As a longtime fan of Gene Kelly, I have had connections to him for much of my life, but nothing was as much pure joy as chatting with the woman who knew him best, his widow and biographer, Patricia Ward Kelly. She is keeping his legacy alive in her one Woman show. Earlier this year, was the US debut of a musical tribute with the Seattle Pops (part of the Seattle Symphony).
In this unique, live one-woman show that has been described as “mesmerizing,” Patricia Ward Kelly — his wife and biographer — gives us the story. Taking audiences behind the scenes, she presents an intimate portrait of this innovative artist who gave us such iconic works as An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.
Using brilliant film clips, previously unreleased audio recordings, personal keepsakes and stories he shared with her over their decade together, Patricia Kelly guides us on an unforgettable journey into the life and heart of the man who changed the look of dance on film and became one of the world’s most beloved stars.
I chatted with Patricia last spring through Zoom.
MKS: Well, first of all, how did you and Gene meet?
PK: Oh, well …that’s a story that I find even hard to believe these days. …I was originally a writer on a television special about the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. And the host and narrator was supposed to be a man named Gregory Peck. And I had seen To Kill a Mockingbird, so I knew who that was.
…At the last minute they fired the writers, and they brought me on as a writer, and then they said that this person named Gene Kelly was going to be the host/narrator. I honestly had no idea who that was. I didn’t know if it was a man or a woman. And then the producer and her assistant were talking about this thing called Singing in the Rain that was to die for. I just played along, because I had no idea what they were talking about. I was a really nerdy Herman Melville scholar. … I just didn’t grow up going to the movies.
…So we just happened to meet as I was going into the ladies’ room and he was coming out of the men’s room at midnight at the Air and Space Museum, and he was just this gorgeous, elegant gentleman, and I was just a very… I had this long, thick brown hair and man’s jacket, and clogs and thick wool socks on and no makeup.
…The women on the set were so determined to get a marriage proposal out of him that week that they were just scratching at the door to get at him. So the director, who was this lovely guy from England, decided he would put me in the room with Gene to keep all of the other women at bay. So it was just this funny, funny meeting. I was tossed in this room with him, and I think he was kind of puzzled, and I think also kind of amused at the fact that I didn’t know who he was.
…My pet study in graduate school was etymology… and that just happened to be Gene’s [interest] as well. So we ended up playing word games and quoting poetry back and forth. And it was magical…
You know, he spoke French, he spoke Italian, he read Latin, he spoke Yiddish. He wrote poetry, he had memorized so much poetry. He was a true Renaissance man. And I, by that point, was completely enchanted. And he’s drop-dead gorgeous.
MKS: That’s the most important thing.
PK: Actually it was the words. It was interesting. It was really the words, because that’s what we really bonded over, because he had such an effortless use of language, and love of language… You know how sometimes you meet people and they’re trying to show you how much they know, and it’s so off-putting?… [Gene had] just a delight in language, a delight in words, and sounds of words. Almost like a childlike delight. …It was so inviting.
But by the end of the week, I still didn’t know he was famous — I was just enchanted. …He kissed me out in front of the museum, got in a limousine, and drove away. He had given me a little piece of paper with his phone number on it, and I gave him my phone number. And the woman next to me said, “That guy’s really famous.” And I said, “Oh, really?” And she said, “Yeah, go down to the video store and ask for Gene Kelly.” And I did.
…That weekend I just binge-watched Gene Kelly films. …I just couldn’t believe that I had missed such a vital part of the 20th century. But in a weird way, I think it was the way to get to know him, because I didn’t come to him then with any preconceived notions. He was just this guy that I met.
…About six months later, he called and asked me to come out to California. He said he had some writing projects. And I came out, and he asked if I would stay and write his memoir with him. I said yes, thinking I would probably stay a couple weeks to record him. (But we ended up getting married five years into that.)
So I recorded him almost every day for over ten years, and that’s the material I have. And that’s the material I used for the show, the symphonic show.
…We would sit on the couch at night and listen to music. …For me, it was an education in American popular song… learning about Cole Porter and Gershwin, and Rogers & Hart and Lerner & Lowe. And Gene would sing to me at night. That was often how he would reveal some of the most intimate parts of his life …through song or lyrics.
…We would listen to Frank Sinatra and …Judy Garland and Nat King Cole. And he described the arrangements, and why an arrangement was good [or] poor, how an arrangement worked. And I spoke with him about… his work. [I asked], what comes first for you? Is it the music? …Or does the dance come first?
And generally, for Gene, it was the dance that came first. He conceived it and …worked with [a music] arranger who would help him craft [and] sculpt the music, so that it would fit the dance — except in the case of things like the American in Paris ballet, where the music was, you know, dictated much more [by the dance].
