This Is the Girl
Notes on Charles Vidor's reflexive wartime musical Cover Girl, starring Rita Hayworth.
To the memory of David Lynch
All we’re saying is what you know, That glamour is a woman's show.
– “The Show Must Go On,” by Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern, performed by Rusty Parker (Rita Hayworth) and chorus
The Gem Of the Ocean
It begins before it begins, with the Columbia Pictures lady holding her torch on high. Not the Statue of Liberty, but Columbia herself, perhaps the oldest personification of the United States, predating Uncle Sam and indeed the official birth of the nation as such. When Cover Girl was released in 1944, a more alluringly current national icon was the film’s star Rita Hayworth—then neck-and-neck with Betty Grable for the title of America’s number one pin-up girl, smiling out from lockers and barrack walls from Salerno to Manila, both a necessary distraction from war and an incentive to keep up the fight. How you might arrive at such a position, and what might become of you afterwards, are among the things the film undertakes to be about.
Club Mid
Overseen by the Hungarian-Jewish director Charles Vidor (born Károly Vidor), Cover Girl was a deadly serious enterprise from all angles, including the financial one: Columbia was among the smaller Hollywood studios, Hayworth easily their biggest star. Yet in spite of Technicolor the opening musical number is studiously average, performed on a cramped nightclub stage by a cluster of weary showgirls all sporting the identical shade of cherry lipstick—including Hayworth’s character Rusty, at the centre of the bouquet but not singled out in other respects. As this indicates, Hollywood musicals didn’t need Bob Fosse to become Brechtian; nor for that matter did they need Brecht. Nor did they need theorists to instruct them on the gendered nature of spectacle. The didactic lyrics spell out that the show which must go on is the one dating back to Cleopatra if not to Eve—which is to say that every woman since then has been in showbusiness, whatever her occupation officially.
The War At Home
Cover Girl is a traditional backstage musical, a sub-genre where singing and dancing is rationally justified: we’re not to imagine that Rusty and the others came up with music and lyrics on the spur of the moment. Their paymaster and drill sergeant is the small-time impresario Danny Maguire (Gene Kelly), who was shot up in Libya and sent home to Brooklyn, where he runs a small club with his bespectacled sidekick Genius (Phil Silvers), who does patter songs in between the high-kicking routines (“the act that follows the act,” as he says). It’s not the classiest of joints, as the opening scene indicates, and as Danny knows as well as anybody. Still, he has his principles, which include hiring dancers based on talent rather than just looks: he’s an ally, as we might say nowadays, or that’s how he’d like to think of himself. His girls aren’t always grateful, but he shrugs off their complaints: “The bigger the gripe, the better the army.”
A Fresh Face
Rusty is Danny’s girl personally as well as professionally, but she’s not above dreaming of a different life than any he can offer her, even without entirely knowing what she has in mind. So when word gets out that Vanity magazine wants an unknown for the cover of its anniversary issue, she’s willing to do whatever it takes to secure the spot, including flying into simulated paroxysms when she’s falsely advised that the publisher John Coudair (Otto Kruger) and his right-hand-woman Cornelia Jackson (Eve Arden) are after an “animated” sort. In fact Coudair like Rusty isn’t sure what he’s after, though he similarly expects to recognise it on sight. “What does a young girl think about when she’s going down the aisle to be married?” he rhetorically demands of Cornelia and the real-life 1940s supermodel Jinx Falkenburg, who’s stopped by for a cameo as herself. “That’s the look I want.” The two women exchange glances, Falkenburg matching Arden for knowingness as few co-stars could.
Warning: Genius At Work
Genius has no other name, but the one he’s given is a riddle. If it’s dazzling intellect we seek, we’d be better-advised to look to his successor, Donald O’Connor’s Cosmo in Singin’ in the Rain—who manipulates those around him like Puck, whose private life it would be impertinent to wonder about, and who is never wrong. Genius by contrast is fully capable of bonehead plays, like tearing up the message from Vanity that offers Rusty a shortcut to stardom, rather than trusting her to make her own choice. Maybe he’s best understood as a genius loci, the spirit of Danny’s club incarnate—or maybe he incarnates Danny’s own creativity, bound up as it is with shame at having been exiled to the unmanly realm of art. Or maybe the name just comes from his glasses, which hint in turn at unfitness for service, even though Silvers famously wore them in a military role later on. Silvers spent a decade playing “best friend” characters like this, who never got the girl; he later referred to this period as “my years with Blinky”.
My Very Good Friend the Milkman
Kelly in 1944 was not yet a full-blown movie star, and neither he nor his teenage protegé Stanley Donen are among Cover Girl’s credited choreographers. Still, “Make Way For Tomorrow” is the template for later Kelly-Donen paeans to camaraderie such as “Good Mornin’” in Singin’ In The Rain: Danny, Rusty and Genius leap off their stools at their local bar and stride as one down the darkened street, mimicking a Salvation Army band with Genius banging trash-can lids together like cymbals. This number too is rationally justified, more or less: the three are song-and-dance pros, and Joe the bartender sees them going through the same well-rehearsed routine every week. But wait, what’s the deal with the happy milkman who comes down the stoop and starts tapping right along with them? Taken literally he’s evidence for another of Danny’s pet theories, about what can be accomplished through commitment to the group—a philosophy Kelly seems to have shared, though this reportedly didn’t stop him coming to blows with Vidor during the film’s making.
