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- [00:00]
Martin Sheen
It's Sunday morning and that wonderfully relaxed feeling of a long, lazy day lingers in the air. If you want to make the moment last, may I suggest the perfect solution? The Martin Sheen Podcast Join me, your host Martin Sheen, for beautifully crafted 20 minute programs filled with never before heard stories of my life along with personal reflections and poetry that inspires. The Martin Sheen Podcast is the perfect Sunday refresh. A chance to take a deep breath, relax and know that the stress of Monday may be just around the corner, but not here, not now. So make this your weekly moment of calm as we explore faith, hope, love and what it means to be human. And know this, this journey is ever unfolding as I invite you to see what's next with me, Martin Sheen. And thank you.
- [00:56]
Kelly Therese Pollack
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollack. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to.
- [01:34]
Narrator
Clarence Bradley Epps was born in Clarksville, Georgia on July 24, 1905. He was the third of Robert and Georgia Epps, four children. Robert was a brick mason who often traveled for work and in 1908 the whole family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, a fast growing city with opportunities for a skilled craftsman. Clarence attended school, but Industrial High in the Jim Crow south was so academically weak that that kids whose families moved north in the Great Migration had to repeat a grade to catch up. Robert died when Clarence was six and Georgia died when he was 15. After George's death, Clarence and his younger brother Aurelius moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to live with their sister Ernestine, who was herself just a teenager, married with a two year old son. Ernestine's husband, Thomas helped Clarence find a job as a waiter at a hotel, but he dreamed of something bigger. In 1921, 16 year old Clarence headed to Harlem where he worked as an elevator operator, but he hoped to become a film projectionist. A resident at his boarding house taught him to tap dance and another tenant recommended him to Leonard Harper, who was looking for chorus boys for a show at Connie's Inn, a swanky club. He followed up that job with a role in the All Black Lou Leslie Show Dixie to Broadway in 1925. At just 19 years old Clarence began teaching dance at the Billy Pierce Studio which was set up to teach African American influenced dance styles like jazz and tap to white pupils, especially those who wanted to star on Broadway. He quickly gained a reputation as a superb teacher. Stars like Ada May, Adele Estaire, Eleanor Powell and Mae west flocked to the studio and soon the orphan boy who had known poverty was living well. Around this time, Clarence Bradley Epps started going by a stage name, one that he would be known as for the rest of his life, Buddy Bradley. In 1926, actress Irene Delroy asked Bradley to choreograph her a solo number for the Greenwich Village Follies. The show was panned in reviews, but Delroy's number was praised. Bradley was brought in to rework the whole show and he worked a miracle with one review of the reopening exclaiming Venus to Milo after a blood transfusion. Unfortunately, Bradley was not given credit as dance director on the production. It wouldn't be the last time he was brought in late to save a show and it wouldn't be the last time that he wasn't credited for that work. Broadway wanted Bradlee's genius, but it didn't want to give him the credit. In 1930, producer Charles Cochran invited Bradlee to London to serve as dance director Forever Green, which was slated to star Ada May. Cochran knew of Bradley's work, but it was when Ada May declared that she owed her success to Bradley that Cochran decided to make an offer to him. Outsider Jesse Matthews replaced Ada Mae, beginning a long and close working relationship between Bradley and Matthews. With the soaring success of Evergreen, Cochran asked Bradley to choreograph two more shows, the next 1931 revue and the cabaret show Creation, which one critic deemed one of the best London had ever seen. Bradlee headed home to New York after the shows, but producers in London had taken notice and he was soon invited back to choreograph for book musicals, beginning with the London transfer of Cole Porter's 50 million Frenchmen. As Bradley traveled back and forth from New York to London, director choreographer Seymour Felix encouraged Bradley to join him in Hollywood to work on films. But Bradley was wary of working in the US where his white colleagues often received credit for his work. London productions credited Bradley and the press there raved about his choreography. In 1932, Bradley moved to London for good. He had constant work there on book musicals and cabarets and eventually film. To ensure that there were enough English dancers who knew his style of dance, he opened the Buddy Bradley School of Stage Dancing in Soho. Dancers lined up to take classes at the studio to learn from the great Buddy Bradley. It was with one of those students, Frederick Ashton, that Bradley began to collaborate on a style of dance that combined ballet and jazz, which they debuted at the Savoy Theater to rave reviews. Bradley's success in London theatre led to offers to work on British films, where he continued to innovate, carefully considering the visuals for this new medium and choreographing the first dream ballet in a musical film. Bradley lived in London for decades, continuing to teach and work in theater and film. In the 1950s, he led two dance troupes that traveled through Europe for performances. Although Bradley had several serious relationships, he married for the first time in August 1967, when he was 62 years old. His wife, Dorothy D. Pitchford Edgehill, was a friend of a friend who had come to Bradley's London dance school as a layperson and then had helped Bradley convalesce when he was seriously ill, possibly with tuberculosis. By then, Bradley had closed his dance studio and was teaching in a church hall, taking on the occasional project. A former protege invited him back to New York to direct a musical adaptation of P.G. wodehouse's 1934 play, who's who. Bradley moved back with Dee and got to work, which thrilled the dancers in the show. Unfortunately, the show was underfunded, and when a new producer was brought on to shore up the finances, they demanded changes to nearly every aspect of the show, including Buddy. Firing Bradley did not have the intended effect, though, and the show flopped. Bradley stayed in the United States, but after such a long time away, he no longer had contacts there and was unable to find meaningful work in dance. Buddy Bradley died on July 17, 1972, in New York City. He was 66 years old. Joining me in this episode is Maureen Footer, author of Feel the Restoring the Life and Legacy of Jazz Choreographer Buddy Bradley.
