My Gene Kelly Hollywood connection began in the late 1970s. I was doing a bit of acting then. I had recently been an extra in a Paul Newman film, WUSA. One afternoon I was asked to attend a blood drive for the Actors Fund. A member of the drive called me over and introduced me to Gene Kelly.
Gene was in his late 60s at the time. I remember how small he seemed, and a little frail. But he couldn’t have been nicer. It was a brief encounter. The kind you file away and don’t think much about — until decades later, when it takes on a different meaning.
How the Gene Kelly Hollywood Connection Ran Deeper Than I Knew
The rest of this story came together in 2024. My paternal grandparents lived in West Hollywood on Rangely Avenue. It’s just west of Robertson Boulevard, east of Doheny, and south of Melrose. What I didn’t know was that my grandmother had a connection to Gene Kelly going back much further than my own meeting with him.
She had helped out at the Kelly family’s dance studio — the Gene Kelly Studio of the Dance — in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In 1941, Gene was signed by David O. Selznick and headed to Hollywood. Gene’s mother called my grandmother and asked if she could give him a place to stay.
The house on Rangely had two apartments on the top floor. That’s where both sides of our family, the Ling’s and the Brakke’s, lived. The ground floor had three bedrooms, one of which Gene likely stayed in. He didn’t live there long. His career at MGM took off fairly fast.
The photo above is a colorized version of a 1938 black-and-white image of that Rangely Avenue home. The same house where Gene Kelly once had a room, thanks to my grandmother’s generosity.
If I had known this back in the 1970s when I shook Gene Kelly’s hand at that blood drive, our conversation would have been very different. Instead it was a warm but brief hello. Now it feels like a missed moment between two people with more in common than either of us knew.
Funny how history works that way. If you enjoy stories like this, you might like another memory.
