Cyd Charisse

Here is one of the movies most famous dancers, the leggy and elegant Texas girl with the unusual and largely unforgettable name.  She was probably my second favorite of her contemporary female dancers but perhaps none of them were this kind of refined.  For the price of my ticket, Cyd Charisse was the deluxe model.

Like most all musical stars, when the public was no longer clamoring for musicals, these folks needed another avenue to pursue or the career was over.  Charisse could actually act so it was not a great stretch for her to move into dramas.  That said, she has never been known for her dramatic roles as she was for those MGM musicals... and she was in a few of the most famous of them all.  She was also fortunate that she and her singer-husband could take their act on the road.

She is only one of six women who has danced on the screen with both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.  The others are Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, Vera-Ellen, Debbie Reynolds and Leslie Caron.  

If you were a young woman in 1921 Amarillo, how do you think you'd feel being named Tula Ellice Finklea?  Yikes.  Her brother had a rough time with it so he called her Sis although it came out Sid.   As a very young child she was  sickly, greatly concerning the family.  After a bout with polio she started taking dancing lessons to build up her strength.

At 12 she studied ballet in Los Angeles and by 14 she was dancing with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo first as Felia Siderova and later as Maria Istomina.  She was also studying with dance wizard Nico Charisse (oh you see it coming, don't you?).  At age 18 when on tour with the ballet in Paris, she and Charisse were married.  

After the ballet company disbanded, Charisse, now known by still another name, Lily Norwood, was offered a job at

Columbia Pictures.  In 1943 she had a bit part in a ballet sequence in the lackluster musical, Something to Shout About, with Don Ameche.  

That ballet number was spotted by MGM choreographer Robert Alton (he discovered Gene Kelly) and the studio was so impressed it hired her and she would become their resident ballet dancer.  One of the studio's premier musical producers, Arthur Freed, gave her a new name or at least a new spelling to an old name.  She became Cyd Charisse. 

MGM started her out in the forties in four of those all-star blockbuster flicks that we so popular at the time... Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By and Words and Music... where she appeared in specialty numbers.  In the 1950s and an established star, she handled the same type of assignment in Deep in My Heart.  All studios made these kinds of films, all were essentially musicals, and all the contract players who could sing and/or dance were rounded up.

 

Her first speaking part was in The Harvey Girls (1946) alongside Judy Garland but Charisse was barely noticeable.  She made a pair with Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban, Fiesta and On an Island with You in 1947 & 48.  Neither was particularly exciting and Charisse's parts were again small.

In 1947 she divorced Nico Charisse.  The marriage hadn't worked for some time and they hadn't been living together for over a year.  In 1948 she married singer Tony Martin whom she had been dating for awhile.  He had previously been wed to singer Alice Faye.  Charisse had one son with each of her husbands.

She asked her bosses if she could do some non-musical films and see what she could do in dramas.  They liked her spirit and happily yielded to her wishes, putting her in four dramas.  

Tension (1949) is a yummy film noir with Charisse as a reporter looking into a unfaithful wife's murder by her husband (Richard Basehart).  The rub here is that he was planning to murder her when someone beats him to it but he becomes the prime suspect. Charisse's part was not particularly exciting while Audrey Totter stole the show.

East Side, West Side (1949) is a classy Manhattan tale of high society infidelity.  Charisse's role is again small, only a couple of scenes.  One was in the backseat of a car with Barbara Stanwyck.  Charisse said Stanwyck would never look at her directly in the eyes and was downright unfriendly.  I hate hearing that about a favorite actress.

The swashbuckler The Mark of the Renegade (1951) and The Wild North (1952) as an Indian girl did nothing for her career.  Again she approached the bosses with a request to return to musicals.  Again they acquiesced.  Her career was about to explode.

Charisse had her first opportunity to dance with Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain (1952).  The film was (and remains) so popular that she grabbed her first big handful of fame.  Interestingly she is not part of the main story at all.  

Gene Kelly gave her fame

Some studio weirdo didn't like the film when he first saw it and ordered his minions to tack on to the end a long number called Broadway Melody.  Since childhood I have always remembered two things about this piece... the 50-ft long silk streamers that Charisse had attached to her shoulders as she runs against the wind (machines) and second is the scene in the picture above.   

Sombrero (1953), a story of three romantic relationships in a Mexican village, is weak except there was that popular cast... Montalban and Pier Angeli, Vittorio Gassman and Yvonne DeCarlo and sexy newcomer Rick Jason and Charisse.  I found the best thing about it was the Hermes Pan-choreographed rainy dance she does on a mountain.  It had nothing to do with anything we were watching (like the prior Broadway Melody scene) but it is one of the lady's most fascinating dances.  She was a lovely partner but I confess to preferring her solo numbers.  Pan, who worked closely with Astaire, was an imaginative and inventive choreographer and teacher.

I think many consider The Band Wagon (1953) to be Charisse's best film and Astaire's as well.  They had actually worked together once before in Ziegfeld Follies, in a single dance number, but didn't get to know one another.  While she was working with Pan on Sombrero, Astaire came on the sound stage, ostensibly to see Pan on something but really to check out Charisse.  

It wasn't to check out her dancing skills but to check her out.  He wanted to be reminded of how tall she was and whether they might look good as a couple.  (By the way, Charisse was 5'7.5" and both Astaire and Kelly were 5'9" and very concerned over not dancing with taller partners.    Anyway, Astaire said yes.

