Mark Griffin (6 page)

DESPITE MINNELLI’S GRUELING WORK SCHEDULE at Marshall Field, he somehow managed to find time to attend recreational education classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
^j
“I went to the life classes a couple of times but couldn’t keep it up because I was working,” Minnelli recalled years later.
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Encouraged by the positive response he had received for his acting forays back in Delaware, Lester gave performing another try, appearing in an amateur production of Eugene O’Neill’s
Where the Cross is Made
at the Radical Playhouse.

He also regularly attended the theater, but never as just another passive spectator. Throughout a performance, Lester was continuously busy, creating what he would later refer to as “memory sketches” of the incandescent stars on stage, including showstoppers such as Ina Claire and Mary Nash. Encouraged by friends, Minnelli began selling his memory sketches backstage for $10 ($15 if the purchaser was especially well dressed). Oftentimes he was able to make direct sales to the actors whose likenesses he had captured, including some of his future collaborators, such as Fanny Brice and Ethel Barrymore. One evening, after the curtain fell, Lester met professional photographer Paul Stone backstage. Stone took notice of Minnelli’s work and was immediately impressed. “If you can do that, you can learn to photograph,” Stone told Lester. When the photographer offered Minnelli more money than he was earning at Marshall Field, he had no choice but to agree. It was time to get behind the camera.

Paul Stone snapped theatrical luminaries, society matrons, wedding parties—and, when nobody was looking, male nudes.
^k
Lester Minnelli proved to be a characteristically quick study, though he lacked Stone’s finesse in dealing with the celebrities and high-society types who streamed into the photographer’s Raymor Studio, which happened to be across the street from Marshall Field.

Minnelli would remember Stone as a “high strung, nervous type” who suffered a breakdown only a few months after Lester began working for him.
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During Stone’s extended absence, it fell to Minnelli to photograph the likes of actress Ina Claire.
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Lester was so bashful shooting a star that he worshipped that he hid behind the camera, quaking. Social unease aside, Paul Stone’s studio was beneficial for Minnelli, as it furthered the education that had begun in Mr. Fraser’s window-display department at Marshall Field. Lester learned how important lighting was in terms of creating the proper mood; he discovered that he had a knack for presenting subjects so that they appeared utterly glamorous yet perfectly natural. After agreeing to photograph a determined leading lady from her “best side,” Lester would sweet-talk her into trying a different angle. Almost always, Minnelli’s way proved to be the more visually arresting.

There may have been a different kind of education taking place at Stone’s studio as well. With a parade of handsome, well-built young men stopping in to be photographed with their clothes off, it’s possible that Raymor Studio was something of gay sanctuary. In fact, in a deleted passage from his autobiography, Minnelli noted, “Paul Stone’s assistant gay—didn’t have much to do with him.”
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Was it Minnelli’s strict Catholic upbringing that wouldn’t allow him to have “much to do” with Stone’s unnamed gay assistant? Or was it the fact that by the early ’70s, when Minnelli was preparing his memoir, he had a vested interest in presenting himself as the exclusively heterosexual father of superstar Liza Minnelli?

Minnelli’s remark is curious—and all the more so as it was while he was working in Stone’s studio that he began to pattern himself after the most colorful fop of them all—James McNeill Whistler. In later years, Lester would tell the story of discovering his idol in one of two ways: A Raymor Studio sitter left behind a copy of E. R. and J. Pennell’s biography of the flamboyant painter and Minnelli was instantly smitten, or he happened into an art gallery one Sunday afternoon and was taken with the Whistlers up on the wall. Whichever way it went, Minnelli latched on to Whistler’s story as though it were the modern-day dandy’s guide to life. Lester no doubt recognized something of himself in descriptions of Whistler being “absorbed in his work when that work was in any way related to art.” Whistler’s life story so completely captured Lester’s imagination that he began to emulate the artist’s dandified ways—from his ostentatious style of dress to his reverence for color, which Whistler once described as “the most magnificent mistress possible.”
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A master of self-invention, Whistler’s story pointed the way to Minnelli’s own personal transformation. For it was in Chicago that Lester Minnelli became Vincente Minnelli. At first, he used his father’s name, “Vincent C.,” before deciding to add the final “e” to his first name for a touch of sophistication and old world elegance. “Vincente Minnelli” said man of the world. Artist. Aesthete. The name change signaled a whole new beginning. Lester from Delaware simply ceased to exist.

It was yet another example of how Minnelli and his companion Lester Gaba were on the same wavelength. “Lester Gaba wanted you to believe that he was a genie born out of a bottle in midtown Manhattan,” says Morton Myles. “He didn’t like any allusions to Hannibal, Missouri. If someone appeared who knew him from his early days in Chicago, they got very short shrift. If someone brought up Chicago, you never saw that person again in his presence. . . . He invented himself as a New York character. It probably was the same with Minnelli.”
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In the midst of transforming himself, Vincente suddenly found his surroundings uninspiring. “I yearned to be a participant like Whistler instead of a spectator, and I was itching to move on,” Minnelli recalled of his later years in Chicago.
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The same kind of driving ambition that had propelled a teenager out of Delaware, Ohio, now brought him through the doors of the opulent Chicago Theatre. Once again, Minnelli would exhibit his portfolio (which now included photos of glamorous stars he had snapped at Stone’s studio) and find that it met with immediate approval.

