Kelly never quite got the respect he deserved as a dancer and an artist - always under the shadow of Fred Astaire, Arthur Freed, Vincente Minnelli... even Stanley Donen. But he was a giant in his field. This is an affectionate and comprehensive book.
Kelly was from Pittsburgh and came up the long way - he loved dancing but instead of running off to Broadway he stayed home for a bit and ran his own dance studios. This turned into a nice little earner... but he didn't go to New York until his late twenties. It turned out to be the right decision - he was ready to go, and made it relatively quickly, then came film offers. He was actively recruited by Arthur Freed of MGM, and although it was Selznick who got him first, MGM was where he wound up - the absolute perfect studio.
The first decade of Kelly's career was a dream - from For Me and My Girl to Singing in the Rain. His career stumbled when he went to Europe for tax reasons - the films became less good, his musicals less polished away from Donen and the MGM studio, musicals became less popular. He had married teenage Betsy Blair who cheated on him and left him (she was more left wing than he was). He fell in love with his former assistant and they had a happy life til she died of leukemia. He later married a third time to a woman who hasn't always had the easiest relationship with his kids.
Kelly always found employment - he directed Flower Drum Song on Broadway, played a straight part in Inherit the Wind. He ever seemed to recapture his late forties/early fifties triumphs - no one much seems to like Gigot or his version of Hello Dolly. It's a shame he never made more swashbucklers - The Three Musketeers is fabulous.
He seems to have been a hard working decent person, a little obsessive, highly competitive - at heart he was a jock, a hard task master, a master of his craft of dancing. The book hints at perhaps a more complex figure - he married people below him in a way (a much younger woman, his former employee), was prone to anger. Maybe there wasn't more to him. A fine book.
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