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• Jeni LeGon

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1916-2012
Birth Date: Aug 14, 1916
Death Date: Dec 7, 2012

Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois
Place of Death: Vancouver, British Columbia

Jeni LeGon, one of the first African-American women in tap dance to develop a career as a soloist, was born Jennie Bell, the youngest of four children. Her father, Hector Legon, was a chef and railway porter; her mother, Harriet, was a housewife. Not a high-heeled dancer in pretty skirts, she was a low-heeled dancer performing toe-stand in pants, and her rigorous combination of flash, acrobatics, and rhythm dancing proved you didn't have to be a man to dance like a hoofer. Born and raised near the south side of Chicago, her musical talents were developed on the street, in neighborhood bands and musical groups. She attended Sexton Elementary School. By the age of thirteen, buoyed by her brother who got a job touring as a singer and exhibition ballroom dancer, she landed her first job in musical theatre, dancing as a soubrette in pants, not pretty skirts.

By the age of sixteen, she was dancing in a chorus line backed by Count Basie Orchestra, and soon after touring as a chorus line dancer with Whitman Sisters, the highest paid act on the TOBA circuit. This all black, woman-managed company was successful in booking themselves continually in leading southern houses, and had the reputation for giving hundreds of dancers their first performing break. The Whitman Sisters' chorus line, she remembers, "had all the colors that our race is known for. All the pretty shading-- from the darkest to the palest of the pale. Each one of us was a distinct-looking kid. It was a rainbow of beautiful girls." It was while working in Los Angeles, where she was stopping the show for her flips, double spins, knee drips, toe stands, that Le Gon got a part in the 1935 MGM musical, Hooray for Love, as dance partner to Bill Robinson, who she says was a patient teacher and a perfectionist.

It was while working on that movie that she met Fats Waller, who she continued to work for most of her career. After dancing specialty acts in Detroit nightclubs, she headed for Los Angeles with a children's unit, stopping the show with her flips, double spins, and knee drops. It was there that RKO discovered her talent and cast her to appear with Bill Robinson and Fats Waller in the 1935 film Hooray for Love. Dubbed by the press as the "Chocolate Princess," MGM was impressed enough with her dancing to sign her to a long-term contract, paying the teenager $1250 a week. For her first film on contract with MGM, LeGon was assigned to work on Broadway Melody of 1936, the first of MGM's Melody musicals, which was to star the tap-dancing Eleanor Powell. Given the music, LeGon began rehearsals, and at a cast dinner party to promote the show, even performed before Powell and stopped the show. By the next morning, LeGon was informed through her agent that MGM executives had decided that since Powell was already cast as the star soloist, two female tap dancers were not needed for the production. "They didn't want to have two [female solo] dancers," said LeGon, "and because I was the brown one, they just let me go." The studio moreover informed LeGon that they had assigned her to the London stage production of At Home Abroad, performing the dances of Eleanor Powell and the songs of Ethel Waters, who had both appeared in the Broadway stage production (1935).

LeGon did perform in the London stage in C.B. Cochran's At Home Abroad and was hailed as "one of the brightest spirits," the new Florence Mills, "the sepia Cinderella girl who set London agog with her clever dancing." Back in the United States and in Hollywood, however, LeGon faced the cruelest indignity --of being cast to play every kind of servant imaginable. One of the cruelest, having to play the role of Ann Miller's maid Effie in Easter Parade (1948), starring Miller and Fred Astaire, who never spoke to her on the set. "The stars did not socialize. There was complete separation, that's the way you lived."

The tragedy about LeGon was that a burgeoning career as a female soloist in Hollywood films became a dream deferred. Had she emerged in another era, she might have surpassed the success of, say, Ruby Keeler, who in the 1930s was regarded as the "queen of taps," after appearing in the 1933 films that were directed by Busby Berkeley, Footlight Parade and 42nd Street. In a conscious and misleading redirection of LeGon's contract, MGM avoided having to consider how to represent her as a virtuosic black female soloist. If they paired her with a white leading man, how could they face possible financial losses caused by bad publicity? The nearest retrieval of LeGon's enormous talents was to keep her behind the scenes at MGM, working s a a dance consultant and dance director, having her stage such numbers as "Sping," for Lena Horne in her first movie, Panama Hattie (MGM 1942). The word sping was a cross between "Spanish" and "Swing." The song-and-dance "Sping" was LeGon's conception; she wrote the lyrics and staged the number, but she received no onscreen credit. LeGon said that it was only when she was an actress, in such all-black films as Double Deal (1939), Take My Life (1942), and Hi-Di-Ho (1944) with black jazzman Cab Calloway that she got the chance "to be the heroin, to get kissed." The lovely Lena Horne had the same experience in Hollywood, not coincidentally.

In the 1950s LeGon owned and operated her own dance school, the Jeni LeGon Dance Studio, in Los Angeles, teaching acting, personality singing, and dancing. Former students include Mickey Grant (the playwright who wrote the hit musical, Don't Bother Me I Can't Cope) and the choreographer Victor Upshaw. On television in 1951, in CBS-TV's Amos ‘n' Andy, she played the role of Daphne Jackson, the Kingfish's secretary. In 1969, LeGon relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia and has carved out her own niche in the local dance scene there. In 2004, she was teaching dance and voice privately, as well as at the Kits Neighborhood House. An accomplished percussionist, she was performing every Sunday night with a five-piece band at the La Botte nightclub.

In 2002, LeGon received an honorary doctorate from Oklahoma City University.

[Sources: Rusty Frank, Tap!: the greatest tap dance stars and their stories 1900-1955 (1990); Oklahoma City University, The Doctors of Dance: Honoring Nine Performing Artists Who Carved the Landscape of American Culture and Dance (2002) program; Henry Sampson, Swingin' on the Etherwaves: A Chronological History of African Americans in Radio and Television Broadcasting, 1925-1955 (2005); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]

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