Dan Dailey

It's fair to say that his star didn't shine bright enough or long enough.  Of course, for any dancer, there is a shelf life.  There comes a time, too early I suspect, that the body simply does not cooperate as it used to.   But even when the body was young and supple... and we touched on this in pieces on Gene Nelson and Donald O'Connor-- if one's last name was not Astaire or Kelly, there was a need to have something else to fall back on.

Dan Dailey had something else, too.  He was a fine dramatic actor and made a number of non-musicals.  However, despite the fact that his fine work in drama came with an Oscar nomination and other recognition, it still didn't ignite his career in any noticeable way.  

In the mid-50s, shortly after making, arguably, his most famous film, the salacious Confidential Magazine wrote a piece on him.  That was never a good thing.  By the late 50s another rumor surfaced and any ideas he may have had about super stardom seemed to vanish.  That said, he still worked until a year before his death, another 20 years away.

Dan Dailey Jr. was born in New York City in 1915.  Dad ran a hotel for show people and Mom was a singer.  There was a brother and two sisters (one of whom, Irene, became an actress).  At one time or another the entire Dailey tribe was in show business.  At around four years of age, he appeared in a minstrel show and a short while later appeared in vaudeville.  He made his Broadway debut in Babes in Arms in 1937.  During his Broadway song-and-dance days, he often found himself competing for jobs with Gene Kelly.

At 6'3" with his deep voice, glorious smile and a talent for acting, singing, dancing and comedy, it's not surprising that he was quickly noticed and snatched up by the movies.  An MGM talent scout brought him to the attention of L. B. Mayer who also saw promise.

Soon he was appearing with Joan Crawford and a young Rita Hayworth in Susan and God and playing a Nazi in The Mortal Storm, both 1940.  He had marginally larger parts in some of the studio's big musicals, Ziegfeld Girl and Lady Be Good, both 1941, and Panama Hattie (1942).  Also in 1942 he was loaned to Universal to appear with the Andrews Sisters, Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan in Give Out, Sisters.  The enormously popular singing sisters had rare starring roles and despite debuting their famous Pennsylvania Polka, the film was not successful.  Part of Dailey's time at MGM was interrupted by the military.

Then came 20th Century Fox who thought MGM apparently didn't know what they had in the lanky actor and was determined to show him at his musical-comedy best.  I loved his dancing.  There was something different about it which, perhaps, was due to his height.  He was light on his feet, had a great reach as he moved about the stage and usually included some comedy.  He performed wonderful solo numbers, usually including a song, but I must say I thought he was a wonderful partner to some lovely ladies.

Although at Fox he made such crowd-pleasing romantic comedies as You're My Everything, You Were Meant for Me, A Ticket to Tomahawk and The Girl Next Door with such Fox leading ladies as Jeanne Crain, June Haver and Anne Baxter.  It's his four films with Betty Grable that really got Dailey's career rocking.

They adored one another.  He could count his show business friends on one hand but Grable was a good friend until the day she died.  By the time she first worked with Dailey, she was queen of the Fox lot although in short time her star wattage would dim.  The films Dailey made with her were enormously popular... the public demanded they make another and another.

It began with Mother Wore Tights (1947) where they're a vaudeville song-and-dance team who tries to manage everyday life, like marriage and eventually two daughters, with life upon the wicked stage.  Of course there are musical numbers galore, some of them quite good.  It is the film that provided Dailey's big break and Grable considered it her favorite of all her movies.

Grable & Dailey... it was special

When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948) had them as vaudeville performers trying to cope with marriage and his fame eclipsing hers.  Sounds vaguely familiar.  He plays an alcoholic and earned his only Oscar nomination for his efforts.  He was on a high.

My Blue Heaven (1950) has Dailey and Grable as stars of early television who are having problems conceiving a child.  The comedy was a little more biting than usual and the musical numbers fewer and the film didn't do so well despite a supporting cast that included Mitzi Gaynor, David Wayne and Jane Wyatt.

Shooting had to be halted at one point when Grable needed to nurse a black eye.  Rumor had it that bandleader-husband Harry James entered her dressing room without knocking and caught the two stars in flagrante delicto.  He and Dailey got into a fist fight and Grable got knocked around.  

