Book Review: He's Got Rhythm

He's Got Rhythm:The Life and Career of Gene Kellyby Cynthia Brideson & Sara BridesonUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2017When commenting on the great dancer and choreographer Gene Kelly's own personal choice of 1944's Meet Me in St. Louis as the best example of the light-as-air Hollywood musical he did as much as anybody to raise to the level of art, Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson in their stellar new work He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly, refer to their subject by his first name and write: “It is telling that Gene, in spite of his social conscience, quick temper, and occasional dark moods, chose as the ideal musical not one of his own works or a weighty moralizing picture.”“Social conscience, quick temper, and occasional dark moods” – oh, what a continent, what a veritable world of discretion is compacted into just those few words! Kelly, Pittsburgh's proudest and most famous son, with his cabbie's face and his longshoreman's body, is in this book given a much longer treatment than he received in Clive Hirschhorn's even-handedly acerbic 1985 book Gene Kelly: A Biography; Brideson and Brideson make use of even more primary sources than Hirschhorn had at his disposal, and since their book is written long after Kelly's death in 1996, it has the added benefit of perspective. And the great story of Kelly's rise to prominence and then worldwide stardom at MGM and beyond in a string of now-iconic shows like Anchors Aweigh, An American in Paris, On the Town, and of course Singin' in the Rain is retold with almost starstruck enthusiasm by his newest biographers, who energetically capture a time when legends gathered at the Kelly house during the height of his time at MGM:

Among those accepted for membership in Gene's “club” were new friends such as Saul and Ethel Chaplin, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, Lena Horne and Lennie Hayton, Phil Silvers, and Judy Garland … Guests usually arrived at five thirty for a game of ping-pong and a potluck dinner, but the highlight of a given evening was when Chaplin, Martin, or Hayton would sit at the piano and play while guests (most conspicuously Judy Garland) belted out Gerswhin, Porter, Mercer, and Arlen tunes. Gene would perform only by request or if others were performing. With his guests, he drank wine, sang, and laughed until two in the morning, at which time those who were still awake would have a calming snack of milk and Oreos.

And in addition to the fine details, which Brideson and Brideson provide in great heaps for the delectation of the hard-core fans, the book also regularly and very engagingly widens its narrative focus. Kelly was born in 1912, and his life and rise to stardom coincided with drastic societal changes our authors instructively link to both their subject's strutting bravado and also his intermittent brooding and prize-fighter's focus:

Gene Kelly had grown from child to man during what F. Scott Fitzgerald fondly dubbed the Jazz Age. In his formative years, he absorbed the vivid characters that flickered on the silver screen: swashbuckling pirates, cowboy heroes, fearless aviators, and mustachioed matinee idols. Young Gene heard American music find its own sound and saw American dance break free from European influences. After World War I, his country became a world power and trendsetter. Flappers and philosophers danced side by side, artifice and realism commingled. Gene had lived through all of this; thus, in the summer of 1951, he delved into his next project, Singin' in the Rain, with added gusto.

That gusto fills the pages of He's Got Rhythm, but as that opening quote indicates, this is an unfailingly, unblinkingly discreet book. It's true, as our authors frequently concede, that Kelly was an unremitting perfectionist (“You'll get along just fine with him,” a producer once told a neophyte dance-school graduate just joining a Kelly production, “provided you know exactly what you're doing from the first minute and never make a single mistake”); he was also all the less-printable things that are always likewise true of unremitting perfectionists, and those things find virtually no mention here. “Give it to me straight on the chin,” one of Kelly's best-known co-stars once said in slightly different context, “I can take it, and I prefer it that way.” But although this book is fair in its appraisals and thorough in its research, it pulls its punches in favor of burnishing its legend. Kelly himself might have frowned at such white-glove treatment, but there's no denying the entertainment value of the result.