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The Man in the Dancing Shoes
Gregory Hines Scores Big on Broadway with
Jelly's Last Jam
by Mervyn Rothstein
It's close to curtain time at the Virginia Theater on Broadway, and
backstage in his dressing room Gregory Hines is getting ready to put
on his dancing shoes. They are bright and shining, brown and tan; on
the bottom of each are two pieces of metal called taps, one covering
the heel, the other the front of the sole.
"You've got to be sure the shoe fits comfortably and snugly," he
says. "And you can choose from many different styles. But when it
comes down to it, it's not the shoe that matters. It's what in your
heart that counts."
Gregory Hines's heart has been in his shoes for most of his 46 years,
as he has tap-danced his way into the heart of America. And soon on
this hot Sunday afternoon, he will walk out of the dressing room door,
head for the stage and go into his song and dance to thrill a sold-out
audience with his portrayal of the great jazz composer Jelly Roll
Morton in Jelly's Last Jam. In that role, Hines received this
year's Tony Award as best actor in a musical.
As he prepares to go on, Hines is sitting before a mirror surrounded
by photographs of his friends and family, talking about his life and
his career: his new show, his childhood performances with his brother,
Maurice, as a tap-dancing duo in Harlem, his Broadway success in
Sophisticated Ladies, and his roles in movies such as The
Cotton Club, White Nights, and Tap. And, as he speaks, his
deep, dark expressive eyes and his gentle, relaxed friendly smile
convey the warmth and happiness he has achieved by doing what he
enjoys most.
"I just love to tap-dance," he says. "I've been tapping for 44 years,
and for me, it's the easiest way I can express myself as an artist. I
don't mean it isn't challenging. It's just that when I have my tap
shoes on, I feel very self-confident. I feel like I can speak from my
heart. It's a way I've always been able to get in touch with many
different emotions. I put my shoes on and I start to dance, and it's
clear to me what I'm feeling."
Hines usually arrives at the Virginia Theater about two hours before
the show starts. "First I put the gel in my hair and slick it back,"
he says. "I have something to eat, I slowly begin putting on my
makeup, and I go through my mail. It's time for me to relax. I make a
few phone calls. And then, I begin to stretch, very slowly. I have a
device called a Pro Stretch, which I use for the lower part of my
legs. It's terrific for hamstrings, the Achilles tendon, the calf
muscle. Then, as other people in the show come in, we talk for a
bit. About an hour before curtain time, I start to get my mind right,
to seriously consider the Jelly Roll Morton character--his feelings,
his attitudes. And by the time they call half-hour, I'm ready to go
on."
That character is a complex one because the Jelly Roll Morton in
Jelly's Last Jam is not your typical Broadway-musical
protagonist. Born to one of the oldest, most genteel Creole families
in New Orleans, a family that vehemently denied its African-American
heritage, Morton carried that same attitude throughout his life. "We
are who we are, and we are not who we are not," his family would tell
him. He was cruel and cutting to his friends and lovers. He called
himself the inventor of jazz, but he refused to acknowledge the
African-American roots of his music: "Beating on pots will never be
music," he says in the show. And yet when he died, it was in the
"colored wing" of Los Angeles County General Hospital.
"This show is a real departure for the American musical stage," Hines
says. "Especially in terms of African-American musicals. Those kinds
of shows are usually all singing and all dancing. Everybody's
happy. I've been in those shows and was happy to be in them. But I
think our situation now is different. We need to reach for something
more. First of all, I don't think African-American people are
particularly happy now. And if you show them as happy on the stage,
it's not true. This is not to say that we shouldn't entertain, because
that's what the musical stage is for. But we can also do more now, and
learn something about ourselves, and the human condition, the
condition of being an American."
Hines credits much of this aspect of "Jelly" to George C. Wolfe, the
show's author and director. Bringing such a story to the stage, Hines
says, "was a great gamble, because Jelly Roll Morton is not a hero;
he's a human being and not a great one."
"I struggled, man," Hines says. "Some of the things Jelly says, that I
have to say, I couldn't even say to the other actors during
rehearsal. In one line, where I'm talking about Jelly as a young man,
I say, 'classically trained by the finest musicians of the day, while
others of darker hue lived in shacks and crooned the blues. 'Whew! And
then I say to the woman I know loves me, 'Nobody knows me, but as far
as bitches go, you come the closest.' And, I say to my best friend,
Jack the Bear, I say, 'Why don't you just be a good little nigger and
put on that coat?' For the first three weeks of rehearsal, I just
couldn't say it. We'd get to those lines, and I would just hang my
head. And George would say, 'It's all right. Don't worry about it. It
will come.'"
