Elegance on Two Feet

A funny thing used to happen in movie houses when people saw the Nicholas Brothers--undoubtedly the most accomplished tap duo in history. After their rhythm-charged “Argentina” number in 1940’s “Down Argentine Way,” for instance, or their impossibly aerial “Jumpin’ Jive” dance from 1943’s “Stormy Weather,” moviegoers got so excited that they hooted and stamped until the projectionist rewound the film and showed the sequence again.

Fayard and Harold Nicholas were never on the screen for long, but they always made a big impression. Handsome and impeccably attired, they’d start a dance number by singing and trading impossibly intricate percussive bons mots as breezily as anyone else flops into an easy chair. They looked elegant but at the same time friendly and fun--like Fred Astaire, only with more verve.

And then they would turn into tap supermen, leaping tall orchestras in a single bound. Or they would descend a giant staircase by vaulting over each other in stretched-out splits--rising from each splayed landing without putting a hand down, as if they were remote-controlled. The big band would be Chattanooga-choo-chooing (“Sun Valley Serenade,” 1941) or I-got-a-gal-in-Kalamazooing (“Orchestra Wives,” 1942) like crazy, and when the brothers finally slid to a stop, audiences didn’t know what hit them.

Today’s audiences are different, of course. They’re used to high-energy dancing, technical bravura and rhythmic sophistication--so it takes more than that to impress them. Yeah, right. Then why do people who attend Nicholas Brothers tributes still jump and jive out of their seats when the brothers’ famous film numbers are shown?

It happens over and over these days, during what might be called the tribute years for the Nicholas Brothers. Retired from dancing, they now live on separate coasts--Fayard, 85, is in L.A.; Harold, 80, has an apartment in New York. But they get together for ceremony after ceremony: the Kennedy Center Honors in 1991, a long-overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994, and in 1998 a Carnegie Hall tribute and a lifetime achievement award from the American Dance Festival--among others.

And lest they be under-celebrated in the town that launched their film career, the latest lionization will take place this week during the Jazz Tap Ensemble’s Summer Tap Fest 2000, with master classes and appearances by the brothers. Friday, they will attend a film tribute and book signing to salute the recently published study of their work, “Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers” by Constance Valis Hill. On Saturday night at the Ford Amphitheatre, the honors are capped by a Jazz Tap Ensemble concert, which will include a few reconstructions of Nicholas Brothers choreography. JTE’s youth ensemble, the Caravan Project, has learned “Lucky Number,” from one of the brothers’ earliest film appearances in a 1936 short called “Black Network.”

And, most ambitiously, Sam Weber and Steve Zee will re-create a later Nicholas Brothers routine--or at least an excerpt.

“To duplicate them in their full maturity would be really difficult,” says JTE artistic director Lynn Dally. “Sam and Steve are rhythmically hot, but you won’t be seeing them do the acrobatics. To cast one of those numbers would be impossible--I don’t know if there’s anyone who could do it all.”

In fact, if Hollywood wanted to make a movie of the Nicholas Brothers’ lives, Gregory Hines suggests in the foreword to “Brotherhood in Rhythm,” “the dance numbers would have to be computer-generated.” They were just that spectacular.

*

“I’m glad all the things we did are on film--it’s there forever,” says Fayard Nicholas, happily answering questions about his long career at the Toluca Lake apartment he shares with his bride of a few months, Catherine Hopkins Nicholas, 50. Two hip replacements and a mild stroke have slowed him down a bit, but his wit is quick.

“Now, don’t ask me to do anything I’ve done in movies,” he warns. “Forget it! If you want to see me do that, go rent the film!” He laughs and tosses a hand in the general direction of the local video store. It’s a lyrical gesture that echoes the graceful, smooth-flowing style the brothers were known for. They were always a class act, and it’s easy to see that Fayard still is. On this hot May afternoon, he’s wearing a three-piece wool suit and uncreased leather boots, and when he speaks, there is a touch of the polite, musical speech that harks back to a more genteel age.

Just now, he’s sharing a story that not many tappers could tell in any accent: “When we were working with Balanchine. . . .” This was while rehearsing for “Babes in Arms,” a Rodgers & Hart Broadway musical in 1937. At that time, the Nicholas Brothers had already made their reputation as precocious youngsters at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club and in a few movies. They were testing their wings (and would succeed) on the Great White Way, where George Balanchine was supplementing his ballet income by choreographing musicals.

A great lover of jazz, Balanchine was fascinated by the brothers’ style and abilities. “He asked us to do a little something on the stage, so he could get some ideas,” Fayard recalls. “So we did a few steps for him, and he came up and started working with us.” The man who would soon be lining up ballerinas for the New York City Ballet started lining up eight chorus girls and directing Harold to slide through their legs and Fayard to fly over their heads, landing, of course, ever so elegantly in the splits.

“Balanchine said to us, ‘You look like you did ballet,’ ” Fayard says. “Well, I told him, ‘We just dance the way we feel, and if it looks like ballet is in there, so much the better.’ We never did ballet--I guess it just came naturally.”