- [11:01]
Kelly Therese Pollack
Hi, Maureen. Thanks so much for joining me today.
- [11:04]
Maureen Footer
Good morning. I'm so looking forward to talking to you this morning. Kelly.
- [11:08]
Kelly Therese Pollack
Yes, I loved reading this book and learning about Buddy Bradley. I want to hear a little bit about how you got started on this book. I know your previous books are about fashion history, so what inspired you to write this biography?
- [11:22]
Maureen Footer
I know my books often seem like they're about fashion or about design, and they are. But my real interest is in creating a lens in which we can understand society. Why do we choose to present ourselves this way? What's the zeitgeist of the time? What are perhaps the political and trade situations that are making these things available and making us interested in them? But I Felt that. Kelly. I had done several books on design, and one was Design and tangentially, Fashion. And I was starting to think I'm ready for something new. Dance has been a lifelong passion of mine. My first dream, not realized as many first dreams are, was to be a dance critic. So this was always in the back of my mind. And because I'd written this book about related to Christian Dior, I'd been invited to a conference on how ballet influenced haute couture. And at the last minute, one of the speakers called in sick, and the organizers scrambled around just to fill that slot. You know, you cannot have a dead 45 minutes in a 9 to 4 symposium. Who came in really didn't know much about couture at all, but she was a live body and she had some very interesting things to say about African Americans in dance and was all quite interesting. And one thing that Teresa Ruth said, which made me sit immediately up in my chair and perk my ears up, was we all know the debt that George Balanchine, the great founder of neoclassical ballet, owes to Buddy Bradley. And that really made me catch my breath. I had read a lot about Balanchine. I know his repertory, I know his company well. And I didn't think I'd ever heard of Buddy Bradley. And lo and behold, I went home and looked at all my books on Balanchine, and I have a shelf full, and there was not a mention of Buddy Bradley. So that incited my curiosity, what's going on here? Who is Buddy Bradley? And sent me down the rabbit hole. Seven years later, I emerged not exhausted, but excited by what I found and what I recovered, not only to put Buddy Bradley back in the dance conversation, but what I feel like I restored to our history, American history, Western history. I mean, it's my belief that if we just have a certain set of jigsaw puzzle pieces, we can't see the whole picture. And this was culturally important. But I also, for me, and I hope for many others, it also illuminates African American history in real time from, say, Reconstruction forward. So that was the process that opened up the book topic for me. Kelly.
- [14:35]
Kelly Therese Pollack
So let's talk some about the rabbit hole that you went down. How do you know he didn't leave journals and things? So how do you go about reconstructing this person's life?
