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ONE RESULT of the illiteracy of most of today’s popular music, and of the plot and dialog idiocies of today’s stage musicals, was the revival on Broadway this year of a melodic, up-beat musical of the ’20s called No, No, Nanette. It opened last January and is still doing capacity business. One reason: the casting of Ruby Keeler, now 61, in the feminine lead.

Miss Keeler’s singing-n-dancing in No, No, Nanette reveals a heartening fact: she has retained not only the ability to sing-n-dance but also the “engaging personality” that captivated audiences almost four decades ago. She was neither a great beauty nor a great singer but she was, and is, the kind of tap-dancer whose energy seems to be generated by a whole-hearted, unquestioning yea-saying to life. It is an irresistible sight, and Miss Keeler was as effective on the screen as on the stage. Watching her seemingly unreflective, instinctual optimism in filmusicais like 42ND STREET and GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 made audiences feel revitalized.

She was born on August 25, ’09, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is of Irish-Dutch ancestry. When she was three her parents – Ralph and Elnora Lehy Keeler – moved to NYC (Miss Keeler doesn’t know why). Her father became a driver for the Knickerbocker Ice Co. They lived in tenements in what is now an uppermiddle class section of NYC (between First and Second Avenues from 66th to 70th Streets). There were five other children: four girls, one boy.

She was sent to the parochial school of the St. Catherine of Siena R. C. Church on East 69th Street and by paying five cents a week participated in what was called “drill,” a class in rhythmical exercises conducted, to music, by a woman named Helen Guest, who soon began giving Ruby ballet lessons. “We were very poor,” Miss Keeler says, “and I think she gave me the lessons for nothing,”

These ballet lessons led to Ruby Keeler being enrolled, when she was eleven, in Jack Blue’s Dance Studio on West 51st Street. One of her fellow students there was Patsy Kelly, also eleven years old.

When she was 14 one of the girls at Blue’s told her there were openings in the chorus of a George M. Cohan production called The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly. Miss Keeler lied and said she was 16, demonstrated her dancing ability, and was hired at $45 a week. “I couldn’t believe I’d get so much money,” Miss Keeler says. “When I told my mother she was very pleased. Although she was very busy raising six children she always found the time to accompany me to and from the theatre. But she was no pushy ‘stag mother’.”

At that time a Broadway character named Nils Thor Granland got up dance contests as a means of finding girl-dancers for nightclubs. “Lord knows I was no beauty,” says Miss Keeler, “and I certainly was no Granny’s type. But I won one of the contests and he hired me to dance in the El Fey Club, which was run by Larry Fey at 105 West 45th Street. The hostess was Texas Guinan. She was always singing, and was very kind to us chorus girls. But I, being a teenager, regarded her as an old woman.”

Miss Keeler says her youth and innocence protected her from the facts of speakeasy life during Prohibition. “Dancing in speakeasies was a job,” she says, “and none of us knew for sure who were gangsters. No one told us, so how could we know? My mother used to come and take me home. We thought nothing of walking home together at two in the morning. How different New York was then!” She danced in the chorus at the El Fey for three years and then went to The Silver Slipper on West 48th Street. While working there she landed a spot in a show starring Dorothy Burgess called Bye Bye Bonnie. It opened on January 13, ’27, and Miss Keeler’s number, “Tampico Tap,” was commented on by the critics. “I wasn’t ambitious, then or later,” Miss Keeler says, “and the newspaper attention surprised me.”

Producer Charles Dillingham took a look at her and gave her a job in Lucky, which closed almost as soon as it opened, and then in The Sidewalks of New York, a musical that starred Ray Dooley (Bob Hope billed as Lester Hope, made his Broadway debut in it). Once again Miss Keeler was noticed favorably in the reviews. Her performance was also noticed by two men who affected her future: Florenz Ziegfeld and Al Jolson. In the summer of ’28 Ziegfeld offered her a sizeable part in Whoopee, a musical he was putting together as a vehicle for Eddie Cantor and Ruth Etting. Rehearsals were not to begin for several months so Miss Keeler, and a friend name Mary Lucas, said yes when Bill Grady, then of the William Morris Agency, proposed that they work a couple of months in the “prologue shows” which the Loew theatres on the West Coast put on before the movie feature.

