Mark Griffin (4 page)

As Paul turned three and a half and his disabilities were becoming more apparent, Mina discovered that she was expecting again. The baby would arrive in February. In the theater, the winter months were known as the “lean season,” as engagements were harder to come by, especially for traveling players. Sure enough, as they awaited the arrival of their fifth child, Mina and V.C. found themselves engaged by different theater companies. Mina continued performing—as a visibly pregnant ingénue—until the latest possible moment. When she could hold out no longer, she retreated to her mother’s house. On February 28, 1903, Lester Minnelli made his debut in Chicago. Years later, there would be an enormously successful return engagement.

AS SOON AS LESTER WAS OLD ENOUGH, his parents worked him into the act. “I played the children’s parts whenever there were any to play,” he recalled. It was Lester’s unforgettable performance in the Minnelli Brothers’ production of the creaky melodrama
East Lynne
that sealed his fate as an actor. Five-year-old Lester was playing “Little Willie,” who dies in his mother’s arms during the play’s overwrought climax. Mina, in character as the distraught mother, clutched her son’s “lifeless” body and exclaimed, “Gone! And never called me mother!” Mistaking his mother’s dramatically charged portrayal for real life anguish, Lester suddenly sprang back to life and did his best to reassure a thoroughly embarrassed Mina that he was still among the living. “No Mama. I’m not dead. I was
acting
,” Lester announced as the audience roared.
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“Acting never appealed to him,” V. C. Minnelli would later say of his son’s early retirement from the spotlight. “He was a quiet boy and [he] would
sit in the dressing tent and watch the men make up. Before the season was over, the cast would not go on without Vincente’s o.k. of their make-up. If he said, ‘Eyebrows too black’ or ‘Not enough red,’ the change was made to suit him.”
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At a very young age, Lester began displaying some legitimate artistic talent. It wasn’t long before his doodles morphed into designs. As Minnelli would recall years later, “The fact that my father and uncle owned the show made it possible for me, at an early age, to make suggestions for settings and costumes. . . . My proudest moment was when my mother wore a costume that was made up of about 75 percent from my rough design and suggestions. It was this early triumph which probably influenced my entire career.”
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WHEN THE MINNELLIS WEREN’T OUT bringing culture to the provinces or getting on or off a Pullman car, their home base (and winter headquarters) was Delaware, Ohio. Smack dab in the center of the state, Delaware was the birthplace of the nineteenth president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the home of Ohio Wesleyan University.

“When the Minnellis came to Delaware, they didn’t have very much money and of course, they were trying to find a place to stay,” recalls family friend Anne Dinovo.
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“So, my father offered that they could stay in a house he had on Park Avenue until they found their own place. Well, they never found a place. They lived in the house my father owned—free of charge—for many, many years. . . . They had a lot of courage but very little money. But the whole world was a stage to that family. . . . The father was always dressed like the jack of diamonds and I don’t think he had a dime in his pocket, poor guy.”
^f

When Lester was five, the
Journal-Herald of Delaware
announced the Minnelli Brothers Farewell Tour: “Regardless of the so-called hard times . . . Minnelli Bros. are making great preparations for the coming season.” V.C. did his best to put a positive spin on what appeared to be his swan song as an impresario, telling a local reporter, “If hard work, excellence and ‘the goods’ count, that should make 1908 our banner year.”
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The reports of the company’s imminent demise proved to be premature. Although the Minnelli Brothers managed to press on for a number of years, there were indeed hard times ahead.

A fire destroyed their entire operation at one point, necessitating a $10,000 reconstruction effort. Neighbors in Delaware also remembered that the Mighty Dramatic Company was sidelined by the Great Flood of 1913. Although the Minnellis survived these setbacks, even they were no match for a new-fangled invention that was proving to be more of a legitimate threat than a passing fancy. As Vincente remembered it, “Motion pictures had finally done the theatre in. The movies started to be good and more or less killed the tent show business.”
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Decades later, when he received his Best Director Oscar for
Gigi
, Vincente Minnelli was all too aware of the supreme irony: The same film industry that had awarded him its highest honor had put his father out of business.

