On February 2, 1996, a man died peacefully in his sleep at his Beverly Hills home. He was 83 years old. Two strokes had spent the previous two years dismantling the body that had once been the most physically extraordinary instrument in Hollywood. The body that had swung from lampposts in artificial rain, danced on rooftops and ships and city streets, redefined what a man could look like in motion, and what motion itself could mean on film.
The world called him the greatest dancer America ever produced. His films called him charming, accessible, the common man’s hero. His co-stars called him something else. Debbie Reynolds said it felt like assault. Esther Williams called him a jerk. Sid Cariss danced with him and went home bruised. This is the story of the Pittsburgh boy who built himself into a legend and what he destroyed along the way to get there.
Eugene Curran Kelly was born on August 23, 1912 in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The third of five children in a household that was simultaneously warm and demanding in the specific way of workingclass Irish Catholic families of that era. Love expressed through expectation, ambition understood as the proper use of God-given ability, and the understanding that softness was a luxury that people without money could not afford.
His father, James Patrick Kelly, was a phonograph salesman, a man of moderate income, moderate temperament, and a moderate love for sports, particularly the specifically Canadian sports he had brought with him from his birthplace of Peterborough, Ontario. James flooded the backyard every winter to make an ice rink.
Jean skated before he could properly dance. He played ice hockey, football, baseball, and gymnastics with the focused competitiveness of a boy who had decided early that physical excellence was the vocabulary through which the world spoke its highest praise. He wanted to be the shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
He said this so often and with such conviction that the people around him believed he meant it entirely, which he probably did. His mother, Harriet Katherine Curran Kelly, was Irish and German and entirely in charge of the household’s cultural ambitions. She had been an aspiring performer herself before marriage and children redirected her energy, and she had not surrendered those ambitions.
She had transferred them. When Gene was 8 years old, she enrolled him and his brother James in dance classes, an act that required in 1920s Pittsburgh a degree of confidence about what the neighborhood boys would say and what they would do about saying it. They were not gentle about it.
Jean and James were called sisses and were, by Jean’s own later account, continually involved in fist fights with the neighborhood boys, who considered dance an offense against the natural order of masculine Pittsburgh childhood. He quit. He did not dance again until he was 15. What happened between 8 and 15 is the unremarkable growing up of a boy in depression era Pittsburgh school at Sacred Heart.
Then Peabody High, sports dominating everything. The particular grinding anxiety of a family in the early 1930, watching the economic world contract around them. As the depression tightened its hold on the industrial cities that had built themselves on the assumption of permanent growth. When he returned to dance at 15, something had changed.
The fist fights had produced in him not the retreat from physical display that might have been expected, but the opposite, a relationship with his own body that was entirely without self-consciousness, a comfort in physical space that gave his movement a quality that no amount of formal training could manufacture.
He danced the way he played hockey, low to the ground, explosive, grounded in the earth rather than reaching away from it. The body’s weight used rather than denied. That quality, which would define everything he did on film for the next 30 years, came from the ice rinks and the fist fights and the Pittsburgh streets as much as from any studio or classroom.
The depression arrived and Jean Kelly graduated. He had studied economics at the University of Pittsburgh, completing a degree in 1933 with the specific practical ambition of a man who had watched the economy collapse around his family and understood that the arts were a precarious foundation for a life. Unless you built them on something more solid, he planned or told himself he planned to attend law school.
He taught dance instead. The Jean Kelly Studio of dance opened in Pittsburgh in the early 1930. Operating simultaneously in Pittsburgh and in the nearby city of John’stown, Kelly taught children while teaching himself, refining his technique, studying ballet with the focused intensity of a man who has recognized a gap in his training and is determined to close it, developing the choreographic instincts that would eventually make him not just a performer, but one of the most innovative visual artists in the history of the film medium. He performed in vaudeville with his brother Fred. He toured. He saved money. He watched the professional distance between Pittsburgh and the serious theatrical world of New York and calculated with the pragmatic clarity that had always characterized his ambitions what it would take to close it. In 1937, he went to New York
arriving with the specific mixture of confidence and desperation that the city tends to receive well. too much arrogance to be easily discouraged, too much practical necessity to indulge the discouragements that came. The city was not immediately welcoming. He took what work was available, which was small, and he made what impression he could, which was large.
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the particular quality of Kelly’s presence, the physicality, the directness, the complete absence of the effected refinement that classical dance training often imposed on male performers of the era was immediately distinctive in rooms full of people doing the conventional thing. His first significant Broadway break came with a role in William Syan’s The Time of Your Life in 1939 in which he played Harry the Hoofer.
The role was not large and the applause it attracted was not enormous, but it was noticed by people whose noticing mattered. He had shown that he could perform in the serious theatrical context, that the Pittsburgh workingclass energy translated to the stage without losing its essential quality, that audiences responded to his specific presence with something more than polite appreciation.
The role that made everything else possible came in 1940. Pal Joey was a Rogers and Hart musical with a book by John O’Hara and it was by the standards of the Broadway musical theater of its era a genuinely transgressive work. Its central character Joey Evans was a charming, manipulative, morally compromised nightclub entertainer who used people for his own advancement and felt minimal guilt about it.
The character was not a sympathetic anti-hero in the way that the form had previously allowed. He was something more uncomfortable, recognizably charming, recognizably calculating, the kind of man who made audiences feel the specific discomfort of finding an operator attractive. Kelly understood Joey Evans immediately and completely.
He played him with a specificity and a conviction that went beyond craft, a sense of inhabiting the character’s psychology rather than simply executing its external gestures. The show ran for 270 performances. Critics who had been skeptical about a musical built around an unlikable protagonist were largely silenced by the execution.
Jean Kelly’s name appeared in print with a new and more permanent kind of emphasis. Here it is worth noting something about Kelly that his films would later encode and his colleagues would later confirm. The character of Joey Evans was not entirely a departure from the man playing him.
The calculation was real. The charm was real. The willingness to use people and situations in the service of his own advancement was real. managed in ordinary life by the genuine warmth and the genuine talent and the genuine democratic Irish Catholic decency that coexisted with it, but available in moments of professional pressure in ways that the people on the receiving end found difficult to distinguish from its fictional counterpart.
Kelly was not Joey Evans. He was a better man than Joey Evans by a significant margin. But the understanding of Joey Evans that made the performance so precise and so true came from somewhere and that somewhere was interior. David O. Selnik saw pal Joey. He told Kelly afterward that he was a great actor and that the musical nonsense was something he could do for a hobby.
MGM came with a contract. Kelly took it, planning to return to Broadway after fulfilling the one film required. What kept him in Hollywood was what he later described as the kindred creative spirits behind the scenes at MGM. The specific extraordinary concentration of talent that the war years had produced.
The musicians and choreographers and directors and designers who had gathered in Culver City and were collectively building something that had never existed before. He arrived at MGM in 1941. He brought with him from Pittsburgh the ice hockey stance and the fighting posture and the absolute refusal to be anything other than entirely himself.
Hollywood had never seen anyone like him. It would never entirely know what to do with him and he would never entirely know what to do with himself when the dance finally stopped. MGM in 1941 was the most powerful dream factory in the world and its power resided not merely in the money and the talent but in the specific machinery of control that Louis be Mayor had built over two decades of absolute authority.
Stars were manufactured by MGM shaped and maintained and occasionally destroyed by MGM loaned and traded and leveraged like any other asset in a portfolio. The contract players who populated the studios stages were simultaneously its most valuable property and its most managed.
