Saturday Night Live Torments Tootie To Get Real Tears For Meet Me In St. Louis
Over Hollywood's history, directors have done all sorts of quirky and morally questionable things in an effort to get a certain performance out of their actors. Francis Ford Coppola screamed abuse at Winona Ryder off-camera during the making of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and encouraged the other actors to do the same (Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins refused, according to Ryder). Then there's everything that William Friedkin did to the cast of "The Exorcist," from slapping them before shouting "action!" to firing live guns to get a shocked expression.
By comparison, "Meet Me in St. Louis" director Vincente Minnelli telling six-year-old actress Margaret O'Brien that her dog had died in order to make her cry for the 1944 musical "Meet Me in St. Louis" seems almost tame. Especially since it probably didn't actually happen (more on that in a moment). But that's the subject of a sketch on this week's episode of "Saturday Night Live," with guest host Kate McKinnon playing the role of O'Brien and Chloe Troast showing off her lovely singing voice as Judy Garland. You can check it out above.
The origin of this story is actually Minnelli's own memoir, "I Remember It Well." As the story goes, O'Brien's mother or aunt would prep her for emotional scenes by whispering in her ear before the cameras started rolling: "Like the salivating of Pavlov's dog, Margaret would get highly emotional and cry." One day, O'Brien was angry with her mother and didn't want to be prepped by her, and so her mother asked Minnelli to take over. She explained that Margaret had a little dog, and Minnelli would have to tell Margaret that somebody was going to kill her dog. He did as instructed, and got the tears they needed. "She did the scene in one take ... and went skipping happily off the set. I went home feeling like a monster."
Did Vincente Minnelli really tell Tootie her dog died?
It's a good story. But, at the risk of undermining the expertise of "Cinema Classics" host Reese De'What, the truthfulness of this anecdote has been called into question by Margaret O'Brien herself. In 2019 she told the Los Angeles Times that her mother never would have allowed such a thing to happen, and offered another explanation for her ability to cry on cue:
"I'll tell you how they got me to cry. I was in a contest with June Allyson [on the MGM lot] of who was the best crier, because June cried in a lot of her movies. I wanted to win the contest ... I thought, I'm not letting her win the contest. I started crying."
The dog story may have simply been a fabrication, either of Minnelli's or of biographer Hector Arce, who is co-credited as the author of "I Remember It Well." The little dog was real, though, and O'Brien told The A/V Club that she has the dog to thank for her start in show business. Her mother was a famous dancer, and on one day when she couldn't find a babysitter, she brought O'Brien and the dog along for a photo shoot.
"The photographer came out and said, 'That's the face I'm looking for. That's exactly the face I am looking for.' And my mother thought it was her, but it was the dog. He said, 'That's the dog I've been looking for to be on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.' And he said, 'Well, the baby's not so bad either. Do you mind if I put the baby in the picture with the dog?'"
Good dog.
"Saturday Night Live" returns on January 20, 2024, with guest host Jacob Elordi and musical guest Renée Rap.