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Betsy at home in Belsize Park |
Gene’s lucky star
What a glorious feeling to watch your husband, Gene Kelly, rehearse Singin’ in the Rain in your living room. Dan Carrier meets actress Betsy Blair, who
now lives in Belsize Park
BETSY Blair knows the secret of success. The Hollywood star of the 1940s and 1950s can write the magic formula down – an ingredients list casting agents would die for. She got it from her husband Gene Kelly.
“It is a kind of miracle when everything comes together in one person at exactly the right time,” she says.
“You take a young man with big ideas from a working-class neighbourhood. Then you add his gifts: perfect rhythm, boundless energy in an athletic body, musicality, imagination and humour and sexiness and charm. Then add his character: hard-working and confident. And finally, you mix in the unique ingredient, the one that makes all the difference – his unparalled ability to use his own life experience and communicate it to the whole world through dance.”
Betsy Blair, star of such hits as the 1955 film Marty, is the living proof that dancing keeps you young. The exercise keeps the limbs supple, while the brain remains pin-sharp. Doctors say a sense of rhythm staves off the slowing of the mind.
As the actress – now based in Belsize Park – tucks into breakfast, her choice suggests that a healthy start of porridge and a variety of fruits has kept her sprightly. But as soon as breakfast is finished, she lights a cigarette – the first of three or four during our conversation – and I feel relieved that Betsy Blair’s youthfulness – she is now in her ninth decade – is not the product of an uptight Hollywood health freak.
Her introduction to Gene came about partly because of the Depression. Her father, an insurance salesman, was finding it hard to find employment. Her mother was working as a school teacher in New Jersey. Betsy had always loved dancing – she had been enrolled in classes as a little girl and had a major childhood crush on Fred Astaire – and when she won an amateur dancing contest, it opened opportunities for her to bring in some money to help the family.
She was also bright: at school she excelled and won a scholarship to St Lawrence University. However, her tender age – she was just 15 – meant they felt she was not ready emotionally to enrol. They told her to go to a junior college and then come back in year.
“There was not the money for this,” recalls Betsy. “My father thought it was foolish for women to go to university anyway. He wanted me to become a secretary.”
The summer of 1939 saw her life change drastically. She answered an advert requesting dancers at a Broadway club. It was where Betsy first met Gene.
He was a choreographer in New York. She was 16 when she walked into the Diamond Horseshoe nightclub looking for an audition as a chorus girl. A man was clearing away the tables and chairs and she assumed he was a bus boy. He told her the place was closed and she should come back the following day. She returned and discovered the man who had given her the advice a young dancer called Gene Kelly.
She recalls her mother taking her to Pennsylvania station, then on to the famous department store Macy’s before the auditions to buy high heels and lipstick.
She got the job.
Her father was none too pleased until he heard of the $35 a week wage – a far sum at the tale end of the Depression.
But how would she get from new jersey to New York each day? She was required to work two shows, from 8 until 10, and then another from midnight to 2am. It was out of the question that the teenager could get the train home.
“My father had not been the best of husbands and I think he wanted the excuse to be out late – he said he’d come and collect me each night,” recalls Betsy.
She handed over $15 each week for housekeeping, paid $15 into a university fund, and then kept $5 for herself.
“My father never told me how he felt about it – I suppose he would not have been happy. But my older brothers thought it was wonderful – their kid sister a chorus girl on Broadway, and the youngest one on the stage.”
The club held 500 people and was seen as one of the best in the town. It had tiered layers of tables and a dance floor, a full orchestra and respected performers, all backed by the hard working and beautifully made-up chorus line.
Betsy was quickly engrossed in the comradeship of the performers, and she found herself besotted by Gene. “He was wonderful. He looked after me. We went with a gang to a Chinese restaurant and ate with chopsticks – I thought that was incredibly sophisticated. I had never seen them before.”
They dated, and Gene took Betsy to the Polish Folk Hall, where they danced polkas and mazurkas and ate pickles and sausages.
She recalls Kelly’s attraction. “He seemed to be balanced on the balls of his feet, ready to spring like a cat. The combination of sensitive Irish face and slim muscular body was spectacular.”
But Hollywood was soon to sit up and take notice of Gene, which meant leaving the east coast. “He did not want to leave me to the mercy of new York,’ she says. “I was more than happy to marry him and go West.”
They were married for 20 years and she was with him as he became an icon.
She saw his creativity expressed on a daily basis and would watch him work with his friends on ideas in their Beverley Hills farmhouse. One such project she watched unfold was Singin’ in the Rain in 1952.
She recalls that while Gene was working on the film it was treated like any other. They hummed choruses over the breakfast table as the songs were written, but there was no clue as to how it would be received.
“When he was making it, nobody was aware how big a hit it would be,” she says. “Gene just did not think of it in those terms.”
Betsy saw perhaps the most iconic Hollywood production ever coming together in her home.
“It was all happening in my sitting room,” she recalls. “I’d walk in and Roger Edens (the composer) would be sitting at the piano with Gene and they’d be trying things out. There was a real sense of joy about the place.”