The people whose faces were recognized by every American and whose freedom was circumscribed by the small print of agreements that gave the studio authority over their professional lives, their public appearances, their romantic associations, and anything else that bore on the commercial value of the persona the studio was selling.
Jean Kelly walked into this machine and immediately identified himself as a problem. Not a destructive one, not a malicious one, but the specific kind of problem that institutions encounter when they acquire talent whose vision of what they should be doing is more fully developed and more stubbornly held than the institution’s own.
Kelly had not come to Hollywood to do what Hollywood told him. He had come to do what he had been doing in Pittsburgh and New York, which was creating a new kind of dance, athletic, democratic, grounded in the American vernacular rather than the European classical tradition, telling stories with the body rather than decorating stories the body was incidental to.
His first film, For Me and My Gal, in 1942, co-starring Judy Garland, was not the vehicle for those ambitions. It was a conventional musical set during the First World War, and Kelly navigated it with the professional competence of someone executing a reasonable assignment while keeping the real plans in reserve.
Garland, who was at this point one of the most accomplished performers at the studio, taught him about the specific demands of film performance. The adjustment of scale, the way the camera compresses and transforms what the live stage expands, the technical discipline that film required of performers who had trained on stages where the back row was 30 ft away and everything needed to reach it.
He absorbed her instruction with the student specific humility of someone who recognizes that what is being taught is genuinely necessary. The film that first indicated what Kelly was actually building was Covergirl in 1944 made on loan to Colombia. A dance sequence in Covergirl became the beginning of what Kelly would spend the next decade perfecting.
The use of the film medium specific technical capabilities to create dances that could not exist on a stage that used cinema’s ability to cut and composite and locate action in real physical space as choreographic tools rather than merely recording mechanisms. In a sequence where Kelly danced with his own mirror image, the camera became a collaborator rather than a witness.
And the result was something that demonstrated to anyone watching carefully that this man understood the medium he was working in at a level that most performers never achieved. Louis B Mayor understood Kelly’s commercial value more clearly than he understood Kelly’s artistic ambitions, which is the normal relationship between studio executives and the artists they employ.
What Mayor saw was a box office asset whose specific combination of masculine physicality and musical gift was not duplicated anywhere else in the studios talent pool and was reliably profitable. What Kelly saw was a production apparatus that properly leveraged could support experiments in the integration of dance and film that had never been attempted at scale.
The creative partnership that made the experiments possible was with producer Arthur Frerieded who ran the Freed unit at MGM with the specific authority of a man who understood that the best work emerged from giving talented people the space to do things that couldn’t be predicted or controlled in advance.
Frerieded created a production environment in which Kelly, his frequent collaborator Stanley Donan, musical director Roger Edens, and a shifting constellation of choreographers, cinematographers, and designers could work with an unusual degree of creative freedom. The results were extraordinary.
The costs for the people who worked directly with Kelly in that environment were sometimes considerable. Kelly was a perfectionist in the specific mode of people who have constructed their standards from their own exceptional abilities. They know exactly what the work should look and feel like because they can themselves achieve it and they find it genuinely difficult to accept from others the lesser versions that different levels of talent produce.
He rehearsed with relentless intensity. He worked his casts and his crews to the limits of their physical endurance and sometimes passed them. He expected from everyone around him the same commitment that he made himself which was total. And he expressed his dissatisfaction with less than total commitment in ways that ranged from demanding to demeaning depending on his patience level and the magnitude of the gap between what was happening and what he needed.
His relationship with Fred Estair, the only male dancer of the era whose reputation approached Kelly’s own, was a complex compound of mutual admiration, competitive awareness, and the particular awkwardness of two people who defined themselves in relation to each other without being entirely comfortable with the definition.
They were different in every dimension that mattered. A stair was vertical, elegant, European influenced, formal in bearing and in movement. Kelly was horizontal, athletic, American to the core, earthy where a stair was airy. A stair once said of their relationship that they were a fraternity of two, which was generous and accurate and also true in the specific sense that fraternities involve competition as well as brotherhood. There was an ankle.
In 1948, Kelly was cast opposite Fred Estair in Easter Parade, a pairing that would have been the ultimate collision of the era’s two greatest dancers and a commercial event of considerable magnitude. Kelly was deep in rehearsals when he broke his ankle playing volleyball, the sport he played compulsively at the Beverly Hills house, where he spent his evenings avoiding Hollywood parties.
A stair was persuaded to unretire and take Kelly’s place. The film was a success. A stair received the credit that Kelly had been building toward. Kelly was not gracious about this in private. According to people who knew him, even as he publicly expressed nothing but goodwill about the outcome, the relationship with Stanley Donan was the creative partnership that produced Kelly’s best work and ended bitterly in ways that neither party fully resolved.
They co-directed On the Town in 1949, which was the first Hollywood musical filmed substantially on location, bringing the energy of the actual New York streets into the frame and giving the film a physical vitality that studiobound productions could not replicate. They co-directed singing in the rain in 1952 which is now considered the greatest musical ever made and which was during its production a controlled disaster of interpersonal tension and physical suffering that the finished film does not remotely suggest. The collaboration collapsed under the weight of Kelly’s controlling temperament. Donan, who was a gifted director in his own right and had contributed substantively to both films, was treated by Kelly with a specific condescension that powerful people deploy toward talented collaborators whose contributions they
are not prepared to fully acknowledge. Donan later described the experience of working with Kelly in ways that made clear the professional relationship had extracted a personal cost that took years to process. They had made two of the greatest films in the history of Hollywood together, and they ended the collaboration having damaged something between them that the film’s excellence could not repair.
Kelly’s relationship with MGM was similarly productive and similarly corrosive over the long term. He was valuable to the studio and he knew it. And he used that knowledge with the precision of a man who had spent his 20s in poverty teaching dance in Pittsburgh and was not interested in gratitude as a substitute for leverage.
He pushed for creative control. He fought for his choreographic vision against studio executives who wanted something cheaper and faster and more reassuringly conventional. He won enough of those battles to make the films he made. He lost enough of them to feel the studio’s constraints as a permanent low-level frustration.
What he was building through the 1940 and into the early 1950s was an argument not a theoretical one, but a practical, visible, inarguable demonstration made one film at a time. That dance on film could be something other than theatrical performance recorded by a stationary camera. that the medium and the art form could be integrated at the level of their fundamental principles, producing work that was neither theater nor pure cinema, but a third thing specific to the possibilities that only film provided. An American in Paris in 1951 made the argument definitively. Sing in the rain in 1952 made it permanently. Then the argument was over. The golden age of the Hollywood musical was ending, and the man who had won the argument found himself with very little left to argue about. The scene that defines Jean
Kelly’s legacy was filmed under conditions that illustrate everything about his relationship with his own work and everything about the cost of that work to the people in proximity to it. The singing in the rain title number. Kelly alone on a nighttime street. Lampost umbrella artificial rain. The expression on his face of a man so overwhelmed by love that the weather has become irrelevant.
Took an entire day to shoot. The temperature on set was cold enough to be physically uncomfortable. The water was cold. The rain was artificial and relentless. Kelly was running a fever of 103°. He danced it anyway. He danced it until it was exactly what he needed it to be, which required repeating it enough times that the precision of the timing and the physical freedom of the performance existed simultaneously.
