Mark Griffin (42 page)

IT WAS OSCAR NIGHT, APRIL 6, 1959, at the RKO Pantages Theatre, and after performing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” Maurice Chevalier was presented with his honorary Oscar by an admiring Rosalind Russell. Then it was time for Gary Cooper and Millie Perkins to announce the nominees for Best Director. Along with Minnelli, the contenders included Richard Brooks and Stanley Kramer, both nominated for provocative fare—
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
The Defiant Ones
, respectively. “And the winner is . . . Vincente Minnelli.”

Vincente (who attended the ceremonies with Ginger Rogers) made his way to the podium and addressed his colleagues:

As eloquent and heartfelt as Minnelli’s acceptance speech was, the audience was distracted by the fact that he picked an unusual moment to scratch his eye—with his middle finger. For a director so attuned to visual minutiae, it seems odd that Vincente didn’t realize how this would appear on camera. Or was this Minnelli’s own special tribute to all of the exasperating MGM executives he had tangled with over the years?

WHEN IT OPENED AT THE Cambridge Theatre in London in 1955, William Douglas Home’s play
The Reluctant Debutante
seemed to be the answer to the question most frequently asked by MGM executives: “Where can we find another
Father of the Bride
?” At first glance, Home’s very British high-comedy appeared to offer the same satisfying mix of good-natured satire with an endearing father-daughter relationship at its center. The high-society London setting succeeded in camouflaging the familiar plot just enough so that it didn’t seem too familiar.

Metro acquired the rights to
The Reluctant Debutante
and even financed the 1956 Broadway production of the play, but the studio decided that before its property reached the screen, it needed to be anglicized so that American audiences wouldn’t be put off by the ritzy tea-and-crumpets tone.
Father of the Bride
’s screenwriting team, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, were initially offered the opportunity to adapt Home’s play, but they passed, feeling that the scenario was in some ways too similar to the domestic predicament faced by Spencer Tracy and his brood.

As Debbie Reynolds was being considered for the debutante of the title, MGM next turned to one of the authors of Reynolds’s 1955 crowd-pleaser,
The Tender Trap
. Julius G. Epstein and his brother Philip had not only scripted the immortal
Casablanca
but had also been responsible for transplanting two of Broadway’s most inspired comedies,
Arsenic and Old Lace
and
The Man Who Came to Dinner
, to the screen. Julius (sans Philip) was tapped
to work the same magic with
The Reluctant Debutante
, but his
An American in London
approach was ultimately deemed wanting—and then some.

“We wouldn’t play one word of that lousy script!” prospective star Rex Harrison barked at producer Pandro Berman. The irascible “Sexy Rexy” and third wife Kay Kendall (also set to star) were none too pleased with Epstein’s fish-out-of-water scenario, in which an American father and daughter find themselves in the thick of London’s high season. Minnelli also found the Americanized approach contrived and “off kilter.” Epstein was out and William Douglas Home, author of the original play, was in. Home would crank out a completely new screenplay at breakneck speed even as cameras began to turn in February 1958. Due to the Harrisons’ complicated tax situation, the picture would actually be filmed in Paris, with a mere two days spent immersed in authentic London fog. Debbie Reynolds was replaced with Sandra Dee, and Angela Lansbury joined the cast as catty Mabel Claremont.

Although Rex Harrison was his usual impossible-to-please self (“He didn’t give a damn whom he offended,” Home observed), everyone—including Minnelli—fell in love with his vivacious new bride and the picture’s leading lady, Kay Kendall.
¹
Unbeknownst to Vincente, the crew, and even Kendall herself, the star was battling myeloid leukemia (but led to believe by Harrison and others that she was grappling with an iron deficiency). “Kay was really, really ill, having transfusions almost every day,” remembers Angela Lansbury:

Kendall was such a thoroughgoing professional that the effects of her illness were never evident during production, despite a physically demanding role.

In a sense, the glittering high-society swirl depicted in
The Reluctant Debutante
was not that far removed from the Holmby Hills cocktail-party circuit that Vincente knew all too well. In fact, Minnelli may have been a little too enchanted by the overdressed socialites he was supposed to be sending up in
Debutante
: Where the comedy should be biting (à la Cukor’s
The Women
), it is polite.

Lansbury also found her director well-mannered yet remote:

And it is the performances that make
The Reluctant Debutante
worthwhile. Kay Kendall is a madcap delight, twittering hypertensively and flitting about in her Pierre Balmain feathers, and Angela Lansbury is great fun as the acid-tongued Mabel. Despite the presence of teeny-bopper icon Sandra Dee, the picture was not the
Father of the Bride
-style cash cow the studio had hoped for. The reviews, however, offered some consolation: “Vincente Minnelli’s
direction glitters like a tiara,” said the
Evening Standard
. “Lighter than air, entertaining as all get out,”
Newsweek
chirped.

