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 A
Man’s Game
By Donna
J. Pointkouski
The Master: Mr. Gene Kelly
Whether
it’s his classic puddle jumping in Singin’ in the
Rain or romp through the streets of New York in On the
Town, Gene Kelly has made generations of film audiences
smile. But many of his admirers don’t realize that long before
this dance and screen icon became an actor, he was a
small-town dance teacher. And before that, he was a boy who
did not want to dance!
Eugene
Curran Kelly was born on August 23, 1912, in Pittsburgh, PA,
the third of five children. His father, James Kelly, was a
phonograph salesman who instilled in his children a love of
sports. His mother, Harriet Curran Kelly, introduced them to
the arts; Gene was 7 when he started dancing. He and his
brothers, James and Fred, were the only boys in the class and
consequently the target of taunts by the other neighborhood
boys. But the boys fought back. Gene used to joke that the
only thing he learned from dancing school was how to be a good
street fighter.
By the time
Gene was 8, he and his siblings— James and Fred, plus sisters
Joan and Louise—were performing dance routines at amateur
vaudeville nights, billed as “The Five Dancing Kellys”. But
the only one who enjoyed performing was young Fred, who seemed
to be a natural performer. Gene disliked performing as much as
he hated attending dance school. If he had had a choice, he
said he would have spent all of his free time doing sports,
adept as he was at gymnastics, ice hockey, swimming, football,
and baseball. In later years he confessed that what he really
had wanted to do was to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh
Pirates.
By the
time he was in high school, Gene had discovered that his
dancing made him popular with girls, and he began to enjoy it.
He and Fred began to appear at amateur nights as “The Kelly
Brothers”, once dancing to the live music of Cab Calloway.
Vaudeville had a huge impact on them; they memorized the steps
performed by every vaudeville dancer who came to town, later
making them their own. Gene cited his earliest dance
influences as George M. Cohan and Clarence “Dancing” Dotson, a
vaudeville tap dancer.
In 1932,
The Kelly Studio of the Dance was founded, with studios in
Pittsburgh and Johnstown. (Shortly after, “Gene” was added to
the name to distinguish it from a similarly named studio.) A
family affair—Gene’s mother was the manager, his father was
the bookkeeper, and Gene taught, along with Louise and Fred—it
was successful from the start, with an enrollment of 350
students by 1935. Several former students have described Gene
as an enthusiastic, energetic teacher who took time with each
student and never gave up on anyone. Gene remembered what it
was like to be teased by other boys for his dancing, and he
took pride in his young male students. In his 1972 book
Gene Kelly: Versatility Personified, Michael Burrows
quotes the dancer as saying, “I had a dread of being branded a
sissy as a youngster— an epithet often hurled at would-be male
dancers—so I always began my dancing classes with an athletic
routine and taught [the students] basketball or baseball.”
Although
Gene enjoyed dancing and teaching it to children, working at
the studio was merely one of many part-time jobs he held while
attending the University of Pittsburgh. The Depression hit the
family hard, and Gene worked at many jobs to put himself
through school, including ditch digging and working as a soda
jerk. The one he enjoyed the most, however, was dancing. After
graduating from college Gene attended law school, but his
heart belonged to dance, and he quickly returned to the studio
to teach. He also choreographed and directed at the Pittsburgh
Playhouse and for “Cap and Gown” shows at the University of
Pittsburgh. With Fred, he choreographed shows for the Temple
Beth Sholom in Pittsburgh as fund-raisers.
 Besides
teaching dance, Gene was hard at work learning his craft. By
age 20 he was a member of the Chicago National Association of
Dancing Masters [see page 17]. He and Fred would often attend
master dance classes in Chicago, studying with Spanish dancer
Angel Cansino (Rita Hayworth’s uncle) and ballet teacher
Bernice Holmes. Soon Gene was teaching master classes himself.
By 1938
Broadway beckoned. Gene’s big break came in 1939 when he
starred as Harry the Hoofer in William Saroyan’s The Time
of Your Life. The following year he played the
title role in Pal Joey, as a sleazy nightclub owner who
stops at nothing to get what he wants. The show, and its star,
became an instant hit, and the role led Gene to a Hollywood
contract.
Despite the
new tangent of his life, Gene continued to play the role of
teacher even when he was performing. Frank Sinatra joked that
after eight weeks of dance training to prepare for Anchors
Aweigh, Gene said, “Francis, you’ve worked your way up
from lousy to adequate— I’m ready to dance on camera with
you.” He took a similar tack with Debbie Reynolds in
rehearsals for Singin’ in the Rain. Unlike her co-star
Donald O’Connor, who had been dancing since childhood,
Reynolds didn’t know many steps. She called the training
“sheer agony,” but later admitted that it made her a better
dancer.
