Energy on Tap : Peggy Gene Evans, who became a professional dancer when she was 10, is 99 and counting. The Newport Beach resident has no intention of slowing down.

Peggy Gene Evans has a “secret of youth” facial cream she makes on her stove top from a recipe passed down by her grandmother. She’s used it all her life, and she doesn’t look a day over 70. That might not be quite the desired look you’ll see Cher advertising on TV, but it suits Evans just fine, inasmuch as she’ll be turning 100 in a few months.

And a vivacious 99-year-old she is too, more than any well-beaten mixture of baby oil, beeswax and borax can account for. There aren’t many people within decades of her age whom you can still find tap-dancing on stage, as she was this past Sunday at the “Time of Your Life” seniors exhibition at the Anaheim Convention Center.

Along with attending dance classes at Coastline Community College since 1977, Evans dances with a group called the Happy Hoofers that performs at charity events and retirement homes. She also works as a volunteer at Hoag Hospital, with 1,500 hours logged, helps run the apartment complex where she lives when the owners are gone, and still drives herself to the library and other destinations.

“I also,” she said, smiling, “have all my own teeth.”

Visit for a while in her neatly kept Newport Beach apartment decorated with her oil paintings and you would swear Evans is lying about her age. The day before she and some of her dance-mates had gone to Los Angeles at 6 a.m. to dance on a KTLA news program. Yet, here she was jumping to her feet every few minutes: to offer coffee, to conduct a tour of her rooms, to perch precariously on a coffee table while working her VCR, to talk to a prospective apartment tenant, or to fetch a succession of scrapbooks. These latter pretty well quash any notion that she’s fudged her age, though, for they are full of mementos of an active life that spans the entirety of this century.

Trust to art, not to chance,

For they move easiest who have learned to dance.

So declares an advertisement from 1927 announcing the Peggy Gene Studio of the Dance, the first of a chain of 10 studios she was to helm at a time when few women were running their own businesses. As bold as that might seem, Evans says that actually was a cautious move: Born in 1894, she had been a professional dancer since she was 10, and “I wanted some security for when I got too old to perform.”

Evans’ father had been a touring lecturer, and both parents died in a train wreck when she was 4. She was placed briefly in a convent, where one of the nuns determined she had a talent for dancing. An aunt, whom she describes as “very much an Auntie Mame” saw to it that she had the best dance training possible and became her manager.

Under the name Peggy Gene (dropping her maiden name Eaton), she worked on both the classical stage and the vaudeville circuit, doing a “toe dance” between acts, working on bills with W.C. Fields, Will Rogers and other names.

“They were lovely to me,” she recalls, “but I doubt whether they would have even remembered me at all. I was pretty much of a child.”

She began dancing in films in her 20s, and believes she is the last surviving cast member of the classic 1925 Lon Chaney silent “The Phantom of the Opera,” in which she was a prima ballerina in a dance scene. She also frequently stood in as a dancing double for actresses, including Norma Talmadge in “The Lady,” Mary Pickford in “Annie Rooney” and May McAvoy in the breakthrough 1927 talkie “The Jazz Singer.” As was the practice then, it was never acknowledged that the stars had someone else making them look talented on screen.

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Evans thinks she could have had a shot at stardom herself, had her situation and morals been different.

“My aunt watched very closely over me in those days. I like to joke that it’s too bad she watched so closely because so many of the stars, especially the silent stars, had some influence leading to their fame--a lover, a husband or the couch.

“It was almost a known thing then that if you wanted to get anywhere, you went to bed with a guy. And they nearly all made those attempts, the best of them. They would practically kick you out of their office if you didn’t expect it, because women wanted to be a movie star so bad they’d do anything.

“I think there’s much less of that now, because women are more independent, and they’ve got to have some real talent. Very few of the silent movie people had talent. Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford did, because they were on stage first.”

Evans did go on to teach stars Judy Garland and Loretta Young in her studios and continued dancing professionally herself until she was 50. Along the way she’d had a couple of boyfriends, “someone in St. Louis and someone else over there,” she said with a general dismissive wave. “And I had proposals, but back then men wouldn’t marry you unless you gave up your career. I would have had to give up the dancing, and I didn’t want to do that. It was too much part of me.”

She did finally hang up her shoes at 50 when she married an industrialist named Hal Evans.

“My husband was chauvinistic, and I had to get rid of everything,” she said, meaning her career and 10 studios. “He didn’t even let most of his friends know I’d been a dancer.” Some of his friends were society folk, “and dancers and actors were not held in any great respect at all, so he kept that secret.”