So it was just this phenomenal education. And also, …you don’t meet many people like Gene. You just don’t… I don’t see people with that breadth of knowledge and curiosity, that passion, that devotion. He was really very unique in so many ways.
MKS: The first time that I saw Gene Kelly when he was doing the Singing in the Rain number. I felt that Gene was way above Fred Astaire, because of the fact that he was a choreographer and he was a director and behind the scenes, while Fred was basically a dancer who worked with choreographers. I think that was the difference between the two.
PK: Gene would appreciate that you noticed that, because a lot of people don’t. Gene gets lopped off of a lot of the lists of great directors and great choreographers. In fact, he preceded Jerome Robbins, he preceded Bobby Fosse. You don’t get a Fosse or a Robbins without a Kelly, but people don’t see him in that position.
I think the fact that he’s so prominent up on that screen that [people] just don’t… think about the fact that he’s behind the scenes, crafting what you’re seeing. And I think with the distinction with Astaire is really [about] who changed things in a way. …Gene came along and he saw things and he changed the way dance looked on screen. He was determined to do that. …Ironically, people always assumed that Gene was influenced by Astaire, but in fact it was the other way around.
Yeah, Gene had never even seen Astaire when he created his own particular style. …Gene got Astaire out of retirement when Gene’s friend broke Gene’s ankle playing volleyball in the backyard. Gene had already choreographed most of Easter Parade. So they got Fred Astaire out of retirement — so you see Fred dancing to Gene Kelly’s choreography. And that then changed Astaire’s trajectory. You see him [then] do things like The Band Wagon.
And so the influence is really in reverse. I mean, they had great mutual respect — don’t get me wrong. It was a very mutual regard.
…They were very different characters, certainly. Gene was the very educated one. Fred had kind of grown up in a trunk. …He was on the road with his family and his sister, whereas Gene had gone to college and was an economics major. …[Gene] saw the rich people dancing on polished floors in [bowties] and white tails, and he just thought, “This is not the people that I know. This is not who I am.” …He wanted to break with that. He saw that as a …continuation of European ballroom dancing. He wanted to create an American style of dance… a break from the European that really came out of the Depression and his personal experience.
MKS: He had started on Broadway doing Pal Joey and so forth, and then he went to Hollywood. Did he ever want to go back to doing Broadway?
PK: In fact he had it in his contract that he would definitely go back. He never intended to stay in Hollywood. So it wasn’t until Cover Girl, when he was loaned out and he began to experiment with the use of the camera, that …he decided he was going to stay in Hollywood and …in his words, lick that thing that he called the one-eyed monster, the camera.
…So he experimented with things like blending live action and animation with Jerry the Mouse and various things. And then [in] , he’s dollying and panning and [using] double exposure in Technicolor, which was so radical in 1944. I mean, nowadays with a computer, you just do it once… [Back] then, you do [did[ it twice, but you go in and drape the set in black velvet and recreate it in the dark.
…You notice he’s always moving toward the camera. There’s always a kinetic sense of energy …The camera’s moving as well, but he’s also moving… He always said, the higher he jumped, the more kinetic energy you would have in the sense of giving [the film] a third dimension.
…In the American in Paris ballet, for example, you have the use of light and color to give a sense of that. I don’t think you ever look at Gene and think, “Wow, he looks really flat. That looks flat.” I think he tricks your mind.
…All this he just learned and he studied, and he was just constantly, constantly innovating, constantly thinking. His mind never stopped. It was just a hundred miles an hour all the time.
MKS: Not to mention the fact that he looked really good in that white body suit in American in Paris.
PK: He got a lot of mail about that one, and the shorts in The Pirate. And still there are websites devoted to that… Think about it: it’s 70, …it’ll be 72 years old this year, but he looks so contemporary. I think that’s one of the things that is so lucky about Gene is that …he’s not really dated. His movement is current. It’s still what everybody goes to.
If you look at any of the shows…, if you look at Strictly Come Dancing, or even — there was an ice skater in Finland a couple nights ago, and he did “Singing in the Rain,” and [Gene’s style of] movement just keeps going on. He hasn’t really been supplanted, I think.
…He always said that …the hardest thing was to create something that was both contemporary and timeless. And I think today we have contemporary down, but I don’t know how much of this we’ll be watching in 70 years. I don’t know how many of these things people will watch again and again and again and again each year.
I mean, in lock-down [during] COVID, Gene was in the top-ten list of the movies to watch …Singing in the Rain, sometimes Brigadoon, sometimes Summer Stock, sometimes American in Paris. I think his movies provided a kind of joy that people desperately needed. And for all ages.
