Gene Kelly, Creative Genius

 

This page will list some of the ways in which Gene spent his leisure time. Yes, believe it or not, he did stop work occasionally!

Gene inherited his love of sports from his father. It remained a constant all through his life and occupied much of his leisure time. In some ways Gene had an idyllic childhood, lots of fresh air, good food and the freedom to do as he pleased, especially during their extended summer holidays on Lake Conneaut in Western Pennsylvania. He could fish, ride, shoot, swim, row, cycle, read, play indoor games. He was even taught the rudiments of boxing by the world champion Harry Greb, which stood him in good stead back in Pittsburgh when the bullies started in on him. When he wanted his own space he could run into the local woods to his special place, away from all of the bustle of family life.

They were a self-contained family, the five children making up their own amusements.

As he grew his spare time was occupied with gymnastics, ice-hockey, football and baseball, at all of which he excelled. He was made to play an instrument, first the violin and piano, then his own choice, the banjo, and of course was taken to dance classes, which he did not think of as leisure or pleasure! Then he discovered girls. It was the need to be noticed by the female of the species which led to his renewing his association with dancing. He said it was the only way you could get your arms round a girl in those days. He never lacked a partner for the college dances.

As an adult, it seems that his fierce urge for perfection in his work often spilled over into his play time too. He became expert at everything he did, including sports and intellectual activities. Nevertheless from what I have read and heard, he was a real bundle of fun to be with, a tease, a joker, a relaxed and welcoming host, and someone you would want on your team at any cost.

 

Saturday Evening Post July 1950

It was Harriet Kelly’s notion to open a branch studio in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Johnstown seemed an unlikely place for such an enterprise. Since it was a steel town, “effete” was hardly the word for it. When its male citizens saw Gene coming, they placed hand on hip derisively and waved at him with simulated daintiness. This sort of thing stopped when he joined the Johnstown Elks, won a bruising fist fight at the Y.M.C.A. pool, and became known in the local pubs.

 

Yudkoff A Life Of Dance And Dreams 1999

Hockey was a particular favourite [of Gene’s father], as befit his Canadian roots. Early on he recognised his middle son’s special talent on the ice. He made a point of purchasing for Gene, all of four years of age at the time, a pair of used ice skates with two blades instead of one, helping to instill in Gene a sense of balance that his son never lost. By the time to boy was eight, he was without doubt the best skater in the neighbourhood

 

Seventeen Magazine. Date unknown

Gene: I was very adept at playing baseball, had an excellent knack for street fighting and an almost uncanny ability to break windows.

 

Saturday Evening Post July 1950

When passing years freed Gene from the thraldom of Buster Brown suits, he was in a furious rush to free himself from his apron-string bondage and become a 130-pound, tough-as-wire high school athlete. He made his letter as a peewee half-back at Peabody High, and by the time he was fifteen, he was working out with a semipro ice-hockey team, the Pittsburgh Yellow Jackets. There are still those who recall him as a rink prodigy who “might have been to hockey what Yehudi Menuhin is to the violin, if he’d only stuck with it.”

 

Colliers Magazine May 1945

[Johnstown] That’s a steel town and they gave me that old floppy-wave-of-the-hand-pat-on-the-wrist treatment when I showed up. I couldn’t get around to licking everybody in town, so I played baseball and basketball every chance I got, and that convinced them I was a real guy.

 

Yudkoff 1999

At Peabody [High school], Gene was an outstanding hockey player and a varsity letter-winner with the gymnastics and football teams. He did appear in school plays, and his poetry was published in the school newspaper, The Civitan.

 

Bert Prelutsky. The Secret Of Their Success. 2008

Growing up in Pittsburgh, I wanted to play shortstop for the Pirates. I was pretty good too, until I got to high school and faced really tough pitchers. If I could have hit a lick, I could at least have made it to the minors.

