MOVIES : It’s Been <i> So</i> Entertaining : These days, when there are more MGM stars in heaven than on Earth, there is still Gene Kelly, who is quite happy to debunk some of the myths of the studio’s Golden Age, much as ‘That’s Entertainment! III’ does

If Gene Kelly had any weakness for sentiment, you might expect to find it here, in the massive Craftsman-style home on Rodeo Drive he has owned, well, as long as he can remember. Ten years ago it burned to the ground while Kelly and his three college-age children stood on the lawn and watched the flames reduce a career’s worth of artifacts and memorabilia, including his one and only Oscar, to ash.

“Oh, I lost it all,” says Kelly, cheerfully gesturing around the spacious, oak-paneled living room that is, with the exception of a new marble fireplace, an exact replica. “I wanted to move to a smaller house,” he adds, nodding at his wife, Pat Ward, a slender woman in her 30s whom Kelly married in 1990. “(Pat) would have helped me fix up a new house. But the kids cried and moaned, so I built it again.”

Say this for Kelly, as a dancer, choreographer and director whose career spans more than half-a-century reaching back to Broadway’s and Hollywood’s Golden Age: He has managed to blend a respect for tradition and an audience’s wishes with an iconoclast’s eye for opportunity. He wasn’t a rich dancer of the top hat and tails variety--that was the province of the classicists, like his friend Fred Astaire--but what he did was rich. In his working-man clothes and trademark white socks, Kelly remade dance on film from a European art form into an American one with his snappy paper-tearing, roller-skating, puddle-stomping footwork.

A masculine, athletic dance style he called it, offering it to his employer. And Hollywood returned the favor. Between 1942 and 1960, he made 34 films, almost all of them for MGM during the studio’s heyday, and many of them--”Singin’ in the Rain,” “On the Town,” “An American in Paris”--are among the best musicals ever.

At 81, Kelly is the oldest surviving alumnus of the studio’s fabled roster of “more stars than there are in heaven.” He doesn’t dance anymore, a concession to a bad leg and his years, but then again, Kelly will confess that his body, “the dancer’s instrument,” wasn’t what it was even in 1954 when he made “Brigadoon,” his last great musical for MGM, when he was 43.

“Oh, it all starts to go soon enough,” he says, his voice raspy, but his bright eyes a ticket back to the ‘40s. Now, in his own elegant twilight, Kelly is dapperly dressed in a white turtleneck, a heavy, expensive-looking navy cardigan and, reassuringly, pale socks. He looks as if he had just come in from rehearsal.

Despite his long reign as one of Hollywood’s true royalty, Kelly seems genuinely pleased to be the subject of an interview. He is polite, even gallant, inquiring about his visitor’s hometown and accompanying his guest to and from the front door. Although the phone seems to ring almost constantly, Kelly says most days are spent quietly at home alone with his wife, with whom he is working on his autobiography.

“We don’t go out much,” he says, “although there is a dinner tonight and in a couple of weeks the premiere for the film”--”That’s Entertainment! III.” The second sequel to “That’s Entertainment!,” the popular 1974 anthology of MGM musicals, “That’s Entertainment! III” will open in New York and Los Angeles Friday. Directed and produced by Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan, who edited the first two versions, the film features onscreen appearances by Kelly and several other MGM legends including Esther Williams, Lena Horne, Cyd Charisse, Debbie Reynolds, Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney recalling their years at the storied studio.

In addition to the oral history, the film is distinguished by a surprisingly puckish tone with the inclusion of several, frequently hilarious outtakes from such films as “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Easter Parade” and “The Band Wagon.” The film makes instructive use of split-screen images and jump-cut editing as the never-before-seen numbers careen from the sublime (Judy Garland in her signature tuxedo jacket and impossibly long legs singing “Mr. Monotony” in a scene cut from “Easter Parade”) to the ridiculous (a family of singing contortionists, the Ross sisters, and an absurdly overproduced underwater sequence in which Esther Williams brings some Greek statues to life). Occasionally, the scenes border on the surreal: a split-screen comparison between Cyd Charisse’s sinuous rendition of “Two Faced Woman” and Joan Crawford’s disquietingly campy version--in tropical makeup--that was used in “Torch Song.”

