In her autobiography, Betsy Blair wrote with notable affection towards Gene. ‘He treated me like a little angel’. Gene said to her: “What I want, is what I have, you - to pick flowers and read by the fireplace and sing around the house - my little white dove with burnished feathers that wakes up every morning smiling.”
Because Betsy was aware what the failure of their marriage would mean to Gene, she felt guilty about having to go through with the divorce. She also felt bad that their break-up coincided with the virtual disappearance of the screen musical. Now there wasn’t even that to which he could cling. Nor did he have any really deep friendships.
‘For all the scores of people he surrounded himself with,’ Betsy said, ‘he was a very private man. People liked, respected, and enjoyed him. But few people understood him. I always thought this was a pity, and never more so than after the divorce when, apart from Kerry, the only other person he could cling to was Jeannie (Coyne). But he had no real close male friends. After Dick Dwenger, his best friend, was killed in the war, I felt he should have another ‘best friend’. I even introduced him to Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote ‘Marty’, because I knew they were politically on the same side of the fence and should have a lot in common. But it didn’t happen. After fifteen years of marriage and hundreds of people passing through our lives, I had to face the fact that Gene was a loner’.
Kerry loved the idea of her father being famous, but again the ‘prevailing ethos’ in the Kelly household was that one must not be too proud, or boast. ‘Though he was always surrounded by people who believed him to be as outgoing in his private life as he was on the screen, he was very complex and really rather lonely’, Kerry recalled of her father, ‘He was always restless - trying to prove something to himself all the time’.