- [14:45]
Maureen Footer
Yeah, fortunately, because I've done several biographies before, I kind of knew the basic methodology. My first stop is always the New York Public Library and going into the Milstein genealogical room, and there you start to push the envelope. You know, you start with censuses. That was pretty hard, Kelly, because Bunny Bradley was not his given name and Mitten Weber was his. It was a stage name and it was his career name. And it's the name that which he had the most renowned, but it was never his official name. So sometimes he's filling out forms, you know, shit manifests and census is Buddy Bradley, sometimes as Clarence Epps, sometimes as Clarence Bradley Epps, you know, whatever. So if you have three names, you have three times three, nine ways to look up the name and try to find him. And sometimes too. Kelly, what happens with African American history? Not so much by Buddy's time, because he's born in 1905, but for his ancestors. When I wanted to understand his family, the census taker, the record keeper, be quite casual about the whole thing. You know, where was someone educated, how many years of education, names and ages of siblings? All of which was quite fluid to say the least. But that's how I started to first put the framework together. Then my next stop was because I knew he had. Well, not sure, it's sort of circular process. You're going multiple directions at once. But I knew that because he had worked on Broadway that I was hoping that I would find references to him in New York theater reviews contemporaneous from the 1920s, because he's working during the Jazz age in New York. And there weren't too many for the same reason that Bradley has largely been forgotten, that nobody really thought much about dance on the musical stage. It wasn't concert dance, it wasn't high art. You know, you might as well have been a circus performer in terms of the intellectual elite. So there wasn't too much. But occasionally there was. And I started to get a framework and names of some of the plays he'd worked on. And then much more useful was going into the theatrical press, the billboard and variety. And there they spent more attention on all of these things. So I more names of plays and the collaborators. Was it Richard Rogers, was it George Gershwin, who was the producer? All these sorts of things starting to popul. And then the real holy grail for early on research was the African American press. Buddy Bradley, by the time he rings his career from the Harlem Prohibition era clubs down to Broadway, and they desperately need him on Broadway. So he's a commodity in demand and he's doing well. And he upgrades to a fancy apartment down the street from W.E.B. dubois and you know, he's wearing nice suits and he has the latest model LaSalle convertible. And so The African American press adores him. He's the Kim Kardashian of his era. And they cover him. You know, they cover when he shows up at a nightclub. But most importantly, they say, ah, little bird has told us he's being pulled in to do the choreography for this play, and he's going to be the first African American choreographer, or they didn't use the word African American at the time, Race man, or something like that. So that really pushed me forward because the more particulars, the more you can fill in the dots. If I knew the play, even though there may not be other mentions of Bradley, I can find out the stars. I could look at their biographies, connect those. So that was round one in New York, which pretty much only took me to 1930 as the expatriates to London in, well, officially early 1930s. But he starts working in London in 1930 and London, kind of the same thing. There's a great database at the British Library for newspapers. There's British newspapers.com I couldn't access, the same way I can here in New York genealogical records. So I often teamed up with a genealogist who could help me dig down a little further into specifics. And that was really the framework enough that I could really get a handle on the breadth of his life. At which point I realized it's important he's not only working in theater. He is not only the man who brings jazz down to Broadway jazz dance, he's also the man who brings it worldwide. When he moves to London, when he works on the continent, he was the go to for the British film industry. So it was a British empire at the time. So this jazz dance through Buddy is being beamed to every corner of the universe and changed, changing dance forever. So this, when I get all of this together and I start, you know, researching his childhood in Birmingham, what was it like? What did the school board records tell us about how a black child was educated versus a white child and whatever. I was able to put together a proposal. And it was after the proposal, I thought. I mean, I've already spent a lot of time on it, but I loved it. I was learning so much, Kelly. I was reading things. I, you know, sociological Studies and W.E.B. du Bois and Langston Hughes, whatever, because Buddy loved Langston Hughes. But after I had the proposal, it's like, okay, now I'll spend money on the project. And that's when I start to go to London. That's when I start to dig out these dancers funding old programs, the names of the cast and Figuring out, you know, some of these could still be living. Not the ones from the 1930s, but starting about wartime, I realized there's a possibility some of these people are living. So I start digging for them. And of course, they're all. The average age is 90, and they're all retired. They're not looking for a job. So they're not on LinkedIn. They're not yet of that generation that, you know, stays active on Facebook or whatever. And they weren't necessarily famous. They were the dancers. So if they died, there wasn't an obituary that was gonna tell me a lot more. But every once in a while I'd find things through the. With these names and whatever. And I placed ads in their equivalent of variety, the stage and the call boy. Two different papers. And you know, that old fashioned thing that you don't see too much anymore but on the back of the New York Review of Books or the Sunday Times Book Review is like, I'm researching xyz. If anybody has any information, please contact. And that actually did come up with several names, which was great. And those names often said, oh, well, I danced in this show with xyz and I'm still in touch with Eric. Here's a number. But then there's still, you know, this is the vital information because I can put Bradley on paper, but I didn't know who he was as a man. And these are the people who could tell me, you know, what they knew about him, how they experienced him, what they saw real time. Not just he was the choreographer on this play, but this play was a disaster. And the producer and the playwright weren't getting along. And Bradley was the glue who held it all together, you know, which is so revealing about a character. And then. But I still wanted more. And so those that I couldn't find in Obituary but weren't coming forward. I submitted the names to a private investigator who sometimes they were still dead, they just hadn't gotten to the dead end. But, you know, he probably came up with about seven, eight more live bodies. Just addresses or phone numbers. I had to take it from there. But that was really a large part of the research as well as fortunately, because dance is ephemeral doesn't last. It's not like a painting. Fortunately, he was the go to for British films in the 1930s. So the British Film Archive had virtually every film he made. So I could see some of his work. So that was the rabbit hole.
