GENE KELLY’S lifelong obsession was to make dancing seem masculine, athletic, sporty. In 1958, he directed a documentary for NBC called Dancing is a Man’s Game where he recruited sports legends like Sugar Ray Robinson and Mickey Mantle in order to illustrate how the conventionally masculine athleticism of a boxer or baseball player mirrored the physicality of dance. Kelly’s signature stance was very much like a baseball player’s: knees bent and feet wide apart, not because he wants to spring up into the air to catch a ball but because he likes to stay low to the ground. All of his life, Kelly repeated that he had wanted to be a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, but his mother had pushed him into dancing school at the age of eight and he eventually stuck to dance as a career. He got picked on as a kid because the boys his age thought that dancing was for sissies. Kelly was hellbent to prove them wrong.
Many Kelly fans today are women and gay men who uninhibitedly ogle his body online. There is even a tumblr devoted exclusively to the worship of his ass. An outrageous Kelly-ogling opportunity is embedded in the seventeen-minute ballet that ends An American in Paris in which he appears dressed as the figure in Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting “Chocolat Dancing In Bar Darchille.” Sporting a white kind of body stocking, Kelly takes the ass-out Irish dancing of Cohan and James Cagney into the realm of the erotic sublime, punctuating his butt shaking with springing, stiff-legged arousal at the sight of Caron in a blond wig:
Kelly got away with displays like that without ever seeming foolishly narcissistic because his screen persona stayed anchored to his breakout Broadway role, Pal Joey, the tough-heel hero who might just be a pure heel, a resourceful tool who uses what he has to get what he wants. He had the shifty expression of a sharpie or con man, and a scar on his left cheek that lent an air of menace to his looks.
In his book Original Story, queen-of-mean screenwriter Arthur Laurents wrote, “Gene made faggot jokes constantly…he flirted with men as well as with women…due to his overblown narcissism.” Kelly is least tolerable on screen in his many numbers with male co-stars like Frank Sinatra, Phil Silvers and Georges Guétary where he contemptuously assumes the female role with them, putting a tablecloth on his head and simpering it up, as if to say, “What could be more disgusting or absurd than a man trying to be a woman?” He returned to this routine again and again, so obviously it was important to him, one of his more gruesome methods of showing that he was all man even though he was a dancer.
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