Tripping My Way Through “Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance”

“Nice” doesn’t make you famous. It doesn’t sell copies of magazines or get you invited to appear on TV talk shows. Ron Howard, for one, has spent much of his adult  career dodging the accusation that he’s merely a nice guy. But Paula Broussard and Lisa Royère have devoted their first biography to a woman who balanced star power with a personal graciousness that made her a joy to be around. They should know. When That’s Entertainment introduced them to Eleanor Powell (who starred in glossy MGM musicals from 1936 to 1943), the two fell in love with her spectacularly athletic tap-dancing. Dance-mad themselves, they managed to befriend the long-retired Powell, and were charmed by her friendly and upbeat manner. And yet their dream of compiling a pictorial guide to Powell’s films was put on hold for decades. It was the pandemic that revived the project, which then evolved into a fully-researched new biography, Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance.

 Powell’s early life, we learn, was not an easy one. Raised in tight circumstances by a single mother, she discovered in dance a way to overcome her shyness.  At an early age she made it to the Broadway stage as a variety performer.  Though she first specialized in ballet and acrobatics, she eventually learned to tap, and this became her springboard to Hollywood. Before reading Born to Dance I had never considered the importance of tap-dancing in early Hollywood musicals. In the decade after sound entered the picture, audiences thrilled to the rhythmic clatter of tap shoes on a soundstage floor. In a series of Broadway Melody films, as well as such starring vehicles as Rosalie, Honolulu, and Born to Dance, Powell thrilled audiences with bravura production numbers (like dancing down a series of oversized drums) while also performing romantic duets with the likes of James Stewart and Robert Taylor.

 Of course audiences clamored for her to be paired with the greatest of male ballroom dancers, Fred Astaire. According to Broussard and Royère, the self-critical Astaire resisted for quite a while the opportunity to be her dance partner. Finally it happened. In Broadway Melody of 1940, a sentimental tale of two hoofers and the woman who comes between them, they wowed audiences with  Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” in what has been called the greatest tap sequence in the history of Hollywood. Performed on an elaborate mirrored set, it begins with a mood of Latin elegance, then shifts midway through into joyous jazz.  Alas, though audiences hoped for an encore, it was not to be. Amazingly, Astaire was intimidated by her powerful tap skills, saying that “I had twenty-nine partners, but I met my match with Ellie.” 

 The end of her partnership with Astaire was not the only disappointment in Eleanor’s life. Tastes in entertainment changed, and she faced some health challenges. Her one stab at matrimony ended in disaster: husband Glenn Ford turned out to be a compulsive womanizer, and one who also stepped out with men. When they finally divorced, he proved himself a cad about finances, and she was too ladylike to object. Needing to raise son Peter on her own, she courageously resurrected her career as a nightclub entertainer after years of devoting herself solely to the domestic realm.  Through it all, a strong religious faith kept her sane.

 One truly admirable thing about Eleanor: she refused to accept skin color as a barrier to friendship. She and the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson shared routines; Robinson and Pearl Bailey were honorary godparents to her son. A lovely lady, in every sense of the word. Brava!

 

 

 

 

Black is the Color . . . . Toni Morrison, Shirley Temple, and Blackface On-Screen

I recently saw a dramatic version of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, not on the screen but on stage. In it, a young African American girl with a grim past obsesses (circa 1941) over her desire to have blue eyes like her idol, child-star Shirley Temple. She’s not the only one in her increasingly tragic family circle whose life-goals are shaped by Hollywood movies. Her downtrodden mother, it seems, has long brightened her own sad life by admiring such Caucasian stars as Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Hedy Lamarr on the silver screen. Tellingly, she has named her daughter Pecola, closely mirroring the name of the young Black girl who successfully—though painfully—passes for white throughout much of 1934’s Imitation of Life.

 Funny thing about Pecola’s obsession with Shirley Temple’s blond-and-blue-eyed charms. Though Temple, who starred in black & white films in the 1930s and ‘40s, was truly an adorable tyke, her hair was on the auburn side and her eyes were emphatically brown. But Pecola, longing to be a little white girl, naturally assumes that her idol has big blue eyes, unlike her own. There’s something about the power of movies that showcases our dreams of what we’d like to be, particularly if those dreams are wholly out of reach.

 On the other hand, back in the 1930s and 1940s there are many screen entertainments that highlight white performers posing as Black for public amusement. There was an era when it was controversial indeed for a Black performer to be injected into a white cast, even when playing a so-called “tragic mulatto.” As late as 1951, when Lena Horne sought to play the tragically bi-racial Julie in an upcoming version of Edna Ferber’s hit, Show Boat, she was rejected in favor of the not-Black-at-all (and not-musical-at-all) Ava Gardner. It was OK for William Warfield, in the role earlier made famous by Paul Robeson, to sit on the dock and sing “Old Man River.” But it was definitely NOT OK for a light-skinned African American woman to be shown in a love relationship with a white man.

