And Then We Danced

by Henry Alford

  * * *

  Whenever insecurity is much in evidence in a particular arena of activity—I’m looking at you, fashion, royal courts, glossy magazines, high-end restaurants—that arena’s denizens will, in an effort to ease anxiety, create or pay heed to easily recognizable protocols and brand names; e.g., your friend didn’t just spend $900 on shoes, she spent $900 on Manolo Blahniks. Murray’s uncanny talent as a salesman saw him both combating and employing this humiliation/snobbery axis. On the former front, he had great success selling mail-order dance instruction: customers could buy paper “footprints” that you’d put on the floor and step on. The footprints had markings that corresponded to directions in a booklet. His book How to Become a Good Dancer had you trace your own shoes onto paper, and then make five copies of your “feet.” Murray encouraged you to dance alone at first, until you got up and running. Imagine the relief that a pathologically shy, aspiring dancer would feel, knowing that he wouldn’t have to go to a studio and endure the gaze of others.

  More tellingly yet, Murray the advertiser was not above speaking to a potential customer’s insecurities. “Most people lack confidence,” he told his wife. “Subconsciously, they would like to have more friends and be more popular, but they don’t openly recognize this desire.” When writing ad copy for his dance studios, Murray and his wife—one waggish line of criticism against Murray runs that, since Kathryn did most of the writing, Murray made his fortune “by the sweat of his frau”—sometimes mined Murray’s own travails from adolescence. An awkward evening he’d spent as a sixteen-year-old turned into an ad titled “How I Became Popular Overnight.” The ad’s copy ran, “Girls used to avoid me when I asked for a dance. Even the poorest dancers preferred to sit against the wall rather than dance with me. But I didn’t wake up until a partner left me alone standing in the middle of the floor. . . . As a social success I was a first-class failure.”

  As Mrs. Murray writes in her book, “Arthur found that no man wanted to admit that he was learning to dance, but he didn’t mind saying that he was learning the rumba. It was something like the difference between saying your feet hurt and your foot hurts. We ran smart-looking ads that now sound corny, but they appealed in those days to businessmen who read New York’s leading newspapers and business journals: ‘Does your dancing say “New York” or “small town”? Where do the fastidious satisfy their craving for the up-to-the-minute dance steps and instruction? A secret? On the contrary, they happily pass the word about Arthur Murray’s delightfully modern studios where chic meet chic.’ ” This ad was rigged out with pictures of attractive women; the pictures’ captions extolled these women’s good social backgrounds.

  In its heyday, ballroom and its attendant glamour could take you places. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers both came from modest backgrounds, but went on to become icons of sophistication and elegance; ditto Astaire’s idols, Vernon and Irene Castle. In Murray’s case, ballroom’s power to raise one’s station in life was noticeable not only in who Murray became in his success but also in who worked for him. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, the fall of the Hapsburgs, and the upheavals of the Depression, impoverished European aristocrats were happy to take jobs as instructors at Arthur Murray studios: at one point Murray’s work staff included a baroness, several countesses, and a White Russian prince.

  Pinkies: they’re for extending.

  * * *

  It occurred to me that I had a good opportunity to witness up close the aftermath of Murray’s work and life: I could talk to his daughter Phyllis McDowell. So, one balmy August day, I visited her at her summer house in Fenwick, an old-money enclave on the Connecticut shore where she’s been going for more than fifty years.

  Phyllis, now eighty-nine, was all accommodation and bemusement and warmth. Barefoot, nut brown from tanning, and wearing a bright yellow Izod shirt and a Lilly Pulitzer skirt that set off her beautiful legs (she danced weekly until a few years ago), she invited me to sit on her porch and drink ice water with slices of lemon in it. Her silvery-white hair was held in place by a barrette. She has a sly smile and wonderfully warm, welcoming eyes that seem perpetually to be responding to faint music from another room.

