Vera Ellen on dancing with Gene Kelly

“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from Words and Music (1948)

“Until I did Slaughter, I had done only light taps and other frothy kinds of dancing in pictures. Nevertheless, Gene asked MGM to get me for the number.”

“At first I wasn’t sure whether I should take it. I knew I could do the steps, but I was going to have to portray a girl who was a floozy. It shocked me a little, I’ll admit.”

Vera Ellen grinned, “But Gene, the old master, when I told him of my doubts, sent me down to see Marie Bryant, a colored dancing teacher who lives in the heart of the negro section, on Central Avenue.”

“Marie Bryant shook her head. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘you can’t wear that dress if you’re going to do the kinda dance Mr Gene Kelly told me to teach you. I can’t see your body in such an outfit. I gotta see it to know what you’re saying with your body as you move around.’”

“I worked hard all that day. But when we finished she said, ‘You’re dancing fine honey, but what are you thinking about?’ I told her I was just thinking about the steps. She said that was no good. ‘If you don’t think about men and sex while you’re dancing, your body won’t say anything about those things to the folks watching you.’”

She learned to think sex while doing the dance.

There was a complication when she started rehearsing with Gene Kelly. He taught her to dance like a man, instead of a dainty little ballet girl, to dance with more power and strength. So while dancing like a woman thinking of love, she also had to dance like a man.

“I’m getting better parts all the time now…But I’ll never have a dance I loved more than ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,’ I’ll never stop being grateful to Gene Kelly for giving me my chance at doing it with him.

“They play the music of Slaughter over the air even now. If I hear it while driving, I have to stop the car, pull over on the side of the road - and listen to it, hearing that music makes me shiver and quake, I get goose-flesh at the memory, though we rehearsed it for six weeks, it lasted exactly seven minutes on the screen, the greatest seven minutes of my professional life.”

- Motion Picture and Television Magazine (July 1952)

The Kid with Two Feet

Dorothy Kilgallen interviews Gene Kelly over dinner after coming home from the Navy in 1946

“That Old Black Magic”

Gene Kelly - Movieland, May 1948

Gene Kelly, Kathryn Grayson & Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh (1945)

Gene Kelly talking on Fred Astaire

“Fred is a real inspiration to me,” says Gene. “He always was, and he always will be. He’s a wonderful guy. I am personally so crazy about Fred and his work, that he can do no wrong. Furthermore, what a lot of people don’t know is that Fred doesn’t have to dance to be a success. He is the best light comedian in the business. No one can touch him.”

(Gene Kelly - Movieland, May 1948)

Gene Kelly as Don Lockwood in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)☔️

Happy “Singin’ in the Rain” Day!!! ☔️☔️☔️

Happy “Singin’ in the Rain” Day!!! ☔️☔️☔️

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)☔️

Gene Kelly writing as guest columnist for “The Voice of Broadway”

“Here I am sticking my neck out. Which reminds me not so many months ago in this column, Dorothy Kilgallen stuck it out for me and I am still hearing about it.

Dorothy had chosen me as one of her ‘ten favorite dates’ which was a nice convienient columnist gimmick to turn her spotlight on me and nine other fellows. She wrote a swell piece.

I feel myself blushing whenever I think about it - but oh, that last sentence which ran ‘And girls if you should ever meet Gene, take a look at the back of his neck’ - oh, murder!

So there it was - the charm of Gene Kelly in the eyes of the feminine contingent was the back of his neck. And I thought it was my footwork all the time.

Dorothy’s observation about the back of my neck has haunted me since then, although I can’t see to this day what La Kilgallen saw in my neck. Believe me I’ve tried to find out, but keeping a eye on one’s neck is most difficult even with double and triple mirrors.

It does explain though, why, whenever a visiting party from the East is brought to the set to watch us do a scene for a picture, I feel conscious of feminine eyes peering, not at my bread-and-cake providing feet, but at my neck.

One sweet young visitor, when I was introduced to her, even reached up, placed her hand at the back of my neck, and said, “Why your neck isn’t different at all. I don’t know what Dorothy Kilgallen saw in it.”

And speaking of mirrors, when I was in the Navy in the recent worldwide unpleasantness, at least half the gobs I met opened up the conversation with almost the same question - and answer.

‘Say Gene, how did you do that dance with Jerry the Mouse in Anchor’s Aweigh? It was done with mirrors wasn’t it?’

It wasn’t done with mirrors. In fact I didn’t meet Jerry until I saw him on the screen after I had done my part of the dance. That can be easily figured out. But since then I have done some dancing for films for which I would have welcomed mirrors. Perhaps in time we can get mirrors to do all our work for us - that will be the millennium.

Right now - with Judy Garland - I’m in the midst of a pleasant chore at the Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios in the shape of a Cole Porter musical, a Technicolor production of ‘The Pirate’ based on the S. N. Bergman play. For choreographic strenuousness it tops anything I have been called upon to do for pictures. But I like it.

Consider one sequence: A Caribbean street set, fifty yards long, buildings on each side, and I do a number where I dance (and sing) down one side of the street, climb a couple of balconies en route, then up to the top of a building, a leap to another building then down a water spout, and a dance down the other side of the street.

That is 100 yards of dance. Okay, there’s no kick there. But do that fifty times a day, counting rehearsals and camera takes, and one gets somewhat tired by the end of the day. Incidentally, the studio day is from 9 to 6.

What a cinch the stage used to be - 8:30 to 11, two matinees a week and the rest of the time to myself. That’s a loafers routine compared with the work on a picture during production and during pre-filming rehearsals.

