by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Hollywood was notorious for not allowing Broadway stars to recreate their acclaimed stage roles on film—Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, and Julie Andrews had all been passed over when South Pacific, Gypsy, and My Fair Lady turned up on movie screens. Holliday proved to be the exception to the rule as she already had a cinematic track record, having won an Oscar and enormous acclaim for her performance as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. The film’s director, George Cukor, considered Holliday “A true artist… . She made you laugh, she was a supreme technician, and then suddenly you were touched.”2 Holliday was highly regarded off screen as well. Many of her colleagues remembered her as an endearing presence and an exceedingly generous performer. Despite her tremendous talent, though, her insecurities and self-doubt could be crippling, and Minnelli was about to experience her neurotic side at full volume.
From the moment she signed a contract with MGM to appear in a Freed-produced, Minnelli-directed version of Bells Are Ringing, Holliday seemed to have second thoughts. The comedienne agonized over what she perceived to be some of the weaknesses in the screenplay. In reviewing the stage show, the same Brooks Atkinson who had saluted Holliday and the sprightly score had grumbled about “one of the most antiquated plots of the season.”3 Although Comden and Green had handled the adaptation chores themselves, Holliday felt that in attempting to open up the story for the screen, they’d only succeeded in making the show longer—not more cinematic. Would the flimsy plot become even more conspicuous when it was magnified on a movie screen? This got the slightly overweight star to thinking about how she would look on a movie screen—blown up to CinemaScope proportions, no less. With each passing day, Holliday’s doubts and fears multiplied.
In a script conference with Minnelli and Freed, Holliday shared her thoughts on how the screenplay might be improved. Although Freed acknowledged that Holliday had “a few good suggestions,” he dismissed her concerns as “nothing monumental.”4 Still, the star fretted over the fact that little was being done to transform an intimate theater piece into a wide-screen event. As Holliday told Cosmopolitan: “Of course, lots of things have to be changed when a stage show is filmed. And should be, I think.”5 Like the leading man, for example.
Judy Holliday and Dean Martin in conference with their director on the set of Bells Are Ringing. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Reportedly, Holliday had had an affair with her Broadway Bells costar, Sydney Chaplin. Despite the positive notices for his stage portrayal, Chaplin would not be invited to re-create his role on film. For one thing, his fling with Holliday had ended badly. But even more important to MGM was the fact that his name meant next to nothing to moviegoers. Instead, Dean Martin was cast as the procrastinating playwright Jeff Moss, or “Plaza O-double-four-double-three,” as he’s known on the switchboard. As principal photography began in October 1959, Holliday feared that Martin, like Minnelli, was sleepwalking his way through Bells Are Ringing—though Dino’s laissez-faire attitude certainly suited the character and his easygoing demeanor offered the perfect contrast to Holliday’s high-spirited intensity.
Convinced that she was starring in a mediocre retread of her Broadway show, Holliday asked to be released from her contract and even offered to hand back her salary if Minnelli would start over with, say, Shirley MacLaine manning the switchboard. The studio did not take Holliday up on her offer. She would have to continue. She even made her reservations public, telling reporter Jon Whitcomb: “I’ve done four pictures with George Cukor, and he’s a perfectionist. I’m afraid Arthur Freed and Mr. Minnelli are very easy to please. They don’t mind okaying things that strike me as only half right. If anybody knows the values in this play, I do. After living in it for three years, I’m the final authority on what lines ought to get laughs and how to get them.”6
As Holliday biographer Gary Carey noted, “Vincente Minnelli was surprised to find he couldn’t gain Holliday’s confidence… . Minnelli did his best to reassure her, but he failed to win Judy’s confidence simply because she was convinced that the entire concept of the film was hopelessly, irredeemably wrong.” As outrageously talented and insecure as that other Judy, Holliday also shared Garland’s susceptibility to illness—either real or imagined. Over the course of a tense production, Holliday suffered from laryngitis, bursitis, bladder problems, and a kidney infection, all of which may have been early indications of the far more serious health problems ahead for Holliday. Or were these physical manifestations of her fears? “I kept reassuring her, but Judy was a constant worrier,” Minnelli said of Holliday, likening her to Fred Astaire. Both performers were exacting perfectionists whose work appeared effortless on screen. It was ironic that two of the most talented stars in the business were rarely satisfied with their own efforts.7
Wisely, Minnelli lets his camera linger on his leading lady throughout Bells Are Ringing. Blessed with undeniable magnetism and unsurpassed comedic timing, Holliday is the heart and soul of the whole picture. Just as Funny Girl wouldn’t have been much minus Barbra Streisand, Bells Are Ringing is totally dependent on its shining star for life support.
