Page 108 – LIFE

Gene Kelly: An American Song and Dance Legend Takes Paris

February 17, 2026July 15, 2014 by

Talented song and dance men have hoofed it across the silver screen almost since movies were born, but of those who earned fame during the Golden Age of Hollywood, only three stand out as genuine legends: Fred Astaire, James Cagney and Gene Kelly.

Astaire, of course, is the paragon of onscreen elegance; Cagney, meanwhile, perfected a style of quintessentially American acting, singing and dancing so winningly explosive that it’s been celebrated and lovingly parodied ever since.

And then there’s Gene Kelly. In movies like On the Town (with good friend Frank Sinatra), An American in Paris and, of course, 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain for most movie fans, the greatest Hollywood musical of all time Eugene Curran Kelly created an utterly inimitable onscreen persona: optimistic, playful, knowing and yet, deep down, hopelessly romantic. That he could dance, it seemed, from morning til night without breaking a sweat only added to his visceral charm. (There’s an old saying to the effect that the women who swarmed to movie musicals in the middle part of the 20th century dreamed of dancing the night away with Fred Astaire and of going home with Gene Kelly.)

Here, LIFE.com offers rare photographs by Loomis Dean of the protean dancer, singer, actor, producer, director and choreographer in France in 1960, as he enjoys a prestigious off-screen career highlight: creating a ballet for the storied Paris Opera.

As LIFE noted in August 1960, in an article about Kelly’s Parisian triumph:

The figure on the austere marble stairs of the Paris Opera [see first image in this gallery], looking like a sporting type who got in by mistake, is the newest addition to its ballet roster: Gene Kelly. Normally the staircase swarms with France’s most resplendent music-goers, and on gala openings it is lined with red-coated guardsmen.

But at times this summer the scene looked right out of his American in Paris as Kelly rushed to and from the stage at rehearsals of his 45-minute jazz ballet, Pas de Dieux (Dance of the Gods). Idolized in France for his movie dancing, Kelly was signed by the Opera’s own ballet company to enliven its shopworn repertoire with this work set to Gershwin music. He does not perform himself, but his radical dance ideas drew 23 curtain calls from a fancy premiere audience of ballet regulars. Cheered one of France’s top critics: “Kelly succeeded in blowing away a half century of dust from the Paris Opera.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Gene Kelly on the steps of the grand staircase of the Paris Opera, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly rehearsed with ballerina Claude Bessy, Paris, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly rehearsed with ballerina Claude Bessy and other dancers, Paris, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly rehearsed with dancers at the Paris Opera, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly in rehearsal with dancers at the Paris Opera, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly in rehearsal at the Paris Opera, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly spoke with ballerina Claude Bessy during rehearsal at the Paris Opera, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly and ballerina Claude Bessy took a curtain call (one of 23 that night) at the premiere of his ballet for the Paris Opera, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly dined in Paris at the time of his triumph at the Paris Opera, 1960. At his left, her chin on her hands, was prima ballerina Claude Bessy.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly enjoyed himself at a party following the premiere of his ballet at the Paris Opera, 1960.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Haile Selassie in Jamaica: Color Photos From a Rastafari Milestone

November 2, 2020July 9, 2014 by

In terms of spiritual significance, few dates compete with April 21, 1966, in the hearts of Rastafari. Celebrated by the faithful the world over as Grounation Day, it marks the visit to Jamaica by the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, a figure worshipped as a deity by Rastafari everywhere. (Selassie was born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael on July 23, 1892, in the Ethiopian village of Ejersa Goro; “Ras” is a noble honorific thus, Ras Tafari.)

Here, on Selassie’s birthday, LIFE presents photos from his historic 1966 trip to the Caribbean. The images capture something of the fervor and delight, as well as the barely restrained chaos, among thousands of believers upon seeing the man they considered a messiah and whom countless others still view as a power-hungry fraud.

Like photographer Lynn Pelham’s pictures, the story of Selassie’s visit never ran in the American edition of LIFE. But informal observations made by LIFE staffers who were there provide some fascinating insights into how the proceedings were viewed hint: negatively by at least some in the national press.

