What the eye hears, p.17
What the Eye Hears, page 17
Marilyn Miller, another Wayburn pupil, was Ziegfeld’s biggest success. She was four when she joined her stepfather’s vaudeville act, and her performing never lost a childlike exuberance. Framed by blond ringlets, her darling smile and sunshiny eyes captured the hearts of a generation of theatergoers. In 1918, when she joined the Follies, she was twenty. Two years later, she shot to fame in the Ziegfeld-produced Jerome Kern musical Sally. It was a Cinderella story, the era’s favorite plot, tracking the rise of an orphan who makes it into—where else?—the Follies. By the time of Miller’s next show, Sunny, she was the highest-paid performer on Broadway, the ingenue queen of musical comedy in the twenties.
At the end of that decade, when sound films came in, Hollywood hired Miller to reproduce those landmark performances, and so, acknowledging the time lag and the change of medium, we can still catch a glimpse of what the fuss was about. Miller’s joy shines through, though not quite with movie-star projection. “Come on, let’s have some fun,” she says before her tap number in Sunny (1930). Flat-footed, in pants, she starts at an easy tempo, knocking out stop-and-start rhythms before building to turns and leg-crossing ballet jumps. In “All I Want to Do, Do, Do Is Dance,” a tap number added to the film of Sally (1929), Miller wears a skirt, but there’s still a disjuncture between the feminine styling of her upper body and the drags, swivels, and heavy breaks of her lower half. The fun she’s having is that of a girl playing at boys’ games with no intention of being mistaken for a man. Her technique may be beginner-intermediate and sometimes wobbly, yet her smile never dims. When Miller tied on her ballet shoes, critics of her own time found her “poetical,” but her sloppy, superficial ballet technique holds up less well on film. A musical theater star of the twenties could count on the trick of turning on her tiptoes to make an audience swoon. Sally’s debut with the Follies, the culmination of the Cinderella plot, came in the form of a Butterfly Ballet. It had to. Ballet signified aristocratic refinement and fairy-tale endings. Tap was for horsing around.
ECCENTRICS
Horsing around is what the era’s male musical comedy stars did. Leon Errol, a Follies regular and Marilyn Miller’s co-star in the stage version of Sally, was a physical comedian, but his drunk act was a dance. He specialized in “rubberlegs,” a term that explains itself, as does the similar label “legomania,” both in the general category of “eccentric.” The cartwheels, splits, and walkovers favored by women constituted a female parallel—Evelyn Law hopping across the stage with one foot nuzzling her ear. But “eccentric” was principally reserved for men, for funnymen. Most tapped.
A child of the prairie, Fred Stone grew up as a blackface breakdown dancer. With David Montgomery, he broke into musical comedy playing a buck-and-winging Moses and Aaron. In 1903, the pair found greater fame as the Tin Man and the Scarecrow in the original Wizard of Oz, where, in straw-stuffed clothing, Stone fashioned the archetypal eccentric dance character, ever on the verge of collapse. One critic noted the “perfect rhythm with which he does the anatomically impossible.” Montgomery died in 1917, but Stone lasted as a Broadway draw through the twenties. When he made it into movies, it was as a nondancing character actor. (He’s the bulb-nosed father of Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams.) It was Stone who said that ragtime changed stage dancing, and it was his eccentric type that he meant. Ragtime syncopations expressed through African-derived isolations: that could make white America laugh.
Lauded as Stone’s successor, Harland Dixon was a superior dancer. This was the same Harland Dixon who had tried to copy George Primrose’s style and it came out funny. In the beginning, he was a wing dancer, stringing together eight different wing steps in sixty-four bars of music. One day, he put in what he considered a “rest step,” slowly drawing in a leg. The step got a laugh and also a bigger hand than any of his exhausting wings. “From then on,” Dixon later said, “I never did wings except in hotel lobbies when other dancers were around.” Around 1912, Dixon gave up blackface, and he and his partner, Jimmy Doyle, moved from burlesque into vaudeville. They did challenge dances, imitation dances: Italian, Chinese, Russian, Negro. Dixon’s Irish jig was a display of confrontational temperament, a style he admitted to having stolen from Jimmy Monahan, who jigged with a glass of beer on his head at Coney Island. Dixon was less concerned with coining steps than with using them to convey character; when he played a man in a dentist’s office, he tapped out his trepidation all over the chair. This helped him and Doyle fit into musicals, and after the pair split in 1921, Dixon continued to move between vaudeville and Broadway. Critics adored him, but it wasn’t until well after Dixon retired that he appeared in a movie, Something to Sing About, a 1937 film starring and produced by his buddy James Cagney; in a sailor number, he shows his knack for turning an ordinary tap routine into farce.
