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Vincente’s elderly father and his brother, Paul, would be cared for by his Aunt Amy. While Vincente would keep up a correspondence with his relatives and he provided for them financially, his new employer would keep him so busy that extended visits were out of the question. Besides, Minnelli had a new family now. It was called the Freed Unit.

    MGM’s Dream Team: Minnelli and producer Arthur Freed on the set of The Clock , 1945. Director Stanley Donen said of his Metro colleagues, “Arthur Freed thought Vincente Minnelli was remarkable. He gave him anything he asked for. . . . He fought for it and got it.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

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    “A Joy Forever, a Sweet Endeavor . . .”
    IN APRIL 1938, MGM announced that it had acquired the motion picture, radio, and television rights to the title Ziegfeld Follies . The studio promised that a screen version of the Follies would go into production “shortly.” Five years later, Arthur Freed, Roger Edens, and a small army of assistants were still poring over the mountainous stacks of material that Metro had amassed concerning showman extraordinaire Florenz Ziegfeld, whom MGM producers seemed single-mindedly obsessed with.
    By 1944, virtually every writer, composer, and designer on the lot found themselves contributing to what was regularly being touted in the trades as a “colossal super production.” The Freed Unit’s Follies was so spectacular and sophisticated that it had no use for anything as pedestrian as a conventional plot. Like one of Minnelli’s Shubert revues, the Follies would forego story in favor of high-toned style. Such an opulent extravaganza would also provide irrefutable proof that MGM really did have “more stars than there are in the heavens,” as studio publicists liked to boast.
    As Freed and his minions envisioned it , Ziegfeld Follies would showcase every star in Metro’s lustrous galaxy. Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, and Lena Horne would be featured in the musical sequences. Fanny Brice, Red Skelton, and Keenan Wynn would handle the comedy sketches. William Powell, who had snagged an Academy Award nomination for MGM’s gargantuan 1936 biopic The Great Ziegfeld , would re-create his role as the flamboyant impresario, only this time he’d do it in luscious Technicolor.
Powell’s Ziegfeld would mastermind Metro’s Follies from his heavenly boudoir. “Just because I moved up here, did the Follies have to die, too?” muses a nectar-sipping Ziegfeld as he gazes down upon Culver City.

    Minnelli’s screen credit for MGM’s “super spectacular” Ziegfeld Follies . Many promising sequences were cut from the film: Fred Astaire’s “If Swing Goes, I Go, Too,” Avon Long serenading Lena Horne with “Liza,” and Fanny Brice whooping it up as the incorrigible Baby Snooks. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
    Billed as “the screen’s biggest picture,” Ziegfeld Follies was such a massive undertaking that it proved to be too much for George Sidney, who vacated the director’s chair after helming several sequences. aa By May 1944, Minnelli had officially succeeded Sidney as director, though the movie was so big that directorial chores were ultimately divvied up among Robert Lewis, Lemuel Ayres, Roy Del Ruth, Norman Taurog, and Merril Pye. As a result, there would be a noticeable variance in the quality of the sketches. Some routines dazzled, others fizzled. To Minnelli fell the plum-star turns, including several elaborate production numbers featuring the most graceful star in Metro’s firmament: the inimitable Fred Astaire.
    A pair of Astaire showcases in which the forty-five-year-old hoofer was effectively teamed with twenty-two-year-old Lucille Bremer (fresh from Meet Me in St. Louis ) immediately captured Vincente’s imagination. Dipping into his file of illustrated clippings for inspiration, he would lavish these sequences with the same inventiveness and visual ingenuity that had distinguished his work on the Broadway