That’s the other thing. Where do you find movies that a two-year-old can love as much as a 102-year-old? And both men and women. …That’s one of the things I say about my …symphonic show: there’s no demographic. …It’s a really wonderful thing to have a two- or three-year-old sitting there, and you have a 102-year-old, and they’re laughing at the same things, and crying at the same things. It’s really an extraordinary experience.
MKS: It took me so long to actually finally see his last film with MGM, which was Les Girls. I noticed something really, really groundbreaking there. This was 1957, and he had backup dancers. And they were all women of color. That is monumental and groundbreaking for 1957.
PK: He was groundbreaking with dancing with the Nicolas Brothers in Pirate. He was groundbreaking in his television special, in New York, New York. He’s dancing with the beautiful African American dancer in the Museum of Modern Art.
…He was at the forefront of trying to break down barriers. He was one of the people who …kind of got onboard with Paul Robeson [regarding] the anti-lynching laws in the ’40s. I wrote a piece about that. Fortunately they finally passed an anti-lynching law — it only took how many decades?
But he really was truly a guy who looked out for the underdog… I’m always hearing from people in the crews that he would pay attention to what everyone’s job was… just some beautiful stories. And those are some of the things I incorporate in the symphonic show.
But yeah, no, he was ahead of his time in everything. I mean he was really ahead of his time in his thinking, and he had a real tenderness in him, a real sensitivity. And I think sometimes that gets lost. Everybody thinks of the athleticism, but there was a real tenderness in him. He was a true romantic. I mean, you could see that in everything he does.
MKS: Of course, that brings me to Xanadu.
PK: …They had to do lots and lots of begging to try to get Gene to do the movie …Well, he liked the idea of the movie initially… because he actually knew “Kubla Kahn,” he actually knew the poem. And he thought it could be quite interesting, this notion of the gods. He had done something similar in his own ballet with the Paris Opera.
The problem was that when he got there, there was no script, there was no… Gene said it was the only time nobody knew what they were doing. Olivia Newton-John has said this too. …For Gene, who’d grown up in the Depression, there were two things that were completely [anathema] to him: one was wasting time, and the other was wasting money.
…I think he was angry with the way that the roller skating was cut, so that …sometimes it looks like it might be a double, where[as] it’s actually Gene doing all the roller skating.
The number with Olivia was not in the original movie. …When they put it out for preview, everybody said, “Where’s the number with Gene and Olivia Newton-John?” They had neglected to include one. So that’s when they tried to get Gene back, and he refused. He wouldn’t even take their phone calls. …But finally he agreed to come back and do it on one condition: that it was a closed set. And the director and the producers were nowhere near it.
So he choreographed it, and they just shot it and [it was] the cinematographer, the camera operator, Oliva, and Gene. It’s a beautiful number. It’s one of the hardest for me to watch, because he looks exactly like he did when I met him. So it’s more meaningful [to me] than Singing in the Rain… The way he moves, the way he just gets out of a chair and gracefully goes across the carpet. That’s Gene walking across our living room.
So it’s a very powerful piece. And Olivia was so gracious about Gene, and about his joy in working with her, and her fear of working with him.
MKS: When I interviewed Olivia back in 2016, I had asked her, “Who did you most enjoy dancing with? John Travolta or Gene Kelly?” She said that she couldn’t choose; she said both, because one was different than the other, but she really, really enjoyed being with Gene.
PK: He was so gentle. He guided her through it, I think. And you really see, it’s a perfect example of how he choreographed for the non-dancer. I mean, she was not an expert dancer. And so he always choreographed for the inexperienced person… Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Olivia Newton-John. …His thing was: you make them look terrific. It was never this notion that he would make himself shine and make other people look bad. …He was always: you elevate yourself by elevating everyone around you. He had a great generosity of spirit.
I read some accounts that suggest that’s not true, — that’s just simply not true at all, because he really did see it [that] it was not that he was a star and everybody else was something else. It was like: it took this whole team to bring it up: the composers, the musicians, the arrangers, the Betty Comdens and Adolf Greenes, who write something as witty as “Singing in the Rain” or “It’s Always Fair Weather.” So, yeah, I think the generosity of spirit is important.
MKS: Xanadu is an incredible tribute to Gene because it has so many of his trademarks, from animation to fantasy. Everything about it is just totally his.
PK: I’ve never really thought of it that way. I’ve attended so many Outfests and everything. I’ve done the 20th anniversary and the 30th, …and I’m always astounded that so many people love it. But I think, like you, people grew up on it …then they went, “Wait, who is this guy?” And then they went back and watched other things. So if it’s a way in to Gene[‘s work], then I’m okay with it.
See Gene Kelly: The Legacy at Benaroya Hall on December 15 at 8pm. Go to seattlesymphony.org for Tix.
