Home >  Local News >  Neighborhoods

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

By Al Lowe, Tri-State Sports & News Service

"Ask me anything," screen legend Gene Kelly's widow, Patricia, told more than 100 students who posed lots of questions during her visit last week to Baldwin High School.

They probed into both her life under public scrutiny and the life and times of her famous dancer/actor/director husband.

But that didn't happen until after she congratulated the students on their nine nominations for Gene Kelly awards and on their win for best stage crew and technical assistance.

Gene Kelly, who was comfortable behind the camera as a film director, "really appreciated his crews," Patricia Kelly said during comments punctuated by clips from his films.

The students asked about how she met the famed performer and how it changed her life.

She said actor Roddy McDowall once described her as "Alice after she fell down the rabbit hole."

"I didn't know he was one of the biggest stars in the world," she said about the first time she heard of her husband-to-be. "Gene Kelly? I didn't know who that was. I didn't know if it was a man or a woman."

She wore a lumberjack jacket, corduroy pants, thick wool socks and clogs on the day they met. He was "elegantly dressed" in a blue suit and red tie. She was 26 and he was 73. She is 44 now.

Asked what her friends thought when she told them she was going to marry such a famous man, she said, "What is more interesting is how do you tell your father you are going to marry Gene Kelly when your father is younger than Gene is? How do you explain that?"

They met when he was appearing in a documentary about the Smithsonian Institution and she was writing the script. They found they had common interests in studying the English language and a love of poetry.

"People who knew us well understood it and were overjoyed," Kelly said.

She recalled the first time she spotted a tabloid photographer and wondered why he was lying on his stomach. "In those photos you always have the stupidest look on your face. My mother said I looked a deer caught in the headlights."

But her mother in Connecticut bought issues of the tabloid in the local grocery and was asked by the clerk if she really wanted eight copies. "That's my daughter," her mother said, pointing to the front page photo.

Patricia Kennedy remembered being hounded by the paparazzi as her husband entered and left hospitals during periods of illness. "We were so happy when we outwitted those guys," she said.

Answering another student, she said Gene Kelly attended dancing lessons at his mother's insistence. "If you came home from dancing school or carrying a violin in East Liberty, you're dead. They beat him up. But he learned to fight and developed a pretty good right hook."

He began to appreciate the advantage of having dancing skills when it attracted girls.

He liked to watch classic films, like "Brief Encounter" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and sometimes cried, she said. "He liked to quote James Cagney as saying 'The Irish cry at card tricks.' "

But contemporary movies saddened him with all the violence and lack of romance, she said.

Asked if she danced, she said she took lessons after meeting Gene and that they danced together in the privacy of their home. Or sometimes they would sit and listen to ballads sung by Frank Sinatra.

"It is one of the most romantic ways to spend an evening," she said.