Gene’s influence on his teenage girlfriend was immense.
“He was friends with other ambitious young actors, writers and directors,” she says. “Their group was intellectual and left wing.”
Gene’s close friend the pianist Dick Dwerger quizzed Betsy about her beliefs and lectured her about politics. Actor Lloyd Gough was also part of the gang, and he fed her political pamphlets and spoke of the civil war raging in Spain. It helped confirm her left wing views.
This strong sense of right and wrong was to later give her and Gene trouble – they were both tracked by the FBI. Betsy was blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunts. She got her FBI file two years ago as she wrote up her memoirs and was surprised to find she had been tracked for years across America and Europe for her political beliefs.
She says that although she did not realise it at the time, she was surrounded by people who would shape her own political views.
“I was told once that there was no point in having a crush for man in the club,” she recalls. “I asked why, and they said it was because he was a homosexual. I had never heard of this – and I thought it was absolutely wonderful.”
Her outlook was forged by the Wall Street crash and salvation coming through the New Deal.
Her admiration for the Roosevelts started when as a nine year old she was chosen to perform a dance for Eleanor Roosevelt. Her father, a Republican, disapproved at at the dinner table commented on the First Lady’s plain looks: “I replied that she had beautiful blue eyes and then fled from the table in tears.”
She recalls the New Deal with pride and it makes her depressed at the calibre of the current White House incumbent.
“You think of Roosevelt’s great speeches, and John Kennedy’s great speeches – inspiring. Then think of Bush,” she says darkly. “It is incredibly depressing.
“It is very hard nowadays to believe in anything. We were mistaken about the Soviet Union in many ways and Stalin in a great big way but it helped us to have something to believe in, something that could change the world for the better, something which was a philosophy of helping other people.”
Gene instilled this in her.
“Gene was through out his life on the side of the right and the good. I remember saying to him when he came out of the Navy that I wanted to join the Party and he said to me I’d be a terrible CP member. He said: Betsy, all regimentation is bad. They agreed, and said I’d be more use on the outside.”
She was personally affected by the McCarthy witch hunts, a period that saw the industry she and Gene relied on cleaved in two.
“Blacklisting was done with the collusion of the motion picture association,” she says.
She remembers with sadness the 1957 Oscar ceremony which saw the Bridge On The River Kwai scoop numerous awards. Authors Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson had been blacklisted and had their names removed from the credits. Instead the writing credit went to Pierre Boule, who had not been. he failed to show at the event and the award was collected by the Hitchcock actress Kim Novak.
It wasn’t until 1984 that the Academy righted this wrong and posthumously gave the two writers the Oscar.
“I was not able to work for four years as an actress because of McCarthy,” she says.
But she adds she was not badly off compared to others.
“I was still married to Gene, I lived in a nice house, there was still money coming in and life was still wonderful,” she says.
“But it wasn’t like that for others. marriages broke up. People had to flee – to run to Mexico or Europe. Some could laugh about it – the director John Berry said to me that they did him a favour – ‘if I’d stayed in Hollywood I may never have tasted French food’ – but it wasn’t funny.
“At the time the FBI knocked on his door he climbed out of the bathroom window and fled to Canada. He would not answer their subpoena. They may not have been starving refugees, but they were refugees all the same.”
They did not come for Gene, despite the fact he was as left wing as others who had been accused of “Un-American activities”. The reasons where perhaps obvious. “Gene had been in the Navy during the war,” recalls Betsy. “ He was a big star, everyone loved him. He was acclaimed – and had stayed a good social democratic.”
She has a sense of pride, untainted by a nostalgia for youth, of the America of the 1930s and 1940s.
“Roosevelt really changed the world for the better,” she says. “He fought back against everything I hate. He worked so hard.”
She admits his dogmatic belief in how to fix a broken world meant he would act the political strongman.
“One side of his personality was he was an aristocrat and autocratic – he took things into his own hands. He overhauled things and did it all for the right reasons.”
She is unsure who she wants to win the Democrat nomination for President as she pragmatically is swayed by the need to choose a candidate that will win.
“I suppose Hilary Clinton as president and Barrack Obama as her vice president would suit me,” she says.
But above all she wants a Democrat candidate in the White House, and fears how a woman or a black man will win votes.
“I have always been an admirer of John Kerry and wonder if he could be the one.”
She also believes America created their greatest gift to the world to date during those times, and which she believes still stands as America’s greatest export – jazz music and Hollywood films.
But she is wary of the current salaries the new stars earn. Gene was very well looked after but the crucial thing for him was the security provided by the studio system, which allowed talents to get together and create wonderful films.
“Nowadays actors get $25m to make a film,” she says. “What can they spend it on? A personal aeroplane and the expense of keeping it? It is ridiculous, obscene – and it means the supporting cast are paid less.”
• Black and white photos from The Memory of All That by Betsy Blair. Knopf,
Random House 2003
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