Mark Griffin (13 page)

“MGM was self-sufficient in that it had the best of everything,” says actress Marsha Hunt, who made several pictures for the studio. “You had the feeling that [studio chief] Louis B. Mayer, who surely had his faults, was not a man to sneer at because he really understood motion pictures. He loved them
passionately and he had an ability to find and bring onto the lot the very finest talents from anywhere.”
¹

If MGM was able to boast that it had the most impressive collection of artists (both in front of and behind the camera) in all of Hollywood, Arthur Freed would eventually siphon off the cream of the crop. As Metro scholar Hugh Fordin points out, the producer knew exactly where to go to import such top-of-the-line talent: “Freed didn’t want anybody from Hollywood. Freed wanted everybody from Broadway . . . Minnelli, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Chuck Walters, Robert Alton, Connie Salinger, Betty and Adolph . . . all of these people came from New York.”
²

When Broadway’s dynamic duo, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, first landed at MGM, they were informed that they had been assigned to the Freed Unit. “We didn’t really know what ‘the Freed Unit’ was,” Comden admitted.
³
What it was has been described as “Broadway-on-Hollywood.” Part artist’s colony, part repertory company, it was a collection of diverse, remarkably talented artists who all had one thing in common: Arthur Freed. The producer, who was known for cultivating prize-winning orchids and amassing works by French Fauvist Georges Rouault, also had a knack for collecting the best in the business.

“It was called ‘the Freed Unit’ but there never was a unit,” says film historian Richard Schickel. “It was just a bunch of artists clustered around Arthur. They were just over in a corner by themselves making movies and I don’t think there was as much oversight on that group of actors and directors and writers as there was in other areas of MGM’s production. . . . That was almost like a piece of good luck.” Typically, an MGM movie was created by a committee or micromanaged by an omnipresent producer, but, true to form, Arthur Freed would buck the trend. He allowed his writers, directors, and choreographers almost complete autonomy. And the results spoke for themselves. “You can immediately see the difference between a musical from MGM and those done at Paramount and Fox,” says actress Betty Garrett. “There’s just something different about an MGM musical. Somehow they’re more professional, more sophisticated. There was just a touch that Arthur had that nobody else in the business really had.” Some believed that Freed’s greatest gift was simply knowing who to hire.
⁴

“The thing that has been said most often about my father was that he was a great finder of talent and an appreciator of talent and he gave all of these artists a chance to do their thing,” says Arthur Freed’s daughter, Barbara Freed Saltzman. “He talked MGM into hiring a lot of these people, and once he had them, he let them do whatever they did best. So, that was really one of his greatest talents—finding talent, encouraging it and not just doing it
all by himself, but letting other people come up with their own ideas and then he’d go to bat for them.”
⁵
Even by MGM’s standards, the team that Freed assembled was truly extraordinary.

First and foremost, there was composer-arranger Roger Edens. Ethel Merman’s one-time rehearsal pianist, Edens was brought to Metro by Freed, who put the tall, well-mannered Texan to work as a musical adaptor. Before Judy Garland ever attempted “The Boy Next Door” or “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” Edens would have tried those tunes on for size first, determining how Garland’s powerhouse pipes could be shown off to best advantage on each note. Almost immediately, Edens became indispensable to Arthur Freed. In fact, many believed that Roger Edens
was
the Freed Unit.

“I can tell you that one of the greatest advantages my father had in life and throughout his movie career was Roger Edens. He was a lovely man and a great assistant to my father in everything,” says Barbara Freed Saltzman.
⁶
Just how essential Edens was to the Freed Unit was spelled out later in his career, when he produced two musicals—
Funny Face
and
Hello, Dolly!
—at studios other than Metro. Although they were made elsewhere, both films exhibit an unmistakable Freed Unit sparkle from start to finish.

After her abrupt dismissal from Minnelli’s
Hooray for What!
Kay Thompson reinvented herself as a vocal coach and arranger, landing at MGM in the early ’40s. Thompson could always be counted on to fire up a number with her own distinctive brand of “bazazz.” For Garland’s “A Great Lady Has an Interview” sequence in
Ziegfeld Follies
, Thompson would not only provide the number with a scintillating, ahead-of-its-time be-bop sound but also help Judy find the comedic nuances of the piece. “Kay would write twenty ideas while I threw out nineteen,” says composer Ralph Blane, who collaborated with Thompson on
The Harvey Girls
. “They would just come to her like that, she was so fast! As a matter of fact, Kay could have been a great composer had she settled on one theme or idea.”
⁷

Orchestrator Conrad Salinger was, in the opinion of André Previn, “the greatest arranger of American musical-comedy that ever lived.”
⁸
Salinger could take a well-worn tune, such as “Limehouse Blues,” and turn it into a masterpiece that not only shimmered and soared musically but also brilliantly underscored the emotional content of the sequence it was accompanying. “He knew orchestration absolutely,” says Freed Unit musician-librarian Frank Lysinger. “He could take something like a very simple kind of English folk song and arrange it in a quiet way, and then, when the same tune is reintroduced later in the film, he could build it up practically into a symphony. He was just brilliant in so many ways.”
⁹

Choreographer Robert Alton would showcase Ann Miller’s trademark hundred-taps-per-minute in the memorable “Shakin’ the Blues Away” in
Easter Parade
and even made Peter Lawford look relatively graceful doing “The Varsity Drag” in
Good News
. “Everybody deferred to Robert Alton,” says writer Jess Gregg. “He was the master but he was also a very droll man. He was married and had a son but he confessed to us that sometimes when he was sitting in the park, the other men who used the park would call him
Evelyn
.”
¹⁰

