Harold Nicholas
By:
March 27, 2015
Brother Fayard was born first — in Mobile, Alabama — then HAROLD NICHOLAS (1921–2000) in Winston-Salem. Their parents were black vaudeville musicians — Ulysses drums, Viola, piano — and in 1926, they moved north to Philadelphia to lead the pit band at the Standard Theater on South Street. Fayard grew up copying professional dancers; Harold adored him and followed. By 1929, they were an act and two years later, the Cotton Club called: gangsters, white people with money, black audiences not allowed. Their first film was an all-black short, Pie, Pie Blackbird (1932), while Harold scored a solo spot in Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson (1933). Kid Millions (1934) was Hollywood: Eddie Cantor in blackface, leggy white chorines, all ofays astonished — and Harold really was a kid! (As adults Fayard stood five-foot-four, Harold five-foot-two, both weighed 110 pounds.) Recognizing their brilliance, George Balanchine cast the brothers in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Babes In Arms (1937), while subsequent film cameos in Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with Harold’s future wife, Dorothy Dandridge, and the all-black Stormy Weather (1943), with Cab Calloway, were especially wondrous. However beloved, the brothers were still black and by 1951 — Hollywood racist, vaudeville dead — they were done. Harold moved to Paris to work solo. Later, they’d reunite, revered, and in 1984, Harold starred in Melvin Van Peebles’s 1984 one-man musical comedy, Waltz Of The Stork Boogie. “My brother is the most versatile actor, singer dancer. He does everything. And I’m so proud of him,” Fayard would explain. “Because I taught him everything he knows.”
Kid Millions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nDk85BxEbo
Stormy Weather, with commentary by Gregory and Maurice Hines
Sun Valley Serenade with Dorothy Dandridge
Harold Nicholas & Max Roach tribute to Duke Ellington (1981)
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Edward Steichen, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Quentin Tarantino.
READ MORE about members of the New Gods Generation (1914-23).