- [23:07]
Kelly Therese Pollack
So you just mentioned the importance of having these conversations to understanding him as a person. So could you talk a little bit about what he was like as a person? He's got this really unlikely journey, right? An African American boy born in Birmingham, Alabama in the early 20th century, becomes the go to choreographer in London. So what was it about his personality that that helped that journey happen?
- [23:31]
Maureen Footer
Well, I'll tell you what I learned from speaking with people. But my summation of it is, and this is partly also from a really revelatory interview that he gave to someone named Marshall Stearns who was compiling a book on the history of jazz dance. And Marshall really focused on the New York Hoofer or the American Hoofer. Somehow he got to Buddy Bradley, went to London and interviewed him and there are, you know, it all gets condensed in his book. But out of the archives at Rutgers I could get like 20 pages of a transcript. And one of the things Bradley said that really struck me is I wanted to experience and see the world. But in Birmingham, his wings were so clipped by Jim Crow. He was curious, he was inquisitive, he wanted to have experience and know the world. His brother in law was helping him get into being a waiter and he was like, that's not for me, you know. So this curiosity brings him up to Harlem as a 15 year old, 16 year old orphan. And this is I think, which really drives him and which makes him a great choreographer because he doesn't stay in his lane. This is what black dance is. He's constantly opening up and experimenting and creating something new. And I wouldn't necessarily challenging, but he's really making us rethink dance as he choreographs. So that was sort of my summation of everything I put together. But then I got the story, stories, the stories of this man who was so understated and so elegant, never raised his voice even in the most tense rehearsals or with the stupidest, slowest dancer. And he was always encouraging, loved dance, was so inclusive in his studio of some young boy who was selling cigarettes on the street, couldn't afford a class, but he would just wave him in quietly to the back of the classroom. He didn't want anybody to be excluded from this magic that he knew personally. But we also see, and I hear this from other stories that you know, he's gone through a difficult life. I mean, his parents die young because they've basically been burnt out by all of the obstacles that face African Americans, particularly in the Deep South. He really shakes up Broadway and yet he's never given credit. There's always an excuse why he can't be A member of the club, why he can't have name recognition and become, you know, develop a career based on reputation. And I think that really hurts him. There's a chapter in the book which you read, Kelly, where, you know, he's working late at night, he's cleaning up a show for Buzz v. Berkeley. It's the night before opening, he goes out with some of the pit orchestra for ham and eggs. They're all white and he's not allowed in the restaurant, you know, And I think at that point he kind of realized he was never going to be invited to the party in America. But that's a hard realization. That's your home, that's his family, that's all of his friends, the Hoopers, whatever. He gives it all up and has this magnificent career in London, but at a price. And what we see in Bradley as a result is he is imperturbable. He's constantly poised, but he also never shares his emotions. I think, you know, he learned early on that that was too dangerous to do. You could not be in public a real full fledged three dimensional human being. You always had to protect yourself. And we see him, somebody else tell me, you know, regardless of how busy his day was, rehearsals, opening nights, you know, needs to see the show and make sure the dancers are still, you know, doing what they should be doing and they haven't veered off the track. His ritual was to go alone to a pub every night and just have read the newspaper and have a pint of Guinness or I don't know if it's a pint, but whatever. But you know, he needed that time alone to kind of reconnect, reconnect with himself and recollect and find that poise again. So, I mean, I thought these were such interesting stories. You know, at the same time, he's supremely confident as a dancer and choreographer. Somebody told me he was so confident that in a studio A, he didn't talk. He was extremely, not taciturn, but reserved man. But he demonstrated to show what he wanted and he was happy to demonstrate a hundred times if the class needed it or whoever he's coaching. But he wasn't the one who was