Being Mrs. Gene Kelly wasn’t enough

As a child, Elizabeth Boger of Cliffside, N.J. (father, an insurance broker; schoolteacher mother encouraged her to “dance and dream”) wanted to be an actress and/or movie star. But not just any actress or star. Elizabeth was thinking Eleonora Duse and Margaret Sullavan or dancing (like Ginger Rogers) with Fred Astaire. In 1934, at 11, she was tap-dancing in an amateur show. In 1936, as Betsy Boger, she was a model for Lux. And in 1940, as Betsy Blair, she answered a call for the chorus line at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. It was advertised as “Billy Rose’s Long-Stemmed American Beauties,” and Rose approved her stems.

Blair had changed her name, but the Diamond Horseshoe changed her life. The choreographer of its new show was Gene Kelly, who had just started to make a name for himself on Broadway; as Blair recalls in her wonderful memoir, she was immediately struck by his “combination of sensitive Irish face and slim muscular body.” They fell in love and married soon after Kelly became a Broadway star in “Pal Joey.” Then he signed a seven-year movie contract, and the couple drove west in his roadster, reaching Hollywood on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Although Hollywood has been the matrix of self-reinvention since Joan Crawford kicked over the traces of Lucille Fay Le Sueur, it proved the matrix of self-discovery for Blair. With touching honesty, she describes how she saw herself as “the girl next door” in movies and couldn’t understand why she was passed over in favor of June Allyson or Dorothy McGuire. Many years later she watched herself in TV reruns of “A Double Life,” “The Snake Pit,” “Marty” and “Another Part of the Forest” (an exceptional performance as the young Birdie in Lillian Hellman’s prequel to “The Little Foxes”). “As an actress,” she realized, “I wasn’t what I thought,” too offbeat and edgy for comfort.

As the book’s subtitle implies, Blair’s self-discovery involved politics as well as love. Like many perceptive actors, writers and directors during the McCarthy era, Kelly was a moderate left-winger who joined the Committee in Support of the Hollywood Ten. Blair went further. Uncomfortably aware of the contrast between her prosperous life as Mrs. Gene Kelly and the poverty and racial injustice beyond Beverly Hills, she decided to join the Communist Party. But the party decided that the wife of an important Hollywood figure would be more valuable as a fellow traveler.

In that capacity she lent her name to organizations that supported human rights, racial equality and other admirable causes. The reward was an FBI file that fingered her as “Friend of Oona Chaplin” who “Met Paul Robeson at London Airport.” No one mentioned the word “blacklist,” Blair writes, because it was secret. Fritz Lang once told me that after a few movie deals mysteriously fell through, his agent explained: “There is no blacklist, but you are on it.” In the same way, Blair was suddenly “replaced” in MGM’s “Kind Lady,” and as Kelly was a major MGM star, her agent arranged an interview with Louis B. Mayer.

“You live in the greatest country in the world,” Mayer told her. “Don’t try to change the country God loves best.” Blair adopted her best demure manner, convinced Mayer that she really was the “very nice girl” he had taken her for and made the movie after all. But the blacklisting continued until Kelly finally pressured the new head of MGM, Dore Schary, to phone the American Legion in Washington and “vouch for me.”

The experience led to a crucial self-discovery. Although Kelly had always been totally supportive, Blair felt that he wanted her to be “the perfect little angel girl” he had fallen in love with. In becoming politically involved, “I was staking claim for myself, as a person apart from Gene.” This person’s career dreams had crystallized into serious ambition, and she wanted “an equal partnership” with her husband. “I don’t think I was jealous of his success; I just wanted mine too.”

As Kelly’s wife and mother to their daughter, Blair realized, she had been too busy to worry about her career. But “the urge to act is powerful,” and when it finally asserted itself, she knew that she had to leave Hollywood.

The second act of Blair’s life begins with a divorced woman of 32 settling in Europe, where she found rewarding work in theater and movies. Most notably, she played the sometime girlfriend of an Italian worker in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Il Grido,” and a young woman suffocated by small-town life in “Calle Mayor,” directed by Juan-Antonio Bardem, uncle of Javier Bardem and later a victim of Franco’s blacklist. She also embarked on a major love affair and “equal partnership” with French actor Roger Pigaut. They co-produced a documentary about everyday life in Paris, and he introduced her to friends (including Simone Signoret and Yves Montand) who shared their political views.

Then, in 1961, Blair made a movie in London. She fell in love with Karel Reisz, whose “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” had recently opened to great acclaim. Once again, she leaves “a whole life” and “a good man” and, in writing about it later, is surprised not to feel wicked or guilty but “free” -- and “maybe a bit more grown-up.” It’s a brave moment of truth in a vivid self-portrait that contains some equally vivid background scenes: working with Antonioni, three weeks as Desdemona in Orson Welles’ “Othello” before the money runs out, visiting Charlie and Oona Chaplin in Switzerland. But there’s a poignant coda. Blair writes that she fell in love with her second husband believing she would “always be interested in him, intrigued by him.” Reisz died shortly after she finished writing this remarkable book.

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Gavin Lambert is a director and screenwriter and the author of “Inside Daisy Clover.”