What the Eye Hears, page 27
That seems to have been the norm for dancers, Hollywood stars included. Every studio showcased its stable of talent in revue films, and just as some stars of the silent screen surprised audiences with their voices, others broke out time steps. MGM’s never-released (but subsequently rediscovered) revue The March of Time allotted a minute or so to the eighty-year-old Barney Fagan, the rival of George Primrose in minstrel days. This was around the same time that Fagan wrote his jeremiad against low expectations in tap. The tap he encountered in Hollywood must have driven him batty. It looks like something everyone could do and everyone was doing. “Everybody Tap” was, in fact, a song in Chasing Rainbows, a MGM backstager that also included the song “Happy Days Are Here Again.” They weren’t, not in 1930. But they might seem so while people were tapping. “Everybody Tap” was an invitation that the movies extended to the world. In 1930, the Dancing Masters of America announced that demand for tap shoes had increased 150 percent since 1928: “America has gone tap-crazy.”
* * *
On with the Show, filmed in 1929, follows the same formulas as the other early movie musicals, with a few significant differences. One is Ethel Waters, who is segregated from the plot but treated as the great artist she obviously is. Another is that the show that must go on is set on a Southern plantation, and during the big chorus dances (once again by Ceballos), two black couples come out and take care of the real work. In a levee number, they hoedown in straw hats and striped overalls; during a party, they dance while carrying trays with champagne bottles attached. Props don’t impede their hoofing. It’s fast, vibrant, up-on-the-toes but weighted, thick with wings and one-leg-over-the-other jumps. The taps don’t all register aurally, but you can sense that’s not the fault of these dancers, manifestly in-the-pocket, especially compared with whatever it is the white chorus is doing behind them. (Calisthenics? Patty-cake?) Who was this scene-saving quartet? The credits don’t give names, but when On with the Show was shown at Philadelphia’s Standard Theatre, moviegoers such as Fayard Nicholas recognized the Four Covans.
Child dodger of cowboy bullets, Chicago master of the Double Around the World, Willie Covan had formed a family act, around 1927, with his brother Dewey and their wives, Florence and Carita. As Willie described it, their eight-minute act included a tap waltz, a military drill, and a challenge dance, in addition to up-tempo precision work. In On with the Show, Willie’s dancing stands out, in time with the others but on a larger scale. You watch him to learn how the step should look. As a personality, though, Willie is a blank. The Four Covans tapped in a few more films the same year, but Willie’s career in front of the cameras ended just about as it began. By 1934, he had officially retired. He opened a dance studio and made himself a kind of Buddy Bradley for the West Coast, a private coach to the stars. MGM put him on the payroll.
In its initial borrowings from Broadway, the studios mostly ignored the blacks that Broadway had borrowed from. The Four Covans did dance in Hearts of Dixie, one of two tales of the black South released in 1929. The other film, Hallelujah!, a distinguished romanticization, used some buck-dancing black kids to evoke rural simplicity and some low-down steps to signal urban seduction. The only major career to emerge from either film was that of Stepin Fetchit, with his canny hyperbolizing of laziness. (Avoiding work in Hearts of Dixie, he puts his energy into a sand dance.) It would be a long while before the big studios made any more all-black musicals, but black two-reelers were a briefly plentiful experiment. By the middle of 1930, Buck and Bubbles had starred in six all-black shorts based on the Uncle Remus–like stories of Hugh Wiley. In and Out, from 1929, has the earliest footage of Bubbles’s dancing, the number in which he seems to be imitating Bill Robinson and saving his John Bubbles steps until the end.
Robinson’s film debut in Dixiana, an antebellum spectacle of 1930, comes near the end of the movie. Out of nowhere he appears, alone, in rags, holding a feather duster. As he dusts, his feet carry him, inevitably, down a flight of stairs. The number is not his finest work, yet for two minutes or so, a master tap dancer fills the screen. Then the plot finishes up without him. Robinson would have to wait five years for another chance in a mainstream film. Until then, he starred in “race movies,” all-colored films produced on tiny budgets and distributed to black theaters. Two were the backstagers Harlem Is Heaven (1932) and King for a Day (1934). These films make Broadway Melody look sophisticated. Robinson plays himself, or nearly: Bill, the world’s greatest tap dancer and compulsive gambler. King for a Day features a minstrel-show number during which he and some blacks in blackface commit terrible puns about color. Bill doesn’t wear cork, though. He dresses nattily, and his dance, nearly four minutes of wooden-shoe brilliance, confirms just about everything Broadway critics had praised in him. Harlem Is Heaven contains Robinson’s stair dance—one for the ages.