No small achievement because precision and freedom are temperamentally opposed qualities that most performers can achieve only one at a time. Kelly achieved them together and the result is 4 minutes of film that has been watched by more people and inspired more response than almost any other sequence in the history of Hollywood.
The performance is worth examining technically because the technical examination reveals something about what the man was doing that the emotional response to it sometimes obscures. The choreography does not announce itself. It builds incrementally from ordinary movement, an umbrella opened and closed, a foot testing a puddle into sequences of increasing athletic complexity and decreasing apparent effort, so that by the time Kelly is swinging from the lampost in full commitment to the rain, the audience has been walked there so gradually that the arrival feels inevitable rather than extraordinary. The transition from the pedestrian to the ecstatic is the subject of the sequence, and Kelly executes it with the narrative precision of a storyteller who understands exactly what the audience needs to feel at each moment. He was sick for the entire shooting day. Nobody sent him
home. He did not suggest going home. The fever was simply another condition to be managed, like the cold water and the multiple takes and the technical requirements of making the camera see what his imagination required. This was Kelly’s relationship with physical discomfort throughout his career.
It was real and he acknowledged it and he worked through it because the work was more important than the discomfort and stopping was not a thing he could consider without feeling that he had failed at something essential. Debbie Reynolds was 19 years old when she arrived on the set of Singan in the Rain in 1951.
She had no formal dance training. Her background was gymnastics, which provided her with athletic coordination, but not the specific vocabulary that the film’s choreography required. Kelly was 39. He had been dancing professionally for 20 years. The gap between their abilities was not a gap that extra effort could close quickly.
and the production schedule of a major MGM musical did not provide the time for a gradual patient closing of it. What happened in the rehearsal rooms has been described in Reynolds memoir in interviews given over decades in accounts from other people who were present on the production and finally in responses from Kelly himself who at various points in his later life acknowledged that he had not been kind to her.
Kelly came to rehearsals and criticized everything she did and never gave her a word of encouragement. This is Reynolds account repeated consistently across decades and it carries the specific weight of a description offered by a witness who has had 60 years to consider whether it is accurate and has concluded that it is. The Good Morning Number required Reynolds, Kelly, and Donald O’Connor to perform an extended, physically demanding sequence across multiple surfaces and configurations, including a section that involved the performers running up and across walls at angles that required specific physical techniques entirely outside Reynolds training. The number took 15 hours to complete in a single shooting day, running from 8:00 in the morning until 11 at night. Reynold’s feet were bleeding when it was finished. She was put on medical rest for 2 days. Whether Kelly caused her feet to bleed through
unreasonable demands, or whether the filming of a challenging musical number in the Hollywood studio era simply required performers to work through physical discomfort as a standard expectation is a question that his defenders and his critics have argued across the decades since. What is not arguable is the account of the on-screen kiss, the moment when Kelly, during the filming of a romantic sequence, shoved his tongue into her mouth without warning and without consent. Reynolds, by her own account, pushed him away and called for CocaCola and was genuinely shaken. She was 19 years old and had never been kissed that way. She described it in her memoir as feeling like an assault. She wrote that she was stunned that a 39-year-old man would do this to her. Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, has disputed various accounts of his behavior toward Reynolds, noting that Reynolds later thanked him for giving her her career and that production records do not
support the most extreme accounts of physical suffering. This is a defense worth examining because it contains real truth. Reynolds did achieve something on Singan in the rain that she could not have achieved without Kelly’s demanding instruction. She became a professional dancer capable of holding her own in one of the most physically demanding film sequences of the era.
The demanding instruction produced the result. The question that the defense does not answer is whether the result required the specific methods Kelly employed or whether a teacher with the same goals and the same standards could have achieved the same outcome without the verbal abuse and without the unwanted physical contact.
Fred a stair found Reynolds crying under a piano in an adjacent rehearsal studio. He sat with her. He let her watch him rehearse the specific grinding, sweating, repetitive work of a professional dancer finding a sequence that doesn’t yet exist. Turning the idea into the execution through the exhausting mechanism of trial and accumulation and revision.
He told her to watch how hard it was even for someone who had been doing it for 40 years. He told her the hardness was the work and the work was worth doing. His intervention was the act of a man who understood that the cruelty was unnecessary and that the lesson could be taught another way and who demonstrated by his own presence that gentleness and excellence were not contradictions.
Sid Cariss was a professional dancer when she worked with Kelly in the Broadway melody dream sequence in singing in the rain. She was not an inexperienced teenager who could be managed through intimidation. she was technically his equal or close to it and her account of the experience that she went home bruised from rehearsals that the physical demands were at or beyond what professional training prepared her for is the testimony of someone who cannot be dismissed as inexperienced or overly sensitive. Esther Williams, who worked with Kelly on Take Me Out to the Ball Game in 1949, was blunt in her assessment in a way that bypassed the careful diplomatic language that Hollywood colleagues typically deploy when discussing difficult co-workers. She called him a jerk. She described her experience on the film as pure misery. This is not the nuanced assessment of someone trying to balance a complex portrait. It is the
direct statement of a person who worked closely with someone and found the experience genuinely unpleasant and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. The pattern across these accounts, Reynolds, Caris, Williams, and others who were less publicly vocal but privately consistent, is not the portrait of a monster.
It is the portrait of a man whose relationship with excellence was genuine and whose method of pursuing it with other people was inadequate to their humanity. He knew what the work needed. He could not always distinguish between the work’s demands and his own comfort. The work needed high standards and focused rehearsal and the willingness to push past ordinary fatigue.
His comfort required not modifying the impatience and the contempt that arrived when other people did not immediately meet those standards. He could have provided the former without the latter. He often did not. His own awareness of this is documented. He admitted at various points in his later life that he had not been kind to Reynolds.
He admitted it with the specific economy of a man who has thought about something and arrived at an honest assessment and is prepared to state it once without elaboration or extensive apology. The once was real. The elaboration and the apology were not forthcoming because the management of his own emotional accountability was as precise and as controlled as his management of everything else.
An extensive dwelling on private failures was not a thing Jean Kelly permitted himself in public or apparently in private. The film that Singan in the Rain became is not reducible to its production methods. It is a genuinely extraordinary achievement. the most fully realized expression of what Kelly had been arguing cinema could do with dance.
The film that 30 critics and filmmakers and institutions have repeatedly placed at or near the top of rankings of the greatest American films ever made. It is also a film made partly through methods that included verbal abuse of a teenage girl, unwanted sexual contact, and rehearsal conditions that left professional dancers physically injured.
Both things are true and neither cancels the other. And the discomfort of holding them simultaneously is the price of an honest engagement with the actual history of the film. The film that the Academy rewarded before it rewarded Singan in the rain. The film for which Kelly received his only Oscar, an honorary award given in recognition of his versatility and specifically for his achievement in choreography on film.
was made in 1951 and was at the time of its release widely considered his masterpiece. An American in Paris took the premise of an American painter living in post-war Paris and built around it a meditation on art and love and the relationship between the two that culminated in a 17-minute ballet incorporating visual motifs from French impressionist and postimpressionist painters.
Nothing like it had been attempted in the Hollywood musical. Nothing like it has been precisely replicated since. The production was built on Kelly’s specific insistence on the ballet sequence which the studio considered expensive and unnecessary and which Kelly considered the entire point of the film. Arthur Freed backed him. MGM funded it.
The sequence was shot over two weeks on sets constructed to evoke the specific visual worlds of Renoir and Rouseo and to lose Lrek and Utrillo with costumes and color schemes designed to match the painters pallets and movement choreographed to realize and dance the visual vocabularies that the paintings had established in paint.
