A Tap-Dancing Role Model

In my previous post on Betty White, I made a passing mention of another talented artist with an even longer career: Dancer, singer and actress Doris Eaton Travis performed with Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson and appeared on Broadway in AIDS benefits when she was well past 100. As fate would have it, the day after my piece appeared, Travis, the last surviving member of the Jazz Age's famed Ziegfeld Girl chorus line, died of an aneurysm in Commerce, MI. She was 106.

But Travis, whose colorful life merited a lengthy obituary in today's New York Times, wasn't just a miracle of longevity. She also was a woman with multiple careers--from tap-dancing ingénue to silent movie star to ballroom dancing entrepreneur to author. Travis also was a ninth-grade dropout who eventually earned a college degree with honors--at age 88--and still had ambitions of going back to school again to complete a master's degree. Call her the diva of reinvention.

Travis made her first appearance on the stage at age five, and joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1918 on the day she finished eighth grade, after fudging her age to get around child labor laws. After rising to become a tap-dancing soloist with Ziegfeld, she left in 1921 to become an actress, appearing in silent films such as At the Stage Door , Tell Your Children (with a young Alfred Hitchcock as a title designer) and High Kickers, as well as talkies such as 1933's Reckless Decision. Here's a wonderful YouTube video of Travis performing the song-and-dance number "Broken Up Tune" with Gus Arnheim and his Coconut Grove Ambassadors orchestra in 1929.

By the mid-1930s, however, Travis found it harder to get roles and, at the depths of the Great Depression, she briefly earned a living as a dime-a-dance girl at the public dance halls that were a popular form of entertainment at the time. Desperate for a new career, in 1936, she walked into Arthur Murray's dance studio on 43^rd Street in New York City and asked him for a job as a $1-per-hour tap dancing instructor. Quickly, she became the school's most popular teacher, working 12 hours a day to accommodate the demand.

But Travis wasn't content just to teach. According to her 2003 memoir, The Days We Danced, she soon moved to Michigan, where she started the first Arthur Murray franchise outside of New York City. Eventually, she built a chain of 18 studios, the biggest such operation in the  Murray empire. From her base in Detroit, Travis helped popularize Latin dances such as the tango and the mamba nationwide, training instructors from across the country how to teach the dances.

In 1968, Travis and her husband, Paul, an inventor who made a fortune by creating a door jamb for automobiles, retired to Oklahoma. There, the couple lived on a ranch and raised quarter horses, a business which Travis eventually managed by herself after her husband's death in 2000.

Travis never gave up on trying new things. In her seventies, she resumed her academic studies, and finally earned her high school diploma. She then went back to college at the University of Oklahoma, taking a course or two each semester. In 1992, at age 88, she earned her bachelors degree in history and made Phi Beta Kappa as well. In a 2009 New York Times interview, she said that she was still thinking of returning for a master's degree. She also expressed an interest in break dancing, though she conceded that she probably was a bit too old to learn the moves herself.

"I probably have a few regrets," she told the New York Daily News in 2004. "But I have no complaints."