Just before
The Reluctant Debutante
went before the cameras, Minnelli was served with divorce papers. In her statement to the court, Georgette charged Vincente with “mental cruelty.” During the hearing, she testified that “he said he was sorry he ever met me because he liked being alone better.”
⁴

The sister of Miss Universe would emerge victorious. Georgette was awarded custody of three-year-old Tina Nina and a property settlement that provided her with $4,325 a month in alimony for fifteen months and an additional $1,700 a month as long as she remained single (according to Georgette, Minnelli’s MGM contract entitled him to $4,250 a week). When pressed for a statement about the proceedings, Vincente had no comment.
⁵

MADISON, INDIANA, may have been thrilled to see Frank Sinatra coming, but the feeling wasn’t exactly mutual. The city, which had once been selected as “the typical American small town” by the Office of War Information, was a far cry from the Chairman of the Board’s natural habitat. It certainly wasn’t The Sands in Las Vegas, where one could order hookers as easily as waffles from room service. If Madison was too low rent for Sinatra (he told the press it reminded him of skid row in Los Angeles), it was the perfect Parkman, the fictional Midwestern town of
Some Came Running
. In this sprawling character study, Minnelli would confront ’50s conformism and small-town repression head on. The cast, which included Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine, descended on Madison (population 10,500) in August 1958.

Although Vincente was thoroughly well versed in dealing with temperamental talent, Sinatra was in his own category. From the get-go, the working relationship between director and star was bound to be strained. Sinatra was a firm believer in getting his performance down in the first take. “If you want a second take, print the first one again,” the unpredictable star had informed one of his dumbfounded directors. Minnelli, the plodding perfectionist, had been known to proceed beyond take thirty in pursuit of some elusive effect—usually visual—that he wasn’t able to name. Although he was as much of an iconoclast as Sinatra, Vincente’s taffeta personality didn’t click with his male leads.

Sinatra and Martin “thought he was too precious and pursed his lips too much,” Shirley MacLaine recalled. “The two of them could dislike people
because of small things that personally offended them.”
¹
With his tics, fidgety mannerisms, and Noel Coward-ish way with a cigarette, Minnelli gave them plenty of ammunition.

Despite all of his idiosyncrasies, however, Minnelli was clearly the man in charge. “When he would walk onto the set, there was almost like a hush,” says Peter Woodburn, who had a bit part in the film. “You’d hear people whispering, ‘Mr. Minnelli’s here. Mr. Minnelli’s here . . .’ and that was from the crew and that sort of spilled over to all the extras. Everybody straightened up when he came on the scene.”
²

With so many strong personalities on board, the company braced for fire-works as the cameras began to turn. They weren’t disappointed. When hapless assistant director William McGarry interrupted Sinatra’s ’tini time with a reminder that they were behind with the shooting schedule, Ol’ Blue Eyes decided to make everybody’s life a little easier—by ripping out a twenty-page chunk of the screenplay. “There, pal,” Sinatra said, “Now we’re on schedule.”
³
It wasn’t as though the story couldn’t have used a little pruning. The original James Jones novel weighed in at over a thousand pages—an epic length to tell the story of the prodigal Dave Hirsh returning to a hometown rife with hypocrisy (“Dave was back and the whole town knew that trouble—and women were close behind!”).

An ex-serviceman and frustrated novelist, Dave Hirsh is one of Minnelli’s most conflicted protagonists. Although his duffle bag is well stocked with William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe, Dave spends his days playing poker or getting loaded at Smitty’s bar. Complex and unpredictable, Sinatra’s character even comes complete with polar-opposite love interests.

Martha Hyer’s Gwen French is a frigid, buttoned-up schoolteacher who prefers engaging with Dave in affairs strictly literary; Shirley MacLaine’s amiable floozy, Ginny Moorehead, is a cheap souvenir Dave picked up at Gilly’s Green Room in Chicago. Throughout the film, Ginny is described as “a pig,” “a pushover,” and “a nobody,” though she is just about the only character in the film who is truly herself. Like night and day, the two women in Dave’s life embody his own identity crisis. Hirsh is torn between the cultured life of the intellectual and a neon-tinted world of bars, booze, and broads.

Accustomed to studio hacks or autocrats such as Otto Preminger, Sinatra seems to have been thrown by the have-it-your-own-way freedom that Minnelli offered his actors. For Sinatra, shaping his own portrayal may have allowed some familiar emotions to rise to the surface. His schizoid mix of brutality and sensitivity, his Madonna-whore complex regarding the women in his life, and his need to occasionally park his machismo and artistically express himself were all very much a part of his character.