HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD |
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HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD |
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Kelly was only one of Ken Hari's subjects |
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"Relax, sister, I'm from Perth Amboy, New Jersey." If you think that sounds like a Gene Kelly line, you're right. Kelly who died Feb. 2 at 83 at his Beverly Hills home, said it in "An American in Paris." Playing an ebullient painter, he is setting up an armload of paintings on a Paris street, and is approached by a young American woman, who attempts her second year college French on him as she discusses his paintings. I saw the clip. The film was made in 1951 by MGM on a back lot in Hollywood. Years later - in 1973- in Hollywood, when Kelly was having his portrait made by the boy genius Perth Amboy celebrity painter Kenneth Hari, Kelly crinkled his eyes and smiled his great Gene Kelly smile and told Hari, "That was you I was playing in "An American in Paris." "I didn't know what he meant until years later," Hari said this week from his home in Perth Amboy, where he showed me a film clip from a video. In the same room was a framed original pencil drawing for one of the portraits Hari had done of Pablo Casals, the great Spanish cellist who fled Franco and was living in exile in Puerto Rico. At the time, Hari hadn't seen the film so he didn't know what Kelly was referring to. "What didn't become evident until later," Hari said, "was that I actually did live that life - as a painter in Paris for 13 months - in 1977 and 1978." But Gene Kelly ended up marring Leslie Caron, whereas Hari courted a beautiful multilingual Cuban girl: "I didn't get the girl," Hari said, "but we remain friends." The painting that Hari did of Kelly was among the artifacts destroyed in a fire in Kelly's Beverly Hills home in 1981, Hari said, but Hari has the original drawings at his farm/studio outside Nashville. Other paintings lost in the fire included Picassos and a Mary Cassatt, an American impressionist, Hari said. "He was devasted," Hari said. Even outside Hollywood, Ken says, he and Kelly stayed in touch, and Kelly became a sort of a mentor. In 1976, Hari - whose peripatetic career took him to all parts of the country and the world - was in Nashville where he had a commission to paint 17 Grand Ole Opry singers such as Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe. One of the paintings was a full portrait of Minnie Pearl with her straw hat on, including the price tag. But what Ken did on his own got him in trouble with the Opry officials. He went out of his way to find and paint Deford Bailey, who has then in a nursing home but had been a bones player with Uncle Dave Macon, a banjo player and singer and one of the original down home musicians. The problem is that Bailey was black and the Opry officials objected to his being given consideration, Hari said. Hari had virtually completed all the paintings by then but the Opry decided not to hang them because of the incident, Hari said. They are now somewhere in storage. The incident led to newspaper stories and Hari's appearance on the talk and TV interview shows, "running my mouth off," he says. He wowed the brass with his ability to hold the viewer's attention with his enthusiasm and sincerity. Thus he was offered a shot as a replacement TV talk show host and he called Gene Kelly for advice. Kelly advised against it, and Hari turned the offer down. "Do what you do well and are trained to do," Kelly said. In addition to painting, one thing Hari does well is put his subjects at ease. "I don't know why I'm telling you all these things," his subjects often say as they're holding a pose. "It's like a confessional," Hari says of the sittings. For every character he has painted, he has an anecdote, or at least a one sentence characterization. Dustin Hoffman: "I like Dustin. He's nuts. He wanted me to paint his nose...You walk with him and you hear people calling out, 'Dustin! Dustin!'..." Salvatore Dali: "He was a friend of mine. I did several Dalis. In a couple, I painted him in a space suit, and dripping honey from his hands." Eli Wallach and Ann Jackson: "Wonderful people, warm and friendly." Bill Blass: "He asked me what to wear! Imagine that! He should be telling me!" Katherine Ann Porter, the writer of "Ship of Fools": "She kept the coffin that she was going to be buried in inside one of her rooms. As a gag, we stood up on it, and somehow a picture appeared in the papers." He's done portraits of Hank Snow, the cowboy singer, and C.P. Snow the writer. He painted Elie Weisel, the great moral figure and writer. He did Pele, the soccer player. "Don't forget Antonio Carlos Jobim," he said, "He wrote 'The Girl from Ipanema.' And Dr. Frank Netter, the great medical illustrator. He was my idol. He's probably educated more physicans than any other doctor." He painted the great mime, Marcel Marceau, in Paris and New York, with paint on his face, and without. And according to Hari, Marcel talked..and talked...and talked. Many of the people he has drawn are gone "I am losing my friends," he says. These include the Metuchen poet John Ciardi and Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer. And poet W.H. Auden, whom Hari knew in New York and has been a father figure. Auden wrote and dedicated poetry to him. He also knew and did a portrait of playwright Tennessee Williams, whom he called by his original name, "Tom." But if he is losing his friends, he is gaining others, as he paints. His father was a musician and a band leader and it was while he was traveling to perform at servicemen's bases that he accompanied him to Key West, Fla where, at the age of 6 or 7 in 1955, he met and drew a sketch of Ernest Hemingway. "That's nice, kid, Hemingway said, and patted me on the head," Hari recalls. The drawing is among his collected possessions. In years, after Hemingway shot himself, Hari did his portrait from memory. "Ernest was a very clumsy man," he said about Hemingway. "Hemingway's wife, Mary, insists the death was an accident," Hari says He has painted the late Peter Devries, one of my favorite comic novelists, and Kurt Vonnegut, author of "Slaughterhouse 5"; Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, and Ravi Shankar, with his sitar. He has done Gene Krupa, Stephan Grapeli, the jazz violinist, Artie Shaw ("Uncle Artie"), Benny Goodman with clarinet, and guitarist Les Paul, Chet Atkins... and Segovia, the classical master. He has done Duke Ellington and his son Mercer Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Enough already? He also did Norman Rockwell, George Burns, Sammy Kahn, the song writer, and Groucho Marx. Nowadays Hari paints from a rented suite in the St. Regis Hotel in New York. His portraits go for a minimum of $50,000 each, which he says is cheap, compared to what other portrait painters get. "Celebrities are different," he says. "You feel the aura of their talent. I try to get it in the painting." "What do you think of your life so far?" I asked him. "It's great," he said, "I love it. Can I get another one?" |
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