 

From Gene's letter to the Navy Department in 1954

My extra-curricular activities at high school included dramatic clubs, football, track, tennis, gymnastics and volleyball team, and associate editor of the school paper. At college I was a member of the Phi Kappa fraternity, which was a Catholic social fraternity…and I still am a member of that fraternity. After changing from Penn State College to to the University of Pittsburgh in 1930, my extra-curricular activities were curtailed because I had to work at odd dancing jobs to earn my way through school. The only study group I was connected with in my college days was the French Club.

 

Colliers Magazine May 1945

Gene had gone to St Raphael’s grammar school and then to Peabody High, where he was a star halfback and played on the basketball and hockey teams. He also found out that you could be a pretty big shot with the girls around school if you got in on the school plays. They liked football heroes, but most of these gentry possessed a bovine agility on the dance floor that horrified the ladies; the actors were pretty smooth stuff.

“These slick guys took all the best dates, and we got what was left, and this was pretty silly.”

He got into the school shows because he could dance, and he got the best dates because he was in the shows, and he found that acting was about the softest thing anybody ever invented. After High School he went up to Penn State to take journalism, and things were going all right there until the depression yanked Mr Kelly right out of Columbia Gramophone, and the family was flat on its neck.

Gene came back home, got a job teaching gymnastics at Camp Porter, for the summer and entered the university of Pittsburgh next year.

 

 

I Married a Dynamo. Magazine article, Betsy Blair. 1950

Next to his family, he likes work best. He’d rather dance than eat, think than loaf, labor than relax. Sometimes even after eight years of marriage it’s still difficult for me to distinguish between his states of relaxation and deep meditation.

 ...Gene seems to remember every book he has ever read. When we first met his memory seemed to me positively amazing…he’s always bumping into old friends, and never, even for a moment, does he stumble over a name or fail to recognise a face.

 ...He never spends any of his spare time studying the stock market or investing in oil wells.

 

Photoplay June 1944 It’s Like This – to be Mrs Gene Kelly

Gene is a natural linguist. I remember how quickly he was able to speak Spanish when we studied together before we married.

 

Betsy Blair. The Memory Of All That. 2002.

We bought a Ping-Pong table, our first joint possession. It took up the whole downstairs except the inglenook fireplace and the kitchen. We played like demons....Guts and gusto he had in everything he did. The games - Ping -pong, charades, volleyball - they were played and fought as full-bloodedly as he danced.

 

Modern Screen. June 1943

He thinks people his age should go in more for baseball and football instead of golf. Fifty’s time enough for golf. Partly, his prejudice derives from the fact that he loathes walking. In walking, you use the muscles opposite to those used in dancing.

 

Photoplay January 1946

Kelly and his wife, a pretty redhead…bear slight resemblance to a typical Hollywood couple. Although she wears a mink coat, she wears bobby-socks and saddle shoes with it. Their Friday nights in New York are not spent at vaselined El Morocco. They are spent instead, at Polish Hall, a dilapidated Greenwich Village building where a lot of earnest couples who have taken the trouble to learn English gather to do strenuous folk dances. It is worth noting that at Polish hall, the Kellys are treated like any other couple with the price of admission.

 

Modern Screen. August 1944

The other day he disappeared and stayed away by himself all afternoon. Betsy asked where he’s been.

“Roller skating.” Replied Gene. He’s pretty fancy on skates, so he’s been rolling happily around a public rink all by himself all afternoon.

 

Movie Show October 1947. Van Johnson

Because of Gene’s dancing, for example, he avoids certain sports that might knot his muscles, like tennis… He doesn’t care about swimming and the beach…When he’s not working he likes to get in grimy old clothes and dig in the garden, or play catch with the neighborhood kids.

 

Tim Kelly, quoted in Brian Kilmeade It’s How You Play The Game. 2007. Harper Collins NY

He thought dance was a real sport and compared the moves on the field to anything on stage. Lynn Swann was his favorite football player because he loved the body control Swann showed.  Dad always believed he was a better hockey player than dancer.....