In notes that accompanied Pelham’s rolls of Ektachrome film to LIFE’s offices in New York just days after Selassie’s visit, for example, an editor for the magazine wrote privately to his colleagues that “the Rastafarians went wild on Selassie’s arrival. They broke police lines and swarmed around the emperor’s DC-6 [plane]. They kept touching his plane, yelling ‘God is here,’ and knocking down photographer Pelham, who got smacked. The Rastafarians fouled up the visit, as far as most Jamaicans were concerned. But Selassie seemed to love the attention these strange, wild-eyed, lawless and feared Jamaicans gave him.”

The same editor noted a few days later, when Selassie visited the Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Port-au-Prince, that “Papa Doc looked pretty much as evil as he did in 1963 when I last saw him.”

Haile Selassie died in Aug. 1975, almost a year after he was deposed in a military coup. There is no consensus, among historians or among Rastasfari, on whether he died of medical complications while under house arrest in Addis Ababa, or was assassinated.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Haile Selassie 1966

Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Haile Selassie in Jamaica, 1966

Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Haile Selassie in Jamaica

Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Haile Selassie in Caribbean

Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Haile Selassie in Caribbean, 1966

Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Haile Selassie in Jamaica

Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Haile Selassie in Caribbean, 1966

Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

I Was in LIFE: Ann-Margret Remembers

February 25, 2020July 8, 2014 by

Fifty-odd years ago, a young singer/dancer on the verge of breaking into the movies visited LIFE magazine’s Los Angeles bureau and for once, the news hounds who worked there were speechless.

“Everybody was working on typewriters back then, so it was very noisy,” remembers editor Richard Stolley, who was the L.A. bureau chief at the time. “I’m sitting in my office and suddenly it got quiet. All the typewriters stopped. I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?’ So I got up and I walked to the door. And what was happening? Ann-Margret was walking through the newsroom.”

Years later Stolley and Ann-Margret reminisced about that time. “That,” Stolley says of the picture at left, “is what you were wearing when you came in to the bureau.”

“It was a light blue, lambswool sweater,” Ann-Margret recalls, laughing. “That’s the only outfit I had at the time. The only one! Oh, dear.”

In the decades after that first encounter, Stolley served as the top editor of both LIFE and PEOPLE magazines, and that fresh-faced 19-year-old starlet did pretty well, too: Ann-Margret, born Ann-Margret Olsson in Stockholm, became one of Hollywood’s most vivacious stars, her energy and talent lighting up movies as varied as Bye Bye Birdie, Viva Las Vegas and Tommy. Through the years, Stolley and Ann-Margret remained friends.

In 2012 the two discussed these photos made by Grey Villet (“Oh, I loved him,” Ann-Margret says of the late LIFE photographer) for the 1961 LIFE article that introduced Ann-Margret as a hot Hollywood prospect while she auditioned for a role in the film, State Fair. Many of the photos in this gallery were not originally published in LIFE.

A quick excerpt from Stolley and Ann-Margret’s chat in 2012:

STOLLEY: How important was the LIFE story to your career?

ANN-MARGRET: It was incredibly important. I had not done anything. Nobody knew me. I was amazed and shocked. What can I say? My parents were just beaming.

STOLLEY: The opening page on that story had a picture of you pointing, and the headline was “Who, Me? $10,000 a Week!” That was what we predicted would be your salary if you got the role in State Fair. How did you feel about $10,000 a week?

ANN-MARGRET: I had never heard of such money! That’s just sci-fi.

STOLLEY: How old were you when you came over to the States from Sweden?

ANN-MARGRET: Six years old. And it was my mother and I, because daddy had come to America [earlier] looking for work. That was during the war, and he thought it was much too dangerous for mother and I to cross the ocean. So five years later, my mother and I got on a huge ship and came to America. And neither one of us, of course, spoke English.

