Busby Berkeley

Busby Berkeley, born Berkeley William Enos on November 29, 1895, in Los Angeles, California, was an American choreographer and film director whose innovations in musical staging shaped the genre throughout the twentieth century. His father, Francis Enos, was a stage actor who died in 1904 when Berkeley was eight years old, and his mother, Gertrude Berkeley, was also a stage actress who later appeared in silent films in maternal roles. Among Gertrude's associates were actress Amy Busby, from whom Berkeley derived his professional name, and actor William Gillette. Berkeley made his stage debut at the age of five, performing alongside his family.

In 1917, Berkeley was living in Athol, Massachusetts, employed as an advertising and sales manager. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army as a field artillery lieutenant, where he drilled 1,200 soldiers in complex choreographic formations. That military experience with large-scale, precisely ordered movement informed his later work in the theater and on film.

Throughout the 1920s, Berkeley served as dance director for nearly two dozen Broadway productions, among them the 1927 musical A Connecticut Yankee, on which he worked as choreographer. His Broadway credits also include the 1928 musical Present Arms. As a choreographer, Berkeley prioritized his performers' capacity to form geometric patterns over their individual dancing technique, and his musical numbers were recognized for their scale and precision.

His film career began with Samuel Goldwyn's Eddie Cantor musicals, where he developed signature techniques including the parade of faces, in which each chorus girl received an individual close-up, and the top shot, a kaleidoscopic overhead camera angle that also appeared in the 1932 Universal film Night World. Rather than employing the standard four cameras, Berkeley used a single camera to maintain complete control over how his sequences could be edited. His numbers typically began within the physical boundaries of a stage but expanded into spaces and perspectives achievable only through cinema, before returning to shots of a curtain and applauding audience. The numbers were largely decorative and upbeat, with some costing approximately ten thousand dollars per minute more than the surrounding film, though "Remember My Forgotten Man" from Gold Diggers of 1933 addressed the hardships faced by World War I veterans during the Great Depression.

Berkeley's association with Warner Bros. in the early to mid-1930s produced some of his most celebrated work. He choreographed five consecutive musicals for the studio: 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, Dames, and Fashions of 1934, as well as Wonder Bar and In Caliente, both featuring Dolores del Río. As the large-scale musical format declined in popularity, Berkeley transitioned to directing non-musical films, resulting in the 1939 John Garfield vehicle They Made Me a Criminal, a box office success and the only non-musical feature he directed. At MGM, he encountered friction with Judy Garland and was removed as director of the 1943 production Girl Crazy, though his staging of the number "I Got Rhythm" was retained in the finished film. That same year, at 20th Century-Fox, he choreographed Carmen Miranda's "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" for The Gang's All Here. He returned to MGM in the late 1940s to create Technicolor finale sequences for the studio's Esther Williams films, and his final choreography credit was MGM's Billy Rose's Jumbo in 1962.

In his personal life, Berkeley purchased the Guasti Villa at 3500 W. Adams Boulevard in the West Adams district of Los Angeles in 1937, owning the property, which was built in 1910, until 1944. The home is now designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 478. Berkeley was married six times, to wives including actresses Merna Kennedy, Esther Muir, Claire James, and Etta Dunn, who survived him. In 1938, he was named in an alienation of affections lawsuit involving Carole Landis, and he was at one point engaged to Lorraine Stein. In September 1935, Berkeley was responsible for an automobile crash on Roosevelt Highway in Los Angeles County in which two people were killed and five were seriously injured. Witnesses testified that he had been speeding and changing lanes, and some reported smelling alcohol on him. Two trials for second-degree murder ended in hung juries, and he was acquitted at a third. Following the death of his mother and a slowdown in his career, Berkeley attempted suicide in July 1946 by slitting his wrists and taking an overdose of sleeping pills, after which he was hospitalized for an extended period.

A resurgence of interest in his work during the late 1960s brought Berkeley back to public prominence, and he toured colleges and lecture venues discussing his career. At the age of seventy-five, he returned to Broadway to serve as production supervisor on a revival of No, No, Nanette in 1971, which starred his former Warner Bros. colleague Ruby Keeler, who had also appeared in 42nd Street. Both Berkeley and Keeler had cameo roles in the 1970 film The Phynx. Berkeley died of natural causes on March 14, 1976, in Palm Springs, California, at the age of eighty, and is buried at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California. He was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 1988.