Finally, it did, "One of the things about acting," Hines says, "is
that one has to get in touch with one's own self, one's own emotions
and experiences, with anything that will help. We all have a darker
side, but we push that side back. But once I started to get inside
Jelly, to try to understand him, to try to live in that character, I
was able to get in touch with aspects of my own personality and my own
history that I couldn't deny, and that were very valuable to me.
"I come from a background where people on my mother's side of the
family are very light-skinned and the people on my father's side are
dark-skinned," he says. "And when my mother married my father, my
mother's father refused to come to the wedding. He didn't want her to
marry a dark-skinned African-American. I loved them all, but as I grew
up I could see and feel a certain subtle superiority that the
lighter-skinned African-Americans felt toward the darker ones. And the
more I read about Jelly, the more I could understand."
Now, Hines says, he loves to say those lines. "I've been hissed on
stage by the audience because of some of the things Jelly says," Hines
recalls. "And it makes me feel good. Because I've always played nice
guys. It was time for a change."
Hines started playing nice guys at an early age. He was born in New
York City, and spent his younger days with his family on West 150th
Street in Harlem, in an area known as Sugar Hill, where many black
entertainers resided. His older brother, Maurice, began taking tap
lessons at age 4. Gregory was eager to follow in his brother's dance
steps, and soon joined in.
"I don't think we were given tap lessons because my parents thought we
were going to become professional dancers," Hines says. "It was just
like giving kids piano lessons. But we began to develop, and we began
to feel it might be a career."
Gregory and Maurice's parents next sent them for lessons to Henry
LeTang, the world-renowned tap teacher. "He gave us an act," Gregory
Hines says. "That was really the beginning."
The act, called the Hines Kids, began when Gregory was six. He and his
brother danced at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem. They made
their first Broadway appearance in 1954, in small roles--Maurice was a
newsboy and Gregory a shoeshine boy--in the musical The Girl in
Pink Tights. As they became teenagers, the name of the act was
changed to the Hines Brothers. And later, after their father, Maurice
Hines Sr., joined them as a drummer, they called themselves the Hines,
Hines and Dad. They appeared on television on the The Ed Sullivan
Show and often on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and
performed internationally.
But by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hines says, "Tap had fallen out
of fashion and the act split up." (The breakup, and earlier disputes,
drove a wedge between Gregory and his brother, one that persists
despite occasional reconciliations.) There was also another split:
Gregory had married in 1968, and his daughter, Daria, was born in
1970, but divorce soon followed.
Gregory moved to Venice, California, and played in a jazz-rock band,
Severance. He often had little money, but, he says, those days were a
crucial learning experience.
"It was a great time for me," he says, "because it was a time of great
discovery. I became a hippie. I didn't do any tap dancing. In fact,
from 1973 to 1978, I didn't even own a pair of tap shoes. It was the
first time I was really by myself. It was the first time I was on my
own. I had to learn how to take care of myself. Which I did. And it
really paid off when I came back to New York and started working in
the theater. Because I felt so much more self-confident. And
ultimately, that's what it takes."
It was in Venice that Hines met his current wife, Pamela Koslow, who
is a producer of Jelly's Last Jam. They have a son, Zachary,
9. Koslow also has a 19-year-old daughter, Jessica, from a previous
marriage.
In the late 1970s, tap was beginning to make a comeback. Hines
returned to New York and soon found roles in Broadway shows. And soon
rediscovered the success he had known as a youth.
First there was Eubie!, a tribute to the composer Eubie Blake,
choreographed by LeTang, in which Hines appeared with his
brother. Then came, Comin' Uptown, a musical version of Charles
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, set in Harlem. And finally, there
was the smash hit, Sophisticated Ladies, a joyful and highly
praised revue of the magic of Duke Ellington. For all three--in
consecutive years from 1979 to 1981-Hines received Tony Award
nominations: as featured actor in Eubie!, and as leading actor
in the other two. But each time, he lost.
He then began his movie career, as an actor, first in Mel Brooks's
History of the World Part I. Roles soon followed in
Wolfen with Albert Finney, Deal of the Century with
Chevy Chase, Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (set in
the legendary Harlem supper club at which his grandmother, Ora Hines,
was a dancer), White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov and
Tap with Sammy Davis Jr., a boyhood idol.
