What the eye hears, p.33
What the Eye Hears, page 33
TOO DARN HOT
A star did not have to be an accomplished tap dancer, yet it was still possible for an accomplished tap dancer to be a star. As a child in Houston, Johnnie Lucille Ann Collier showed signs of rickets and was enrolled in ballet classes as physical therapy. She loathed ballet. She wanted to dance to drums. By age eleven, she was supporting both her divorced mother and herself with her dancing. She called herself Ann Miller and her style “machine-gun.” In the early forties, Ripley’s Believe It or Not would officially designate her “the world’s fastest tap dancer,” clocking her at 598 taps per minute in a contest with a typist. While her feet were firing away, her hands ran up and down her body, hinting at burlesque. The sounds she made with her feet were self-accompaniment, drums she could shake to. Where Eleanor Powell held her mouth open, Miller bit the air, ardently, with a hard-sell seduction that many people found sexy.
At thirteen, she was in New Faces of 1937, and in her early films, the influence of Powell is apparent, down to the broken wrists in endless turns. During a successful sojourn on Broadway in George White’s Scandals of 1939, a more distinctive persona emerged, and in Too Many Girls (1940), it was captured on-screen: Miller in a sombrero and a split skirt, tapping in a manner to match Desi Arnaz beating bongos. For Columbia she made a dozen films in half as many years, cheap B movies that almost always turned a profit. They were war-effort films, and Miller’s numbers were morale-boosting. In Reveille with Beverly (1943), she taps a V for Victory, her path outlined in flames. In Jam Session (1944), she rivets the floor, backed by a chorus of Rosie the Riveters. Like Grable, Miller was a serviceman’s dream, just not the kind the men wrote home to Mom about. Her solo in the otherwise army-based movie Hey, Rookie (1944) is an ersatz belly dance with taps.
In 1948, after Powell had retired, Miller moved to MGM, taking to the big-budget glamour as to her natural habitat. In Easter Parade (1948), she gets to dance with Astaire, though Judy Garland is his love interest. (There are worse fates than second billing: Miller’s maid in the movie is played by Jeni LeGon.) In her libidinous number in On the Town (1949), she actually says, “I really love tom-toms,” and in another tom-tom-loving number in Small Town Girl (1953), eighty-six musicians hide under the stage, with their arms and instruments poking up through it. Miller dances around this obstacle course, a late flourish by Busby Berkeley, and her long chain of tap turns outdoes Powell. Yet the quintessential Miller routine is “Too Darn Hot” in Kiss Me, Kate (1953). In pink heels, elbow-length pink gloves, and a pink bustier with a bit of fringe for a skirt, she taps all over the furniture while musicians scream, “Go, girl, go!” Stripping, spinning, shimmying, she beats out the same rhythm as the bongo player, then pumps out sixteenth notes as she fans herself. The steaminess is pleasurably absurd, yet the full impact can be appreciated only, as intended, with 3-D glasses.
As a movie star, Miller always made an impression. As a tap dancer, she stepped within a narrow territory. She worked with many choreographers, sometimes more than one at a time. For Easter Parade, Robert Alton choreographed her movements, but he didn’t tap, so Nick Castle helped her with the steps. For “Too Darn Hot,” Hermes Pan could offer her both steps and styling, but Busby Berkeley was a different kind of director. The surreal mise-en-scène was his concern, but for tap steps, Miller had to look to her uncredited coach, Willie Covan. The inventor of the Double Around the World with No Hands was one of many craftsmen and experts who worked behind the scenes, or under the floor, of the studio system. Movies like Miller’s required that system, and it wasn’t as stable as it looked.
ASTAIRE EFFECTS
In the meantime, tap in the movies thrived. How could it not when Astaire was still at work? The age gap between him and his partners kept widening. Rita Hayworth was the most stunning, a schooled dancer who looked at ease in the ballroom numbers and whose youth allowed Astaire to keep current with the bobby-soxers, building a tap-and-swing duet around the Savoy step Shorty George. Vera-Ellen, on the bland side of pretty, had the technique of a true all-rounder. In her films without Astaire, her pert tapping gravitated to arrhythmic tricks and tap on pointe, but her skills inspired one of Astaire’s most intricate and beautiful mixes of tap and ballroom in one of his least popular films, The Belle of New York (1952). Astaire’s other partners couldn’t tap much. Cyd Charisse, with her ballet training and never-ending legs, didn’t even pretend.
