That Was Entertainment
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That Was Entertainment

The Golden Age of the MGM Musical

Bernard F. Dick

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eBook - ePub

That Was Entertainment

The Golden Age of the MGM Musical

Bernard F. Dick

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That Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical traces the development of the MGM musical from The Broadway Melody (1929) through its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s and its decline in the 1960s, culminating in the notorious 1970 MGM auction when Judy Garland's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Charlton Heston's chariot from Ben-Hur, and Fred Astaire's trousers and dress shirt from Royal Wedding vanished to the highest bidders. That Was Entertainment uniquely reconstructs the life of Arthur Freed, whose unit at MGM became the gold standard against which the musicals of other studios were measured. Without Freed, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ann Miller, Betty Garrett, Cyd Charisse, Arlene Dahl, Vera-Ellen, Lucille Bremer, Gloria DeHaven, Howard Keel, and June Allyson would never have had the signature films that established them as movie legends.MGM's past is its present. No other studio produced such a range of musicals that are still shown today on television and all of which are covered in this volume, from integrated musicals in which song and dance were seamlessly embedded in the plot ( Meet Me in St. Louis and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers ) to revues ( The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Ziegfeld Follies ); original musicals ( Singin' in the Rain, Easter Parade, and It's Always Fair Weather ); adaptations of Broadway shows ( Girl Crazy, On the Town, Show Boat, Kiss Me Kate, Brigadoon, Kismet, and Bells Are Ringing ); musical versions of novels and plays ( Gigi, The Pirate, and Summer Holiday ); operettas (the films of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy); mythico-historical biographies of composers (Johann Strauss Jr. in The Great Waltz and Sigmund Romberg in Deep in My Heart ); and musicals featuring songwriting teams (Rodgers and Hart in Words and Music and Kalmar and Ruby in Three Little Words ), opera stars (Enrico Caruso in The Great Caruso and Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody ), and pop singers (Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me ). Also covered is the water ballet musical--in a class by itself--with Esther Williams starring as MGM's resident mermaid. This is a book for longtime lovers of the movie musical and those discovering the genre for the first time.