Grady wired William Perlberg, then in the West Coast office of the Morris Agency, to meet the girls. Fannie Brice was on the same train that took the girls to Los Angeles and she was met by Al Jolson and an assortment of Warner Brothers brass. Jolson noticed Perlberg waiting in the station and asked him whom he was meeting. Perlberg said two dancers from New York and mentioned their names, and Jolson, recalling that he had seen Miss Keeler in The Sidewalks of New York, asked Perlberg to introduce him. When the train pulled in Perlberg did so. “The introductions were perfunctory,” Miss Keeler says, “and everybody went their separate ways. And that’s the true story of how I met Jolson.*

While she was dancing in the Loew theatres she was given a test at Fox. That studio made a brief short of her tap dancing and released it to theatres, but did not offer her a contract.

When she went back East, Jolson followed her, and they were secretly married in Port Chester on September 21, ’28. The NYC newspapers discovered it the next day and gave it a big play (Jolson’ friends were astonished). After a brief honeymoon to Europe, Miss Keeler went into Whoopee. But she left it during its out-of-town tryout “to join my husband in California.” Several newspapers asserted she had quit because a joking reference to her marriage to Jolson had been inserted in Whoopee’s patter. Ziegfeld denied it.

A year later he hired her for the George Gershwin musical called Show Girl, and billed her as Ruby Keeler Jolson. The cast included Jimmy Durante and Eddie Foy Jr., and she had two numbers: “Harlem Serenade” and “Liza.” Show Girl opened on July 2, ’29, and during the finale, as she was dancing to “Liza,” Al Jolson got up from his seat on the front row of the orchestra and sang to his wife on stage. But four weeks later she left the show (health reasons were given). Dorothy Stone succeeded her.

She was not before the public again until ’33 when Darryl Zanuck, then an executive producer at Warners, cast her as the ingénue in 42ND STREET, which started a new cycle of filmusicals, chiefly because of the ingenious staging of its dance routines by Busby Berkeley. “Berkeley was wonderful to work with,” Miss Keeler says. “He always knew what he wanted, and he always got it. All the girls loved him and some of them wouldn’t take jobs after a Berkeley picture finished for fear they wouldn’t be in his next one.”

Miss Keeler says her success was due to luck and adds: “I was all personality and no talent.” It may have been luck that Zanuck cast her in 42ND STREET but her success in that filmusical was due so much to merit that Warners cast her again with Dick Powell in GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933. In that still pleasing filmusical Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon and Miss Keeler are three unemployed showgirls and Powell is a rich young man posing as a struggling songer-composer. Berkeley composed one of his best numbers for it (“The Shadow Waltz”). Another inventive number was “Pettin’ in the Park,” which Powell and Miss Keeler sang-n-danced. Said the Warner pressbook for GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933: “Give Ruby Keeler a special blurb whenever possible. Fan mail and exhibition reports indicate that millions are waiting to see hei again on the strength of her 42nd Street performance.”

“I couldn’t have cared less about having a career,” Miss Keeler says “I had no ambition and being movie star truly didn’t interest me. I remember watching Ginger Rogers at the time we made GOLD DIGGER and thinking she would make it all the way, would be a star because she wanted to be one. You’ve got too have the drive. I never did. I always felt there was more to life than show biz. The idea of an early retirement appealed to me no end.”

Warners lost no time in putting her and Powell in a third filmusical: FOOTLIGHT PARADE, but added James Cagney to the cast “just to make sure.” Berkeley again directed the dancing and he devised one of his most spectacular numbers for it, as aqua-ballet to “By a Waterfall.” Miss Keeler and Cagney did a dance routine together (“Shanghai Lil”) that’ still worth watching.

Her fourth picture with Powell, DAMES, was not so successful. Miss Keeler had only one number in it, and a disproportionate amount of footage was given to Berkeley’s staging of some of his lesser creation. But Dames has one unforgettable number: Joan Blondell’s singing of “The Girl at the Ironing Board.”

Bobby Connally directed the dancing in the fifth Powell-Keeler filmusical. It had a West Point background and was appropriately called FLIRTATION WALK. Miss Keeler did not dance, but her sister, Gertrude, was in the chorus (Gertrude and Helen had been in the chorus of 42ND STREET, and Gertrude still does bit parts in Hollywood films).

Miss Keeler then did her one and only film with Al Jolson. This was GO INTO YOUR DANCE (’35), in which she plays a naive young hoofer who helps rehabilitate an actor-singer (Jolson) who has gambled and drunk his career away. Glenda Farrell and Helen Morgan were also in the cast, and Miss Keeler danced in two of the numbers Jolson sang: “Latin from Manhattan” and “A Quarter to Nine.” Patsy Kelly, Miss Keeler’s childhood friend, had three amusing scenes with Jolson.

At that time the Jolsons had homes in Scarsdale NY and Encino CA, and in ’35 they adopted a son, whom they named Al Jr.