Vincent Minnelli directed the film which was itself the product of a collaboration between two perfectionists whose visions were complimentary enough to produce extraordinary work and different enough to produce the specific productive friction that great collaborations sometimes require. Minnelli’s visual sophistication and Kelly’s choreographic authority created between them.
a film that moved between the two arts with a fluency that made the transition feel natural rather than forced, as though the dance had always been inside the painting, and the painting had always been pointing toward the dance. Lesie Karen, who played the young French woman whose love complicates Kelly’s American painter, was 17 years old when she was cast.
Kelly had seen her dance in Roland Patise Ballet Company and had insisted on her casting with the specific certainty of a man who can see what he needs when he sees it. The production was her first major film role and her first significant experience of the Hollywood system and the experience of working with Kelly was complex in the particular way that working with Kelly tended to be.
He was demanding of her in the ways he was demanding of everyone. the hours, the physical standards, the expectation of a precision, and a commitment that would have been challenging for a much more experienced performer. He was also by several accounts genuinely caring in the specific paternalistic way that characterized his better moments with younger performers, attentive to her artistic development, invested in her success, capable of the warmth that his champions always described, and that his critics acknowledged existed before the pressure of production activated the less gentle qualities. The film received the Academy Award for best picture for 1951 along with six other Oscars. Kelly received his honorary award, not a competitive nomination, which reflected the Academyy’s uncertainty about how to categorize what he was doing, but a specific recognition
that what he had contributed to the art form required acknowledgement outside the normal categories. The language of the award description was precise. in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director, and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.
The award was lost in a fire in 1983 and replaced at the 1984 ceremony. Kelly received the Oscar at the ceremony and held it and made his brief speech and felt by accounts of people who were present the specific satisfaction of a man whose argument has been formally acknowledged by the institution with the authority to do so.
He had spent 10 years making the argument. The academy had accepted the argument. The next film would be Singing in the Rain, which would eventually be considered greater than An American in Paris by most assessments and which would receive no competitive Oscar nominations for Kelly at all. Not for acting, not for directing, not for choreography.
The honorary Oscar given the previous year was apparently considered sufficient recognition for the work that followed it. Kelly found this outcome genuinely difficult to accept with the equinimity he projected publicly. He had made what many people would come to regard as the finest American film musical in history and the Academy had looked at it and declined to nominated for the awards that other films received as a matter of course.
The snub, if it was a snub, if institutional oversight deserves that charged a word, reflected something about the specific problem that Kelly’s work presented to the industry’s standard categories. What he was doing in singing in the rain was not acting in the conventional sense or directing in the conventional sense or even dancing in the conventional sense.
It was all three things simultaneously integrated into a form that the standard award categories were not designed to recognize and the integration was the point. His private response to the Academyy’s indifference was to make invitation to the dance in 1956. A film consisting entirely of three dance sequences with no dialogue whatsoever.
the most explicit possible argument for dance as a complete expressive language requiring no verbal supplement. The most direct possible demonstration of what he had been arguing since Pittsburgh. The film was admired and seen by almost no one. Hollywood audiences in 1956 were already disengaging from the movie musical as a form.
And a film that offered them three extended dance sequences without the romantic narrative and the comedy and the songs that they associated with the genre was asking them to engage at a level of pure choreographic attention that the mass market had never been prepared to sustain.
The failure of invitation to the dance was a significant blow to Kelly, not commercially. He had never expected it to be commercially successful, but artistically. He had made the purest possible statement of his position, and the world had not engaged with it at the level he had hoped. The medium was moving away from him. Rock and roll was arriving.
The audience for the specific integration of high art and popular entertainment that he had spent his career building was contracting. Television was drawing audiences away from the movie theaters. The great age of the Hollywood musical that he had helped to define was ending before he had finished what he needed to do inside it.
It’s always fair whether the 1955 film he made with Stanley Donan and which would prove to be their final collaboration is in many ways the most interesting film in Kelly’s catalog precisely because it is the least comfortable. The film is about three veterans who reunite 10 years after the war and discover that they have become strangers to each other and to themselves.
that the idealism and the camaraderie of their shared youth has not survived contact with the compromises and disappointments of adult American life. The tone is darker than anything Kelly or Donan had previously attempted in the musical form. Genuinely satirical about American commercialism. Genuinely pessimistic about the possibility of maintaining values intact across time.
genuinely uninterested in the reassuring resolutions that the genre’s conventions required. The film was not wellreceived commercially and was not wellreceived personally between its two makers. Whatever remained of the Kelly Donan working relationship after the tensions of singing in the rain was consumed by the production of its always fair weather and afterward the collaboration was finished.
They did not make another film together. They did not for a long period speak to each other with the ease of people who had once been genuine creative partners. Kelly’s MGM contract ended not long after the studio that had funded his experiments and frustrated his ambitions simultaneously that had given him Arthur Freed and also given him Louis B.
mayor that had been the container within which the decade of his greatest work had been conducted was no longer interested in the musicals that had been its greatest products. The musical was dying. The studio system was dying. The specific confluence of commercial infrastructure and artistic ambition that had produced an American in Paris and singing in the rain was dissolving.
Kelly was 43 years old when his MGM contract ended. He was past his physical prime as a dancer by his own assessment, which was characteristically harsh and characteristically accurate. The body that could execute what the mind choreographed was not going to be available indefinitely.
And he had known that for years and had worked against the knowledge with the focused desperation of a man trying to accomplish a finite quantity of work before the clock ran out. He had accomplished it. The films existed. They were not going to unexist. But the container that had made them possible was gone.
And the question of what came next did not have the kind of answer that the question of what the next film would be had always provided. Betsy Blair met Jean Kelly when she was 15 years old. She arrived early to an audition. She was a teenager from New Jersey trying to find work as a dancer in New York at a time when teenagers from New Jersey found their way to New York by necessity and determination rather than by any organized path and mistook the man who was there when she arrived for a hired hand, someone setting up the space before the choreographer arrived. When she returned the next day, she discovered that the man she had assumed was peripheral was Jean Kelly, who at this point was the choreographer for Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, one of the most celebrated nightclubs in New York and was about to become the biggest star on Broadway. He was 27 years old. He noticed her. She
was beautiful and funny and direct and entirely without the performance of sophistication that New York’s entertainment world tended to produce in aspiring young actresses. Because she was 15 and had not yet had the opportunity to acquire that performance, Kelly’s attraction to younger women was a pattern that preceded Blair and continued after her.
And in this specific instance, the age gap was large enough, 12 years, to raise questions in a later era that the early 1940s did not raise in quite the same way. He was a 27-year-old man of rapidly growing professional authority, pursuing a 15-year-old girl. They married in 1941 when she was 17 and he was 28.
The marriage that followed was conducted under the specific conditions that Gene Kelly’s career created and that his temperament enforced. He was central. She was peripheral. This is not a characterization imposed from outside. It is the account of the marriage that emerges from Blair’s own 2003 memoir, The Memory of All That, written with the honesty of a woman who had processed the experience across 60 years and arrived at a cleareyed assessment of what it had been. She loved him. She was loyal to him. She supported his career with the specific selfless attention that wives of ambitious men of that era were expected to provide. And she watched herself become progressively less visible as he became progressively more so. Her own career, which had promise and genuine talent at its foundation, was managed by Kelly with a paternalism that he experienced as advocacy
and she experienced as control. He pushed producers to cast her. He carried hundreds of photographs of her to meetings and showed them to anyone who would look, saying she was beautiful and gorgeous. He believed in her talent with the specific conviction of a man who has decided something is true and is not interested in evidence to the contrary.