saying now shuffle, ball change or whatever. And he was so supremely confident and casual that he would dance in the front of the classroom with his hands in his pockets, you know, just particularly whistling to the wind, which I just found so charming. And then the last thing is, everybody said he was just, you know, he moved like a God. He didn't walk, he glided, that he moved like silk. And some former dancer told me that she really, really wanted to study tap dance. And she'd heard the great fine Buddy Bradley was the person. Well, her mother was a highbrow French woman who was in the UK because she was one of de Gaulle's translators when he was writing the Free French. And you know, she just couldn't believe that her daughter wanted to dance. And, you know, and it wasn't even ballet or, you know, high art dance. And the daughter drags her up to the studio. They're going to inspect it and see what's going on. Cause the daughter's quite young, she's like 14 or so at the time. And you know, the studio is typical Soho studio. You know, there's no elevator, there's no doorman, it's grotty stairs. And they're on the top floor and on the way up. England has this tradition of after hours drinking clubs because pubs have to close at a certain time. I think it's 10 o'. Clock. But that doesn't mean the English want to stop drinking and particularly people in the arts and performing arts. So they're going by all these closed drinking clubs and alcohol is stale. It smells like the most unseemly places in the world. And the mother's getting really huffy and they get to the top floor, they take a breath, the door is open. Bradley is teaching a class. And this mother sees Bradley dancing and he's just so exquisite, this music just moving through his body. She bursts into tears. And at that moment she knows that she can confer with confidence, her beloved only daughter to this man that she now realizes is truly an artist. Not just a hoofer, not just a theater guy, but an artist. So these are the kind of stories. There were so many stories like that. And that only comes from interviewers. And it only comes from usually three interviews. The first interview is a getting to know you session. I have my list of questions and they answer them. Then I go and look at the transcript, think, oh, why didn't I push that a little further? And they started to think, you know, going back 40, 50 years and thinking about other things they want to tell me. So usually when I go back to England for another set of new interviews, I try to get back to the old interviews and make the rounds and more information comes out. And then by then they're friends. And then when I'm back in England, if they're not too far out of London, because nobody lives in central London, you know, they're retired, they're out in some seaside town. You know, I try to see them again. So that, I think is really the value of the oral interview and the firsthand witnesses. And, you know, if nothing else, I hesitated to write this book, Kelly, because I. I did think, you know, who am I on this territory? I mean, just to write the book. I started taking tap dance classes for the first time in my life. My background is ballet. I also took dance to African drums, just trying to understand, you know, that whole lineage of African American dance. And I was really respectful about doing my research and delving deep into family records, ancestry, the African American experience. But still, I don't have that experience as oral history in my family. I don't really have access to it in the same way as an African American. And I did. I went down to a professor at Duke at the time who was kind of the senior presence in African American performance art. And I asked him, I said, do I have the right to tell this story? And he said, well, first of all, I see everything at every colloquium and nobody's working on this topic and we need it. And secondly, most importantly, given the numbers, if somebody doesn't get these oral interviews out, we're losing this history forever. So that kind of gave me the confidence to forge ahead and perhaps somebody else can write the second interpretation of Bunny Bradley, second generation work. But at least now we have all that oral history collected. And I must say, the chronology and the framework and, you know, a lot of things happened in that book that I hope will encourage future research.
- [32:44]
Kelly Therese Pollack
This is an audio medium, of course, that we're using, so we can't show dance on here, but can you describe some about the style of dance that. And of course, he had a long career, so it evolved over time. But the way that Buddy Bradley danced, the way he choreographed.
