On Christmas Eve, 1940, the curtain rose at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre on a musical with a leading man nobody was supposed to like. Joey Evans was a heel — a cheap, scheming, womanizing nightclub song-and-dance man, drawn from the John O’Hara stories that had scandalized the readers of The New Yorker. The role required its player to seduce the audience while playing a cad, to dance like a dream while acting like a rat. The 28-year-old dancer cast in the part had been a chorus boy two years earlier. His name was Gene Kelly, and by the final curtain, Broadway knew it had found something it had never seen before — and Hollywood, watching closely, knew it too.
The Pittsburgh kid who bet on himself
To understand the gamble Kelly took in Pal Joey, you have to understand where he came from. Eugene Curran Kelly was born August 23, 1912, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the middle child of five in an Irish-American family. His mother enrolled the Kelly children in dance classes, and young Gene — who dreamed of playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates — took to it with an athlete’s competitiveness. He studied at Penn State, taught dance to make money, and by his early twenties was running a dance studio in his hometown with his brother Fred.
He didn’t come to New York until 1938, at 27 — late by dancer standards. His first Broadway job was a chorus spot in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me!, where his main distinction was supporting star Mary Martin while she sang “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” But Kelly was not built for the chorus. In 1939 he landed the featured role of Harry the Hoofer in William Saroyan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Time of Your Life — and, crucially, danced to his own choreography for the first time on Broadway. That same year he got his first Broadway choreography assignment, for Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. The dancer was becoming a creator, and creators don’t stay in the chorus long.
Joey Evans: the heel as hero
Pal Joey was itself a bet. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Broadway’s most sophisticated songwriting team, wanted to adapt O’Hara’s stories about a small-time Chicago nightclub operator — a genuinely unlikable protagonist — into a musical. The show’s director, George Abbott, needed a leading man who could make an audience root for a man they should despise: charming enough to get away with it, dangerous enough to be believable, and a dancer spectacular enough to justify the whole enterprise.
Robert Alton, the choreographer who had spotted Kelly years earlier in Pittsburgh, championed him for the part. Kelly got it, and he made Joey Evans his own in a way that rewrote what a musical leading man could be. The critic John Martin of The New York Times wrote that Kelly was “not only glib-footed, but he has a feeling for comment and content that give his dancing personal distinction and raise it several notches as a dancing art.” That phrase — characterization through dance — became the Kelly signature: his dancing wasn’t decoration, it was acting. His first-act classical ballet and his second-act Spanish tap in tango rhythm weren’t just showcases; they were Joey’s soul laid bare, the dreamer inside the schemer.
The show ran 270 performances — a solid hit, not a blockbuster — but its impact on Kelly’s life was total. Sharing the stage with him were Van Johnson, June Havoc (Gypsy Rose Lee’s sister), and a young dancer named Stanley Donen, whose name would be linked with Kelly’s for the rest of both men’s careers. By day, while playing Joey at night, Kelly was also choreographing the Broadway hit Best Foot Forward. He was, at 28, the most exciting young man in the American theater.
The Selznick contract — and the wait
Hollywood had noticed. David O. Selznick, the producer of Gone with the Wind and the most powerful independent producer in the business, offered Kelly a film contract — and Kelly accepted, reportedly because Selznick, unlike Louis B. Mayer at MGM, did not require him to submit to a screen test. (Mayer had seen Pal Joey too and wanted Kelly, but the screen-test demand was a dealbreaker for a Broadway star at the height of his powers.)
Kelly finished his Pal Joey commitment and arrived in Hollywood on November 11, 1941. And then… nothing happened. Selznick had no musicals in production and no idea what to do with a Broadway dancer-actor-choreographer. It was one of the great mismatches in Hollywood history: the industry’s most prestigious producer had signed its most dynamic young talent and parked him. Kelly waited, and the wait must have stung — the man who had conquered Broadway in two years was now contract furniture.
