Sextuple Threat

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.

A lot of people seem to agree. In the past half a dozen years, switching hats like a bargain-basement shopper, he created a jazzy ballet for the Paris Opera, directed, produced or starred in six movies. On TV, he waltzed with Julie Andrews ("He made me feel as if I really could dance"), mugged with Danny Kaye, hosted the Hollywood Palace, narrated documentaries on silent movies and baseball, and starred in four one-hour specials and his own series, Going My Way. This year he was awarded an Emmy for the best children's program, Jack and the Beanstalk, in which he danced with animated characters, a technique he helped pioneer in Anchors Aweigh in 1945. Between times, he emceed the 1965 Arts Festival at the White House and toured West Africa as a cultural ambassador for the State Department.

Feeding Grimaces. Kelly deplores the common U.S. image of the dancer as a mincing she-man. When he first began dancing in nightclubs in the Pittsburgh area, ringside drunks would snigger "Hello, honey." One night he slugged one of the loudmouths and hotfooted it to Manhattan. He prepped as a Broadway chorus boy, "feeding grimaces to Mary Martin" in 1937, three years later won the lead in Pal Joey and a one-way ticket to Hollywood.

He arrived at the time when the leggy, cotton-candy spectacles of Choreographer Busby Berkeley were giving way to the cool sophistication epitomized by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. But Kelly discovered that he couldn't dance in white tie and tails. "I needed more room. I had to roll up my sleeves." Thus he developed a stereotype of the cinema dancer that endured for more than a decade: an ordinary chap in sports shirt, ballooning slacks and white socks (to draw attention to his feet). His style was virile, breezy, and charged with a lusty bravura, whether he was splashing through a Technicolor rainstorm, kicking up his heels beneath the Eiffel Tower, or skittering across Manhattan stoops in his Navy whites. Though his singing voice sounded like someone gargling pebbles, he projected an easy grace and wit that made him the most sought-after song-and-dance man in Hollywood.

Today, Kelly is committed to directing The American Male, an irreverent look at the species by European women, and Tom Swift, a satirical treatment of derring-do in the early 1900s. Last week he began flexing his joints for a dancing stint on the Jackie Gleason Show. No barbell and wheat-germ addict, he simply runs around the block every morning, gradually increasing the laps until he feels the urge to go soft-shoeing all over the neighborhood.

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