Sunset over the Boulevard
Philip French
THE MEMORY OF ALL THAT by Betsy Blair Elliott & Thompson, £15.99, pp. 320, ISBN 190402730X ✆ £13.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Betsy Blair was born Elizabeth Boger in 1923 into a middle-class episcopalian family in New Jersey, her mother a teacher, her father an insurance broker. By the age of 12, this prodigiously confident child performer was dancing before Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. At the age of 16 she came to audition at Billy Rose’s Manhattan nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe and, as in a Hollywood musical, she mistook the resident choreographer for a waiter. He was Gene Kelly, 12 years her senior, of whom she says in her attractive and evocative biography, ‘He gave me and the world — an unforgettable legacy of joy.’ When they married two years later and set off for Hollywood, he was a Broadway star under contract to David Selznick, she was an experienced chorus girl with high ambitions as an actress and political views far to the left of her husband’s liberal democratic convictions.
He was an immediate success in the movies, while she bore him a daughter and remained in his shadow though doing some stage work and becoming active in a number of left-wing causes of an admirable kind. Her request to join the Communist party (made just after the second world war) was turned down by the comrades on the grounds that she would be more useful as the wife of a prominent liberal. Surprisingly this did not alert her to the party’s deviousness. With considerable skill and wonderfully girlish enthusiasm, Blair recreates the Hollywood of the Forties and Fifties when the Kellys were among the cynosures of the movie colony. These were the last days of the big studio system, and also the time when hundreds of naive idealists paid for their brave political hopes by being trampled on during the McCarthyite witch-hunts. The Hollywood Ten were sent to jail for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), many others became victims of an industrial blacklist, quite a number went into exile. Instead of telling her story chronologically, cross-cutting between themes and events, Blair chooses to pursue a single line over a period of years and double back so that we have three parallel accounts of the early Fifties. One is about accompanying Kelly to Europe where he spent 1952 and ’53 directing his commercially disastrous experimental dance film Invitation to the Dance in London and appearing in two mediocre movies. Another concerns her experiences on the blacklist, which was briefly set aside when, partly due to Kelly’s firm intervention, she got her most famous role opposite Ernest Borgnine as the plain schoolteacher in Marty. For this she won an award at the 1956 Cannes Festival, received an Oscar nomination, and became world-famous. The third strand is about her personal development, which she compares with Nora’s break-out in A Doll’s House and involved a series of affairs beginning in 1952. She finally confessed these infidelities to an understanding Kelly four years later before leaving him to start a new life. She won’t name any of the lovers because that would make her a stool-pigeon like HUAC’s friendly witnesses: ‘Besides, I never slept with Frank Sinatra or Aly Khan or Laurence Olivier only with a few nice left-wing men who deserve their anonymity.’ The reader is left to work out how these three independent narratives relate to each other. We wonder, for instance, if Kelly and MGM decided it would be better if he and his politically embarrassing wife got out of America while HUAC was conducting its most vociferous campaign against Hollywood. She doesn’t say this, but then she doesn’t deny it.
Marrying Kelly got Blair out of New Jersey. Divorcing him got her out of America to become ‘an independent woman’, setting up a production company in Paris in 1957 with her French lover, appearing in art-house movies such as Antonioni’s Il Grido, and mixing with Buiiuel and Picasso. She recalls Robert Capa being of her expatriate circle then, though as he was killed in 1954 this is one of her occasional memory lapses. This period of freedom and fame came to an end in the 1960s, when she married the British film-maker Karel Reisz, ‘my second and eternal husband’. She first came across him when at a French documentary festival she persuaded her fellow jurors to give his film We Are the Lambeth Boys the top prize, though he wasn’t there to receive it — as nice a case of what Hollywood screenwriters call ‘meeting cute’ as her first encounter with Kelly. Their happy marriage, of which she writes disappointingly little, lasted until his death in 2002. Once again she seems contented to have lived and worked in the shadow of a man she loved and respected.
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