Patsy Kelly
Patsy Kelly was an American actress. She is known for her role as the brash, wisecracking sidekick to Thelma Todd in a series of comedy shorts produced by Hal Roach in the 1930s. Kelly continued to appear in similar roles after Todd's death in 1935.
After her film career declined in the mid-1940s, Kelly returned to New York, where she worked in radio and summer stock. She also became a lifelong friend and personal assistant of Tallulah Bankhead. Kelly returned to the screen after 17 years with guest spots on television and sporadic film roles.
Kelly returned to the stage in the 1971 revival of No, No, Nanette, for which she won a Tony Award.
Early life and early career
Youth and formative years
Kelly was born Bridget Sarah Veronica Rose Kelly in Brooklyn, New York to Irish immigrant parents John and Delia Kelly. Her father was a police officer who left Ballinrobe, County Mayo, Ireland around 1900 to escape persecution. He died in 1942. Her mother Delia died in 1930. She was the youngest of five children, only two of whom were born in America. She acquired the nickname "Patsy" by being the butt of her family's gentle teasing and becoming the "fall guy" for many of their shenanigans. "I was always spinning and tripping about the house, usually over chairs." She was originally inspired to become a firefighter decades before the field would open to the first FDNY woman in 1982, but her mother enrolled her in a dancing school to keep her off the streets of Manhattan. Her New York entertainment debut came as a member of a vaudeville chorus at age 12. Learning how to tap dance at Jack Blue's School of Rhythm and Tap, she befriended future talent and fellow hoofer Ruby Keeler. She had had more than her share of scrapes when she was young. She fell from a fire escape when she was seven, was struck by an automobile when she was eight, and was involved in no less than five accidents in one week at the age of nine. It was at this point her parents decided to send her to dancing school, where she broke her ankle at the end of her first week. She first attended St. Paul's Cathedral School, then Professional Children's School with Keeler.Teenage years
In 1923, at age 13, she advanced from pupil to instructor, raking in $18 a week but coming home at nearly two or three in the morning. "So," Kelly once recalled, reminiscing about the years leading up to that, "Father Quinn, who knew about me and my tap, advised my mother to send me to dancing school. He thought perhaps that would get me interested in something besides baseball. It did. I liked the dancing and in time I began to teach in the school where I had just been studying."She performed in Frank Fay's act, first in a song-and-dance routine and later as Fay's comic foil. Her brother John W. originally tried out for the job, but ultimately, it was Kelly who ended up landing the position at The Palace Theatre with Fay, while Willie went to work at the Waldorf Astoria, after being Fay's chauffeur for a spell. "My brother didn’t care. He thought it was sissy stuff, anyhow." In one routine, Kelly told Fay and the audience that she had been at the beauty parlor. Fay remarked, "And they didn't wait on you?" She remained with Fay for several seasons until Fay eventually dismissed her, either for refusing a proposal of marriage, not calling him by his surname, or refusing to travel to England.
