Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen (5 page)

A black-wigged Verdon as a specialty dancer gets paid by King David of Israel (Gregory Peck) as Uriah (Kieron Moore) watches in a lobby card for
David and Bathsheba
(1951).

Cole and Verdon’s next Fox assignment was the musical
Meet Me After the Show
(1951). Directed by Richard Sale, the film was in production from December 14, 1950, to February 21, 1951, with the dance sequences shot from March 8 to April 1951. The film was a remake of the comedy
He Married His Wife
(1940) with new songs by Jule Styne and Leo Robin. The story centered on the relationship between Broadway star Delilah Lee (Betty Grable) and her husband, producer-director Jeffrey Ames (Macdonald Carey). Verdon was again uncredited and appears in three scenes, with the finale of “I Feel Like Dancing” having her credited with her real name in the movie’s show program. The credit also separates her from the dancers for the number, since it reads “Delilah Lee and Dancers with Gwen Verdon.”

For the “Bettin’ on a Man” number she is said to be the woman in silhouette with the man (who is said to be Cole) also in silhouette. Verdon wears a long-sleeved black dress with a black head scarf, black fishnet stockings and black high heels. She and Cole appear on an upper level and dance wearing long horsetails, while Betty Grable sings the song on the lower level by a garishly styled piano and a chorus of clapping male dancers. During the number, as Verdon and Cole move to simulate a race, Grable and the chorus look out with racing binoculars. She is Sapho in the “No Talent Joe” number, one of two back-up dancers for Grable. The women both sing and speak the introduction as they hold an urn on their shoulders with their right hands and gold fronds in their left. They wear black diaphanous low-cut long-sleeved and short-skirted dresses, seamed stockings, gold shoes and necklaces and headdresses, and sculptured hairdos.

For “I Feel Like Dancing” Verdon accompanies Grable as one of two female dancers with a male chorus who are all presented as children in dress-up. The two women are dressed like men, in trousers and horizontal-striped sweaters and with their hair covered by feathered hats, which adds androgyny to the moment when they dance together like a romantic couple and hug. Verdon also speaks in the number when she yells, “Beat me. Tyrone Power beat me.” One’s eye goes more to Verdon than Grable when the two dance together. The first half of the number presents Grable and Verdon as slum kids holding off the marauding boys who wear buckets on their heads like helmets and wield cap pistols. Scaring the boys away, the girls find boxing gloves and a piece of material in a garbage can. Verdon is more tomboyish and, taking the gloves, wants to fight whereas Grable prefers the material and strikes toreador poses. Then they climb a tree, hitch a ride across the backlot on a clothesline, and land on a rooftop.

The film was released in New York on August 15, 1951, and in Los Angeles on August 21, 1951, with the tagline “It’s America’s Big Date for a Great Time…!” It was praised by
Variety
and by Tony Thomas and Aubrey Solomon in
The Films of 20th Century Fox
. The film became a box office hit.

The team of Cole and Verdon was back for the Fox musical
The
I Don’t Care Girl
(1953). Directed by Lloyd Bacon, the film was shot from October to November 1951 with additional dance sequences shot in December and then in February and March 1952. The long time between the film being in production and its release suggests that Fox lacked confidence in it, and reportedly half of the footage originally shot was scrapped. The screenplay by Walter Bullock is about the vaudeville performer Eva Tanquay (Mitzi Gaynor) who was nicknamed “The I Don’t Care Girl” after the song she made famous. Verdon, again uncredited, only appears in the “Beale Street Blues” number as the lead back-up dancer. She has a long red hairpiece, a long pink ruffled dress and pink fedora, and uses a red sash which she also wears as a shawl. Verdon opens the number, and after Eva enters, takes her parasol and moves around her as Eva sings. The number ends with a split level effect. Verdon is on the top level with boy dancers, and Eva and Larry are on the floor level, and the back-up dancers do an identical dance to those on the top. There is a story that either Gaynor or Fox didn’t want Verdon to dance the same step next to Gaynor. Cole overcame this problem with the use of the split-level when both women do the same step.

Betty Grable (left) and Verdon dressed in male drag for the “I Feel Like Dancing” number in
Meet Me After the Show
(1951).

Sources differ as to when the film was released. Some say it was December 24, 1952; others January 14, 1953. The tagline was “The Wild and Wonderful Musical About the BAD Girl of Show Business!” It was lambasted by
Variety
, and received a mixed reaction from Tony Thomas and Aubrey Solomon in
The Films of 20th Century Fox
. The film was not a box office hit.

Verdon was next seen on screen, uncredited, in the Fox comedy
Dreamboat
(1952) without Cole being attached to the film. Directed by Claude Binyon, it was in production from December 27, 1951, to February 2, 1952, with additional sequences shot in late March and early May 1952. Clifton Webb stars as Underhill College English literature professor, Thornton Sayre, who used to be the silent movie actor Bruce Blair, with the nickname of “Dream Boat.” Threatened with losing his job, Thornton goes to New York to stop his movies from being broadcast on the television show of his former acting partner, Gloria Marlowe (Ginger Rogers).