And now, he is back on Broadway, after a decade-long absence. And he
has finally won that elusive Tony, for a role that showcases his
talents as an actor and a singer as well as a dancer. "Tony night was
very intense," Hines recalls, "because I had lost three years in a
row. I knew that I knew how to lose. I knew that if I lost again, I'd
feel bad for a couple of hours, and then I'd be OK. That was the way
it usually was. I recovered. I got my appetite back. I felt good about
the whole nomination thing, but I remembered that every time I lost,
when I heard the other person's name announced, it was like a harsh
sound in my ears. It was cutting. I felt such a rush of
disappointment. But this year, when I heard my own name, it was so
warm. And, it felt so good. We have a tape of it, and a couple of
nights ago we looked at it, and even now when I replay it, I feel the
same warmth."
Soon it will he time for Hines to perform, to rise up on a platform in
front of the stage, his back to the audience, his head and shoulders
slumped forward, as Jelly Roll Morton, his old body "terminally
inclined," prepares to relive in music and dance the joys and
sadnesses of his life. There will he no hisses this day, but there
will be a standing ovation, for Hines and the entire cast, at the end
of the show.
Immediately after the final curtain, Hines is almost as busy as he is
during the two and a half hours on-stage. First he smiles and shakes
hands with the long line of well-wishers waiting outside his dressing
room. And then he heads downstairs to sign 15-minutes worth of
autographs for a crowd of fans standing outside the Virginia's stage
door.
Finally, he is back in his dressing room, and it is time to relax. It
is time to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes: a good cigar. He
takes one out of a portable rosewood carrying case, gazes at it and
smiles.
"I love the taste," he says. "I love the whole ritual. Clipping off
the tip. Rolling the cigar in my fingers. Looking at the
wrapper. Lighting it up. The aroma. The sense that pervades my
sinuses. I love that it all takes a nice long time. It really relaxes
me."
Hines says he smokes many kinds of cigars. "I get some Cubans
surreptitiously," he says. "But lately I've been smoking the Zino
cigars. Zino Davidoff has been doing some cigars in Honduras now. He's
pulling all his stuff out of Cuba. I have a lot of respect for his
artistry in terms of cigar making."
Hines began smoking cigars 22 years ago, he says. "My daughter was
born Nov. 16, 1970, and I bought a box of cigars to give out," he
recalls. "They were just typical cigars that said, 'It's a girl!' It
was a very happy time for me, and I was smoking them, and I liked
them. I just felt so contented and happy that I'd had a daughter. She
was so beautiful and healthy. So I started smoking on a daily
basis. They weren't expensive. They were just whatever I could get my
hands on. They cost maybe a buck or a buck fifty."
But then, he says, he stopped for a while. "I was only 24 years old at
the time," he says, "and my father told me I looked stupid with a
cigar in my mouth."
He started again about nine years later. "I was in a film,
Wolfen with Albert Finney," Hines says. "Finney had
Montecristos--lots of them. We were supposed to play best friends in
the movie so he said we should spend a lot of time together. He was
supposed to smoke the cigars in the movie, too. And he asked me if I
liked cigars, and I said I used to smoke them but I hadn't had one in
years. So he gave me about 10 Montecristos. And that was that."
Then, a few years later, while Hines was in London filming White
Nights with Baryshnikov, he ran into an old friend, Robert
DeNiro. "He told me about Davidoffs," Hines says. "He bought me a
bunch of them and left them for me at my hotel. And ever since then
I've been a Davidoff fan. It's a terrific cigar. It's well-wrapped. I
like the color. It's a full smoke, but it's not harsh in any way."
When he's not working, Hines says, he smokes about one or two a
day. "But if I'm on vacation--we go to the Caribbean and rent a house
for about a month in Barbados--then I smoke four or five or more a
day." When he's performing though, "It's just one at the end of the
week, after the Sunday matinee, because there's no performance
Monday," he says. "But on the night of the Tonys, I smoked two."
As he is puffing, Hines is thinking about what comes next, what he is
hoping to do to follow the success of Jelly's Last Jam .
Tap is in his future, he says, and so is film.
"I'm committed to this show for a year," he says. "And, I'm looking
forward to it. I'm going to use that time to develop a couple of
musical films. I co-own the movie rights to the story of the great
African-American tap dancer Bill Robinson, and I very much want to do
that."
Because the role of Jelly Roll Morton is so intense, he says, he is
not planning to take a vacation during his time in the show. "It would
he very hard to come back," he says. But afterward, he says, he is
looking forward to relaxing in Barbados, "while the Caribbean is
lapping up against the shore."
He laughs. "I'll sip some piņa coladas," he says. "And, I'll
smoke 50 cigars a week."
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