SHALL WE DANCE? Arthur Murray recalk how he waltzed away with a fortune

Press, 21 July 1978, Page 13

SHALL WE DANCE? Arthur Murray recalk how he waltzed away with a fortune

In Honolulu the islanders are fearfully vigorous about their tourism. To wander from Waikiki Beach is to be assaulted by shop windows bright with souvenir coral (mostly imported from the Philippines) and screamingly multifloral his’n’her Aloha shirts.

Twice nightly they lay on displays of Authentic Polynesian Hula and, daily, memorial boat rides to Pearl Harbour. These are curiously popular with Japanese package tourists who may be seen smiling with inscrutable unembarrassment as Adventurer V glides over 3000 GI remains to the re-created sound effects of ack-ack gunfire. It does, however, strike one as a little odd that the Honolulu Tourist Board should make so much Of historic past, yet skimp on living legend. Pearl Harbour they promote but Arthur Murray, their one indigenous celebrity, they inexplicably ignore.

And now, if ever, is the time to fete him, for it is 65 years exactly since Murray Teichman, the 18-year-old baker’s son from a cold water tenement in East Side, New York, won his first waltz contest and set Out to make his 40-million-dollars-a-year fortune on the crest of a dance craze that makes “Saturday Night Fever” look like the Ladies’ Excuse Me at a local hop. Can you imagine the souvenir value of colour snaps posed with Arthur Murray and captioned for the folks back home: Self, quickstepping with A. Murray, who once twostepped with Barbara Hut-

ton and Tallulah Bankhead? I tried to trace Mr Murray through the studio on Kalakaua Avenue that bears his name. No joy. There was only a certain Father Francis looking very chipper as he mastered the quickstep fishtail and a fresh-faced half-Sa-moan pizza bar chef hefting his way through eight private and six group lessons in touch dancing, 325

dollars the lot, paid off in monthly instalments. It transpired that Arthur Murray had sold out the franchises on his 500 worldwide studios 15 years ago and seemed since to have disappeared along with Colonel Sanders into brand name history. “I don’t go down to the studio any more,” sighed Murray when I finally tracked him down to the beachside penthouse where he now lives with his well face-lifted wife Kathryn and a healthily appreciating cache of French impressionist paintings. “You don’t look so good under fluorescent lights when you’re over 70. Some of those women they have in the Swinging Housewives class just won’t ever loin (sic) when they look ridiculous.

“Fifty dollars an hour some of them are paying — I never charged more than 10 — but you could ask what you liked and they’d still keep on coming just to picture themselves as Ginger Rogers in the arms of Fred Astaire.”

It might be a little unwise for a senior citizen of 83 to snipe at the middle-aged matron, were he any less fastidiously elegant than Arthur Murray, who it must be said, has done rather well at defying chronology.

He was dressed in a style I suppose the French might call ecolier sportif: grey flannel shorts reaching to just above his flawlessly rounded knees, black knee-length socks and brogues, and a burgandy sports shirt with one of those discreetly pukka reptiles embroidered on the left nipple. He plays tennis daily and claims to spend 10 hours a day studying Wall Street takeovers on behalf of a syndicate of friends for whom he now invests “just to keep my hand in. They’re all three times as well off as they were last year.”

It may be that his diet has something to do with his altogether improbable state of preservation: “I’ve never drunk alcohol,” he said, pouring me some of his favourite prune juice and hospitably proffering a jar of sticky sweetmeats heavily encrusted with macadamia nuts. “Have an aphrodisiac rock. I made them myself.” He had made his first million through mail order dance instructions, organised as flick books and introduced as the surefire way “to overcome your inferiority complex or to become popular overnight."

If you ask him for the root cause of his prodigious success then Murray will tell you it is due in part to his perfectionism: he would personally dust the lightbulbs in his studio, and all his Arthur Murray girls were issued with instruction manuals reminding that “sitting down enlarges the hips” and asking “Do you really think that peppermint overcomes onions?”

Any girl encouraging a relationship more intimate than the proper ballroom hold was instantly dismissed.

He understood the proprieties. In 1912 when ragtime was just beginning to be heard in New York but was not yet quite respectable 12 young ladies were dismissed from “Ladies’ Homes Journal” for doing the Turkey Trot during the lunch hour. Ever after

Murray was careful not to teach a step — “not the Maxixe, not the Chine Tato nor the Lulu-Fado” — till society thought it proper.

But mostly Murray attributes his fortune to cunning advertising: the slogans appealing to the emotions that sound corny now, struck straight at the heart sixty years ago.

They were followed up by ever-more-inventive persuasion: cheap rates for those born under certain sun signs, solve-this-cross-word cut-rates and random phone calls that opened with “Congratulations: you have been selected for a free trial lesson.”

ndeed Murray may go down in history as Ihe inventor of the free trial lesson, t..ough it must have cost him dear for in his wife’s clear-sighted view it seems that Arthur owes a great deal of his success to his own natural flair for economy.

At night, she says, he used to carry his own whistle to avoid having to tip doormen; he used a sharpening gadget on his razor blades and ordered a clause in his will restricting his funeral expenses to a $5OO maximum. This morbid mention is clearly not to Murray’s taste for he switches the conversation sharply back to the tango-hustle.

“I’ve seen ‘Saturday Night Fever’.’’ he says, “and yes, 1 know attendance at the Arthur Murray studios has doubled since the movie. But frankly I’d limit disco dancing to the under-20s. It’s only for those who know they've got sex appeal. Now do have another aphrodisiac rock.”