Keeler, Ruby

(b. 25 August 1909 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; d. 28 February 1993 in Rancho Mirage, California), dancer and actress known for her starring roles on Broadway and in Warner Brothers musicals.

Keeler was born Ethel Hilda Keeler, the second of the five children of Ralph Keeler, a grocer, and Elnora (“Nellie”) Leahy, who also worked in the family-owned grocery store. In 1913 the family moved to the East Side of New York City, where Keeler’s father drove a truck for the Knickerbocker Ice Company and her mother became a homemaker. Keeler attended a Roman Catholic grammar school and later the Professional Children’s School. She also received private dancing lessons in exchange for teaching dance classes for elementary schoolchildren.

Keeler danced briefly in the chorus of George M. Cohan’s The Rise ofRosie O’Reilly in 1923, then joined a hotel floor revue. After winning first prize in a dance contest, she worked in Manhattan at the El Fey nightclub run by Texas Guinan. Her dancing attracted the attention of the Broadway producer Earl Lindsay, who cast her in Bye Bye Bonnie in 1927. She then appeared in Lucky and The Sidewalks of New York that same year, and in 1928 Florenz Ziegfeld signed her as the chief tap dancer for Whoopeel Before starting rehearsals, Keeler went to Hollywood to appear in live musical prologues for Loew’s theaters and to make a promotional film for Fox Movietone sound equipment. A cute, full-faced brunette with short, bobbed hair, Keeler projected a wide-eyed look of natural innocence and naïveté that contradicted her nightclub experience.

While in Hollywood Keeler met the singer Al Jolson, who was then Broadway’s biggest star. Jolson, twenty-three years older than Keeler and twice divorced, began courting her. They married in suburban Port Chester, New York, on 21 September 1928 and adopted a son in 1935. After her honeymoon Keeler joined rehearsals for Whoopeel but, at Jolson’s request, left the show before it opened. Ziegfeld offered Keeler a leading role in his next production, Show Girl, which opened in New York on 2 July 1929. She left the show soon after it opened, again at Jolson’s insistence, to live at his Hollywood home. After she moved there, however, Jolson spent most of his time in New York, starring in Broadway shows and having affairs with other women.

Warner Brothers asked Keeler to play the lead female role in 42nd Street (1933), a major musical involving complex dance numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Keeler was the star dancer in the “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and “42nd Street” production numbers. Critics and the public loved her work with her costar Dick Powell, although she later described herself as “a scared rabbit in 42nd Street” and recalled, “I knew I wasn’t an actress but figured all I had to do was say lines like, ‘What?’ ‘Who?’ ‘When?’”

Warner Brothers paired Keeler and Powell in several other musicals, often with choreography by Berkeley and songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, including Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), Dames (1934), and Flirtation Walk (1934). The movies had almost interchangeable plots but were wildly successful with audiences seeking fantasy to escape from the Great Depression. A later documentary filmmaker noted, “She represented all that was grand, all that was enjoyable in life at a time when life wasn’t that great.” Keeler’s naive innocence was perfectly complemented by Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic, surreal, and frequently erotic dance numbers. Keeler later recalled, “With Berkeley directing, I never knew whether I’d be sprouting out of a flower or dancing on a piano.”

In 1935 Keeler and Jolson appeared in their first and only movie together, Go into Your Dance, a First National production. Its success led the studio to suggest a sequel, but Jolson declined, fearing he’d lose top billing as part of a husband-and-wife team. Keeler later recalled: “Al was called the greatest entertainer in the world. I know that was true because he told me so—many times.”

Keeler was paired again with Powell in Shipmates Forever (1935) and Colleen (1936). Her final musical was Ready, Willing and Able (1937), in which Keeler and her partner Lee Dixon danced on the keys of a giant typewriter. She insisted that this was her favorite dance scene despite the fact that “it was difficult jumping from key to key doing wing-and-taps, and I’d get charley horses in my legs from dancing on those footstools.”

Jolson argued with Warner Brothers concerning his contract terms, left the studio, and took Keeler with him. Her next film, Mother Carey’s Chickens (1938) for RKO Studios, was a drama and did not do well at the box office. Sweetheart of the Campus (1941), which Keeler made for Columbia, was also unsuccessful. She said, “It was so bad I had no regrets about quitting.”