 Still, white performers of those eras seemed perfectly comfortable smearing on blackface makeup and pretending to be “colored.” This had been happening since the era of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), when all the rapacious Black men who trash democracy and menace heroine Lillian Gish were portrayed by white actors. Later it was common for musical performers like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to do a blackface minstrel-show turn, as they did in 1941’s Babes on Broadway, completely with Judy’s hair in “pickaninny” braids.  In 1936, the great Fred Astaire—playing a nightclub performer—darkened his face for “Bojangles of Harlem,” designed as a tribute to Black tap dance legend Bill Robinson and also to Astaire’s friend and mentor, John Bubbles, whose dancing silhouette—I’m told—backs Astaire’s on screen in this number. I’m sure Astaire’s intentions were of the best, but today such moments can make us cringe. That’s how I felt when watching the otherwise frothy Holiday Inn (1942), in which Bing Crosby’s character establishes a country inn and nightclub which builds its floor shows around holiday themes. The President Lincoln’s birthday number, “Abraham,” features not just Bing (looking like Uncle Remus) and but also an entire dance band and chorus in blackface, with co-star Marjorie Reynolds forced to model exaggerated lips and a particularly obnoxious get-up. (One curious note: a cutaway to lovable Louise Beavers as the inn’s cook; she was earlier the  mother of Imitation of Life’s “tragic mulatto” child.)

 

 

Astaire and Rogers Face the Music—and Dance

When I was learning to appreciate classic musicals, I noticed that revival houses liked to pair the Astaire/Rogers Top Hat (1935, music by Irving Berlin) with their 1936 offering, Swing Time (music by Jerome Kern). Both, of course, are heady blends of screwball antics, mistaken identities, tap dancing, crooning, and glides around the ballroom floor. These films don’t make much sense, but Astaire’s suave grace. Rogers’ spunk, and the participation of a host of amusing sidekicks ensure that they’re magical and fun. Of the 10 Astaire/Rogers films Top Hat was chronologically #5, and proved to be their all-time major blockbuster. Swing Time, slightly less of a hit but still highly popular, was #7.

 In between these two major outings by one of Hollywood’s favorite duos, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers launched as their sixth pairing a little vessel called Follow the Fleet (1936, again with an Irving Berlin score).  It certainly has its moments—and some wild and crazy dancing—but an ultra-sappy romantic plot and some additional missteps prevent this from being one of the duo’s top outings.

 Because Astaire, in his early films, was typically kitted out in white tie and tails, Follow the Fleet tries to modify his patrician image by dressing him in a sailor suit. In other ways too, the script aims to suggest that he’s simply an average Joe (in many of the early scenes we have to watch him enthusiastically chewing gum). The nautical segments give us some great song-and-dance numbers, like Berlin’s rollicking opener, “We Saw the Sea.”  I can’t resist providing some sample lyrics to showcase the song’s deadpan wit, which Astaire sells with gusto:

 We joined the navy to see the world
And what did we see? We saw the sea
We saw the Pacific and the Atlantic
But the Atlantic isn't romantic
And the Pacific isn't what it's cracked up to be . . . .

 We never get seasick sailing the ocean
We don't object to feeling the motion
We're never seasick but we are awful sick of sea

It took me a while to realize what’s unusual about this gang of gobs. In such nautical musicals as On the Town and Anchors Aweigh, the men may be enjoying shore leave, but they’re members of the U.S. Navy, and they’ll soon be risking their lives in some of the bloodier battles of World War II. Follow the Fleet, by contrast, focuses on the peacetime navy, in which sailors seem to have nothing better to do than court pretty girls and evade the shore patrol while staging an impromptu musical show to help a damsel in distress.

 That damsel is not Ginger but her sister Connie (played by a pre-Ozzie-Nelson Harriet Hilliard). She’s a mousy music teacher who—when glammed up by a helpful (and very blonde!) Lucille Ball—catches the eye of Fred’s buddy, portrayed by a hunky but not too ethical Randolph Scott. Soon she’s deeply in love and worried about a potential loss of self control, which leads her to sing a really nauseating song called “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Clearly, Irving Berlin had his duds as well as his triumphs.

 Somehow everything ends up hinging on the success of that shipboard show, in which (of course) Astaire and Rogers triumph. It’s an unusually somber but gorgeously staged routine in which Ginger’s character contemplates suicide but is persuaded by Fred to “Face the Music and Dance.” Their achievement is such that the out-of-work Ginger earns her debut on Broadway and gets Fred in the bargain too. 

 They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.