Get Happy (36 page)

Honey there was and honey there is; but there is also much more. What Freed and Minnelli had been alone in seeing was that their picture did not need a traditional plot, that the most wrenching dramas are those that involve the conflict of emotions. No plot in
Meet Me in St. Louis?
It has the most basic plot of all: the fight for survival, the struggle of the Smith family to preserve its happy, almost blessed way of life. In
The Wizard of Oz
Dorothy had to battle murderous apple trees, flying monkeys and a wicked witch before she could return home. The Smiths
are
home, and they want to stay there, stopping time in its one perfect moment, the months leading up to the St. Louis World’s Fair. There is no villain but the calendar, time itself, relentless and implacable.

It is that sense of evanescence that speaks to the subconscious, giving the film a poignancy that is as sharp now as it was in 1944, that year of war and dislocation, when home, and the permanence and security associated with it, were all millions of people thought about. “If a picture doesn’t haunt you a little after you’ve seen it, it hasn’t meant much,” Minnelli was to say, and by his definition, which is as good a measurement as any of a picture’s enduring value,
Meet Me in St. Louis
means quite a lot. Audiences thought so, anyway, and the film’s receipts soon
surpassed those of any previous M-G-M release. No further proof was needed: Freed and Minnelli had not only succeeded, they had triumphed. They had been right, and everybody else had been wrong. One of the first to admit error was the star. “Arthur,” Judy said after an early preview, “remind me not to tell you what kind of pictures to make.”

O
f all the curious events that had occurred on the set
of Meet Me in St. Louis
, the most curious was this: the star and the director had forgotten their antagonism long enough to fall in love. For several weeks they kept the happy news to themselves. Judy was uncharacteristically silent, Minnelli was characteristically inscrutable, and the transition from war to peace was so slow and subtle that even the keen-eyed Ralph Blane, who had followed every movement of Judy’s previous pas de deux, was surprised when he learned about what he called their “tootsie wootsie.”

Judy’s heart probably started to melt a little when she watched the daily rushes, for Minnelli, who had caused her so much pain and self-doubt, was doing what no other director had ever done: he was making her look beautiful. Not just pretty, or handsome, or any of the other adjectives that are attached to a merely attractive woman; but beautiful, without conditions or qualifications. Some of the credit had to go to her new makeup woman, Dorothy Ponedel, who rounded out Judy’s thin lower lip and
used the tricks of her trade to call attention to her dark and expressive eyes; some credit, too, had to go to Irene Sharaff, who designed costumes that disguised her short neck and somewhat odd figure. But Minnelli, who made sure that every shot was not only flattering, but tenderly embracing, was the architect of her new look, and Judy knew it. As far back as she could remember, she had wanted to look beautiful. Now, thanks to him, she did.

As their relationship began to defrost, she sometimes joined Minnelli and his assistant director, Al Jennings, along with Jennings’s wife, Juanita, for dinner at a nearby studio hangout, then returned with them to watch the rushes. There was no hint of romance during those dinners, however, and sparks did not start to fly until a mutual friend, the dancer Don Loper, decided to play matchmaker and arranged a dinner on neutral territory, away from Culver City and its workaday associations. The evening was such a success that dinner together became a habit, just the three of them and Loper’s date. So it continued until the day Loper phoned Minnelli to say he was sick; dinner was off. When Minnelli—or Vincente, as Judy now called him—relayed the bad news to Judy, he discovered that she was not disappointed at all: there was nothing, she replied with a chuckle, to prevent them from having dinner by themselves. Her logic was inescapable, and from then on she and Vincente usually dined alone, as Loper had apparently intended all along.

It was at that point that people began to notice. For all its worldly glamour, Metro was no different from any other nosy village; it feasted on gossip, tidbits of which were passed from set to set, lot to lot, with astonishing speed. By then Judy and Vincente, openly billing and cooing at parties, did not care who knew. Their tootsie-wootsieing did not stop with sweet talk at parties, and sometime in the spring of 1944, a few weeks after
Meet Me in St. Louis
finished shooting, they started living together. To the astonishment of everyone but themselves, they were a couple.

One thing at least they had in common: childhood memories of life on the lowest rungs of show business, of falling asleep to the sound of applause
rather than lullabies. Vincente’s father, the son of an Italian revolutionary, was a conductor; his mother, whose own family was French, was an actress; and they met, sometime around 1900, in a small Midwestern theater, as Frank and Ethel Gumm were to do a decade or so later. In 1902 Vincente’s father and uncle formed the Minnelli Brothers Tent Theater, which, with Vincente’s mother, the new Mrs. Minnelli, as its star, toured rural Ohio for the next two decades, bringing drama, or melodrama, to such places as Marion and Sandusky, Zanesville, Massillon and Chillicothe. Born in February 1903, Vincente, like Judy, was not much more than a baby when he was first pushed in front of an audience. But Vincente, unlike Judy, was not a stage natural, and he spent much of his childhood at a boarding school or with his grandparents in little Delaware, Ohio, where Grandfather Minnelli had settled down to teach music. And little Delaware, which had a population of about nine thousand, as conventional a town as a town could be, was where Vincente grew up.

