Mark Griffin (24 page)

Vincente, of course, was all too aware of the extent of Garland’s illness. For all his gentlemanly diplomacy, understanding, and support, he may have been at least partially responsible for Judy’s crisis. As Hollywood legend had it, arriving home after an exhausting day at the studio, Garland was shocked to discover Minnelli in their bed and in a compromising position with another man, usually described in retellings as “a domestic.” A distraught Judy locked herself in the bathroom and reportedly began slicing at her wrists with a sharp object. Minnelli rushed to Judy’s aid, and the unidentified domestic
presumably fled. If Garland had wondered if there was any truth to the rumors about her husband, this episode could have left no doubts in her mind.

Not long after the incident, Vincente learned that his wife’s new psychiatrist had advised Arthur Freed that Minnelli should be removed from the forthcoming production of Irving Berlin’s
Easter Parade
—a highly anticipated project that was originally to have reunited Garland, Kelly, and Minnelli. However, it was suggested that Garland harbored “a deep-seated resentment” of authority figures. Being directed by Minnelli during the day and then returning home with him at night would simply be too much for her. According to Minnelli, the disappointing news was relayed to him by Arthur Freed. Garland never said a word.

Before production began on
Easter Parade
(which would be helmed by Chuck Walters), Judy checked into a psychiatric clinic in Las Campanas favored by many in the Beverly Hills community. It was left to Vincente to explain to two-year-old Liza that “Mama went away for awhile. . . . But she’ll be back very soon.”
¹⁷
For Garland, withdrawal from her pharmaceutical enslavement was a wrenching and often frightening experience, but, true to form, the self-deprecating star would find a way to laugh at her own misfortune.

Judy loved to tell friends the story of her arrival at the sanitarium: “It was very dark that night. . . . These two burly attendants met us at the car and walked me across the grounds. Suddenly, I tripped. They picked me up. I tried to walk but I kept stumbling. When I woke up the next day, I looked out the window. I noticed this nice, green lawn. Then I saw why I kept falling. . . . I’d been tripping over the croquet wickets.”

After all of the turbulence and emotional upheaval that Minnelli had weathered, both during and following production of
The Pirate
, there was suddenly a lull. While Judy was whisked from one project to the next, Vincente found himself idle. Unaccustomed to sitting still, he grabbed at whatever assignments were available. “I seem to have directed every screen test filmed at Metro during 1948,” he recalled. Just when he thought he’d spend the rest of his career testing every “next Norma Shearer” who wandered onto the lot, the phone rang. Was he interested in bringing a certain literary masterpiece to the screen? “God, yes! When can we start?”

“I THINK THIS PICTURE is going to be great, and you are going to be great for it,” Dore Schary, MGM’s new vice president in charge of production, told Minnelli. The picture he was referring to was
Madame Bovary
. And Schary was right. Minnelli was, without question, the perfect man for the job. He’d be helming an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s immortal novel, which had created quite a stir when it was published in 1857. Public officials had branded the novel obscene and it would be called the “monstrous creation of a degenerate imagination.” The story concerned Emma Bovary, the unfulfilled wife of a provincial doctor. Emma yearns for a more glamorous existence and has an insatiable appetite for romantic passion and a life of luxury. As a result, she engages in adulterous affairs, has dealings with an unscrupulous moneylender, and finally commits suicide. Flaubert’s novel was widely considered a masterpiece; by the 1940s,
Madame Bovary
had already been filmed twice before, though not successfully in either case.

Many believed Jean Renoir’s 1934 French version of the story had been damaged by the miscasting of Valentine Tessier in the title role. With this in mind, Minnelli and producer Pandro Berman carefully considered the actresses under contract to MGM at that time. They hit upon the “audacious” idea of casting the studio’s sultriest sweater girl, Lana Turner, as the heroine who had been called “a disgrace to France and an insult to womanhood.” While the studio immediately saw dollar signs, Joseph L. Breen’s censorship office saw things differently. A Breen office administrator cautioned that the coupling of the screen’s most scintillating sexpot with an allegedly obscene
novel was too erotically potent for conservative, postwar America. “You could make it easier to stay within the code if you used an actress with more dignified appeal, like Greer Garson or Jennifer Jones,” he informed Berman and Minnelli.
¹
Metro executive Ben Thau initiated the negotiation process to borrow the Oscar-winning Jones from her very proprietary husband, producer David O. Selznick.

In terms of the various screen adaptations of Flaubert’s story, Robert Ardrey’s treatment for MGM’s version was surprisingly sympathetic to its doomed heroine, and much of this can be directly attributed to Minnelli: “
Madame Bovary
has always been one of my favorite novels. . . . I developed an attitude about the character that I wanted to convey.”
²
In Vincente’s reading of the novel, Emma is not simply greedy or sexually rapacious but desperately attempting to manifest the dream image of herself that she’s harbored since her youth.

