Rythm Was His Business

Beyond the pure joy they gave their audiences, the brothers’ historical contribution to dance is in linking those who came before — dancers such as John Bubbles and Bill Robinson — and those who followed them. “You recognize their style in breakdancing,” Baryshnikov says in We Sing, We Dance. “They are the chain, and that’s why they are important.” But though many dancers today look with admiration to Harold and Fayard, no dancer or dance team since has equaled their unique blend of talents.

“People used to say that me and my brother were going to be the next Nicholas Brothers,” Gregory Hines has said. “Until I saw them and realized that nobody was going to be the next Nicholas Brothers.”

For most black performers of the day, roles outside of specialty acts were impossible to secure unless it was to portray a servant or other similar character, something that never interested the Nicholas Brothers. “We wouldn’t do the ‘Mammy’ thing,” Harold recalled in the 1998 PBS documentary Vaudeville. “Maybe that’s why we didn’t get too many parts in films.”

While they were forced to stay in separate hotels and use back entrances, and were forbidden the freedoms of white performers in the States, they were lauded and showered with attention whenever they performed abroad. “When we went overseas, it was just like the Beatles,” Fayard recalled. “Crowds of people would come to meet us at the airport.”

Racial barriers in the U.S. finally prompted Harold to live in France for more than a decade. During his years in Europe, he taught himself several languages, performed extensively as a vocalist as well as a dancer, and pursued film roles. Fayard, meanwhile, stayed in Los Angeles, and when the brothers reunited for a 1964 appearance on the Hollywood Palace television show, Harold returned to the United States permanently. Though he ultimately settled in New York, he maintained strong ties with L.A. audiences and the local dance community, appearing most recently at the Getty Center in December.

Along with all the brothers’ accolades — including receiving the Kennedy Center Honors from President Bush in 1991 — Harold had received his fair share of negative publicity of late. His lifelong penchant for women — and they for him — came under scrutiny in Donald Bogle’s 1997 biography of Nicholas’ former wife Dorothy Dandridge. Likewise, television audiences saw him portrayed in HBO’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridgeas a womanizing and inattentive husband. Harold admitted to his far-from-perfect treatment of Dandridge, mostly blaming his age: “I was just too young.”

Harold Nicholas approached life like he did a dance routine: He attacked it with gusto, in one take. If the results weren’t always perfect, they were certainly memorable. The image I’ll carry with me is that of the spunky adolescent in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1936 who fearlessly belted out a Johnny Mercer tune and carried the same sentiments throughout his long career:

Just throw your head out, stick your chin out,

Bring your best Sunday grin out.

You know that you can win out soon,

Thanks to the twinkle in your eye, and the twinkle in your toe . . .

 

Paula Broussard is writing a biography of the Nicholas Brothers.