Mark Griffin (32 page)

IN 1951, CLINTON TWISS PUBLISHED
The Long, Long Trailer
, a bestselling rib-tickler that chronicled the author’s misadventures tooling across the country in the company of Mrs. Twiss and an enormous “twenty-eight foot aluminum whale of a trailer.”

With its raucous slapstick episodes,
The Long, Long Trailer
seemed custom built for television’s first couple of comedy, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The stars of the phenomenally popular CBS series
I Love Lucy
had conquered the small screen but a feature-film success remained elusive. After Arnaz read an abridged version of the Twiss novel in
Reader’s Digest
, he attempted to acquire the rights to the property but found himself outbid by MGM producer
Pandro Berman (rumored to have been a Ball beau back in her starlet days at RKO).

Berman was convinced that the story had the makings of another
Father of the Bride
-sized smash and went to work assembling much of the same team that had brought
Bride
to the screen. The inevitable Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett would handle the adaptation, while Vincente agreed to direct. Ball and Arnaz signed on to star, preparing to shoot
Trailer
while on summer hiatus from their series. Everything had fallen into place, with one exception: MGM was dead set against the idea of a Lucy-Desi movie.

I Love Lucy
was a weekly must-see event for virtually everyone in America with a television, but Metro executives didn’t think people would leave the comfort of their living rooms (where they could enjoy Lucy and Desi’s zany antics for free every Monday night) to pay to see them at the local movie house. But Berman was banking on the fact that Ball and Arnaz, then at the height of their unprecedented popularity, would make for “boffo boxoffice,” and he ultimately persuaded the studio to see things his way. Television’s Lucy and Ricky Ricardo morphed into
Trailer
’s Tacy and Nicky Collini.

Once Lucy and Desi had signed on, MGM’s initial trepidation about casting the couple evaporated. The studio rolled out the red carpet for Ball and Arnaz, both returning to the studio they had called home as contract players a decade earlier. In addition to their combined $250,000 salary, the couple were showered with star perks. Lucy would be occupying Lana Turner’s former dressing room (rumored to have been the busiest on the lot), while Desi would make himself at home in Clark Gable’s old quarters.

For Minnelli, guiding Ball and Arnaz through a widescreen variation of their weekly sitcom shouldn’t have been too taxing. After all, he had just helmed one of the most memorable musicals of all time and skewered his own industry in the film preceding it. And yet, Ball recalled that as filming began in June 1953, Minnelli was “a basketcase.” According to Ball, it wasn’t the logistics of the shoot that were agitating Vincente but an especially bad case of ex-wife: “He was a great director. It was Judy who was making him crazy. Judy made
everybody
crazy. They were already divorced. But Judy was going through one of her crazy times. God, that woman was impossible. He was trying to take care of Liza and Judy wanted her, but Judy was so drunk and full of pills that he didn’t want Liza to be with her. Jesus, it was a mess.”
⁹

When Ball offered to take seven-year-old Liza in to live with the Arnaz clan, Vincente was beyond grateful. “He grabbed my hand and just kept saying, ‘Will you?
Will you
?’” recalled Ball, who would play surrogate mother to Liza for nearly a year.

Nicky and Tacy Collini (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball) and the forty-foot monster that comes between them in
The Long, Long Trailer
. Tacy’s Aunt Anastacia happens to reside on the
Meet Me in St. Louis
street and her cousin, the painfully shy “poor Grace,” was based on Minnelli’s Aunt Anna. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

With his domestic situation settled—at least for the time being—Minnelli could concentrate fully on the film. Despite all of the chaos on screen and some rigorous shooting on location in Yosemite National Park, Vincente would recall the shooting of
The Long, Long Trailer
as “painless.” Even Ball, who in later years would gain a reputation as a hard-nosed taskmaster, seemed to be enjoying the ride. “I didn’t find her controlling at all,” says Perry Sheehan Adair, who appeared in the film as one of Ball’s bridesmaids. “In fact, she seemed quite nice. I think she and Minnelli really clicked on that picture, too. They brought out the best in each other and it really showed on screen.”
¹⁰

Only two months after the movie started shooting, it was previewed at the Picwood Theatre in West Los Angeles. Among the raves, there were some dissenting votes: “Minnelli has lost his touch,” read one comment card. “Acts very similar to the weekly TV show,” griped another. And most pointed of all: “This is a television team primed for a half hour of experienced laughs. Arnaz is not movie material. Lucille Ball is movie material. Let her co-star with someone else. Let Desi lead a band.”

