Mark Griffin (28 page)

Years later, Vincente seemed to even the score in his autobiography. Despite the fact that Lerner was solely responsible for the script, the Gershwins had furnished the score, and Kelly and his assistants handled the choreo - graphy, Minnelli assigned credit where he thought it was due: “Though I don’t minimize anyone’s contributions,” he wrote, “one man was responsible for bringing it all together. That man was me.”
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“I GREW UP WHERE EVERYBODY’S PARENTS were movie stars,” Liza Minnelli once said of her Beverly Hills upbringing—though even in the land of Lanas and Hedys, Liza’s household was unique. For “Mama” was Judy Garland, “Daddy” was Vincente Minnelli, and everything they did kept Leo the Lion
roaring. After school, most kids rushed home for milk and cookies. Not so for Liza Minnelli, who raced over to her own personal playground, which the rest of the world knew as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was here that she rode the boom with her father, mesmerized by the sight of Gene Kelly being pursued by a bevy of Sharaff-styled furies as Gershwin pored over the playback machine. And even after Daddy called “Cut!” the magic didn’t end. For at home, Vincente was aiding and abetting the creation of a mini movie star.

Party Girl: “The Oscar for Best Birthday Given by a Parent went to Vincente Minnelli for Liza’s sixth,” said actress Candice Bergen, a childhood friend of little Liza May. Two years earlier, for Liza’s fourth, Judy and Vincente gave the birthday girl a puppy. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

As Liza remembers it: “I would stand there and he would create these costumes on me, just with safety pins and crepe paper. And I could watch and see myself becoming this Spanish dancer. And he would watch me dance for hours. He was just wonderful because he fed my imagination.”
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And then some. If Mama attempted to play disciplinarian, Daddy encouraged Liza’s incredible flights of fancy. Well versed in the art of wish fulfillment, Vincente understood the need to dream. And nobody dreamed bigger. In Hollywood, over-the-top occasions were standard, but Liza May’s star-studded
birthday parties were so extravagantly lavish that they could have been produced by Arthur Freed.

“Most seemed to agree that the Oscar for Best Birthday Given by a Parent went to Vincente Minnelli for Liza’s sixth given at Ira Gershwin’s house in Beverly Hills,” remembered actress Candice Bergen, who, along with Mia Farrow, was one of Liza May’s childhood playmates. According to Bergen, Vincente made sure that Hollywood’s crowned princess was dressed appropriately for the part: “I remember always asking to go to Liza’s to play dress up because in her closet hung little girl’s dreams. Vincente Minnelli had seen to that. In her dress-up closet glowed tiny satin ball gowns embroidered with seed pearls, wispy white tutus. . . . You could choose between Vivien Leigh’s riding habit from
Gone with the Wind
or Leslie Caron’s ballerina costume from
An American in Paris
.”
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It’s no wonder that Liza considered Vincente her own personal Wizard of Oz. He was the master magician who could transform her into a can-can dancer or a pint-sized Cyd Charisse. While others in the movie colony turned their children over to overburdened nannies so that someone else could do the entertaining, Vincente seemed to revel in the fantasy as much as his daughter did.

Although Liza and her chums were thoroughly enchanted with such exquisite make-believe, actress Nina Foch thought Minnelli had gone too far:

TOWARD THE END OF JUDY GARLAND’S long and often stormy association with MGM, the Hollywood trade papers seemed to be constantly reporting that the increasingly fragile star was being replaced in one elaborate production after another:
The Barkeleys of Broadway
(Ginger Rogers would reteam with
Fred Astaire instead of Judy),
Annie Get Your Gun
(Betty Hutton took over the title role after the studio suspended Garland), and
Royal Wedding
(Judy filled in for an expectant June Allyson until Jane Powell had to fill in for Judy). Though she made it through
Summer Stock
, MGM began to view Garland, once their most valuable asset, as an increasingly costly liability. Whereas Mayer may have buckled and given Judy another chance in a smaller-scale Joe Pasternak production, Dore Schary was apparently not as forgiving. On September 29, 1950, the studio announced “with reluctance and regret” that Judy had requested a release from her Metro contract, and that they had given in “with a view to serving her own best interests.”