For one thing, I don’t have to worry about my diet. I came out of the Navy weighing 180(?) lbs. I drop ten lbs every picture and pick up the poundage - with feasting a sort of malice aforethought between pictures.

Right now the scale reads 165 but it will be around 160 before the time ‘The Pirate’ is finished. Then I’ll put the ten pounds back, then lose it and then - “

-Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette May 3, 1947

Navy with winged feet Lt. (j.g.) Gene Kelly last seen in “Anchors Aweigh”

By Dorothy Kilgallen

Would you like to know who the ten most attractive men in the world are? Here are my choices for the pin-up boys of 1947

The first thing every girl learns about life is that a man can be more devastating than an Easter Bonnet, more exhilarating than a leap on skis, more debilitating than a lost weekend.

The second thing she learns is that some are more so than others.

And the more so type causes all the trouble in the world. Because of them there are stage door Jennies. Because of them there are swooners and screamers. Beacause of them girls sigh in the mezzanines, cry into pillows buy movie magazines instead of strawberry sodas. Every evening because of them thousands of husbands look less than enchanting to wives just home from the matinees.

And what have they got that makes them so much more magnetic than the average Joe, next door...

Don’t answer too quickly. It isn’t manly beauty. At any rate it isn’t always - or even often. Profiles don’t mean much in the masculine charm sweepstakes... A girl killing male can look like almost anything at all. The face has nothing to do with it. Neither have the mind, the temper, or the torso.

It’s other things. The voice, often. The eyes, a great deal of time. Maybe a smile. Maybe his hands, the way he lights a cigaret, Or maybe it’s just the back of his neck. Did you ever notice the back of Gene Kelly’s neck? Murder!

Is anybody going to argue with me on this one? Warm eyes, good hands, a voice that makes you listen, hard to catch what it’s saying, and a smile that shouldn’t happen to a susceptible girl. Plus an intriguing undercurrent of hardness, a hint of don’t - trifle - with - me - I’m dangerous. And of course there’s the back of his neck. Don’t forget that.

Gene Kelly. Damn he is so funny and charming in these old interviews

Gene Kelly is probably the most interviewed young man on Broadway. Most actors would consider an opportunity to pour out their life stories to a reporter once a week a very high publicity average indeed. Gene tops them all. He “gives out” six nights a week at the Barrymore and twice on matinee days.

The corner first met young Gene Kelly some months ago at Louis Bergan’s bar on 48th St. Mr Kelly had recently more or less completed a brilliant engagement as the hoofer in “Time of Your Life” and had just been signed to Pal Joey. He was in fact fresh from rehearsal of the latter, and over a glass of beer showed your reporter rough drafts of some of Larry Hart’s wicked lyrics. He was so ingenuously delighted with his good luck and so thoroughly likable that Y. R. decided that when and if Pal Joey turned out to be a hit, he would look up young Mr Kelly again.

Well, Pal Joey is a hit and so is Mr Kelly. It is pleasant to report that up to a night or two ago, success had not swelled the Kelly noggin. He is as ingenuously likeable and modest as ever. Quite as nice a guy in dressing room 1 as in Louis Bergan’s bar.

“Tell all Gene,” say Y. R. “Not the stuff about Princeton College or the family estate and the Rolls Royce and how daddy lost his fortune. This really gets printed.”

“The real McCoy huh?” he grins, “Well there wasn’t any Princeton in it, or Rolls, but the Kelly radio and telegraph business got a swell shellacking in 1929. I had a year at Penn State but had to come home and work my way through Pitt.”

“What did you do?”

“ Danced. I had taken lessons as a kid. I had gotten jobs around little clubs in Pittsburgh. Dumps like the one in the show. Jerked sodas, started a dancing school. It caught on and saw me through school. In fact, it got so good, I decided not to be a lawyer and kept right on with it up to 1938. Then I wanted to try my luck in New York. Turned the studio over to my sister, Louise, and came on. Got a little specialty spot in “Leave it to Me” and a better one in “One for the Money.” They wouldn’t give me any lines, said dancers can’t talk. Then I got my first real break in “Time of Your Life” and here I am.”

“And now you’re the lead in a hit show, what’s next?”

“The same thing if I can get it. As Pal Joey says ‘This for me.’ All I want ‘em to let me do is play a part and dance.”

“Do you like ballet or will you always stick to taps?”

“Sure I like ballet, when they keep it masculine enough. I had a job once with the Chicago Civic Opera back in 1932. But I’ve got a hellava appetite. I like to eat three times a day and regularly. It’s hard to do that if you only work 3 or 4 weeks out of the year.”

“What do you do with your spare time?”

“Spare time? Do you know Phyllis Pearlman? (she’s his press agent)She can hook me up for more luncheons and women’s clubs than you ever heard of. She’s even got me lined up as a judge for a dog show tomorrow. What do I know about dogs? Our family never owned anything but mutts. And man how I dread to make a speech.”

“But don’t you hit ‘21’ or the ‘Stork’ club these days? Go dancing and have fun?”

“I get enough dancing in this show. I don’t need any outside workouts. When you get though some of these numbers, you feel as if you’ve just played a full quarter against Princeton College. And I’m no glamour boy. You can keep all the hot spots.”

“But,” he adds, reaching down his hat from the shelf, “If you want to walk around to Louis.’ I’ll buy you a beer right now.”

And he did.

Gene Kelly auditioning dancers for his TV special “The Gene Kelly Show”

Dancin’ Man

Gene Kelly in “Living in a Big Way” (1947)

💚🍀Happy St Patrick’s Day!!!🍀💚

Gene Kelly “That My Dear Old Father Wore (upon St Patrick’sDay)”