My dad was also a gymnast.  Even when he was sixty-five he could sit in a chair, pull his legs up, and go into a handstand. My dad loved testing himself and just competing.  It wasn't all about winning with him, it was about doing everything he could to win. 

 

Chicago Tribune. June 21^st 1965

Gene Kelly is the most proficient skateboard rider in all of Beverley Hills.

 

Lois McClelland: (Quoted in Yudkoff 1999)

He would just sit there in one of two large red chairs in the living room…just thinking and thinking. That’s how I remember him.

 

Free Lance Star. August 13^th 1974

On the stages where Glenn Ford once romanced Rita Hayworth there is a new kind of love game – tennis…at least two studios…are now welcoming white-shorted tennis enthusiasts…the courts are often occupied in the early morning hours by movie stars seeking to unwind… The Hollywood Indoor Tennis Club has attracted many show business personalities…members include Gene Kelly…

 

Philadelphia Inquirer. 1974

Kelly doesn’t travel with any one particular group of friends – except during football season. Then he meets with one steady group of pals – all male. Every Monday night they meet for dinner and to watch the game on TV at one or another’s home. Of course the dinner is served only between halves.

“The gang,” said Gene, “is made up of Billy Wilder, Mike Frankovich, Fred Astaire, Jack Haley Jr., Howard Koch, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, myself and a couple of other guys.”

 

Saturday Evening Post. July 1980

On the set of Xanadu.

Kelly is as trim and athletically built now as he was two decades ago; regular hours on the tennis court and frequent jogging with his two kids have seen to that.

 

Gainesville. Sunday August 23^rd 1982

Gene Kelly turns 70 Monday and the dancer says he plans to hang up his dancing shoes…As for turning 70, Kelly says, “It’s just another round number. Listen, I am wrapped up in my kids, and they keep me busy. We play tennis a lot, I roller skate with them, we just run around together. They keep me in shape."

 

St Petersburg Times. August 4^th 1984

…”I still play a pretty mean game of tennis.”

Sports have been a part of Kelly’s life ever since he started his career as a teen-age tumbler and gymnastics performer in Pittsburgh. “Athletics is one of the foundation stones of everything I’ve tried to do,” he explains. That’s why I’m so excited about the Olympics.”…

“The big difference between competitive sports and the dance is that athletics are completely unrehearsed,” he says, sitting back in a comfortable-looking couch, his feet up on the coffee table. “Like break-dancing, it’s spontaneous. I love break-dancing – it’s real folkloric, right out of the streets, The athleticism is inherent in it.

 

 

Many people have spoken of Gene’s boundless energy and zest for life. He was interested in everyone and everything around him and in the world at large. He was extremely well-read, an erudite conversationalist, loved music both classical and modern, loved art and history, read and wrote poetry, and could speak several languages. He liked to drink beer with his friends and put the world to rights, loved the theatre and the cinema, and spending time with his children. He was completely family orientated.

I imagine him to have been an exhausting kind of guy to be around! It was good that Betsy was equally vibrant and energetic and competitive, they were well matched when young. By the time he married Jeannie it seems that he had calmed down a little, was less restless and ‘wired’.

 

Modern Screen. June 1943

He thinks letter writing (his) should be abolished and that the world will be a better place when people understand that you can love them dearly without benefit of mail.

 

 

Screenland. Paul Marsh 1947

Gene thinks that soon he’ll have three weeks off from the studio. “My dad has promised to come out…and when he does, we’re going trout fishing somewhere up North. I’ve never had a vacation since I’ve been in Hollywood and I’m really looking forward to this one…I might even get dad to help me put the house in shape, but then…we’d both be so tired we’d never get the energy for that fishing trip."

 

Modern Screen. June 1943

He likes to tinker with his car for a week, but not for an hour. Staying greasy for a week is worthwhile, getting greasy for an hour’s a waste of time.

 

Modern Screen. August 1944

Gene likes the mountains and the seashore both – but what people see in the desert baffles him. He took Betsy to Palm Springs, and although they left to spend a week they came back the same night.