Whether belting out the ultimate 11 o’clock number, “I’m Going Back” (“… Where I can be me at the Bonjour Tristesse Brassiere Company”) or poignantly realizing that “The Party’s Over,” Holliday dazzles with a superlative musical-comedy performance that’s charged with a genuine warmth and vulnerability. Although Rosalind Russell or Shirley MacLaine could have played Ella Peterson and come through with an effective comedic performance, the endearingly neurotic switchboard operator is clearly a role that Holliday was born to play. “The picture owes more to Miss Holliday than it does to its authors, its director or even to Alexander Graham Bell,” Bosley Crowther declared in the New York Times.8
Though the film was a personal triumph for Holliday and the Comden and Green score is first rate, some of the star’s concerns about the production turned out to be well founded. As the finished film reveals, Minnelli made only marginal attempts to open the story up and liberate it from its theatrical roots. And why was CinemaScope—a process better suited to breathtaking, panoramic vistas—foisted upon an intimate musical comedy set largely indoors and in confined quarters?
None of this phased the Hollywood Reporter: “It is a better musical on screen than it was on stage,” decided James Powers. “For MGM, ‘Bells’ will ring loud and long, in the friendly clang of the box office cash register.” This proved to be the case when the picture opened at Radio City Music Hall in June. Later that summer, MGM’s accountants were able to proudly report: “Bells Are Ringing joined an elite company of blockbuster films when it topped the one million dollar mark at the Radio City Music Hall box office.”9
The picture would be Holliday’s last. In 1965, the actress died of cancer at the age of forty-four. Bells Are Ringing would not only stand as a testament to Holliday’s inimitable talents but was also the Freed Unit’s last hurrah—at least musically speaking.
For Minnelli, it was on to the next project, and as always, there was already one waiting for him: an epic remake of Rudolph Valentino’s silent classic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—though once on board, Minnelli, like Ella Peterson, probably wanted nothing more than to hightail it back to the Bonjour Tristesse Brasierre Company.
30
Apocalypse
IT WAS WHILE VACATIONING in Rome that Vincente met an unstoppable force of nature who would become his third wife: Denise Giganti. Or as some of her detractors referred to her: “Denise, Inc.” She wasn’t a superstar like Judy, or a knockout like Georgette. Nevertheless, incredible things seemed to happen whenever Denise was around. Or maybe she just grabbed life by the scruff of the neck and made things happen. After all, she had never been shy about going after whatever she wanted, despite the fact that she told Minnelli’s old friend Eleanor Lambert: “I don’t want a lot of things. Just good and right for me.”1 Even so, Denise seemed to be in perpetual pursuit of something. And she was so thoroughly charming—what with that adorable stutt
er, super-chic sense of style, and trademark braided hair—that one tended not to notice whenever she pounced.
Long before she met Minnelli and took Hollywood by storm, Denise’s story seemed ready-made for the movies. It had everything. An exotic location: Namely, Belgrade, Serbia, where, somewhere in the vicinity of 1931, Denise—or Danica Radosavljevic, as she was then named—was born. An unconventional upbringing: Daughter of a military officer loyal to the monarchy, “Dusica” (as Denise was nicknamed) was raised largely by her grandparents. As Denise would remember it, her own mother had been judged “inappropriate” as her primary caretaker. Secrets revealed: During the upheaval of World War II, Denise’s grandfather disclosed to her alone the location of the family’s hidden stash of gold, which she duly noted. The daring escape: After the war, as Tito’s Communists solidified their control, Denise fled her homeland by sailing off in a tiny rowboat. Miraculously, she was spotted by a British minesweeper and pulled to safety. The captain of the ship “took a shine to her,” and instead of hauling Denise back to Serbia, he deposited her in a refugee camp in Bari, Italy. Dangerous liaisons: While working as a model in Rome, Denise caught the eye of Giuseppe Giganti, a considerably older though extraordinarily wealthy Italian mogul (rumored to have had some shady connections), and they were married. Although Denise would later refer to Giganti as her “first husband,” it appears that she had been married at least once—possibly twice—before meeting him.at The moment of truth: In 1958, Denise walked out on her marriage, but by all accounts, she emerged with mucho lira and a world-class collection of jewels that made the House of Harry Winston look seriously underdressed.
