Stanley Donen, the last of a golden age of Hollywood directors, met me for a Japanese lunch at one of his favorite places, Bar Masa, near his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “How are you?” I greeted him, glad to shake his hand.
“I’m still here—as the song goes!” the 88-year-old Mr. Donen replied, and ordered a pick-me-up prosecco cocktail. Dressed all in black, this feisty, very engaging man—who began his professional life as a dancer—directed Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957), as well as Cary Grant and Hepburn in Charade (1963), and co-directed with Gene Kelly the eternal musicals On the Town (1949) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
“You know,” he mentioned casually, “sound was still a fairly new thing when I came into movies. And the reason musicals happened is because of sound. They could put music in the picture! That’s how it all began.”
Stanley Donen was raised in Columbia, South Carolina, the son of Mordecai Moses Donen, who ran a dress shop. Taunted anti-Semitically at school (the memory of it still stings him in the retelling), he found escapist sanctuary every afternoon in the local movie theaters. “I saw Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio when I was nine years old, and it changed my life. It just seemed wonderful, and my life wasn’t wonderful. The joy of dancing to music! And Fred was so amazing, and Ginger— oh, God! Ginger!”
He was a 16-year-old Broadway dancer in the chorus of Pal Joey when he met its star, the 28-year-old Gene Kelly. “Gene made it possible for me to become a director when I was in my 20s. And I went on to direct him and Fred Astaire too. Well, that’s a gift nobody else got. You have to have the luck, and you can’t do without it.”
I reminded him that when his sweeping opening sequence of On the Town revolutionized movie musicals he was only 25—a year younger than Orson Welles when he directed Citizen Kane. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Don’t print this,” he confided. “Citizen Kane is better.”
He called a waiter. “Hello! Help!”
“I’m right here, sir.”
He ordered kampachi jalapeño along with beef rice. “You can’t go wrong,” he said.
I mentioned several stars he’s directed— Grant, Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, Gregory Peck. “It was another world. I thought of them as gigantic, adult personalities. And you depended on their presence and power to get the picture made.”
But didn’t Grant say about himself, “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant”?
“But that’s not how I saw him! He thought of himself as a guy who’s got to make a living. But to me he was what movies were all about.”
Why isn’t a romantic thriller like Charade made today? “It was!” he replied, and laughed. “It was remade.” (Retitled The Truth About Charlie, Jonathan Demme’s 2002 remake of Donen’s classic wasn’t his finest hour and 44 minutes.) Stanley Donen has been married to beautiful women five times. I mentioned that his sister once said of him, “Stanley’s problem is he keeps thinking that romances will turn out like they do in the movies.”
“That’s absolutely right,” he responded. “In the movies, they always lived happily ever after.”
Nowadays he’s been happily unmarried to Elaine May for 12 years. “Have you asked her to marry you?” I wondered.
“Oh,” he replied, “about 172 times.”
He adores her. She gave him a silver medallion he wears round his neck. It’s inscribed, STANLEY DONEN. IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO ELAINE MAY.
In 1998, Martin Scorsese presented him with his Honorary Academy Award. The idea for his acceptance speech came to him in an inspired moment.
“When I got the news about the Oscar, I called my friend Marshall Brickman, who lives in the same building as me, and I said, ‘Marshall, can I borrow your Oscar? I just want to hold it.’ He said sure.” Brickman had won his Oscar for co-writing Annie Hall with Woody Allen. “It’s quite heavy and I held it close,” Donen went on. “And I started to sing, ‘Heaven, I’m in heaven / And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak … ’ ”
His acceptance speech—during which he danced cheek to cheek with his Oscar to Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” more usually sung by Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers in Top Hat—must surely rank among the most charming ever given.
“You know, it was for lifetime achievement. That’s a big thing to say to somebody.”
He looked like a kid again.
“Well, I mean it,” he said.