Miss Keeler’s last two pictures with Powell – SHIPMATES and COLLEEN – were not successes. “My screen musicals didn’t get better, they merely got bigger,” Miss Keeler says. In ’37 she still owed three pictures under her Warner contract and she reluctantly agreed to do READY, WILLING AND ABLE, in which her costar was dancer Lee Dixon. It had one good song (“Too Marvelous for Words”), and one good dance routine, in which she and Dixon danced on the keys of a giant typewriter.

As soon as it was finished Warners agreed to release her from her contract and two months later she signed a contract with RKO for two pictures a year at $40,000 per picture. But only one was made. This was MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKENS, a cheery programmer about a widow and her daughters who run a boarding house patronized by teachers, Fay Bainter played the widow. Miss Keeler was one of the daughters, and was billed below Anne Shirley, which caused her to terminate her contract with RKO.

In ’38 she went to Honolulu alone, and the fact that her marriage to Jolson was in jeopardy became public knowledge. On her return she agreed to appear in a play with Jolson called Hold on to Your Hat, but she walked out of it in Chicago when Jolson persisted in making ad-lib references to their marital troubles during rehearsals. In October ’39 her lawyer announced that the Jolsons had separated, and that she would seek a divorce, $400 weekly alimony, and a $1000,000 trust funds for their adopted son. Jolson told the press “our family troubles are not important enough, in my opinion, to bring a divorce.” Miss Keeler alleged extreme mental cruelty and said Jolson never agreed with her about anything, and called her stupid in public. An interlocutory decree was handed down December 26, ’39. Jolson told the press Miss Keeler was a wonderful girl, that he was sorry if he had given her an inferiority complex, and that he hoped they’d reconcile, The divorce became final a year later (12.27.40).

Miss Keeler refuses to discuss her marriage to Jolson, except for saying: “It was a mistake – a long mistake.”

She made one more film: “Sweetheart of the Campus.** It was a filmusical and she did a little dancing, but she was miscast as a cynically wisecracking showgirl.

At dinner with golfing friends in ’41 she met a handsome, successful (real estate) bachelor named John Homer Lowe and married him a few months later (10.29.41). “Once I became Mrs. John Lowe it never entered my head to be or do anything else,” Miss Keeler says. “I had enjoyed making movies but I’d always felt there was more to life.”

There was. She and Lowe had four children: John, Christine, Theresa and Kathleen.

They lived a very private life in Newport Beach CA. When, in ’46, Sidney Skolsky produced a fictitious biofilm about Jolson she refused to permit the use of her name. She is called Julie in that picture and her characterization, which, she says, “had nothing to do with our lives,” was portrayed by Evelyn Keyes.

She made only a few appearances in public after her marriage. In ’50 she appeared with Ken Murray’s Television Revue at NYC’s Roxy Theatre, and four years later she and Dick Powell were on the Ed Sullivan Show (it was the first time she’d seen Powell in 20 years). She appeared on “This Is Your Life” when that tv-show devoted a segment to Lillian Roth. In ’63 she was on tv with Jerry Lewis. In ’66-7 she appeared at several of the “film festivals,” here and abroad, that honored Busby Berkeley. In ’68 she did a 3-week stint of summer-stock in Bell, Book and Candle.

John Lowe died of a heart attack in February ’69 and a year later she agreed to play the feminine lead in No, No, Nanette after producer Harry Rigby told her Busby Berkeley would supervise the dancing and Patsy Kelly would be in the cast. The show revolves around the two numbers in which she dances (“I Want to Be Happy” and “Take a Little One Step”). Her son John is the assistant stage manager, and het sister Gertrude is pinch hitting at her business manager.

Miss Keeler contracted to play in No, No, Nanette for two years and says she enjoys the show but will be glad to get back to California. Her adopted son, who changed his name from Al to Peter, lives in her Newport Beach house (he is a landscape contractor and has been divorced). “What I want most of all,” she says “is to have a place where all the family can be together at Thanksgiving and Christmas and whenever we want to be.”

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* Asa Yoelson (Al Jolson) was born in Russia on May 26, 1886. When he was seven his parents emigrated to US and settled in Washington DC. His father was a rabbi and Jolson sang in his synagogue. Jolson’s rise to the top of the entertainment world was rapid. Before his marriage to miss Keeler he was married to two showgirls (Henrietta Keller, 1906-19; and Ethel Delmar, nee Alma Osborne, 1922-26). After his divorce from Miss Keeler he married Erie Galbraith Chennault (in ’45), He died 10,23.50.

** She and Busby Berkeley appeared as themselves in the audience watching the dance marathon in THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? but their footage was cut out. And she is one of the celebrities in THE PHYNX.

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