O.C. DANCE : He’s Still Tapping His Talents

With their flying splits and daredevil acrobatics, the Nicholas Brothers vitalized tap dancing on stage and in films from the 1930s to the ‘50s and beyond.

“When we did our routine on that big screen, people would applaud as if we were really there, even though it was only our image,” Fayard Nicholas, 77, recalled in a recent phone interview from his cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture and Television Village in Woodland Hills.

“People in the audience applauded and stomped their feet” so much, he said, that when the film “Down Argentina Way” (starring Don Ameche, Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda) opened in 1940, “the operator had to stop the film and show it all over again. Sometimes, that happened twice.”

For achievements such as that, Fayard Nicholas and his younger brother, Harold, will be among seven American artists receiving Kennedy Center Honors “for their contribution to the cultural life of the nation” in Washington on Dec. 7, followed the next day by a live television broadcast from the facility focusing on this year’s honorees.

Fayard Nicholas will also teach a master class Saturday afternoon at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. The class is open to the public.

Tapping began for Nicholas in Philadelphia when he watched his show-business parents performing at a local theater.

“I used to go to the theater every day and watch the performers on stage,” he recalled. “I thought I’d like to be doing something like that. Just by watching, I taught myself how to perform. I never had a lesson.”

Nicholas was encouraged by his father to find his own tap style.

“ ‘Don’t do what other people do,’ my father told me,” he said. “Do your own thing. And don’t look at your feet. Look at the audience. You’re entertaining them. You’re not entertaining yourself. Just have fun.”

He began honing his style by watching himself in the mirror, then taught what he knew to his younger siblings--Harold and their sister, Dorothy. The three made their debut as the Nicholas Kids at the Pearl Theatre in Philadelphia in 1929.

“But my sister couldn’t keep the late hours,” he said.

The two brothers continued, however.

“We were very young,” he said. “We had these baby faces, but we were putting it down like men. Why, we were showstoppers!”

They were showstoppers when they opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1932 (when Harold was only 10). Very quickly, they went on to headline with such artists as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Benny Goodman and Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1934, they headed to Hollywood to appear in the first of the 55 films they would dance in--”Kid Millions,” with Eddie Canter. Other films included “Tin Pan Alley” (1940), “Stormy Weather” (1943, with Lena Horne) and “The Pirate” (1948, with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland). Broadway shows included “Ziegfeld Follies of 1936,” “Babes in Arms” (1937) and “St. Louis Woman” (1946).

Despite being known for splits and acrobatics, Fayard Nicholas doesn’t consider the Nicholas Brothers a “flash act.”

“Those acts are flash at the beginning and flash all the way to the end,” he said. “We would always start off doing beautiful things with the whole body before we got into splits and those things. People would say, ‘It looks like there’s ballet in it, the way you use your hands so gracefully. . . .’ We gave some style, class, personality and all those things, and flair. . . .

“We make it look easy, but it’s hard. Making up a new routine is not easy. It’s a lot of hard work, and it takes many hours.”

Nicholas said he liked live audiences because “I liked to hear when they clapped their hands for us and (showed) they were enjoying themselves. We were enjoying ourselves on stage. That made it intimate.”

He “just hated” live television because “I knew it was a one-shot thing. If I made a mistake, that’s it. They would see it all over the country.”

Not that the Nicholas Brothers made many mistakes. But Fayard Nicholas still remembers one.

“On one of Milton Berle’s shows my brother and I jumped (into a split) and I got stuck down there. My brother said, ‘What are you doing there?’ I said, ‘Trying to get up!’ Finally I did get up, and we finished the routine. But it seemed that everybody in Manhattan saw that show.”

So he was happy when videotape came in. For that reason, he also liked movies.

“If I made a mistake, I could take it over again,” he said. “I was trying to make it as perfect as I can.”

Tap dancing’s popularity declined in the United States in the ‘50s. “When television came in, that’s what did it,” Nicholas said. “There was no more (tap) dancing in nightclubs, theaters--no place. But they still love it in Europe. It seems whatever we (in the United States) invented, they love it and keep it going.”

So the Nicholas Brothers continued their career in Europe.

“As far as my brother and I were concerned, tap never did leave,” he said. “All over the world, people loved it. Once after a show, people were applauding so much, I turned to my brother and said, ‘What is this bad propaganda that dancing is dying? They can’t get enough of it.’ ”

Still, they never enjoyed as much success as they deserved.

“We should have had acting parts in films after the success” of “Down Argentine Way,” Nicholas said. “If we had been white, it would have been done.”

Indeed, people told them that they “would have been dancing with Ginger Rogers if they had been white.”

“Thank you very much,” he said. “But even though we haven’t had the success of other artists, we still have had great success.”

Both brothers, however, continue performing. Harold, who lives in New York, has danced in stage musicals and appeared in such films as “Uptown Saturday Night” in 1974 and “Tap” in 1989. Fayard, who had a double-hip replacement in 1985, won a Tony award in 1988 for his choreography work on the musical revue “Black and Blue.” In 1990, he appeared as Drosselmeyer in San Diego Ballet’s “Nutcracker.”

“I’m not really bitter because all the movies that we have made have been successful and we are known all over the world. There is no place in the world where they don’t know about the Nicholas Brothers.”

* Fayard Nicholas will offer a master tap class on Saturday from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $15 for participants; $5 for observers. Information: (714) 532-5506.