Fayard Nicholas' dancing dazzled audiences, peers

If you had a couple of stuntmen, someone handy with trick photography and a computer animator, you might be able to reproduce the scenes danced by the Nicholas Brothers on film in the 1940s. It's hard to imagine that any two dancers today could do what Fayard and Harold Nicholas — two young men who hoofed their way to Hollywood from the Cotton Club — did in the "Jumpin' Jive" number from the 1943 film "Stormy Weather," surely the greatest dance sequence ever shot.

In that nightclub scene, the brothers tap dance their way around and through the orchestra, laying down sizzling footwork atop drums and a grand piano. They bound over the heads of musicians as if there were jets on their ankles, and end it all by plunging down a flight of stairs, leapfrogging over each other to land on each step in the splits, legs like scissors blades, sliding open and snapping up.

They shot it all in one take. Legend further posits that the scene was unrehearsed. Believe what you will: It's all there on film, and practiced or not, its power is undiminished six decades later. No one — or two or even a team of dancers — can touch it.

A self-taught wonder

Fayard Nicholas, who died Jan. 24 at 91, and his brother Harold, who died in 2000, put generations of cinematic dance stars to shame, with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Maurice and Gregory Hines and even Mikhail Baryshnikov expressing fascination and envy.

Fayard was the elder, the one with the finesse and the keen musician's ear, the driving force who, once he got rolling, could scarcely stop. He was a self-taught wonder, boasting that he had never had a dance lesson. The son of musicians in a vaudeville orchestra, he hung around their theater and picked up steps from the cast of dancers, then taught them to Harold, who was several years younger.

After the nightclubs and the films (around 30 of them, including "The Pirate" with Gene Kelly), winning a Tony in 1989 for co-choreographing the Broadway hit "Black and Blue" and an eventual professional split from his brother (though they remained close), Fayard kept on performing.

Ever the showman

Nearly four years ago, he even put on a dazzling little show at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Va.

He was 87 then, and a stroke had virtually immobilized his right side. He had undergone heart surgery and two hip replacements. A small, thin, dapper-looking man, he moved with a painfully slow gait — until he took the stage. Under the lights, and in front of a crowd of several hundred (he was the centerpiece of an evening of swing-dancing put on by local instructors Tom Koerner and Debra Sternberg), the showman bubbled forth.

"If you think you're gonna see on this stage what my brother and I used to do, forget it," he said with a grin to an audience that had just seen a montage of Nicholas Brothers film clips. "I can't do that anymore. I don't want to do that anymore. And I'll tell you why — it hurts!"

His frailty and stiffness seemed to melt away, and his easy charm burned ever brighter as he swayed and gently shimmied while singing "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." He scatted in a creaky tenor, and his soft, small hands punched the air. He sketched out a little footwork, hinting at the explosive displays of the past. Really, the essence was still in the hips, those ruined joints that still stirred, still wanted to swing.

Beaming and drinking in the crowd's devotion, he sang "Chattanooga Choo Choo" with his wife of two years, Katherine Hopkins-Nicholas, a tall, beautiful blonde 36 years his junior.

The act could have been excruciating. One could have watched it aching with pity. But there was nothing to feel sorry for. Nicholas was a sweet success. Whatever it was that drove him to keep performing after his body had all but broken down also animated him under the lights.

Before the show, he had barely been able to navigate the hallway. Sunken into an armchair in his hotel room, he had clearly wanted to stay by the bed, presided over by the teddy bear that traveled with him everywhere (there was clearly a story there, but we never got around to it). Yet he grabbed hold of something powerful onstage, whatever it was that brought him off the streets of Philadelphia to the big screen, whatever it was that carried him and his brother across those drumheads and dangled them atop that grand piano in "Stormy Weather."

Appreciation and envy

Donald O'Connor paid tribute to the Nicholas Brothers in 1952's "Singin' in the Rain," when O'Connor tries to run up a wall and crashes through it instead. The Nicholas Brothers pulled off a variation of this trick a decade earlier in the film "Orchestra Wives."

Kelly cast them in his 1948 film "The Pirate," the last film the Nicholas Brothers made. In it, they nearly outdo Kelly in a breathtaking trio. Kelly's exhausted eye-rolling at the end of the number was no act, Fayard Nicholas said. The more-celebrated song-and-dance man was jealous of their ease, he said.

"The three of us were rehearsing," Nicholas said in 2002, the day before that Hyatt Regency show, "and Gene and I were really going at it. Harold was taking it easy; he was saying, 'I got it, I got it.' But Gene said, 'Fayard, he says he has it but I don't think he has.' So my brother went through the whole routine without one mistake. Gene was so mad!"

Fayard Nicholas' life was one of self-invention, of being discovered and forgotten and rediscovered. Through it, he kept his musical ear, his gift for invention and his young hoofer's heart — up to his last days.

"When I get onstage, I'm home," he said, before that Reston show. "This is showbiz — I've been in it all my life."