Arthur Freed

  • Born: September 9, 1894
  • Birthplace: Charleston, South Carolina
  • Died: April 12, 1973
  • Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Freed’s production unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) helped shape the look and the style of the Hollywood musical, which achieved prominence in the 1940’s and the 1950’s. Freed hired many of the best directors, performers, songwriters, and technicians of the day to create films that became classics.

Early Life

Arthur Freed was born in Charleston, South Carolina, one of eight children of Max Grossman, an art dealer, and Rosa Grossman. Freed’s father’s occupation as an art dealer caused his family to live around the world, but they eventually settled in Seattle, Washington. Freed graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1914. He went to work as a piano player for a Chicago music publisher and performed in vaudeville. During World War I, Freed joined the Army and staged military shows with his partner, Louis Silvers. After the war, Freed returned to Seattle, but soon he moved to California to become a theater manager in Los Angeles. In 1921, Freed began collaborating with composer Ignacio (“Nacio”) Herb Brown. He married Renée Klein on March 14, 1923; they had one child.

In 1927, Freed and Brown wrote “Singin’ in the Rain,” the team’s most famous song, for a stage musical that Freed was producing in Los Angeles, The Hollywood Music Box Revue. The Freed-Brown collaboration lasted for more than twenty years; they wrote songs for more than two dozen Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) films. Several became popular standards, such as “Temptation,” “All I Do Is Dream of You,” and “You Were Meant for Me.”

Life’s Work

Freed and Brown joined MGM in 1929 as lyricist and composer, respectively, for that studio’s first all-talking musical, The Broadway Melody. The film Hollywood Music Box Revue of 1929 featured the motion-picture debut of “Singin’ in the Rain,” which was later sung by Judy Garland in Little Nellie Kelly (1940), and then in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), which both critics and fans consider one of the best film musicals of all time.

In 1938, Freed persuaded MGM president Louis B. Mayer to acquire film rights to L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Freed became that classic film’s associate producer. The role of Dorothy was given to newcomer Garland, whom Freed discovered and then placed under contract to MGM. However, before The Wizard of Oz (1939) was finished, Mayer allowed Freed to produce Babes in Arms (1939), with Garland and Mickey Rooney as the leads; it became one of the studio’s largest-grossing films. This was followed by several other Freed-produced “backstage musicals,” all featuring Rooney and Garland, including Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), and Girl Crazy (1943).

Freed initiated a new era in the film musical when he persuaded Vincente Minnelli to join his musical production unit to direct Cabin in the Sky (1943) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), one of Freed’s most fondly remembered films. Thereafter, Minnelli or former choreographers Stanley Donen and Charles Walters directed virtually all of Freed’s most renowned films: Easter Parade (1948), the only film Fred Astaire and Garland made together; On the Town (1949), one of the first films to be shot almost completely on location; Annie Get Your Gun (1950); An American in Paris (1951), which won an Academy Award for Best Picture; The Band Wagon (1953) and Silk Stockings (1957), both starring Astaire and Cyd Charisse; and Gigi (1958), Freed’s last great production, which benefited greatly from its Paris locations and which also won an Academy Award for Best Picture. All defined “the MGM musical,” with its integration of song and dance into the story line and a glorious display of color, costume, and scenic design.

By the end of the 1950’s, the number of Freed’s projects decreased; his last film production was a nonmusical, The Light in the Piazza (1962). However, he continued to devote time to his hobby of growing prize-winning orchids.

In 1951, Freed received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was its president from 1963 through 1967, and he produced several Academy Award shows, for which he received a special Oscar in 1968 for “superlative and distinguished service.” Overall, his productions received twenty-one Academy Awards.

Freed spent much of the 1960’s as an inactive producer. He tried to get MGM to purchase the film rights to My Fair Lady (1956) and to Camelot (1960) but both films were made by Warner Bros., in 1964 and in 1967. In 1963, Freed and his associate producer, Roger Edens, attempted to develop a film, Say It with Music, based on the life and works of Irving Berlin, but it was never made. Freed resigned from MGM in 1970, shortly after the new studio head, former television executive James T. Aubrey, Jr., canceled work on the project. Freed died of a heart attack in 1973.

Significance

Freed’s long career as a producer at MGM was one of the most distinguished in film history; he is recognized for the high quality of his musicals at MGM and for the talents he coached to highly regarded performances, such as June Allyson, Astaire, Garland, Eleanor Powell, Howard Keel, and Kelly. He encouraged directors Busby Berkeley, Minnelli, Donen and Walters; writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green; choreographers Michael Kidd and Bob Fosse; and composer André Previn. This was a tribute to his particular skill for hiring the best possible talent and for getting important stories for his musicals. His efforts resulted in what amounted to the formation of a theatrical stock company, with many of the collaborators forming close working relationships.

Bibliography

Eyman, Scott. Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Mayer gave Freed a chance to produce at MGM, and this biography discusses the relationship between the two men. There is good material on Freed and the Freed Unit, especially some of the great films the unit produced, especially Meet Me in St. Louis.

Fordin, Hugh. The World of Entertainment! Hollywood’s Greatest Musicals. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Comprehensive and well-illustrated study of all the films Freed produced, based on Freed’s archives. The producer gave the author complete access to all his files; information is quite thorough on each film. This is not a biography but a behind-the-scenes, film-by-film account of the making of his musicals.

Hemming, Roy. The Melody Lingers On: The Great Songwriters and Their Movie Musicals. New York: Newmarket Press, 1986. Freed’s contributions as a lyricist are covered in the section on his partner, Brown. There is a discussion of the Freed-Brown hit “Singin’ in the Rain” and its evolution into the classic film of the same title.