DANIELS, 71, STILL SPINS THAT MAGIC

When he was a lad with raging hormones, Billy Daniels took off from Jacksonville, Fla., to visit his grandmother in Harlem, who was a seamstress working for Brooks Brothers.

The famed clothing company made costumes for the musical shows produced by theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, and Daniels often accompanied his grandmother when she went to fit the Ziegfeld Girls. Those trips proved to be the kind of encounters that can change a boy’s life.

“Here were these big, tall girls, who had everything a 15-year-old could want to see,” Daniels recalled. “I said, ‘I think I’ll stay around.’ ”

That was in 1932, and the youth, who already sang in glee clubs, soon was seduced by New York’s night life, a hotbed of jazz and musical theater. Daniels sang at the Apollo Club’s weekly amateur night and placed second the same night a girl named Ella Fitzgerald won the fifth prize. It was the beginning of both their careers.

By the late 1930s, Daniels was the vocalist for Erskine Hawkins’ band as it crisscrossed the country playing an endless string of one-night stands.

Now those days are just a memory, but Daniels, 71, has hardly slowed his pace. Monday he opened the new Bravo! showroom at the La Costa Hotel & Spa, headlining “The Black Magic Revue.” A living tie to the heyday of Harlem’s fabled Cotton Club, Daniels performs the music from that era in the revue twice nightly, Monday through Saturday, until Dec. 13.

The eight cast members dance and sing their way through a program of music written by or for the likes of Duke Ellington, Billy Holliday and Bert Williams--primarily music from 1910 to 1940. From Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” to Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” the 1-hour, 10-minute show (no cover and no minimum) reprises such standards as “If the Moon Turns Green,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Just in Time,” “Stormy Weather” and “From This Moment On.”

You can count on Daniels singing “That Old Black Magic,” the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer tune he popularized in 1943. Sophie Tucker made sure of that. At a performance years ago, Daniels was suffering from a leg injury and told the band leader to drop the song. Tucker overheard him and pulled him aside.

“I’m stuck with ‘Some of These Days,’ ” she whispered. “Al Jolson is stuck with ‘Mammy,’ and you’re stuck with ‘Black Magic.’ People come for miles to hear it,” she said, her voice taking on volume. “Do not ever perform if you do not sing that song!”

Daniels recalled that incident, sipping coffee on a sunny morning at a table overlooking one of La Costa’s golf courses. His blue eyes twinkling and an infectious grin radiating humor, he spoke of a career that soon will span a half century and includes performances in movies, musicals and night spots ranging from the Club Harlem in Atlantic City to Las Vegas’ Stardust Hotel.

Although Daniels clearly has an eye for the women, he never married an entertainer. “I’ve had some tempestuous relationships with show business girls, but never got to the altar,” he said. For more than 30 years he has lived in Hollywood with his fourth wife, Perri. Their love affair is straight out of the “Sound of Music.”

Daniels met her in Montreal when she became governess to his three children after the death of his third wife. Their relationship “evolved and then my position became indispensable,” said his wife, who is now his manager. They will soon celebrate their 31st wedding anniversary.

As a young man, Daniels was happy just being in front of a crowd.

“I didn’t give a damn if I got paid. I just wanted to sing,” he said. With the Hawkins band he sang plenty, especially in the rural South, which meant performing in unlikely places, from backyards to barns and fields when no theater was available.

But Daniels has not been content to just sing. He had his own ABC television variety show in 1951 and has appeared in 21 films such as the musical “Sunny Side of the Street.” “The theater gives you a chance to be a character and to go into a depth,” he said. “I’m really being someone else.”

His roles have been diverse. He’s played Ralph Rackstraw in a jazz production of “H.M.S. Pinafore,” with Bill (Bojangles) Robinson in the late 1930s; a homosexual gangster in “Golden Boy” on Broadway, and John Sage in “Bubblin’ Brown Sugar.” Daniels just finished a 12-week run of “Sugar” at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theater.

After his La Costa show, Daniels heads for Miami, where on New Years Day he will appear with magician Harry Blackstone in the Orange Bowl half-time show.

What is it that keeps him going? “When I perform, it’s a transfusion. It’s the only thing I can do well. Man it’s a shot,” he said, smiling hugely at the attractive La Costa employee who was escorting him. “You know how you feel when you’re real dressed up and you know your dimples look good, and a guy says, ‘YEAHHH!’ It’s the same feeling.”