As “That’s Entertainment! III” ably demonstrates, MGM frequently misused its massive talent pool--a fact that seems to delight Kelly, whose offscreen response to this latest anthology is rather more roguish than his stately onscreen narration bookending the film. He quarrels with the film’s premise--”I think the best scenes have already been taken in the first one and Part 2,” says Kelly, who directed “That’s Entertainment! Part 2” in 1976. He also insists that only “movie buffs” will be fascinated by this fourth trip to the MGM well (“That’s Dancing!” in 1985 also culled clips from MGM musicals), but he clearly relishes the film’s funniest-home-video approach, which he considers much-needed comeuppance for the once-mighty studio.

“MGM never wanted to admit that any force in the world could hold them back,” says Kelly, who spends much of the conversation debunking some of the myths, “canards,” he calls them, about the studio’s so-called Golden Age. Indeed, beyond his memories, a rich repository in an industry fascinated by its own gilt-edged beginnings, Kelly retains a certain cantankerous pride--not for MGM, its fabled contract system or Louis B. Mayer, the studio’s legendary, voluble founder--but for the sheer doing of it.

“There was no model for what I tried to do with dance,” he says, slipping into an armchair and launching into one of several, sharply observed stories he will tell during the course of an hour. “And the thing Fred and I used to bitch about was that critics didn’t know how to categorize us. They called us tap dancers because that was considered the American style. But neither of us were basically tap dancers. And people would compare us, but we didn’t dance alike at all! Fred danced in tails--everybody wore them before I came out here--but I took off my coat, rolled up my sleeves and danced in sweatshirts and jeans and khakis.”

He was one of the studio’s A-list players during the second half of MGM’s glory days, the years from 1928 to 1959 when Mayer’s studio was the largest and most powerful in town. He arrived already a star--from the 1941 Broadway show “Pal Joey”--initially under contract with David O. Selznick and then, quickly, with MGM, the largest employer of musical talent in Hollywood, where he made his first film in 1942, “For Me and My Gal,” with Judy Garland.

“When I came out here, I thought stars were Gary Cooper or John Wayne,” Kelly recalls. “I didn’t see myself as one of them. And I had it in my contract to do one picture and then go back to Broadway, go back to the theater.”

As a stage-trained song and dance man, Kelly preferred New York; Hollywood at the time “was just a bunch of orange groves,” as he remembers it. “I didn’t like the whole ambience of the town.” It wasn’t until Kelly was loaned to Columbia Pictures, where he starred opposite Rita Hayworth in 1944’s hit “Cover Girl,” that Kelly’s film career hit what he calls “the turning point, when MGM said, ‘Wait a minute, this guy dances with girls.’ They called me back and put me to work with leading ladies--Esther Williams, Kathryn Grayson--and other non-dancers.”

Although he would become one of the greatest dance partners Hollywood ever produced, it was the kind of studio decision-making that rankled Kelly. “One of the things I loved (about “That’s Entertainment! III”) was seeing the ladies, if I may use that term--Judy, Esther, Cyd--looking so young and talented,” he says, “because MGM always had a thing that the studio made the pictures and not the creative people, that the films just sort of appeared from the Thalberg Building.”

It was the era of the studio mogul, an autocracy he remembers with mixed feelings. “We felt Hollywood was a smaller community, although I don’t know that it actually was the case since we made more pictures than are made today,” he says. “But the studios were more self-contained with their own A-list and B-list actors, and then underneath them, the people they would keep around on scale. Some of those people were old silent movie stars like May McAvoy, whom I worshiped as a boy. MGM kept her on as an extra and I choked back a little sob to see what Hollywood could do to its people. No studio would even give D.W. Griffith a consulting job toward the end of his career and he died in poverty while they paid guys to just walk the halls and say, ‘I’ve got an idea.’

“All the executives--Mayer, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck--thought they could create stars, so they all pretended that everybody sang and did their own taps when most of the actors just faked it,” says Kelly, who was routinely asked to dub tap-dancing sound effects. “MGM would never publicly admit that in my generation, but for the first time, that’s acknowledged in this film.”

It was all part of MGM’s relentless search to find the next Greta Garbo or Rita Hayworth, “but of course only the public can do that,” says Kelly, recalling that he was forced to write a pool scene for Esther Williams in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” when studio executives insisted she be in the film, “because they told us all baseball pictures flop and all Esther Williams’ films are hits.”

In another instance of MGM’s heavy hand, Kelly recalls when “Mayer teamed me with the actress he considered the next Jean Harlow”--Marie McDonald--”and she turned out to be a triple threat who couldn’t sing, dance or act. Of course, the picture (1947’s ‘Living in a Big Way’) was a terrible bomb. You couldn’t give it away with china.”