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THE MUSIC MAN OF MGM
In Hollywood’s Golden Age, each of the studios—including Poverty Row’s Republic, Monogram, and PRC—made musicals. MGM, the “Tiffany of studios,” whose letterhead boasted of “More Stars than Are in the Heavens,” was the gold standard. That might never have been the case if Arthur Freed had not become part of the MGM family in 1929, five years after the amalgamation of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Productions to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, known to generations of moviegoers as MGM.
Arthur’s life is a skein of dates and places, supplemented by news stories and production files. There are many lacunae, many questions never to be answered; there are also facts that are easily verified. His father, Max, was born in 1866 in Asszonyfa, Hungary, seventy-eight miles west of Budapest. Max emigrated to America in 1887; his future wife and Arthur’s mother, Rosie Grossman (nĂ©e Groseman), also Hungarian, emigrated in 1891. Rosie was either four or six years younger than Max. Census records give her birth year as 1872; her death certificate is more specific—August 1, 1870. Max and Rosie seem to have met in Charleston, South Carolina, which had been a major center of Jewish immigration before the Civil War but afterward was just a southern city with a small Jewish presence. Why Max and Rosie were in Charleston in 1894, the year they supposedly married, is unknown. Since postbellum Charleston Jews were merchants and peddlers, Max, who was, among other things, a zither salesman, may have thought that Charlestonians would be intrigued by the sound of the stringed instrument that was becoming increasingly popular in North America.
Since census data are never complete, the 1910 and 1920 census reports did not record the day and month of Max and Rosie’s marriage. The month would be significant: Arthur was born on September 9, 1894. Initially, he bore his mother’s surname, Grossman, probably because Rosie and Max had not yet married, although it is also possible that Max may not have been Arthur’s biological father. Romantics might like to imagine Max and Rosie as lovers living in a garret where he played Hungarian folk melodies on a zither, legitimizing their union after Rosie became pregnant with Arthur; or getting married to legitimize Arthur, if he were another man’s child. Either version would make a great woman’s picture, a blend of fact and fiction complete with a tragic ending: Max’s suicide in 1917 at age fifty-one, as Arthur was on the first leg of a journey that brought him to MGM twelve years later.
Within this skein of dates, places, and conjectures, there is one certainty: Arthur was his mother’s son in every way and remained devoted to her until her death on March 11, 1957, in Los Angeles. At some point, Arthur was given his father’s last name, Fried, which, according to Polk’s Seattle City Directory, Max was still using in 1909 when he was working in real estate in Seattle. By 1910, “Fried” had vanished from the Directory, replaced by Freed, a variant of the family name (Max’s father was Mordechai Moritz Fried). To Max, “Freed” seemed less ethnic (for example, Freed, West Virginia). The spelling apparently meant a great deal to Max, even though “Fried” and “Freed” are pronounced the same. “Freed” also went better with his new title. The listing in the 1910 Directory read, “Freed, Max, mngr, Max Freed & Co.”
The mercurial Max did not remain in real estate for long. His business address changed frequently. In the 1913 Directory, he was listed as president of the Smyrna Valley Orchard Company. There was no listing for him in 1914, but there was one a year later. Max had switched from produce to hardware and was now manager of the Seattle office of Butler-Freed-Riley, a hardware manufacturing company with headquarters in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The Freeds were now living on a ranch in Bellevue, just across Lake Washington and accessible by boat or ferry from Seattle.
To census takers, Max Freed was a merchant, who began in art, antiques, and zithers, but soon branched out into totally unrelated businesses like furniture, real estate, fruit growing, and livestock. Max seemed happiest on the Bellevue ranch, which may have evoked memories of his Hungarian boyhood. The Ranch (April 1, 1914) carried an ad for an auction (cash only) at Max’s ranch. Up for bidding were Holstein dairy cows, a Holstein bull, horses, a seven-passenger Garford touring car that cost $3,850, milk cans, and separators. “Max the Rancher” was just another role in an ever-growing repertoire. In the 1916 Directory, “Freed, Max” was followed by the names of two companies that he supposedly represented: Molloch Knitting Mills and the National Loan and Investment Co. There was no listing for him in 1917, only one for his wife, identified as “Rosie wid Max.” After May 9, 1917, Rosie was a widow.
There was something about Max Freed that recalls Hubie in the Jule Styne–Betty Comden and Adolph Green Broadway musical, Do Re Me (1961). In his opening number, Hubie, whose wife calls him “a schemer, a dreamer,” insists that “all that you need is an angle” to succeed. Max found enough of them to buy a ranch in Bellevue, Seattle’s largest suburb. Until they settled permanently in Seattle around 1909, the Freeds lived a peripatetic existence. They moved regularly, their latest address determined by Max’s latest angle. All of their children were born in different places: Arthur, 1894, in Charleston; Victor, 1896, in Denver; Hugo, 1897, in Boston; Sidney, 1900, somewhere in New Jersey; Walter, 1903, in Spokane; Ruth, 1906, somewhere in Washington State; Ralph, 1907, in Vancouver, British Columbia; Clarence Rupert, 1911 in Seattle. When Max felt successful enough to purchase the Bellevue property, he believed he could finally settle down and become a successful rancher, providing his family with a lifestyle befitting a gentleman farmer.