A few months later, another noteworthy separation was announced. On December 21, 1950, the world received the news that the marriage of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland appeared to be over. “Climaxing a turbulent two years of career and personal problems, actress Judy Garland announced through the William Morris Agency that she and her director husband, Vincente Minnelli, have separated,” the Associated Press reported.
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Flying in the face of countless rumors, the separation was termed “an amicable arrangement.” In the wake of some of Judy’s very public calamities, press sympathy seemed to lie with Minnelli. “Perhaps Vince was too easy and too gentle with her,” mused Louella Parsons.

Minnelli seemed to agree: “I’d been too sympathetic, too ready to see it her way, when I should have been more assertive,” he wrote. Ever the gentleman, Vincente attempted to end his marriage to Judy on a dignified note: “I was glad she was happy and functioning, and would do nothing to cause her a moment’s concern. Peace and freedom was something we both wanted.”
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Decades after the divorce (which became final in April 1952), Garland’s friend June Allyson was more matter-of-fact about the demise of one of Hollywood’s more unconventional marriages: “It was no surprise that it couldn’t work out. He was wrong for Judy. Totally wrong.”
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AT LEAST ON THE WORK FRONT, things were looking brighter for Minnelli. Arthur Freed was interested in reviving an ambitious project that he had launched back in the ’40s and then abandoned: a musical version of
Huckleberry Finn
. Freed considered Mark Twain’s classic “the best book ever written in America,” and the impressive array of talents the producer had initially lined up for the project said plenty about his level of commitment. From the beginning, there seems to have been a conscious attempt to recapture some of the magic of
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Freed had hired Sally Benson, the author of the original
St. Louis
stories, to transport Twain’s enduring book to
the screen. He had also hired
St. Louis
songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane to compose the score for
Huckleberry Finn
. It was Freed’s hope that the songs Martin and Blane whipped up for Twain’s riverfront waif would be as memorable as the ones they had written for Garland’s lovestruck teenager. Although everything about the project seemed promising, by the mid’ 40s Freed’s plate was brimming over—the producer was readying several elaborate musicals for the screen, including Minnelli’s
The Pirate
. With Freed unable to give
Huckleberry Finn
the attention it needed, the project was temporarily shelved.

Freed started over in the ’50s with a whole new creative team: writer Donald Ogden Stewart, lyricist Yip Harburg, and composer Burton Lane. At the height of the Red Scare era, left-leaning progressives Stewart and Harburg were suddenly deemed unsuitable and ousted. Alan Jay Lerner was then assigned to both book and lyrics. “Alan had a great love for
Huckleberry Finn
,” says Lerner’s assistant Stone Widney. “He thought the book was one of the seminal works in American literature. He really, desperately wanted to get that made and he and Burton Lane wrote about five or six songs.” (They included “I’ll Wait for You by the River” and “The World’s Full O’Suckers.”) “Alan had very high hopes for that project,” Widney added. In fact, Lerner would refer to the material he created for
Huckleberry Finn
as “some of the best stuff I’ve ever written.”
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In early script conferences, it was decided that Metro’s musical version of
Huckleberry Finn
should not attempt to dramatize every episode in Twain’s sprawling saga. Instead it would focus primarily on wily orphan Huck Finn’s adventures with Jim, a runaway slave. But it would also reserve a considerable amount of screen time for a pair of scene-stealing supporting characters, two vagabond gamblers known as the Duke and the Dauphin. These roles would be tailored to the talents of Gene Kelly (also on board as choreographer) and Danny Kaye (on loan out from Samuel Goldwyn). In large part, the project would also be dependent on the star power of Kaye and Kelly to lure moviegoers into theaters.

In March 1951, Minnelli was announced as director. Rehearsals began and Kelly found himself working on
Huckleberry Finn
in the morning and then dashing off to codirect his other important picture in production,
Singin’ in the Rain
, in the afternoon. Things seemed to be progressing smoothly when suddenly the studio pulled the plug. “MGM announced that it will postpone production of
Huckleberry Finn
until next year,” the
Independent Film Journal
reported in October. “This was made necessary because of the impossibility of completing rehearsals and filming in time for Danny Kaye to report back to the Samuel Goldwyn Studios [to begin shooting
Hans
Christian Anderson
] by December 15. Gene Kelly, Kaye’s costar, still has work remaining on his current film,
Singin’ In The Rain
, until Oct. 15th.”
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