Salvation came from the one man in Hollywood who knew exactly what Kelly was. Arthur Freed, the producer who ran MGM’s musical unit, had seen Kelly on Broadway and never forgotten him. Selznick sold half of Kelly’s contract to MGM so the studio could cast him opposite Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal (1942) — and when the picture proved Kelly a natural screen actor, Freed picked up the other half of the contract. MGM soon bought Kelly out from Selznick entirely. The Broadway bet had paid off; it just needed a second bet, by Freed, to collect.
For Me and My Gal: the screen test that mattered
For Me and My Gal was a canny piece of casting. The story — a brash vaudeville hoofer who dodges World War I service and learns, painfully, what courage means — gave Kelly a role cut from the same cloth as Joey Evans: a heel who has to earn redemption. Garland, MGM’s former child star, was making the delicate transition to adult roles, and the studio needed a leading man with the energy of her old partner Mickey Rooney but the maturity of a grown man. Kelly had both, plus something Rooney didn’t: he could dance like nobody else alive.
The film was a hit, and Kelly’s performance announced a new kind of screen masculinity. He didn’t dance like Fred Astaire — all top hat, tails, and effortless glide. Kelly danced in shirtsleeves, in sailor suits, in work clothes. He danced like an athlete: low center of gravity, powerful leaps, tap work that hit the floor like a boxer’s punches. Where Astaire suggested aristocracy, Kelly suggested the street, the gym, the ballfield. It was a revolution disguised as entertainment.
The masculine dancer
This is the heart of Kelly’s turning point, and the reason Pal Joey mattered beyond one man’s career. Before Kelly, the American public’s image of the male dancer was essentially Fred Astaire: elegant, refined, slightly remote — wonderful, but not someone a 1940s American boy imagined becoming. Kelly changed the conception entirely. He had been a genuine athlete — hockey, baseball, the whole Pittsburgh sports-kid résumé — and he brought that physicality into every number. His famous formulation, offered in interviews over the years, was that if Astaire was the Cary Grant of dance, he was the Marlon Brando of it: earthy, muscular, democratic.
The effect was cultural, not just choreographic. Kelly made it possible for American men to love dance without apology. His 1958 television special Dancing: A Man’s Game — made for NBC’s Omnibus — made the argument explicitly, pairing dance movement with the movements of athletes like Mickey Mantle and Sugar Ray Robinson to show that a dancer’s body does what a ballplayer’s body does, only to music. It earned him an Emmy nomination and became a landmark of dance on television. But the argument had really been made eighteen years earlier, on a Broadway stage, by a heel named Joey Evans who danced like he meant it.
What the bet bought
Look at what followed the Broadway bet and you see the whole Kelly career as its dividend. The Selznick contract led to MGM; MGM led to Freed; Freed led to Cover Girl (1944, on loan to Columbia, where his “Alter Ego” dance with his own reflection announced his film-choreography genius), Anchors Aweigh (1945), The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Every one of those films rests on the foundation laid at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre: dance as character, athleticism as artistry, the musical as a place where a regular guy in shirtsleeves could be the most romantic figure on earth.
Kelly never forgot what Broadway gave him, either. He returned to the stage as a choreographer and director — his staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song in 1958 showed the theater world he hadn’t lost his touch. And Pal Joey itself became one of the defining roles of the American musical theater, revived again and again, always in the shadow of the original Joey.
There’s a coda worth savoring. When the film version of Pal Joey was finally made in 1957, the role of Joey Evans went not to Kelly but to Frank Sinatra, with Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. Kelly was 45 by then, a Hollywood institution, arguably too big — and too beloved — to play a heel convincingly. The irony is perfect: the role that made him a star was the one role his stardom eventually put out of reach.
But on Christmas Eve 1940, none of that had happened yet. There was just a 28-year-old dancer from Pittsburgh, playing a cad, dancing like an angel, and making the biggest bet of his life — that Broadway would see what he was. Broadway saw. Hollywood followed. And the movies were never the same.