- [33:01]
Maureen Footer
Well, first of all, I have one 10 second clip from a movie where he, like Alfred Hitchcock, makes a cameo. It has nothing to do with the story, but we get 10 seconds of Bradley himself dancing. And that's all we know of Bradley as a dancer, except that some people stole his routines when he was working on Broadway. And then they made Oscar Michaud films, which were great black films in the late 20s. And we know some of those routines were stolen or most likely stolen. And so we can see buddies, proteges and buddies work that way. But basically, tap dance, African American dance, really differs from other dances, except perhaps dances of American natives, because it is not trying to reach for celestial forces. It's not airborne and going up. Instead. It comes from this belief in African cult, West African culture, at least, that the soil is the source of life, of energy, of renewal, of power. And so African American dance, instead of moving upward and trying to look like it's floating, is moving downwards to connect with the universe. So we see a much lower body stance, sometimes bent over, knees are deeply plied, and the feet, as in Tao or most words, are really connected to the ground. That's where the power is coming from. Essentially, the feet and the ground have the same connection as a drumstick or a hand and the top of a drum. You know, you touch the earth, it responds back, you respond to it. It's a dialogue, essentially. So that's one of the first things that we'll see in almost all of Buddies dance. And the other thing that we see that happens is polyrhythms. There are very complex rhythms in African dance and African American dance, where, just as you hear in jazz, there can be multiple rhythms happening simultaneously, and the different body parts are going to be moving to different rhythms. So you might see the shoulders moving in one way, the hips in another, knees, feet, and yet at another rhythm. It's highly complex, which is why Buddy Bradley became celebrated as a teacher. Because if you don't grow up with this, it's so hard to catch on. It's like trying to learn Greek when you're no longer five years old, you know, and apparently your palate can still accept influence or whatever. So, I mean, there's that going on too. And then there's. What evolves with Buddy is he starts, particularly when he gets to London, he's like a child in a candy store. He's being shown other forms of dance and he's starting to play with them. You know, can we use the way you use shoulders in ballet for a Noel Coward musical? Can we take some of the influence of the percussive of flamenco dance and translate it into theatrical dance? And a lot of people would say, well, this is an orthodox jazz dance or African American dance. And that's true. It's not the orthodox that we first saw in the early 20th century, but it's artistry. It's Bradley reinterpreting it for himself. So, as you said, Callie, he's got a real breadth of style, but always anchoring it largely is the sense of connection with the earth and these complex polyrhythms.
- [36:30]
Kelly Therese Pollack
And then he interprets these dance styles in multiple different places. Right. So he's working, as you said, in the theater he's got dance troupes, later he is in film, later in tv. What does he need to do to be able. Like obviously the, the settings are different. The way that you can stage things is different. How does he incorporate those different media as he's thinking through how to stage dances?
- [37:00]
Maureen Footer
Well, I think one thing that Betty always believes in, and I can't remember if someone told me this or I read it in the Marshall Stearns interview, but if you divorce jazz dance from jazz music or music period, it's no longer dance, you know, it's isolated movement. But it's not rhythmical, it's not musical, it's not dance, it's movement, perhaps. So I think that centers everything he does, regardless of the genre he's working in. And then the other thing that I think is enlightenment thief through all of his work is this curiosity. When he gets to film, for instance, he's got all these gadgets to work with, rolling cameras and things that they can do in the editing room and whatever. And he invents things like this moving stage and the way you close in a camera from a big proscenium out view to come in intimately on a dancer. So these things continually inspire him as he starts to understand these mechanisms. And therefore in the movie Sailing along, he creates a two mile pas de deux, essentially, which gets cut down significantly for the movie, but it was numerous takes hours and hours of filming and then, you know, the best 12 minutes or whatever, it gets reduced into the best 12 minutes. But you know, these are the kinds of things that Bradley is continually bringing in and yet always adhering to those central principles.
- [38:27]
Kelly Therese Pollack
And of course, he works very closely with some dancers. He has muses essentially who he has long relationships with. Could you talk about that in the Importance of Choreography, how he's thinking through what individual dancers can do?
- [38:44]
Maureen Footer
Well, well, every choreographer isn't creating in thin air. They're dependent on a body. And the good choreographers are sizing up their body and seeing what they're capable of, what they can exploit and maybe the things that they don't so much want to put forward. And for body, this is so important. Well, for any choreographer, because the choreographer, unless you're Jerry Robbins or Bob Fosse, is essentially behind the scene. So you're dependent on that dancer to visibilize your artistry. So he is extremely close to certain dancers. One, he is probably his most famous and one of his best, Jesse Matthews, is a very fragile personality. And over time, I mean, they really become confidants. He can coax her out of any malaise, any, you know, lack of self confidence when she's cowering in her dressing room or even in her bed, unwilling to get up and go on set. And Bradley's the one who can, because he's given her choreography that she shines in. But also, he's got this really sympathetic personality. I mean, he's gone through his own share of travails, too. And, you know, he can empathize with her and bring her out. But all in all, I would say his muses, starting with his white muses on Broadway, are the way that Bradley really became visibilized. You know, he starts with Ada Mae, a huge star, former ballerina. The Metropolitan Opera comes to Bradley to reinvest herself in the theater as a theatrical dancer and actress. She's so gifted, and she's this great mimic. She's got a big stage personality. But Bradley, one of the ways that he goes to London is when she is with a play that transfers from Broadway to the West End. She captivates everybody, including the key producer of the era, Charles B. Cochran. And when Cochran sees this and he sees his dancers whose West End shows have transferred to Broadway and they've earned word of mouth about this legendary dance teacher, they stop in at a studio, they come back to London completely transformed. Cochran puts this all together, and he's like, I need that man here in the West End. But it's really because Ada Mae was the final straw. And she was one of those, unlike so much of Broadway, who was willing to acknowledge him and say his name. And she literally did tell Cochran, everything you're saying, I learned from Buddy Bradley. And she'd say that to the press. She'd say that anywhere. So, I mean, these muses were so important because they visibilized his talent. And some of them either became friends or became major promotion vehicles for a man who's very restrained and not inclined to promote himself.
