FAYARD & GINGER:

Fayard Nicholas (Daily Telegraph, 27/01/2006)

When the Nicholas Brothers appeared on screen in the musical Down Argentine Way (1940), cinema audiences threatened to riot to make projectionists play the dance sequence again. Fred Astaire considered their "Jumpin' Jive" sequence in the all-black musical Stormy Weather (1943) to be the best dance sequence ever filmed.

The sequence, in which the brothers performed to music by the Cab Calloway band, saw them tap dancing across music stands in the orchestra and leaping off a grand piano in full splits, before leapfrogging each other in synchronised full splits as they descended a huge sweeping staircase.

Fayard Antino Nicholas was born at Mobile, Alabama, on October 20 1914. His brother arrived seven years later. They grew up in Philadelphia, where their parents worked as musicians in their own vaudeville pit band.

The boys learned to dance by watching the black vaudevillians whom they accompanied. "One day at the Standard Theater in Philadelphia, I looked onstage and I thought, 'They're having fun up there; I'd like to do something like that'," Fayard Nicholas recalled.

Back in their living room, they worked up an act called "The Nicholas Kids" and were good enough by 1928 to debut in vaudeville. In 1931 they were signed to perform at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, and from there became a featured act at the Cotton Club, where they did their dance routines elegantly clad in top hat, white tie and tails. [...]

In 1940 the brothers were signed by Twentieth Century Fox to a five-year contract. In The Great American Broadcast of 1940, they appeared alongside the Ink Spots; in Sun Valley Serenade (1941), they performed Chattanooga Choo Choo to Glenn Miller's music with Dorothy Dandridge, although they were not allowed to appear on screen with the white stars of the picture.

"Tallulah Bankhead said if I'd been white I might have been able to dance with Ginger Rogers," Nicholas recalled in 2000.

The world is just a bit less beautiful place because our hatreds kept us from seeing them dance together.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2006 11:05 PM