Broadway
Kelly made her Broadway debut in 1927, performing in Harry Delmar's Revels with Bert Lahr and Winnie Lightner at the Shubert Theatre. In other Broadway activity, she performed in Three Cheers with Will Rogers and Dorothy Stone, Earl Carroll's Sketch Book with William Demarest and Faith Bacon, Earl Carroll's Vanities with Jack Benny and Jimmy Savo, The Wonder Bar with Al Jolson, and in the Howard Dietz-Arthur Schwartz musical revue Flying Colors with Clifton Webb, Imogene Coca, Buddy Ebsen, and Charles Butterworth. In her later years, she appeared in No, No, Nanette with Ruby Keeler and Jack Gilford, and Irene with Debbie Reynolds.Film career
The early 1930s
Kelly made her screen debut in a Vitaphone short subject filmed there in Brooklyn, The Grand Dame, where she plays a rich gangster's moll. In 1933, reputedly after seeing her in Flying Colors, producer Hal Roach hired Kelly to team up with Thelma Todd in a series of short-subject comedies, and to replace her then-current co-star ZaSu Pitts after a contract dispute, beginning with Beauty and the Bus. Pitts had demanded a salary hike of $8000 per script, so Roach terminated her services. Before making the move to Hollywood, Kelly intimated that "I'll be a flop in movies. Besides, I don't like 'em, and I never did believe there was a place called Hollywood. Somebody made it up!" She once confided to Motion Picture that, "I tried it for a few days and thought it was the silliest fool business in the world. I had to get up about five in the morning and get a lantern to light my way to the studio. I'd get there and there'd be no audience, no applause. It was like talking to myself. Someone was always hollering, 'Quiet!' or 'Hush!' My voice was always too loud or not loud enough. You had to knock yourself out with a powder puff in this business. Make up every minute. I was always hanging out a window, off the edge of a cliff, or from the side of a car going ninety miles an hour. Or I was being knocked on the bean with a pot or a pan. First day I was yelling, 'Say, where are those doubles I've heard about?' After a few days of it, I packed my duds and took a train back east."Kelly, therefore, was quite reluctant to make the transition to films at first, but Thelma Todd encouraged her to remain in Hollywood, and so she did. Todd even drove to Pasadena to stop Kelly from returning on the train bound for New York. She also helped Kelly with her finances and tax trouble during the first few stages of her move out west. Already in debt, Todd suggested to her not to file for bankruptcy; that it would damage her credit rating. “Those were the happiest days I had in pictures,” Patsy said in 1937, “I have made more money since, but the fun Thelma and I had making those silly two-reel comedies is something that comes only once in a lifetime. Thelma was better than any tonic and taught me a lot about comedy.”
Shortly after filming wrapped on Beauty and the Bus, in August 1933, Kelly was injured as a passenger in a car driven by Gene Malin, the prominent drag performer. Malin apparently confused the gears and reversed off a pier into the water, after performing at the Ship Cafe, a club in Venice, Los Angeles. Malin was killed; Kelly and fellow passenger Jimmy Forlenza suffered serious injuries. She was told by the doctors that she had only ten years left to live based on the amount of sandy water that got into her lungs, but actually survived for decades after the accident. Kelly once said that "I overheard a jury of grave-faced doctors nodding their heads over my supposedly unconscious body. They were giving me a maximum of ten years to live. Maybe they're right. When I heard that scientific verdict, I was plenty scared. But I pulled myself together and said, ‘Kelly, there’s only one way to beat this rap: don’t worry — and have fun out of the remaining years.’"
The Todd-Kelly shorts cemented Kelly's image: a brash, freewheeling, fun-loving, wisecracking woman who frequently punctured the pomposity of other characters. Most were directed by Gus Meins, such as Air Fright, Maid in Hollywood, and Babes in the Goods. Later entries in the series, such as Slightly Static, showcased Kelly's dancing skills. Referring to the time she spent at the Hal Roach Studios, Kelly exclaimed: "I laughed from the time I arrived at the studio until I left at night. I was almost ashamed to take a paycheck." Kelly made 21 shorts with Todd before Todd died in 1935 of carbon monoxide poisoning after filming An All-American Toothache with Mickey Daniels and Duke York. Years later, regarding Todd's death, Kelly revealed, "She had a fight with her lover at a party that night. I wasn’t there but friends of mine were and they told me about it. There were a lot of suspicious things surrounding her death that never got explained. She most certainly wasn't drunk. Thelma used to nurse one drink for a whole evening and she never touched drugs of any kind. She was a strong New England woman with a powerful sense of humor and a wonderful zest for life. I always figured God wanted another angel. She was too young and too beautiful..."
