Kay Kendall

Madcap

Genevieve (1953) is close to a perfect movie, one of those sleeper hits that people remember fondly, best perhaps on first viewing when it can feel like you are “discovering” it. Kay Kendall is basically playing a supporting role in this picture, yet her fashion model Rosalind is so integral to its unexpectedness that it brought Kendall to some prominence in her native Britain after years in bits and thankless parts.

Ambrose (Kenneth More) says that Kendall’s Rosalind shares his interest in vintage cars, but this turns out not to be true, or she was just being polite with him. Ambrose refers to Rosalind as a woman he met at the races, but “I use the word ‘woman’ in the broadest sense,” he cracks. We first see her standing in a classic model pose, with one foot slightly out in front of the other, and the tall Kendall is like the incarnation of Dior’s “new look” from this period, for everything about her is long: long arms, long legs, even long fingers. Her ski-jump nose became her visual trademark, as did curious chestnut-colored hair that could be teased this way and that when she got into a tizzy, and she was usually rather heavily made up, with an emphasis on deathly white powder and rouged cheeks and arched eyebrows.

Kendall’s Rosalind has a neurotic St. Bernard named Suzy that she has brought along for a trip in a vintage motor car to Brighton and back, and it is gradually revealed that she is an unusual person with hidden depths, nowhere more winningly than in the famous scene where she drunkenly decides to get up and play the trumpet in a small restaurant band. Though Rosalind claims that she was once part of an all-girl orchestra as a teenager and is very good, Ambrose cringes as she ascends the podium and takes up the horn, assuming that Rosalind is tipsy and about to make a fool of herself and some awful noise.

But then Rosalind plays a slow tune very well on her horn, and Ambrose is relieved and delighted, and this delight turns to wonder as she goes into a fast trumpet number and even manages to hit a perilous high note. When she gets back to their table, Rosalind passes out, a blissful look on her face; this is something she was meant to do, play the trumpet, but she gave it up for modeling because, she says, “there was no future in it.” This scene in Genevieve is so moving because it is a metaphor for Kendall’s own unexpectedness as a gifted comic who looked like a cover girl, and her wasted potential.

Her father and grandmother were music hall performers, and Kendall’s diction is sometimes redolent of the way Julie Andrews spoke in films, for they had a similar background. She started in movies as a teenager in the late 1940s with parts like “Party Girl” and “Slave Girl” in comedies and epics, and those looking for worthwhile British films with Kendall after seeing her in Genevieve are bound to be disappointed. Even pictures that sound promising like Simon and Laura (1955) turn out to have no spark for her, and it was only when the Rank Organization loaned her out to Hollywood in the late 1950s that Kendall started to show what she could do.

In Les Girls (1957), Kendall dominates a big musical with the help of her director, George Cukor, who clearly loves the contrast of her classy appearance and voice and the wildness of her comic urges. Cukor was always good with drunk scenes for actors, and there is no funnier drunk scene in his movies than the scene in Les Girls where Kendall’s Sybil gets roaring drunk and tries to sing the “Habanera” from Carmen with a red flower behind her ear. This is the sort of routine that could be unbearable if done with anything less than total abandon and crack timing and inventiveness of voice and body, and Kendall is hilariously unleashed here; she even manages to warm up Gene Kelly in their brief routine together, and he reacts to her as if he knows how unique Kendall is, how utterly unlike anyone else in looks and talent.

In the musical scenes of Les Girls, which feature a dirty gay trifecta of Cole Porter songs, Jack Cole choreography, and Orry-Kelly costumes, Kendall manages to dance with those long legs and arms, and the eye always goes to her. Kendall herself could do “sad eyes” for a scene when necessary, but they aren’t serious sad eyes but just saddish; she was too obviously dedicated to fun and silliness to be down for long. Could she have played Oscar Wilde or Nöel Coward or Restoration comedy, or Shakespeare’s Rosalind? That’s hard to say, but I would love to see her try.

In The Reluctant Debutante (1958) for Vincente Minnelli, Kendall again dominates, this time opposite her husband Rex Harrison, who had married her when he was told she had leukemia and would likely die of it soon. Kendall herself was not told this diagnosis, and Harrison and his ex-wife Lilli Palmer knew about it and kept it a secret from her and planned to marry again after she died, all of which seems very odd and questionable now. Kendall suspected she was seriously ill, but no one she spoke to, like her friend Dirk Bogarde, would confirm it to her.

Yet it is clear at points in The Reluctant Debutante how much Harrison loves Kendall, especially toward the end when he makes a very affectionate physical gesture to her as she sits beside him. Harrison was a comic technician, and very expert, but he seems to know that Kendall is more gifted than he is, and her gift was for “going wild” in a spontaneous way, and when she does this in The Reluctant Debutante he is so completely overshadowed by her that he seems to disappear. Kendall had that spark of inspiration that would have made her a great screwball comedy heroine had she been lucky enough to be young and signed to say, Paramount or Columbia or RKO during the 1930s. But she was in the wrong place, Britain, at the wrong time, and her own time was nearly up.

There are moments in The Reluctant Debutante where she looks a bit ill, yet in her last movie Once More, with Feeling! (1960), which was released after her death at age 32, Kendall is in such comic overdrive that it feels like she knows her time is short and she wants to kick over the traces and shoot the works in the most extreme possible way. There is a scene in that movie where Kendall plays the harp, and she does all kinds of crazy comic business with her face and body: winking, looking “grand” and piss-elegant, plucking the strings in a zany way that brings to mind another comic touched by something like genius, Beatrice Lillie. She even blows on her fingers when she is done! And Kendall gets away with all this somehow because of the genuinely eccentric spirit with which she does it.

There are some performers, like Lillie, Kendall, and Madeline Kahn, who are funny in a way that goes beyond accepted conventions of humor and getting laughs. They are on some other plane. Kendall could shriek and scream and toot brandy and twirl madly around a set like a whirling dervish with her elbows out for distinctly un-lady-like effects and still somehow seem like the cover girl she was meant to be at the same time. Maybe that is the secret of her talent, that contrast.

There was no more delightful performer in movies during her brief heyday than Kay Kendall, and her early death robbed us of so much more she could have done. Imagine her in some of the mod Swinging London comedies of the 1960s, and then in comic character parts. It is a loss. But she is so wondrous in Genevieve, Les Girls, The Reluctant Debutante, and Once More, with Feeling! that Kendall’s name and style still live.