James Barton may have been an even greater comedy dancer. Born into an Irish-American theatrical family in 1890, he performed from age four, but he didn’t make it onto Broadway until he was nearly thirty. In 1923, he carried Dew Drop Inn with some fourteen different routines, including burlesques of a dying swan and of a waltz danced earlier in the show. For the critic Alexander Woollcott, Barton could be compared only with Nijinsky and Chaplin. Heywood Broun hailed him as a genius, citing his ability to be “sublime and grotesque at the same time.” Reviewers described Barton, like Master Juba, as dancing with his toes, his legs, his ribs. His role in Dew Drop Inn had been created for Bert Williams just before Williams died, and the reviewer’s comment that Barton was “as negroid as Bert Williams used to be” was likely prompted not just by his blackface but by his pelvic freedom. Tap dancers—black and white—recognized Barton as a great in their field, and he called himself a drummer who danced best with a good jazz band. Nevertheless, as one tap master phrased it, Barton was “more fun to watch than to listen to.” In 1933, he began a five-year run as a sharecropper in the play Tobacco Road. He played Hickey in The Iceman Cometh and memorable cowboys. When cast in a musical, he would break out his soft shoe, but few thought of him as a dancer anymore. Only the 1929 short After Seben preserves his early style. There, his wit is evident—anarchic, self-mocking—but it’s hard now to see him as more than a white guy in blackface, shown up by the film’s black dancers.
Jack Donahue—the Boston lad who became a dancer, not a fighter—was in the Barton-Dixon line. He and Dixon were good friends, and their third musketeer was Johnny Boyle. Modestly, Donahue wrote of Boyle as the “best all-round tap dancer,” and Dixon agreed that Boyle was a great tap dancer—with zero personality. Boyle went into teaching. In a 1929 ad for the school he ran with Donahue, his photo looks like the mug shot of a man who could work for Capone. (He also appears in that 1937 Cagney film with Dixon, where he somehow manages to leave almost no impression while doing flips.) Donahue was different. Playing an orderly, he used a whisk broom to turn his sand dance into comedy. In Sunny and Rosalie, he played opposite Marilyn Miller, a pairing that indicated his rising professional stature. He was lauded for his “almost endless variety of steps” and for such tasty tapping that “the very orchestra stops to listen,” yet by the time of Rosalie, in 1927, he was, in the words of Brooks Atkinson, “more clown than hoofer.” He died in 1930 and made no films.
George White’s early life followed a similar trajectory, except that he started out on New York’s Lower East Side, as Isadore Weitz. After his bankrupt family decamped to Toronto, young Weitz discovered he could earn more by hoofing than by hawking newspapers. (He would recall “the sharp sting as the nickels and pennies hit your legs.”) He ran away to New York and worked for such underworld characters as Steve Brodie. His first dance partner was a black boy. With a white boy, Benny Ryan, he broke into musicals and traded steps with Dixon and Donahue on Forty-second Street at midnight. In the Follies, he paired up with Ann Pennington, of the dimpled knees. Instead of becoming a comedian, however, White became a producer, at age twenty-six. His “Scandals,” starting in 1918 and running annually through 1926, then more sporadically into the late thirties, gave the Follies its strongest competition in the revue business. White still danced—the Times called him “an adept stepper and a facile imitator of the steps of others;” he does a competent soft shoe in George White’s 1935 Scandals, one of two films he directed. But mostly he hired dancers: Pennington and Dixon and Tom Patricola, a knock-kneed zany who tapped heavily while strumming a ukulele. Almost no white eccentrics of the twenties made it into the thirties as dancers. It was one of their own who changed the mold.