A sexy dance with Astaire

The Bandwagon has Charisse as a ballet dancer and Astaire as a jazz dancer.  He is putting on a Broadway show and becomes upset when his story gets changed to include ballet numbers with Charisse as a new addition to the cast.  It is actually a story that very much parallels Astaire's life and was, in fact, the last Broadway show he did with his sister Adele.

There are at least two classic dances.  The Girl Hunt Ballet at the end of the film and the elegant Dancing in the Dark.  Watching the pair of them dance in the latter made me realize she is every bit as elegant as he is and for my money is arguably his best partner.  (Oh damn, now I'm thinking of Eleanor Powell.)  

Over the years Astaire would go deaf and dumb when asked who his favorite partner was.  But he did apparently say once to an interviewer that Charisse was the best dancer he ever worked with.

She has said that Brigadoon (1954) was her favorite film that she made with Kelly while acknowledging that it was not successful.  It concerns a couple of American friends who wander into a Scottish village that arises out of the mist for one day every 100 years.  It was formerly a Broadway musical but when Kelly and Charisse were signed for the film, many songs were cut and it became more of a dancing movie.

Unfortunately it was not a happy set.  MGM refused to shoot on Scottish locations and filming at the studio gave it a cheesy, phony look.  Even audiences caught on to it.  Additionally Kelly was an unforgiving task master and he and Charisse got into it a few times.  And costar Van Johnson and director Vincente Minnelli had legendary scuffles.  Here's a case where I thought the naysayers were right.  It is a cornball musical that came about just as musicals were losing favor.

It's Always Fair Weather (1955) concerns three soldier buddies (Kelly, Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd) who meet up 10 years after leaving the service and find they have little in common.  While the story is just so-so, the dancing is a sight to behold.  Charisse is given a little more to do in the acting department and pulls off a sensational dance at a gym with wise-guy boxers called Baby, You Knock Me Out.  It only did so-so business.

She was reunited with Dailey in what she claimed was another of her favorite MGM musicals, Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956).  MGM producer Joe Pasternak had the film written especially for her.  The story of a Vegas rancher and ballerina was just plain fun without needing to worry about being one of the screen's great musicals.  What was fantastic is a 13-minute ballet of Frankie and Johnny with Charisse and John Brascia (Vera-Ellen's exquisite partner in White Christmas) and Liliane Montevecchi.  This film, too, didn't do a lot of business although it's on television all the time.

In 1957 she was to be paired with Astaire in Funny Face but she declined the part which went to Audrey Hepburn.  The same year she did join Astaire for Silk Stockings which helped put one last nail in the movie musical coffin.  It is a comical spy caper, a musical remake of Ninotchka with Charisse in the Garbo role.  Her big number, The Red Blues, is another Charisse sensation and one of her personal favorites.  The movie was such a bomb that both her and Astaire's movie dancing days were over.

She was loaned to Universal to make some seafaring poppycock with Rock Hudson, Twilight for the Gods, and then returned to MGM to make a hardcore drama,. Party Girl, opposite Robert Taylor.  Both were in 1958 and she was charmed by both of these handsome actors.  Party Girl ended her contract with MGM.  Times were a-changin' and the studio was divesting itself of nearly all of its contract stars.

Somewhere in the early 60s Cyd Charisse got quite beautiful.  Getting older wasn't doing her any harm.  She lightened and lengthened her hair, added some sex appeal and wore shimmering gowns.  She and Martin decided to take their dancing and singing on the road in the form of a new act.  They did it for years, frequently in Las Vegas, but also in supper clubs around the nation and in venues in Europe and also on television.

Charisse with Marilyn Monroe

Some may not remember that Charisse was in Marilyn Monroe's ill-fated, uncompleted, final film Something's Got to Give (1962).  It was a remake of My Favorite Wife, the story of a wife who has been declared dead after missing for seven years and returning on the day her husband remarries.  Charisse had known Monroe for some time and felt a kinship and she was upset when Monroe was fired from the film, shortly before her death.

How many times have we discussed careers of American actors who in their later years find work in Italy?  Well, here is a picture based on that very idea, Two Weeks in Another Town (1962).  Directed by Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas and Edward G. Robinson, I think it was better than people give it credit for.  Charisse had a glamorous role as Douglas's wife.  She was supposed to have been billed with the two guys above the title but Douglas apparently nixed the idea.  Nice guy.  It turned out to be her last decent film.

Charisse at 44 in The Silencers

A brief appearance in a Dean Martin Matt Helm movie The Silencers (1966) is memorable only for an incredibly sexy striptease number she does before the credits roll and when the dance is over, she is killed.  Occasionally when this turkey shows up on TV, I watch this opening number and turn it off.

While still doing live performances with Martin, the turn in her big screen career couldn't have pleased her and it wasn't much better for her on television.  Of course that included the regulation Love Boat, Murder She Wrote and Fantasy Island (several episodes, in fact, at the request of old friend Montalban).

Tony and Cyd

In 1976 she and Martin wrote a combined and very comfy autobiography called The Two of Us.  Good fun.  Informative.  Their marriage would last an incredible 60 years.  I don't think there was ever a whiff of scandal.  You don't find these stats too often in Hollywood stories. 

Not counting an occasional picture of the two of them at some social event, not much was heard about Charisse for years.  The lovely lady whose balletic grace charmed the public for years died in Los Angeles from a heart attack at age 86 in 2008.  Martin, by the way, would die four years later at age 98. 

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a guilty pleasure