 

Los Angeles Times. October 9^th 1949. Hedda Hopper.

Between pictures he does a fade-out. Unlike most stars who find it necessary to spend their vacation among the bustling throngs of New York, Gene retires to a mountain hideaway and not even the studio can contact him. His favourite and constant companion on these trips is Kerry.

 

Yudkoff 1999

MGM put pressure on him to play for the Metro Wolves, the Culver City entrant in the studio soft ball league…Gene was the star shortstop, a fielder of wide range and a solid batsman.. He had wanted to involve younger MGM athletes: grips…lighting men…cinematographers, chauffeurs…but it was quietly understood that the league was for executives and ‘above the line’ employees.

 

Evening Independent. May 21^st 1950

Gene Kelly plans to fish at Acapulco when he finishes Summer Stock, the long-run musical which has been delayed by Judy Garland’s illness.

 

Modern Screen December 1952

American In London

After Gene finished making Devil Makes Three in Münich he was ready for a short breather. He and Betsy decided on a week’s holiday in North Africa. They rented a car in Casablanca, and spent a wonderful non-spectacular seven days casually visiting all the little towns in the French Moroccan area. At least it was non-spectacular for the Kellys. French Morocco may never be the same. They are great movie fans there, which rather surprised Gene. But very respectfulones, standing quietly at a good distance, just looking. (In Germany it is quite the reverse. Stars are followed around everywhere.)

The vacation was fine, except for one thing. Kerry was in school, and couldn’t come. So her daddy promised to make it up to her as soon as they got together.

On the very first Bank Holiday after they arrived in London, all the Kellys headed for Dublin. From the moment they started, Gene and Kerry were like nine-year-olds…The mere name of the place thrills them. They prowled the countryside for hours. They haunted ancient castles. Long before the too-short holiday was ended, Gene had instilled the love of Ireland in Kerry. And it looks as if it will remain a life-long romance.

 

Los Angeles Times. December 6^th 1951

Gene Kelly vacations in New York. Can be seen nightly at the City Ballet Company. He’s seeking new ballerinas for his next picture.

 

Go To It. Magazine article after 1953

I hold with the idea that one must have adequate holidays. Nothing can start an artist downhill so quickly as tiredness and boredom…I enjoyed tremendously my days exploring the Thames. We rented a cruiser and it was such fun and so relaxing too…having our imagination stirred by such historical sites as Runnymede, where freedom was born for England in the signing of the Magna Carta. Another happy holiday was one nearer here when we explored the Hudson. Rivers fascinate me.

 

Los Angeles Times. March 20^th 1951

Gene Kelly, back from Europe, spent four weeks in Switzerland skiing. He didn’t go to swanky St. Moritz but to a small village…

 

Modern Screen July 1953

Betsy:  “By last Christmas [1952] Gene and I were both free, and we took Kerry to Klosters in Switzerland. She stayed there and went to school for a while, and I went to Nice and finished up my work.

“In March, all of us jumped into our Sunbeam Talbot and toured Spain.”

 

Motion Picture  magazine 1954

Gene: I liked skippering so much that I recruited Kerry as First Mate, studied navigation charts, rented a cruiser and travelled the Hudson River. Kerry took to navigation quickly, learned to catch and clean and cook fish for our dinners.

Dance. Pauline Swanson. 1954

[After realising that he was exhausted while making Brigadoon, Invitation To The Dance, and Deep In My Heart, all at the same time]. He phoned his friend Noel Coward in London,  arranged to borrow Coward’s luxurious home in Jamaica and two days later, took off…Gene lured along the Stanley Donens, first extracting a promise that there would be no shop talk. The promise was broken by Gene himself. In two days he had enough of just lazing.

 

Spokane Daily Chronicle. January 13^th 1954

A group of movie stars, including Rosalind Russell, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Jack Benny, have registered cattle brands in Nebraska. It was not learned whether the group intends to run cattle.

