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).
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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).
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