As a
dancer, Gene’s masculine style defined him. Although he was
not the first male
dancer to be popular with movie audiences, his athleticism was
so pronounced that he epitomized the “everyman” dancer.
Realizing that his childhood love of sports had helped him as
a dancer, he integrated elements of sports into his dance
teaching. He shared his secret with a larger audience in a
1958 episode of the TV show Omnibus. The segment,
titled “Dancing: A Man’s Game,” illustrated, through the
actions of professional athletes like Mickey Mantle and Sugar
Ray Robinson, that dance steps have physical counterparts in
sports, that reaching for a line drive could be as graceful as
a ballet step. Gene used examples like passing a football,
throwing a boxing punch, and basketball defensive moves to
show that dance takes these same movements and extends or
exaggerates them. In dance, the movements become more defined.
Gene explained that there’s “very little difference” between
football players warming up for a game and a dancer warming up
for a show—“it’s only a matter of intention.” His entire
philosophy of dance was summed up with that special, which was
well received by the public and won several awards.
In a 1962
Cosmopolitan article, “Lunch Date with Gene Kelly,”
writer Lyn Tornabene asked him what he would do if he had a
son who wanted to dance professionally. He replied that he’d
tell him that dance is hard work but that he would help him if
he wanted to do it. She then asked if he would worry about the
boy’s masculinity. The famous dancer replied, “Of course not.
Dancing is as much a man’s game as baseball. There’s a strong
parallel between great athletes and great dancers. If a man
dances in an effeminate way, he is a very bad dancer.”
Gene’s
advice to young dancers was invariably to “work, work, work.”
And he provided a good example to follow. After his 1942
Hollywood debut in For Me and My Gal with Judy Garland,
he seemed to work nonstop, providing his fans with many famous
musicals to savor.
In 1944,
MGM loaned Gene to Columbia Pictures for a musical with Rita
Hayworth called Cover Girl, which was the first time
that he did major choreography in film. It showcased his
ability to create a dance that was uniquely cinematic—the
alter ego scene in which he dances with himself. Realizing his
talent for musicals, MGM then cast him in Anchors Aweigh,
which earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
Once again he created a dance that was unique to film—in
“Worry Song” he danced with the animated Jerry the Mouse. The
number remains a cinematic achievement to this day, despite
modern computer-enhanced exploits.
 Gene’s
success continued in such musicals as The Pirate, Take Me
Out to the Ball Game, and On the Town, on which he
made his directorial debut with Stanley Donen. On the heels of
that achievement came An American in Paris, winner of
the 1951 Academy Award for Best Picture and five other Oscars.
That year Gene was given an Academy Honorary Award for his
“extreme versatility as an actor, singer, director, and
dancer, but specifically for his brilliant achievement in the
art of choreography on film.”
The
fledgling director immediately followed the success of An
American in Paris by co-directing (a gain with Donen),
choreographing, and starring in Singin’ in the Rain.
His career Flourished throughout the 1950s and ’60s, with his
work on Invitation to the Dance, Hello, Dolly!, Jack and
the Beanstalk, and What a Way to Go, among
others. During the following two decades Gene was most visible
in retrospectives and awards shows. That’s Entertainment!
and That’s Entertainment II were extremely successful,
and a new generation became enthralled by the magic of movie
musicals. In 1982, he received the Kennedy Center Honors, and
in 1985, the Life Achievement Award from the American Film
Institute.
Gene was
married three times and had three children, Kerry (with Betsy
Blair) and Timothy and Bridget (with Jeanne Coyne). In 1957 he
and Blair ended their 15-year marriage; Gene married Coyne,
his longtime dance assistant and former pupil, in 1960.
Tragedy struck in 1973 with Coyne’s death from cancer. Gene
became both mother and father to his two young children and
did not accept any work that took him too far from home. In
1990 he married writer Patricia Ward, his companion until his
death on February 2, 1996, after a series of strokes.
During the
last years of his life Gene was hard at work on his
autobiography; never finished, it remains unpublished. His
final words on film are from 1994’s That’s Entertainment
III. Quoting Irving Berlin, he remarks, “The song is
ended, but the melody lingers on.” And so it is with Gene
Kelly. He is no longer with us, but he will remain in our
hearts forever.
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