Patricia Ward Kelly met Gene Kelly in 1985 when she was writing for a television special about the Smithsonian Museum, which he happened to be hosting.
“I didn’t know who Gene Kelly was once I first met him. That at all times surprises people,” Patricia Ward Kelly told Fox News Digital from her home office where memories overflow from their relationship.
“In actual fact, some people think I’m making it up.”
Ward Kelly was in her mid-20s on the time, and the inimitable star of classics like “Singin’ within the Rain,” “On the Town” and “An American in Paris,” was 47 years her senior.
“The age issue was not a difficulty for me,” she explained.
“And the funny thing is, I never really even thought about it because he was so young at heart.”
She said she didn’t think about their age difference “until the tabloids began making such an enormous deal about it. After which I didn’t even add up the difference until they made an enormous deal.”
The age difference also didn’t matter to her parents.
“My parents understood and didn’t see it as any problem. They knew I’d at all times form of coloured outside the lines just a little bit. And so it seemed perfectly natural to them. There wasn’t anything strange about it.”
Nonetheless, as a self-described “nerdy Herman Melville scholar,” being “suddenly thrust into this highlight and to have people around you passing judgment on you and your life” was a difficulty.
“That was harder to take, if you happen to go from anonymity to being the poster child on the checkout counter on the food market,” she said.
“But it surely is strange when persons are following you, taking pictures and definitely nothing like what persons are experiencing today, what these mega stars experience by way of violations of privacy, but we were just on the sting of it.”
Ward Kelly said she didn’t go to many movies growing up.
“I hear from so many individuals now saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, my mother would keep me home from school if a Gene Kelly movie was on’ or, they watched them with their parents or grandparents and that just wasn’t my upbringing,” she explained. “In a weird way, I believe it was the most effective approach to meet Gene because I got here with no preconceived notions of him. Everybody else is available in there like, ‘Oh my God, I like you.’ And I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know what he represented. I didn’t know his movies in any respect.”
She said after they worked on the TV special together, he asked her to assist him with his memoir.
“I figured it could perhaps be a few weeks, and we ended up getting married five years into that process.”
She added, “In an odd way, I’m very joyful that the work got here first, and the wedding got here second, because I used to be really committed to getting Gene’s words on tape after which on paper, and ensuring that I got a way of this man that he felt had not been captured before.”
Ward Kelly said she fell in love with his “words,” explaining they each loved etymology, the study of the origins of words.
“We began playing word games and quoting poetry backwards and forwards and by the center of the week I noticed he spoke French, he spoke Italian, he read Latin, he spoke Yiddish, he wrote poetry,” she said.
“He had memorized a rare amount of poetry, and he had a love of language. I mean, it wasn’t just that he had studied this stuff and absorbed them. It was that he was like a baby. He delighted in them. He delighted within the sound of words and would often just say a word again and again, because he loved the way in which it sounded, and so I discovered it very charming.”
In private, the singing and dancing star was “very quiet,” she said.
“People will ask me if he danced across the kitchen,” she said, “but his idea of an amazing time was to take a seat in front of the hearth at night and take heed to Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole on the stereo. To read a book, to only have a quiet, very quiet evening. And in order that’s how we spent much of our time was just in, sitting next to one another on the couch, or sitting across from one another in front of the hearth. And, and I believe those are a few of the most memorable evenings.”
When he was younger, she said Kelly’s home was a “form of salon” for the celebs at the moment.
“So you would possibly stop by, and Leonard Bernstein could be playing the piano, or Oscar Levant or Judy Garland could be singing, and a few people in one other room can be playing a version of charades.”
Most of Kelly’s closest friends weren’t stars, but she said he “revered” Judy Garland.
“He really at all times credits her with his profession and teaching him how you can perform in front of a camera. Frank Sinatra was a pricey friend. And really, as Gene said, they were closer than brothers. And Frank really showed that at the tip of Gene’s life, once I was with him, I could see how clear that was and this type of camaraderie that that they had and, just really deep affection for each other.”
Nonetheless, she said he was very private and relished not having to be “on.”
“He was ‘on’ any time we left the home. I mean, the tour buses went by always and so, even on a walk around our neighborhood, you were ‘on’ and being recorded,” Ward Kelly remembered.
She said the “hardest point we had with privacy” was the times the star spent within the hospital within the last years of his life.