“I am Madame Bovary,” Gustave Flaubert reportedly said of himself in later years, but such a revealing admission might have come directly from Metro’s house director. In fact,
Madame Bovary
would emerge as one of Minnelli’s most personally revealing films. In the early scenes, in which Emma Rouault is glimpsed in her farmhouse bedroom, Vincente’s camera lingers over the illustrations torn from the pages of
Les Modes
decorating the walls. These are “images of beauty that never existed,” images that “taught a lonely girl to live within herself.” This is the first clue that Minnelli, an inveterate collector of beautiful images, has aligned himself with his main character; beneath the sudsy surface of a Jennifer Jones melodrama, there lies a poignant autobiography in code.

“My point of view is that she wanted everything to be as beautiful as possible, yet everything that touched her was ugliness. But she never lost her desire to have beauty around her,” Vincente would say of his discontented protagonist.
³
According to film scholar Drew Casper, the director could have been talking about himself:

Jennifer Jones and Vincente welcome three-year-old Liza Minnelli to the set of
Madame Bovary
. The title role was originally slated for bombshell Lana Turner but the censorship office warned that the combination of the screen’s most scintillating sexpot and an allegedly obscene novel was too erotically potent. Jones was cast instead. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

Or, as Flaubert wrote of Emma Bovary:

Just as Emma is forced to hide her financial dealings with the unscrupulous moneylender Lheureux (the magnificent Frank Allenby), she must also keep secret her pursuit of illicit passion. For some observers, direct parallels can be drawn between the scandalous Emma and a director constantly whispered about and branded as sexually suspect. “Look at what society felt about her and Minnelli didn’t care because she managed to realize her inner self,” says Drew Casper. “The fact that she wants to escape that humdrum life that she was living with the kid and the doctor. . . . In the end, Minnelli puts
it in this framework, which exonerates Flaubert for writing this story. What Minnelli is saying is that none of what she’s done is immoral.”
⁶

It’s not surprising that the most memorable moment in Minnelli’s third melodrama is a musical one. “The waltz in
Madame Bovary
is terribly important because that’s the biggest scene in the book,” Vincente told interviewer Richard Schickel. “The waltz itself is her one moment of gratification. Things are the way she expects them to be.” In staging this elaborate sequence, Minnelli created one of his most sublime, transcendent set pieces. Working closely with composer Miklos Rozsa and choreographer Jack Donohue, he designed the waltz so that it matched Flaubert’s vivid description in the novel: “Everyone was waltzing. Everything was turning around them . . . the lamps, the furniture, the paneling, the parquet floor, like a disc on a spindle.”
⁷

The mood achieved is so deliriously giddy and exhilarating that it’s obvious that Madame Bovary isn’t the only one enjoying a transportive experience. One can feel Minnelli’s rapture whenever a scene he was directing allowed him an opportunity to unleash some deeply held belief or an emotion he may have been too accustomed to keeping in check. In
Madame Bovary
, it is the sequence Minnelli dubbed “the neurotic waltz” that radiates with that peculiar power, signifying that the director was not only fully engaged with the scene but living it right along with the characters.

While the waltz brings out the best in both Minnelli and star Jennifer Jones, they are aided immeasurably by Miklos Rozsa’s masterful score. “Minnelli was a sensitive artist and director and he made a masterpiece of
Madame Bovary
,” the Hungarian-born composer recalled:

Rozsa’s waltz is so electrifying that it was later recycled for
The Seventh Sin
, but it was never used more effectively than it was in
Bovary
.

Thankfully, Minnelli and Pandro Berman did not succeed in casting Lana Turner in the lead, as Jennifer Jones is unusually well suited to the title role. Restless and a bit neurotic off screen, Jones had left her husband, actor
Robert Walker, for producer David O. Selznick. The detail-obsessed Selznick seemed almost single-mindedly determined to turn Jones into a star of the highest magnitude. It was exactly the kind of Faustian exchange that Flaubert would have appreciated.
The Song of Bernadette
may have netted Jones the Oscar as Best Actress, but her Madame Bovary is a much better fit: the half-mad gleam in her eye during the waltz; her look of supreme disgust as the town clock strikes “the death of another hour;” her agonized expression as her lover’s carriage rides off without her.
Time
said: “Miss Jones, in her best picture to date, manipulates Emma’s moods and caprices with sensitive dexterity. Hardly ever out of sight of the cameras, she gives a performance that is hardly ever out of focus, a feat that even the finicky Flaubert could admire.”
⁹

And what would the author of
Madame Bovary
have thought of Minnelli’s sympathetic take on his heroine? “You could argue that the film is not really Flaubert,” says historian John Fitzpatrick. “Though it’s a good film on its own terms. In many ways, Minnelli has this very florid and romantic sensibility, whereas Flaubert is very often ironic and distant. The tone of the film is really quite different from Flaubert’s tone. It’s not that Minnelli gets it wrong, it’s just that it all came out rather differently.”
¹⁰

Even so, most of the critics would praise Vincente’s direction. As the
New York Times
noted in a review: “The high point of his achievement, indeed, is a ballroom scene which spins in a whirl of rapture and crashes in a shatter of shame. In this one sequence, the director has fully visualized his theme.”
¹¹