THE FLIGHT CREW

Fayard Antonio Nicholas, 83, lifted his cane lightly in the courtyard of the Autry Museum and did a little time-step for the showgirl who had followed him, star-struck. The old man’s body, and the impeccable suit and the cane, still danced, but it was a sly shuffle, more touching than grand.

It was a grand gesture nevertheless--and showed the kind of star he was: good natured and, even with two hip replacements, willing, capable and strong. On this night, he judged a Dorothy Dandridge look-alike contest, and in a few days he would fly to Washington with his brother, Harold, to attend the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy Center Honors, of which they were 1991 recipients. (They were saluted as movie legends with a 1994 star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.) On April 6 would come more honors, at Carnegie Hall, with an all-star tribute to the Nicholas Brothers featuring Bobby Short, Savion Glover and Lena Horne.

If it is true, as Aristotle supposed, that a dancer can, “by the rhythms of his attitudes . . . represent men’s characters, as well as what they do and suffer,” then the Nicholas Brothers speak for millions. Mikhail Baryshnikov pronounced them “the most amazing, amazing dancers I have ever seen in my life--ever.” They’ve been characterized as “the greatest dance team ever to work in American movies.” And they are as notable as any historical figures of the American stage. Beginning in the 1930s, the time of the brothers’ adolescence and rise to national prominence, Harold and Fayard were among the few African American performers allowed to appear in the new medium of sound films without blackface or tatters, or dressed in livery, or in the obsequious guise of human pets and good luck charms, or as ne’er-do-wells, sycophants, pickaninnys or buffoons. The Nicholas Brothers were the first African Americans in big-time films to look like the people we looked up to, and went both to parties and church with. They were confident, dapper and gifted and always appeared to be relaxing--playing themselves, whether extending the limits of human flight in dance or resting within its myriad rhythms and stops, in top hat, tails and tuxedos, in boaters and spats. They represented what the Negro, until that time, never had in America: continuity, a preservation and extension of the highest virtue of the past and a confident flight into the unknown.

They were already consummate showmen by 1931, the time of their first radio appearances in their hometown of Philadelphia, on the “Horn and Hardart Kiddie Hour” radio show (Harold was 10; Fayard, 17). They were naturals, self-taught by Fayard, a kind of motion-poet with an intuitive grasp of the interior architecture and imperatives of dance. Harold, the beautiful child, was a precursor to all the pop-transforming prodigies who followed him, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Michael Jackson. As little boys, they dressed and danced like men, and they were acknowledged as peers (and adored) by adult contemporaries such as Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The great George Balanchine recruited the brothers for two of his Broadway productions; within the span of two years, they leaped from vaudeville to radio to movies, and by 1932 they were co-starring with jazz composer Eubie Blake in one of the early Vitaphone sound films.

They sang and danced to the songs of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington and others, in five languages and on five continents, yet they hardly uttered a word of dialogue to a white actor onstage, or kissed or touched a woman of any age or type, or buddied-around with a leading guy--with the notable exception of Gene Kelly (“The Pirate,” 1948)--in more than 30 years of film. Their routines were “specialty numbers,” shot independently of the movie plot lines so Southern film exhibitors could have the option of cutting the team out of the picture. But their dance sequences were a living special effect--an unrepeatable, show-stopping spectacle. When they were filming “Orchestra Wives” (1942) with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Nick Castle, 20th Century Fox’s famed dance director, was continually challenged to come up with stunts that would showcase the team’s athleticism and grace. “Hey, stop the music,” Castle said. “I’ve got an idea. I want you to run up a wall [and] do a back flip into a split.” “Are you crazy?” Fayard responded, “let me see you do it.” Castle confessed he could not, but added: “I know you can.” Their ecstatic, wall-walking, 360-degree flight into a split became one more impossible routine in a career that has lasted almost seven decades.

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I met Fayard Nicholas, quite by chance, late last year. Mayme Clayton, founder and president of the Black American Cinema Society, called to find out if I could drive a friend living in the San Fernando Valley to the Autry Museum. He was to judge a Dorothy Dandridge look-alike contest. That fellow I was to chauffeur that night--Dandridge’s former brother-in-law--was Fayard.

I picked him up in front of the cottage he shared, until her recent death, with his wife, Barbara. His home sits on the 40-acre campus of the Motion Picture & Television Fund and Foundation, at the western edge of Woodland Hills. The site includes a compound of independent cottages, a hospital, retirement community, outpatient care facility, recreational area and theater. “You have to be in motion pictures or TV for 20 years before you are eligible to move here,” Fayard informed me.