The fourth and final Dailey-Grable movie, Call Me Mister (1951), was the least successful.  It has eight songs no one has heard of which makes its success iffy.  Dailey plays a GI in postwar Japan who tries to re-woo his ex-wife when she comes to entertain the troops.  Some of the soldiers are Danny Thomas, Dale Robertson, Richard Boone (always loved his musicals, didn't you?) and in his film debut, Jeffrey Hunter (a perfectly valid reason for catching the flick).

It's interesting to note that although Fox was keen on developing Dailey and showcasing him as the studio's top male dancer, in the first three movies with Grable, he was not the first or even second choices for those parts.  Cagney and Astaire either together or singly were sought for all three and turned it down.  That is likely because they didn't want to support Grable at her own studio.  Each wanted singing and dancing costars who supported them.  Dailey had no such concerns.

Dailey first worked for John Ford in 1950 in When Willie Comes Marching Home.  Then came What Price Glory (1952) and finally The Wings of Eagles (1957).  None were highly-regarded, especially as Ford films.  It has always interested me that Ford used Dailey three times in his films.  Why Dailey?  How did he, the song-and-dance man, come under Ford's radar?  Ford is famous for his family of actors (and crew), people he uses over and over again.  None of them are in the first two films.  Both, by the way, are comedies, hardly Ford's métier.

I've read several times that crusty, old macho Ford occasional had liaisons with male actors on his film sets.  He apparently hired some in the anticipation that an occasional tryst would materialize.  Was that the situation with Dailey?  Did it happen?  Could it have happened?  Hollywood always had such a big closet. 

Paid off by Susan Hayward

In 1951 Dailey made a drama, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, starring Susan Hayward as a dress designer who will step over anyone to get to the top of the heap.  Dailey excels as the man in her life who gets treated as shabbily as the others.  Still, it's Hayward's film all the way.

After filming ended, Dailey came apart.  Mentally he was not in a good place and apparently hadn't been for some time.  But it was now that the top of his head exploded and he checked into the Menninger Clinic for a four-month stay.  His usual manner was to appear happy-go-lucky but Grable, for one, knew he was a cauldron of seething emotions and it was serious.  

His second marriage was ending and he was moving away from his beloved three-year old son.  Daily had long been dealing with depression and his consumption of alcohol certainly made it worse.  People spoke of his personal problems when they heard he was checking into a psychiatric clinic.  The main one dealt with his transvestitism.  He had long loved dressing up in women's clothes.  For some time he had kept it private but he had been doing some in public and he was not handling the resultant whispers very well.

Whether his predilection included forays into gay life may be conjecture but I am reminded of the Ford issues, the fact that Daily was a dancer and the fact that I found his dancing a touch effeminate... more than I usually did with other male dancers.   There was also the general secretiveness of the Menninger stay.   Maybe he had a hard time dealing with gayness (at whatever level he involved himself) and  marriage and fame.  

His visibility increased when Fox had him top-billed in two baseball flicks.  It seemed that the only thing America liked more than playing or watching its favorite pastime was seeing a movie about it.  Dailey had his fun tap dancing for the ladies and these two were for the husbands.

First came a biopic on Dizzy Dean, The Pride of St. Louis (1952).  Famous enough to get his own movie, he was a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs in the 1930s and 40s.  Dailey showed his dramatic mettle and the movie was wildly popular.  A favorite pastime for me was watching Joanne Dru and she plays Mrs. Dean.

Certainly not as popular nor as well made as the former, nonetheless, a sentimental, little comedy, The Kid from Left Field (1953), had some good business, too.  It does have a kid (Billy Chapin, who would, two years later, be terrorized by Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter), at the heart of the story.  Dailey is his father, a peanut vendor at a baseball field, and both try to wangle their way into jobs with a major league club.  Anne Bancroft, Lloyd Bridges, Richard Egan and Fess Parker are also featured.

There's No Business Like Show Business (1954) was surely Dailey's most popular musical film.  He and Ethel Merman are vaudevillian parents to Donald O'Connor, Mitzi Gaynor and Johnnie Ray.  It is an Irving Berlin tunefest chronicled in these pages earlier.  As production ended, Dailey married O'Connor's ex-wife which caused some gossip.  There were also rumors that Dailey and Ray were playing around.