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“He is one of those extraordinary persons whose sense of rhythm and humor have been all mixed up,” wrote Alexander Woollcott in 1919 about one more eccentric: Fred Astaire. This one performed with his older sister, Adele, the obviously gifted child in the family. Born in Omaha, of Austrian and Alsatian parentage, they began as a child act on the vaudeville circuits of the teens, stepping up and down a wedding cake as bride and groom in one number and dancing as a lobster and a glass of champagne in another. For his solo, the boy managed buck-and-wing on toe-tip. They studied at New York dancing schools, including Ned Wayburn’s factory, and Wayburn designed an act for them. (A 1907 profile of Wayburn mentions the Astaires as “wonderful little clog dancers from Omaha.”) Later, a vaudevillian named Aurelio Coccia taught them “smart” dances in the mode of Vernon and Irene Castle. They passed their awkward years touring small-time theaters in the opening slot, trudging their way up the billing and into the big time. Fred labored ceaselessly to improve, scrutinizing other acts and beginning to choreograph. Adele couldn’t be bothered. She got all the good notices.
Adele had a gamine charm, a refined outrageousness, ready-made for the twenties. After she and Fred appeared in their first Broadway revue, Over the Top, in 1917, she continued to receive most of the attention, from critics and college boys alike. But the critics also began to notice her gangly, big-eared, already balding brother, who was nimble and “ease-limbed.” The siblings became known for a jokey bit called the Runaround, during which, shoulder to shoulder, deadpan, they accelerated in a circle to an oompah beat. Their dancing was brightening, bubbly—all the more so since it looked, in the words of a Times reviewer, “apparently impromptu.” And they could handle the comedy part of musical comedy and take on speaking roles.
In London, critics greeted their dancing as a new American art. “Grotesque and eccentric dancing is familiar, but humor combined with vivacity and art and nimble daintiness is a novelty.” Royalty and the smart set invited the Astaires into their social circle, putting a permanent crease in Fred’s mid-Atlantic sense of style. Back in New York, the siblings were cast in Lady, Be Good!, with the first full score by Fred’s buddy from vaudeville, George Gershwin. The tricky pattern of “Fascinating Rhythm,” a song actually addressed to a maddeningly catchy cadence, required a rhythmically adept singer. Offstage, Astaire and Gershwin played stride piano together and traded tap steps. Woollcott was soon writing about the affinity between Gershwin’s rhythms and Fred’s feet. Others would soon note how Astaire’s dancing visualized music and how audiences held their applause in order to listen. A year into the run of Lady, Be Good!, Fred got bored with his solo and inserted tap. It stopped the show, so he added more. Virtuosic tap was something Adele did not do.
While Lady, Be Good! was knocking ’em dead in London, Astaire made an audio recording. The time is April 1926. The number is “‘Half of It Dearie’ Blues.” The composer is at the keys. When Astaire goes into his dance, his rhythms are clear and thumpy. There’s a little Shim Sham avant la lettre and sections that sound like a heavy-footed Bojangles, but Astaire is much less tidy than Robinson, much more apparently impromptu in sound. “How’s that, George?” he asks, and Gershwin answers: “That’s great, Freddie. Do it again.” Now Astaire goes to town. When he almost misses an offbeat, he screams like a motorist swerving to avoid a collision, and when he pulls out the quick stuff he chortles. Gershwin’s right. It’s pretty great. And in 1926, especially in Britain, it must have sounded new.
8
IT’S GETTING DARK ON OLD BROADWAY
Ziegfeld’s weren’t the only Follies. In 1913, a Follies opened in Harlem. As a result of overdevelopment, the area had recently been made available to black tenants, who could be charged higher rents. The long migration of New York’s Darktown up Manhattan from the Five Points stopped and pooled, converging with a rising tide of blacks from the South and the Caribbean. The growing numbers of black tenants caused white tenants to flee, and so Harlem became Harlem, the great black metropolis. Neighborhood theaters—the Lincoln, then the Lafayette—acknowledged the demographic shift by opening their doors to black patrons and by booking productions those patrons might appreciate. J. Leubrie Hill’s Darktown Follies fit that qualification perfectly. His shows toured the same black theater circuit as those of the Whitman Sisters. Increasingly, Harlem was a hub for colored time.
The first Darktown Follies show at the Lafayette was My Friend from Kentucky, a broad and conventional comedy of social climbing. What made it distinctive was the dancing: the Texas Tommy, the tango. For the finale, the entire cast formed a hands-to-hips chain that circled backstage and on again. Ethel Williams, the girl on the end, did her own thing entirely. For Carl Van Vechten in the New York Press, this approached that undiscoverable grail, “the negro as he really is—and not as he wants to be on stage.” Van Vechten enjoyed how the performers enjoyed themselves. He enjoyed how the spectators enjoyed themselves, rocking and screaming like worshippers at a camp meeting. Writing again six years later, after he had established himself as the white authority on happenings uptown, Van Vechten could still remember the spontaneity and joy of “the real nigger stuff” in the Darktown Follies and how the rhythm had “dominated” him for days.