Fayard calls what he and his brother did “classical tap,” but only recently has anyone tried to explain why that’s the right description and exactly what ingredients contributed to their overall success. The first serious study of their dancing is Hill’s book, which was originally her doctoral dissertation at New York University.

“Their dancing is a highly refined style of percussive dance,” she says on the phone from her office in upstate New York. “The Nicholas Brothers didn’t invent jazz-classical dance, but the form certainly reached its apotheosis in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and they really perfected the style. My inspiration was to examine what made their dancing so intoxicating for audiences.”

What came “naturally,” as Fayard puts it, was only part of the equation. “There’s still this stereotype of tap as a popular art form that has no discipline in it,” Hill says. “But try to do the Nicholas Brothers’ numbers. They’re so complex, the way Fayard takes rhythms and reframes them, plays with them. They look good, like they’re having fun, but it was definitely a result of the artistic choices they made and their discipline and rigor.”

*

From the very beginning, tap dancing was both serious and fun for the Nicholas Brothers. As the children of vaudevillian pit musicians (Viola played piano, Ulysses the drums), the brothers grew up around theaters, mostly in Philadelphia and New York in the ‘20s, when some of the greats were strutting their stuff.

Backstage, they heard the complex and inventive rhythms of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington; they saw the witty, dapper Cab Calloway, and the expressive bodies of tap dancers such as Leonard Reed, Clarence “Buddy” Bradley, and, in the movies, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who was said to take tap “up on its toes” from an earlier, shuffling style.

The brothers also saw hundreds of lesser-known acts, which featured a creative abundance of African-influenced popular dance and music styles. By the time he was in his teens, Fayard started working on his own routines, taking some of the smooth moves of ballroom gliding, the daring acrobatics of “flash” acts, the playful drive of the “challenge dance,” and the propulsion and rhythmic diversity inherent in so much jazz.

Fayard taught his younger brother what he knew (his sister, Dorothy, didn’t have the bug), and they practiced endlessly, eventually making their own version of “the class act”--a phrase that described vaudevillians drenched in proper, aristocratic formality. They later picked up even more classical momentum and innovative variations encountering Balanchine and, in Hollywood, Nick Castle, the choreographer who worked with them on their most famous 20th Century Fox movie numbers.

What the brothers’ success meant to the black community of the time is hard to overestimate. Movie theaters in African American neighborhoods all over the country put their names above the movies stars on the marquee. “We were only on the screen a few minutes,” Fayard says, his eyes widening and crinkling into a laugh. “But it would say ‘Starring the Nicholas Brothers.’ ”

At a recent book signing at a Harlem theater, Hill says, older fans lined up to shake the brothers’ hands, saying things like, “I want to thank you guys, because you dressed for us. We didn’t have the clothes to dress like that, but you looked so good, and you did it for us.”

What the brothers minimize when talking about their careers now are the effects of racial prejudice. They were taught to be positive and make their statements with their behavior and their talent. “Being outspoken isn’t the only way to show resistance to racism,” Hill says. “I think the Nicholas Brothers tried very, very hard to elevate their art form, to make it as professional as they could--that was one way of fighting the oppression.”

But starting in their early years at the Cotton Club, the brothers were often faced withlimitations. They felt powerless to do anything about the fact that black performers were prohibited from mingling with the Cotton Club’s all-white audiences. But when Fayard asked to meet some of the movie star patrons, and the brothers were allowed out in the house, they considered it a victory. Sitting at a table with their admirers--film stars such as Eleanor Powell and George Raft--Fayard felt “showing them we had class” was the best they could do with the situation.

In Hill’s book, she tells how the brothers tried to avoid singing an offensive lyric in a number from “Babes in Arms.” Their mother never allowed them to use “Negro dialect” onstage, so they tried changing the line, “All dark people is light on their feet,” to “All dark people are light on their feet.” Never mind that they had to work within the larger stereotypes about “all dark people,” they at least wanted to speak proper English, as they did every day.

But after an opening night of good grammar, the stage manager demanded the line be sung as written. They complied, but Fayard recalls that later in the run, “we would just sometimes forget” and sing their own version. Small steps were better than none.

At the same time, there was nothing the brothers could do about the fact that their film roles were confined to brief musical numbers unrelated to the plot. Why weren’t movies built around such talented performers? “Well, that’s where your prejudice comes in. They didn’t write scripts for us,” says Harold Nicholas, on the phone from New York, where he lives with his wife (and the brothers’ manager), Rigmor Newman. “We couldn’t be Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire--all they wanted us to do is dance, and the more spectacular the better. Of course that was disappointing.”

In fact, the short Nicholas Brothers dance segments were made with a not-so-hidden agenda--so they could be easily cut out of the movies by presenters in the South. It was a reality that might reasonably have made the Nicholas Brothers bitter.

