Glenn Ford: A Life

8. "Rock Around the Clock"

8 147 “Rock Around the Clock” T he Violent Men wrapped up in May, and after my father attended to the matter of finishing The Americano for Jack Stillman and RKO, he was tempted by an offer from the most prestigious and luxurious of all the dream factories. Dore Schary, MGM production head, had asked my father many times to join the studio, but there was always a conflict or other commitments. Now, with just a one-film-per-year responsibility to Columbia, Dad felt it was time to give MGM a try. Dad had come to Dore’s rescue when he filled in for Russell Nype on Young Man with Ideas four years earlier—Dore appreciated that. Dad agreed to do one film at MGM before making any long-term commitment so that he and the studio could get a sense of each other before they planned for the future. When my father arrived at MGM in the fall of 1954, it was a rather different place from the one my mother had known when she began working there nearly twenty years before. The times had changed, and with them the appetite of moviegoers. Box-office receipts were down; television was blamed for keeping audiences at home with its less grand but free entertainment . The great names that had once been synonymous with MGM had faded or been allowed to slip away. The group portrait taken at the studio’s Silver Jubilee (its twenty-fifth anniversary) in 1949 had featured an array of fifty-eight famous faces under contract, but now, six years later, only four of those faces remained. Not only the stars and featured players but many of the longtime personnel behind the scenes had been trimmed from the payroll. Even the once mighty, invulnerable mogul himself, Louis B. Mayer, had been made redundant, replaced by Schary. Schary was a different sort of showman from Mayer, with different ideas and ambitions. The studio would continue to make pure entertainment such as The Tender Trap, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Singin’ in the Rain, but Dore’s real interest was in more serious fare, dramatic and realistic filmmaking and, as often as possible, a movie that espoused a message or a cause. Schary would readily give the green light to mature and hard-hitting projects that old Louis B. Mayer would never have dreamed of authorizing. Interrupted Melody was the first project that Schary offered to Dad, a biographical subject with music, the life of opera star Marjorie Lawrence, an Australian-born soprano who brought theatrical flair and innovation to her productions around the world. Lawrence had contracted polio at the height of her fame, been nearly destroyed by depression, and then in her wheelchair returned to the spotlight in triumph. The film had originally been prepared for Greer Garson, but that grande dame of the studio was now too old for the part, and her contract with Metro had ended. The role had been bequeathed to Eleanor Parker, a leading actress since the mid1940s who had increased her stock with dramatic, Oscar-nominated work in Caged and Detective Story while showing her flair and sex appeal in recent lighter fare like Scaramouche. It was Parker who asked the studio to pursue Glenn Ford for the role of Lawrence’s caring doctor husband. Indeed, Parker was insistent and even willing, if necssary, to sacrifice her top billing. While the film was clearly focused primarily on Marjorie Lawrence and not her husband, Glenn liked the subject. It was something different for him, a chance to do a plush Technicolor musical, introducing himself to a fresh sector of the moviegoing public. He had worked before with the assigned director, Curtis Bernhardt, and producer Jack Cummings, now a family friend, had produced Eleanor Powell musicals years before and was highly esteemed by her. Filming got under way on September 15, 1954, on the Culver City lot, with some location work in Santa Monica and El Segundo (doubling for the Florida coast). “I had it easy,” my father remembered, “compared to Eleanor Parker. She had to do all those opera arias, in different languages, Puccini, Bizet, Wagner. For logistical reasons they had to shoot all of those 148 149 scenes back to back, so she really had an enormous amount of rehearsal and memorization.” Director Bernhardt revealed that he was in over his head, Parker recalled...