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• Miriam Nelson

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1919-
Birth Date: Sep 21, 1919

Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Miriam Nelson, tap dancer, film and television choreographer who pioneered the staging of amusement park extravaganzas, was born Miriam Franklin in Chicago, Illinois. Her father worked for the celebrity photographer Felix Seymour in Chicago and Bruno of Hollywood in New York; her mother was the wardrobe mistress for the exclusive Chicago nightclub Chez Paree. When she was ten years old a tap dancer moved into the building where her mother had a shop. "I heard all those wonderful sounds coming from down the hall," she recalled about her first exposure to tap dance, and finally found the courage to ask the man to teach her the steps. She eventually managed to learn with difficulty his entire repertory of buck and wing, trench, and over-the top steps and thought that she knew everything until, at age fourteen, she moved to New York. Studying with Ernest Carlos, she learned that tap dancing was not supposed to look difficult but effortlessly "cool." After absorbing all of the films of her female idols Eleanor Powell and Ann Miller, she auditioned for many shows, including the Radio City Music Hall Rockets. In a borrowed pair of toe shoes, she auditioned for Billy Rose's Casa Manana and was told to "Come back when you grow up." After many successive efforts, she made her professional debut in an act playing Troy and Schenectady, New York, eventually playing the Casa Manana as well as the Mayfair Club in Boston.

After making her debut in the dancing chorus on Broadway in the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart musical Sing Out the News (9-24-1938), she went on to appear in Yokel Boy (7-6-1939), starring Buddy Ebson, Very Warm For May (11-17-1939), with music by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Max Gordon; Rodger and Hart's Higher and Higher (4-4-1940), Panama Hattie (10-30-1940), starring Ethel Merman; and Cole Porter's Let's Face It (10-29-1941), working with choreographers Robert Alton, Billy Daniel, and Charles Walters, and often selected to be line-captain and making $35 a week, with $5 extra for being dance captain and $10 extra for understudying two people (for a total of $50 a week).

Upon moving to Hollywood with husband Gene Nelson, who was working on the Warner Brothers' film This Is the Army (1943), she visited the Paramount studios and ran into the director Buddy DeSylva, with whom she worked on Broadway and who facilitated her signing a seven-year acting-dancing contract, where she was featured in Double Indemnity and Here Comes the Waves (1944), Duffy's Tavern and Incendiary Blonde (1945), and the 1946 short Naughty Nanette. She worked for Columbia on Cover Girl (1944), starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, and in The Jolson Story (1946), with dances staged by Jack Cole, she choreographed and ghosted for the star Evelyn Keyes in the "Liza" number. With the Hollywood goddess image of a Greta Garbo and long and shapely legs, she was a riveting dancer on film. Dancing with Johnny Coy in Duffy's Tavern (which she choreographed), she played the girl-next-door who wanted to be married to Coy's Johnny-comes-marching-home from the war soldier boy, in a dance routine that moves from the white-picketed fence front yard to a soda shop, carnival sideshow, entrance to a church. Nelson choreographed the routine, combining tap and ballroom and ballet.

It was at Paramount, assisting the dance director Danny Dare that she first began choreographing, and when her husband Gene was signed by Warner Brothers to appear in a series of musical films, she choreographed many of his solo routines, as well as coaching Doris Day and many of his other costars. Divorced from Nelson, she continued as one of Hollywood's busiest TV and film choreographers, an expert tap choreographer but also a specialized in the staging of party sequences, later becoming one of the pioneers of spectacular Arena show staging with Disney on Parade (1969).

On television in the fifties and sixties, Nelson choreographed numbers for The Red Skelton Show, Make Believe Ballroom, Shower of Stars, Playhouse 90: The Dingaling Girl, The Bob Hope Show, The Don Knotts Show, Oh, Susanna, Wagontrain, The Farmer's Daughter, The Hollywood Palace, My Three Sons, The Lucy Show, Away We Go, with The Miriam Nelson Dancers, and the 42nd annual Academy Awards (1969). Widowed after her second husband, producer Jack Meyers' death, she returned to the stage in longtime-friend Marge Champion's Ballroom at the Long Beach CLO in 1992.

Dancing with Rusty Frank in Play Piano Play (1994) to a composition by Errol Garner, they make their entrance onto the stage sliding and stepping on the after beat; tapping out the rhythmic pattern of the tune they utilize tiptoe steps, syncopated cramp rolls, and flaps of the wrists to accentuate the solo vamps of the piano. The tap choreography is fleet-footed and musical, made all the more lighter by the fluttering sauté jumps into the air with beautifully shaped arms. The choreography is especially designed for tandem teamwork, and allows the viewer to follow the couple as they trade moves and direct the the audience's eye to each of the pairs; the gestures are sassy and upbeat and they look like they are having fun. While there is a keen sense of the bon vivant, their feet make close-to-the-floor chattering rhythms that belie the fact that they are dancing in heels.

In 2006, at the age of 86, Nelson performed at the New York City Tap Dance Festival. She was partnered by tap dancer and historian Rusty Frank, who said, "Miriam Nelson is one of the grandest people I know, and certainly one of the most stylish and talented tap dancers I've ever seen."

(Sources: Larry Billman, Film Choreographers and Stage Directors: an Illustrated Biographic Encyclopedia, 1893-1995 (1995), interview with author July 11, 2006, New York City; Rusty Frank, Tapping With the Masters: Miriam Nelson's Play Piano Play]