Even recounted in the starkest factual terms, the life of Vincente Minnelli,
the director of classic MGM musicals like “Meet Me in St. Louis,”
“Gigi” and “An American in Paris,” is as packed with color and incident
as one of the dream ballets that became his trademark. Born Lester
Anthony Minnelli in 1903, he grew up the only child in a family of
traveling performers in the Midwest (his mother, Mina Mary LaLouche
LeBeau, played the ingénue in stock melodramas, while his father,
Vincent, conducted the Minnelli Brothers Tent Theater orchestra). In
young adulthood, the pathologically shy, stammering Lester, who had
once apparently had a penchant for trying on his mother’s clothes, read
a biography of the flamboyant painter James McNeill Whistler and
decided to reinvent himself as a worldly aesthete, working as a
department-store window dresser in Chicago before making his name as
adesigner of lavish theatrical sets in New York. It was there that he
became “Vincente.”
Once he moved to Hollywood as a director in
MGM’s stable, Minnelli quickly built a reputation as a fearsome
perfectionist, despite his passive, retiring personality. A closeted
gay man, Minnelli had been known to sport “light makeup” while
frequenting places like the Gershwin brothers’ New York salon in the
1930s. Nonetheless, he was married four times — first, and most
famously, to MGM’s troubled star Judy Garland — and fathered two daughters, the older of whom is the perpetually re-self-inventing Liza Minnelli.
In
“Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer,” Emanuel Levy, a film
critic and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles,
makes the case that Minnelli was largely responsible for elevating
movie musicals from their earlier incarnation as filmed vaudeville into
sophisticated middlebrow entertainments by integrating musical numbers
into the plot. Levy, the author of a biography of George Cukor and numerous books on Hollywood history, is a tireless cine­phile and a
prodigious researcher. He has trawled through the archives — including
many previously unseen papers left in the possession of Minnelli’s
fourth wife, Lee Anderson Minnelli, after his death in 1986 — and
returned laden with lore. Some of the anecdotes that emerge belong in a
Minnelli-directed melodrama (he named his and Garland’s pet dog Gobo, a
play on the name of Lester Gaba, who was the closest thingMinnelli ever
had to a boyfriend and whose heart was broken by the marriage to
Garland). Other details seem tailor-made for one of his farces (while
filming “Gigi” in Paris, “Minnelli was bitten by a swan in the Jardin
de ­Bagatelle”).
No book that combines lifelong thwarted passion
and Parisian swan assault can be all bad. But the vigor Levy poured
into amassing biographical data seems to have deserted him when it came
time to shape those facts into an artist’s life story. Reading
“Vincente Minnelli” can feel like scaling a vast, slippery mountain of
internal studio memos, news clippings and telegrams. What analysis of
the 1952 Lana TurnerArthur Freed,
to abandon the working title for “The Band Wagon” — without ever
telling us what that working title was. The lack of a complete Minnelli
filmography adds to the frustrating impression of wandering through a
forest without a map. melodrama “The Bad and the Beautiful” would be complete without noting
that “shooting . . . began with an exterior of the cemetery, Scene 7,
then the cemetery gate, Scene 8, then an exterior of Jonathan’s estate,
Scene 10, and an exterior of a Hollywood club, Scene 25”? Similar
details pop up throughout the book in sudden, impenetrable clumps. Yet
elsewhere, information that would be crucial for comprehending the
significance of a story is mysteriously absent. For instance,
Levymentions that Minnelli persuaded his longtime producer,
Levy’s prose does have its vivid moments, especially when he’s lamenting some of the low points in Minnelli’s ­oeuvre, like the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton howler “The Sandpiper.” I laughed aloud at Levy’s image of Taylor
“parading about in lurid lavender . . . while a wounded fowl nests in
her raven tresses.” (Unable to restrain his glee, Levy goes on to
describe how Taylor “sports a violet-blue bra while she fends off a
randy ex-lover by brandishing a dainty hatchet.”)
In fact, the
degree to which the author’s language gains in liveliness when he
criticizes his subject’s work raises the question: Why does Levy
believe that Minnelli’s career merits this, the director’s first
full-length biography? Of course, no artist need produce an unblemished
string of masterpieces to deserve critical attention, but Levy seems
hard pressed to find a Minnelli film he actually likes. “Kismet” is
“heavy-handed, grim and listless.” “Brigadoon”is “curiously flat and
rambling, lacking in warmth or charm.” “The Long, Long Trailer” is
“vulgar” and “banal.” After half a dozen such assessments, it’s
puzzling to hear on Page 308 that “Gigi” counts as “one of Minnelli’s
few movies that occasionally feels like an overly studied work.”
The
account of Minnelli’s brief, dreadful marriage to Garland exerts a
ghoulish fascination, but so many details are left out that the
portrait that emerges is maddeningly vague. Nearly 100 pages after
chronicling their breakup, Levy offhandedly mentions that “Judy caught
him in compromising positions at least twice, once with a bit player
and once with their gardener.” Now you tell us? It’s one thing for a
biographer to play down intimate details of his subject’s life in order
to emphasize the work. But as long as Levy has already disclosed
Garland’s startlingly explicit complaints to friends about Minnelli as
a lover, shouldn’t we also be privy to the extent and nature of his
dalliances?
The gauzy cloak of privacy Levy draws over Minnelli’s
sex life hints at the author’s ambivalence about the role his subject’s
sexuality should play in the book. In the introduction, he calls “queer
sensibility” “a concept I am not fond of,” but he does allow that
Minnelli “channeled his sexual and other anxieties into his work in
both manifest and latent ways.” Though Levy seldom revisits this notion
in the course of the book, he acknowledges in a final chapter on
Minnelli’s legacy that certain gay and bisexual directors — including
Minnelli, Cukor, James Whale and, in our day, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant — “imbue their work with agay/queer sensibility regardless of the particular genre or narrative they work in.”
Yet
among the book’s strongest pas­sages are those few in which Levy reads
the director’s work from, as it were, inside the closet. When Minnelli
turned the play “Tea and Sympathy” into a film in 1956, the industry
censorship bureau known as the Breen office forced MGM to sanitize the
story: the hero, originally a sexually confused schoolboy bullied for
his lack of interest in masculine pursuits, became a sensitive straight
lad mocked for his ill-defined “nonconformity.” Despite his low opinion
of the resulting picture, Levy offers a powerful reading of the film’s
use of color: the signature shade of yellow worn by Deborah KerrLeslie Caron, with Minnelli’s own insecurity about being both a closeted artist in ’50s Hollywood and a “kept” man in the MGM studio system. and the male characters’ varying shades of blue (dark for the “virile”
characters, pale for the “sissies”) are combined in the green dress
Kerr wears in the climactic seduction scene. And in his assessment of
“Gigi,” Levy deftly equates the anxiety of theheroine, a courtesan in
training played by
It’s
the delicate, perhaps impossible task of the biographer to find a
balance between the virtues of thoroughness and trenchancy, between the
roles of archivist and critic. In this book, Levy errs on the side of
thoroughness, with the paradoxical result that readers learn more than
they ever wanted to know about Vincente Minnelli’s life, but not nearly
enough about Vincente Minnelli.