This Day in Film History (Garland Weds Director Vincente Minnelli)

June 15, 1945—With love having bloomed on the set of their first collaboration, the hit musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland married director Vincente Minnelli, who had not only guided her towards mature roles but used his camera to make the insecure young star experience something she had never felt since signing with MGM: the sense of her own beauty.

It was the most unlikely of professional and personal partnerships. Minnelli was nearly twice the age of his star and wife, visually rather than orally inclined, painfully shy where she was often explosively funny, and self-disciplined where she was chronically late in showing up on the set.

The age difference between the two—and Minnelli’s genuine thoughtfulness and concern for her—may have reminded Garland of her own beloved father, a vaudevillian and theater owner who had died when she was only 13. But Minnelli resembled Frank Gumm in another important respect: homosexual liaisons that shadowed and complicated his marriage.

At this time, though, the two were as happy as they ever would be. Each had had their entire careers riding on the success of Meet Me in St. Louis, and each had achieved a principal objective: for Garland, an adult role and a performance so incandescent that it enabled MGM to overlook her increasing tardiness in arriving on set; and for Minnelli, his greatest opportunity to that point in a high-profile project. 

Their professional relationship did not start out well during the early days of shooting Meet Me in St. Louis. Already addicted for several years to a studio-compelled pill regimen to clamp down on her weight, Garland continued to annoy studio executives and fellow cast and crew members with tardiness that drove up the costs of filming. Moreover, Minnelli couldn’t communicate how he wanted her to act.

But as time went on, Garland realized what the rest of the crew understood: that Minnelli, a former costumer, set designer and art director who had apprenticed for a year at the studio, had knowledge of virtually every department at MGM, a painter’s eye for color and atmosphere—and more important, a keen sense of how makeup could provide Garland with grown-up sophistication. 

Moreover, this homeliest of men understood how the camera could minimize the flaws and enhance the advantages (notably, highly expressive eyes) of this sensitive young star who had resented studio bosses’ disparagement of her looks.

For his part, as indicated in this YouTube clip of an interview with the director in later years, Minnelli saw a little-noticed asset of Garland’s: a photographic memory that enabled her to absorb direction despite inevitable on-set distractions. Altogether, he believed her potential was so great that she could have been “as great as Duse, or Bernhardt, or Garbo.” 

His sense of her possibilities—and her eager responsiveness—transformed Meet Me in St. Louis from a problematic, plot-free property into a masterpiece of rich visual textures and charm to go with a rich score.

In Hollywood, it has never been unusual for male directors to sleep with female stars. But the growing, open affection between Garland and Minnelli was greeted with astonishment by cast and crew. 

Minnelli’s use of more mascara, eye shadow, lipstick, and a covering base than MGM’s actresses wore would have been enough to spark talk about his sexual preferences. But rumors of his intimate relationships with several men only fanned the gossip.

Besotted with the director who had awakened her sense of her attractiveness, Garland dismissed these rumors as “just his artistic flair!” It would be two more years before, during production of The Pirate, she happened on her husband with another man. 

According to Gerald Clarke’s biography of Garland, Get Happy, her furious description of this encounter quickly spread until it reached the ears of would-be actress Jacqueline Susann, who incorporated the incident into her 1960s bestselling potboiler, Valley of the Dolls. 

(Ironically enough, Garland was set to play a character modeled on Broadway star Ethel Merman in the film version of the roman a clef, until Garland's problems with pills led to her termination early in the project.)

After Meet Me in St. Louis, Garland and Minnelli worked together on two full-length features, The Clock (1945) and The Pirate (1948), and one segment of another, Ziegfeld Follies (1945).  They also had an off-screen production: a daughter, the future singer-actress Liza Minnelli. (Her proud father let her sit in his laps even while he was directing the lavish musicals that became his trademark.)

But four years after their wedding, their marriage was coming under relentless pressure, with the couple unable to cope with the daily stress of studio  suspensions, Garland’s indebtedness, her intensifying pill addiction—and the couple’s growing physical estrangement and mutual resentments (Garland identified Minnelli with the MGM regime, while he, worn down by her constant storms, saw the last straw as her constant lying to her psychiatrists). Though the marriage officially ended in divorce in 1951, it was, for all intents and purposes, over two years earlier.