The people he was lobbying generally saw what everyone but Kelly could see. That Betsy Blair was a theater actress, not a film actress. that her specific gifts belong to a medium that was not the one her husband was trying to place her in and that the relationship between their respective talents and their respective careers was not going to produce the symmetry that Kelly appeared to believe was possible.
She was blacklisted in the late 1940 and early 1950 due to her left-wing political activities. She had attended political meetings, supported causes, moved in circles that Huak considered suspect. And while she had never formally joined the Communist Party, the party had apparently decided she was more valuable as the wife of the liberal Jean Kelly than as a member.
Her associations were sufficient for the blacklist’s purposes. The blacklist damaged her career in ways that Kelly’s protection could partially, but not fully buffer. He used his leverage with MGM to insist that she be given the role of the school teacher’s girlfriend in the 1955 film Marty, threatening to stop shooting it’s always fair whether if the studio did not allow her to work despite the blacklist.
The threat worked. She got the role. She received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She won the acting prize at Cans. The nomination briefly made her more visible than Kelly in the public discourse about the films of 1955. And the brief reversal of their usual positions in the cultural conversation appears to have been uncomfortable for Kelly in ways that he did not entirely conceal.
A man who had spent their marriage managing her career and deciding what was best for her professionally was now watching the world assess her performance as superior to anything he had done that year and the assessment was largely correct and the correct assessment was not easy for him to receive graciously. They divorced in 1957.
The marriage had lasted 16 years. Betsy Blair gave interviews in which she said she had nothing bad to say about Jean in any way. That they had been married 16 years and it had come to an end, which is the language that people who have been through a difficult experience and come out the other side with their dignity intact use when they have decided that public detail serves no one. The reticence was not denial.
It was the deliberate withholding of a woman who had written her memoir and put the truth there for anyone who wanted to read it and who declined to repeat the details in every subsequent interview because she had said what she needed to say and saw no reason to keep saying it. her subsequent life, the move to Paris, the relationship with French actor Roger Pigout, the marriage to director Carol Rise, the long and satisfying career in European films suggests a woman who had found away from Kelly and away from Hollywood the specific kind of life that the particular conditions of the first marriage had not provided. She died in London in 2009 at 85, having outlived Kelly by 13 years. Her obituaries noted her Oscar nomination and her long career. They also noted the first marriage because the first marriage was the context without which her career and
her politics and her subsequent choices could not be fully understood. the specific dynamic that had characterized the marriage to Betsy Blair. The controlling paternalism, the belief that his judgment about her life and career was more reliable than her own, the specific condescension of a powerful man toward a woman he genuinely loved, but whose autonomy he could not quite accommodate, did not disappear with the marriage.
It was a quality of Kelly’s character that existed independently of any particular relationship and that shaped his professional interactions with women as well as his personal ones. His professional relationships with the women he worked with most closely were characterized by the same quality. Jean Coin, who became his second wife in 1960, had been his dance assistant for years before the marriage.
a professional relationship in which she was literally in a subordinate position to him, executing his vision, serving his choreographic requirements, available to him as a professional resource before becoming available to him as a domestic partner. The transformation of the professional relationship into the romantic one did not change the fundamental hierarchy. It formalized it.
Coin had danced in many of his films in uncredited background roles, had assisted on multiple productions, had been so thoroughly incorporated into his professional world that the distinction between her artistic identity and her role as Kelly’s collaborator had been effectively dissolved long before the marriage.
She had been briefly married to Stanley Donan before Kelly. A circumstance that added a specific layer of complication to both the Kelly Coin relationship and the Kelly Donan collaboration given that the woman Kelly eventually married was the ex-wife of the man with whom he was making his greatest films. The interpersonal geometry of that situation, two men who were simultaneously creative partners and competitive equals, one of whom would eventually marry the other’s former wife, was not simple and was not handled simply by any of the parties involved. Kelly and Jean Coin married in 1960. They had two children, Timothy and Bridget. The marriage appears to have been the most genuinely equal and genuinely happy domestic arrangement of Kelly’s three marriages. A partnership between two people who had worked together for years and understood each other’s professional world and shared
the specific language that dance provides to people who have spent their lives in it. Gene Coin was not a peripheral figure in Kelly’s life whose career he managed and whose visibility he unconsciously resented. She was a full participant in his professional world. A woman with her own dancing history and her own understanding of the demands of the work.
And the equality of that understanding seems to have produced a domestic relationship that more closely resembled what Kelly was capable of than what either his first marriage or his later behavior on set suggested. She died of leukemia on May 10, 1973. She was 50 years old. She and Kelly had been married for 13 years and had built what the people who knew them described as a genuine and tender partnership.
And her death left Kelly with two young children. Timothy was 12, Bridget was 10, and the specific devastation of a man who had been given relatively late in life the experience of genuine domestic happiness and had then lost it to a disease that offered no negotiation.
Four years after Gene Coin’s death, Kelly was offered the leading role opposite Lisa Minnelli in Cabaret, a role that would have returned him to the serious artistic consideration that his career had not received since the early 1950s. He turned it down because the filming schedule would have required too much time away from Timothy and Bridget.
This decision, consistently reported in accounts of his post gene years, is one of the few moments in Kelly’s record that is straightforwardly admirable without qualification. A man who could have made a professional choice that served his legacy and chose instead to be present for his children.
He had not always made that choice. In those years, in the wake of Jean’s death, he made it. His political commitments throughout the Hollywood years were genuine and were expressed at a personal cost that his public persona sometimes obscured. He was a Democrat by conviction and by temperament.
A supporter of progressive causes at a time when Hollywood progressivism was dangerous. Married to a woman who was blacklisted for her political activities and whose blacklisting he fought against using every tool his professional leverage provided. He was not a communist and was never credibly accused of being one. But his willingness to use his position to protect his wife’s right to hold left-wing views put him in a position of calculated risk during the Huick years that he accepted without apparent anxiety. He believed that dance was democratic, that movement was a language available to everyone, that the physical expression of emotion and story was not the property of the trained elite, but something that the common man both deserved and could access. He called his approach dance for the common man. Meaning it not as condescension but as aspiration. A belief that the highest achievements of the form should be
available to the widest possible audience. That the barrier between high art and popular entertainment was artificial and should be dissolved. He was right about this and his films demonstrated the rightness of it in ways that the theoretical argument alone could not. The 17-minute ballet in an American in Paris is not inaccessible to audiences who have never been inside a ballet company’s rehearsal room.
The singing in the rain sequence is not the property of dance scholars. They work for everyone, which was always the point. What the democratic commitment to the common man did not extend to in the daily operations of his professional and personal life was the people immediately around him.
The common man Kelly was committed to was an abstraction, an audience of millions, a democratic ideal, the broad public that he believed deserved access to the best work that the art form could produce, the specific individuals who were present in his actual life, the teenage girls he dated and married.
The inexperienced actresses he reduced to tears in rehearsal rooms. The wives whose careers he managed with the same paternalism he applied to everything else were the recipients of something considerably less democratic than the philosophical commitment he articulated in interviews and embodied in his films.