The Freeds were a musical family. Max was a tenor; Walter was an organist who later taught music; Sidney worked in the record business; Ralph and Ruth wrote songs, at first for amusement, and later for profit; and Arthur became a lyricist and world-class movie producer, whose Freed Unit at MGM was responsible for many of the world’s best-loved musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), An American in Paris (1951), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Except for Victor, who was killed in World War I, all of Arthur’s siblings relocated in Los Angeles, including Clarence Rupert, about whom the least is known. In the 1930 census, he identified himself as “employer” and listed his occupation as “packing company.” He still described himself as “employer” in the 1940 census, but this time as “proprietor.” Nothing else is known about him except that he married, enlisted in the army on April 29, 1944, was discharged in 1946, and died in Ventura, California, in 1988 at the age of seventy-seven.
Max Freed did not live to see his children embark on successful careers. Hugo became an orchid breeder and popular lecturer on orchids. In 1946, he and Arthur started Arthur Freed’s Orchids in Malibu. Ruth took up songwriting professionally, sometimes under the pseudonym of Patty Fisher. As Ruth Freed, she wrote “Perhaps” and “Make a Circle,” recorded, respectively, by Joni James and Kay Starr. As Patty Fisher, she wrote the lyrics for “An Old Love Letter,” performed by Alice Lon, the “Champagne Lady,” on the Lawrence Welk Show on March 29, 1958. She also wrote two numbers, including the title song, for the Doris Day movie, The Tunnel of Love (1958). Ruth’s husband, Albert Akst, was a former musician who became a highly regarded film editor and cut a number of Arthur’s films including Meet Me in St. Louis, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Words and Music, Easter Parade, Summer Holiday, The Barkleys of Broadway, Royal Wedding, The Belle of New York, The Band Wagon, and Brigadoon.
Ralph also became a songwriter, not as famous as his older brother but more prolific. At fourteen, he left Seattle for Los Angeles; after graduating from Hollywood High School, he worked as a writer and lyricist at Paramount and Universal. He joined the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1931 and began collaborating with such composers as Burton Lane and Sammy Fain. Ralph and Lane wrote the Oscar-nominated “How about You?” sung by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in MGM’s Babes on Broadway (1941), which Arthur produced. Notable artists such as Shirley Bassey, Frank Sinatra, and Rosemary Clooney have recorded the song. Since 1941, “How about You?” has been heard in a number of movies: Ship Ahoy (1942), Grand Central Murder (1942), The Youngest Profession (1943), A Guy Named Joe (1943), All about Eve (1950), Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), The Young Lions (1958), The Good-bye Girl (1977), and The Fisher King (1991). Alec Baldwin even sang it on TV’s Saturday Night Live in 2000. At least one critic found Ralph’s lyrics superior to Arthur’s, “whose words stroll through their clichĂ©s with a shrug.”
Arthur was a June/moon type of lyricist whose rhymes were elementary: “I walk down the lane / With a happy refrain” (“Singin’ in the Rain”); “You are my lucky star / I saw you from afar” (“You Are My Lucky Star”). Arthur’s rhymes are never intellectually teasing, unlike, say, Cole Porter’s, which are.
Ralph’s lyrics, however, have flashes of wit and clever internal rhymes: “I like potato chips, moonlight and motor trips” (“How about You?”); “A rhythmical campaign can do more than champagne” (“Swing High, Swing Low”).
Between 1932 and 1962, Ralph wrote regularly for the movies, often uncredited. One of the films for which he received credit was Arthur’s production of Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), based on Cole Porter’s 1939 Broadway musical. Ralph wrote the lyrics for three numbers: the title song and “Madame, I Like Your Crepes Suzettes” with Burton Lane and “I Love an Esquire Girl” with Roger Edens. Although Ralph’s lyrics did not evoke vintage Porter, they captured one aspect of his style: the incongruous rhyme: “work of art” / “a la carte” (“Madame, I Like Your Crepes Suzettes”). Porter, of course, remains the indisputable master of the incongruous. Who else would rhyme “sassy air” with “brassiere” (“I Jupiter, I Rex” in Out of This World [1951])? Only two of Porter’s songs from Du Barry Was a Lady made it into the movie: “Do I Love You?” and a laundered “Katie Went to Haiti.” Gone were the references to Katie’s trade (“Practically all Haiti had Katie.”). It was obvious that the delectably bawdy “But in the Morning, No” would never make the cut. It was a question and answer duet with Madame du Barry asking Louis XV, among other things, if he uses the breaststroke, does double entry, and likes third parties, to which he replies in the affirmative—“But in the morning, no.” The finale, “Friendship,” was interpolated from Porter’s Broadway show, Anything Goes (1934). At least a glimmer of Porter peeked through the 1943 MGM film.
Ralph may not have been a poet, but he was a superb craftsman. For the Esther Williams–Van Johnson musical, Thrill of a Romance (1945), he wrote “Please Don’t Say No” with Sammy Fain.
The lines are of varying length, and there is no fixed meter. The rhyme scheme is unobtrusive, unlike Arthur’s in “Singin’ in the Rain.” Note what Ralph does in the last two lines of the first stanza: “I’ve so much love to impart / It’s making my heart overflow.” There is nothing poetic about “impart,” which is, literally, prosaic. Yet Ralph makes it poetic by having “part” rhyme with “heart.” In the last line, the singer (in the film, operatic tenor Lauritz Melchior) must take a beat after “heart” to bring out the rhyme, so the song can end quietly with an anapest, “overflow.”
