Maurice Hines Loved Where Tap Dancing Had Been and Where He Thought It Could Go
One of the early scenes in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 movie The Cotton Club features several veteran tap dancers who performed at the actual Cotton Club decades earlier.
They are names spoken with reverence in the dance world: Honi Coles, Buster Brown, Harold Cromer, Bubba Gaines, Phace Roberts, George Hillman, Sandman Sims, Jimmy Slyde, Henry LeTang.
Maurice Hines and his brother Gregory, two of the stars of the movie, had grown up watching these dancers, back to the days when Maurice and Gregory were child stars and then the title attraction in the touring act Hines, Hines and Dad. They danced in the style and tradition of the legendary Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, about whom all you have to know is this.
So naturally the Hines brothers were hanging out with the old-timers, and naturally everyone got to dancing.
“I tell you,” Maurice said in an interview soon after the scenes were filmed, “Greg and I were hard-pressed to keep up with those guys.”
And not just on the floor.
“A lot of times the old guys don’t respect you unless you’re only a hoofer,” Hines said. “They were hoofers. They started dancing on the street. They learned on the street. Never had a lesson.
“Greg was a hoofer. They respected him. He always wanted to be a hoofer. I didn’t. I love tap, but I also wanted to grow. I wanted to incorporate jazz and ballet. I wanted to dance to Michael Jackson and Al Jarreau. You can tap to any beat, because tap is its own beat.”
So even though he’d been dancing since he was 5, taking steps from his predecessors the way everyone in tap, uh, borrows steps from those who came before, he felt he had to sell himself.
“At the end of one step, I improvised a scene,” he said. “I finished it with nine pirouettes. When you do something like that, they respect you.
“My admiration for them is boundless.”
This Cotton Club set encounter, in a couple of ways, feels like a microcosm for the life of Maurice Hines, who died December 29 at the age of 80.
He was a splendid tap dancer who fought to keep the marvelous legacy of tap alive during a time when it had drifted out of the mainstream. At the same time, he felt tap needed to expand beyond the legacy. He pointed to the choreographer Katherine Dunham, who blended multiple styles of dance into single performances.
“I want tap productions on the level of Alvin Ailey,” he said. “I want ‘pieces,’ not ‘numbers’.”
He felt it was critical for African-Americans, who created and shaped tap, to be recognized as virtuosos of the form. “When the Nicholas Brothers danced with Gene Kelly,” he said, “they were dancing down to him.
“Harold [Nicholas] told me that Fred Astaire wouldn’t dance with Fayard,” the implication being that it wouldn’t have been a fair fight.
Yet when Maurice put together his solo act, it included a 15-minute tribute to Astaire.
“I loved to watch him,” Hines said. “Baby Laurence was the greatest tap dancer of all time, but I loved watching Astaire, just like I loved watching Eleanor Powell. Astaire was a dance concept genius. I put ‘Cheek to Cheek’ into my show — only this time the dress doesn’t shed.” (When Astaire and Ginger Rogers introduced that number in Top Hat, Rogers’s ostrich feather dress famously kept shedding feathers.)
Unfortunately, Hines said, not every producer in 1983 had yet achieved color-blindness when it came to dancers.
“There are shows on Broadway that won’t hire skilled black women dancers,” he said, suggesting some producers think tap dancing only requires a long chorus line synchronizing foot movements.
“I see performers on stage who just shuffle their feet and it’s called tap,” he said. “It’s insulting. No one would do that with jazz.”
Most critics too, he said, “don’t understand tap.” When Hines and Mercedes Ellington created a new production for their dance company Balletap, he recalled, “A critic in Philadelphia compared us to A Chorus Line. Greg and I talked about how they’d compare us to 42nd Street. Because that’s all they know.”
Tap is more complicated and subtler, he said, than it looks: “People see the Nicholas Brothers and think they were a ‘flash act.’ They weren’t. They also did close floor work. There’s a lot going on. I didn’t really understand things like improv myself until I became a choreographer.”
And then there’s the thing that was always hard to understand: his relationship with Gregory.
Because they had danced together since Maurice was 5 and Gregory was 3, the strange world of show biz kids fused them.
“Every afternoon we’d do an hour of homework and then it was off to dance classes,” Maurice said. “That was our lives.
“Professionally, we grew a little differently. Greg was more drawn to the rhythm dancers, like John Bubbles. He hated ballet. I loved it.
“But we love dancing together. When Greg dances with me, he knows he has to dance. And vice versa. We build each other up, and greatness happens.”
And yet, like the Everly brothers and other sparring siblings, the Hines brothers spent many adult years not talking to each other. Neither offered a quick and neat explanation, which probably means there wasn’t one.
After Gregory died in 2003, Maurice talked about missing him all the time, which he undoubtedly did.
Still, by all indications, Maurice played the game well. He parlayed a programmed childhood into an adult career he liked, branching out from dance into directing and choreographing. If he didn’t match Gregory’s crossover success, he starred on Broadway in Sophisticated Ladies and Eubie! He pushed two of his own shows to Broadway. He toured in Jelly’s Last Jam. He gave free tap lessons. He created a 20-minute dance piece called Pretty & The Wolf, narrated by Duke Ellington and loosely based on Little Red Riding Hood, with Maurice in a zoot suit. He founded and ran dance companies. Along with Gregory he carried the torch between those Cotton Club old-timers and the new generation led by Savion Glover and innovative women.
One thing he resisted doing for years, he said in 1983, was movies. “I’ve had offers,” he said. “But I didn’t want to play pimps. I wanted to dance with my brother.”
So when Coppola was casting The Cotton Club, Hines said, “Greg told him, look, the brothers in the movie break up, have fights, have a reunion — just what happened with Hines, Hines and Dad.
“I want to stay in black culture. Greg wants to get into white show biz. Not leave black, but go to white. We tap, we break up, then we have a reunion. Tears and hugging. We dance.
“I improvised the breakup scene based on memories. It took about three weeks before we went in front of the camera. It was very heavy, I must admit.”
Fourteen years later, Hines was asked what, in retrospect, he thought of The Cotton Club. “I never watched it,” he said.
