Sugar Babies : Ann Miller Remains Timeless . . .

Thirty years ago, the joke circulating MGM studio went like this:

“Too bad about Ann Miller.”

“Why? What happened to her?”

“She fell down and broke her hair.”

The sophisticates used to deride Miller, with her lacquered hair, powdered face and sunshiny verve. But most of her detractors are dead or at the Motion Picture Country House, and Miller goes on. The gams are great, and the toes can still tap a mile a minute.

She remains a Hollywood landmark at age--well, it’s best to let her tell it.

“My story is kind of weird,” she says. “I was discovered dancing up at Bal Tabarin, a theater-restaurant in San Francisco, when I was not quite 13 years old. I was very tall, and I had eyelashes and long fingernails, the whole thing. Lucille Ball and (vaudeville and radio comic) Benny Rubin saw me dancing one night. That was when Eleanor Powell was at her height.

“RKO was looking for another dancer, and Lucy and Benny saw me doing this little machine-gun tap thing. They asked me if I’d like to take a test at RKO. Of course, my mother and I just jumped at the chance. They asked me how old I was, and I said 18. I had to say that; I was working at almost a nightclub in San Francisco.

“I stayed 18, literally, for five years. Unfortunately, RKO found out, and they demanded that I produce a birth certificate. My mother and father were divorced, and about the only good thing he did for me was to get a birth certificate--he was an attorney--that said I was the age I was supposed to be. That tacked five years on my age.

“So now people say, ‘My, she’s got to be 70 years of age.’ I’m 67. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. But people say, ‘She made her first film at RKO in 1936; she’s gotta be 70-75.’ I just say, ‘OK, I’m 108. And I still dance.’ ”

In recent weeks, she’s been on the book-selling circuit, hawking the tome she wrote with Maxine Asher, “Tapping Into the Force.”

At her comfortable house in mid-Beverly Hills, she talked about the reasons for her second book (the first was a 1972 autobiography, “Miller’s High Life”).

“I decided to write it since Shirley MacLaine had such huge success with her books and her videos,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘She’s opened the door, and I might as well walk through it.’

“My book is different from hers. I’m very clairvoyant. Shirley is not clairvoyant; she was just involved with meeting clairvoyants and getting from them the experiences that made her books so wonderful. I’ve had some amazing clairvoyant experiences.”

She related a few. When her father came home late one night, he claimed a business meeting. Ann, then 3 or 4, corrected him: “Dad, you were having dinner with that pretty, blond lady.” End of marriage.

About her psychic sense: “I can’t turn it on, like professional clairvoyants. Mine is an inner voice that comes to me--unlike the audible voice in ‘Field of Dreams.’ When that voice comes to me, I always listen, because it will save me from something dangerous.”

Miller married three millionaires. All were unhappy experiences. Didn’t her voice warn her?

“Yes, but I wouldn’t listen because I was in love. Love does strange things to people.”

Miller was born Lucille Ann Collier in Cherino, Tex. She began dancing at age 5 to strengthen her legs after rickets. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where Ann won a talent contest that led to the San Francisco engagement.

Her first speaking part came in 1937 with “Stage Door,” in a cast that included Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball and Eve Arden. She primarily appeared in B musicals at RKO and then Columbia Pictures. Her glory years came at MGM.

“My dear friend, Cyd Charisse, fell and broke her leg, and I was tested among other girls for a role in ‘Easter Parade’ with Fred Astaire. I won the part. That picture is what got me the contract at MGM where I stayed 12 years. That was like being in the ‘Ziegfeld Follies.’ It was so fabulous.”

After the MGM musical era ended, she danced on television and on Broadway in “Mame.” She teamed with Mickey Rooney in a hokey revue, “Sugar Babies,” that lasted 8 1/2 years in New York, on the road and London. It made both stars rich.

“ ‘Sugar Babies’ brought me the financial freedom that I needed,” Miller reflected, “and it brought me the stardom that I needed. At MGM I always played the second feminine lead; I was never the star in films. I was the brassy, good-hearted showgirl. I never really had my big moment on the screen.

“ ‘Sugar Babies’ and ‘Mame’ gave me the stardom that my soul kind of yearned for.”