COME AND MEET THOSE DANCING FEET
As soon as Hollywood learned how to make musicals, it made too many of them. The public recoiled, and the studios pulled way back, but the retrenchment didn’t last long, because, in 1933, Warner Brothers released 42nd Street. It was another backstager, but a tough-talking one in which putting on the show was given the desperate urgency of jobs on the line. An ingenuous chorus girl steps in for the injured lead at the last minute, and the director gives her a pep talk climaxing in the immortal phrase “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!” For tap, the more telling line is the director’s exasperated rant at the chorus line he’s drilling in time steps: “Faster! Faster!” It gives you an idea of the dance values that California imported from New York. But at least most of these musical numbers were designed for the camera. And the raw kid out of the chorus, the character you’re meant to root for, is a tap dancer. The actress playing her was so suited to the role that she seemed not to be acting at all. Yet by the time she made this, her first film, the twenty-three-year-old Ruby Keeler was a Broadway veteran.
Ruby was born Ethel, in Nova Scotia, one of six children in a poor Irish Catholic family. She grew up in New York, and she learned her first jigs at her parochial school. Informed that Ruby was talented, her parents transferred her to the Professional Children’s School and into the Jack Blue School of Rhythm and Taps. Mr. Blue had worked with George M. Cohan, and he taught in the Cohan mode. It was in a Cohan show, The Rise of Rosie O’Grady, that Keeler joined her first chorus, at age thirteen. Winning a dance contest earned her jobs at nightclubs and speakeasies, El Fey and the Silver Slipper, working for the mob under the protective wing of the notorious mistress of ceremonies Texas Guinan. Keeler’s boyfriend was a mobster, Johnny “Irish” Costello, until an infatuated Al Jolson, more than twice her age, convinced her to become his third wife. Keeler was a specialty act, a Champion Charleston and Buck Dancer. When she moved into featured spots in Broadway musicals, the Times commented that although tap dancers were plentiful, this one had personality.
That personality was peculiar. Early silent films and photographs preserve the look. Pretty in a flapper’s bob, she goes through the motions of over-the-shoulder seduction, but those big, beautiful eyes—they’re dewy to the point of dopey, innocent to the point of oblivious. In 42nd Street and films that followed, Keeler isn’t like the other girls. They’re golddiggers: jaded, wisecracking, mercenary. She’s naïve, guileless, hardworking. Even when she’s wised up, she stays nice, with only a hint of demure rebellion that says, as her character in Dames does, “I’m free, white, and twenty-one. I love to dance, and I’m gonna dance.” But a Ruby Keeler character doesn’t live fast and she doesn’t dance fast, either. She taps clearly and hard. “I dance like a man,” she once said, “because all my teachers were men.” (She studied with Buddy Bradley, and possibly with Bill Robinson.) In the title number of 42nd Street, Keeler peels off her skirt to unveil her gams in shorts, but though she holds up her arms, she’s much less concerned with posing than with pounding out clog steps in her wooden shoes. The rhythms are simple, mainly swung eighth notes with a heavy backbeat, but they’re solid. Keeler is solid. She was right to call herself a hoofer.
* * *
Keeler claimed to have choreographed her own solos. It’s entirely plausible. The hoofing she does in 42nd Street is all her. When the camera tilts to reveal that she’s dancing on top of a taxicab and the scene opens up to a fantasia of New York that discloses a crime of passion and finishes with the chorus girls creating a skyline with their bodies—that’s all Busby Berkeley, who directed the number. Berkeley also came from Broadway. In the late twenties, he had made a reputation for himself as an up-and-coming dance director. That he brought to the position no training in dance or music raised no eyebrows back then. What did was his approach to rhythm. In the Times, John Martin praised him for delving “into the actual rhythmic structures of jazz,” pointing out how Berkeley had his chorus girls execute a five-against-four rhythm with one part of their bodies and a three-against-four with another. It sounds positively African. When Martin interviewed Berkeley about it, the dance director couldn’t explain what he had done. He got the girls together, watched what they did, and experimented. The things he tried in Hollywood, however, wouldn’t have much to do with rhythm.
