Vincente Minnelli
Vincente Minnelli was an American stage director and film director. From a career spanning over half a century, he is best known for his sophisticated innovation and artistry in musical films., six of his films have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Born in Chicago, Minnelli made his stage debut as an actor in a production of East Lynne, staged by the Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater. After he graduated from high school, Minnelli began his theatrical career as a costume designer for the Balaban and Katz theater chain. In 1932, Minnelli moved to New York and worked for the Radio City Music Hall, where he later became the venue's art director. On Broadway, Minnelli directed numerous theatrical musicals, including At Home Abroad, which starred Beatrice Lillie and Eleanor Powell. In 1937, Minnelli briefly worked for Paramount Pictures, but then returned to Broadway.
In 1940, Minnelli was hired by Arthur Freed to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he directed sequences in Babes on Broadway and Panama Hattie. He made his directorial film debut with Cabin in the Sky. A year later, Minnelli directed Meet Me in St. Louis starring Judy Garland. He married Garland a year later, and their daughter Liza was born in 1946. He subsequently directed Garland in The Clock, Ziegfeld Follies and The Pirate. He divorced Garland in 1951.
Throughout the 1950s, Minnelli directed numerous comedies, dramas and musicals, including Father of the Bride, An American in Paris, The Bad and the Beautiful, Lust for Life and Gigi. An American in Paris and Gigi respectively both won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Minnelli winning the Best Director Oscar for the latter film. For over 26 years, Minnelli became the longest-tenured film director for MGM.
By 1962, Minnelli's relationship with MGM worsened due to the commercial failures of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Two Weeks in Another Town. He formed his production company called Venice Productions, partnering with MGM and 20th Century Fox on The Courtship of Eddie's Father and Goodbye Charlie. He directed his final film A Matter of Time, starring his daughter Liza. Ten years later, in 1986, Minnelli died at his Beverly Hills residence, at age 83.
Early life
Lester Anthony Minnelli was born on February 28, 1903, to Marie Émilie Odile Lebeau and Vincent Charles Minnelli. He was baptized in Chicago, and was the youngest of four known sons, only two of whom survived to adulthood. His mother, whose stage name was Mina Gennell, was born in Chicago. She was of French-Canadian descent, and there is a likelihood of Anishinaabe lineage through her mother, who was born on Mackinac Island, Michigan. His father co-founded the Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater, serving as the musical conductor. Both had met each other at a musical revue; although they initially argued over her accompaniment, they grew closer and were married in November 1894. Following the marriage, she joined the Minnelli Brothers troupe.His paternal grandfather, Vincenzo Minnelli, and grand-uncle, Domenico Minnelli, both Sicilian revolutionaries, were forced to leave Sicily after the collapse of the provisional Sicilian government that arose from the 1848 revolution against Ferdinand II and Bourbon rule. Domenico Minnelli had been Vice-Chancellor of the Gran Corte Civile in Palermo at the time he helped organize the January 12, 1848, uprising there. After the Bourbon return to power Vincenzo reportedly hid in the catacombs of Palermo for 18 months before being successfully smuggled onto a New York-bound fruit steamer.
At three years old, Minnelli made his debut stage performance portraying Little Willie in East Lynne, alongside his mother performing dual roles as Lady Isabel and Madame Vine. During the performance, Minnelli broke character when his character was supposed to have died. His family moved to Delaware, Ohio, where he spent the first three years of high school at St. Mary's. Since St. Mary's had no twelfth grade, he spent his last year at Willis High School in Delaware, graduating at 16 years of age. There, he appeared in a school production of H.M.S. Pinafore and starred in The Fortune Hunter at the Delaware Opera House.
Following his high school graduation, Minnelli moved to Chicago, where he lived briefly with his maternal grandmother Le Beau and his aunt Amy. In search of a job, Minnelli took his portfolio of watercolor paintings to the Marshall Field's department store. Arthur Valair Fraser, the store's display director, reviewed his portfolio and hired him immediately as an apprentice window dresser. There, the store windows were changed four times a year with elaborate themes matched to each corresponding season. Minnelli was first assigned to design the men's store, but he instead asked to design windows on Wabash Avenue where furniture and decorative antique items were frequently rearranged. Meanwhile, Minnelli enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago with personal ambitions to become a painter. However, he dropped out due to his lack of interest in the curriculum.