Verdon appears only once as the female dancer with two male dancers in long shot in a television commercial for the prune juice Prunecta. She wears a long black sequined strapless dress with long black gloves. Regrettably, the dancers are shown within the frame of the television screen as the point of view of the watchers. Verdon is given a medium close-up for the end of the commercial, holding a glass of the product.

The film was released in New York on July 25, 1952, and in Los Angeles on August 22, 1952, with the tagline “Fresh! Wonderful! And Loaded with Laughter!” It received a mixed review by Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
but was praised by Tony Thomas and Aubrey Solomon in
The Films of 20th Century Fox
and Laura Wagner in
Anne Francis: The Life and Career
. The film was a box office disappointment. In her autobiography
Ginger: My Story
, Rogers writes that Verdon helped to choreograph the harem dance that she did in one of the silent movies. There is no choreographer credited for the film.

It is reported that Verdon did post-production work on the MGM musical comedy
Singin’ in the Rain
(1952) which took place from January 1952 with the film being released in New York on March 27 and in Los Angeles on April 9. Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyne were the uncredited assistant dance directors to Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. Verdon is said to have aided Haney and Coyne in dubbing the sound of Kelly’s taps and splashing noises for the film’s famous title sequence which was shot on July 17 and 18, 1951. The ladies had to stand ankle-deep in a drum full of water to match the soggy on-screen action. Kelly had gone to Germany in January 1952 to make his next film, the romantic thriller
The Devil Makes Three
, so he was apparently unavailable for the post-synching. Verdon said that it was Haney who dubbed Kelly and she did the swashing of the water. In her 1977 television interview with Dick Cavett, she said that she and Haney put on Kelly’s tap shoes after the film was made and dubbed his taps as they danced in pans of water. She said that Haney called her in to help because she was a friend, and also because the job was fun. While doing it, the women laughed hysterically. However other sources claim that Kelly did dub all his own taps and that extra sloshing sounds were dubbed in after them, although there is no evidence of this activity in the MGM archives. The claim that recordings were made in ankle-deep water has also been questioned since it is thought that it is impossible for anyone to make a recording of taps in these conditions.

Cole and Verdon reunited at MGM for their next film, the musical
The Merry Widow
(1952), which was in production from September 12 to December 1951, and directed by Curtis Bernhardt. MGM had previously made the film in 1925 as a drama directed by Erich von Stroheim and 1934 as a musical directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. The musical was based on the German operetta of the same title with music by Franz Lehar and book and lyrics by Victor Leon and Leo Stein. The new version starred Lana Turner in the title role. The screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig changed the plot so that now the widow is the American Crystal Radek, whose fortune is needed by the country of Marshovia to pay their national debt. Verdon appears in only one scene, uncredited, as one of the two leading cancan dancers in the chorus at Maxim’s (the other dancer is Ellen Ray). She wears a large black hat, a black slip and tights and pink underwear and holds a scarf as she dances. Verdon sings and screams for the number, and also winks and points to the camera after she bends over backwards. She also speaks after the number is over, calling out to Danilo simultaneously with the other lead dancer.

Verdon (right) as one of the lead chorus girls doing the cancan at Maxim’s in
 
The Merry Widow
(1952).

Released on September 5, 1952,
The Merry Widow
was praised by Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
and in Jeanine Basinger’s book on Lana Turner, but not by John Douglas Eames in his book
The MGM Story
. A box office hit, it was nominated for the Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction and Set Decoration Academy Awards.

Back at Fox, Cole and Verdon reunited with Betty Grable for the musical comedy
The Farmer Takes a Wife
(1953), a remake of Fox’s 1935 romantic comedy of the same name. The new film was directed by Henry Levin and in production from May 28 to August 5, 1952, with additional sequences shot in December 1952. The screenplay was by Walter Bullock, Sally Benson and Joseph Fields, and based on a play of the same name by Frank B. Elser and Marc Connelly and the novel
Rome Haul
by Walter D. Edmonds. The story is set in the shipping town of Rome, New York, in 1850 and centers on the boat of Jotham Klore (John Carroll),
The Old Hickory
, his cook Molly Larkins (Grable), and their new driver Dan Harrow (Dale Robertson).

Verdon appeared in two scenes. She is in the opening scene and has two lines of dialogue as she asks questions of Molly. She also appears for the number “We’re in Business,” first in a white dress with red trim as part of the chorus who falls into the canal. Later she reappears to sing and dance with Grable. Both women wear plaid shirts, potato sacks dresses, white pantaloons, black stockings, black caps and metal plates as shoes. They dance on the deck of a boat as “native women from Utica” and bang more metal plates in their hands. Cole has the number continue in the water, as Dan throws semi-naked boys over his shoulder, and Grable and Verdon jump into the canal.