Gregory Hines propped himself up in his chair in the New York offices of his publicist, rolled up his trouser leg and applied a plastic grocery bag, jammed with ice, to one kneecap.
”And I had been so lucky,” he says, of his strenuous outing-eight shows a week, starring in Broadway`s brand new hit, ”Jelly`s Last Jam,” wherein he sings and dances up a storm, as only he can. He adds, tongue nowhere near cheek, ”I hadn`t had an injury in two whole weeks.”
Two whole weeks? He laughs. ”I know, I know. I remember when I was filming `White Nights` with Mike (as he calls Mikhail Baryshnikov), and they hired a physical therapist to be on call to get us ready. Mike would hurt his hip and I`d hurt my back, and he`d be hooked up to ultrasound on one side of the room, and I`d be under deep heat on the other, and the director`s running in and out saying, `When can I have them?`
”We`d just look at each other across the room gleefully. Here we were, the world`s premiere dancers, in our fields, and we needed this therapist guy to keep us going. It`s an athlete`s life-injuries are inevitable.”
At the moment, injuries and gerry-rigged icebags notwithstanding, Hines is at the top of his game. The lackluster reception of ”Tap,” Hines` effort to meld tap and the movie musical with urban video grit, is long behind him. He`s back on stage, and after three prior shots as a nominee, he finally scored the Tony Award two weeks ago as lead actor in a musical for his sensational job in ”Jelly,” winning plaudits for the show`s gutsy, frank outing of sensitive black issues and for his unabashed, exhilarating star turn.
”We took the right kind of risk,” he says, and then echoes his Tony acceptance speech: ”We`re doing a musical in which African-Americans aren`t happy all the time. There`s genuine darkness in our show.”
”Jelly” tells the story of composer Ferdinand ”Jelly Roll” Morton, self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, using much of Morton`s actual music and Hines` tap-dancing as dual metaphors for the flowing of creative juices. The story is no biographical whitewash, either, but offers a grim look at Morton`s own prejudices. He grew up a light-colored New Orleans Creole with a proud disdain for those blacks ”of a darker hue,” according to one line from the show.
The show opens with Morton`s death, and thereafter escorts his ghost through an underworld journey reviewing his life, reveling in both the lively zest of his creations as well as revealing his proclivity for petty vengeance. His ”last jam,” in other words, is a kind of ”it`s not such a wonderful life” trip through his own past. Driven and gifted, he also was a figure who sometimes turned on those he loved the most.
After wandering as a young musical wanna-be, leaving New Orleans in 1913, Morton settled in Chicago for years, having great success with his group, the Red Hot Peppers. But later he met his comeuppance when he moved to New York in the `30s, his style surpassed by the big band emergence. Morton left New York broke, driving cross-country to die in a segregated section of a Los Angeles hospital.
”It`s not that unusual for an artist, especially a great artist, to have that kind of a life,” says Hines, who struggled for a while to get up the nerve to actually utter several of Morton`s more condescending, racist lines. ”You know, that edge and that pain. Most of the time, when we deal with African-Americans and racism, we think of the racism from without. But it`s from within as well. I`ve experienced it first-hand. My mother`s family was very light-skinned and my father`s dark. My mother`s father refused to come to my parents` wedding as a result.”
Hines himself has enjoyed one of the lengthiest and more roller-coaster careers in modern show business. At his parents` instigation, he began dance lessons barely past infancy, and his teacher, Henry Le Tang, quickly told his parents that he and his older brother, Maurice Jr., were another Nicholas Brothers in the making. Hines` first Broadway job came at age 7, in ”Girl in Pink Tights,” choreographed by Agnes De Mille.
”I remember touring in the late `50s, going to Miami, which was like South Africa,” he recalls. ”We had to get permits to work there, and when I saw two water fountains, one marked `white` and the other `colored,` I thought the latter meant some kind of colored water. They had to yank me away from the `white` fountain before I caused a stir.”
By 1965, joined by their dad, Maurice Sr., on drums, the now grown-up Hines brothers were playing ”The Tonight Show.” Then Gregory Hines dropped out. ”I`d been on a treadmill for years, and nightclubs were going out. I didn`t enjoy it anymore, so I did what others were doing, I spent five years playing guitar and living on Venice Beach, in California, learning to be a parent.”
Hines, by then divorced, had married at age 22, and spent much of his dropout period bonding with his daughter, who is now grown and married herself. ”When my daughter began school, her mother and I didn`t feel it was fair to split her between cities anymore. My brother convinced me to return to New York, where they were tapping again, and I returned to show business.”
Hines came back in the mid-`70s and was cast in ”The Last Minstrel Show,” which ”really was the last minstrel show,” closing on tryout in Philadelphia. But he was back, ”it was like greeting an old lover,” with stage parts in ”Eubie” and ”Sophisticated Ladies,” and then the movies:
”History of the World, Part One,” ”Deal of the Century,” ”The Cotton Club,” ”White Nights,” ”Running Scared” (with Billy Crystal) and the 1989 ”Tap,” featuring not only Hines` idol, Sammy Davis Jr. (in his last screen role) but veteran tap greats like Charles ”Honi” Coles, a lifetime inspiration.
At 46, Hines now finds himself the reigning king of tap. He`s helping to groom the next generation. ”Jelly” is slyly organized so that the ghostly, older Morton, played by Hines, can dance with his younger self, played by 18- year-old Savion Glover, the phenomenal tap dancer from ”The Tap Dance Kid,” ”Black and Blue” and the movie ”Tap.”
”Right now he`s the best tap dancer I`ve ever seen,” Hines boasts of his protege. ”I idolized Sammy and Honi Coles, but they were 20 or 30 years older than me. I see young kids 13 or 14 idolizing Savion, and he`s barely older than they are. He can tap to rap. There`s a whole new wave coming up.” Of course, Hines hoped ”Tap” would revitalize the form, but it was disappointing at the box office. Broadway remains infinitely more hospitable, sad to a man who says he remembers stealing from reruns of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and can testify that tap is a form in which a lot more can be accomplished on film than live.
”From a personal point of view, the movie meant a lot. I got to work with Sammy, we were able to hire real pros, not actors who learned tap overnight, and the whole experience convinced there`s a way to film dance today and make it work.”
As if to plug ”Jelly-the Movie,” a deal yet to be signed, but maybe an inevitable one, Hines smiles and adds, ”I`m not giving up.”