The tap concentrated in Astaire’s solos. In You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), his enlisted-man character is sentenced to a guardhouse where his fellow inmates improbably include a band of black musicians. Smitten with Hayworth, Astaire can’t help but beat out rhythms, and his dance manages to appear sportively and improvised even though it’s constructed with the theme-and-variations logic of a composer. In his solo for Holiday Inn (1942), a dance for the Fourth of July, he walks on jauntily, a cigarette between his lips and his hands in his pockets. The pockets are stuffed with firecrackers, which he detonates in between taps. New gag, old effect: Astaire’s tapping was always setting off strings of explosions. “Sometimes,” he later wrote about the solo, “you want to bang your feet down so hard in a tap dance that you get shin-bucked or stone-bruised. In this one I had a completely satisfactory outlet with those dynamite noises.”
And in The Sky’s the Limit (1943), an underrated film about the home front, his tap explosions serve as an outlet for frustration and anger. Rejected and misunderstood by his beloved and soured by the war, Astaire’s character sings “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” in bar after bar until he’s alone and thoroughly drunk. Astaire’s previous drunk dances had been comic. Here, launching himself onto a bar top, he taps away furiously, smashing three stacks of glasses and shattering a mirror with a barstool. In truth, his tapping and his marvelous gliding along the bar’s surface seem more an expression of what-the-hell than of rage, yet the outright destruction must have been startling at the time, exposing the violence in Astaire’s style.
Astaire didn’t go there again. In his tap solos, he played with tricks of process photography and mechanical illusion-making—dancing with a chorus of Astaires (Blue Skies, 1946), dancing in slow motion (Easter Parade, 1948), dancing with shoes that come to life before he shoots them (The Barkleys of Broadway, 1949). Most famously, he danced up walls and across the ceiling (Royal Wedding, 1951). But it remained true that no special effects were as good as what he could do on his own. Blue Skies has its own slow-motion section and Royal Wedding has a hat rack that comes to life, but in both of those cases, it’s Astaire who effects the magic, just by dancing.
Even in terrible films, Astaire managed great solos—such as the screwball routine all over two pianos in Let’s Dance (1950), with its sublime sailing exit, Astaire riding a series of chairs to the ground with all the finesse he applied to dipping Ginger. Through the fifties, he kept minting numbers good and great as the culture shifted under his feet. From the mid-forties on, the scores for his films tended to borrow from the twenties and thirties. Irving Berlin wrote “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in 1929, and in 1946, when Astaire used the song for Blue Skies, its staggering syncopations remained his comfort zone, recalling the days when Broadway stars took trips uptown. Ensconced in Hollywood now, Astaire got his inspiration from records, at home, drumming and dancing along.
THE TAP-DANCING TRUCK DRIVER
“Puttin’ on the Ritz” was advertised as Astaire’s last solo, since he planned to retire. But two years later, Astaire agreed to star in Easter Parade in order to replace Gene Kelly, who had injured an ankle playing volleyball. It was a gracious move, or a cunning one, since Kelly was already assumed to be Astaire’s chief rival, if not his replacement, as Hollywood’s premiere song-and-dance man. Comparisons between Astaire and Kelly were and are inevitable. Astaire: slim, elegant, understated in his evening clothes. Kelly: brawny, athletic, forceful in his tight-fitting T-shirt. This is the contrast that Kelly promoted. “Fred,” Kelly liked to say, “represented the aristocrat when he danced. I represented the proletariat.” That’s a tendentious way to put it, unless we’re talking about an aristocracy of talent, but it’s true that costume signified as much for Kelly as it did for the black class acts. He shunned the associations of formal attire as eagerly as the Nicholas Brothers sought them. That was one of many ways he altered the image of a tap dancer.