It was quite a saga—more than enough melodrama for three Joan Crawford pictures. In fact, many felt that Vincente should have scrapped plans for his next epic, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and instead turned his cameras on The Denise Giganti Story. Now that movie would have sold tickets, and everybody would still be talking about it. According to Denise, people couldn’t stop talking about her—even if they had only seen her from across the room at a Dior showing or at a Vivien Westwood retrospective: “Over 90 percent of the people who write or talk about me have never met me,” she once observed.2
Even Hollywood insiders who had met her (and who were all too familiar with larger-than-life personalities) were genuinely intrigued. “Denise would be a fantastic subject for a novel,” writer-actress Ruth Gordon told the Los Angeles Times in 1967. “She’s fiction, right out of Somserset Maugham or Michael Arlen. And I’m sure if she were written, she would turn into a real person. Only then could you find out who she really is.”3
As it turned out, Ruth Gordon was right. Denise was a fantastic subject for a novel. In Joyce Haber’s blistering 1976 bestseller The Users (best described as the literary love-child of Rona Barrett and Harold Robbins), the character of “Elena Brent” was reportedly inspired by The Third Mrs. Minnelli.
In Haber’s racy roman à clef, the enterprising Elena becomes a Beverly Hills super-hostess after scraping, scheming, and sleeping her way to the top. Her stunning ascent begins when she flees dreary East Berlin after bedding down with a border guard (“She spent half an hour of her last evening in East Berlin in the shack with Helmut, while his friends guarded their privacy.”) So, did Denise see any parallels between herself and Haber’s scrappy heroine? Not a chance. “You can believe if I had to escape by going to bed with some body, it would be a commander,” Denise announced.4 Still, there seemed to be some striking similarities between the Serbian powerhouse and Haber’s wily Elena, who realizes “that sex was something she could use if she had to, without feeling that she had betrayed herself, and that it didn’t require love.”
By the time Denise divorced Giuseppe Giganti and made her way to America, she had acquired plenty of life experience and some choice baubles, but she was still sorely lacking in the social-standing department. “Denise was a nobody,” says designer Luis Estevez. “She arrived from nowhere and with a very sketchy past.”5 But all of that would change. As friends and foes alike would learn, one must never underestimate The Power of Denise. It wasn’t long before she had charmed her way into a glittering circle composed of Hollywood’s super-elite.
As Luis Estevez recalls, “[Producer] Sam Spiegel and his wife Betty had befriended Denise and introduced her to very sweet, adorable, talented, wonderful Vincente Minnelli … who was gay.” Denise seemed willing to overlook that particular detail. During production on Vincente’s next film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the couple’s relationship blossomed. As Minnelli recalled, “It was very easy for me to begin having serious thoughts about her, and I hope she felt the same.”6
IT HAD CATAPULTED Rudolph Valentino to superstardom in 1921. Could a modernized version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse do for some swarthy unknown in the ’60s what it had done for Rudy in the Roaring ’20s? In an attempt to emulate the megahit that was Metro’s 1959 remake of Ben-Hur (which had also been a silent smash in 1925), MGM was digging deep into the vaults and dusting off any properties—no matter how antiquated—that had once turned a tidy profit for the studio. Valentino’s Four Horsemen had raked in an estimated $5 million back in the days when Warren G. Harding was still in office. So, even though nobody had asked for it, Metro was going to give a new generation their own Apocalypse—only this one, of course, would be bigger and better, in CinemaScope, in Metrocolor, and directed by Vincente Minnelli. Even the World War I setting of Valentino’s version and the original Vicente Blasco Ibáñez novel wasn’t good enough. A movie this super-colossal required no less a global conflict than World War II. Julian Blaustein, who had produced such historical dramas as Desiree and The Wreck of the Mary Deare, would mount his most ambitious production to date with Four Horsemen. Robert Ardrey, who had scripted Minnelli’s Madame Bovary, was assigned the daunting task of reworking such musty material and bringing it up to date.