He is thin, vigorous and small (5 feet, 4 inches), a marked contrast to the monumental presence he projected on the screen. His sharp, expressive features are set in a narrow, cinnamon brown face. Cheerful, aristocratic and polite, he speaks incessantly, always about celebrities and show business: Louis Armstrong, Harold Lloyd, Eleanor Powell. For the contest, he was dressed in a brown three-piece suit that seemed an updated copy of the clothes his show-business parents had custom-made for the team when they started out on the black vaudeville circuit in Philadelphia about 70 years ago.

The brothers lived as pampered cultural aristocrats, with the legends of American pop culture and celebrity making dutiful pilgrimages to see them. “It was so wonderful,” Fayard recalled. “All those great people wanted to come and meet these little guys, the Nicholas Brothers.” Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were among those who came to the Nicholas home on Harlem’s storied Sugar Hill, where the family moved in 1932. When the brothers were cast in films in which other Negro stars were expected to don--in spirit or in fact--the burnt cork and tatters of blackface minstrels, none of the accepted racist practices seemed to apply. “My brother and I, we never did do anything like that. We thought our talent was enough. They didn’t even ask us to do those things. They wouldn’t dare. Can you imagine us being a pickaninny, dancing in tails?”

Yet some observers believe “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” a Tony-award winning musical closing today at the Ahmanson Theatre, is critical of some of the black pioneers of tap dancing, such as Bill Robinson and, inexplicably, the Nicholas Brothers. Strange, since their act was both apotheosis and rebuttal to the fading periods of minstrelsy, vaudeville and ragtime into which they were born. Nonetheless, a study guide distributed when “Noise/Funk” performers have appeared before school groups, tells how “The Kid,” in a role created for the stage and choreographed by Savion Glover, in his quest to rescue the true “beat” from the manifold depredations of Hollywood (that is, whites), encounters a team of Negro dancers named Grin and Flash. Black dancers, we are told, “who have given up their true beat to dance Hollywood style.”

Dorothy Nicholas Morrow worries that the “Noise/Funk” characters are clearly meant to ridicule her brothers. George C. Wolfe, the director who conceived and, with Glover, developed the show, is famous for his satirizing, she said. “So it is not unique for him to do this, but at the same time you wonder why he needed to.” It is particularly remarkable since the Nicholas Brothers’ hip credentials are as unassailable as, say, Cab Calloway’s or Duke Ellington’s, with whom they performed. Moreover, Fayard was one of Savion Glover’s earlier inspirations. “Black and Blue,” a Broadway show that Fayard choreographed, and for which he was awarded a 1989 Tony, included in its cast the then little-known, 15-year-old Glover.

So, are Grin and Flash a parody of the Nicholas Brothers? “A lot of people think that,” Glover replied. “We’re just showing what cats had to go through. It’s not necessarily the Nicholas Brothers. That can be any dance team or any one person who chooses to take his career in that way.” Glover is currently in Los Angeles choreographing “The Rat Pack,” an HBO movie about the adventures of Frank and Dean and Sammy--Nicholas Brothers contemporaries and fans, every one. “It’s because of them that I am here and able to do what I do, which is tap dance,” Glover said of Fayard and Harold. “I have a great amount of respect and admiration, not only for the Nicholas Brothers, but for all the cats who paved the way. Just respect and love.” When asked who he thinks has real star potential on the American horizon, Fayard returns the favor: “I’ll tell you a little guy who I think is going to be one of the great dancers in the 21st century . . . Savion Glover. He’s got some wonderful feet. [But] I don’t like the way he dresses.”

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On the night we met, Fayard was lionized and fawned over, just like the old days. His brother Harold made an unexpected appearance during the Dandridge look-alike contest, and Fayard’s granddaughter, Catherine, 10, did an impromptu tap dance onstage. But on the drive back home, the magic of the night faded as Fayard raged over the public memory of Dandridge, the first African American nominated for a best actress Oscar, for 1954’s “Carmen Jones.” It is often noted that she died much as Marilyn Monroe did--depressed and alone. Dandridge, sometimes called “the black Marilyn Monroe,” was a friend of the actress.

“Why don’t they call Marilyn the white Dorothy Dandridge?” Fayard complained. Her bizarre death--a drug overdose in 1965--was not a suicide, he insisted. “No way . . . she had everything to live for.” Dandridge had become friends, post-divorce, with Harold Nicholas, Fayard said, and was reviving her stalled career.

