Fondling a martini, flaked out on the sofa in his Beverly Hills home, bald, bespectacled Gene Kelly could pass as the aging big star lapsing into the big fadeout. But not so. One flourish from that invisible 100-piece orchestra that always seems to follow him around, and he would undoubtedly slap on his hairpiece and straw hat, pirouette over the coffee table, go tippity-tap-tapping along the poolside, buck and wing it across the volleyball court, and end up with a ten-minute improvisation on the monkey bars.
At 54, Kelly is going like sixty. It has been 25 years since he first whirled across the screen with Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal, and now he is Hollywood's busiest (and only) sextuple threat—dancer, actor, singer, choreographer, producer, director. "I wear so many hats," he says, "that sometimes I forget where I've been and where I'm going." These days he prefers the checkered cap that goes with the director's chair. He has just completed A Guide for the Married Man, a kind of lab course in advanced adultery starring Robert Morse and Walter Matthau, and it is one of the niftiest comedies to come out of Hollywood in years.
Crack the Whip. Deftly alternating fast and slow motion, blackouts, flashbacks and stop action (mostly eye-popping closeups of female posteriors and anteriors), Kelly in effect has choreographed the film along the lines of a fast-paced modern dance. He enlivened one terpsy-turvy scene, for example, by having Art Carney prance after his mistress like an oversexed peacock.
It is the moving part of moving pictures that interests Kelly, and to keep the action hopping on the set, he will often shout out the desired rhythms like a ballet master: "One-two-and-three-and-four" His own movement is jitterbug. He will bound off his chair to correct a camera angle, touch up the scenery, or show an actress how to swivel her hips. "Actors like to be told how to act, not shown," says Matthau, "but with Kelly, his great body movements reveal what he wants."
What he usually wants is another retake, and he is just stubborn enough to keep at it for hours. Says Frank Sinatra, whom Kelly directed in On the Town: "The guy just never heard of exhaustion." But he has heard about charm, and he can crack the whip without stinging the ego. When he teamed up with Jackie Gleason to film Gigot in 1961, the trade waited expectantly for the Great One to unload his celebrated wrath on the demanding director. Instead, Kelly had Gleason puffing up and down a flight of stairs like a trained St. Bernard and Jackie begrudgingly tacked a reminder on his dressing-room door: GENE KELLY is RIGHT.