By his own description, Vincente was a lonely boy. Awkward, painfully shy and more interested in drawing and painting than in the games that occupied most other boys, Vincente—or Lester, as he was known in those days—spent much of his time in his backyard studio, a converted chicken coop. A year after graduating from high school, he took his paintbrushes to Chicago, which, strange as it might seem, provided the best possible schooling for a future movie director. Vincente’s first job, dressing windows at Marshall Field, the giant department store, taught him how to arrange a scene in three dimensions. His second, assisting a society photographer, taught him composition and perspective. His third, designing costumes for the stage shows of Chicago’s biggest theater chain, Balaban and Katz, instructed him in the dramatic uses of color, a knowledge he was to exploit so effectively in
Meet Me in St. Louis
.

After a decade in the Second City, Vincente took his now mature skills to New York, where he ascended the theatrical ladder even more swiftly. Shy Vincente may have been, but he was also ambitious, determined and sometimes even ruthless in getting what he wanted. “If there is anything I want to be known for,” he declared, “it is for smart, sophisticated productions.” Within three years he was presenting such
smart productions at the new Radio City Music Hall; within four years, on Broadway.

Arthur Freed lured him to California in 1940 with what may have been an unprecedented contract. Vincente was required to do nothing but wander the Metro lot until he learned how movie musicals were made. After two years of watching and occasionally offering suggestions, he was given his first directing assignment—
Cabin in the Sky
, an all-black musical fantasy starring Lena Horne and Ethel Waters. Shot on a low budget,
Cabin in the Sky
nonetheless bears the distinctive Minnelli stamp: an easy, fluid camera style; the use of songs to help tell the story, much as dialogue does; and a fanatical eye for small details that, looked at separately, escape notice, but, added together, create an atmosphere of rock-hard, altogether convincing authenticity.
Cabin in the Sky
was both a critical and a financial success, and those, like Judy, who were later puzzled when Vincente was chosen to direct
Meet Me in St. Louis
had simply not been paying attention.

Youth needs models, inspirations and ideals, and, as a young man in Chicago, Vincente had chosen his: James McNeill Whistler, the expatriate American painter who had dazzled and often outraged nineteenth-century London and Paris with his individual style and pugnacious wit. “Here was a man—and an artist—with whom I could identify,” Vincente was to write in his memoirs, and it was then, in Chicago, that he discarded his provincial past and reinvented himself, as best he could, as a latter-day Whistler. By the time he reached New York, the transformation was complete. He was no longer Lester Minnelli, a timid boy from Ohio who liked to draw: he was Vincente Minnelli—artist, aesthete and man of mode.

If Whistler, who wore yellow gloves and brandished a long, wandlike cane, was a dandy, then so was Vincente, whose Metro uniform, modified for a later age and a more congenial climate, consisted of immaculate pearl-gray slacks and short-sleeved yellow shirts. If Whistler violated contemporary taste by painting the interiors of his houses in simple and arresting colors, then so did Vincente, who decorated one room of his California house in stark black and white—black walls,
white furniture. If Whistler enjoyed a stylish life, then so did Vincente, who hired a Filipino houseman to see to it that things ran smoothly inside his dark and elegant walls.

He could wear smart clothes, he could live in smart rooms and he could be pampered by a smart-looking houseman, but Vincente could not copy Whistler in every respect. Whistler, for instance, was as famous for his sharp tongue as he was for his art. Vincente, by contrast, could scarcely make a point, let alone a witticism. Whistler was handsome; Vincente was not. With a receding chin, an aggressive nose and drooping eyes, he was so downright ugly, in fact, that his co-workers made jokes about him, some claiming he looked like a dinosaur, others a goldfish. Making his physical defects even more noticeable was a collection—a virtual rogues’ gallery—of unconscious tics, an occasional twitch in the right eye and a continuous pursing of the mouth. “To tell the truth, I couldn’t really look at him,” said Kathryn Grayson, who, for a decade or more, was Metro’s reigning classical soprano. “He had this affliction: he was totally unattractive.”

But Vincente had still another characteristic that was, to many people at Metro, even more repellent. He was obviously, even ostentatiously effeminate, and conduct that had gone unremarked, if not ignored, in New York caused constant comment—and sometimes a disbelieving hush—in Culver City. One incident, from the early forties, can stand for many. Visiting the set of
Kathleen
, the only picture Shirley Temple was ever to make at Metro, he wore more makeup than most of the female stars: mascara, eye shadow, lipstick and a covering base—everything but false eyelashes. If he had been the ghost of Irving Thalberg, his arrival could not have caused more amazement. “There was an absolute silence on the set,” recalled Dorothy Raye, one of
Kathleen’s
dancers. “I mean
silence!
Nobody had ever appeared looking like that. None of us could think of what to say.”