Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 4

A-4 PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1996 Pittsburghers remember a life of amazing grace GENE KELLY 1912-1 996 4f. it---: tj'J; 1 ww- A rV, I I A 4 7'SMV 5- 1, h'y ni 1 'V It l( i V-C, nV; i rs- 1 i uJ local club owner and Variety correspondent, Lenny Litman, remembers Greenberg, now 98, had been in charge of hiring a dancing teacher for Beth Shalom and chose Kelly. She didn't know she was making a lifetime friend. "He sent her a birthday card every year and he also wrote a beautiful letter on her 90th birthday when her daughter gave her a big party at the Hilton," Litman said, Litman has her own storv of crossing paths with Kelly. About eight years ago, she was visiting a fnend in California and they were en route to the Friars Club for lunch.

They came upon a parade of vintage cars with Kelly as grand marshal. No wallflower, Litman waved and called out, "I'm the delegation from Squirrel Hill. Mrs. Greenberg sends her love." Litman said Kelly stopped the car and got out "He was so sweet just a darling man." The CLO's Bill Thunhurst has an earlier Kelly story. When he was a chorus boy in "South Pacific," he met Kelly to audition for "On the Town." "No, you're too good-looking," Kelly told him.

"That was the nicest and swiftest brush-off I've ever had," Thunhurst laughed. Al Checco, a fellow East Liberty native a decade Kelly's junior, remembers playing amateur contests in movie houses. "Gene, Fred and his sister had a wonderful act where they did a dance on roller skates, going up and down steps. I had to follow that act as a 4- or 5 ear-old kid, singing 'Brother Can ou Spare a Dime'! He taught me how to take a bow. There was an ovation and I wanted to run out, but he said, 'Hold it, kid.

Let 'em want you Presented a 1985 Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute, Gene Kelly said, "All I wanted was to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates." Instead, he went "screaming and kicking" to dance lessons. Then at 14, "I discovered the girls liked the fellows who were good dancers." Kelly once told the Post-Gazette's George Anderson, "I don't like social dancing, because it was a form of courtship in my day. It was the only time a fellow could Eut his arm around a girl's waist low, if I get up on the floor to dance, people move away to watch. Forget it If you want to watch, pay me. Bob Miller remembered meeting Kelly at age 10 at a camp near Ashtabula, Ohio, where Kelly, 20, was a counselor.

"I came back and had two years at his dancing school. I danced with Gene and Fred in one of the kermesses they gave each year at Taylor Ailderdice. He took me under his wing it's like losing an older brother." Leslie Brockett also studied tap with Kelly. She recalls one school show at the old Nixon Theater. "The number was 'The Parade of the Wooden The curtain closed and I got stuck in the middle of the curtain," rear toward the audience.

Kelly was in the wings whispering, "Leslie, this way." Like so many Pittsburghers who never watched Kelly dance in person, she said, "I thought he was so wonderful. He's such a legend. I'm so proud he's from Pittsburgh." Post-Gazette staff writers Barbara Vancheri, Mike Pellegrini and Jane Crawford contributed to this report By Christopher Rawson Post-Gazette Drama Critic "I've gone through four deaths in a year," said Gene Kelly's "baby brother" Fred, 79, from his home in Tucson, Ariz. Sister Louise's husband Bill Bailey died last May in Pittsburgh, Fred's wife Dorothy died last March, and sister J's husband died last year. Brother James had already died a couple of years ago.

And now Gene. "I'm at that age when I hate to' open the mail," Fred said. But Louise is well in Dothan, near her daughter, and (really Harriet) is doing fine in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "she swims, on-line roller skates, plays bridge, and she's seven years older than me. But don't call her, she'll break up." Fred himself is a flowing fount of memory: "All you have to do is say 'Hello to me, and I'm off." His own career followed closely behind Gene's.

They all started as "The Five Little Kellys," in imitation of "The Seven Little Foys." Of the five, James went to Carnegie Tech and the others to Pitt Fred followed Gene as director of Tech's Scotch and Soda Show and at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. He even took over his Broadway role in 'The Time of Your Life" and did the tour "I played the Nixon, but everyone thinks they saw Gene, because they used his picture with my name!" The balance was righted when "For Me and My Gal, played Pittsburgh, and for a week the movie marauee mistakenly listed Judy Garland and Fred Kelly. Jeanne Coyne, Gene's second wife, had been Fred's dance student in Pittsburgh. Fred's New York apartment "was where she first met Gene as a grown-up," he said. 'Deep in My Heart' in 1955 was the only picture where we danced together," he mused.

