Eleanor Powell [biography]
Dates: 1921-1982
Birth Date: Nov 12, 1921
Death Date: Feb 11, 1982
Place of Birth: Springfield, Massachusetts
Place of Death: Beverly Hill, California
Eleanor Powell, considered "the world's greatest feminine rhythm and tap dancer" of her time, was born Eleanor Torrey Powell to father Clarence Powell, a hardware retailer, and mother, Blanche Torrey. When parents separated when she was eleven months old, she was raised by her maternal grandparents, Harold and Susie Belle Torrey, while her mother worked as a chambermaid, waitress, and bank teller. "Everything I am as a woman I owe to my mother and the way she brought me up," Powell said about her mother. At age seven, to help overcome her shyness, she was enrolled in dancing school where she studied ballet and acrobatics with Ralph McKernan. In the summer of 1925, during a family visit to Atlantic City, New Jersey, she was turning cartwheels on the beach when discovered by the entrepreneur Gus Edwards who offered her a job working three nights a week, earning a salary of seven dollars per show, in a dinner club at the Ambassador Grill.
In the summer of 1927, Powell returned to Atlantic City to work at the Silver Slipper and Martins, a high-priced supper club. Her routine combined classical ballet and acrobatics; she looked down on the tap dancers who appeared with her at the club and considered their style to be awkward. Urged to try her luck on Broadway, Powell headed to New York in the fall of 1929, where she worked at Ben Bernie's nightclub and danced at private parties, where she met and appeared on the same bill as Bill Robinson. With him, she devised a dance routine in which they challenged each other. Powell and Robinson performed at various private society parties organized by the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and others, for which they were paid $500 a night. Robinson became her lifelong friend, and later taught her his famous stair dance. It was the heel-dropping rhythm tap dancing of John Sublett Bubbles, however, that most influenced her footwork and rhythmic style. Powell met Bubbles in 1928, on a twenty-week vaudeville tour that included New York's Paramount Theater. On the same bill as Buck and Bubbles, and doing five shows a day, she said they were each other's most appreciative audience. She remembered "lying on my stomach in the wings, watching Bubbles dance to me." Between shows, dancers spent time backstage trying new steps. Wearing high-heeled tap shoes with a Cuban-heel-- one that is wider than the spiked or hour-glassed heel of a chorus dancer-- she began to master the heel-drops that marked Bubbles' style of rhythm tap dancing. "I often wondered if I had some colored blood in me," she later said, "because the kind of offbeat tapping I came up with was a colored sound."
After auditioning for Broadway shows and meeting with rejection because of her lack of tap-dance expertise, Powell enrolled in Jack Donahue's dance school where she studied with the master soft-shoe dancer, and Johnny Boyle, a vaudeville hoofer known for his "terre a terre" style of buck-and-wing. She signed up for ten classes, and somewhere between the first and fifth lesson became frustrated with learning the steps-- her training in ballet and acrobatics made her tap dancing too aerial. In private lessons, Donahue sat on the floor in front of her and held her ankles, explaining that tapping was done with the feet and not the whole body. Donahue and Boyle then devised a belt, purchased from a war surplus store, with a large sandbag attached on either side. They made her wear it in practice, thereby training her to tap close the ground. By the eighth lesson, she caught on and was often called on in class to demonstrate. Those tap lessons were all Powell needed to help launch her career on Broadway. She debuted in Follow Thru (1929), in which she auditioned with Donahue's class routine for "Button Up Your Overcoat." During the run of the show, Powell practiced twelve hours a day, devising her own routines, dancing to phonograph records of such jazz pianists as Fats Waller. Between shows, she appeared with jazz and big bands, such as the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, where she had the distinction of being the first tap dancer to perform at Carnegie Hall.