Anecdotes notwithstanding, Kelly retains no lost love for MGM executives, especially Mayer. “I hated the man,” he says simply. “I thought he was bizarre and he never liked me. Fortunately, I never dealt directly with him, and, of course, I made the studio money.”

What Kelly found more to his liking were the kindred creative spirits he found among MGM’s fleet of contract performers--not just his famous co-stars, but the dozens of behind-the-scenes artists, professional arrangers, orchestrators and composers, many of them European artists who took refuge from World War II in Hollywood.

“MGM had a great studio orchestra and we worked with a lot of the same arrangers although they weren’t exclusive to MGM, because there were other studios, like Warners, that were also doing musicals,” Kelly recalls. “But fellows like (Arnold) Schoenberg and (Artur) Rubinstein came to the studio often, and a lot of the arrangers had studied in France with Michel Legrand’s teachers. They were geniuses with strings, guys like Conrad Salinger. We were very lucky to have that kind of talent around.”

Indeed, like his role at MGM, Kelly was something of a catalyst offscreen. He was married first to actress Betsy Blair (whom he divorced) and then to Jeanne Coyne, a dance instructor at MGM (who died more than 20 years ago); his Rodeo Drive home was the scene for many a gathering of what he calls “MGM’s elite.”

“Old age and death have weaned away a lot of my generation,” he says a bit wistfully but also matter-of-factly. “We had a whole gang, Oscar Levant and Lennie Bernstein when he was in town, Comden and Green, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy would come and Judy (Garland), who was a great girl and a dear friend, and Lena (Horne) and Judy would always sing.”

It was that concentration of talent, plus the studios’ demand for product in a pre-television era, that Kelly says fostered MGM’s reputation for film musicals.

“When I first came out here just before World War II, musicals were considered a sub-genre, unlike the early days of talkies with (Rouben) Mamoulian and (Ernst) Lubitsch, when musicals were very artistic things aesthetically. But they had become something where directors and writers would say, ‘Let’s do a little musical,’ which meant the actors turned and yelled at each other in song.

“I think we corrected a lot of that, because we had a great group of people who were all very serious about making musicals an indigenous American art form. And we succeeded, of course, not without some yelling at studio heads.”

Indeed, Kelly remains ambivalent not only about Mayer but also the studio’s infamous contract system. “It was a very efficient system in that because we were at the studio all the time we could rehearse a lot. But it also really repressed people. There were no union regulations yet and we were all indentured servants--you can call us slaves if you want--like ball players before free agency. We had seven-year contracts but every six months the studio could decide to fire you if your picture wasn’t a hit. And if you turned down a role, they cut off your salary and simply added the time to your contract.”

The A-list actors, Kelly says, fared a little better--”If you made them money you could say, ‘I don’t like this picture,’ and they were slower about cutting you off”--and, ironically, those artists who worked on musicals. “We got the best of it, because the executives didn’t know how to read a musical script--they still don’t! There would be a line like, ‘I love you,’ which was followed by ‘Three minutes of song and dance’ and they never quite understood that.

“One time, somebody upstairs insisted that we write out the dances, so I got together with the other choreographers and wrote out, ‘Four bars then into a glissade, arabesque, boy takes girl in arms, lifts her down into a fish . . . ‘ It’s classic dance language, but of course it was Latin to them, and we soon went back to the old way.”

It was left to individual producers and directors like Arthur Freed, Vincente Minnelli and most notably Stanley Donen, with whom Kelly collaborated on four films including “Singin’ in the Rain” and “On the Town,” to exert greater control over musicals than did Mayer and other MGM executives.

“When I came out here Mayer was more interested in running his racehorses and so different producers and directors were given great latitude,” Kelly recalls. “Freed never curtailed any of us. He believed in talent to the point if we said, ‘Bring a dancer or a designer from New York,’ Arthur would see they were hired because he knew we were trying to move musicals to a different plane while keeping them still palatable to the public--which is not what studios like Warners or Fox or Paramount were doing with musicals. Paramount at the time was largely doing Hope and Crosby ‘Road’ pictures.”

And Kelly was an innovator--not just as a dancer, but as a director and choreographer--who took Broadway dance techniques and reworked them for film. Believing that simply filming a stage production flattened the dance numbers, Kelly experimented with camera angles and props, trying to create a sense of movement on film. It was out of that larger perspective that Kelly pioneered his more memorable dance sequences--on roller skates, in a rain-soaked gutter, on a flatbed truck, swinging from a drape, leaping over a cartoon mouse, and in one particularly daring sequence in “Living in a Big Way,” literally hopping across rafters.