The Nicholas Brothers can claim some credit for launching her. In 1938, the brothers were already stars, headlining the stellar all-Negro revue at the whites-only Cotton Club in Harlem when they met Dorothy, then a 15-year-old singer with the Dandridge Sisters, a group that included sister Vivian and childhood friend Etta Jones. Dorothy was an innocent, and Harold, months her senior, was already an experienced show-business Casanova. Smitten, he romanced Dorothy like an old-fashioned sweetheart, with chaperoned dates at movie matinees and long romantic walks on the streets of New York and, later, Los Angeles. Engagement and marriage would soon follow. In 1940, the brothers were in Hollywood filming “Sun Valley Serenade” for 20th Century Fox. Nick Castle and the brothers were charged with creating a routine for a novelty song called “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

In an interview with producer Michelle Anton, Fayard recalled: “We were talkin’ to our dance director, Nick Castle, [and I said], ‘I think it will be a nice change for the audience to see a beautiful girl in the middle of us.’ And my brother said, ‘Yes. How about my fiancee, Dorothy Dandridge?’ ” The sequence, shot in black and white, shows the young trio in the full bloom of their beauty and brilliance. Film historian Donald Bogle has described it as “. . . a deliriously joyous sequence, an often unacknowledged classic in the history of the American movie musical.”

But by 1948, Harold and Dorothy’s marriage meant little, after degenerating into its own tragic opera. The marriage had produced a retarded daughter, Harolyn, whom Harold all but abandoned. Encircled by human vultures and ciphers, Dorothy’s life acquired its somber pall, a tragedy that has inspired three books and competing biopics, as well as an A&E; biography to be completed this spring. For all the Nicholas Brothers’ accomplishments, and their long, difficult evolution from their younger days, when they were spoiled international playboys, the fates of both brothers now seem inextricably linked to Dandridge.

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At the Kennedy Center Honors 20th anniversary celebration in December, as Harold and Fayard were invited onstage by President and Mrs. Clinton to join the 1997 honorees, it was Harold who walked onstage with the aid of a cane. But following the banquet that night, Fayard suffered a stroke that would render him cane-dependent. “We had this wonderful dinner, and my wife and I got up and danced to the music of Count Basie’s band,” Fayard said later. “Joe Williams was singing ‘Every Day I Have the Blues.’ ” Barbara Nicholas said she was tired and they decided to leave. They got into the limousine. “All of a sudden I wasn’t feeling that well,” Fayard recalled. Over the next several weeks, Fayard was forced to undergo two surgeries, one to remove the tumor that had caused the stroke and the second to repair a hole in his heart “the size of a quarter.”

The Clinton White House staff even found time to drop Fayard a note expressing concern: “Please know that you both are in our thoughts and prayers and we all wish you a very speedy recovery.”

After Fayard’s six weeks of recovery at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, he returned home on Valentine’s Day to find that Barbara, his beloved wife of 27 years, had been hospitalized with inoperable cancer. She had kept her illness hidden from him, the headaches, the exhaustion. She had suffered in silence, to the end fulfilling her role as his biggest booster, protector and fan. She died on March 7.

The enigmatic and brilliant Harold Nicholas, 77, flew in from his New York home for the funeral, joining their sister Dorothy, Rosa Parks, Barbara’s four sisters and other elegant folk. I spoke briefly with Harold on that occasion, but a few weeks earlier we had talked at length during an apocalyptic rainstorm. Harold, so alive and giving onstage, seems taciturn and distant when he’s out of the spotlight. As the precocious younger half of the team, he quickly emerged as a sensual, explosive star. But the youthful beauty and exuberance that brought Harold romance, wealth and fame are now present solely in his eyes--inquisitive, playful and dark--and in his guarded world-weary grin.

His hair is pulled back into a modest ponytail. Five-foot-2, his body seems smaller, and more fragile, beneath his clothes. He gives the impression that, as Harold Bloom said of Lord Byron, “No wonder awaits him; his deeds have pierced the depth of life. His heart has grown hard, having endured too much love, sorrow, fame, ambition, strife.”

On the afternoon of the storm, I asked Harold about the bond between the two brothers--the perfect communion within the furies of the dance; those impossible flights, those splits. “My brother--he’s tops,” Harold said, his eyes brightening in that weary face. “Fayard was a natural dancer, but me, I had to be taught. He looked at other artists, but no one ever taught him . . . . And [that communion] between my brother and me? That’s love. That’s all it was.”

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And so it goes. Not even age and sorrow, it seems, can stop the Nicholas Brothers. Several months after our first meeting, Fayard remains unbowed, debonair and exuberant, although he now moves with the aid of a walker. On June 29, the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., will give the brothers the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement in modern dance; past recipients include Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Alvin Ailey.

And along with Dorothy Dandridge, the Rat Pack and Sinatra, there’s a current reexamination of the brothers, their times, their legacy. And today, almost 70 years after their show-business debut, the Nicholas Brothers are headliners again.

Fayard’s dancing days, he admitted, are over. The dance for the showgirl under the stars at the Autry Museum, was, perhaps, Fayard Nicholas’ last time-step, but certainly not his last waltz.