The Quintessential Dancer Has Left the Stage - Cyd Charisse

When I was a little girl I loved Sunday afternoons. They meant old movies and musicals on TV. I gobbled up all the Fred and Ginger that Chanel 47 could put out. I saw Easter Parade, Royal Wedding, Top Hat, and Singin’ In the Rain so many times my parents begged told me they’d rather hear me learning to play the oboe than have to hear the songs again (which trust me sounded like I was slowly strangling a soprano goose with a bagpipe).

After the 3 o’clock flick was over I’d be pushed outside to play and would spend hours hanging upside in a tree, or running around the backyard pretending to be dancing with Fred or Gene. I loved the costumes and the sets. I loved the romance and the songs. I was probably the only kid on my block that could sing most of Cole Porter’s songs by heart by the age of nine.

There was one dancer who absolutely enchanted me. She was all legs- slinky, smooth and seductive. She seemed to turn the men she danced with into shadows. When she was on the screen nobody else existed. Cyd Charisse. Even my father, who rarely made comments about women other than my mother’s good looks, would stop and watch. She had something special. I didn’t get exactly what she had, but boy did she have it in spades.

Yesterday part of history passed when Ms. Charisse was taken from us by a sudden heart attack. She hasn’t appeared on film in decades-1958 to be exact. But she remains trapped like a magical spectre in those knockout numbers like “Dancing in the Dark” in Band Wagon and “Girl Hunt Ballet” where Fred Astaire dances with two stunning women-one blonde and one brunette-both danced by Charisse.

There was a fantastic comment in the New York Times this morning that I can’t help but quote. “The number, “Broadway Melody Ballet,” occurs in a film within a film that takes flight with Gene Kelly as an eager hoofer looking for his Broadway break, singing “Gotta Dance!” He slides on his knees toward the camera, abruptly stopping before his hat, which has somehow become perched on a foot attached to a long, long leg. He gapes (as do we) as that leg then rises straight in the air with phallic suggestiveness, a prelude to a carnal encounter that was as close to on-screen sex as was possible in the 1950s and wholly sublime.”

She was sex before I knew what sex was. She was beautiful and sublimely talented. And she will be greatly missed.