Follies' specialty girl - Doris Eaton Travis, a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer - IVTR

In her ninety-four years, Doris Eaton Travis has had more lives than even the wiliest feline - from her adolescence as a dancer in the fabled Ziegfeld Follies to her upcoming appearance in Jim Carrey's wild new movie, Man on the Moon. Not long ago, she dusted off her tap shoes to perform to an enraptured audience in New York City, and took time to describe her past and present incarnations

Recently, while collecting background material for a book in the making, I went in search of a dancer or show-girl who had appeared in the 1918-1924 productions of the fabulous Ziegfeld Follies. Would anyone be alive who had danced on the stage of Florenz Ziegfeld's New Amsterdam Theater eighty years ago? With luck, I found Richard Ziegfeld, author of The Ziegfeld Touch, and a distant cousin to Florenz. Through Richard I found The Ziegfeld Club, located on Park Avenue in New York City, on the top floor of a church. Among its members: former Follies girls who had paraded in front of the Ziegfeld footlights in the most splendid, outrageous costumes, cutting a swath that made Wall Street tycoons rush to the stage door and hope to be seen about town with a Ziegfeld girl on their arm.

The administrator of The Ziegfeld Club, Nils Hanson, told me of five women who had danced in the 1918-1924 Follies and who would be happy to talk with me. Among them was a former Ziegfeld star - now ninety-four and living on an 880-acre horse ranch in Oklahoma. She had first danced in the chorus of the Follies in 1918, when she was fourteen. Her name is Doris Eaton Travis, and she was one of the five Eatone who in the 1920s made a splash on Broadway.

Pearl was the first of the Eatons to be hired by Ziegfeld, appearing in the Follies when she was eighteen years old. She then became an assistant dance director for Ned Wayburn and later in Hollywood, first for RKO studios, working with Hermes Pan. Joseph and Charlie Eaton were on the stage in their teens - beth were in the 1921 edition of the Follies. Charlie Eaton had starred on Broadway in Skidding, playing a young boy called Andy Hardy (MGM bought the rights, and the rest is Mickey Rooney history). Mary Eaton, the most celebrated of the family, made her stage debut when she was fifteen. Ziegfeld saw her in Over the Top with Fred and Adele Astaire and hired her to become the next Marilyn Miller, then one of Broadway's biggest stars. Mary later went to Hollywood to make her way In pictures, among them the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts.

Doris was the youngest of the Eaton girls. She worked her way from Ziegfeld chorus girl to specialty dancer to understudy for Marilyn Miller to principal before the age of sixteen. She appeared on Broadway with Al Jolson; Nacio Herb Brown wrote the song "Singin' in the Rain" for her. But all of this is practically an aside in Doris Eaton Travis's story - Doris has been through many adventures and many lives since her Ziegfeld days.

Last April, Doris danced on the stage of the New Amsterdam Theater for the first time in seventy-eight years. She was part of the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS annual benefits tribute to the Ziegfeld Follies dancers who were still alive. The audience stood and cheered and whistled and adored her. Doris was a showstopper. Rosle O'Donnell had her on her show - twice. Doris is finishing her autobiography and is about to appear with Jim Carrey in his new picture, Man on the Moon, directed by Milos Forman.

VICTORIA WILSON: Did your mother want you to be in show business?

DORIS EATON TRAVIS: It was my older sister Evelyn who really catapulted us into it. Mama went along. I grew up in a small town - Portsmouth, Va. Evelyn was the first child, and when she was about seven or eight years old, my father's sister, Aunt Rose, who loved the theater, took Evelyn to the theater, and Evelyn never got over it. From then on she was always asking Aunt Rose to take her again. As time went on, Mama had more and more children, and Evelyn saw Mama becoming a slave to the house. Evelyn probably saw preparing the younger kids for the stage as a way of helping her.

VW: How did you get into the Ziegfeld Follies?

DET: Well, Pearl was hired by Ziegfeld for the 1918 version. We had a friend who was one of Ziegfeld's business advisers, and he recommended her. She was just a chorus girl to start with. But Ned Waybum, Ziegfeld's dance director, evidently saw that she could handle the girls in some way, because he made her his assistant within several months. Soon after, I went down one afternoon to watch a rehearsal. I was fourteen at the time, and I was put in the chorus. I did eight chorus numbers.

VW: It's hard for me to imagine the grandeur of these shows.

