Vincente Minnelli | Bells Are Ringing / 1960

circumstantial evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Betty Comden and Adolph Green (screenplay, based on their stage production, with music by Jule Styne), Vincente Minnelli (director) Bells Are Ringing / 1960

 

The last musical collaboration between Vincente Minnelli, a closeted gay man despite his marriage to Judy Garland, and Arthur Freed whose MGM music unit was described as Freed’s fairies, was the 1960 recreation of the Jule Styne Broadway musical Bells Are Ringing.

     Freed himself evidently wasn’t gay, but nearly everyone around him, particularly Roger Edens who worked closely with Freed and Minnelli in musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), On the Town (1949), Show Boat (1951), An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953)—three of these being Minnelli, Edens, and Freed collaborations—and Walter Plunkett, the costume designer who worked with Freed on Show Boat, Singing’ in the Rain, and Bells Are Ringing, among others were quite openly gay.

     Little of the plot of Bells Are Ringing—which concerns the now archaic subject of a Brooklyn telephone answering service, Susanswerphone, where the phone is answered by the film’s star Judy Holliday, Jean Stapleton, and Ruth Storey, with Holliday (playing Ella Peterson) getting far too involved with her customers, including the man with whom she falls in love, Broadway librettist Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin)—has anything to do with LGBTQ life.

      There are, however, two nominally gay characters: a dentist, Dr. Joe Kitchell (Bernie West), who simply can’t contain himself from writing popular musical numbers on his air hose and through Ella’s help gets a stint at a nightclub performing his song “The Midas Touch,” which, again through Ella’s intercession, becomes also the name for Jeffrey Moss’ newest Broadway show.  

     West, who was not gay in real life, becomes a mad fairy as he excitedly directs his own numbers and somewhat limp-wristedly dances out his tunes as Hal Linden (who had been in the original stage production playing Moss) belts out the cheesy song Kitchell has created. Later in his life West became a regular writer with Norman Lear of TV shows All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and other spinoffs.

    The second fairly obvious gay figure is Carl (Doria Avila), a delivery boy who supposedly is dating Ella’s co-worker Gwynne (Storey). In this film he plays a man who is not only a dancer who teaches Ella how to Cha Cha, but seemingly knows all the classical musical recordings, particularly that Beethoven only wrote 9 symphonies, despite the fact that the pretend record company created by J. Otto Prantz (Eddie Foy, Jr.), who also shares space in Susanswerphone’s basement office, have announced a recording of a 10th symphony in their attempt to use their record company as a front for their bookie service, memorably celebrated in the movie's wonderful song “It’s a Simple Little System” (which also gives us a look at a couple of possible lesbians, one being Asian).

     Avila, who had studied dance and performed with many notables including George Balanchine, Volonine and Olga Presobajenska in Paris, and worked in modern dance with Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, the New York City Opera, and the New York City Ballet, later ran a major dance school and revived Mexican Folkloric and Spanish-Flamenco Dance in South Texas. He was killed, at age 78, through blunt force trauma, afterward his body being burned, apparently by a 25-year-old gay lover who reported he often stayed overnight in Avila’s house.

      Well, there might be one further semi-gay figure, the detective assistant of Inspector Barnes (Dort Clark), a meek and very unsuspecting and somewhat effeminate underling who believes in Ella’s innocence, Francis (Ralph Roberts).

       Roberts, after several small roles in movies, went on to become a major masseur for Hollywood actors. Perhaps his most notable client was Marilyn Monroe, with whom he developed a close friendship and about whom he became very protective, arguing she was not depressed at the time of her death and was planning to share dinner with him that evening. Other famous clients included Carol and Walter Matthau, Eddie Albert, Ruth and Milton Berle, Shirley Jones, Julie Harris, Maureen Stapleton, Judy Holliday, Betty Comden, Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green, Felicia and Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, Arthur Laurents, Ellen Burstyn, Montgomery Clift, Helen Hayes, Richard Burton, David Merrick, and many, many others. Apparently he did not ever marry.

  When we talk about the major lead in this musical, moreover, things get slightly more complex. Holliday began her career performing in the late 1930s as part of the nightclub act called The Revuers, which included Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Alvin Hammer, John Frank, and Esther Cohen, with often Leonard Bernstein playing the piano. The group, which broke up in 1944, performed at several major New York clubs including the Village Vanguard, the Blue Angel, the Rainbow Room, and the Trocadero in Hollywood.

      In the early 1940s Holliday had a lesbian relationship with Katherine Hepburn before living with a policewoman. In 1948 she married Leonard Bernstein’s former lover, classical musical clarinetist David Oppenheim, upon Bernstein’s suggestion, as a “beard,” a female willing to share in a relationship to represent heterosexuality to the public while permitting homosexual relationships out of the public eye. Bernstein, in fact, before marrying Felicia Montealegre Cohn, had considered proposing to Holliday.

    During the red scare of the 1950s, Holliday was called to testify before the Senate Security Subcommittee to relate her own ties to communism, a situation which apparently arose because of her girlfriend Yetta Cohn who the FBI had been investigating. Like her character in Born Yesterday, Billie Dawn, Holliday played dumb, refusing to reveal anything about anyone while protecting herself.

        The greatest song in this musical, "The Party's Over," is a musical lament to the gay experience, Ella having so long pretended someone who she is not, finally recognizing that her "mask" has slipped, that the relationship with Jeffrey Moss she is seeking is an impossibility. That song and its lyrics represents what every gay or lesbian being has experienced several times in his or her life, and the work is a plaintive testament to the feeling of desire, of not being able to participate in normative sexual life:

 

             The party's over

             It's time to call it a day

             They've burst your pretty balloon

             And taken the moon away

             It's time to wind up the masquerade

             Just make your mind up the piper must be paid

 

             The party's over

             The candles flicker and dim

             You danced and dreamed through the night

 

             It seemed to be right just being with him

             Now you must wake up, all dreams must end

             Take off your makeup, the party's over

             It's all over, my friend

      Later in her career, Holliday was involved in a long relationship with the famous jazz musician and arranger, who oddly enough appears as her date in Bells Are Ringing, Gerry Mulligan. She supplied the lyrics to his theme music for the 1965 film A Thousand Clowns.

      When Holliday died of metastatic breast cancer in 1965, Mulligan began a relationship with actor Sandy Dennis.

       In short, this frothy musical of 1960 is pure family entertainment, but at the edges is filled with gay and lesbian contributions, the way so many films secretly were. If nothing else, it serves as a sort of icon of just how interlinked the New York and Hollywood gay societies were, and how they developed through mutual private connections.

    Even when I declare a movie is not gay, accordingly, I am not speaking the whole truth. The circumstantial evidence makes it clear what Judy Garland once said on a TV interview: “Without homosexuals there would be no Hollywood.” And one might certainly say the same of New York’s Broadway.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).