  I asked about the bomb shelter. (“Ted had some funny ideas,” she told me.) I asked about the footprints. (“It was a very architectural approach to dancing. If men were ever embarrassed about dancing, this mechanical approach made it much more palatable.”)

  But what I really wondered was, What was it like to be the daughter of someone whose orientation—both to dance, and to life—was so aspirational? Phyllis told me, “Nothing escaped my father’s attention—like if the lightbulbs were dirty or there was dust anywhere. He was very fussy about grammar. He was intolerant of any indulgences—especially alcohol, which was my mother’s nemesis. He’d make you unpack a suitcase if you packed too much. No wonder I’m a Quaker now.”

  Arthur and Kathryn Murray didn’t tell young Phyllis and Jane that the family was Jewish; when, as a teenager, Jane read about the traditional Jewish meal the seder, she thought it was a kind of wood. At age sixteen, Phyllis and Jane were taken to a plastic surgeon for nose jobs. The twin girls started attending Vassar, but when their father visited the campus one day he found the student body to be unkempt, so he convinced the girls to transfer to Sarah Lawrence.

  In Phyllis and her sister’s youth, an instructor would come to their house each week to give them dance lessons (like her father, young Phyllis stuttered). After college, the two sisters spent a summer working as Arthur Murray instructors, during which time Phyllis fell in love with and married a fellow instructor, Mr. McDowell.

  “Have you come across the story,” Phyllis asked me, chuckling, “where my father tells my mother, ‘We’re going to have a TV show! I want you to host it,’ and my mother says, ‘I don’t know anything about acting or singing,’ and my father tells her, ‘Don’t worry. The screens are so small that nobody will notice’?”

  “I did see that,” I said. “I also liked in your mom’s book when she talked about doing acrobatics on the show in her ball gown, or roller-skating on the show, all of which caused you to ask her, ‘Mother, do you think the things you do are really appropriate?’ ”

  “We were such little snobs. Parents can’t do anything right. Here my parents were, adventurous enough to have their own TV show at a time when no one else except Milton Berle did. They were fun and funny. Mother would call me after every show from Sardi’s. It was exciting.”

  As the afternoon wore on, Phyllis’s and my conversation gradually drifted toward her father’s demise in 1991. He and Kathryn were living in Honolulu at the time. Phyllis told me, “I remember just before he passed, he was lying out on the lanai. The last words I remember him saying were ‘We were so poor, we had to use newspaper as toilet paper.’ Isn’t that a peculiar thing to say? Why would you dwell on that?”

  I tried, “Maybe it was a statement of appreciation? Like, life was so bad back in the day, but then he managed to make it a whole lot better?”

  “That’s a nice way to look at it.”

  I looked over Phyllis’s shoulder at the sparkly Connecticut Sound, only a block away. I had about an hour before my train back to New York, and Phyllis said she was going to lie down for a few minutes before driving me to the station. I said that I’d brought my bathing suit and was hoping to take a quick swim.

  Phyllis, whose spirits had started visibly to flag, suddenly brightened. “That’s a great idea,” she said. “Take our golf cart!”

  DANCE AS POLITICS

  1.

  THE BALLROOM DANCING LESSONS OF my childhood weren’t my first exposure to dance instruction. In third grade I’d made the acquaintance of a charmer by the name of Dough-See-Dough.

  In the early 1970s at my elementary school in Worcester, Massachusetts, teachers would sometimes of an afternoon foist square dances on us. The renewed interest in folk dancing during the 1960s and ’70s mirrored the utopian idealism of the earlier of those two
decades, and blossomed amid an uptick of folk singing and ethnomusicology; it was a time when men with beards were using the word “community” a lot.

  The dance I remember best here is the Virginia Reel: the group forms two lines of an equal number of dancers, who face each other, boys on one side, girls on the other. The couple at the top of the line, while skipping or bouncing on the balls of their feet, hook arms and twirl around each other, and then each hook and twirl with every member of the opposite line (boys with girls, girls with boys), always returning to their partner for a hook-and-twirl after each “away game.”