This is not a simple contradiction. It is the ordinary complicated depressing reality of a man whose ideals and whose behavior existed in different registers of his personality and did not always communicate with each other. He genuinely believed in equality. He genuinely failed to practice it in the most intimate context of his daily life. Both things were true.
Neither thing is unusual in the history of idealistic men. The word that appears most consistently in accounts of Jean Kelly’s rehearsal methods is tyrant. Not bully, which implies sadism, and not perfectionist, which implies only the raising of standards beyond what is comfortable, but tyrant, which implies the exercise of absolute power without accountability, the imposition of will through the elimination of alternatives. Kelly did not ask.
He did not suggest. He did not offer the collaboration of equals to the people who worked under his direction in the rehearsal studios of MGM and on the stages of Broadway before that. He told them what the work required and he expected them to produce it. And when they did not produce it with the speed and the precision and the commitment that he needed, he expressed his dissatisfaction in ways that went beyond professional correction.
The rehearsal room was his absolute domain. This was true from the earliest days of his choreographic career in New York when he was directing the diamond horseshoes dancers through routines that he had developed with the focus and the impatience of a man who can see what the dance needs to be and finds every deviation from that vision a personal offense.
It was true throughout the MGM years when he was co-directing films and serving as his own choreographer and performing the work he was simultaneously designing which created a specific kind of productive tension in which the choreographer’s standards and the performer’s experience existed within a single body and produced a man who was simultaneously the most demanding person in the room and the most technically capable.
The rehearsal day for a Kelly production began early and ended late and proceeded at a pace that the people who survived it described consistently as extraordinary. He worked himself and everyone else at the same level of intensity, which was his consistent defense of his methods. He asked nothing of others that he did not ask of himself.
A defense that contains real truth and also misses the point entirely. He asked nothing of others that he did not ask of himself because he was Jean Kelly and the others were not because his body was the instrument he had been developing for 30 years and their bodies were their bodies.
Because the physical demands that were appropriate for the most gifted dancer of his generation were not therefore appropriate for the 19-year-old girl from New Jersey who had never danced professionally and had been given 3 months to learn what Kelly and Donald O’Conor had been doing for decades. Donald O’ Conor, who had been doing it for decades, was also pushed to his limits on Singing in the Rain.
The Make M Laugh Sequence, a solo comedy number that required Okconor to run up walls, fall repeatedly, and execute a series of physically violent comedy routines, was filmed in a single day, at the end of which O’ Conor was so physically depleted that he was hospitalized. He had been smoking four packs of cigarettes a day throughout the production.
The combination of the smoking, the physical demands, and the filming schedule produced a hospitalization that lasted several days. When he recovered, the footage was found to be technically flawed, and he had to film the entire sequence again. Kelly, by accounts of people on the production, did not express particular guilt about this outcome.
The sequence needed to be filmed and then needed to be filmed again because the first attempt was technically compromised and that was the sequence and those were the requirements and the requirements were not going to be revised because one of the performers needed hospitalization. The work needed what the work needed.
The people the work needed it from were expected to provide it. That was the arrangement. His directorial relationship with Stanley Donan had been complicated from the beginning of their collaboration by the specific problem of whose vision was being executed and whose name was on the result.
They had agreed to co-direct, which in practice meant that their respective contributions were inextricably combined in the films they made together, and also that the credit for those contributions was a source of permanent unresolved tension between two men who each believed with some justification that their own contribution was more substantial than the others accounting acknowledged.
Donan was the technical director, the man who understood the camera, who managed the visual grammar of the films, who translated Kelly’s choreographic visions into the specific cinematic language that the films required. Without Donan’s technical knowledge, Kelly’s choreographic instincts could not have been realized in the specific ways that made the films great.
Without Kelly’s choreographic instincts, Donan’s technical knowledge would have produced films of a fundamentally different character. They needed each other in the specific way that great creative partnerships always need both parties. And the need was the source of both the work’s excellence and the partnership’s ultimate dissolution.
Because the need in Kelly’s psychology was not something he was prepared to acknowledge at the level it deserved. He controlled the rehearsal room and he controlled the creative direction and he controlled the relationship with the studio and he controlled as fully as he could manage the final product.
Donan controlled the camera work and the technical execution and his own growing conviction that the collaboration was not crediting him accurately. The tension between Kelly’s controlling temperament and Donan’s increasing assertion of his own creative identity produced friction throughout singing in the rain that did not appear in the finished film and produced its always fair weather.
A film whose subject, three men who discover that their former closeness has been replaced by competitive disappointment, was a barely concealed meditation on the Kelly Donan relationship itself. The film was made by two people who were simultaneously making a film about the difficulty of maintaining genuine creative friendship and demonstrating through the making of it that they were no longer capable of the thing they were filming.
Donan said later that working with Kelly on that production was the most professionally difficult experience of his career. Kelly with the characteristic economy of a man who does not dwell on private failures said less. Outside the specific Kelly Donan dynamic, the broader pattern of Kelly’s behavior in the studio was documented by enough independent sources to constitute a clear picture.
He had relationships with the younger women in his productions that combined genuine mentorship with a paternalism that was difficult to separate from control. He was brilliant with the male dancers and the trained professionals who could meet his technical standards, warm and engaged and genuinely invested in the quality of their work.
He was demanding in ways that crossed into cruelty with performers who could not immediately meet those standards, particularly women, particularly young ones. The Hollywood studio system of the 1940s and 1950 did not provide mechanisms for addressing this behavior. There were no HR departments.
There were no complaint processes. There was no language in the specific cultural vocabulary of the era for describing what a powerful man did to a young woman in a rehearsal room as anything other than the natural exercise of his professional authority. The women who experienced it either processed it privately as Sid Cariss processed the bruising she took home from rehearsals or they described it in the diplomatic language of professional life or they waited decades and described it plainly in memoirs as Reynolds did in unsinkable. Kelly in his later years was not entirely unaware of the gap between his methods and the standards that subsequent decades would apply to them. He acknowledged occasionally and carefully that he had not always been kind. The acknowledgment was real and limited. Real in the sense that it reflected a genuine awareness, limited
in the sense that it did not translate into any sustained public reckoning or extended apology or attempt to account for the specific people who had been on the receiving end of the methods he was acknowledging as sometimes unkind. The artistic justification that Kelly himself and his defenders always deployed was results-based.
Look at what Debbie Reynolds achieved on singing in the rain. Look at what the films produced. Look at the permanent contribution to the art form and judge the methods by the outcomes. This argument has a kind of brutal logic. The outcomes were extraordinary. The methods produced them. Therefore, the methods were justified.
The counterargument is equally logical and considerably more uncomfortable. Extraordinary outcomes have been produced throughout history by methods that cause genuine harm to the people subjected to them and the existence of extraordinary outcomes does not retroactively make the harm acceptable.
Reynolds became an accomplished dancer. She also described being kissed without consent by a man two decades older who was in a position of absolute professional authority over her. And the one experience does not justify or negate the other. Both are true. Both are part of the record. The record is the man.
What the record also contains. Running through it alongside the demanding and the sometimes cruel is genuine evidence of artistic generosity and genuine evidence of human warmth in context where neither was professionally required. Kelly campaigned for Betsy Blair’s right to work during the blacklist and backed the campaign with real professional risk.
He turned down cabaret to be present for his children after Gene died. He invested years of his creative life in arguments about the dignity of dance as a popular art form because he genuinely believed that the common man deserved access to the best work the form could produce. He mentored dozens of dancers across decades with a dedication that produced performers who acknowledged his influence without qualification.
