he had been completely intrigued by the lives of the artists he idolized. Even as he was being proclaimed the master of the Broadway musical, Minnelli had admitted to a reporter that he “would rather paint one good canvas than have his name above the show title of the smash hit of the season.”11 Through van Gogh’s story, Minnelli would be allowed to say what making art meant to him.
In Lust for Life, the creative process offers refuge from disappointing relationships, spurned affections, and a world that would never really understand. But the struggle for artistic expression is actually a secondary theme in Lust for Life. The main theme is loneliness and social alienation, a leitmotif Minnelli would turn to repeatedly throughout the ’50s. In addition to van Gogh’s story, there would be Sinatra’s conflicted novelist in Some Came Running and John Kerr’s frustrated folk singer in Tea and Sympathy. Simply by being who they are, Vincente’s characters are in immediate opposition to the world around them. The eventual exile that a Minnelli protagonist endures is often self-imposed, as each extraordinary misfit instinctively knows that he or she must ultimately turn inward to attempt to heal themselves and achieve some kind of life-altering liberation.
Table for One: Kirk Douglas as lonely outcast Vincent van Gogh in Lust For Life. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
It’s no accident that iconic pictures about rebels, loners, and mavericks emerged in the 1950s, a period described by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen as “an era of such towering dullness.”12 It’s also no accident that Vincente Minnelli would be pressed into service to direct movies about people who were naturally nonconformist. Who better to explore the world of the extra - ordinary outcast than a man whose very being had been in question all the way from Delaware, Ohio, to the Director’s Guild of America?
Despite some last-minute studio tinkering (including the removal of several scenes that Minnelli had begged Dore Schary to retain), the director was confident that Lust for Life contained some of his best work. “I didn’t need any critics to tell me it was a great film,” Minnelli boasted. “It looked and smelled right. We’d pul
led it off.”13 Even if he didn’t need the critical reassurance, it was there. “Two hours of quite shattering and exciting entertainment,” raved Alan Dent in the Illustrated London News. “Hollywood’s most profound exploration of the artistic life,” said Newsweek. “One of the most beautiful films ever made,” gushed the New York Times.
When the Oscar nominations were announced, Douglas and Quinn found themselves contenders in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories, respectively. Although Douglas would go home empty handed (though still in character), Quinn copped the Best Supporting Actor prize for his nine-minute turn as Gauguin, prompting rival Mickey Rooney to turn to fellow nominee Robert Stack and lament, “We wuz robbed.”14 Of course, the real injured party was Lust for Life’s director. Despite all of the critical approbation, Minnelli hadn’t even been nominated as Best Director. Once again, he had been passed over in favor of some dubious contenders. Having an opportunity to pay tribute to one of his idols had proved to be the real reward: “I felt a great affinity for van Gogh… . He was too much for anybody. Nobody could live with him for more than a couple of weeks without going mad. Because he gave too much, he wanted too much. And this is the kind of character that is inconsistent and therefore I think brilliant to work out.”15
Self-Portrait: Kirk Douglas as van Gogh in Lust for Life. “He directs like a madman,” Douglas said of Minnelli. “If you don’t know him, he can drive an actor crazy. But what comes out is beautiful.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
23
Sister Boy
“IT HAS NOTHING to do with homosexuality,” Robert Anderson would say of his best-known work, Tea and Sympathy. Though others would beg to differ. “Tea and Sympathy is definitely about being homosexual,” says film historian Richard Dyer. “It’s about curing homosexuality and the signs of homosexuality are effeminacy.” This echoed the feelings of many who felt that Anderson somehow missed the point of his own story. The author, however, remained insistent: “It’s about a false charge of homosexuality … but that is not a gay play.”1