  You’d think that any break from multiplication tables or the causes of the American Revolution would have been welcome diversion, but most of us kiddies trudged through these dances in a zombie-like state of grim obligation. I didn’t mind standing in the non-leadership part of the line: the effort expenditure was minimal, and no one was focusing on you for long. But to be the lead couple was to be saddled with responsibility. The lead couple had to remember always to return to each other, and had to remember with whom they’d just danced. Also: you were skipping, and let’s all just silently agree that this particular brand of bounciness is a good look only for the heartier leprechauns. The combined demand on my memory and motor skills was a lot to ask of someone who had difficulty fitting a pillow into a pillowcase and who was convinced that Saran Wrap’s campaign of self-adherence was a conspiracy to discredit children.

  The Virginia Reel’s salvation was the thrill of centrifugal force as you whirled your partner to the next post. All the clunking around seemed worthwhile once you were rewarded with a brief blast of the dizzies. My classmates and I could also see the inherent appeal of do-si-doing (or, as we thought of it, Dough-See-Doughing), which we did when dancing square dances: the potential for delightful body-crashing loomed large here.

  But I’m going to guess that there was probably something going on at a deeper, subconscious level, too. This was, after all, our first non-parental, non-televisual exposure to the war between the sexes. The script ran, I’m crossing my arms as if in disapproval or silent judgment, and then, while circling you, I’m gonna wash you down with a heaping dose of side-eye.

  * * *

  It was only in 2015 that I learned about the importance of square dancing to automobile titan Henry Ford (a name which, given its similarity to mine, was invoked in my presence throughout my childhood). As Megan Pugh points out in America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk, Ford was, in many ways, “the great modernizer: he invented the assembly line, mechanized labor, collapsed distances with his Model T, and sped up the pace of American life. But Ford wanted to slow things down, too.” He championed square dancing in all its wholesomeness by throwing dance parties for friends and his employees, by publishing a 1926 manual of old-timey dances, and by successfully rallying to get square dancing into the phys ed curriculum of public schools in Dearborn and Detroit.

  All good, no? Well, the problem lies in the “wholesomeness” part. An anti-Semite and isolationist, Ford thought that America’s roots were, and should continue to be, white and Protestant. Much of his fervor for square dancing was a reaction to the wildness of jazz dancers like Lindy Hoppers. He thought dancers’ bodies should not touch, and that dancers should put a handkerchief over their hands lest flesh touch flesh.

  Ford told the New York Times in 1925 that square dancing could make its participants “less hurried and more neighborly. People lived further apart [previously], but knew each other better. They worked harder, but had more leisurely recreations. They weren’t pushed by a mania for speed. There was a community of interest, of work, of pleasure. Farmers, folks who are supposed to be rough and ready people, had an innate gentleness of manner that is rare today. The square dances had much to do with that.”

  I find Ford’s ideas about Jews repulsive. I’d like to rub him raw with Golda Meir’s hankie. But the idea that he saw square dancing as the medium through which to create his straw-flecked utopia is fascinating to me.

  Somehow, the inherent power of stepping and twirling and bouncing to music spoke to the industrialist. The man who had done more than any other individual to speed up America now wanted to slow it down.

  “Perhaps progress means speed,” Ford told the Times. “I don’t think civilization does.”

  2.

  When it is political, dance shares a lot of similarities with the other arts—e.g., the very act of dancing is, in some contexts or climes, political, just as expressing certain views while living under a dictatorship might be. Then, once you add touching or gyrating or same-sex partnering or revealing clothing, you only up the ante. To be gay and to dance in a club after the 2016 shooting in which forty-nine people were killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando is to experience powerful volts of ambient, free-floating solidarity; it would be difficult for this experience not to feel political.