He made the camera dance: that’s the standard line on Berkeley’s contribution to film. It’s partly true. His camera eye swooped high above the scene and it moved into the action, gliding between the parted legs of chorus girls as if it were Harold Nicholas. Berkeley had holes put in the studio ceiling so the camera could gain further altitude, and he had a monorail built so the camera could travel faster. But he was even more interested in what he arranged in front of the camera: enormous, metamorphic sets and lots and lots of girls. Berkeley had a multiplying imagination: if he saw four pianos, he imagined sixteen; if he saw one girl with a violin, he imagined dozens, with violins in neon. His sense of scale was extreme. The young women were pretty faces in close-up or they were pieces in a kaleidoscope. They were sex and the machine. As a field artillery lieutenant in the First World War, Berkeley had organized parade drills, and that sense of pattern found full expression in his Hollywood work, where what had been latently militaristic in Ziegfeld precision routines often became explicitly so. His musical sequences took Ziegfeld-style spectacle and magnified it to dimensions that could never exist onstage, though the fiction that the numbers were happening onstage was often maintained, at beginnings and endings, almost in jest.
The other joke was that Berkeley was a dance director who wasn’t really interested in dance. He selected his girls for looks. (“I never cared whether a girl knew her right foot from her left, so long as she was beautiful,” he said. “I’d get her to move, or dance, or something.”) When he let a tap dancer do her thing, it was usually in a stagebound introduction to the cinematic fantasy, as in Keeler’s taxi dance in 42nd Street or the soft shoe she performs (not so softly) before the teasing, voyeuristic spectacle of “Petting in the Park” in Gold Diggers of 1933. Alternatively, tap soloists served as pockets of individualism dwarfed by the collective vision: Lee Dixon on a giant rocking chair about to be blown to bits in the mammoth battle of the sexes of Gold Diggers of 1937. In the finale of Footlight Parade (1933), James Cagney is an American sailor searching for Shanghai Lil: Ruby Keeler in slanted eyeliner. They celebrate their reunion by hopping on a bartop to trade snare-drum cadences with their feet, then get swamped by a parade of marching sailors who merge like puzzle pieces into an American flag and the face of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Cagney had started out as a song-and-dance man in Broadway revues and vaudeville, and he remained one while a movie gangster. An electric presence on-screen, he was more graceful when not dancing. He and Keeler grew up in the same heavily Irish neighborhood, but where she was winsomely ungainly, Cagney tended to force his stiff-legged tapping in pseudo-balletic directions. He came from the school of Irish posturing in which an arch high in the back suggests something stuck in lower down. Make a quip like that and he’d slug you. It was an odd style, but it worked for Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which Cagney, playing George M. Cohan, out-Cohaned the original, careening around a stage in a complete triumph of personality over technique. (His dancing coach on that film was Johnny Boyle, the personality-bereft associate of Jack Donahue.)
There’s one major exception to Berkeley’s general disregard of dance: the “Lullaby of Broadway” sequence in Gold Diggers of 1935. The dancing doesn’t begin until a good six minutes into the number, after a montage contrasting the nocturnal revels of a Broadway baby with the daily grind of working folk. In what might be a dream, the film’s leads, Dick Powell and Winifred Shaw, find themselves the sole guests in a cavernous nightclub. An army of tap dancers marches in, fifty women with bare stomachs interpenetrated by fifty men doing something like a Nazi salute. When the orchestra cuts out for twenty-four measures, all you hear are distinct rhythms, the women holding up their skirts to take a turn, the men answering. Later, a trio of rhythm boys raises the difficulty level with wings, Berkeley filming them from above and also below, through a glass floor. Yet it’s the surrounding ensemble tapping that’s most striking. Normally, a multiplication of bodies decreases the intensity of tap, perhaps because ensemble tapping overwhelms the perception of this foot producing that sound. The editing helps subvert the craving for that synchronicity, delaying the cuts from group to group so that we hear the beginning of each phrase before we see it, and the predictable patterns of time steps bind together images of pretty faces and bared flesh filmed from oblique angles. The choreography hardly deserves the name, but the cold setting chills the tapping—relentless in its thundering, at once martial and erotic—and when the mob sings “Come and dance!” at Shaw, the friendly invitation takes on menace as the Broadway baby is crowded onto a balcony and off it to her death. The lullaby transforms into moral fable, and for once, massed tap dancing signifies something other than shared mirth.
