GIRL HUNT

It just hadn’t occurred to me that Cyd Charisse would die. The death any time soon of Kirk Douglas (her co-star in Two Weeks in Another Town) or Mickey Rooney or Olivia de Havilland or Olivia’s unbeloved sister Joan Fontaine wouldn’t be a surprise, but then they are all from an earlier Hollywood generation. Even Doris Day and Shirley MacLaine, respectively three and thirteen years her junior, do not look like they’ll go on forever (though of course Shirley will come back). Charisse’s close contemporary Jane Russell is increasingly frail. Paul Newman and Tony Curtis are both being treated for cancer. And Elizabeth Taylor? Whoever guessed she would get to 76? Yet at 87 Cyd Charisse floated away on that endless bolt of chiffon that she wore for the clouds sequence of the ‘Broadway Melody’ ballet in Singin' in the Rain. It defies reason; more important, it defies romance.

Charisse seemed too ethereal, too much of a fantasy figure to be mortal. “She came at me in sections” drawls Fred Astaire’s private dick in the ‘Girl Hunt’ ballet in The Band Wagon. “She had more curves than a scenic railway”. Her legs made Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth look bowed and, even after childbirth, her wasp waist, that ideal of the 1950s, was only emulated by Gaye Gambol. Her face was flawless yet not, at the same time, sexless, as perfection in humans can so often be. Curiously, her chronic inability to deliver a line made her seem even more remote. She didn’t even try to act. Beside her in Band Wagon, dear Nanette Fabray looks like a wind-up toy, signalling wildly.

Cyd Charisse: an impossibly glamorous, romantic, exotic name. Yet it had such prosaic origins. She was born Tula Ellice Finklea. Only in America do you get such preposterous names and only in America can you hope to recover from such a start and go on to conquer Hollywood, as did Lucille Fay le Sueur and Spangler Arlington Brugh (respectively, Joan Crawford and Charisse’s Party Girl co-star Robert Taylor). ‘Sid’ was supposedly her kid brother’s attempt at ‘sis’, respelt to look feminine and foreign by MGM. Charisse was the surname of her first husband Nico. Like so many women – Susan Sarandon, Shirley Williams, Janet Street-Porter, Tessa Jowell, Antonia Fraser – she retained the name, even through subsequent marriages. After Nico, she married the mediocre crooner Tony Martin and they stayed together like few other Hollywood couples (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson). What did she see in him? When last sighted, he was a malign old toad.

She didn’t sing. She was said to be quite tone deaf. Mostly, a woman called India Adams dubbed her voice. In some of the melodramas in which MGM later cast her, notably Party Girl and Two Weeks in Another Town, she proved to be a rather more accomplished and convincing actress than had been thought. Professionals do get better, more adjusted. Fred Astaire’s first movie audition elicited the notorious judgment “Can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little”. Turned out he could do the first two to alpha level and the third beyond the stratosphere. And dancing up there with him was Cyd.

We watched again (for the umpteenth time) The Band Wagon. The ‘Dancing in the Dark’ number is perhaps the most rapturous ever performed on screen, right up there with – indeed, ahead of – Fred and Ginger in ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek’. The setting, a sound stage version of Central Park, helps, as do Mary Ann Nyberg’s elegant costumes and Vincente Minnelli’s wonderful direction of the camera, informed both by his design background and by his instinctive feel for choreography. And it’s one of those dances where Astaire ‘accompanies’ the woman, so that he directs you to her even while you can’t help but watch him and she rewards you amply for accepting the presentation of her. And it’s so sensual. Dance is more than anything a metaphor for making love and here it is as transforming and bewitching as it can be. Now she’s gone, it made me cry more than ever.

That’s not to say that Charisse was Astaire’s “best” partner, whatever that means (it used to be asked whenever a new Astaire picture was released). Ginger Rogers was of course his best-known and most regular partner and strong enough to match him often. For my money, the most perfect of Fred’s dances with a woman (rather than solo) occurs in that piece of fluff, The Broadway Melody of 1940. Eleanor Powell really was as fine a hoofer as Fred and she was a threat in every department (Charisse didn’t do tap, for instance). The big number in the movie, led by Astaire and Powell, is ‘Begin the Beguine’ but the one that does it for me is a little throwaway routine in rehearsal togs called ‘The Juke Box Dance’. With its improvised air, it encourages Powell and Astaire to raise each other’s game in delighted competition and the sheer pleasure they take in each other’s skills is certainly not acted.

Looked at severely, Cyd Charisse was not so much a great dancer as a great storyboard upon which an imaginative choreographer could sketch. I saw her at the Palladium in the early 1980s. She was 60-odd then but she came to give a show and give a show she did. She didn’t sing of course and, when you concentrated, you saw that she didn’t exactly dance either. Mostly, she was lifted by young chaps in leotards and, hoisted up and smiling prettily, she posed and flashed those extraordinary gams and we all thought we’d seen a fine show from a great star. Actually, of course, she doesn’t do very much more than that in the ballet sequence in Band Wagon, whereupon Astaire and Oscar Levant tell us that she’s an incredible dancer and we buy it.

So she really was an illusion. A sort of imaginary woman. No more real than Jessica in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? She hasn’t really gone because she was never really there yet she will exist on film as long as film exists because she is one of the indelible images of movie-making: sitting arch-backed in that shimmering green shift with Gene Kelly’s straw boater dangling from the elongated point of her right shoe at the end of a hundred yards of sheerest-nyloned leg. Or sublimely dancing with Fred in the park in the dark.