Keeler and Jolson separated in 1939 and divorced on 27 December 1940. A year later, on 29 October 1941, Keeler married John Homer Lowe, a prominent Los Angeles businessman and real estate developer. Keeler retained custody of her adopted son and had four children with Lowe. When Columbia Studios prepared to film The Jolson Story in 1946, Keeler’s feelings about Jolson were still so strong that she refused to allow use of her name in the movie. She told the producer Sidney Skolsky, “I don’t want my children to grow up and know I was married to a man like that.”

For the next three decades Keeler focused her attention on raising her family and made only occasional guest appearances on television and the stage. Among them were The Greatest Show on Earth in 1964, Hooray for Hollywood in 1964, a summer stock revival of Bell, Book and Candle in 1968, The Rowan and Martin Special in 1973, and Glitter in 1984. Keeler also appeared as an uncredited extra in the movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and had a brief cameo in The Phynx (1970).

Although Keeler had not starred in any films for several decades, her work gained attention in the late 1960s. College students began a craze for Berkeley films, whose dance numbers were then viewed as psychedelic or “the MTV of the 1930s.” The New York Museum of Modern Art sponsored a Berkeley film festival in 1965, and Keeler appeared as a guest lecturer in New York, San Francisco, and London. She charmed audiences by stating disarmingly: “It’s amazing. I couldn’t act. I had that terrible singing voice, and now I can see, I wasn’t the greatest tap dancer in the world either.”

Lowe died in 1969, and shortly afterward the producer Harry Rigby asked Keeler to join a revival of the 1925 musical No, No Nanette. She was initially reluctant, but her children persuaded her to accept. “We didn’t want her to turn into a golf widow,” her son later said. “We thought the show would give her something to do.” The show was choreographed by Berkeley and also starred Patsy Kelly, Keeler’s long-time friend. Keeler played the role of Sue and tap danced in two show-stopping numbers, “I Want To Be Happy” and “Take a Little One-Step.” Keeler’s son also joined the production as assistant stage manager.

The show opened on Broadway in New York City on 19 January 1971 and was a huge success. Critics singled out Keeler for special attention, and ABC’s John Schubeck called her “the entertainment comeback of the century.” She won the Catholic Actors Guild’s George M. Cohan Award in 1971 and the Harvard Hasty Pudding Award in 1972.

Keeler stayed with the show during its entire two-year Broadway run of 871 performances. She subsequently starred in its nationwide tour for another two years but dropped out after developing a cerebral aneurysm in 1974. Initially paralyzed, she spent several months in physical therapy learning to walk and talk again. She never danced professionally after her stroke, but she appeared in a Disney video series, Just You and Me, Kid, volume 4 (1985), about parent-child relationships. She also had a cameo in Beverly Hills Brats (1989).

Keeler remained in the public eye, giving lectures about Berkeley films on cruise ships and appearing as a spokesperson for the National Stroke Association, which established the Ruby Keeler Fellowship Memorial after her death from cancer. She is buried at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Orange County, California.

Keeler is a major figure in the pantheon of American movie musical stars, and her fame is matched only by Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly. Unlike the other three dancers and virtually every other movie star, Keeler was not driven by a need to achieve fame. Her friend Theresa Lane noted, “She got big in spite of herself.” Keeler began performing only to help her family escape poverty and, once this goal was achieved, could discard her stardom without any regrets. She gave her highest priority to creating her own happy family and finally succeeded during her second marriage.

The Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has a file of magazine and newspaper clippings about Keeler. Interviews with Keeler are in John Gruen, CloseUp (1968); and Cass Werner Sperling and Cork Millner, Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story (1994). Nancy Marlow-Trump, Ruby Keeler: A Photographic Biography (1998), is the only book-length study. Keeler is discussed in David Shipman, The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years (1970); Don Dunn, The Maying of No, No Nanette (1972), which discusses the nostalgia craze; Sidney Skolsky, Don’t Get Me Wrong—I Love Hollywood (1975), which describes the incident regarding The Jolson Story; Tony Thomas, That’s Dancing! (1984); Herbert G. Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (1988); Rusty E. Frank, Tap!: The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955 (1994); and Ollie Mae Ray, “Biographies of Selected Leaders in Tap Dance,” Ph.D. diss., University of Utah (1976). Obituaries are in the New York Times and the Washington Post (both 1 Mar. 1993) and Variety (8 Mar. 1993). Chuck Stewart directed a documentary video, Ruby Keeler: The Queen of Nostalgia (1998).

Stephen G. Marshall