Free Gwen Verdon: A Life on Stage and Screen by Peter Shelley

song “If You Loved Me Truly” cut from the soundtrack. Hermes Pan staged the dances, and it is said that Verdon agreed to coach Prowse in her numbers. Prowse had played an uncredited dancer in the United Artists musical comedy Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955) which was the next film project for Jack Cole and Verdon. It is thought that the women had met on this film which led to Prowse getting Verdon to help her on Can-Can .
    Released in March 1960, Can-Can received some notoriety after Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier who was on a trip to the United States, was brought to the film’s set to view a special performance. Can-Can was not a box office hit.
    Gentlemen Marry Brunettes , directed by Richard Sale, was shot from September 8, 1954, to early January 1955 at the Shepperton and MGM Studios in England and Paris Studio Cinema in France. Based on the novella “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes” by Anita Loos, it was a sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . Fox had considered protesting the production of the film because they felt that it would infringe upon their rights to make a sequel. So in order to avoid any complications, screenwriters Sale and Mary Loos (the niece of Anita) changed the names of the characters and much of the plot, retaining only the title and the idea of two American singers going to Paris.
    Connie (Jeanne Crain) and Bonnie Jones (Jane Russell), sisters and nightclub performers, work in Paris. Verdon appeared in a flashback to 1926 with Rudy Vallee at a party. She has two lines, “She’s disenchanted? We’re all disenchanted” before she dances and disappears into the crowd. Verdon wears a sparkly brown sleeveless flapper dress with waist sash, black bonnet and red beads, and has a long cigarette holder. However she cannot be spotted as a backup dancer in the scene once Russell and Crain appear in sparkly silver dresses to dance on a table as Mimi and Mitzi Jones to “Miss Annabelle Lee.”
    The film had its world premiere in Chicago on September 22, 1955, and opened in New York on October 29 with the tagline “See ’em sizzle in the big, buxom, beautiful musical!” The film was lambasted by A.H. Weiler in the New York Times and Ronald Bergan in his book The United Artists Story .
    Playing a maid, Verdon had an additional dance sequence filmed in the Jones sisters’ hotel room but it was cut. The New York Times (June 5, 1955) reported that the British Board of Film Censors supported the American Production Code Administration decision to cut Verdon’s dance sequence. The British censors found both her dance and costume objectionable, though it was said that the sequence would be retained for the American release. However the dance is missing from prints available in America and Britain. On the same date in Daily Variety it was reported that the dance was cut because Verdon wore a garter high on her thigh, which wasn’t acceptable. Other sources claim that in the number she was a Dior model who sheds her garments one by one, and that the number was deemed obscene for dancing that was too sexy in a costume too brief. In the September 23, 1955, Hollywood Reporter it was suggested that the reason for the cut was that she wore a rose in the wrong place. A still exists of Verdon’s burlesque costume for the number: a brief one-piece with flowers on the top and in her crotch, a garter linked to suspenders and black stockings, a big “chocolate box” bow at her back, black high heels, long black gloves and a feathered picture hat, and she holds a white parasol. Verdon herself would describe the cut dance as “just humorous and kind of athletic.”
    While she was in Paris, Verdon was asked by Robert Griffith, Fred Brisson, and Harold Prince to be in their next Broadway show Damn Yankees . The female lead was Lola, who was the Devil’s right hand, and the part required someone to dance but also sing and act. Carol Haney may have seemed like the producers’ obvious choice for the part and it