“No, I wasn’t too bitter,” Fayard says. “But I wanted to do more in the movies than just sing and dance. I wanted to be written into the script and have some kind of acting role, not just being a shoeshine boy or whatever.” But he quickly goes on to the bright side, how what they did do was to perform well and become popular around the world, and the way today’s actors like Denzel Washington and Diana Ross thank him for paving the way for black performers.

He’s pleased, he says, when young people who were only into hip-hop before seeing the brothers’ films are impressed with their virtuosity. “They say, ‘How did you do that?’ And I say what I tell everybody: ‘We did it very carefully.’ ”

*

After the heady years of ‘40s Hollywood movie fame, jobs fell off for dancers. Musicals turned more to lyrical jazz and balletic dancing, and television started to capture theatergoers, but there was more than that to the Nicholas Brothers’ unemployment.

“They were young when they did ‘Stormy Weather,’ ” Hill says, “and when they became men, their contract wasn’t renewed at 20th Century Fox. There was still work for white tap dancers, but certainly the black male body on the stage was something that was perhaps threatening. They ended up going to Europe.”

After an amicable separation of about seven years, during which the brothers did solo acts, they were reunited for a few appearances on television’s “Hollywood Palace” in the mid-’60s. They then did television and nightclub work for a while, but Fayard’s advancing arthritis eventually brought an end to his dancing days. Harold continued to dance and then to capitalize mostly on his vocal talent.

The brothers’ fame was brought to the attention of a new generation in the ‘70s, when their film clips were included in the MGM movie-musical compilations “That’s Entertainment!” Parts 1 and 2. In the ‘80s, they made virtual appearances on the ceilings of New York discos, in projections of their “Be a Clown” number, with Gene Kelly, from “The Pirate.”

By then, they were gaining a firmer place in the pantheon of serious dance innovators. Today, they’ve been acknowledged as the masters whose spirit and innovations inspired dancers like Gregory Hines, Hammer, Michael Jackson and Savion Glover. Of course, the role of mentor is not always easy. Fayard recalls directing a talented but stubborn teenage Glover in the cast of “Black and Blue” on Broadway in 1989 (Fayard won a Tony for choreographing the show).

“I used to say to him, ‘Savion, your feet are great, but please use your hands and express yourself--kind of have a little class and style.’ And he’d start to do it, then those hands would go back down again.” Fayard demonstrates with arms hanging akimbo, looking down at the floor. “I’d say, ‘Savion, don’t look at your feet, hold your head up high--you’re entertaining the audience, not just yourself.’ ”

Fayard advised Glover’s mother to take him to ballet class. “He was there one day,” Fayard deadpans. “Never did go back.” He breaks into laughter and laughs even harder when he describes attending Glover’s recent concert at the Wilshire Theatre. “His feet sound so beautiful; he’s like a musician,” Fayard says in a rhapsodic tone. “So I just close my eyes and listen.” But he can’t get used to those still dangling arms and downcast eyes--not to mention Glover’s wardrobe of baggy T-shirts and pants. “I open my eyes for a little while,” he says, “and then I think, ‘Uh-oh, better close them again.’ ”

Hill understands the style gap between tap generations. “Savion’s style is very different from the Nicholas Brothers’--he doesn’t even call it tap anymore, he calls it ‘hitting,’ ” she says. “He comes out of a very different aesthetic, out of hip-hop--it’s more alienating, the idea of not addressing the audience. It’s absolutely cutting-edge.”

Nevertheless, Glover has paid tribute to the Nicholas Brothers more than once, throwing them kisses from the stage at the Kennedy Center Honors celebration, for example. This, despite the fact that in “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” he seemed to reduce the brothers’ body of work to a downtrodden cliche by choreographing a ‘40s, Hollywood, black tap duo called Grin and Flash.

Hill calls that characterization “pretty disturbing,” but despite “Noise/Funk,” believes that Glover respects his inheritance. “He has in his body the masters who came before him, and the Nicholas Brothers are part of that,” she says. “He’s been able to progress to another style, but it doesn’t come out of thin air--it follows in this 300-year-old continuum of percussive dance.”

Whether or not Glover’s brilliance will be resonant for audiences decades in the future is still up for grabs. But Hill and many other writers have already weighed in on the Nicholas legend. As her book’s title, “Brotherhood in Rhythm,” suggests, she thinks that their dual dancing bodies are still doing a lot more on screen than “just entertaining.”

“For a moment, we are transported by their ability to move together and the rhythm that goes directly to the heart,” she says. “I don’t want to say this as a fantasy, and I don’t mean to be naive, but they truly do climb to quite an incredible artistic standard, and for a moment, we’re unified in a really beautiful space.”

And for that gift, have the Nicholas Brothers yet gotten all the accolades they deserve? The Jazz Tap Ensemble’s Dally has an answer: “No, not yet, but we’re getting there,” she says enthusiastically. “That’s why you have a tribute.” *

*

* Nicholas Brothers tribute concert: Saturday, 8 p.m., Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood, $20-$25, (323) 461-3673. Other Summer Tap Fest 2000 events: (310) 475-4412.