“Nurses were selling the stories out of the hospitals,” she said.
“And it was before all of the HIPAA rules got here into play. And, the people would eavesdrop on the 911 calls and show as much as take pictures on the hospital and other people dressed as priests and tried to return into the room. And, and I discovered that the most important violation of all, because at that time, when it is best to not must spend your energy with this stuff and attempting to protect any person’s dignity and privacy, your attention is spent on that form of chasing people down stairways and things like that.”
She added, “That was I believe is an actual violation and I don’t know how you can stop it.”
She said fans could be surprised by the “magnitude of his brain, the immensity of his brain. They someway don’t imagine that he has this mental capability. I believe, perhaps it’s something that perhaps plagues dancers, choreographers, that someway that exact form of genius shouldn’t be like other.”
Fans are a “little surprised that he’s an mental, as he was, and that he was a real Renaissance man and so gifted in lots of areas. Numerous persons are surprised that he directed and choreographed. They’ll ask me if he ever choreographed anything, and I’ll say, ‘Yes, just about every thing you’re seeing.’”
She said Kelly was also extremely protective of her during their relationship, describing a black tie event they attended early on when someone called her name and took a photograph of her. She said her mother later told her she looked like a “deer within the headlights.”
“And I said, ‘Well, Mom, you realize, you’ve gotten no idea quite what this experience is like,’ but, it wasn’t anything I used to be prepared for. I attempted to weather it as best as I could, I’m sure there are individuals who handle it a lot better, but Gene was good about it. He would – you’ll see him in the images – He held on to me with a good, tight, grip. He held my hand, and I can see in the images now that, I’m sure, gave me a way of strength at the moment.”
Since his death in 1996, Ward Kelly said she misses the “brightness of his mind.”
She continued, “I miss the enjoyment of the enjoyment of words and sitting. There’s nothing like sitting next to any person, reading, and you then’ll form of stop and talk briefly after which return to reading. I mean, I don’t think there’s much that’s more romantic than that. I mean, perhaps I’m odd, but I just that was just a tremendous thing. And I believe I also I miss his decency. I actually miss his decency. I miss his integrity. He was fighting for things way ahead of the pack.”
She said he was also the “epitome of romance.”
“He would wake me up in the midst of the night simply to exit on the balcony to see the complete moon,” she said.
“And I miss the little valentines he would go away sprinkled across the house for Valentine’s Day and the little, little, enamel boxes from England that he would give to me. And he’d take a red felt marker and put a heart on the within them. In order that’s all gone. And I even have them. I even have the valentines, and I even have the notes that he left for me and every thing. That’s a fairly large hole to fill.”
Ward Kelly said she is doing “every thing she will to preserve his legacy, including her one-woman show “Gene Kelly: the Legacy,” that illustrates his creative process and the way he modified the “look of dance on film.”
She also does a live symphony tribute to Kelly, wherein she interweaves stories about him with clips from his movies that the orchestra accompanies.
During his life, Kelly had a “crusade” to “break down the stigma of boys dancing, and it’s still prevalent today,” she said, adding that she works with a bunch that tries to interact boys in dancing.
In 1958, Kelly put together a television special called “Dancing Is a Man’s Game,” wherein he would choreograph a dance based off of sports movements described by athletes like Mickey Mantle and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Ward Kelly said her late husband’s movies are also used for children who’ve autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia.
“A friend of mine has a child who has autism, and he’s watched ‘Singin’ within the Rain’ greater than 20 times. It’s something that’s joyful,” she said.
His movies are also used to assist trigger memories in Alzheimer’s victims.
“I speak in quite a bit [of] care homes,” she explained.
“His movies aren’t violent. They bring about back immediately, will trigger them positive memories, songs and things. So, there’s a reasonably broad spectrum that I don’t think he actually was not aware how much his work can be used and in so many alternative, other ways.”
Ward Kelly said her late husband’s movie “On the Town” with Sinatra – which celebrates its seventy fifth anniversary later this yr – “broke recent ground, by being shot on location in Latest York City and using the town itself because the form of chorus, [which] had not been done before.”
She added, “Gene’s never going to go away. I believe, you’ll have the seventy fifth anniversary of ‘On the Town,’ but there can be the a hundred and fiftieth anniversary. I believe he’ll just keep going.”