The totality of the man does not resolve into either the saint that MGM’s publicity machine presented or the tyrant that the rehearsal room accounts described. It resolves into something more characteristically human, a person of considerable gifts and genuine ideals whose methods of pursuing both were shaped by a character that contained simultaneously more warmth and more cruelty than either his admirers or his critics found entirely convenient to acknowledge.
The rain sequence endures because the truth of it, the specific physical fully committed truth of a man expressing an emotion through movement with such completeness that the expression becomes the thing itself is not diminished by knowledge of the fever or the cold water or the difficult man behind it.
Art contains its maker but is not reducible to its maker. The lampost and the umbrella and the puddles and the extraordinary joy of a human body moving through rain with absolute freedom. Those things exist independently now, belonging to everyone who has ever seen them. Carrying forward the argument that Jean Kelly spent his career making about what the body and the camera and the musical form could achieve together.
He was right about the argument. He was sometimes wrong about the people. Both truths belong to the record. The Hollywood musical died slowly and then suddenly the way that cultural forms always die by gradual audience drift that the industry monitors with increasing anxiety until the anxiety becomes certainty and the production budgets reflect the certainty.
The late 1950 were the years of the slow drift. The early 1960s were the years of the certainty. By the time the certainty arrived, Jean Kelly’s great decade of work at MGM was seven or eight years in the past, and the form that had made him the most important figure in American popular dance was no longer commercially viable at the scale that had made the experiments possible.
He was not idol during the years of the musical’s decline. He directed Jigot in 1962 with Jackie Gleason, a film that was not a musical and did not require him to dance and that demonstrated his directorial ability independent of the choreographic context that had always defined his directorial work.
He directed Hello Dolly in 1969 with Barbara Strayand, a massive, expensive, commercially uncertain studio musical that represented one of the last attempts by the Hollywood system to produce the kind of largecale integrated musical entertainment that had been MGM signature in Kelly’s prime years.
The film was expensive, the production was difficult, and the cultural moment for its arrival had already passed. His relationship with Stracend on Hello Dolly was by the accounts that filtered out of the production the familiar Kelly dynamic applied to a performer of even greater professional confidence than he was accustomed to encountering.
Strayend was not Debbie Reynolds. She was not going to hide under a piano and cry when her director expressed dissatisfaction. She had her own vision of what the work required, her own understanding of her own performance, and her own considerable professional leverage that was at least equivalent to Kelly’s in the context of that specific production.
The collision of two controlling, perfectionist, creatively doineering personalities produced the specific kind of difficult production that results when neither party is prepared to yield to the other’s authority. He danced publicly for the last time in a significant professional context in the early 1970.
And the experience of watching those performances available in archival footage is one of the peculiar sadnesses that the documentation of great physical ability creates. He was still beautiful. The understanding was still there. The knowledge of where the body needed to be and why.
the specific quality of musical engagement that had always made his movement seem like a physical form of listening to the music rather than a performance laid over it. What was not there or not fully there was the capacity of the body in its prime to execute without visible effort what the mind could still perfectly conceive. He knew this.
He had known it was coming for 20 years. The knowing did not make the arrival easier. The years between Gene Coiny’s death in 1973 and his third marriage in 1990 were the years that Kelly’s biographers have the least material to work with. Because they were the years in which he withdrew most thoroughly from the public life that had provided the documentary record.
He raised Timothy and Bridget with the specific focused attention of a widowed father who had already missed one childhood and was not going to miss another. He taught. He served on arts boards. He made occasional television appearances in which the warmth and the intelligence were unchanged. And the physical Kelly was visibly diminished.
And the gap between the two was its own kind of testimony about time and bodies, and the cruelty of careers that require the body to perform at a level it cannot sustain indefinitely. He did not do what Bing Crosby’s sons did. He did not drink himself into a crisis. He did not disappear into bitterness about the ending of the great years.
He turned toward the children and toward the students and toward whatever version of the work was available to him at each stage of the years after Gene. And he moved through those years with the specific forward-facing quality that had always characterized his movement. No looking back, eyes on whatever was ahead.
The body oriented toward the next thing even when the next thing was less than what the last thing had been. The strokes that began in 1994 were the specific cruelty that dancers face in ways that other artists do not. A poet who has a stroke can still think about poetry. A painter who has a stroke retains their relationship with color and composition even if the hand that executes it is impaired.
A dancer who has a stroke loses the body that is the instrument, the medium, the subject, and the expressive apparatus simultaneously. Kelly had spent 80 years inhabiting a body that had been capable of things that most bodies were not, and the strokes began the systematic removal of those capabilities with the efficiency of a process that does not negotiate.
The first stroke in 1994 left him partially incapacitated. He continued to live at the Beverly Hills house, the oldest house in the area, where he had spent evenings playing volleyball and chess for 40 years, where he had raised his children and conducted his friendships in the private way that he had always preferred to the Hollywood social circuit.
The house was his world in those final years in a more literal sense than it had ever been before because the strokes had narrowed the world to what the house contained. Patricia Ward Kelly, the writer he had married in 1990 when he was 77 and she was 30, was with him throughout. The marriage had produced the particular kind of surprised happiness that late marriages sometimes produce in people who have stopped expecting happiness in any domestic form.
two people who found each other at an age when finding someone at all was itself unexpected and who built something genuine out of the unexpected finding. Patricia’s devotion to Kelly’s legacy, visible in her continued public advocacy for his work long after his death, suggests that what existed between them was real in the ways that matter.
The second stroke in 1995 was more severe. Kelly’s last public appearance had been in That’s Entertainment Roman 3 in 1994, a MGM retrospective that brought together the survivors of the studios golden years to celebrate what had been made there. He appeared and was visibly diminished from the man. the footage behind him showed.
And the disparity between the man on screen in 1951 and the man on stage in 1994 was the kind of disparity that age and illness produce in physical performers and that audiences find difficult to witness because it requires them to acknowledge something they would rather not acknowledge about time. His last words on film delivered in That’s Entertainment Roman 3 were a quotation from the songwriter Irving Berlin.
The song is ended, but the melody lingers on. He chose those words deliberately because Jean Kelly did not do anything without deliberateness. The song is ended. The melody lingers on. It was as precise and as honest an account of his own situation as the man who had spent his career expressing truth through movement rather than through language was likely to produce in language and it was accurate.
He died on February 2, 1996 at 8:15 in the morning in his sleep with Patricia beside him. He was 83 years old. The cause of death was complications from the two strokes. He was cremated. His ashes were scattered at sea in the Pacific Ocean. There was no funeral and no memorial service, which was his wish and which was consistent with the privacy that had always characterized his actual life as distinct from his public one.
The tributes arrived in the days that followed from the people who had worked with him, known him, been shaped by him. Debbie Reynolds, who had spent 40 years describing the rehearsal room cruelty and the unwanted kiss and the physical demands that had pushed her body past its limits, also said that she was grateful to him, that singin in the rain had given her her career, that what he had demanded of her had produced something she was proud of.
This coexistence of genuine grievance and genuine gratitude is not a contradiction that requires resolution. It is the honest account of a complicated experience with a complicated man held in the full complexity that simple narratives of hero or villain always flatten into something less true. Fred a stair had died in 1987 9 years before Kelly.
The fraternity of two had preceded Kelly into whatever comes after and Kelly had spent 9 years as the surviving member of the only peer relationship of his professional life. A stair’s death had not been simple for Kelly, whose relationship with the other man had contained genuine admiration and genuine competitive awareness in proportions that shifted across the decades.
