Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen (2 page)

For nearly ten years the girl’s legs were encased in ugly high-topped corrective shoes laced up to her knees and rigid leg braces which earned her the nickname “Boots” Verdon. Later she would claim that this was a refrain she still heard in her sleep. She only wore them in her off-hours but they gave the girl a sense of shame and a fear of discovery and recrimination. Verdon said that people would look at her and she would think that she was pretty but still a cripple. Even after she was able to take them off, she was afraid that something give her away to be the cripple she knew people saw her as. To hide her deformity, Verdon would stand with her right leg turned; Bob Fosse would later make it one of his signature looks. The leg positioning came from incorrect dancing. Ballet training had the dancers’ feet turned out for a stand but Gertrude had learned that the muscle used to turn out was the wrong one to use for her daughter. Therefore Verdon learned ballet with her toes turned in. Her legs were not her only problem since she was also cross-eyed, freckled, bespectacled, and pathetically skinny. Verdon would say that she had to learn to accept herself as an ugly duckling and to hope that people would learn to like her a little in spite of the way she looked. As dance was prescribed for her legs, eye exercises were given to correct her squint and ballet would keep her eyes busy rolling up into her head to focus together on images which were never there.

She said that she didn’t remember exactly when she started dancing. Since her mother was a dancer, she thought everybody and their mother danced. At Gertrude’s school, Verdon studied under the instruction of Ernest Belcher. Known as the dancing teacher to the stars, he was the father of Marge Champion, who also attended the same classes, as did Tula Ellice Finklea who would become Cyd Charisse. Marge Champion tells that she met Verdon when she was eleven and Verdon was seven. Verdon learned ballet, buck-and-wing, soft shoe and the waltz clog. Belcher would tell her that any contortionist can learn to stick their leg up in the air, but only a rare person can do it the right way and become a dancer. That’s the kind of person that Verdon wanted to be. Belcher demanded perfection but he was not the kind of teacher who fired one to great heights. Rather, he saw that an unemotional technique should be thoroughly planted. Verdon was grateful for his influence.

At the age of three, Verdon had entertained at an MGM Christmas party thrown by Marion Davies. The first time when she was in front of an audience was when she was three and a half. Gertrude worked at the Los Angeles Cotton Club as a dancer, doing ethnic pseudo–Oriental numbers. The dinner show audience members were all white, the night show audience members all black, and at 2 a.m. it was mixed. One night Verdon’s father drove her and her brother to the club and, upon arriving, told Verdon to get Gertrude. In her pajamas, she walked up the red carpet that led into the candlelit club and onto the stage where Willie Covan, a black tap dancer, was performing. He asked her what he could do for her and Verdon told him, “I want my mother!” The audience laughed when they heard it. Verdon would later study acting with Covan, although she felt his approach was old-fashioned. She said that she also appeared in her first act with Covan and his wife Flo, who was beige with red hair and freckles. It was known as Covan and Family, and Verdon played their daughter.

At four she appeared with Gertrude in a dance act called the Two Flying D’Arcys at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. She also was taught the Hawaiian hula dance by her mother and performed at Loyola University in Los Angeles. The sight caused a priest to come running down the aisle to tell her that she was lewd. Verdon didn’t know what the word meant but she still ran off stage in response. Verdon was billed as Baby Alice, “the fastest tapper in the world,” at the Shrine Auditorium. She claimed that this was a title that didn’t mean anything because that’s what everybody called themselves, and you were only considered good if you were fast. You could really be terrible but if you were fast, that was all that mattered. Some sources claim that the Baby Alice credit was when Verdon was six although she said she was five and in an act with four-year-old June Brady. Brady imitated Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker and Mae West while Verdon tap-danced, told the corniest jokes, and did pratfalls. She and Brice also ended up together doing a pseudo–Hawaiian dance. She also danced at Loew’s State and the Million Dollar Theatre.

At nine Verdon was in a ballet at the Hollywood Bowl, and also performed as a hula dancer, acrobat and clown in the circus. According to Marge Champion, one ballet at the Bowl was called Carnival in Venice and all the dancers had specialty acts to help give the illusion of a painting come to life. Champion did “The Spirit of the Night” in a Grecian outfit. Verdon and Gertrude and a little dog were people wandering through the streets. During the June rehearsal, it was very hot, which made the dog vomit. Belcher’s assistant Maria stripped Verdon down to a leotard and put poms poms on her and a little tail and a leash around her neck and she became the dog.