Stage career
By the 1920s, Minnelli was working at Marshall Field's. There, a blind female customer arrived to rent stage props for the Radical Playhouse. She asked him to join their acting group where they were performing one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill. Minnelli agreed, and read for the part of a retired sea captain in O'Neill's Where the Cross is Made. He disliked this acting job, but remained a frequent attendee of Chicago's theatre district. In his spare time, he painted watercolor sketches of contemporary theatre actors, including Ina Claire and Mary Nash. Encouraged by his friends, Minnelli sold his paintings backstage, and earned enough money to live on his own. One night, while selling his artwork backstage, he was approached by Paul Stone, who admired Minnelli's pictorial composition. "If you can do this sort of thing, you can become a fine photographer," Stone told him.Minnelli left his Marshall Field's job, and worked for Stone as an assistant photographer. Stone specialized in photographing actors and socialites from Chicago's theater district at theatrical luminaries, society matrons and wedding parties. At Stone's Raymor studio, Minnelli photographed numerous celebrities, including Ina Claire, where he coaxed them into capturing their best angles. Minnelli reflected, "Stone's photography was soft, but in sharp focus, so that it could reproduce on the printed page. This taught me a way of creating mood." Months later, Stone suffered a nervous breakdown, and Minnelli assumed his photography duties. Feeling he was not suited for photography as a profession, Minnelli grew dissatisfied and began reading Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell's 1911 biography of James McNeill Whistler, an American painter. Inspired by Whistler's art techniques, Minnelli immersed himself in impressionist and surrealist painters, such as Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. He also admired the experimental films of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel, and the writings of Sigmund Freud. Around this time, Minnelli dropped Lester from his name, replacing it with "Vincente"; he added the final "e" in order to seem more sophisticated and elegant.
Next, Minnelli approached Frank Cambria, who headed the Chicago Theatre, which was a part of the Balaban and Katz theater chain. He told Cambria that he should open his own costume department, and allow him to run it. Cambria took Minnelli to A. J. Balaban's office, where he was hired as a costume and set designer. Assigned to give the stage productions "a custom touch", Minnelli was shocked the costume department operated on meager budgets. At the time, theatre productions ran one week at the Chicago Theatre where the sets and costumes were disassembled and reused at the Tivoli and Uptown Theatre.
In 1931, Balaban and Katz merged with the Paramount-Publix theater chain, and Minnelli was asked to work on New York stage productions for $150 a week. He left Chicago and rented a tiny Greenwich Village apartment. At Paramount, Minnelli worked exclusively in costumes, and was prevented from designing sets because he wasn't in the set designers' union. He was eventually accepted into the union membership thanks to sponsorship from J. Woodman Thompson, a prominent stage designer. His first Broadway assignment was designing the show curtain for Earl Carroll's 1931 edition of the Vanities musical revue. Taking inspiration from Léon Bakst's designs for the Ballets Russes, Minnelli fashioned a –tall green and silver curtain to accompany the Art Deco theatrical style. Impressed, Carroll rehired Minnelli as a costume and set designer for the 1932 Vanities.
By this time, Grace Moore asked Minnelli to supervise the art direction for the operetta, The Dubarry. During rehearsals, Minnelli and Moore had creative differences but remained cordial. The operetta had tryouts in Boston, and premiered in New York in November 1932 where it ran for 87 performances. Based on his success, Paramount executives selected him for costume and set design for the 1933 edition of Ziegfeld Follies. However, by 1933, Paramount-Publix filed for bankruptcy protection, in which Adolph Zukor fired B. P. Schulberg as the studio's head of production and began a corporate restructuring. Paramount's East Coast studios were relocated to Astoria, New York, but it was decided their touring theatre unit was no longer profitable and was closed down in favor of touring big bands.
In December 1932, Minnelli was hired as the chief costume designer for the newly-opened Radio City Music Hall. On Thursday nights every week, the Music Hall held a lavish stage performance by the Roxettes before the one-week run for a film. Each week, Minnelli, art director Clark Robinson, and dance director Russell Markert had their rehearsals harshly criticized by theatre impresario Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel. Robinson immediately resigned after one heated exchange with Rothafel, who then selected Minnelli as the new art director. Minnelli was the designer of the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers", a piece that is still performed today by The Rockettes in their Christmas Spectacular. In July 1933, Minnelli designed the "Water Lily" ballet, a Cuban potpourri illustrated with a backdrop of fighting cocks, a Big Top interior for a circus number, and a Rue de la Paix dress shop to display the Roxettes. In December 1933, Minnelli art-directed a production of the Scheherazade suite by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His efforts were applauded in the mainstream press, including The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune.