  When compared with the other arts, concert dancing (as opposed to social dancing) gets a special citation here. Politically charged performing arts usually require more bravery from their enactors than politically charged non-performing arts like literature, because these enactors are probably in the same room with their audience during the performance. Us writers tend to savor the shock waves from the sanctuary of the pub.

  Admittedly, putting the words “politics” and “dance” in the same sentence feels a little dubious. Two things come immediately to mind. The first is those lame attempts made by actual politicians—typically, former politicians, or aspiring ones—to boogie publicly in an effort to appear likable. Behold 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump sashaying awkwardly in a black church in Detroit just months before the election. Dancing with the Stars gives its contestants a huge canvas to paint on here—former House majority leader Tom DeLay showed us what happens when a blocky middle-aged white dude unleashes his cha-cha–fueled “Wild Thing”; former Texas governor Rick Perry began one of his routines on the show with that most exalted of choreographic tropes, a visit to a corn dog stand.

  Sometimes a politician’s deployment of dance is more notional. Just two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, candidate Hillary Clinton, who’d gotten a lot of attention for a shoulder shimmy she did during one of the debates, told listeners of the radio show The Breakfast Club, “I keep telling people I want to close the deficit, and one of the deficits I want to close is the fun deficit. We gotta close the fun deficit. I’m sick of all this meanness—why don’t these people that support my opponent go out dancing? I think we need a big national dance.”

  The second thing that comes to mind when contemplating the politics/dance axis is equally tinged with need or desperation. Cue the Saturday night in college when you trudged to a dank basement space to see a leotard-clad friend and her troupe crawl across a spray of dirt and pottery shards while keening their offering’s title, Diaspora and the Ravages of Civil War: An Evening.

  I’m not saying that political dance is inherently inferior to other kinds of dance. Rather, overtly political dance, like all overtly political art, confounds its audience: its viewers don’t know whether they’re applauding the work or the cause. When comedians do jokes solely to make audiences agree or applaud rather than laugh, the audience responds with what is known among comedians as clapter. Other forms of political art generally elicit from their audience a Mona Lisa smile and an ambiguous “You’re so brave.” Moreover, political dance pieces—with occasional exceptions like Savion Glover’s Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk or Kurt Jooss’s ballet The Green Table or maybe Busby Berkeley’s “Remember My Forgotten Man” from Gold Diggers of 1933—are rarely considered a choreographer’s best work.

  In the case of one Broadway show, dance was used to soften the blow of politics. In the middle of Fela!, Bill T. Jones’s terrific 2008 show about the Nigerian musician and human rights activist Fela Kuti, the Fela character encouraged us all to stand up and shake our nyansh (booty): “Let’s just get everybody to participate in moving their nya
nsh. And, in this way, they can look at the nyansh of these women [dancers] and appreciate it—not just from a voyeuristic, you know, pornographic standpoint, but really appreciate the craftsmanship.” Which, indeed, seemed to be a part of the experience of dancing while standing in front of our seats; Greg and our friend Liz and I got all artisanal with our nyanshes.

  But Jones has also talked about how this audience participation eased us audience members into what was, for some Broadway-goers, a fairly tough sell: not only were Fela and the musical form he pioneered (Afrobeat) largely unknown on these shores, but the man was a cocky, raunchy, fire-breathing revolutionary who roundly applauded the virtues of marijuana and polygamy. He married twenty-seven women on one day in 1978. He was arrested more than two hundred times during his life. One Fela song from the show is called “Expensive Shit,” and it is not metaphorical. The show ends with coffins being laid on the stage to protest injustices suffered by Nigerians and other Africans.

  So, a little communal motion-making is a nice way to take the edge off such extremes. As Sahr Ngaujah, one of the actors who played Fela, has put it, “Why not give people candy, if that’s what you want? They don’t have to know that it’s full of vitamins and minerals, you know what I mean? If it’s sweet, they’re gonna eat it anyway.”