Dancing toughened Verdon’s muscles, straightened her legs and developed her body. The eye exercises corrected the squint. But she sometimes rebelled against the discipline imposed on her. She says it was at the age of ten that she first tried to break away from dancing when she discovered boys and baseball. Her mother discouraged her from a career in baseball by pointing out that dancing gave her grace and poise. Verdon didn’t want to hear that and threatened to run away from home, packing greasepaint in her suitcase rather than a tube of toothpaste. But soon she would learn that Gertrude was right. Poise would bring boys faster than a .300 batting average. When she wasn’t working, Verdon attended at a school for professional children. She also began to accumulate elements that she would incorporate in her dancing, such as learning sign language from a deaf mute girl in school. Learning to sign gave Verdon a greater facility with hands and fingers. Verdon said that she wasn’t really interested in dance and she didn’t know she was dancing until she saw a Fred Astaire film and became enamored with him. In the fourth grade when she was about eight, she began signing her homework Ginger Verdon, after seeing an Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie. When the teacher asked “Why Ginger?” the girl told her, “Because I can’t be Fred.”

At eleven Verdon made her uncredited film debut as a solo ballerina in the musical romance
The King Steps Out
(1936). Directed by Josef von Sternberg for Columbia Pictures, the film starred Grace Moore as Bavarian Princess Elizabeth, who goes to the Viennese Hellbrunn summer palace to prevent her sister Helena from marrying their cousin, the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef Habsburg, to whom Helen is betrothed. The screenplay is said to be based on the 1932 German operetta
Sissy
, also known as
Lisa
, by Hubert and Ernst Marischka and composed by Fritz Kreisler, which in turn was based on the play
Sissy’s Brautfahrt
by Ernst Decsey and Gustav Holm. The film was made between January 6 and February 26, 1936.

Verdon only appears in one scene. At first she is amongst a group of what is said to be sixty Viennese Imperial ballerinas who have been summoned to perform for the emperor’s birthday. The girls are seen wearing tutus and dancing in a rehearsal room that would seem too small for them to move in. Verdon is given her own medium shot for a few seconds as she twirls in circles. In a scene where the dancers are addressed by Colonel Von Kempen, Verdon is not visible.

The film was released on May 28, 1936, and was lambasted by Frank Nugent in the
New York Times
(who made no mention of von Sternberg) and later by Pauline Kael. The director would repudiate the film and ask that it not be included in retrospectives of his work. However it proved to be a box office hit.

Verdon went on to perform at American Legion and Canadian Legion meetings and Boy Scout jamborees, and attended Hamilton High School where her classes included drawing and sewing. The class clown, she got into trouble for imitating her teachers. Verdon’s future championing of causes is said to have been stimulated by a school sit-down strike on behalf of Japanese-American neighbors herded into detention camps in World War II. Gertrude tried to imbue the same theatrical ambitions in her son William, though she found that he had not been bitten with the same show biz bug as his older sister. She dressed him up when he was fourteen in a trenchcoat to make him look the required sixteen to audition for the part of Huck Finn, but he didn’t get the part.

At twelve, Verdon was part of a group that did gypsy dances for Shriner’s conventions and the like. At thirteen, she had developed a 36-inch bust, 24 inch waist and 36- inch hips, and with the right makeup she could project the image of a young adult. Some sources claim that at this time Verdon lied about her age, claiming to be sixteen, and was cast as one of the Broadbent Dancers in a revival of
Show Boat
at the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Association. The production was part of the Third Annual Light Opera Festival at the Auditorium Theatre. A program for the show with Verdon listed in the cast is dated 1940, which puts her age at fifteen. Her casting came about after she had been taking classes with choreographer Aida Broadbent, and thereafter she would be cast in Broadbent’s opera dance group for seven summers. These included “nature dances” in productions like
Gypsy Baron
and
The Red Mill
. The shows also played San Francisco and all the dancers lived together. Gertrude traveled with her daughter.