Todd was eventually replaced by the bubbly Pert Kelton for one short, Pan Handlers, but Kelton was quickly replaced by Lyda Roberti, a Polish-born comedienne with a thick foreign accent. Together, they starred in the cute Hal Roach comedy Nobody's Baby just before Roberti's untimely death. According to Kelly, Roberti died of heart failure in 1938 while bending over to tie a shoelace. It was incidents like these that further perpetuated Kelly's reputation as a jinx in Hollywood. And though some considered her bad luck, her performances were never hampered by this. "You see, something, darned if I know what it is, has happened to me since I came to this crazy town. Everyone I loved, turned to, needed, has gone, just like Thelma. It was Jean Malin, that swell New York actor and impersonator, first. I'd been a friend of Jean and his wife for years in New York. Then I went down to the Ship Café that night of Jean's disappearance. I glanced up at the flashing sign over the door that said, ‘Jean Malin’s last night,’ and as clearly as I'm hearing you, a voice said, ‘Be careful, it is his last night.’ He backed the car into the ocean off the end of the pier just one hour later. We were all submerged in the water. Adrenalin worked with me. It didn't with Jean."
Her feature-length debut was playing the role of Jill Barker in MGM’s Going Hollywood and shared screen time with the likes of Marion Davies, Bing Crosby, Fifi D’Orsay, and Ned Sparks. The part was a little more than a mere walk-on, and she didn't have a chance to show off her musical talents in it, although the picture does contain several delightful musical moments supplied by entertainers like Crosby and The Radio Rogues.
Kelly's various film roles in the 1930s ranged from the deadpan, screwball comedic to the impressively and powerfully dramatic. There was very little she couldn't handle on screen. On the comedic side of things, she showed up in such light-hearted Americana as Pick a Star with Rosina Lawrence, Jack Haley and Laurel and Hardy, in the knee-slapping boxing comedy Kelly the Second with Guinn Williams and Charley Chase, and in the biting political satire Thanks A Million with Dick Powell, Ann Dvorak, and famed radio personality Fred Allen. As far as drama, she showed off her more serious side in films such as the politically flavored Jean Harlow vehicle The Girl From Missouri with Franchot Tone and Lionel Barrymore, and in Private Number starring Loretta Young and Basil Rathbone.
In 1935, before Todd's death, and after Stan Laurel had a falling out with Hal Roach over a contract disagreement, there was talk of Kelly joining Oliver Hardy to play his wife and Spanky McFarland’s mother in a series called The Hardy Family, but the project was jettisoned when Laurel returned to the fold. A pilot entitled Their Night Out was announced, with James W. Horne slated to direct, but it never got past the talking stage. She was in the running to play Laurel's wife in Sons of the Desert, but her part was eventually filled in by Dorothy Christy.
During the 1930s, Kelly also appeared in musicals like Going Hollywood, the college football extravaganza Pigskin Parade with Stuart Erwin and Judy Garland, playing second banana in Sing, Baby, Sing with Gregory Ratoff, Adolphe Menjou, and Ted Healy, and in Paramount Pictures' Every Night at Eight, playing one of a trio of hopeful singers who are discovered by an ambitious, blue-collar bandleader by the name of Tops Cardona sympathetically played by George Raft who christens them "The Swanee Sisters". In the film, Kelly gets to showcase her singing talents by crooning out Jimmy McHugh-Dorothy Fields melodies such as the light and breezy "I Feel a Song Coming On" and "Speaking Confidentially". The movie introduced the world to the song "I'm in the Mood for Love", which is sung by Langford. The tap-dancing she learned when she was young was put to good use in films like 20th Century Fox's Thanks a Million and Warner Bros.' Go Into Your Dance starring Ruby Keeler and Al Jolson in their only screen pairing together. According to columnist Ruth White: "Wherever you find a laughing group on a sound stage, you will find Patsy in the center of it. She's everybody's friend, as kindly to the prop boys as she is with the most famous stars... This jolly picture thief... makes picture work such play that not until the film is previewed do her co-stars realize she has stolen the show."