Rothafel was later fired by the theater's board management, having received complaints of his abrasive management style. Rothafel was replaced by W. G. Van Schmus, and in 1934, he selected Minnelli to produce his first stage show titled Coast to Coast, which opened on October 25. Accompanied with music from E. Y. Harburg and Duke Ellington, the show displayed several sets, illustrating the French Riviera, the British Gold Coast, Ivory Coast and the Barbary Coast. Backstage, Minnelli was offered a directing job by Lee Shubert for his stage company. Despite the offer, Minnelli continued working for Radio City Music Hall until he left in April 1935. After months of considering, he joined Shubert's organization, signing a contract to produce three musical shows over eighteen months.
While working for Messrs. Shubert, Minnelli directed At Home Abroad, with music composed by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. Starring Beatrice Lillie, Ethel Waters, and Eleanor Powell, the Broadway musical centered on a married couple who flee the United States, and travel across Europe, Africa, Japan, and the West Indies. The musical had a try-out in Boston and opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on September 19, 1935. In his New York Times review, Brooks Atkinson praised Minnelli's efforts, writing: "Without resorting to opulence he has filled the stage with rich, glowing colors that give the whole work an extraordinary loveliness. Nothing quite so exhilarating as this has borne the Shubert seal before."
While At Home Abroad continued its Broadway run, Minnelli returned to costume and scenic design for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, starring Fannie Brice. John Murray Anderson was the director, but during rehearsals, he transferred directing duties to Minnelli. To update the show's look from previous Follies, whose costumes drew from the Louis XVI period, Minnelli used the 1880s as inspiration for the hair styles and elegant costumes. Opening on January 30, 1936, the Ziegfeld Follies was a commercial success, running for five months and reopened for another five months after a summer hiatus. Minnelli was not involved in the revival, but instead chose to direct a musical revue titled The Show Is On. Minnelli devised an original story, featuring new songs from a team of Tin Pan Alley lyricists. The show premiered on Christmas Day 1936 and ran for 237 performances during its initial run. A reprise opened in September 1937 and played for two weeks.
Based on his Broadway success, Hollywood had taken notice of Minnelli as a rising director. Samuel Goldwyn tentatively approached Minnelli to direct The Goldwyn Follies, and in 1937, Paramount Pictures offered him a contract to produce and direct films. Although he was initially reluctant, Minnelli accepted the offer and was paid $2,500 a week. His first project was Times Square, a mystery film set on Broadway. Leo Birinski was hired to write the script, with the plot detailing characters venturing throughout various musical numbers from Broadway shows to piece together vital clues. Minnelli also proposed a surrealist ballet featuring Paramount's contract actors, and held conversations with Kurt Weill about a potential musical film. Minnelli discussed the project with Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount, but he was uninterested; discussions with William LeBaron, the studio's head of production, did not move the project forward.
Meanwhile, Minnelli proposed the title Shall We Dance for the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers film. He consulted on Raoul Walsh's 1937 film Artists and Models devising the "Public Melody No. 1" number, featuring Louis Armstrong and Martha Raye.
After six months of negotiating, Minnelli was released from his contract and returned to Broadway. Lee Shubert offered him the musical Hooray for What!, which starred Ed Wynn and featured music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg. Minnelli was given only three months for preparation before its premiere on December 1, 1937. The musical was well-received, with Life magazine calling it "the funniest show of the year." Time magazine also applauded: "Sharing credit with Wynn for the show's success is able Vincente Minnelli, trained in the hard school of movie stage-shows, who directed it and designed the scenery."
Inspired by the musicals Pins and Needles and Four Saints in Three Acts, Minnelli began developing a surrealist fantasy titled The Light Fantastic, with Beatrice Lillie in mind to star. He offered her four musical numbers and four sketches outlining his vision, but Lillie, then in England, did not respond in time. He then shifted to a musicalization of S. N. Behrman's play Serena Blandish, wanting to feature Black American actors. Cole Porter was hired to write the musical score. Sid Perelman wrote the libretto, while Lena Horne read for the title role. After six months of development, Minnelli abandoned the project. Exhausted, Minnelli took a sabbatical break until producer Max Gordon offered him the direction of Very Warm for May. Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern were hired to write the lyrics and compose the musical score, respectively. Pleased with the musical's first act, Minnelli unsuccessfully tried to rearrange the second act. The musical opened at the Alvin Theatre on November 17, 1939, with musical critic Brooks Atkinson writing in his review that Minnelli had not "solved the confusion of the story."
William Saroyan's play The Time of Your Life had opened three weeks before and was well-regarded. Minnelli became friends with Saroyan and they partnered on a black surrealist musical comedy, with Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart composing the score. Saroyan was unable to refine his script to be suitably succinct and exited the project.