Verdon said that the ballet company also appeared in the MGM musical comedy
Presenting Lily Mars
(1943). The film was in production from August 3 to late October, 1942 with reshoots done in March 1943 and it was released on April 29, 1943. It is possible that she is amongst the chorus dancers in the number “Is It Really Love (Or the Gypsy in Me?),” in the rehearsal for “Kulebiaka (Russian Rhapsody)” which is later headed by Judy Garland, observing Martha Eggerth rehearsing “When I Look at You,” in the boarding house crowd scenes, in the opening night show performance of “Kulebiaka” headed by Eggerth, and in the finale behind Garland in “Where’s There Music.” In the “Kulebiaka” opening night scene one girl resembles Verdon, standing behind Eggerth in one shot as the star sings, but it cannot be confirmed that it is in fact her.

At fourteen Verdon was chosen “Miss California” by the Catalina bathing suit company, and posed for ads on Venice beach. When she decided to learn to ice skate, she took her lunch with her every day to the rink and glided around getting to know all the instructors. They taught her enough that she was offered a skating job the first time she auditioned. Verdon said that her skating was uncontrolled and that she did a figure eight in squares. At this time she also picked up the ability to sing, although at her age it was considered comparatively late in life to begin to use it in a professional capacity.

At fifteen Verdon appeared at a San Diego club as half of a ballroom team called Verdon and Del Velle. She also frequented burlesque houses because she felt that burlesque was the real folk dancing of the United States: “It grew up here. And the stripper is a natural, spontaneous growth from the hoochy-cooch of the carnivals and country fairs.” Verdon watched with admiration and with the seriousness of a Ph.D. candidate the gyrations and controlled torso sinuosities of Georgia Sothern and Charmaine, and found sermons in their bumps and grinds. Her study would pay off in her later Eve in “The Garden of Eden Ballet” of
Can-Can
. She was also drawn to the burlesque clowns in baggy pants and became fascinated by Chaplin’s Little Tramp character. Verdon’s interest in the comic but sad persona would later develop so that her characters would be indebted to the French clown Pierrot and to Harlequin, the sixteenth-century
commedia dell’arte
figure who was the prototype for many circus clowns and burlesque comedians. She also won a part in a water ballet although she had no previous experience in swimming.

At sixteen Verdon was the specialty act “Girl in Gold,” wearing a rubber bra and panties and with her entire body painted by Gertrude in shimmering gold powder and glycerine, presented before a house of loud and hungry men, in a review at the Hollywood nightclub N.T. Granlund’s Florentine Gardens. The choreography is credited to Dave Gould, the show headlined Sugar Geise, and the chorus included Marie McDonald, Yvonne De Carlo, and Carol Haney. There is footage of Verdon supposedly at sixteen dancing on film on YouTube, although it is not known what the occasion was. Wearing a black tutu and a black feather in her hair, she dances en pointe in front of stationary ladies wearing fashion wear before a man enters singing. Regrettably the clip ends before the man can be seen properly.

Also when she was sixteen, she was in a repertory group. She played in
Pygmalion
and in the comedy
Biography
. However Verdon’s burgeoning theatrical career soon came to a halt when she got married.

Sources differ as to how old Verdon was when she met the man she would marry. Some say it occurred in 1942 when she was seventeen, others say she was only sixteen. However old she was, this man would prompt her to give up her professional career and elope with him. He was James Archibald Henaghan, sometimes spelled as Heneghan. Blonde, brash and fun-loving, he was twice her age. He was also a divorced sometime-screenwriter, gossip columnist on Louella Parsons’ staff, literary agent for Mickey Spillane, promoter and general man-about-Hollywood. Verdon had only known Henaghan for six months when she agreed to marry him, and she is said to have lied to the Orange County judge that she was twenty-two.

Exactly nine months later, on March 9, 1943, Verdon bore him a son, Jimmy O’Farrell Henaghan. Henaghan said that Verdon’s father, who reportedly hated Henaghan, was waiting with a shotgun to make sure that the baby didn’t arrive a day before it was due. Leaving her child in the care of her parents, Verdon followed her husband into journalism and reviewed movies and nightclub acts for
The Hollywood Reporter
. She also served occasionally as her husband’s “leg woman” or news chaser. Verdon said that she had to use fake by-line names because she was underage. Some of these were Phyllis Taylor and Glynda O’Farrell. She once got close to being sued for two million dollars for libel, which highly flattered her. At a burlesque house in Los Angeles, Verdon studied the strippers and learned some of the techniques that she would later use in
Damn Yankees
.