Mark Griffin (39 page)

Like
The Long, Long Trailer
,
Designing Woman
was the kind of lighthearted romp that didn’t demand much of Vincente. He realized that he was there to shepherd his good-looking leads through a frothy comedy, and without complaint, he did exactly that—though just beneath the glossy veneer of
Designing Woman
is the kind of slyly cutting-edge, ahead-of-its-time exploration of gender roles that gets film scholars and academics salivating. And
yet the yin-yang dynamics of the story aren’t exclusively concerned with a marriage of opposites.

Jack Cole’s character, Randy Owen, is the furiously theatrical ringleader of Marilla’s “show crowd,” which she describes as “a pretty neurotic bunch.” Randy is so flamboyantly effeminate that he makes
Tea and Sympathy
’s Tom Lee look like a Navy SEAL by comparison. Inspired by the notion of staging an undersea ballet, Randy offers a preview of his best seahorse. Marilla and her friends are delighted by the wild exhibition, though Mike and his Wednesday-night poker pals are speechless.

Later, when Randy overhears Mike questioning his manhood (“Is that guy for real?”), he immediately whips out photos of a wife and three sons and offers to beat both of Mike’s ears off. Randy can be considered something of a spokesperson for Minnelli, who was, as film historian Stephen Harvey diplomatically put it, “a somewhat suspect figure as well.”
⁶

At first, the very presence of Randy Owen in
Designing Woman
seems rather daring (for 1957), but after the revelation regarding the wife and kids, it becomes clear that it’s all just another misunderstanding. As attentive audiences should have learned from
Tea and Sympathy
, appearances can be deceiving. Just because something looks one way doesn’t mean that it is that way. Randy Owen, like Vincente Minnelli, would appear to be the victim of his own artistic flair. Or maybe the character, like the director, needed the photos of the wife and kids to convince himself.

“That whole dimension of Vincente’s life interested me,” says writer William Gibson. “It did in John Houseman, too. Houseman had a reputation of being homosexual also. And yet, both of them were married and the fathers of young children. On the surface, everything was standard, but it was curious because you felt that there was also a need to display this picture of a young, happy family. . . . I had the impression that both guys were trying very hard to live a ‘normal’ American life.”
⁷

Designing Woman
opened in January 1957, and the picture was generally well received. As
Time
noted, “Director Vincente Minnelli plays his game of pseudo-sociological croquet with the careless good form of a man who does not have to worry about making his satiric points. He plays for the box office score instead, working the sex angles and the big names and the production values—yum-yum Metrocolor, flossy furniture, slinky clothes—with the skill of a cold old pro.”
⁸
Thanks largely to its A-list star power,
Designing Woman
returned $3,750,000 to the MGM coffers.

There was also a surprise in store. When the Oscar nominations were announced for the 1957 ceremonies,
Designing Woman
netted a nomination for “Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.” In something
of an upset, the George Welles script was awarded the Oscar over such strong contenders as
Funny Face
and
I Vitelloni
. As Welles accepted his statuette, he noted that “the suggestion for the screenplay came from one of our industry’s most designing women . . . Helen Rose.”

“THERE’LL BE SOME CHANGES MADE,” Dolores Gray belts out in
Designing Woman
, and by the time the picture was released, she could have easily been referring to the major transitions that had occurred in MGM’s front office. After a controversial eight-year reign as the studio’s production chief, Dore Schary was fired. “Dore Schary was a writer and a picture maker and he didn’t any more know how to run a studio than fall through the roof,” says MGM publicist Esme Chandlee. Schary was replaced by Joseph Vogel, who immediately set the tone for the new regime by announcing his plans to remake the 1927 silent epic
Ben-Hur
.

Meanwhile, Minnelli was involved in a takeover of his own. He was summoned to replace director Ronald Neame on
The Seventh Sin
, an updating of the 1934 Greta Garbo vehicle
The Painted Veil
, which had been adapted from the Somerset Maugham story of the same title.

“The enterprise was sour from the beginning,” Minnelli recalled in his autobiography. “The company didn’t get along with each other and the producer and director were having battles royal with the front office. They’d struggled through most of the filming when matters finally became untenable.”
⁹

Fifty years after he walked off the troubled production, Ronald Neame wasn’t forthcoming about why his set had become such a fierce battleground, but he remained grateful to Vincente for stepping in and wrapping up the rest of the picture.

If walking on to a contentious set was not something Minnelli relished, at least he wouldn’t have to be there for long. With most of the picture in the can, Vincente would only have to shoot some retakes and a few additional scenes. Although most of
The Seventh Sin
belongs to Neame, the finished film contains some distinctive Minnelli flourishes. The opening scene begins with ravenous close-ups of shoes, silk stockings, and jewelry—all obviously shed in the midst of an adulterous interlude. When the nervous lovers, played by Eleanor Parker and Jean Pierre-Aumont, are first glimpsed together, they’re posed before the inevitable Minnelli mirror. A later sequence features a sweeping boom maneuver; the camera sails up to Parker’s bungalow and then right through an open window. Must be Minnelli. The visual ingenuity distracts from the low-budget look of the film and lines such as, “I’ve never been to an epidemic before. I hope it’ll be fun.” And just in case audiences
weren’t hip to the fact that Parker’s character was a slave to her own desires, Miklos Rozsa recycles his
Madame Bovary
waltz to tip everybody off.