- [41:33]
Kelly Therese Pollack
But he has this long, successful career in London, says he'll never go back to the US and then eventually, in the 60s, he does go back to the US where he spends the rest of his life. Can you talk a little bit about why he went back? And, you know, it seems like it was not, perhaps a wonderful homecoming.
- [41:56]
Maureen Footer
Was not a wonderful homecoming, but it began very promisingly. In his 30 years working on the British stage, always is a choreographer. He's learning a lot about production or direction, and he dreams of being a director as well as a producer. He ends up being invited to direct and choreograph a play that is off Broadway with expectations to go to Broadway. And it's it for him. But what's interesting, Kelly, is most people go from the West End to Broadway or Broadway to the West End. They take a long term rental somewhere, they do the job and then they go home. But you know, things that happened in the US since Bradley left, first of all, I think he always felt as much as England embraced him, he always felt very much an African American. An American. This was home, this was family, this was the soil that nurtured him or frustrated him. However, a little bit of both. And you know, at this point, it wasn't that old. It's 1967, he's 62. But in the 1960s, 62 is much older than it is now. It's probably more like 75 or something. 80. And I think he really wanted to bring his life full circle. So he ends up, you know, he's kind of the Amynots grease in the theater at that time. He's got a large flat with a huge living room where he can hold additions if he wants. It's covered with books because he didn't have an education in Birmingham. But he's always curious and reads constantly and is, you know, huge autodidact. He gives it all up and he comes to the US in 1967. I think the other reason he did is that in 1965 the Civil Rights act was passed. And I think he thought, we're turning a new page. This might be the time when I can go back and make amends with America and America can treat me as any individual should be treated. So he does go back with great hopes. Unfortunately, what happens, and it's kind of a double whammy, is early in rehearsals, suddenly the production needs more money. They reach out to new producers who kick out the old producers and they decide on a whole different tactic. They get rid of the book writer, they get rid of this, and Buddy is one of the casualties. So he's out of a job. And almost simultaneously, well, maybe a few months later, Martin Luther King is assassinated. So I think once again, I mean, Bradley's message, I mean, I never wrote a journal, so I don't know this, but I'm just assuming that he's thinking that this is really a contradiction of civil rights, that it's really showing America's colors, that they are not ready for being truly enfranchised in society. So I think, you know, that's really hopeless. No job. And Bradley, because he's so Self protective, never went after things, he never went after women. They always came to him. He never went after jobs. The producers were always flying, walking around him. And I think, you know, he was just so afraid of being disappointed that he never did that. So he comes back to New York. He hasn't been promoting himself. He hasn't been making sure. The African American press or Variety or whatever has these little tidbits saying Buddy Bradley is just over the new play. And it's the talk of, you know, the West End or whatever. I mean, just very quiet. He hasn't stayed in touch with many people, a couple of hoofers, but those hoofers are now porters and hotels and, you know, fragile people. So he really has no contacts and it doesn't get other, other work. And it's just, it's a really sad ending for an extraordinary career. And the only, it gets even a little worse. But the only way I could really write the end of the book is come back to what he, he actually contributed, which is he revitalized theater. He laid the groundworks for this book musical that Agnes DeMille, Bob Fasse, Jerry Robbins really took to the heights. He brought jazz dance to major ballet choreographers and changed concert ballet dance forever. And we see those influences to these day on ballet stages. And he was the man who telegraphed jazz dance throughout the world. And these are major Cali. And that helped me from being really depressed at what was a really anticlimactic, sad end of a great life.
- [46:36]
Kelly Therese Pollack
This is a wonderful book. I loved reading it. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?
- [46:43]
Maureen Footer
The easiest way, the way I prefer is to go to your local bookstore and see if they have it. If not, they can order it and have it for you in a couple of days. Tell them it's fabulous. They should order a bookshelf, some of them. And also it's available on Barnes and Noble online and Last Resort. Amazon will have copies too. So it's widely available. And take your choice of conduit warning to listeners.