For V.C., folding up the tent in many ways represented the collapse of the dream. “Father wasn’t happy about the development,”
¹⁷
Lester would say of the derailment of the elder Minnelli’s career on the road, though Mina seemed to relish the fact that her touring days were finally over. She would embrace her latest role as full-time mother and housewife with the kind of wholehearted enthusiasm that had been missing from some of her tent theater appearances. Besides, the Minnellis weren’t out of the business altogether. They would eventually open their own studio in Delaware and teach young ladies, such as Dorothy Florance, how to dance: “Mrs. Minnelli had a cane that she walked with and boy, she’d crack your legs with that cane if your pointe work wasn’t proper,” Florance recalled. “A nice little lady but a very strict teacher.”
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AS LESTER GREW UP, there was agreement from all corners that he was anything but your typical son of Delaware. From an early age, the budding artist found it necessary to piece together an impenetrable private universe from whatever bits of the fantastic he managed to find in the everyday. “I had learned to recycle my experiences in real life and apply them to my creative endeavors,” Minnelli said.
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If his days in Delaware happened to be uneventful or unkind, Lester’s glittering inner world was always waiting. Real life—with its Catholic guilt, strict discipline, and feelings that never seemed to fit—could always give way to an alternate universe, one that was fantastic, exotic, and drenched in color. A daydreamer without equal, he’d imagine himself carousing in Rudyard Kipling’s barracks or sailing aboard a pirate ship bound for the Spanish Main. Or he might spend an afternoon sketching in his father’s chicken coop. Despite the cackling and rustling of feathers, the relative solitude and sanctuary he found there formed what Minnelli would later refer to as “my
first studio.” Or, when he felt more sociable, he might gather a few friends together and stage a not-so-amateur theatrical in a neighbor’s barn, which he had decorated with a skull and crossbones.

For the most part, V.C. seemed to encourage his son’s creativity, though Lester’s artistic flair may have also churned up some unsettled feelings in the elder Minnelli. “My father treated me with a grave courtesy, perhaps regretful that his son was so socially timid,” Vincente would recall decades later.
²⁰
Lester’s timidity was one thing, though far more disconcerting to V.C. was his son’s undeniable effeminacy. In a pre-politically correct era, having fathered one child who had been branded “feeble-minded” and another who seemed unusually sensitive must have been discouraging to a man as proud as V. C. Minnelli.

Having survived tough crowds and unforgiving critics, V.C. was somewhat unyielding where Lester’s creative endeavors were concerned. “It’s good . . . but it isn’t up to your usual standard,” V.C. would remark when presented with his son’s latest chicken-coop masterpiece. The seeds of Vincente Minnelli’s legendary perfectionism were sown in Delaware. Taking his cue from V.C., Lester would confront his own reflection in the mirror: “Here you are, nine years old, and what have you done? You’re nothing . . . nothing but a failure.”
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As there would always be an emotional distance between father and son, and Paul was unable to keep up with his younger brother’s spectacular flights of fancy, Lester bonded with his Uncle Frank. “He was flashier than Dad, and more current,” Lester would say of the flamboyant uncle who introduced him to the bright lights beyond Delaware through loaned copies of
Life
magazine or
Snappy Stories
.
²²
Frank regaled his nephew with backstage anecdotes, and Lester would inundate his uncle with questions about everything pertaining to show business.

Lester’s strict Catholic upbringing and the years he’d spent touring in the company of adults had matured him beyond his years, making him seem unusually serious for a youngster. “He was very nice, very quiet and very reserved for a child,” recalls Margaret Brawley, who attended St. Mary’s Parochial School with Lester. Brawley remembers that during the holidays, the nuns would encourage Lester to put his unique talents to good use. “Vincente used to come around—he was probably in the sixth or seventh grade—and he’d go up to the blackboard and draw pictures. . . . We weren’t allowed to touch them or erase them because they were just perfect.” Lester’s artistic abilities won him the kind of positive attention that he was not otherwise awarded from his peers. “The sisters and students just clamored around him,” says Brawley, describing a scene that could have been lifted directly
from Minnelli’s cult musical
Yolanda and the Thief
, in which a convent’s star pupil is singled out for special attention.
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Some early evidence of Lester’s artistic flair. ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF BRENT CARSON

John Hanrahan was one of Lester’s boyhood friends. “He just knew that Minnelli was going to be somebody great and important,” Bill Hanrahan says of his father’s friendship with the future director. “He said there was just something about Vincente Minnelli—even as a child—where you just knew he was going to be big time.”
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