When asked to compare their styles, Kelly had given the famous answer. A stare was the aristocrat and Kelly was the proletarian. A stare went formal and Kelly went rough. A stare moved up and Kelly moved down. The analysis was accurate and was offered with the generosity of a man who could afford to be generous about someone he had outlasted.
His three children, Carrie from the marriage to Betsy Blair, Timothy and Bridget from the marriage to Jean Coin, survived him. Carrie Kelly Navik became a psychoanalyst. Timothy and Bridget, who had grown up after Jean’s death in the Beverly Hills house with a father who had chosen presence over professional opportunity, had the specific advantage and the specific challenge of being raised by a man who was entirely present in a way that his first child had not experienced and who was entirely present as Jean Kelly, which is not an uncomplicated inheritance. The rain sequence from singing in the rain is shown somewhere in the world every day. This is not a metaphor or an approximation. It is a statistical near certainty given the global reach of streaming platforms and the film’s permanent inclusion in the cannons that universities and film schools and cultural institutions
maintain. The sequence has been reproduced in advertisements, in tribute performances, in parodies that demonstrate their affection through imitation, in the work of choreographers and directors and performers across six decades who learned from it the specific lesson that it teaches. That movement can express the inexpressable that the body in full commitment to an emotional state becomes the most honest language available to human beings.
The lesson is one that Kelly spent his career teaching. And the irony of teaching it through a medium that documents his physical prime while the person who was that physical prime is gone is the specific irony of cinema as an art form. The footage is permanent. The man is not.
What the footage shows is a version of Jean Kelly that no longer existed by the time he watched it played back at the Entertainment Retrospectives. A body in its early 40s performing at the peak of its capacity in the rain. Alive to the specific pleasure of movement that is its own justification, expressing through every gesture and every splash and every swing on the lampost a quality of joy that is the more affecting for knowing what its production required and what it cost.
The assessment of Kelly’s legacy which has been conducted steadily since his death and with increasing sophistication as the accounts from his co-workers became more widely known and the scholarship on his actual methods became more precise has arrived at complexity that his MGmira public image did not allow and that his more extreme critics also simplify.
He was not simply the charming man in the rain. He was not simply the tyrant in the rehearsal room. He was both of those things and the other things the accounts describe. The devoted father after Gene died. The political risktaker who protected his blacklisted wife. The teacher who produced generations of dancers.
The artist who changed what dance on film could be. The change to what dance on film could be is his most durable contribution and the one that cannot be qualified by anything that followed the initial achievement. Before Kelly, the movie musical recorded dance. After Kelly, the movie musical could use the specific capacities of cinema, the camera’s movement, the cutting, the ability to place the dancing body in actual physical spaces rather than on studio stages as choreographic elements. The dance and the film became the same thing rather than a dance being filmed. And that integration transformed the art form permanently. He had argued for this transformation from his earliest days at MGM when he was making Covergirl on loan to Colombia and dancing with his own mirror image in a sequence that could not have been staged in any theater. He had argued for it
through the decade of his greatest work through on the town and the pirate and covergirl and an American in Paris and singing in the rain and invitation to the dance. He had lost the argument commercially in the late 1950 when audiences stopped coming to musicals. But the loss was commercial rather than artistic.
The arguments he made in those films remained visible and remained convincing. his relationship with the art form in his final decades after the great MGM years after Gene after the strokes began their systematic work was the relationship of a man who has made his statement and is waiting to see what the world does with it.
He did not withdraw from the art form’s ongoing conversation. He appeared on television specials. He accepted honors. He taught when teaching was requested of him. He watched what was happening in dance and in film with the attention of a man who had built part of what was there and was curious about what the builders who came after him were constructing on the foundation. He watched Michael Jackson.
This is worth noting specifically because Michael Jackson acknowledged Jean Kelly as an influence with a directness and a specificity that placed him in the explicit lineage of what Kelly had built. Jackson’s moonwalk, his athletic physicality, the specific quality of his movement that combined classical training with street vernacular and used the camera as a choreographic partner in his videos.
These are recognizably descended from the argument Kelly made in his MGM films. And Jackson knew it and said so. Kelly was pleased in the specific way that people are pleased when the thing they built turns out to have gone somewhere they didn’t entirely predict. He watched the revival of the American stage musical in the 1980 and 1990s, watching shows like a chorus line and later the mega musical era examine and expand what the form could do.
And he had thoughts about those developments that he expressed occasionally and carefully acknowledging the achievement while maintaining the specific critical distance of a man who had done the original work and had particular standards about what the original work was for. Dance for the common man was his argument.
The common man’s access to the highest achievements of the form was the standard. When the form turned towards spectacle without the democratic conviction that had motivated his own work, he was not enthusiastic, though he expressed his lack of enthusiasm diplomatically. His physical decline in the final years was not publicly displayed in the way that some performers of his generation displayed their decline, seeking the cameras as consolation for the loss of what the cameras had once recorded, substituting visibility for the vitality that visibility had once represented. He had never been a performer who required the camera’s attention as validation. He had always treated the camera as a tool rather than an audience, a means of capturing and extending what the body was doing rather than a source of approval for the body’s doing of it. When the body could no longer do what
the camera had recorded, his relationship with the camera changed accordingly. He appeared when he had something to offer. He declined when he did not and he made the distinction with the same precise self assessment that had always characterized his understanding of his own work. His legacy is not simple and the attempts to make it simple have always produced accounts that are less true than the complicated version.
He was the greatest dancer Hollywood has ever produced, which is a statement that contains very little ambiguity despite the comparisons that are always made with a stare and with the stage careers of the Broadway choreographers who influenced and were influenced by him. He transformed what a movie musical could be, which is a statement that the history of the form confirms with every subsequent work that builds on what he built.
He was by multiple accounts from people who were in his rehearsal rooms, a difficult man whose methods of pursuing excellence included a willingness to use power over vulnerable people in ways that a different kind of excellence would not have required. He loved his children and was present for them after Gene died in a way that he had not been for Carrie during the MGM years.
He believed in democratic access to art with a conviction that his films embodied and his daily practice did not always reflect. All of these things are the man. None of them alone is the man. What persists is the rain, the lampost and the umbrella and the artificial water coming down in a studio in Culver City in 1952 while a man with a fever danced until he had what he needed.
And then the four minutes and 25 seconds of film that emerged from that day and the specific quality of joy that the four minutes contain. The specific quality that cannot be manufactured by technical skill alone. That requires the genuine commitment of a person who finds in the physical expression of an emotion the most honest and the most complete form of truth available to a human being.
Kelly found that truth consistently in film after film across a decade of extraordinary work. He found it in the rain and in the Paris Dream Ballet and in the ships of anchors Oig and in the New York streets of On the Town. He found it under physical conditions that would have stopped most people and at the cost of his own body and sometimes at the cost of the bodies and the dignity of the people working alongside him.
The body that found it is gone. The films in which it found it are permanent. The history between those two facts, the specific, complicated, sometimes admirable, sometimes disturbing history of the man who inhabited the body and made the films is available to anyone who wants to look at it honestly.
And looking at it honestly is not the same as looking at it harshly. It is simply looking at the whole thing and declining to look away from the parts that are harder to see. He died at 8:15 in the morning. His ashes are in the Pacific. The rain sequence plays somewhere today. The joy in it is real.