Fired by MGM in 1950, Garland appeared onscreen only occasionally in the last two decades of her life (though one of those was her Oscar-nominated performance in A Star is Born). In contrast, Minnelli continued to work frequently and well for the studio throughout much of the rest of the 1950s in musicals, comedies and melodramas that demonstrated his great versatility, even lasting at the studio for 26 years--the longest-lasting director of anyone at MGM.

Of all the movies Minnelli made in this period, I think that, oddly enough, his Vincent Van Gogh biopic, Lust for Life, might have best reflected his relationship with Garland. While one artist worked with paint and another with popular song, each was bursting with expressive feeling that few others could match—and, sadly, exhibited an emotional instability that those closest to them, like Minnelli, felt powerless to control in the end.

This Day in Classical Music History (Gershwin’s ‘American in Paris’ Debuts)

December 13, 1928—Featuring what its composer termed “the most modern music I've yet attempted,” An American in Paris, the product of George Gershwin’s trips abroad to deepen his knowledge of orchestration and harmony, premiered across the Atlantic, performed by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Walter Damrosch. Still only 30 years old, Gershwin was displaying the ambition that would enable him to transcend the boundaries of his Tin Pan Alley apprenticeship. Many musicians playing the piece at the premiere, though, did not appreciate his moxie. They would be horrified by the thought that the composition they performed with such little appreciation that night would  become one of the most loved classical music pieces of the last century.

Twelve years after this event, and three years after Gershwin’s untimely death, his close friend, pianist-composer-humorist-raconteur Oscar Levant, described an overnight train journey they had taken in A Smattering of Ignorance: “A lengthy discussion of music occupied us for an hour or so, and I was actually in the midst of answering one of his questions when he calmly removed his clothes and eased himself into the lower berth.... I adjusted myself to the inconveniences of the upper berth…. At this moment my light must have disturbed George [Gershwin’s]’s doze, for he opened his eyes, looked up at me and said drowsily, ‘Upper berth—lower berth. That’s the difference between talent and genius.’”

The anecdote tells us what good company the puckish Gershwin could be, but if he thought genius would have been enough to get him by, he would never have been serious enough to change musical direction—nor crucially, over the long term, figure out how he would apply the musical immersion he underwent with Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg. 

(Not that these men could understand his direction, either: Ravel asked, when Gershwin asked about receiving orchestra lessons from him, "Why would you want to risk being a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?" Even Schoenberg, who did eventually come around and instructed him, marveled, after he heard about the American's current income from Broadway show tunes, that perhaps Gershwin ought to give him lessons.)

Gershwin made his first trip to Paris in 1924, after his success with Rhapsody in Blue. Two years later, after yet another visit, he decided to write a piece about the city that would capture an American’s impressions of it. To lend his composition extra authenticity, he even bought French taxi horns whose sounds he would use. 

But it would still not be until the spring of 1928, when he and lyricist brother Ira went to the city for some rest and relaxation after their work for the frenzied opening of their musical Rosalie for Florenz Ziegfeld, that he got to work on the idea forming in his head. (Ira, normally no slouch, used this time, as he put it, "[seeing] the sights and [drinking] beer.")

Gershwin completed his piano sketch for An American in Paris by early August, then his orchestration for it on November 18, less than a month from the premiere by Damrosch, who had also conducted the premiere of Gershwin’s prior major classical work, Concerto in F.

The New York Philharmonic reflected the loathing that traditional classical musicians possessed for the interloper Gershwin, who, for his part, attended its rehearsals dressed in a derby hat and smoking a cigar.  One music critic of the time exhibited similar snobbery over Gershwin’s attempt to cross musical boundaries: “An American in Paris is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane, that the average movie audience would be bored by it."

Au contraire, as they say. One Gershwin phrase about the piece he was planning in the summer of 1928—that it was “really a rhapsodic ballet”—may have inspired Hollywood to think about its possibilities for dance on film. In 1951, MGM released a movie that incorporated the name of the piece into its title and a generous helping of the composer’s music, though the half-hour composition itself was reduced to last than five minutes onscreen. It was a career highlight for star Gene Kelly, director Vincente Minnelli, and even Levant, whose character imagines himself playing Concerto in F before an audience in a large concert hall, taking on the successive roles of  pianist, conductor, kettle drummer, xylophonist, violinist, concert master and, at last, an audience member who shouts "Bravo, encore!"

Whether or not you agree that the movie should have won the Best Actor Oscar that year (beating out A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun), it surely remains one of the highlights of the American musical, just as the composer it honored remains safely esconced now in the classical music canon to which he aspired.

(The accompanying Bain News Service photograph of George Gershwin is now in the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division.)