Powell made her screen debut in the Paramount Picture musical comedy Queen High (1930) and returned to Broadway with Fine and Dandy (1930), which featured three tap=dance numbers-- "I'll Hit a New High," "Jig Hop," and "Waltz Ballet." Variety called her "a clever rhythm dancing girl," and the Washington Post wrote that she threatened to stop the show with "her broken rhythm tap dance and waltz ballet." She next performed in Florenz Ziegfeld's Hot-Cha! (1932); Variety wrote about her dancing "There's Nothing the Matter with Me" that she "tapped her way to a hit." When she performed in George White's Music Hall (1933) with two rhythm tap numbers, the New York Times called her "an excellent tap dancer who stands out markedly." In the early thirties, with the Depression at its worst, Broadway producers were cutting costs. Powell, never intended to go into the movies, was cast by Louis B. Mayer in Broadway Melody of 1936, in the role of a struggling dancer who comes to the big city to become a star. Her routine combined elements of ballet and acrobatic dancing, with pivot turns, arabesques, and close-to-the-floor rhythm tap dancing. The New York Times praised her for "the most eloquent feet in show business" and likened her to Fred Astaire, claiming her status as "the world's greatest female tap dancer." She was immediately offered a long-term contract at MGM, beginning with Born to Dance (1936), a lavish musical, with songs by Cole Porter, in which she played a dancing understudy in love with a sailor, played by James Stewart. The highlight was the finale, "Swingin' the Jinx Away," in which slid down a metal fire pole on a battleship and tapped on the deck. As virtuosic as Powell's dancing was, she was never considered glamorous. In a review of Rosalie (1938), in which Powell danced on drums, Time called her "sexless, superhuman and morbidly adept, as if animated by a baleful intelligence of their own." At MGM Powell had full control of her choreography; she was given a studio in which to rehearse and afforded the opportunity to dub her own tap steps. While Broadway Melody of 1938 gave Powell the chance to tap dance with George Murphy and Buddy Ebsen, Honolulu (MGM, 1939) was her chance to acknowledge Bill Robinson, albeit in an athletic tap number in blackface impersonation.
Publicity was enormous when Powell was paired with Fred Astaire in his first post-Ginger Rogers film, Broadway Melody of 1940. It featured Astaire and George Murphy as a dance team, who compete for a role in a Broadway show, and Powell as their leading lady and romantic interest. In rehearsal, Powell and Astaire worked independently, in opposite corners of the room while improvising to Cole Porter's music. In the "Begin the Beguine," a competitive tap-off in the dazzling finale, Astaire met his match-- not in the romantic-partnership sense that he always sought with Ginger Rogers but in the vivacious and energizing, rhythmic ferocity of Powell's dancing that created a forward-moving propulsion. After Broadway Melody of 1940, there was talk of re-teaming Powell and Astaire in a film version of the Broadway musical Girl Crazy, but Astaire was less than enthusiastic about the project, causing it to be shelved. Plans for pairing Powell and Astaire in a film about the life backstage at the Ziegfeld Follies were also dissolved, as Powell learned that Astaire had been "unhappy with their teaming" in Broadway Melody of 1940.
Powell had begun on the stage as an independent, and she remained so for the rest of her career. In the spectacular finale of the "Fascinating Rhythm" number in Lady Be Good (1941), she reinstated her independence as a star soloist. Dressed in top hat and tails, she danced with a legion of men, who are framing and flipping her into dizzying aerial forward rolls into the camera's eye. Their group partnering of her is not so much to display her as an object of gazing desire, but a device in which she uses them to display her phenomenal expertise as the virtuoso female dancer of the Hollywood thirties.
Powell represents a triumphant figure as a female rhythm-tap soloist. She was a dancer who dressed in top hat and tails and moved with grace and speed, dribbling beats while dipping into backbends, bringing her head to the floor; the speed and aggression of her tapping countered by her long, sleek, and shapely legs. Her rhythmic phrasing did not conform to the standard eight bar- and two-bar break structure, but was varied and complicated with rhythmic phrasings that moved over the bar, combining ballet, rhythm tap, and acrobatics into routines that were entirely her own invention.
[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]