DET: Well, in this 1918 Follies, the First World War was still on, and one of the numbers we did was called a Military Buck Dance, in which the entire chorus had costumes simulating the uniforms of the French Foreign Legion. We came up out of the middle of the stage, through the trapdoor; it started with just the rip of the tent, and gradually the whole tent was brought up onstage. And then the girls began to come out of the tent to make formations and do a tap dance. I did another number about how women had taken over men's jobs while the men were at war. There was a truck driver, a coal miner, and a factory worker - and then there was me, dressed up as a bellhop. [laughs] Will Rogers was in the show, and W. C. Fields and Marilyn Miller. Oh, and Ann Pennington was in that show. She was a petite little dancer, and Ned Wayburn engaged me to understudy her. That's how I got in the Follies, because he wanted someone to understudy her.

VW: You were short, too?

DET: Five-foot-two.

VW: All the dancers were about five-foot-two, right?

DET: Yes, that's right. But the showgirls were tall, willowy creatures, anywhere from five-six to five-ten. Dolores was the tallest one. She was just over six feet, I believe. She usually came on last in these parades of beautiful girls that would open up with a big fan.

VW: Tell me about Ziegfeld. Did you meet him?

DET: Oh, yes, many times. He had what I'd call a soft personality, at least with us anyway. And kind of a fatherly attitude. He'd pat you on the head. When he engaged me for the 1919 Follies, he asked someone to bring me to the office. And Mama and I went down and had an interview with him, and he said to her he would like me to be in the show and to understudy Marilyn Miller this time. It was very nice to be given that opportunity.

VW: You became one of the "specialty" girls. What did they do?

DET: Well, this opening number was called The Salad. There was a chef with a great big bowl, and each of us four girls came on representing something. Now, the Fairbanks twins represented salt and pepper. And then there was one who represented lettuce. I was the last one to come on: I had a red vest and I was paprika. So I did a little murine there with a lot of high kicks and things.

VW: How long did you stay with Ziegfeld?

DET: The next year, 1920, was my last Follies. That was the one in which I had my own solo. I did this kind of jazzy tap dance.

VW: Why did you leave?

DET: I went to England to make a movie called Tell Your Children, directed by Donald Crisp. Do you remember him?

VW: Sure. I didn't know he was a director, though.

DET: Yes. He tried directing. And it was a wonderful trip. Mama, of course, went with me. I was seventeen, I believe. And we went to Egypt for some of the locations. I saw the Sphinx and the Pyramids and the Temple of Karnak and rowed across the Nile. And Mama and I rode donkeys to the temple.

VW: It was a silent picture?

DET: Yes. They just set up the cameras and told us what areas we had to work in. We'd run through where we were going to be and what was being said. And we'd just film it, that's all. I should tell you that my leading man was Walter Tennyson, whose family descended from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet. And they lived in a castle, which Mama and I were invited to spend a week in.

VW: And how was he as an actor?

DET: About as good as I was. [laughs]

VW: Can you talk a little bit about the movie itself?

DET: One scene I remember was set in the Temple of Karnak with Walter and me together against a background of the Sphinx or something. And the story was that the girl became pregnant and her mother was furious and made her marry somebody else.

VW: Who impregnated her?

DET: Well, Walter, who played a farm boy. But the mother was resentful of that and made me marry the roue.

VW: I see.

DET: So, we had a scene where Walter and I had to say goodbye to each other.

VW: Walter played a farm boy and it was being shot in front of the Sphinx? Why would you need to be in Egypt for that scene?

DET: I don't know. [laughs] That must be why the movie was a flop.

VW: In 1922 you went to Hollywood to be in the Gorham Follies. What was it like there?

DET: [laughs] Well, Hollywood didn't have all the boulevards it has now. There was no Sunset Boulevard and all of that. As I recall, there were dirt roads going up to the studios.

VW: Did movie stars come to see you in the Gorham Follies?

DET: A lot of the stars came. Pola Negri came one night and my brother Charlie happened to be there with us. He was only about eight or nine years old, but he had the courage to ask her to dance and she got up and danced with him.

VW: How long were you in the Gorham Follies?

DET: Just one season. And then I married Mr. Gorham. It wasn't a happy marriage, Vicky, and my mother was very distraught about it because he was twice as old as I was. I was eighteen. Mama went back to New York to join the family, and I was out there alone and Mr. Gorham and I did a vaudeville act together. And then he died very suddenly of a heart attack. We were married a little less than a year. So then I went back to the family in New York, and I resumed my work in show business.

VW: In 1925, your sister Mary was in Kid Boots, you were in a play called The Sap, and Pearl was in Annie Dear with Billie Burke. Were the Eatons at the height of the New York musical-theater world at that time?

DET: I would say so. At one point there were five of us on Broadway at the same time.