 

This Day in Film History (“Lust for Life” Gives Van Gogh Respect Elusive in Life)

September 17, 1956--It took nearly a decade to get it on screen, but when Lust for Life premiered in New York, critics hailed the adaptation of Irving Stone’s 1934 biographical novel about Vincent Van Gogh as one of the finest depictions of an artist ever created for film. Shamefully, Hollywood did not even nominate the film for Best Picture, preferring then-fashionable widescreen blockbusters such as Giant, The Ten Commandments and the winner, Around the World in 80 Days--but the critical consensus on the film’s value continues to hold.

To give audiences as strong a sense as possible of the painter’s works, producer John Houseman and director Vincente Minnelli drew on the resources of two dozen museums around the world, even one in the U.S.S.R. On-location filming in Europe, including in many areas where Van Gogh lived, worked and painted, gave the movie a great feeling of realism--and, even more important, Minnelli, a painter himself, implemented a color scheme for the film that mirrored that of the Dutch post-Impressionist artist.

More crucial than anything else about the film, however, was the casting of Kirk Douglas as the tortured artist. The Oscar winning names linked to the role over the prior decade had included Spencer Tracy, Van Heflin and Yul Brenner. The likelihood is good that any of these actors could have done a creditable job.

With his tough-guy image, good looks and raw physicality, Douglas was not the actor many would have thought of immediately for the part. One Hollywood veteran who certainly felt that way was John Wayne, who told Douglas: “Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There's so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers."

But, no matter what his prior roles, Douglas had brought to each of them unparalleled intensity. Had the actor cared to debate the point with Wayne, he could have mentioned that Van Gogh, like Wayne’s role that same year, Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The Searchers, was not just an intense or conflicted character, but an obsessive who ends up anti-social, isolated and marginalized.

Douglas was a painstaking actor who threw himself into every picture, not just going over his own lines but others'. He was not always easy to work with (Stanley Kubrick directed Spartacus on the condition that his six-film deal with the actor’s production company would then conclude), but at his best the results on the big screen revealed his characters’ raw hunger. During production of this film, his wife was concerned that he was taking too much psychologically back home with him each night.

Another bonus of using Douglas: when he grew his beard, he bore such a striking resemblance to the artist that several people who in childhood or young adulthood did a double-take.

Garnering his third Best Actor nomination, Douglas was favored to win this time. Unfortunately, he lost out to Brenner for The King and I. It took the actor awhile to swallow his disappointment. It remains the best performance of his long and honored career--and it ranks very highly, too, in the considerable filmography of Minnelli, who has garnered more attention over the years for his musicals, especially with his wife of the time, Judy Garland.

Song Lyric of the Day (Together in the Holidays, “If the Fates Allow”)

“Through the years
We all will be together,
If the Fates allow,
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow,
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.”—“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” music by Ralph Blane, lyrics by Hugh Martin (1944)

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is the climax of Meet Me in St. Louis, the Vincente Minnelli musical which opened on this date in 1944. The lyrics, sung by Judy Garland to a tearful Margaret O’Brien, were reworked by Martin at the strong urging of the older star, who said people would think she was a monster for singing such sad words (“Faithful friends who were dear to us/Will be near to us no more”) to a little girl.

Martin lightened up the song even further for Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album, A Jolly Christmas. Nevertheless, an ineffable melancholy continues to cling to it, no matter which version is sung.

Several years ago, one of my uncles—who, sadly, passed away in October—told me how much “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” meant to his generation, and particularly to his family, who had their youngest son serving in the South Pacific in World War II. One line particularly struck home, he recalled: “If only in my dreams.”

The Blane-Martin song came from the same era and, I think, from the same pressures. The lyrics constantly employ equipoise: “here” versus “miles away,” “olden days” versus “now,” “happy” versus “troubles.”

But for anyone undergoing a transition—including watching my uncle’s generation pass from the scene—the song hinges, like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” on one line: “If the Fates allow.” As she sang, Garland—for all her youth and considerable show-business savvy—sensed that the song depended on contingency and transience. Among the many songs she sang throughout her career, this would rank among the half-dozen with which she is most associated.

In its nostalgia for a gentler time and its tentative, fragile optimism, Meet Me in St. Louis and its most heart-tugging song are more than just holiday evergreens; they’re prime, poignant pieces of Americana. More than a few people know what it’s like to “muddle through somehow” amid the noise of a seemingly cheerful holiday.