The selfish genius of Gene Kelly
He’s Got Rhythm: The Life And Career Of Gene Kelly Cynthia and Sara Brideson University Press Of Kentucky €49 ★★★★★
Who danced best with Fred Astaire? Ginger Rogers in Top Hat? Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon? Some plump for Eleanor Powell, who at times outdid Astaire in The Broadway Melody Of 1940. As for the man himself, he always said that his best partner was Rita Hayworth.
But when it comes to Astaire’s rival as Hollywood’s greatest dancer, there are no arguments. Gene Kelly danced best with Gene Kelly. Oh, sure, he did a couple of numbers with girls, but in the main, the women he danced with – Judy Garland, Kay Kendall, Leslie Caron – were nowhere near his league.
This may explain why the only partner anyone remembers Kelly dancing with is Jerry (of Tom And Jerry fame) in Anchors Aweigh. Otherwise, his most expressive performances were all solos like Let Me Call You Sweetheart from Thousands Cheer or, of course, Singin’ In The Rain. In Cover Girl, Kelly actually danced a duet with a duplicate image of himself. If this sounds like self-love, then Cynthia and Sara Brideson’s adoring yet thorough biography only adds to the suspicion. The portrait painted here is of a hard taskmaster who couldn’t understand why other people weren’t just like him. To be fair, Kelly had a lot to be self-regarding about. Compact yet powerful, stunningly handsome and with a killer smile, Kelly would have been a shooin for stardom even if he hadn’t been one of the greatest dancers of the 20th century. With his dark, rather cruel good looks (made all the crueller by the facial scar he acquired in a childhood accident), Kelly would have made a great noir heavy or, a generation later, secret agent. Irish-Canadian by descent, Kelly was born in Pittsburgh in 1912, the son of a sport-loving salesman father and a mother with dreams of theatrical fame. At school he wanted to be a baseball or ice-hockey player, and away from the pitch he was a keen gymnast. But even though he feared the dance lessons his mother insisted on made him seem ‘sissy’, Kelly took to them like a natural. After majoring in economics at
college, he set up a dance school in his home town, before studying ballet in Chicago. In 1937, the 24-year-old Kelly arrived in New York. Three years later he had danced himself to Broadway fame in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey.
Soon enough, Hollywood called, and with a war now on, Kelly’s athletic and muscular dancing spoke to a generation who wanted something tougher than Astaire’s topper and tails. With his white socks and loafers, Kelly made dance seem far more democratic; to watch his acrobatic pirouettes and turns is to be in no doubt that dancing is for regular guys.
Yet, as the Bridesons make plain, Kelly had his pretensions. If the short ballet scene in On The
Town mars what would otherwise be a pop art masterpiece, the lengthy ballet sequence in An
American In Paris turns an already overblown picture into dull kitsch. ‘If it looks like you’re working,’ Kelly once said, ‘you’re not working hard enough.’ If only he’d been vain enough to listen.