Kelly was indeed a product of working-class Pittsburgh, the third of five children in a tight-knit, upward-striving Irish Catholic family. His mother insisted that he and his siblings attend dancing school, and for a while they performed together in a vaudeville act called the Five Kellys. In Pittsburgh, this made Gene and his brothers a target. The neighborhood boys would attack the dancing sissies, and the Kelly boys would fight back. For the rest of his life, Gene was sensitive to the suggestion that dancing wasn’t manly. Initially, he didn’t want to be a dancer at all. In high school, he earned varsity letters in football and gymnastics and played with a semipro hockey team. Fred, the baby of the Kelly boys, was the most precocious entertainer, the one his mother expected to become a star. Gene started to change his mind about dance when he realized the effect it had on the girls at school: “Some of them thought I was bloody marvelous and pretty soon I began to believe them.” The Kelly family took over ownership of a dancing studio, and since Gene was the main teacher, they named it after him.
Before long, the Five Kellys had shrunk to the Kelly Brothers, Gene and Fred. The younger taught the older, and the fraternal pair became experts at stealing steps, pooling their plunder by spying on tap acts together and comparing notes. Gene would remember being particularly impressed by George M. Cohan, whose cocky swagger is obvious in the style Kelly would fashion for himself, and by Clarence “Dancing” Dotson, whose eccentric pantomiming isn’t. Dotson wasn’t the only black influence. Gene and Fred admired Bill Robinson and took classes from a black New Yorker named Frank Harrington. Once, when the Cab Calloway Orchestra was appearing nearby and needed an act to replace the Hollywood-bound Nicholas Brothers, the Kelly Brothers filled in. As Fred told the story, Calloway was shocked to discover that the Kelly Brothers weren’t black (the agent hadn’t indicated skin color), but impressed enough to put their names next to his on the marquee.
During the early years of the Depression, when their father was out of work, Gene and Fred supplemented their teaching income by doing their act in the lowest of dives. When customers threw coins, Gene was offended, barely restraining himself from punching somebody; when people yelled “Fag!” he swung. Being ignored was even worse. Wanting out of that world, Gene worked his way through college—a signal difference from vaudevillians like Astaire, not to mention black hoofers—and on summer visits to Chicago, he took classes in ballet and modern dance and traded steps with blacks in a seedy South Side rehearsal hall called the Snake Pit. In the Chicago public library, he read all the books on dance he could find, struck by the insistence of the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine that movement and gesture arise from character. Back at the Gene Kelly Studio of Dance, enrollment swelled, a tide of children floating in on fantasies of Hollywood glory, but Gene Kelly himself hesitated in his hometown, teaching and choreographing local productions. It wasn’t until 1937, when Kelly was twenty-five, that he chanced New York.
As a chorus boy in musicals, Kelly stood out immediately: talent, drive, a killer smile. But it was in a straight play that he revealed true distinctiveness. In William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, a boozily sentimental story about the regulars in a bar, the character of Harry the Hoofer is an unemployed vaudevillian. Playing him was a chance to create a character through dance, to find a dance style appropriate to the role. A Pittsburgh truck driver, Kelly would say, couldn’t come out and do a classical pose. (That was the example he always used, for the rest of his life.) But such a character could tap. Kelly was also trying to forge a specifically American style. It was an aim he shared with many ballet and modern-dance choreographers of the day, but unlike them, Kelly wanted to dance to the popular songs he had grown up with. Besides, as he later remembered, “At the time, the quickest way to establish yourself as an American was to throw a little bit of tap into your dance—even when it wasn’t called for.”
Kelly’s performance garnered him a greater opportunity along the same lines, the title role in the musical Pal Joey. Based on stories by the hard-boiled writer John O’Hara, Pal Joey had as its central character a small-time nightclub performer, a hustler, a heel. A potentially unsympathetic protagonist was unorthodox territory for American musical comedy, and Kelly was largely responsible for making it work. “After some scenes,” he remembered, “I could feel the waves of hate coming from the audience. Then I’d smile at them and dance and it would relax them.” The audience hated Joey, but it loved Gene. Even in the silent fragments of a bootleg film, the effect registers. He dances and he flashes that crinkly-eyed grin, and you forgive the cocky bastard, at least for a moment.
