Donald O’Connor Deserves to be a Super Star By Susan King
Donald O’Connor was a star. But I always thought he should have been a super star – a honorary Oscar-winning, an AFI Life Achievement Award and a Kennedy Center Honors recipient. He should be considered an equal to other legendary musical comedy stars, like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, especially considering his remarkable athletic and acrobatic “Make ‘Em Laugh” number in the beloved Kelly-Stanley Donen MGM musical SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (‘52), in which he literally backflips off walls, leaps over a sofa and even wrestles with a fabric mannequin. It was a gravity defying routine that is still a work of brilliance nearly 70 years later.
What makes that number even more astonishing, is that it was O’Connor’s second attempt at the exhausting routine that’s captured on film. He told me in a 2002 Los Angeles Times interview that “when they filmed it, no one checked the aperture of the camera properly. It was all fogged up. So, the whole day’s shooting was ruined. We had to go back and do it again. But for me, it kind of helped because I knew it better and I was able to do it better in the number.”
During his heyday, O’Connor had it all. He was adorable, impish, possessed a lovely voice, great tap-dancing skills and uncanny comedic chops. And, he managed to hold on to his dignity and get laughs playing straight man to a wisecracking mule in Universal’s extremely lucrative FRANCIS series. In 1997, he told me that he loved doing the franchise, which began in 1950 with FRANCIS. “It was wonderful,” he noted. “It gave me a chance to get away from the song-and-dance character. I never thought they would be that successful.”
O’Connor quipped that he had a “fantastic” relationship with the mule, voiced by Chill Wills. “I have worked with a lot of jackasses! I’ve had plenty of experience. We were very dear friends until he started getting more fan mail and that was the end of that! That broke up our relationships. Ego clashed with ego.”
So why did superstardom evade him?
After all, when the Film Society of Lincoln Center honored him 1997, The New York Times’ dance critic Anna Kisselgoff gushed, “To call Donald O’Connor a song-and-dance man is like calling Shakespeare a strolling player.” O’Connor’s timing was off. When he reached the height of his popularity in the early 1950s, the studio system and big movie musicals were on their way out. He only made a handful of musicals after SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN. And then movie offers basically dried up after the ill-fated biopic THE BUSTER KEATON STORY (‘57), which tanked with both critics and audiences.
And then there was his life.
O’Connor made audiences laugh, but his real-life was anything but joyous. He was literally born in a trunk in 1925 to a circus strongman and a circus acrobat. He lost his father at six months old when his father died of a heart attack in the middle of his routine. O’Connor’s overbearing mother put her children in the act. O’Connor told me he joined the family act when he was just 13 months old. “The first thing I did was dance and do acrobatic trips.” O’Connor told me that his mother never sent him to school. His sister was killed when she was hit by a car, and when O’Connor was 12, his brother Billy died of scarlet fever.
He began drinking when he was about 19 years old while serving in World War II and began to rely on the bottle. His New York Times obituary quoted him saying, “Instead of coming home and having one or two drinks, I’d have one or two bottles.” O’Connor had a heart attack while in his 40s, spurred by his use of nitroglycerin pills before his nightclub acts so he would have the stamina for his routines. He would later have quadruple-bypass surgery in 1990. O’Connor had a physical collapse in 1978 due to his alcoholism. He was sober by 1979 and remained so until his death at 78 in 2003.
I got the opportunity to interview him three times: in the early 1980s, when he was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in a production of Show Boat as Cap’n Andy; in 1997 when he co-starred in the Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau comedy Out to Sea; and in 2002 when he was appearing at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ tribute to SINGIN IN THE RAIN.” Each time I found him charming and sweet.
I was recently watching William A. Wellman’s action-adventure Beau Geste (‘39) and there was O’Connor charming as the younger version of Gary Cooper’s character. He’s was equally enchanting in his first major film SING YOU SINNERS (‘38), in which he portrays Bing Crosby’s younger brother (Crosby is actually old enough to play O’Connor’s father) who becomes a jockey. He became a teen dream when he was put under contract at Universal in the early 1940s, usually appearing with Peggy Ryan in a series of youth-oriented musicals. Critics took notice of the teenager with The New York Times praising his turn in the musical comedy MISTER BIG (‘43), stating “as fresh and delightful a performance as any jaded eye could care to see.”
O’Connor told me that he did 14 films in one year before he entered the service. “The pictures were making so much money, they tried to get in as many as they could so they could release them once every three months while I was in the service. So, when I was in the service, my career was going up all the time. They all made a fortune for the studio.”
He was so popular in the 1950s that he hosted the Academy Awards in Los Angeles in 1954 (Fredric March anchored in New York) and that same year won the Emmy as the host of The Colgate Comedy Hour. And after watching him performing on Texaco Star Theater, New York Herald Tribune’s critic John Crosby enthused that O’Connor was “one of the greatest all-around talents in show business.”
I went on YouTube to watch clips of O’Connor recently. I suggest you do, too. It’s uplifting and joyous watching his fun routine on skates in the “Life Has its Funny Little Ups and Downs” from I LOVE MELVIN’S (‘53), which reunited him with his SINGIN IN THE RAIN costar Debbie Reynolds. And I also enjoyed his “I Love a Mystery” routine from the Deanna Durbin musical SOMETHING IN THE WIND (‘47), in which he duets with numerous colorful balloons.
After he began sober, O’Connor returned to work in such films as Milos Forman’s RAGTIME (‘81) and Barry Levinson’s TOYS (‘92), and he continued to work on stage, in clubs and on TV. He told me in 1997 that retirement was a dirty word to him, and even at 72, he was on the road about 32 weeks a year. “It keeps me really busy. I sing, dance, do comedy.” I told him that he should do more movies. “Well, I know it,” O’Connor said, laughing. “Get in there and talk it up. Be my agent!”
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