Too Many Cooks
Whether we call it life imitating art or vice versa, Cover Girl’s plot literally centres on a struggle between rival creative teams; if we take Danny and Genius to represent Kelly and Donen respectively, it’s not a huge leap to suppose that Coudair and Cornelia are Vidor and his screenwriter Virginia Van Upp, who would jointly reunite with Hayworth on the 1946 noir classic Gilda. As for Rusty, she’s the prize everyone is warring over, her agency seemingly limited to deciding which Svengali to be molded by. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same was true of Hayworth herself, or not in all respects. Still, of the real-life players it was Vidor who best knew the score, as we see when Coudair and his entourage go to congratulate the newly-celebrated Rusty backstage: the throngs of surplus extras weaving through the scene make their own comment, especially the ones in the tall white hats.
When It Starts Turning Dark
It’s past closing time at the club; Danny finishes changing a lightbulb, then descends from his step-ladder and starts stacking the chairs, while Genius plays a yearning operetta melody on the rehearsal piano with his back to the camera. This is “Long Ago and Far Away,” the film’s tenderest number—and again it’s surely Vidor who deserves primary credit for the mise-en-scène (along with his cinematographer Rudolph Maté). It’s a love duet, but the visual counter-theme is how Danny and Rusty have moved apart: first they’re isolated in alternating shots, then she’s off in the distance framed by a doorway, much as she was framed on the Vanity cover that made her the talk of the town (and lifted Danny’s profile too, even if he wishes it hadn’t). But finally their eyes meet, and soon Danny is dancing with her as if the narrow grey space were Cinderella’s ballroom, holding her close to stop her slipping from his grasp. The camera pulls back, arriving at a high angle that includes the bottle-green light fitting Danny was tinkering with originally, glowing like a fragile sun against the dimness.
The Same Dame
Danny has his controlling side, sure. But if there’s any question about which character in Cover Girl most resembles a movie director, the answer is provided by the secondary plot, which curiously anticipates Vertigo. While Rusty is a hit with the public on her own merits, it emerges she caught Coudair’s eye originally as a dead ringer for her late grandmother Maribelle Hicks, a music-hall queen played by Hayworth in flashback. In Coudair’s Gilded Age youth, Maribelle won his heart then broke it, mocking him and his snobby family in her act and finally ditching him for a humbler rival (another piano player, seen only briefly). A lifetime on, he seizes his opportunity to restage this traumatic interlude, with Rusty as his lost love and the obliging Broadway producer Noel Wheaton (Lee Bowman) as her wealthy suitor. It’s not wholly clear what he hopes to gain by playing puppetmaster, but hopefully the exercise brings him some form of closure.
The Big Room
While Wheaton falls for Rusty on schedule, his method of courtship might surprise his friend: he takes her to his deserted Broadway theatre very late at night, around the hour the two heroines of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive head for the mystical Club Silencio (one of them an amnesiac who previously glimpsed a poster for Gilda and named herself “Rita”). The scale inside is immense, especially compared to Danny’s snug little place in Brooklyn; swathes of magic colour shine out from the shadows, sunset red and silvery blue. “Did you ever dance on a stage as big as this one?” Wheaton asks. “It’s more like flying than dancing. The freedom of it.” Closing her eyes as instructed, Rusty spins out all on her own across the vast empty stage, slowing as she discards her grey fur stole, then lifting up her skirts and twirling so they billow ecstatically. The tune she’s humming is “Make Way For Tomorrow,” though we might not recognise it right off the bat: it doesn’t sound the way it did when she and Danny and Genius were all goofing around together.
Out of the Past
After that, nothing greatly matters. Not that Rusty becomes a Broadway smash, an inspiration for the troops, and a sloppy drunk; not that Kelly goes all-out to steal the movie with a noir dream ballet where he’s partnered by his own reflection; not even that we’re subjected to an interminable musical tribute to the American magazine industry, with “cover girls” of all varieties mobilised to show that every woman can be placed in one box or another. Or that the finale lets us settle for the story’s simplest interpretation, that Danny had it right all along and there’s no place like home. Wearying of her cold fame, Rusty leaves Wheaton at the altar with Coudair’s blessing, while back at Joe’s bar Danny sits alone singing “Long Ago and Far Away” to himself, till a familiar voice joins in. Looking up, he sees his girl miraculously returned as if from the underworld; she pauses for a moment in the doorway, then rushes forward like a picture brought to life, a flesh-and-blood woman falling into his arms.
We’ll Meet Again
“The dream was not denied me…” the lyrics run. But is this truly Rusty’s dream as well as Danny’s? Or does she just have nowhere else to go? There’s hardly time to consider, before Genius at the piano strikes up “Make Way For Tomorrow” once more, sealing the deal while breaking the spell. Joining hands, the three launch into their old routine anew—dancing in a ring in front of the bar, then moving out the door and down the street along the same route as always, marching into the dark like veterans of a war still not over.