Keeler Still Taps in Her Memories

If anyone who reads this runs across a print of a movie called “Sweetheart of the Campus,” Ruby Keeler would like to hear from you. It was her last movie--made more than 40 years ago--and she’s never seen it. “It must still be around,” she said the other day at the Balboa Bay Club, “because I still get mail from people who say they’ve just seen it.”

Keeler, who now lives in Rancho Mirage, was in Newport Beach to be included in the Orange County Walk of Stars at the Anaheim Hilton (the ceremony will be Sept. 8 at 11 a.m.), and to enjoy a get-together with her extended family.

And extended they are. The day I visited, there were seven grandchildren, two of her three daughters, one son, one son-in-law and two sisters milling about, with Keeler--ensconced in a deck chair on the patio--at the center of it all. And there were more children and grandchildren due the next day. “It’s like coming home,” said Keeler, who lived in Orange County for more than four decades before defecting to the desert.

At 78, she no longer has the spring in her step, but she has lost none of the liveliness in her eyes. That’s why it’s difficult for a visitor to accept the cane leaning against the back of her chair. She needs it to walk, the result of an aneurysm suffered 13 years ago. But the eyes still belong to the ingenue of “42nd Street” who takes over when the star can’t go on.

But forget the ingenue image; this is the street-wise New York girl who parlayed a love for dancing into vaudeville and night club acts and later, into featured roles on Broadway and in Hollywood.

She talks about it all today with humor, warmth and a small edge of irreverence, flavored with a smidgen of a New York accent. And she chain-smokes all the while.

Although the plot of “42nd Street” mirrors the real life of Ruby Keeler in some quite remarkable ways, there are some significant differences. Keeler wasn’t from the sticks; born in Canada, she grew up in Germantown on New York’s East Side. She wasn’t a young woman; she was still a child when she broke into show business. And she didn’t get to be a star purely by luck; she slogged her way up through a lot of chorus lines.

Keeler learned to dance, she says, from her father and from weekly folk dancing lessons at her parochial school. “My father,” she says, “was a big man who loved to dance. He would waltz with me, and when he turned me, he would always lean over and whisper, ‘Reverse.’ The first time he didn’t have to say it to me was one of the big moments of my life.”

The folk dancing teacher saw talent in young Ruby and invited her to attend a class, but the Keeler family could not afford to pay for it. So Ruby was given free lessons with a weekend group. There she was spotted by another dance teacher, who taught tap and who took her under his wing--along with another little girl named Patsy Kelly, who was to become a lifelong friend and who would follow her to Hollywood.

“When I was 13,” Keeler recalls of her big break, “one of the other girls in my class told me about an audition for a George M. Cohan musical called ‘The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly.’ You had to be 16 to work, so we lied about our age. Before that, Broadway was just a street to me. But once I passed through the stage entrance of the Liberty Theater for the first time, it was just like ‘42nd Street.’ ”

At just 13, Keeler was dancing in the chorus of a Broadway show, moonlighting at a night club and trying to attend a “continuation school.” Something had to give. “My formal education,” she says, “stopped at the seventh grade. I never went to high school. But I was making $45 a week, and how my mother needed it!

“I lived at home until I was married,” she says, “and my mother was always with me when I was working. When my first show opened in Boston, she somehow brought all six of my brothers and sisters up there to see me.”

For the next six years, Keeler danced on Broadway and in vaudeville and club shows, working with all the major stars of that period. She performed in shows with Bob Hope and his wife, Dolores, and she was the featured dancer with Eddie Cantor in Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Whoopee,” although she left the show before it got to Broadway.

She also did a screen test for Warner Bros. Pictures at their New York studio in the late ‘20s, but nothing had come of it when her agent offered her stage work in California.

The agent was waiting for her when she arrived in Los Angeles, where she also met Al Jolson, who had made history in 1927 as the star of the first talking picture. Less than a year later, Keeler, then 19, became the 43-year-old Jolson’s third wife.

In the early ‘30s, as Warner Bros. set out to cast “42nd Street,” Keeler’s old screen test was discovered and she was cast opposite a young singer named Dick Powell.

Keeler and the “42nd Street” formula, with its Busby Berkeley choreography, were such hits that a whole string of similar musicals followed, most with a repertory group that included Powell, Joan Blondell, Frank McHugh, Glenda Farrell, Ginger Rogers, Ned Sparks and Bebe Daniels.

Keeler looks back fondly on those years. “I remember how good it felt every morning to go through the studio gate,” she says. “We had a wonderful time. We weren’t camping those pictures; we were doing them straight, and I still enjoy watching them because I can remember every detail of what was going on that day.”

She was required to sing, something she had never done before and admittedly did not do well. “I never had voice training,” she says, “and the studio never suggested that or dubbing my voice, so I just had to do it. Al Dubin and Harry Warren, who wrote all our songs, would just put me in a lower key when Dick and I sang together. They were marvelous.”

By the time she was 30, she was growing restless with the Hollywood life style. Jolson, however, was not, and their marriage ended in 1939. Keeler made one more film, “Sweetheart of the Campus,” with Ozzie Nelson in 1941, for Columbia, then left show business.

The decision was made easier, she says, by a young Pasadena real estate broker named John Lowe Jr., whom she had met through golfing friends. He lived in a different world, and Keeler was ready to embrace it. They were married in 1941 and moved to Orange County after Lowe returned from overseas duty with the Navy in World War II.

Here they raised four children of their own, along with the adopted son of Keeler and Al Jolson. For 26 years, the couple made Orange County their home, first on Balboa Island, then on Mesa Drive in Upper Newport Bay. The decision to give up show business was a comfortable, easy one, Keeler says. “I never saw myself as an actress, and that doesn’t bother me. It was a little tough to walk away from the good parts of it, but once I started a family, I had my own show going. Taking my kids to school was enough of a production for me--and we were blessed with wonderful kids.”

Lowe, who eventually became a successful real estate developer, died in 1969. Her children were grown and she had just sold the family home and “was feeling very lost” when producer Henry Rigby called from New York in 1970, asking whether she would be interested in returning to Broadway as the star of a revival of “No, No, Nanette!”

“I told him he was crazy,” Keeler recalls. “I was 60 years old, and he didn’t know if I was fat or feeble or anything about me. But he came out to talk to me, and I agreed to give it a try. It helped a lot when I found out Patsy Kelly was in it. I hadn’t danced for years, but I went back to New York and went to a rehearsal hall and just danced and danced until it all came back.”

Keeler’s star was rising again. She stayed with the show for 4 1/2 years, going on tour with the national company. She was taking a vacation from the tour with her daughter Christine and her family in Lewiston, Mont., when she suffered the aneurysm. “I have no recollection of it at all,” she says. “I went into a coma and had surgery on my head in Great Falls. I’m very lucky to be here.”

She enjoys her life now in Rancho Mirage, where she can mingle with show business buddies. Alice Faye and Ginger Rogers and Mary Martin are all close by, she says, and “we have lunch and do benefits together. I can’t play golf anymore, but I still belong to Indian Wells Country Club, and we have a putting group that makes me feel like one of the big girls again.”

She wishes she could still tap a few choruses, and she was skittish about having her picture taken until the Times photographer showed up. Then she accepted the idea with good humor. As her son-in-law discreetly tucked an errant shoulder strap into her dress, Keeler waved him off airily. “Maybe they’ll think I’m Dolores del Rio.”