Betsy Blair was born Elizabeth Boger in 1923 into a middle-class episcopalian family in New Jersey, her mother a teacher, her father an insurance broker. By the age of 12, this prodigiously confident child performer was dancing before Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. At the age of 16 she came to audition at Billy Rose’s Manhattan nightclub, the Diamond Horse- shoe and, as in a Hollywood musical, she mistook the resident choreographer for a waiter. He was Gene Kelly, 12 years her senior, of whom she says in her attractive and evocative biography, ‘He gave me — and the world — an unforgettable legacy of joy.’ When they married two years later and set off for Hollywood, he was a Broadway star under contract to David Selznick, she was an experienced chorus girl with high ambitions as an actress and political views far to the left of her husband’s liberal democratic convictions.
He was an immediate success in the movies, while she bore him a daughter and remained in his shadow though doing some stage work and becoming active in a number of left-wing causes of an admirable kind. Her request to join the Communist party (made just after the second world war) was turned down by the comrades on the grounds that she would be more useful as the wife of a prominent liberal. Surprisingly this did not alert her to the party’s deviousness. With considerable skill and wonderfully girlish enthusiasm, Blair recreates the Hollywood of the Forties and Fifties when the Kellys were among the cynosures of the movie colony. These were the last days of the big studio system, and also the time when hundreds of naive idealists paid for their brave political hopes by being trampled on during the McCarthyite witch-hunts.
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