The Patronesses

An American in Paris, and Humoresque

My first real celebrity crush was Gene Kelly, and of course I love An American in Paris, one of his very best movies. As a teenager, I was vaguely aware that the Kelly character is kind of an asshole to his love interest, played by Leslie Caron. He spots her out in a café with friends and badgers her into giving up her phone number, relying on her reluctance to make a scene. Then he shows up at her workplace and similarly harasses her into a date. But all is forgiven: they soon fall lyrically and choreographically in love.

Watching it again now, as an adult, it’s not those scenes that touch my moral sensitivities; we all know that men shouldn’t be given license to behave that way anymore. It’s the movie’s treatment of a relatively minor character — his Patroness, played by Nina Foch. Though the actress is younger than Gene Kelly by eight years, she slips neatly into the costume of an older woman: elegantly but conservatively dressed, hair elaborately done. Her conversation is clever and ironic, and she pulls out a pair of heavy glasses to examine Kelly’s paintings.

She’s rich, and she likes his work. And for offering to fund Kelly’s career as a painter, while also discreetly wanting him (her clumsy attempt at seduction consists of wearing a revealing dress), the movie makes her suffer. When she asks Kelly, tearfully, not to humiliate her by hitting on other women right in front of her and her friends, he’s indignant, as though she’s denying him a fundamental right. When I watch the movie, I’m pained for her.

Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights writes about the symbiotic — or perhaps mutually destructive — pairing between particular young artists and particular rich women:

Back there, when I first came to New York, I observed that a number of intellectual men, radicals, had a way of finding rich women who loved them in the brave and risky way of Desdemona. A writer or painter or philosophe sailed into port and a well-to-do woman would call out, Evviva Otello! The women were not necessarily sparkling and lighthearted. More often an impressive, thick, downright strength of purpose went along with them, like an overcoat.

Perhaps a sort of perverse complacency led the lucky women to rescue a smart, sulky man, one whose ambitions and gifts were far from settled, whose intelligence was certain but whose destiny was a curling, warning question mark.

In Humoresque, Joan Crawford’s patroness is permitted to fall in love with her artist (a brilliant violinist played by John Garfield) but not without finding herself on the receiving end of resentment. She, too, needs to pull out her glasses upon first encountering his genius.

Perhaps these patronesses, whose lot in the movies tends to be embarrassment at best and destruction at worst, aspire to become something like the great salonnières of 19thc Paris, whose unspeakably elegant rooms played host to the greatest artists and thinkers of their day and whose influence was a true cultural force. But even Proust writes about those ladies not as elegant magnificences, but more often either as petty and ridiculous (if they care about the art too much) or petty and vapid (if they care about the art too little).

I once read a definition of a whore as being one who sells that which should not be sold. The sin of the patroness is perhaps the opposite: one who buys (or tries to) what shouldn’t be bought — love and cultural influence. They also fill their feminine role incorrectly: they have too much power in the relationship, and instead of supporting their man as a wife or mother, they use their money to stand in for both. In Humoresque, Crawford displaces both women, the mother and the “appropriate” wife, to her eventual ruin.

But Milo is simply doing womanhood wrong: in trying to win over Kelly, she’s acting like a man. “Women act like men and expect to be treated like women,” says Kelly’s sidekick in one scene. When I think about Milo, whose significance in An American in Paris is diminished enough that she’s not given any dances or musical numbers, I wonder if the screenwriters intended to make her as sympathetic as she ultimately is to me. When she’s finally rejected for good, she responds with magnanimity: “I think I need another glass of champagne.”

Sometimes I wonder if she kept the paintings.