Though many Minnelli disciples tend to write off
The Long, Long Trailer
as soulless studio fluff and nothing more than an elongated
I Love Lucy
episode, others believe that it has been dismissed unfairly. “There are these statements that Minnelli is making about consumerism and obsession with surface details,” says film scholar Richard Barrios:

And it certainly worked. In its initial release, the film raked in an estimated $4.5 million and ranked among the top grossing pictures of the year. As Arnaz liked to boast, for years
The Long, Long Trailer
held the title as the most commercially successful comedy ever released by MGM. The critics were generally agreeable, with
Time
observing: “Director Vincente Minnelli, as skilled a comedy hand as Hollywood employs, has a way of letting the story babble on absently between solid banks of common sense until the audience is lulled in smiles.”
¹²

WHEN GEORGETTE MAGNANI was introduced to Vincente Minnelli by composer Vernon Duke, she was in her early twenties, newly arrived from France, and almost always referred to as the “Sister of Miss Universe of 1953,” Christiane Martel. Georgette had come to California to look after her sister, who even at the tender age of seventeen didn’t seem in dire need of an escort. After her beauty-pageant triumph, Christiane was being courted by Universal Pictures. She was engaged to marry Ronnie Marengo, heir to the Marengo department store fortune. Being constantly referred to as an appendage of Miss Universe may have prompted the equally photogenic Georgette to attempt to forge her own identity—one that had nothing to do with her much-discussed sister. Suddenly items about “Christine’s Sis” began appearing in print. Columnists described Georgette as though she were the Second Coming of Sophia Loren: “She’s the same height as Christine [
sic
]—5 feet, 6 inches. Other statistics: waist 23, bust 35, hips 35.” Va-voom.

Beyond the vital stats, Minnelli maintained that he was attracted by Georgette’s “open manner” (the same quality he said had drawn him to Judy), her “Latin temper,” and her French-Italian ancestry, which (more or less) matched his own. After they began a whirlwind courtship, rumors were circulating that Judy Garland’s ex was preparing to tie the knot again. When queried about his matrimonial intentions, Vincente told columnist Harrison Carroll, “We aren’t definite on our plans. . . . It’s highly probable. We see a lot of each other and she’s a wonderful girl.”
¹

All speculation ended on February 16, 1954, when Vincente and Georgette wed in a Riverside ceremony termed a “surprise marriage” by the press. For many in the Hollywood community, the phrasing could be interpreted in more than one way. Cyd Charisse changed out of her
Brigadoon
costume long enough to be Georgette’s matron of honor while dapper French actor Claude Dauphin served as Vincente’s best man. The couple’s honeymoon was postponed as production resumed on Minnelli’s latest musical extravaganza.

BRIGADOON
. THE VERY NAME was meant to conjure up images of rolling hills, sable skies, and, of course, the inescapable heather on the hill. If ever a movie cried out for open air, scenic vistas, and local color, it was Production #1645. Expectations were through the roof for MGM’s widescreen version of the triumphant Broadway musical about a pair of American malcontents who stumble upon a mythical Scottish village that springs to life for a single day every hundred years. When the original stage production opened at “the house of hits”—the Ziegfeld Theatre—in 1947,
Brigadoon
was showered with rapturous reviews (“All the arts of the theatre have been woven into a singing pattern of enchantment,” said the
New York Times
²
). The musical racked up 581 performances, netted the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and solidified the reputations of musical-comedy’s new dynamic duo, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The talented team was now being touted as the best thing to happen to the American musical since Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein.

It seemed a good omen when Lerner was tapped to adapt his own libretto for the screen. And given the fact that the property was a lush musical fantasy, Minnelli seemed a very natural choice as director. After all,
Brigadoon
’s lovers-in-a-race-against-time scenario was essentially
The Clock
in kilts. If the saga of MacConnachy Square could succeed within the confines of a New York theater, surely the movies could make a good thing even better by souping it up with what the ads trumpeted as “Breathtaking CinemaScope” and “Gayest Color.” MGM was fully confident that its production of the musical would improve upon the stage show by featuring popular stars whom the paying customer out in Omaha had actually heard of.

In March 1951, it was announced that Gene Kelly and Kathryn Grayson—the stars of
Anchors Aweigh
in 1945—would be reunited in
Brigadoon
. With Kelly in the lead, it became immediately apparent that Lerner and Loewe’s enchanting score (which included “The Heather on the Hill” and “Almost Like Being in Love”) would take a backseat to the star’s fancy footwork. “It
became a dancing show instead of a singing show,” says Lerner’s longtime assistant Stone Widney. Exit Kathryn Grayson. Enter Moira Shearer. The striking, flame-haired ballerina had delivered a star-making performance in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s
The Red Shoes
. Whereas Grayson hailed from Winston Salem, North Carolina, Shearer was an authentic Scottish lass. As fate would have it, Shearer’s ballet company was reluctant to release its star for the length of the film’s shooting schedule, however, and Metro finally settled on someone closer to home: contract player and Freed Unit favorite Cyd Charisse.