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Edens with Judy Garland
November 9, 1905– Roger Edens
What sort of person does not love the MGM Musicals of the Golden Age of Hollywood? I don’t want to be friends with them; that is for certain.
Edens was a most important musical arranger, songwriter, and film producer. He was also a congenial, cultured, and clever gay man who brought in other brilliant gay men as collaborators for MGM. Producer Arthur Freed’s group at MGM was responsible for making some of the best musical films of all time. Freed, who was not gay, was happy to gather the group derisively known as “Freed’s Fairies” that included Edens, director George Cukor and prop master Edwin Willis.
Although Edens was handsome enough to be a movie star, he worked to give the best and brightest performers of Hollywood’s Golden Era the perfect musical numbers suited for their unique talents.
When Edens left his native Texas and arrived in NYC in the 1920s, he found work as a pit musician. In 1930, when Ethel Merman’s pianist withdrew from George and Ira Gershwin’s Broadway musical Girl Crazy, Edens was hired to replace him. Merman was so impressed that she hired him as the pianist/arranger for her nightclub act, and then brought him to Hollywood with her.
Merman returned to Broadway, movies just weren’t able to capture her special magic, but Edens stayed in Los Angeles. He was hired by MGM’s Freed as his musical supervisor and associate producer for the famed Freed Unit. As a team, they made: Babes In Arms (1939), Easter Parade (1948), On The Town (1949), Royal Wedding (1951), An American In Paris (1951), Singin’ In The Rain (1952), and The Bandwagon (1953).
In an era when homosexuality was seen as a fatal flaw in Hollywood, Edens managed to keep his sexuality a secret. After his brief marriage to a starlet ended in divorce, he had a beard in his very gifted friend and co-worker Kay Thompson. If you don’t know Thompson, you really should. She was a lithe, effervescent, gregarious, indefatigable, singular writer, musician, actor, comic, singer, songwriter, vocal coach, dancer, choreographer, fashion designer, and one of the most unique show biz figures of the 20th century. Edens and Thompson share the same birthday. From 1942-1957 they held co-birthday parties where they would each present a surprise production number for the other using special material featuring their party pals: Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, Dorothy Dandridge, Maureen O’Hara, Ray Bolger, Ann Sothern, Danny Kaye, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.
Thompson only played one major film role as an actor: fashion editor Maggie Prescott in the musical Funny Face (1957), produced by Edens who also provided songs and arrangements, and directed by Stanley Donen. Thompson won critical praise for her stylish turn as character based on real-life Harper’s Bazaar editor, Diana Vreeland, opening the film with her splashy Think Pink! number and performing songs with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn.
Edens was the special musical mentor to Judy Garland from the very start of her career and he was an un-credited coach on almost all of her musical films. Because of his exclusive MGM contract, Edens was not able to take screen credit for his work on Garland’s memorable Born In A Trunk sequence in the Warner Bros. A Star Is Born (1954). Edens and Garland remained close friends until the end of Garland’s time on this planet. He put together her famous Dear Mr. Gable/You Made Me Love You (1937) number when she was still just a kid, and he composed Our Love Affair for Garland to sing in Strike Up The Band (1940), receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Song. Edens wrote It’s A Great Day For The Irish from Little Nellie Kelly (1940) specifically to showcase Garland’s powerhouse pipes. Not only one of Garland’s biggest hits, the tune became an Irish-American anthem played by marching bands in every St. Patrick’s Day in every big city. He also wrote special material for Garland’s Palace Theatre and London Palladium concerts in 1951.
His long career at MGM culminated with being made the single credited producer for the all-star Deep In My Heart (1954), a creaky musical biopic about the life of composer Sigmund Romberg, who wrote very old fashioned operettas like The Student Prince, The Desert Song, and The New Moon. It is a film only worth catching because of the Eden’s produced series of musical numbers by nearly every singer and dancer he could rustle up on the MGM lot at the time: Cyd Charisse, Rosemary Clooney, Vic Damone, Howard Keel, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, James Mitchell, Jane Powell, and ballet dancer Tamara Toumanova.
When MGM cut back on producing musical films and disposed of most their creative staff, Edens moved on to work at other studios, producing and giving pal Kay Thompson that terrific role in Funny Face for Paramount Pictures. He also found work doing musical specials for television. In the 1960s, he composed special nightclub material for Garland and Merman.
His final screen credit was as associate producer for the film version of Hello, Dolly! (1969), directed by fellow MGM alumni Gene Kelly. Edens coached Katharine Hepburn for her Broadway musical stage debut as Coco Chanel in Coco (1969). He actually found a way for Hepburn’s distinctive croak to enchant.
Eden’s longtime lover was Leonard Gershe (1922 -2002), a talented playwright, screenwriter, and lyricist. He wrote the lyrics to Eden’s music for A Star Is Born, and was responsible for many episodes of The Lucy Show (1962-68), and the screenplays for Funny Face, 40 Carats (1973) and for his own 1969 play Butterflies Are Free (1972).
A longtime smoker, Edens’ final credits rolled in summer 1970, taken by lung cancer. He was just 64 years old.
Edens was portrayed on screen by Michael Parks opposite Andrea McArdle’s Judy Garland in Rainbow (1978), and in an especially good performance by my friend John Benjamin Hickey in Me And My Shadows (2001) with Tammy Blanchard as young Garland and the great Judy Davis a grown-up Garland.
The post #BornThisDay: Producer/Songwriter, Roger Edens appeared first on The WOW Report.
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