STOLLEY: There’s an unpublished picture here [the final image in this gallery] which is kind of fascinating. It’s you walking down the dusty back-lot street with a big, long shadow in front of you. The reason I like it is because it’s kind of a precursor, a forecast of the long shadow you were going to cast over Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

ANN-MARGRET: I had no idea at the time. Of anything.

STOLLEY: Nor did Grey, but he took a very prescient photograph. When I say something like that, what’s your reaction looking at this picture?

ANN-MARGRET: I’d never been to Los Angeles. Never. I wanted to be a …. [Trails off and chokes up] I can’t, I’m starting to cry!

STOLLEY: Don’t do that I’m sorry.

ANN-MARGRET: When you guys [at LIFE.com] sent me all these photographs, what a rush. It all came back to me. It’s just . . . I’m so blessed.

Ann-Margret, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with costume designer Don Feld before a screen test, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret dining with actor Peter Brown at Har-Omar restaurant in Hollywood, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret t with actor Peter Brown at Har-Omar restaurant in Hollywood, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret looking over a script with the screen test’s director, Robert Parrish, and the actor who would read opposite her, David Hedison.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret face-to-face with actor David Hedison, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret and David Hedison rehearsing a scene on Fox’s back lot, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with actor David Hedison, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret, Hollywood, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Studio hairdresser Helen Turpin taking care of Ann-Margret for her State Fair audition in 1961. The film’s director wanted Turpin to give her a “kind of wild, Alice in Wonderland look.”

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Outfitted for a screen test, Ann-Margret with costume designer Don Feld, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret studying costume designer Don Feld’s quick sketch of what she’d wear during the second half of her screen test.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret doing the song-and-dance half of her screen test, during which she performed the old jazz standard “Bill Bailey” wearing that memorable combo of lambswool sweater and black leotard.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret during a screen test, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

At some point during the shoot for LIFE, Ann-Margret visited with her mentor, the legendary George Burns, in a prop room of a studio where he kept an office, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

With help from friend Scott Smith on piano, Ann-Margret auditioned for Dick Pierce (far left) and others at RCA Victor Records, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

To fully illustrate the Ann-Margret story for LIFE, Villet traveled to Fox Lake, Illinois, where he photographed the starlet with her loving family. She, her parents, and her aunts and uncles had all immigrated to the United States from Sweden. Her father stands above her at far left, above, and her mother is in the middle of the photo.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with family and friends, Fox Lake, Illinois, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret dancing with her father, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret’s Uncle Roy gave her a playful spanking after she tried to tickle him, 1961. “It’s wonderful,” she said, “that Grey [Villet, the photographer] was there to capture that moment.”

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with her uncle, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret, Fox Lake, Illinois, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

In Los Angeles, Ann-Margret practiced her golf stroke in the office of her manager, Pierre Cossette, as her friend Scott Smith (far left) and another acquaintance looked on, 1961.

Grey Villet/TIME & LIFE Pictures

With friends at her manager Pierre Cossette’s house, 1961. From the reporter’s notes: “Whenever these kids get together they perform for one another; that is, they did not stage this hoedown strictly for [photographer Grey] Villet’s benefit.”

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

According to the reporter’s notes, in this photo Ann-Margret was “exploring the back lot alone and doing a few exuberant leaps around the deserted western street.” But the image was so joyful that LIFE used it to illustrate Ann-Margret’s good news, which came after Grey Villet had finished shooting: She’d nailed the screen test and scored a movie contract with Fox.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret on a studio back lot, Hollywood, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Adoring Billy Eckstine: Portrait of a Jazz Legend and His Fans

November 2, 2020July 7, 2014 by

There was a time in the post-World War II era when William Clarence “Billy” Eckstine (1914-1993) was, for millions of fans and peers around the world, one of the most influential singers and bandleaders of the age. Women and girls and, no doubt, more than a few men and boys swooned over him; young musicians wanted to dress, sound and look like him; music clubs and recording studios wanted to book him. The names of the vocalists and jazz legends who played in Eckstine’s big band, meanwhile, is a Who’s Who of early, mid-1940s bebop: Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon and more.