The memories of Gene Kelly are thick throughout his home town, where he is memorialized many times. In 1981 he became Honorary Chairman of the Civic Light Opera. South Whitfield Street in his home neighborhood of East Liberty was named Gene Kelly Square in 1987. That same year he was given a bicentennial medal by Pitt But his most living memorial is the Gene Kelly Awards, started by the CLO in 1991 to honor excellence in high school musicals. At the Pitt ceremony, Kelly spoke to those who asked why he "wasted" four dancing years in college: "It not only made me more of a person, but it aided me in everything I did as a creative artist" He quipped that his economics degree allowed him "to discuss intelligently certain things with the IRS." At the East Liberty dedication, Mayor Caliguiri filled ki for the absent Kelly by opening an umbrella and imitating the famous routine from "Singin' in the Rain." In 1981, he came to accept his honors from the CLO at a ceremony in Mellon Square presided over by Bob Prince.

Bill Copeland, CLO board member, recalls Kelly's one stipulation was that he not be asked to dance with anyone, "because I hate to say no, but then I have to dance with Nonetheless, he did dance with a slight, white-haired woman at that noontime rally. Anne Green-berg beamed at him, holding tight to a thin blue program from a children's dance recital held on April 13, 1932, by Beth Shalom Temple. Roz Litman, wife of long-time ,5 Gene Kelly in "Singm1 in the Ram" (1 952) Few films are as giddily enjoyable as this one Here was a dancer who rolled up his shirtsleeves instead of flourishing tails. KELLY FROM PAGE A-1 Eugene Curran Kelly was born In 1912 in East Liberty, the third of Patrick and Harriet Kelly's five children. Patrick sold gramo- 6 hones, and Harriet acted in a local leater company under her maiden name of Curran.

At his mother's urging but to his schoolmates' ridicule young Eugene studied dancing when he was 8, soon abandoning cotillion for what he felt was the more manly pursuit of hockey. He attended Fulton Elementary School and then St Raphael's Elementary in Momingside and was an altar boy at St Raphael's Church. He went to Sacred Heart High for a year, then three years at Peabody High School. "When I was in the eighth grade, roughly 1925," he said in a 1980 interview with The Pittsburgh Press, "we moved to Kensington Street, about midway between Squirrel Hill and Wilkinsburg. Had Allderdice High been built then, I would have gone there instead of to Peabody." It was while at Peabody High that Kelly noticed that his classmates in plays were getting dates.

He used his dancing skills first to get roles, then girls. By the time he graduated from Peabody in 1929, he was known as the best dancer in the neighborhood. Through the year, Kelly continued to visit family in Pittsburgh several times a year until his mother's death. One of his last visits was in 1950, to attend a Peabody class reunion. In 1928, he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University planning to major in economics, but real economics intervened.

After the stock market crash of 1929, he dropped out to help support his family variously as a gymnastics instructor, a gas jockey and ditch-digger and carpenter's helper. Kelly transferred to the University of Pittsburgh, where he majored in journalism, took part in theater programs and danced in area night spots with his brother, Fred. In 1933, his senior year at Pitt, he directed the Cap and Gown revue. After receiving his degree, he headed for law school but Decame, of all things, a dance instructor working out of the basement of the family home and charging 50 cents a lesson. So successful was the Gene Kelly-Studio of Dance that its director was soon able to rent space in a hall in Squirrel Hill and open a branch in nearby Johnstown.

Kelly learned most of his craft from books, although he briefly studied ballet with the influential Berenice Holmes in Chicago. When Broadway choreographer Robert Alton came to Pittsburgh, he took note of Kelly's stagings and invited the young man to New York, where Bolshoi dancer Alexander Kotchetovsky furthered the novice's ballet education. The result was muscular grace. On Broadway, Kelly soon got a part in Cole Porter's 1938 musical comedy "Leave It to Me," where he was cast as one of the chorus boys flanking Mary Martin as she sang "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." A larger part followed, as Harry the hoofer William Saroyan's Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy "The Time of Your Life." In 1941, Kelly won the starring role in Rodgers and Hart's "Pal Joey," adapted from the John O'Hara stories about the cad whose Ehilosophy is to treat a dame like a idy and a lady like a dame. Kelly's Broadway starring role was similar to the caddish character he played in his film debut, opposite Judy Garland, in "For Me and My Gal" (1942), as the egotistical entertainer who purposefully injures his hand to avoid being drafted.

But for his dancing abilities, Kelly's barracuda smile and shifty eyes might have stamped him as the eternal heel. He was an unconvincing romantic hero, more persuasive as one whose self-love exceeded his affection for others. Under contract to MGM Studios, where he would work from 1943 until 1958, Kelly initially foundered in movies such as "DuBarry Was a Lady" (1943). Only when he was loaned to Columbia Pictures to star opposite Rita Hayworth in "Cover Girl" (1944) did Hollywood understand what it had in this leading man. Not only could he hoof, but he could act and choreograph.