Minnelli immediately voiced concerns about updating the story, though he felt that this was a challenge that could be worked through, especially with The Second Coming of Rudolph Valentino in the lead. But where would MGM’s new matinee idol come from? There seemed to be no worthy contenders among the studio’s dwindling roster of contract players. Well, maybe one. In March 1960, the New York Times announced that George Hamilton was the front runner: “Mr. Hamilton, a poised, dark-haired young man who once spent six months studying bullfighting in South America, is serious about his aspirations to become another Valentino.”7 Montgomery Clift was mentioned. Dirk Bogarde was discussed. Horst Buchholtz was a prime candidate. While vacationing in Rome, Minnelli also met with a stunning up and comer named Alain Delon. The former French soldier turned heads wherever he went, oozed sexual charisma, and would soon be coveted by casting couches of every persuasion throughout Hollywood. Minnelli lobbied for this smoldering star of tomorrow, but Metro’s executives were unmoved. Nobody knew (or at that moment cared) who Alain Delon was.
The Four Horsemen required a dashing young man to play Argentinean playboy turned Resistance crusader Julio Desnoyers, but MGM needed an established star to carry the picture. What Minnelli ended up with was Glenn Ford. The actor had recently signed a multi-picture deal with the studio, and headlining their newly anointed star in an important period piece seemed the perfect way to trumpet the association. At forty-two, Ford was still photogenic, but he was well beyond his Johnny Farrell peak opposite Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Metro may have felt more confident having a bankable star on board, but Ford’s presence seemed to immediately age the project. What’s more, the supporting cast that had been assembled also included more than a touch of distinguished gray. Some twenty years after Casablanca, Paul Henreid once again found himself playing a noble Resistance leader and husband to a wife enamored with another man. Watch on the Rhine star Paul Lukas and Minnelli favorite Charles Boyer would play the German and French heads of the Desnoyers-von Hartrott family. A nearly unrecognizable Lee J. Cobb in a white wig and heavy make-up portrayed the blustery, lar
ger-than-life patriarch Madariaga.
In the role of Julio’s alluring love interest, Marguerite Laurier, the studio bypassed Hollywood’s reigning leading ladies and instead chose Ingrid Thulin, the luminous star of several Ingmar Bergman features. The Swedish-born star of Wild Strawberries may have been a consummate actress, but her name meant next to nothing to the paying customer in Bayonne, New Jersey.
When preproduction began in Paris in August 1960, Vincente’s doubts about the script mushroomed into major concerns. While ensconced in the George Cinq hotel, he scrutinized the screenplay, becoming ever more convinced that Ardrey’s adaptation lacked passion—romantic, political, or otherwise.
John Gay, one of the most prolific screenwriters in the business, received word that his services were desperately needed. “I was working for MGM. I had just finished reworking How the West Was Won, and they said, ‘Go over to Paris. They’re having trouble with this picture,’” Gay recalls:
They said, “We want you to rewrite the love scene.” So, I got the script. I read it on the plane and god, there were about five of them and I didn’t think any of those love scenes worked. So, I was going to go over and be very cautious and ask, “Which love scene do you want rewritten?” When I arrived, the first thing Vincente says is, “How do you like the script?” and I said, “It was … all right. Now which love scene do you want rewritten?” That went back and forth. Finally, Vincente turned to Julie [Blaustein] and said, “I told you. I told you he didn’t like it. I told you it wasn’t any good. I told you we have to work on it… .” So, right away, I wanted to go home. I mean, here I was working with Minnelli—a great opportunity—and I was hoping he didn’t like what I turned in because if he didn’t like what I was rewriting, then I could go home. But, instead, he said, “This is what I want… .” The more I found myself digging deeper and finding trouble with [the script], the more I wanted to get out. Vincente was very tenacious, though… . I felt that some things going into it were good, but we never really had enough time to do all the stuff that had to be done. And the money spent on that picture! When you needed four extras, Vincente used a hundred.8