All the more mysterious, then, why hearing Eckstine’s name not to mention his music in discussions of jazz greats is such a rarity today. After all, an artist who made an impact on giants ranging from Duke Ellington (who played in Eckstine’s big band) to Quincy Jones (who looked up to him as “an idol”) deserves to be celebrated.

Here, on what would have been Billy Eckstine’s 100th birthday he was born July 8, 1914, in Pittsburgh, Penn. LIFE.com remembers the music pioneer and style icon with a marvelous Martha Holmes photo that both captures the man’s charisma and highlights the adoration he inspired in his fans.

Billy Eckstine, New York, 1949

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE With a Cheerful Cape Cod ‘Cult,’ 1948

January 30, 2022July 6, 2014 by

“Do you want a ‘real’ experience to talk about when you get home from your vacation? Come and get yourself Activationized!”

This intriguing invitation, LIFE magazine informed its no-doubt head-scratching readers in August 1948, had been distributed on posters and flyers around Cape Cod’s Provincetown that summer in order to entice potential devotees and to signal the birth of what LIFE (tongue-in-cheekily) classified as a brand-new American “cult”: Activationism.

Activationism’s founder and driving creative force, Milton Hood Ward, “counseled his followers, which included housewives, waitresses, fishermen and would-be artists, to uncork their emotions all over the place. ‘Activate or Deteriorate’ was his motto.

“A composer and press agent,” LIFE went on, Ward “figured that inhibited Americans would feel better if they [danced] … Although Activationist practices varied widely, they generally started with group calisthenics and chanting and went on through progressive frenzies to extemporaneous dancing and ad lib yelling.

“At Provincetown,” the 1948 LIFE article continued, “where crazy summertime goings-on are [quite common], not many Activationists took their cult seriously. Ward, however, thinks he may have started something, and plans to introduce Activationism to New York this fall in an art gallery, a nightclub, and Carnegie Hall.”

Alas, other than photographs by LIFE photographer Martha Holmes, there are few records indicating that Activationism survived past that one magical New England summer. All these years later, in an age of seemingly ceaseless anxiety and sky-high levels of stress, Americans (and most everyone else on the planet) could probably benefit from the emergence of another harmless, playful, free-spirited new “cult.” Is it too much to hope that, someday, a handful of creative souls might reawaken the Activationist spirit that briefly flowered, long ago, on the beaches of Cape Cod?

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Activationism, 1948

Martha Holmes Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

We Were Here: Graffiti and the Human Cry for Connection

August 11, 2021July 3, 2014 by

All people, everywhere, share one elemental characteristic: sooner or later, we all die. But along with that shared mortality comes another, perhaps less-bleak, common thread: the urge to leave a mark, a personalized stamp on the world, so others will know we were here.

Photographer Vernon Merritt III captured a manifestation of this innate human need in a picture he made in New York City in 1969. The movingly straightforward message of the graffiti in Merritt’s photo “Kevin was here” suggests a longing, at its core, for human connection. It’s also reminiscent of the graffiti left around the globe by U.S. troops during World War II, “Kilroy Was Here,” which made its way into the popular culture of the time. (LIFE magazine even ran an ad at one point mentioning that servicemen took solace in knowing that wherever they went, “Kilroy” was there, too.)

Today, in a world increasingly dominated by technology, countless people seem to feel they exist only as long as their status updates and tweets are seen and “liked.” And yet, despite the online noise, some of us still embrace traditional ways to make ourselves seen, and heard. From faceless, rebellious teens (and preteens, and even adults) keeping old methods alive tagging buildings, bridges, and other structures to megastars like Beyoncé, with her haunting song, “I Was Here,” humans continue to leave their mark. In the Digital Age, tangibility might be dying away but the cry for acknowledgement and connection remains very much alive.

Katie Yee is a native New Yorker, an undergraduate studying Literature and Psychology at Bennington College, and an editorial assistant at Tweed’s Magazine of Literature & Art.

Graffiti, NYC, 1969

Vernon Merritt III The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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