Frank Cambria was director of productions for Balaban and Katz, the Chicago-based theater chain that presented live stage shows between screenings of feature films. Cambria introduced Minnelli to A. J. Balaban, who was impressed not only with Vincente’s portfolio but with the young man’s gumption. Although Vincente couldn’t sew a stitch, that didn’t stop him from pitching himself as the head costumer for Balaban and Katz’s nonexistent wardrobe department, promising to enhance their live shows with “a custom touch.” He was hired. Although initially billed as “Creator of Costumes,” Minnelli would eventually design sets for a number of Balaban and Katz extravaganzas as well.

“The Balabans didn’t have access to the best movies because they were latecomers to the scene in Chicago,” says David Balaban, whose great uncle, A. J. Balaban, ran the family business with an awe-inspiring military precision:

The live portion of the Balaban and Katz weekly spectacular rotated among several theaters in the Chicago area, and Minnelli made the rounds along with the sets and costumes. “The time that Minnelli was with Balaban and Katz was a very formative period,” says David Balaban. “It formed the foundation for a lot of his aesthetic beliefs because he had a lot of freedom to basically create these shows from scratch. . . . It would have been the best kind of training for being a director.”
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In 1928, Balaban and Katz merged with the motion-picture chain Paramount-Publix. This corporate marriage would have a life-altering impact on Minnelli. At first, his employers would only occasionally dispatch an all-too-happy-to-oblige Vincente to their flagship theater, the New York Paramount. Once there, he would lend his talents to stage productions that would play before Broadway audiences prior to heading out on the road.

Since his Delaware days, Minnelli’s “secret campaign” had involved bundling up his art books and making his way to New York. And now, not only had that long-cherished dream materialized, but, as Vincente recalled, “It was everything I expected it to be.”
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Not only was New York a neon-drenched utopia, but the city seemed to operate on the same kind of nervous energy that Vincente did. Only one thing was lacking to make the scenario perfect: permanent residency. After his initial visits, Minnelli had made up his mind that at the earliest opportunity, he would move to Manhattan. And as fate would have it, Balaban and Katz had the very same notion. If Vincente wanted to remain in their employ, he would have to relocate to New York. So, Minnelli packed his bags.

IT WAS THE STUFF of countless Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musicals: A wide-eyed kid with loads of talent and insane ambition making the leap from his family’s small-time theatricals to The Great White Way.
Milking applause instead of milking a cow
.
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Though at the moment Minnelli arrived in New York in the early ’30s, the great metropolis seemed like a movie set that was still under construction. They had just taken the wraps off of the Empire State Building. Three square blocks were being leveled to make way for John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Radio City center, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney was announcing plans for a new museum devoted exclusively to American art.

And at the outset of the Great Depression, Broadway was offering, for those who could afford a ticket, escapist fantasy in the form of extravagant musical revues. The more lavish the production, the better. There was the Ziegfeld Follies, Earl Carroll’s
Vanities
, and George White’s
Scandals
. These eye-popping extravaganzas offered over-the-top opulence, “lewder than nude” showgirls, and grand spectacle—everything audiences needed to forget about the harsh realities of the world
out there
, where over 4 million people were unemployed.

There was theater. And then there was street theater. Like countless artists both before and after him, Vincente had naturally gravitated to Greenwich Village. Even in those days, the parade of eccentrics and oddballs wandering around were often more entertaining than any of the legitimate attractions offered in Times Square. The Village was not only a haven for artists, radicals, and self-styled bohemians but had long ago established itself as America’s preeminent gay mecca. In the Village, the unorthodox was the
norm and flamboyance flourished. Here, even more so than Chicago, was a dramatically heightened environment that nearly mirrored Vincente’s colorful inner world.

Minnelli’s first residence in the city was, as he described it, “a tiny Greenwich Village nest, sublet from vagabond-dancer Jacques Cartier.”
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The address was 89 Bedford Street, two blocks off of the better-known Christopher Street. According to census records from 1930, Vincente lived alone in the one-room apartment and was paying the landlord $65 a month for rent, more than any other occupant in the building. Apparently it was around this time that Minnelli began playing with the facts about his age: He informed an unsuspecting census taker that he was twenty-four years old when he was actually twenty-seven.
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The personal transformation that had begun in Chicago continued in New York. Inspired by his surroundings, Minnelli went full tilt Village artiste. He began sporting a long coat and a flat black hat with a wide brim. The look was memorably described by one observer as “a triumphant marriage of Harlem and the Left Bank.” It may have been around this time that Vincente began wearing make-up as well. A touch of eyeliner. A trace of lipstick. As he had grown up advising the actors in his father’s troupe on how to paint their faces, this probably seemed perfectly natural to him. Besides, why should cosmetic enhancement be reserved for center stage? Although the youthful Minnelli had once been described as “quite handsome in an almost Mongoloid way,” Vincente was all too aware of the fact that he had not been blessed with matinee-idol good looks. So why not indulge in a bit of exterior decorating? After all, he had told the census taker that he was “actively employed as an independent artist.” So why not look the part?
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As for the “actively employed,” he was constantly in demand, creating exquisite costumes for the Paramount-Publix circuit and “designing the equivalent of a Broadway show every week.”
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And of course, there was no end of fascinating people to meet both in and out of the theater.