 

Screen Album November 1954

An all-round athlete, Gene may have spent too much time in Switzerland last year, because he fell in love with skiing. This caused columnist Leonard Lyons to list as “MGM’s newest woe: star Gene Kelly’s become a ski addict.”

MGM needn’t have worried about Gene, who survived his jousts with mountains admirably, but somebody should have given a thought to poor Mrs. Kelly, who went off to Squaw Valley with her man, and broke her ankle in three places. The Kellys don’t see too much of each other week-days, since Gene works something like 18 hours per each, but Sundays are generally easy go, with friends dropping in for volley ball, charades, buffet supper, good talk, in which 11-year-old Kerry joins enthusiastically.

 

Dance. Pauline Swanson. 1954

According to Lois Gene found it difficult to avoid mixing work with pleasure even when he and his family were in Switzerland’s great ski resorts…the family insisted he call a halt to work, talked him into putting on a pair of skis, and he crashed, as all beginners will, with resulting minor injuries…he wasn’t too afraid, for he went back to the slopes for a second try. But he was ‘terribly cautious’. For a dancer, a shattered bone can be curtains.

 

Yudkoff 1999

He took his entourage to Zermatt for a skiing holiday. Intent on being the best on the slope and accident-prone as ever, he promptly fell on a patch of ice. He ripped the cartilage in one of his knees. “The end of serious dancing for me”, he said – and so it was.

 

Los Angeles Times.February 24^th 1963

Gene Kelly…checked into Mt. Sinai hospital Saturday to undergo several weeks traction treatment for a slipped disc.

 

Robert Wagner. Pieces Of My Heart. A Life. 2008

Gene Kelly and I were never lucky enough to work together, but we played a great deal of tennis over the years, and we enjoyed many skiing vacations with our kids in Sun Valley. Gene was a wonderful man with great joie de vivre, terribly active and athletic, and one of the most competitive personalities I’ve ever encountered.

 

Dallas Times Herald. June 1974

This spring, shortly after his wife’s death, he took the children to a cabin in the woods, outside Rapid City, South Dakota, borrowing a friend’s cabin so remote that the plumbing was still outdoors. The snow was still on the ground and the three spent a month at Eastertime cut off from the outside world.

 

People magazine 1974

Not only was Take Me Along a chance to hoof and sing again, it offered Pop Kelly a see-America vacation with his children. “The kids should get out of Beverley Hills,” he says. “We got a cabin in the Black Hills of South Dakota over Easter for ten days. We split logs for fires and had to use an outhouse. In four hours they had adapted and wanted to live there forever. That trip made me see they can do a lot of things,” beams Kelly. “They’re so protected in Beverley Hills – it isn’t the way it was in the Pittsburgh neighbourhood I came from. We fought our way to and from school every day.”

 

Woman’s Weekly 1976

Does he still keep up his dancing exercise? “Me? No! I play a lot of tennis and I play a lot of games with Tim and Bridget – football and baseball and skateboarding. So I keep active, but not purposely so...

 "I was supposed to make a movie in Europe this summer and I had said I would do it, but then Tim said to me; “Daddy, why do you have to work every summer? We’ve never had a vacation in America.” The reason for that was that when they were on vacation I could accept a film job abroad and take them with me. I thought I was doing the best for them.  So I said to Tim “You’re right.” We’re going to hire a van or something, so instead of seeing America from 5000 feet, we’ll ride around it, like I was able to do when I was growing up. Of course I didn’t have a car in those days, we hitch-hiked…we get around a lot now, me and the kids…we walk in the mountains…two hours away from us you’re in high snow, then you can go on and in twenty minutes, you’re down in the Pacific ocean...

At 61, he was beginning to see his children – and his role as father – in a new light. “By concentrating totally on a family life, I suddenly realised all the marvellous things I’d been missing out on while I was making movies. Me and the kids…we had so much fun together. We went places and did things I once complained I never had time for…for sheer contentment I really didn’t have to do anything else but just be with them…"