Florenz Ziegfeld paid the show a different kind of compliment. He bought the finale for his own Follies. He did not buy the cast, though he hired Ethel Williams and other Darktown players as tutors. It’s unlikely that the copy matched the original. (Van Vechten didn’t think so. The girls were pretty, he wrote, but “the Congo had disappeared.”) The Ziegfeld Follies program made no mention of J. Leubrie Hill or Ethel Williams or the Darktown Follies at all. Appropriation was an old story, but Ziegfeld’s purchase was a tentative indicator of a new surge of power in black theater. The Darktown Follies moved downtown onto Hammerstein’s Roof Garden and into the Bijou, a “theatre for colored people.” Neither of these incursions lasted more than a year, yet they softened up defenses. Rebuffed, the Darktown Follies rallied on colored time. In 1914, the troupe helped inaugurate the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, one more stop on an expanding black belt.
By 1914, the show also had an added attraction in Toots Davis. Sylvester Russell, the severe dean of black critics, judged Davis “the greatest buck dancer on the American stage, a whirlwind of science.” The First World War was on, and trench warfare in Europe suggested names for two tap steps credited to Toots. The first was called Over the Top. In this maneuver, the dancer leans forward and bounces off the tip of one toe as the opposite leg vaults over the top of it and lands with a heavy crash. Performed on alternating legs, the step makes a figure-eight pattern, and each crash looks perilous, as though the dancer might land on his face. When Davis played the Palace, the New York Tribune praised him for “a variety of new and surprising ways to be just on the point of falling on his ear.”
Similar praise would have served for the companion step, Through the Trenches. Bent over again, with all his weight on one leg, the dancer slides that leg backward along the outside edge of the foot, falls forward onto the opposite leg, slides backward, and so on. The arm across from the falling foot reaches for it, the other arm for the sky, and both arms swing as the legs alternate, the whole package going nowhere in style. Executed correctly, the step is beautiful in cross-body oppositions and a fluid sluicing of weight through the slide. A swoosh shunts into a bass note each time the weight shifts. Though trenches have been described as running in place, the best dancers make the step look more like speed skating. If you’ve seen a Broadway show or a Hollywood movie with tap in it, you’ve seen trenches, though likely in inferior form. Trenches are the most consistently faked step in the history of tap. The essential and hardest part—the slide—gets left out, transforming something smooth and free into something jerky and hectoring, the sound clomping along as outstretched arms beg for the applause that the step undeservedly receives. A proper trench is “pulled.”
DIXIE TO BROADWAY
Trenches and Over the Tops quickly became standard, and their combination a default finish. The new steps seem not to have made it to Broadway until black dancers did, and that wasn’t until 1921 and the advent of Shuffle Along. The story is a classic showbiz tale of perseverence: an ordeal of one-night tryouts in the boondocks, a booking in a broken-down New York lecture hall at the upper edge of the theater district, encouraging reviews, and slow ticket sales gradually ramping up through word of mouth into a society fad and some five hundred performances, a record surpassed that season only by Marilyn Miller’s Sally. All of this was particularly remarkable considering the obstacles a black show faced, such as the white backers who saw it in tryouts, laughed their heads off, then confidently insisted that white audiences wouldn’t enjoy it. On tour before and after the Broadway run, the production had to start over in each city and persuade the skeptical. But persuade it did. Shuffle Along proved again that black musicals could play white theaters and make money.
It was the brainchild of two vaudeville teams. The Dixie plot about a mayoral election came from the burnt-cork comedy pair of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. The songs, slangy but clean, came from the duo of singer-lyricist Noble Sissle and composer-pianist Eubie Blake. Before the New York opening, the creators were most worried about an operetta-style song that broke taboos by treating romance between two black characters seriously, but white audiences ignored it in favor of “The Baltimore Buzz,” the dance-craze number with lyrics advertising raggy-draggy sliding and gliding. Critics mostly disparaged the plot to rhapsodize over the music—“a breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie!”—and especially the infectious vitality of the dancing: struts, strolls, slow drags, one-steps, two-steps, and more.