Since Ralph wrote songs for a number of MGM films, one might assume that Arthur was responsible for his being hired. Although Arthur wielded great influence at MGM, the studio was not bringing on a movie industry newcomer. Ralph had written lyrics for twenty-nine films between 1932 and 1941 before joining MGM. Two of his best were “When Is a Kiss Not a Kiss” in Champagne Waltz and the title song in Swing High, Swing Low (both Paramount, 1937). “Swing High, Swing Low,” sung by a chorus over the opening credits, has been recorded by Gertrude Niesen, the Ink Spots, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw, among others.
Ralph received a better high school education than Arthur, although one would never know it from the standard biographical sources. According to imdb.com, Arthur Freed was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire—a claim seconded by britannica.com, giving the impression that Max and Rosie, like many immigrant parents, wanted their son to have the kind of education they never received. Phillips Exeter archivist Edouard L. Desrochers discovered that Arthur—for some reason still bearing the surname “Fried”—had been enrolled as an upper-middle-class (third-year) student in fall 1911. His grades—Latin, D; English, C; Declamation, C; Math, French, and History, E (failure)—precluded his returning for the spring term, much less graduating from Phillips Exeter.
After the debacle at Phillips Exeter, Arthur returned to Seattle, where he completed his education at Broadway High School on the corner of Broadway and East Pine Street, the first building in Seattle specifically intended for secondary education. Since Broadway High no longer exists, one must assume that he graduated in 1912. That same year, the seventeen-year-old Arthur received his first notice in the Seattle Daily Times (May 24, 1912) as a cast member in Arabian Nights, a comedy presented by the Alumni Association of Temple De Hirsch, a Reform Jewish synagogue that played a major role in the city’s religious and cultural life. As an alumnus, he would have been part of the congregation and perhaps attended the Temple’s school. Arthur must have been gratified to read that the show “was well received by a large audience.” He enjoyed performing, but songwriting took precedence.
Soon after graduating high school, Arthur set out for Chicago, determined to pursue a career as a songwriter. Chicago’s appeal was understandable. Although it had not yet been christened the second city, it was the entertainment capital of middle America. Chicagoans embraced performers like Lillie Langtree, the Barrymores, Maud Adams, Lillian Russell, and Sarah Bernhardt, who responded in kind with return engagements. For the fledgling movie industry, Chicago was a major film distribution center. For Carl Laemmle, an immigrant from Laupheim, Germany, who went on to found the film company that became Universal Pictures, Chicago was the first stop on the road to Hollywood. Laemmle started in exhibition in 1906 with a nickelodeon, the White Front, on Milwaukee Avenue. Needing a piano player, Laemmle hired the thirteen-year-old Sam Katz, a barber’s son; after realizing that all that was necessary to enter the nickelodeon business were a storefront, folding chairs, a projector, and film, Katz went the same route. For Katz, too, nickelodeons were just the beginning. He teamed up with the Balaban brothers—the most famous of whom was Barney, who became head of Paramount Pictures—to provide Chicagoans with their first movie palaces that looked like opera houses, where movies were not just accompanied by a piano but by a four-piece orchestra and a pipe organ.
Arthur was in Chicago at the right time. He first found a job as a song plugger in the Chicago office of the music publishing house of Waterman, Berlin, & Snyder. It was there that he met Irving Berlin, whose immigrant background and richly melodious songs resonated so deeply with him that one of his lifelong ambitions, which never came to pass, was to produce an Irving Berlin biopic, Say It with Music. Arthur soon realized that, as a song plugger, he would be sitting at the piano on the mezzanine of some department store, playing and singing other people’s songs to sell other people’s sheet music, while yearning for the day when someone would be doing the same for him. He attracted the attention of Minnie Marx, the mother and driving force behind the Marx Brothers, who had been living in Chicago since 1910. The standard biographies of the Marx Brothers do not mention Arthur, which is not surprising, since it seems that all he did was write special material for their act, in which he also sang. Arthur told the Los Angeles Times (June 1, 1946) that after “Mama Marx” heard him sing, she made him an offer: “You sing good, and how would you like to join the act?”
That was in 1916, according to his obituary in the Hollywood Reporter (April 13, 1973). Arthur did not remain with the act for long. By summer 1916, he was back in Seattle, where he received his second notice in the Seattle Daily Times (June 29, 1916), in which he was listed among the performers in a vaudeville program at the Hippodrome Theatre on Cherry Street.
Arthur was probably in Seattle on May 9, 1917, when his father took his life. One source described Arthur as having “assumed responsibility as the head of the family” after his father’s death. On his draft registration form, dated June 5, 1917, Arthur identified himself as “head of the family” and gave as his occupation “fruit grower, self-employed.” The Bellevue ranch had apparently become a fruit-producing property. Possibly the 1914 auction marked the end of Max’s dabbling in livestock. Arthur was not head of the family for long. On June 15, 1917, two months after the United States entered World War I, he enlisted in the army, as his brother Victor had done earlier. Unlike Victor, Arthur remained stateside, staging military shows.
Victor, who had been a medical student at New York’s College of Physicians and Surgeons before entering the service, died in France in 1918.
No one in the Freed family was prepared for what happened on May 9, 1917. That day, t...

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