Combining their talents and expertise, the members of the Freed Unit would create some of the finest musical films Hollywood ever produced. “These people were all geniuses,” says Michael Feinstein. “They all created a unique voice and they were a unique part of an era of American music that is largely gone, largely lost and so special in the end result. When I listen to the achievements of Conrad Salinger or of Roger Edens or the dance arrangements of Saul Chaplin—like his arrangement of ‘Get Happy’—or the exquisite music for
Summer Holiday
that Salinger orchestrated, I hear something that is never going to happen again. . . . The team that was assembled at MGM was just a stellar array of talent.”
¹¹

While Edens, Thompson, Salinger, and Alton would form the nucleus of the Freed Unit, the circle would eventually widen to admit the likes of writer-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, choreographer-director Charles Walters, orchestrators Lennie Hayton and Johnny Green, and designer Irene Sharaff. Soon to be included in this incredible mix of artists was Vincente Minnelli, whose work would call upon all of these remarkable talents at one time or another. “Arthur Freed thought Vincente Minnelli was remarkable,” says director Stanley Donen. “He gave him anything that he asked for. . . . He fought for it and got it.”
¹²

While Arthur would always have his back, Minnelli may have also felt at home in the Freed Unit for personal as well as professional reasons. As writer Matthew Tinkcom says, “I think there was a kind of community there that was receptive both to his aesthetic and to whatever kind of ambiguous sexuality we’re talking about. . . . At least on the Metro lot and especially in the Freed Unit, there was a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward there being queer employees. The Freed Unit was, in fact, a kind of place where queer talent could flourish.”
¹³

The unusually high concentration of gay artists in one department led to disparaging remarks about “Freed’s fairies,” homophobic jokes, and no end of salacious stories about many of the principal players. As the rumor mill had it, Conrad Salinger was a giant talent—and in more ways than one. “The reputation about him was that he had a basket to gasp at,” says Jess Gregg.
“And of course, he was into fellas. I mean, that whole MGM crowd was—people like Connie Salinger and Bob Alton—everybody was gay and everybody took it for granted. There was no need to advertise the fact. People suspected that you were—whether you were or not.”
¹⁴

AT VIRTUALLY THE SAME TIME Minnelli landed at the studio, so did a fellow New York transplant—the luminous Lena Horne. Among Vincente’s initial, usually uncredited assignments at MGM were shooting Horne’s “specialty numbers” in musicals helmed by other directors and otherwise exclusively populated by white performers.
^u
“I never felt like I belonged in Hollywood,” Horne remembered. “At that time, they didn’t quite know what to do with me—a black performer. So, I usually came on, sang a song and made a quick exit.” Despite the fleeting nature of her appearances, Horne was well teamed with Minnelli, who made no secret of his fixation on the star. “He was obsessed with Lena in that period, and I would have thought doing everything he could to help her,” says illustrator Hilary Knight, an ardent Horne devotee in his own right. “What’s so interesting to me is why there’s this heavy concentration on blacks as exotics that runs through his involvement with [Horne] and in other movies like
I Dood It
and
The Pirate
. There’s that whole exotic black thing that he was completely obsessed with.”
¹⁵

Vincente’s obsession is readily apparent in
Panama Hattie
, which was released in 1942. Adapted from the Broadway hit that had starred Ethel Merman, this gobs-gone-wild extravaganza directed by Norman Z. McLeod would be utterly forgettable if it were not laced with Cole Porter tunes and graced with Horne’s two Minnelli-mounted production numbers. Lena’s all too brief rendition of “Just One of Those Things” is charged with more vitality and style than anything contained in McLeod’s uninspired footage, which was deemed so wanting that it was overhauled by Roy Del Ruth after an unsuccessful preview. Horne’s number, which is framed in adoring close-up, sets the standard for the way the star would typically be presented during her tenure at Metro—as a glamorous, almost ethereal songbird segregated from the movie’s main storyline. For “The Sping,” Horne is decked out in cockleshell accessories, costumed in a Carmen Miranda cast-off, and accompanied by the dancing Berry Brothers. Horne’s numbers here and her later appearances in
I Dood It
and
Ziegfeld Follies
are sort of cinematic second
cousins to the stylish showstoppers that Minnelli had mounted on stage featuring Ethel Waters and Josephine Baker.

Vincente’s work on
Panama Hattie
would provide him with a crash course in movie making. “He didn’t know anything about the technique of motion pictures, and we couldn’t expect him to,” cinematographer George Folsey would later say of Minnelli’s first attempts behind the camera, not so fondly recalling Vincente’s “twenty-seven moves of the boom . . . up, down, in, out, dollying all around, panning and crossing over, and all of this on musical cues.”
¹⁶
While his dazed colleagues attempted to keep pace with his hyperactive shooting style, Minnelli viewed this all as on-the-job training. “I was learning how to move the camera,” he would later remark.
¹⁷
He was also learning that certain effects that had played well at the Winter Garden appeared one dimensional and stagy on film. Nevertheless, Metro’s newcomer had a few new tricks to teach those Technicolor bogeymen. Color and lighting—two areas in which Vincente excelled—would evolve under his unerring eye. But for the moment, it was small steps forward.

As was the case during his aborted Paramount tenure, Minnelli was called upon to conceptualize musical numbers that would enhance films by some of Metro’s veteran directors, such as Busby Berkeley. Vincente’s concepts, which had been considered too outlandish or artsy at Paramount in the ’30s, were eagerly incorporated at MGM in the ’40s.
Strike Up the Band
, the fifth screen-teaming of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, provided Minnelli with an opportunity to concoct a visually inventive sequence that would win him the right kind of attention. After giving him a tour of the set, Arthur Freed ordered Minnelli to hurry up and get inspired: “We need a big production number here. Mickey and Judy are in the house, and he’s telling her he wants to be a famous band leader like Paul Whiteman. Something big has to happen.”
¹⁸