Dozens of musical sequences mimicked Berkeley’s effects. Few matched his audacity. “Too Marvelous for Words” from Ready, Willing, and Able (1937) ends with Ruby Keeler and Lee Dixon tapping on an enormous typewriter with chorus-girl legs for hammers. The conceit is Berkeley Lite, but the dancing is more technically challenging and cleverly choreographed than anything Berkeley filmed. The duo circulates their steps all over the keyboard’s four tiers of round platforms, each the size of a tom-tom. They toss in wings and switch direction for the hell of it, as if trying to touch as many keys as possible while playing a variety of musically apt rhythms. The number was staged and directed by another Broadway transplant, Bobby Connolly, who appears in the film, stubby in stature and New York in accent. But the technique might be ascribed to Dixon, a talent out of Brooklyn, blond, twenty-two, and free. An inoffensive presence with a floppy style common among white hoofers of his generation, he had one big year in films.
Keeping up with Dixon, Keeler rises to the challenge. She wasn’t given many such opportunities in her movies, four with Berkeley followed by five choreographed by Connolly. After Ready, she made one more film, divorced Al Jolson, remarried, and retired into motherhood.
PERFECTION
By the time of Gold Diggers of 1935, there was already an alternative to Berkeley. For his debut film, Fred Astaire, loaned out to MGM for a lavish imitation of 42nd Street called Dancing Lady (1933), wasn’t allowed to do much. (Joan Crawford, who rose to stardom as a Charlestoning flapper, handled the tap, her style even more ungainly than Keeler’s while also more glamorous.) Astaire’s solo in his second film, Flying Down to Rio (1933), is chopped into many gratuitous cuts, interrupted by reaction shots, crowded by other stuff in the frame, and cheapened by a close-up of the dancer’s feet. As soon as his success afforded him control over how he was filmed (quite soon, since Flying Down to Rio was a hit), Astaire minimized all of these elements, insisting that he and his partners be filmed in full figure. “Either the camera will dance or I will,” he declared. Actually, the camera often danced with him, tracking his movements on what studio technicians came to call an “Astaire dolly.” But the goal was to make viewers forget the camera and attend to dancing that warranted complete attention.
Apart from how it was filmed, there’s much in that first solo that Astaire did not discard. The song is “Music Makes Me,” and the premise is that Astaire, trying to teach some chorus girls a routine, can’t help but dance to the rhythms of the band rehearsing nearby. He resists, then gives in—the band leaves a break open and he just has to fill it. In the brief tap dance that the music makes him do, he has the quality of a man not entirely in command of his own body. It’s like an eccentric routine, in other words, though Astaire plays it cool, and finishes by going right back to what he was doing before. The number exemplifies, at the most basic level, Astaire’s manner of dramatizing a tap dance. It looks as though he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.
The reality was almost exactly the opposite. In advance of filming, Astaire would rehearse each number for weeks upon agonizing weeks, not pausing for Sundays or holidays, perpetually unsatisfied. During filming, he was commonly the first on the set and the last to leave. On the set of Rio, he met two members of what became his creative team, the rehearsal pianist Hal Borne and the dance assistant Hermes Pan. When Astaire was working out a new number, Borne would play, improvising an arrangement of the song in question, and Pan and Astaire would ad-lib along. Days might pass until one of them came upon an idea that Astaire thought he could use. Slowly, meticulously, he would build that idea into a dance—“like writing music,” Astaire explained. But that was only half of the job, for once the dance was set, he would rehearse it until he could do it without thinking, as if he were just ad-libbing in the rehearsal studio. The potential for such paradoxical illusions as rehearsed spontaneity was part of what attracted the masochistically self-critical Astaire to the film medium: “You give your best performance all the time.”
