FRANKIE MANNING AT THE HOP
By DAVID HINCKLEY Daily News Staff Writer
Monday, June 14th 1999, 2:10AM
IN THE deepest valley of the Depression, a man took turf where he found it, and if that meant an ex-pug and hustler like Herbert (Whitey) White had to supplement his street-gang work with a dance troupe, well, Whitey was nothing if not a pragmatist.
Frankie Manning was a pragmatist, too. But mostly he was a dancer. His association with Whitey was a matter of circumstance and mutual convenience.
Whitey was a fair dancer himself, an avocation he'd picked up at Baron Wilkins' club in the late 1920s after his first knockout convinced him boxing wasn't his future. Soon Whitey had formed the Jolly Fellows, who in short order ran almost everything between 135th and 142nd Sts., and when the Savoy Ballroom opened on his turf in 1926, Whitey took himself a job as bouncer.
By early 1927, meanwhile, the younger kids were getting bored with the same Charleston their older brothers and sisters had been doing, and they started jazzing up the steps. When a young transatlantic aviator captured the country's attention that May, they borrowed his headlines and called their new moves the Lindy Hop.
Born with the short shelf life of any fad, the Lindy Hop proved durable enough that by the early '30s some practitioners were making a living at it - giving lessons, becoming gate attractions at the hipper nightspots.
None beat the Savoy, which had two bands for nonstop action, did not serve hard liquor and, unlike downtown joints such as Roseland, was integrated.
Whitey White took to scoping out the new arrivals there and inviting the most promising to join his troupe, Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, who soon became the brand name in Lindy Hop.
Turf worth holding is rarely uncontested, of course. Whitey's dancers were fresh kids like Frankie Manning and Norma Miller and Freida (Fredi) Washington, whom he paid $25 a week and drilled like it was boot camp. On the other side were first-generation dancers like Leon James, Shorty Snowden, Edith Matthews and Twist Mouth George, who created the Lindy Hop and felt the prominence of these kids was due as much to promotion as skill.
And thus in late 1935 was a throwdown arranged. Three of the old-time couples vs. three of Whitey's best. Two thousand fans packed the Savoy and Frankie Manning and Fredi Washington, dancing last, figured they needed to stop the show to win.
"Shorty had a step where his partner, Big Bea, would carry him off the stage on her back, with their elbows locked together," Manning would remember. "I thought I could improve it. I'd take the girl, lock arms with her back to back and flip her all the way over."
They practiced in secret and saved the new move for last. Fredi went up and kept going. She landed on her feet and 2,000 fans went crazy.
Over the Top was born. The first "air step" of the Lindy Hop propelled Frankie Manning onto Broadway and into nightclubs with the likes of Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. Whitey ran the organization, but Frankie ran the dance as Whitey's Lindy Hoppers toured Europe, South America and Australia. Manning choreographed the best Lindy Hop scene ever filmed, in "Hellzapoppin'," as well as dance scenes in the Marx Brothers' "A Day at the Races." He danced at the 1939 World's Fair. He was featured in Life magazine.
It took nothing less than the brutish jackboots of the Axis to bust up this party.
MANNING WAS born May 26, 1914, in Jacksonville, Fla., and his family moved to Harlem when he was 2. When he was 13, walking to Sunday afternoon youth activities at the Metropolitan Baptist Church on 129th St., he rerouted himself to the Alhambra Ballroom, where he learned the gospel of Lindy Hoppers like Shorty Snowden and Stretch Jones. Soon he joined them, working his way up the Lindy ladder from the Alhambra to the Renaissance Ballroom to the Savoy.
The Savoy was where the best would gather, especially for the Sunday afternoon open challenges where the winner got the $5 prize. Manning was a familiar and unmistakable sight there, the muscles and veins on his prematurely bald head glistening with sweat. Musclehead, the regulars got to calling him. "Go, Musclehead, go!"
He borrowed Lindy Hop moves from everywhere - the circus, the ballet. He had dancers take a long sliding split through their partners' legs. He arranged the first synchronized group steps. He added slow steps that made the fast steps seem more frenetic. More than anyone else, he turned the Lindy Hop into theater.
This dovetailed nicely with the inception in autumn 1935 of the Daily News' Harvest Moon Ball, which quickly became another Lindy Hop showcase. Ironically, the first ball didn't even have a Lindy Hop category until it became clear that many of the 150,000 spectators - a crowd that forced the first event to be postponed and relocated into Central Park - saw the ball as a showcase for just that dance. Those who called The News included, among others, Whitey White.
All this popularity surprised Manning not at all. Dance, he said, was life. People who danced together got to know each other and respect each other. Men who understood the principles of dance understood the principles of women. "The woman you are dancing with is a queen," he would say. "That's the feeling you should have. She is letting you dance with her. You should be grateful, fellas."
Also, fellas, "You have to look good. You gotta give her something to look at."
By the early '40s, however, the war clouds of Europe were darkening the dance floor. Whitey's troupe landed in Argentina on Dec. 6, 1941, and was stranded there for six months until it could catch a blackout plane to Miami. After they finally scraped up the cash to get back to New York, Whitey accused Manning of stealing his money.
Whitey was a rich man by now, with a fleet of chauffeur-driven Buicks and a club and farm in Oswego. The dancers knew they'd earned much of that money for him, and they sided with Manning. Whitey walked and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers were history.
In 1943, Manning was drafted. He could have gone for an entertainment unit, but instead he served in the Pacific, surviving hand-to-hand combat in hellholes like New Guinea. He won some medals and stayed in the service until 1948, when he got out to find his job was gone. These new bebop rhythms? Couldn't hang a dance on them.
He formed a troupe, the Congaroo Girls, but his time was over. Rhythm and blues was already becoming rock 'n' roll. Whitey White died of a heart attack on his Oswego farm. None of his dancers attended the funeral. In 1954, Frankie Manning hung up his shoes and took a job with the post office.
For 30 years he commuted from Corona, Queens, and he was closing in on retirement when, one night in 1984, a California woman named Erin Stevens called and asked if by any chance he was Frankie Manning the famous dancer.
"I don't dance anymore," he told her after a long pause. "I just work at the post office." But she persisted - just let us come talk, just show us one step, just do one dance - and it all came back. He became the dance consultant on Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" and Debbie Allen's "Stompin' at the Savoy." He won a National Endowment for the Arts choreography grant and a Tony for the 1989 Broadway show "Black and Blue." He had more invitations than he could handle, from the U.S. and Europe, to teach and talk.
In May 1999, Norma Miller threw him an 85th birthday party at Roseland. To mark the occasion, Frankie Manning danced with 85 women.