As the dancing sailor opposite singing sailor Frank Sinatra in "Anchors Aweigh" (1944), Kelly hit his stride. In this film, made decades before "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," Kelly conceived and performed a live-action dance with a cartoon character, Jerry the Mouse, that became an instant classic. After donning sailor's garb for the movies, Kelly did so in real life, as a lieutenant junior grade, supervising production of training1 films in Washington during 1944 and 1945. When Kelly returned to civilian life, he signed an unprecedented three-way contract as actor, director and producer with MGM. In this triple-threat capacity, Kelly made movie history.

Few remember him in the Judy Garland romances "The Pirate" (he is breathtaking as the daredevil actor mistaken for a buccaneer) and "Summer Stock." Yet Kelly's male- bonding dance romps are unforgettable. He seemed more alive dancing competitively with men than romantically with women. "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" (1949), whose original story Kelly wrote with his chum Stanley Donen, established the three-guys-three plot of so many of his movie hits. Kelly, Sinatra and Jules Munshin were the ballplayers whose team gets sold to Esther Williams. This was followed by the exuberant "On the Town" (also 1949), with Kelly, Sinatra and Munshin as sailors on 24-leave in New York.

The enormously successful film was co-directed by Kelly and Donen. Kelly who choreographed and directed the dance sequences, many shot on actual New York locations is generally credited with liberating the movie musical from the soundstage. Because he felt the plot of so many musicals ground to a halt during the singing-and-dancing numbers, he worked with writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green to create numbers that advanced the story, giving birth to what became known as the "integrated musical." In 1951, Kelly teamed up with his "Pirate" director Vincente Minnelli to create the acclaimed "An Ameri can in Paris," the one about expatriate artist Jerry Mulligan, who is attracted to his friend's girl (Leslie Caron). Blessed with a topnotch score by George and Ira Gershwin, Kelly performed one of his few believable romantic, pas de deux with Caron, dancing to "Our Love Is Here to Stay" underneath the Pont Neuf. The film climaxed with the impressionistic "American in Paris Ballet," where Kelly danced with figures of French artists Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Raoul Dufy seemingly come alive.

The nun won eight Oscars, including one for best picture, and Kelly was awarded a special statuette "in appreciation of his versatili- Sf as an actor, singer, director and ancer." From the seriousness of "An American in Paris," Kelly plunged into the frivolity of "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), a spoof about the early days of sound movies. It was a three-guys-three film with Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds in charge of recasting a turgid costume drama into a lively musical. Few films are as giddily enjoyable as this one famous for its title number, in which Kelly euphorically dances in a downpour. Coming off three of the biggest hits in Hollywood history, Kelly could do anything he wanted. And what he wanted was "Brigadoon" (1954), the lifeless Lerner and Loewe musical about an American in Glocca Morra.

Much better was the last of the three-guys-three musicals, "It's Always Fair Weather" (1955), starring Kelly, Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd as war buddies who reunite after 10 years, horrified that they were ever best friends. Kelly's most personal film, "Invitation to the Dance" (1956), was his first solo effort as a director. In the vein of the "American in Paris Ballet," Kelly here used the medium of dance to dramatize emotions, and the result was mixed, although officials at the Paris Opera were so impressed that Kelly was invited to choreograph a ballet for their resident company in 1960. Kelly maintained that' dancing follows popular music, and he had a hard time following the rhythms of the ascendant rock 'n' roll. During the '60s, he turned to directing full time.

He made "Gigot" (1962), with Jackie Gleason as a Parisian mute who befriends a prostitute; "Guide for the Married Man" (1967), a strained comedy of adultery; and "Hello, Dolly!" (1969), an airless version of the Broadway hit. Better was his direction of those old saddletramps Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart in "The Cheyenne Social Club" (1970). Kelly married actress Betsy Blair (most famous for her role as Ernest Borgnine's girlfriend in "Marty)" in 1941. They divorced in 1957. Their daughter, Kerry, practices psychoanalysis in London.

In 1960, Kelly married dancer Jeannie Coyne, the ex-wife of his colleague Stanley Donen. They had two children, Timothy and Bridget. Jeannie Coyne Kelly died in 1973. In 1990, Kelly married Patricia Ward, a journalist who was assigned to interview him. In his twilight years, Kelly won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute (1985) and the Screen Actors Guild achievement award (1988).

He is survived by his wife, Patricia, his three children and at least a dozen movie musicals that are forever young. A family spokesman said no funeral is planned. Former Pittsburgh Press staff reporter Earl Kohnjelder contributed to this report. I 1 -J i I- -j i' Kelly with Frank Sinatra, left, in "Anchors Aweigh" (1944) As the dancing sailor opposite the siriging sailor, Kelly hit his stride All of the Kelly family enjoyed dancing and one of their routines featured the three brothers, from left, Jim, Gene and Fred..