Regardless of which moments were attributable to Neame and which to Minnelli, the critics could find little to praise in
The Seventh Sin
, with the reviewer for
Cue
noting that the picture “meanders after Maugham but never quite catches up with him.”
¹⁰

“WHY DOES ARTHUR
want to make a picture about a whore
? . . .
”
That question was reverberating through the executive boardroom of Loew’s, Inc. The assembled suits, though not a prudish group by any means, were nevertheless dumbfounded. Why did Arthur Freed, the esteemed producer of such family-friendly fare as
The Wizard of Oz
and
Meet Me in St. Louis
, want to sully his cinematic reputation with a movie about a young girl groomed to be a perfectly mannered prostitute? After the disappointments of
Brigadoon
,
It’s Always Fair Weather
, and
Kismet
, naysayers were already wondering if Freed was losing his touch. Or had that enigmatic collector of Roualts and prize-winning orchids discovered a diamond in the rough in the form of the semi-scandalous
Gigi
?

“You know, basically, it is awfully good,” Minnelli would say of Colette’s original short story. “She wrote it as a kind of throwaway. She never considered it one of her major works, like
Cheri
. But it’s the one that has endured.”
^aq

For all its wistful charm and Gallic whimsy,
Gigi
was written in the midst of agony and despair. During the French Occupation, a sciatica-plagued seventy-year-old, Colette, tormented by the Gestapo’s arrest of her Jewish husband, produced what many consider to be her most unapologetically romantic work.
Gigi
was inspired by the real-life May-December marriage of
Yola Henriquez and the much older Henri Letellier, editor of France’s popular daily
Le Journal
. In 1926, Colette had an opportunity to observe Yola and Henri together as the novelist and the newlyweds happened to be staying in the same hotel on the French Riviera. Colette discovered that the proprietors of the hotel were two aging courtesans who had raised Yola and tutored the young woman in the fine art of snagging a millionaire. All of this formed the basis for the story that ultimately became
Gigi
.

Although inspired by more contemporary events, Colette pushed the setting of her story back to the more picturesque Paris of 1899 or
La Belle Epoque
. The saga of a courtesan-in-training created quite a stir when it was published as a novelette in 1944. Seven years later, there would be a Broadway incarnation starring a luminous twenty-two-year-old newcomer named Audrey Hepburn, hand-picked to play the title role by Colette herself. Though the Anita Loos adaptation was judged “slight but diverting,” Hepburn was acclaimed as “the acting find of the year.” In November 1953, Hepburn’s
Gigi
was staged in Los Angeles, and among those in attendance were Arthur Freed and Vincente Minnelli. While Freed was charmed, Minnelli dismissed the production as “too farcically played” and, Audrey aside, “not very good.”
¹

Nevertheless, Freed decided to submit Colette’s story (and the Loos script) to Geoffrey Shurlock and the Motion Picture Production Code office. Freed knew full well that Colette’s courtesans would have the censors swarming, but he was curious to know how many code commandments
Gigi
was actually breaking. Did a prospective producer have any hope whatsoever of getting the property passed? The initial response was not encouraging. Joseph Breen made it more than clear that the story of a “kept woman” was unacceptable, objectionable, and unclean: “This play is so basically opposed to everything the Code stands for, that any attempt to bring it around to conformity with the Code would prove futile,” he cautioned in his response.

A year passed as Freed turned his attention to other projects. Then he received a telegram from Anita Loos. The playwright responsible for putting Colette’s characters on stage now wanted to turn
Gigi
into a big-time Broadway musical. Would Freed be willing to let Loos see the censor’s report, so that she’d have some idea of what she was up against? The Loos inquiry reignited the producer’s interest in the property. A musical version of
Gigi
. . . of course. It almost seemed tailor-made for Minnelli.

For two years, Freed and the censors went back and forth on
Gigi
. The one element the code office most strenuously objected to was the fact that the story seemed to glorify the “system of mistresses” that existed in Gigi’s
family. Metro’s story editor Kenneth MacKenna argued that despite her family’s notorious history, Gigi herself is a moral girl “who simply wants no part of this shabby way of life.” Code administrators stood firm. The story put “an illegal relationship in the same class as marriage.”
²

Freed and his team then made all sorts of suggestions regarding how the story might be sanitized in order to obtain code approval. Instead of a “grand cocotte,” what if Gigi’s Aunt Alicia had been a former chorus girl? Or perhaps Gigi was not descended from a line of courtesans, but instead, her family operated a matrimonial bureau that introduced middle-aged men to “lonely women”?

Eventually, Freed and his associates seemed to wear the censors down. By July 1957, MGM’s scripted version of
Gigi
(then titled
The Parisians
) met “the basic requirements of the Production Code.” After hurdling that obstacle, Freed found himself facing another challenge. After Colette’s death in 1954, her widower, Maurice Goudeket, had sold the musical adaptation rights to
Gigi
to
both
MGM and the Broadway-bound team of Anita Loos and producer Gilbert Miller. When the studio trumpeted its forthcoming production of
Gigi
, Loos and Miller cried foul. It would cost Freed a pretty penny (some $87,000) to prevent
Gigi
from lighting up the Great White Way.

With code administrators at last appeased and would-be competitors paid off, Freed could finally turn his attention to artistic matters. Although Minnelli had been unimpressed with the stage version of
Gigi
, he greatly admired Colette’s work, and the prospect of bringing turn-of-the-century Paris to life with musical accompaniment was irresistible. He signed on to direct. Freed and Minnelli agreed that their
An American in Paris
collaborator Alan Jay Lerner (who owed Metro another script as part of a three-picture commitment) would be the ideal choice to handle the adaptation.

In February 1956, Freed surprised Lerner by turning up backstage during the Philadelphia tryouts for the composer’s new show,
My Fair Lady
, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. Freed wanted to discuss the composer’s next assignment for MGM. Although Lerner expressed interest in scripting
Gigi
, he initially resisted the idea of furnishing lyrics as well.