Vera Ellen on dancing with Gene Kelly
“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from Words and Music (1948)
“Until I did Slaughter, I had done only light taps and other frothy kinds of dancing in pictures. Nevertheless, Gene asked MGM to get me for the number.”
“At first I wasn’t sure whether I should take it. I knew I could do the steps, but I was going to have to portray a girl who was a floozy. It shocked me a little, I’ll admit.”
Vera Ellen grinned, “But Gene, the old master, when I told him of my doubts, sent me down to see Marie Bryant, a colored dancing teacher who lives in the heart of the negro section, on Central Avenue.”
“Marie Bryant shook her head. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘you can’t wear that dress if you’re going to do the kinda dance Mr Gene Kelly told me to teach you. I can’t see your body in such an outfit. I gotta see it to know what you’re saying with your body as you move around.’”
“I worked hard all that day. But when we finished she said, ‘You’re dancing fine honey, but what are you thinking about?’ I told her I was just thinking about the steps. She said that was no good. ‘If you don’t think about men and sex while you’re dancing, your body won’t say anything about those things to the folks watching you.’”
She learned to think sex while doing the dance.
There was a complication when she started rehearsing with Gene Kelly. He taught her to dance like a man, instead of a dainty little ballet girl, to dance with more power and strength. So while dancing like a woman thinking of love, she also had to dance like a man.
“I’m getting better parts all the time now…But I’ll never have a dance I loved more than ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,’ I’ll never stop being grateful to Gene Kelly for giving me my chance at doing it with him.
“They play the music of Slaughter over the air even now. If I hear it while driving, I have to stop the car, pull over on the side of the road - and listen to it, hearing that music makes me shiver and quake, I get goose-flesh at the memory, though we rehearsed it for six weeks, it lasted exactly seven minutes on the screen, the greatest seven minutes of my professional life.”
- Motion Picture and Television Magazine (July 1952)