Kidd, Kelly & Dailey and those trashcan lids

Dailey was back at MGM for It's Always Fair Weather (1955) where he, Gene Kelly and Michael Kidd play three soldier buddies who vow to meet 10 years after discharge and see how things are at that time.  It doesn't go so well.  The dancing was exciting when performed by the trio but the film was never popular, not because it wasn't good enough but because musicals were beginning to lose their popularity.  

Composer André Previn said in his autobiography that Dailey turned up drunk and decked out in female attire for a press screening of Fair Weather in 1954.  Inside magazine wrote that after every binge he shows up around the film colony all gussied up from head to toe in outlandish female attire.

Sticking around MGM, Dailey did Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) with Cyd Charisse, who was also with him in Fair Weather.  It was a fun but average musical about a gambling rancher who, when he holds hands with a ballerina, wins a great deal of money at the tables and one-arm bandits. 

Agnes Moorehead, his mother in Vegas

 

Dailey, Charisse and company give rousing performances on a farm set singing and dancing to The Gal with the Yeller Shoes.  But the best number, a 13-minute ballet, Frankie and Johnny, didn't feature Dailey but rather White Christmas dancer John Brascia.

Returning to his home turf, Dailey made The Best Things in Life Are Free (1956) which would prove to be his final musical.  He, Gordon MacRae and Ernest Borgnine play real-life songwriters De Sylva, Henderson and Brown, a 1920s team who had great successes until jealous rivalry tore the group apart.

Of course the songs written by the trio are sprinkled throughout the story and Sheree North is along to provide the film's best moments, dancing to Black Bottom with Jacques d'Amboise.  You haven't lived until you've heard Borgnine sing.

L-R... Borgnine, MacRae, North, Dailey

John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus (1957) had been sitting around Fox for sometime with a number of big stars attached to it.  By the time the cameras rolled Dailey was costarring with studio up-and-comers Joan Collins and Jayne Mansfield in a story of a hooker, an alcoholic wife and a traveling salesman who engage in a life-changing bus trip.  While a downer, it had its moments of charm but never seemed to find its audience.

Also in 1957 Confidential ran The Night Dan Dailey Was Dolly Dawn in which they claimed he had danced in a pink tulle dress at a Manhattan gay bar.  Hollywood, always bursting at the seams with gays and no doubt more than a fair share of crossdressers, nonetheless, took a dim view of Dailey's antics.  With little work, his drinking increased.

In 1959 he did a television series, The Four Just Men, which lasted a season.  He also appeared as a guest star on some shows.  Dailey never again made a successful movie.  The few that he did make were surely intended to be better and some were little D flicks where he collected a smaller-than-usual paycheck.  Television became his mainstay and in 1969 included another one-season series, The Governor and J.J., which garnered him a Golden Globe award.

In the late 60s he also returned to Broadway for a role in Plaza Suite.  He lectured on dance on the college circuit and was pleased with the attention he received.

He had been a life-long lover of horses and rode almost his entire life.  He enjoyed training them for jumping competitions and won 75 ribbons at horse shows.

He was divorced by his fourth wife in 1972.  In 1973 he took Grable's death at 56 very hard.  Alice Faye claimed that he was always in love with her.  Following his son's suicide two years later, Dailey turned into an embittered alcoholic.  In 1976 he broke a hip while performing onstage in The Odd Couple.

The 1970s were very difficult for him and perhaps his death in 1978 from anemia was a blessing.  He died in Los Angeles at age 62.

I always enjoyed his dancing and singing.  I saw all of his fifties' films and despite his personal problems, he always seemed to be having a good time.  He considered himself first and foremost a dancer.  

Interestingly Dailey was not a choreographer, per se.  He likely had plenty of input but he didn't actually choreograph dance numbers from any of his films.  Neither apparently did O'Connor.  Nelson did a lot of his own choreography at Warners.  Kelly almost always choreographed his work as did Astaire, although he, the latter, always worked alongside Hermes Pan.  Perhaps Dailey would have been more successful and had more clout had he been more involved and more in charge.

At the same time, none of the other four guys did as much dramatic work as Dailey and he was as good at it as he was with comedy.

Thanks for the fun times, DD.

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A glittering cast