VW: In 1926 you went back to Hollywood with Morton Downey?

DET: That was the Hollywood Music Box Revue. Kind of patterned after the Follies, only not so grandiose.

VW: Now, was this when Nacio Herb Brown wrote the song for you?

DET: That's right. Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed wrote the music and lyrics for several of the numbers, and one of them was "Singin' in the Rain." It was just one of the songs in the revue. And of course MGM didn't use it until years later.

VW: Did you like living in Hollywood?

DET: No. I'll tell you why: During the Music Box Revue, I fell very much in love with Nacio Herb Brown - he was supposed to be getting a divorce at that time. We had a prolonged affair, off and on for about eight years, which is why I went back and forth between New York and Hollywood. But there came a time when I realized that there was no future in it. My show business career hit rock bottom. And I was fed up with the idea that in show business you can only work when somebody says you can, and you starve the rest of the time. So I decided to look for something else. A dear friend of mine in New York said, "Why don't you go down to Arthur Murray's? They need a tap-dancing teacher and you need a job." So the next morning I went and he saw me, and I explained my background to him. He said, "When can you start?" I said, "Any time." And he said, "All right, tomorrow." I made eighteen dollars my first week, and I was so glad to get that money and to know I could get the same amount next week. So I said to myself, "That's it for me. I'm going to follow this career." And it turned out to be the greatest career move of my life.

VW: Tell me about it.

DET: I used to teach from ten to ten every day, five days a week, and from ten to six on Saturday. Eventually I helped open the first Arthur Murray studio in Detroit, in the Statler Hotel. Henry Ford II was one of my pupils.

VW: What dances did you teach him?

DET: I taught him the fox trot, the waltz, and the rumba. He wanted to learn the rumba. [laughs] Eventually Mr. Murray gave my friend Sy and me the franchise for the entire state of Michigan, and we began to open other studios. Let's see . . . . Well, we were running eighteen studios at one time.

VW: And what was your personal life like?

DET: Work, work, work. I met my husband. Paul. He was a student.

VW: How long was the courtship?

DET: Ten years. [laughs]

VW: I beg your pardon?

DET: Ten years, Vicky. Well, it's worked out, let's say.

VW: He was an Inventor?

DET: He invented a jamb to keep the car door open. That was his. Then he bought a ranch, way up north in Midland, Mich. We used to go up there weekends.

VW: And didn't he have horses there?

DET: No - no horses. He had cattle. And then he bought a factory in Rochester, Mich. It began to develop so well he decided he didn't want to keep going back up to Midland. So he bought another farm about fifteen miles from Rochester. And that's where he was living when after ten years he called one night and said, "I'll see you at the DAC [Detroit Athletic Club]." And I said, "Oh no you won't ." He said, "Why not?" I said, "Because I have other plans," and hung up. The next night, he called up and the first thing he said to me was, "When do you want to get married?" [both laugh]

VW: He got the message.

DET: He got the message real fast. We had marvelous times in those ten years. It was really a delightful courtship, if you want to call it that. But even a courtship can wear out. [laughs]

VW: Then the two of you moved to Oklahoma to raise horses?

DET: Yes, and at one time we had about forty brood mares and three studs. Then, a little less than ten years ago, we decided it was time to develop a different kind of horse business because we were getting older, you know. Now we board horses and we' re going to build an arena so that people will have a place to exercise their horses - that sort of thing.

VW: And Is It true that you're also getting your master's degree from the University of Oklahoma In Norman?

DET: Yes. Liberal arts, they call it. I'm going to aim for three years.

VW: You should he getting your master's when you're . . .

DET: Ninety-seven. [both laugh]

VW: When they have the big Miss Zlegfeld luncheon in New York, do you go?

DET: I went to the last luncheon, yes.

VW: Are you going to come to the next one?

DET: I hope so. I'm trying to figure out something I can do, because they always want me to do something now.

VW: Didn't you tap dance last year?

DET: Yes, I did a little number with - I have a dear friend here, she's a justice of the supreme court, and she loves to dance.

VW: Wait a minute! The Justice of the supreme court of the state of Oklahoma?

DET: That's right. Justice Alma Wilson. I asked her if she would do a little sister act with me using the tune [sings] "Hello, my baby - "

VW: ". . . Hello, my honey -"

DET: ". . . Hello, my ragtime gal."

VW: Was it a hit?

DET: Oh, yes. We got a standing ovation. [laughs]

VW: Maybe you'll do it again.

DET: Well, I don't know, I don't like to repeat myself. But it turned out to be such a cute little thing - it would be hard to top, it really would.

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