Donald O'Connor

Donald O'Connor: A Body Built by Vaudeville

He runs at a wall, up it, and off the top of it backwards into a full flip. Then he does it again. "Make 'Em Laugh," the number that made Donald O'Connor immortal, contains dozens of jumps and pratfalls, a wrestling match with a headless dummy, and two of those wall flips, and O'Connor — who choreographed the thing himself, with the assistant directors and his brother — remembered it as an escalation he could not stop. "The scene was building to such a crescendo," he said, "I thought I'd actually have to kill myself." One critic's verdict has stuck for seventy years: one of the most sublimely perfect moments in movie musical history. The joke is that the man performing it did not, for most of his childhood, consider himself a dancer at all.

Born Into the Act

Donald David Dixon Ronald O'Connor was born in Chicago on 28 August 1925, the son of two circus and vaudeville people: Edward "Chuck" O'Connor, a strongman and acrobat, and Effie Irene Crane, a bareback rider. He was two years old when a car struck him and his seven-year-old sister Arlene as they crossed a street in Hartford, Connecticut. Arlene died of her injuries. Weeks later his father collapsed and died of a heart attack while performing in Brockton, Massachusetts.

What followed was an upbringing shaped by a mother who had lost too much. She kept him out of the dangerous routines and kept him close until he was thirteen. He worked in the O'Connor Family act with her and his brother Jack, touring nationally, and he never attended school in any conventional sense — his one brush with organised education was the dramatic club at Danville High School, where his fellow members included Dick Van Dyke and Bobby Short.

The Hoofer Who Had to Learn to Dance

By his own account he was dancing before he could talk: "I was about 13 months old, they tell me, when I first started dancing," held upright by relatives while music played. But being raised inside an act is not the same as being trained by one, and O'Connor was blunt about the gap for the rest of his life. "I couldn't pick up routines because I didn't have any formal training," he said. Around fifteen he recognised the problem and set about fixing it systematically, working to convert himself from a hoofer — all footwork, nothing above the waist — into what he called a total dancer, expressive through the whole body.

He was still deprecating the result decades later. "I wasn't really a dancer, a good dancer, until I got older," he said. "I could do those wings and stuff and I looked very good, but my heavens, it was very, very hard for me to pick up steps." Almost no one else agreed with him.

Universal's Answer to Mickey Rooney, and a Talking Mule

He made his film debut at eleven in *Melody for Two* (1937) and spent the late 1930s in supporting parts before signing with Universal in 1941 at $200 a week. Paired with Gloria Jean and Peggy Ryan in *What's Cookin'?* (1942) and a string of musicals after it, he was explicitly the studio's answer to MGM's Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The war interrupted him: drafted into the U.S. Army on his eighteenth birthday in August 1943, he reported for induction the following February, and Universal frantically banked eight films around his absence.

Then came the mule. From 1949 O'Connor starred in seven films opposite Francis the Talking Mule, and although they made money, he came to resent what they did to his standing as a musical performer. The director Arthur Lubin recalled that he "got very difficult" on the later pictures, sitting in his dressing room staring into space. When Universal declined to renew after thirteen years, the studio's leaving present was a camera and fourteen rolls of film — a gesture he never stopped finding insulting.

Make 'Em Laugh

The rescue came from MGM. As Cosmo Brown, the piano player in *Singin' in the Rain* (1952), O'Connor got the role of his life and won the 1953 Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. Physically he was ideal for it: gangly, big-eared, a face that broadcast every thought, cast forever as the likeable, quick-witted, faintly bewildered friend. The performance works because the comedy and the dancing are the same act rather than adjacent ones — the pratfall is choreography, the choreography is a joke.

He was busy on either side of it. He supported Ethel Merman in *Call Me Madam* (1953), which he later insisted contained his best dancing, and returned to Merman the following year in *There's No Business Like Show Business* (1954), sharing the screen with Marilyn Monroe as his love interest, plus Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor and Johnnie Ray.

A Symphony, a Talk Show, and a Failing Heart

O'Connor was a regular host of NBC's *Colgate Comedy Hour* and fronted *The Donald O'Connor Show* for a season in 1954–55; his 1957 NBC special survives as one of the earliest preserved colour kinescopes. He also composed. In 1956 he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the premiere of his first symphony, *Reflections d'Un Comique*; the Brussels Symphony Orchestra recorded selections of his work. A syndicated talk show under his name was cancelled in 1968 after he was judged to be getting too political and was reprimanded by the studio.

His health then began collecting on the vaudeville debt. He took nitroglycerin before performances to get through them until a heart attack in 1971 ended that; in 1978 he collapsed, spent three months in hospital, was temporarily paralysed from the waist down, and walked again through physical therapy, writing to friends that he would never take anything he had for granted again. A quadruple bypass followed in 1990 and pleural pneumonia nearly killed him in 1999. He kept working — *Ragtime* in 1981 after sixteen years away from features, Cap'n Andy in the 1983 *Show Boat* revival, *Bring Back Birdie*, *Little Me*, *I Ought to Be in Pictures*, and finally a shipboard dance host opposite Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in *Out to Sea*. In his last years he was still performing some thirty-two weeks a year.

Why Donald Is Called a Genius

With O'Connor the claim rests squarely on physical skill, and it is worth being exact about what that skill was. He was not, by his own repeated admission, a natural technician; he could not pick up steps quickly and had to build his technique deliberately in his teens after a decade of being carried along by the family act. What he possessed instead was an integration most dancers never manage — the ability to make comedy and choreography the same gesture. In "Make 'Em Laugh" the acrobatics are never displayed as acrobatics; every flip is motivated as a gag, every fall reads as character. That is the acrobat's body he inherited from a circus strongman father, wired to a comedian's timing learned on vaudeville stages before he could read, and then — crucially — disciplined by conscious study into full-body expression rather than fancy footwork.

The counter-case is real. He worked inside conventional studio material and did not remake the musical the way Astaire or Kelly arguably did; his own choreographic credits are thin, and he spent his commercial prime opposite a mule. Playbill's assessment on his death was that he would be remembered for comedic footwork and physical virtuosity rather than for any body of theatrical achievement. There is also the fact that he was hardly ever the lead in a first-rank picture. Genius here means a rare and specific combination executed at the outer limit of what a body can do, not intellectual originality — and he said as much himself. "I never wanted to be a superstar," he offered late on. "I'm working on being a quasar, because stars wear out. Quasars go on forever."

Legacy

He was given one of the first stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 — he ended with two — took a Primetime Emmy from four nominations, and received a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in 1998. He married Gwendolyn Carter in Tijuana at eighteen, divorced in 1954, and married Gloria Noble in 1956; that marriage lasted forty-seven years and produced three children alongside his daughter Donna. He died of heart failure on 27 September 2003, aged seventy-eight, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House in Woodland Hills. What survives is roughly three minutes of film in which a man runs up a wall for a laugh, and which no dancer since has been able to improve.

Achievements

• Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
• Educated at Professional Children's School, Danville High School and Hollywood Professional School
• Worked as film actor, singer and stage actor