“They would have died if (the executives) had known I was walking along the rafters,” he says. “They usually had stuntmen standing by, because if I fell the picture was over and that’s what really concerned them.”

Not surprisingly, Kelly says that his favorite film remains “On the Town” “because it was my first directing job and I loved it for the ground it broke--shooting on location in New York without a chorus.” He had seen the Broadway show and instantly “phoned MGM to buy it, little realizing that they already owned it, but Mayer didn’t want to do it because of its inter-racial aspect--a Japanese American had played the leading lady on Broadway and we were at war with Japan.”

When Mayer eventually permitted Kelly to film in New York, “I was exhilarated,” he recalls. “It’s still my favorite, even though it’s probably not the best musical or even the most popular.”

His one real regret, Kelly says, was not being able to make more films apart from MGM. Billy Wilder had contacted Kelly for several films, Columbia wanted him to reprise his Broadway role in the film version of “Pal Joey,” and Joseph Mankiewicz wanted him to play Nathan Detroit in “Guys and Dolls.” “But MGM had seen me make ‘Cover Girl’ a hit for Columbia and they didn’t want to loan me--I even flew to New York with Lew Wasserman (who was then an agent) to go over Mayer’s head--but in the end Sinatra got both roles. The paradox was when ‘Guys and Dolls’ was done, MGM distributed it.”

Throughout the conversation, Kelly maintains a garrulous, chatty mien. He seems delighted at the opportunity to set the record straight. When he is told that an hour has passed he seems genuinely surprised. There are a few remaining points to be made.

“It’s hard to do anything but please the youth audience today,” he says. “And the men who run it now are pretty much lawyers and agents, fellows interested in it for the dough. I do think under the old studio system we made more mid-level pictures. But then I’m an optimist and I believe those kind of pictures are coming back. A steady trickle of them have made money and since money is the rule in Hollywood, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more little pictures.”

He is less optimistic about the future of the musical, despite the recent success of such animated fare as “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.” “To transfer that to real people you need (more than) talented people who can sing and dance. Kids today are sorry they can’t do musicals like we did, and the reason is there is no romantic music. It’s hard to do a musical without singing ‘I love you,’ and it’s hard to do a romantic pas de deux to hip-hop music using quick-cut shots from the feet to the eyes to the legs or whatever.”

But even here, Kelly is hopeful, that like Tony Bennett’s renewed popularity, musicals too “will return to a softer romanticism.” Videotape, he adds, is one reason for his optimism.

“Kids talk to me and say they want to do musicals again because they’ve studied the tapes of the old films. We didn’t have that. We thought once we had made it, even on film, it was gone except for the archives.”

He pauses and for the first time, sounds sentimental. “Now, when I look at TV, I see a lot of my old steps being used and I’m delighted.”

Starrin’ in Hollywood

The films of Gene Kelly, including those he directed or produced:

For Me and My Gal (1942)

Pilot Number Five (1942)

Dubarry was a Lady (1943)

Thousands Cheer (1943)

The Cross of Lorraine (1943)

Cover Girl (1944)

Christmas Holiday (1944)

Anchors Aweigh (1945)

Ziegfeld Follies (1946)

Living in a Big Way (1947)

The Pirate (1948)

The Three Musketeers (1948)

Words and Music (1948)

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949)

On the Town (1949)

Black Hand (1950)

Summer Stock (1950)

It’s A Big Country (1951)

An American in Paris (1951)

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

The Devil Makes Three (1952)

Love Is Better Than Ever (1952)

Brigadoon (1954)

Seagulls Over Sorrento (1954)

Crest of the Wave (1954)

Deep in My heart (1954)

It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)

Invitation to the Dance (1956)

The Happy Road (1957)

Les Girls (1957)

Marjorie Morningstar (1958)

Tunnel of Love (1958)

Inherit the Wind (1960)

Let’s Make Love (1960)

Gigot (1962)

What a Way to Go (1964)

The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

A Guide for the Married Man (1967)

Hello Dolly (1969)

The Cheyenne Social Club (1970)

Forty Carats (1973)

That’s Entertainment! (1974)

That’s Entertainment! II (1976)

Viva Knievel (1977)

Xanadu (1980)

That’s Dancing! (1985)

That’s Entertainment! III (1994)