Kelly’s performance was exceptional in another way, and John Martin devoted one of his New York Times dance columns to explaining it. “A tap dancer who can characterize his routines and turn them into an integral element of an imaginative theatrical whole would seem to be pretty close, indeed, to being unique.” Integral was the operative term, as opposed to the usual removable specialty. It was the watchword of the theatrical era and would remain a guiding principle for Kelly. The show’s choreographer, Robert Alton, let Kelly craft his own routines to display different sides of Joey: a little pseudo-Spanish tap here, a little ballet there. Martin noted this influence of ballet in the oppositions and balances of Kelly’s body, an answer to the tap dancer’s problem of what to do with his torso and arms. Compared with the more natural-seeming solutions of Astaire or Bill Robinson, Kelly’s approach struck Martin as a bit too academic, but the dancer was young, attractive, the most promising talent since Astaire. Hollywood would be calling for sure.
In his first film role, opposite Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal (1942), and in many to follow, Kelly plays an egotistical, maddeningly charming cad, much like Joey except that he mends his ways at the end to win the gal. In a character arc like that, Kelly is always a little more convincing at the beginning. His dance duets with Garland are period pieces and pleasing as such. Kelly’s solo in Du Barry Was a Lady (1943) is also pedestrian, thickened only by his pantherine grace; in white tie and tails, he’s a swollen Astaire. A solo added to the wartime romance Thousands Cheer (1943) gave him more room. It’s a prop dance à la Astaire, the kind in which the dancer partners the room, but Kelly is a GI in T-shirt, jeans, and loafers. A mop and broom are his cane and partner. The number is thin on ideas and rhythm-poor, yet Kelly carries it with magnetism and muscle, boosting morale with a run of airplane turns, propeller arms whirring.
Like Astaire and Powell, Kelly soon gained control of his musical numbers. For his solo in Cover Girl (1944), he attempted a duet with his own conscience, played by himself in double exposure. The ambition was threefold: the idea was distinctly cinematic; it grew out of the story, expressing his character’s internal conflict; and everyone said it couldn’t be done. Bucking studio policy, Kelly took on the direction of the number himself, aided by Stanley Donen, a twenty-year-old chorus boy who had followed him from New York and who would be his chief collaborator for the next decade. A Jewish kid from South Carolina, Donen got hooked on dancing after seeing Astaire in Flying Down to Rio. For Cover Girl, the fact that he was a hoofer proved crucial, as he could play Kelly’s double in rehearsals and call out timings during shooting.
In the finished product, Kelly’s conscience emerges from his reflection in a window and asserts its tug in traded tap phrases. Kelly resists by fleeing, and as his conscience takes up the chase, the dance moves—up stairs and down poles and all over the street, climaxing in the kind of leaping turns that serve as strong evidence that Kelly, with more thorough training, could have made it as a ballet dancer. The conscience ends up in the window again, and Kelly smashes the glass, an echo of Astaire’s drunken rampage in The Sky’s the Limit (released just before Cover Girl was filmed). Despite that precedent, the alter-ego sequence was a breakthrough number. It was also a road not taken. Throughout the rest of his career, there would be a brooding Kelly and a tapping Kelly, an ambition and a talent, but seldom would they meet.
Emboldened, Kelly and Donen tried more. In Anchors Aweigh (1945), they paired Kelly with Jerry the cartoon mouse. According to the fairy-tale premise of the dream sequence, Jerry is a king who has outlawed singing and dancing because he believes that he cannot sing or dance himself. Kelly teaches him otherwise: all you need is a big, warm, happy heart. This is what tap means in Anchors Aweigh. The two tap out a nursery rhyme with their feet. The live dancer and the animated one interact ingeniously (the frame-by-frame preparation was grueling), and the whole thing ends with Kelly in a squat, attacking the camera as it tracks backward. That kind of movement of dancer and camera accorded with Kelly’s theories for generating three-dimensional force in a two-dimensional image. Astaire’s style, Kelly often explained, required one kind of filming; his more robust style, another. That sounds sensible—it worked for Kelly—but his innovations weren’t always improvements.