Was he worth it?

“Well, I lived with him 30 years. I loved him dearly. He was a very fine man. But I think in my mind (the decision to marry) was partly for protection. I began to think, ‘Oh, this old age’ and of being alone.”

She says she didn’t dance at all for 30 years. After her husband died in 1974 due to tobacco-related heart problems, Evans took to traveling for a time. One of her sea voyages included a jump into the chilly waters of the Strait of Magellan at age 84, qualifying her for the vacation liner’s “Penguin Club.”

Once settled back home in Newport, where she had lived since 1964, she felt a void and signed up for a Coastline dance class in 1977.

“I was 83, but on my registration I just put 60-plus, because I was sure they wouldn’t take me (if they knew). Finally somebody told them my age, and then they made the biggest fuss over me.” That fuss over the years has included newspaper articles and TV coverage, and now she jokes that the college wouldn’t let her quit if she wanted to.

“They say I’m an inspiration,” she said with a laugh. “When I first started, we had one class, and there was hard time keeping the enrollment up enough to have the class. After I got all this publicity, older people started coming in saying, ‘If she can do it, I can do it.’ ”

Evans is a voracious reader, preferring the works of “old-timers,” such as Edith Wharton and Shakespeare. Between her dancing, reading and volunteer work, she says, she has a full life, one with no room to consider another marriage.

“I think not. Not now. My husband has been gone 20 years, and in that time I’ve never accepted an invitation to go out to dinner or anything, except with the group of women. I have enough fun and kidding and goings-on in the dance class that I don’t need any of that .

“I’ve had some very close calls insofar as I knew what was in the man’s mind. For instance, when I first had hearing trouble, (a hearing aid company) sent someone here. That fellow was something: He’d kiss me on the top of the head every chance he could, and would give me all kinds of compliments, telling me I was sexy.

“He finally made an appointment for evening, saying he was so busy he said he could only come in the evening. I knew what he was up to, see, so I had a close friend come over and sit in that chair there. So he comes tearing up the stairs, thinking, ‘This is the night!’ and stopped short when he saw her sitting there. I called the office and said I didn’t want him to come back anymore.”

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At her busiest, Evans was attending four 90-minute dance classes a week. She is understandably doing far less since fracturing her pelvis in a fall in January, which confined her to bed for two months in tremendous pain. Though she’d been paying extra on her insurance to provide for home care, she said a technicality left her without coverage. Two of her dance class friends came to her rescue, taking turns coming over in the mornings and evenings to cook and take care of her.

Evans said: “They like to tell our other friends, ‘You’d never dream that such a sweet little person could become such an absolute witch with a B in front.’ I imagine I was ugly during that time, because it was so painful.”

Where she once used to lead the dance in several songs, at Sunday’s exposition, Evans limited her efforts to an eight-bar soft-shoe.

“I know I can’t dance as well, because I’m wary of falling again,” she said. “I don’t move my legs as much, but my arms and face still have it.”

When she dances, she says, she’s laughing at herself for having the gall to be up there, and she reserves a bit of laughter for the audience in case its members don’t appreciate her.

“I sometimes used to say to my aunt, ‘You know that audience wasn’t very responsive,’ because I didn’t get enough clapping to suit me. And she’d say, ‘Well, my dear, you just simply say to them in your mind, “You can sit on your hands and your mother loves you,” ’ “ Evans related, with a laugh.

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As others have found, being able to laugh is half the secret to a good life, she said.

“My chief thought from my experience is, if you have a sense of humor, build it and keep it. Also, keep optimistic. I’ve had so much contact with older people dancing in these retirement homes, and so many give up completely and are pessimistic. All they talk about are their ills. I suppose I could talk about my two months in bed forever, instead of forgetting about it. Get it over with! Put it behind you. Look forward. Enjoy life.

“I think you have to look forward even if it is near the end of your life. I’m not thinking about dying at 100. I’m thinking maybe I’ll go to 105 or 110. Who knows?”

What she is thinking of doing when she turns 100 on March 25 is throwing a birthday bash for all her friends, which is a sizable number. She is even still in touch with several of her students from her Peggy Gene Studios. Her Coastline friends threw a party for her on her 99th birthday, where they had a balloon filled with 99 $1 bills: “I told them for my 100th birthday, it has to be filled with $100 bills.”

She fully plans to be dancing at her party.

“Well, I have to keep moving so they can’t bury me,” she said, with a chuckle.