- [47:11]
Kelly Therese Pollack
If you read it, you will want to take tap dance. It's been decades since I took a tap class and I'm like, maybe there's some tap for adults around.
- [47:21]
Maureen Footer
Well, and you know the fun thing after all, the ballet, where it takes years before you feel like you're dancing. In tap dance, you're not a good dancer, but in a short period you feel like you've got this rhythm flowing through your body and you're making noise and it's just, you feel like you're dancing and it's so much fun. So I encourage that too.
- [47:38]
Kelly Therese Pollack
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?
- [47:41]
Maureen Footer
Well, the one thing I really loved was plunging myself into his family history. And one of the reasons I thought there was, of course a biographer has to know a little bit about ancestry, but I was pondering before I got to England, like, how am I going to know this man? I know this career. I've got 30 pages of a timeline of things he's done and, you know, mentions in newspapers and things like that. And it was James Baldwin who said, if you don't understand ancestors, you don't understand an individual. And that really plunged me into going deep into great great grandmother records. Fortunately, I found Buddy Bradley's second cousin once removed, who was the family genealogist on his maternal side, who could tell me fantastic stories about free people of color walking across state lines in search of agency, wanting to buy just a little plot of land and that will become the family homestead which will sustain generations through the 1920s. This is in the 1860s. And on his father's side, I mean, just amazing stories, his grandfather was an enslaved man and he was also the son of his owner, his mother. I don't know if it was, you know, enforced or most likely, as most stories are, nevertheless, he was a light skinned son of his owner. And because of that, he worked in the house rather than in the fields of the plantation in the black belt of Alabama. And because of this, he understood how to mask he could work in two different societies. And when the Civil War is over, his father dies. He takes a pittance of an inheritance because his father is bankrupt, as most big landowners are after the Civil War. And he turns that little tiny pittance into a wholesale trading business. And he's shipping cotton down to Mobile, Alabama and bringing goods from Europe and the east coast US back up to heartland Alabama. But I think one of the things I learned from this is just incredible tenacity, creativity, fluidity, intentionality. And Bradley takes these gifts, he puts them in a different direction. But I really think knowing his ancestors stories, watching his parents who struggle but still have that sort of intentionality and that determination really is what sustains Bradley throughout his life. And I think it's fascinating for those of us who had, you know, American history in high school and that was the end of it, to really see in granular detail what's happening pretty much from pre Civil War to Buddy's death, post civil rights and death of Martin Luther King. So I'm proud of that part of the book because I think for me and so many others, it's exciting new understanding of who we are as Americans.
- [50:43]
Kelly Therese Pollack
Maureen, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I loved the book and I really enjoyed speaking with you.
- [50:49]
Maureen Footer
Thank you Kelly. It was an absolute delight to speak with you.
- [51:15]
Kelly Therese Pollack
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript@unsunghistorypodcast.com to the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @UnsungHistory or on Facebook @Unsung Historypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise or episode suggestions, please email kellyunsunghistorypodcast.com if you enjoyed this podcast. Please rate, review and tell everyone you know. Bye.
- [51:55]
Maureen Footer
Hey, it's Jody Hamilton and Sean Smith Pierce. Here's a taste of what you might have missed from the Politics Bar.
- [52:01]
Jody Hamilton
Jody, I was listening to you this morning filling in for Steph. You and Chris were debating, and just for the record, Jody is right. Chris's argument is that there is some truth to what's being said about the left being in their own information silo. Right?
- [52:16]
Maureen Footer
Basically we started talking about how Gavin Newsom has invited people on his podcast
- [52:22]
Kelly Therese Pollack
High Up MAGA guys.
- [52:23]
Jody Hamilton
Yeah, well known right wing propagandists. That's what they are. Yeah.
- [52:26]
Maureen Footer
And my argument is he shouldn't be inviting them because nobody on that side is listening to Gavin Newsom.
- [52:33]
Jody Hamilton
Right? It doesn't help to bring propagandists into a sphere where truth matters because they're just going to lie their asses off anyway.
- [52:41]
Maureen Footer
Right?
- [52:41]
Jody Hamilton
So here is a public service message for Chris Lavoy. Joey Hamilton is right. Catch all that and more weeknights at the Politics Bar, available through your favorite progressive radio station, your favorite podcast player, or online anytime@the politicsbar.com.