Jazzed

Jack Cole and Twentieth-Century American Dance

Debra Levine

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781985904576
• Subtopic: Dance

Renowned dancer and choreographer Jack Cole (1911–1974), whose birth name was John Ewing Richter, was a one-of-a-kind artist who initiated a gripping style of theatrical jazz dance that forever vanquished the vaudeville kickline. Cole's distinctive four-decade career choreographing for stage, screen, and his iconic nightclub act began during the Great Depression. He transformed early modern dance by injecting angularity, syncopation, and body isolations derived from Indian, Latin American, African, and Caribbean dance forms.

At the forefront of Broadway innovation, Cole worked on shows like Ziegfeld Follies of 1943, Kismet (1953), and Man of La Mancha (1965). But his greater renown came as a film choreographer, with quintessential contributions to Gilda (1946), There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), Les Girls (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Let's Make Love (1960). In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Cole shepherded Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, who were considered nondancing movie stars, through an array of eye-catching production numbers. His work on Monroe's exceptional performance in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" helped catapult Monroe to superstardom. Cole also collaborated with Gwen Verdon, Mitzi Gaynor, Rita Hayworth, and Chita Rivera. He influenced Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Michael Bennett. Yet Cole's impact on American dance has long been overlooked.

With lucid prose and unmatched research pulled from film and art archives, public events, memoirs, and interviews, Jazzed takes readers on a journey through Cole's professional and personal transitions. Author Debra Levine not only focuses on Cole's choreography career at MGM, Columbia Pictures, and Twentieth Century-Fox but also uncovers details of his obsessive training, his struggles with depression and alcoholism, his proclivity for violence, and his encounters with homophobia. Levine winnows fact from fiction to deliver an insightful, entertaining biography of the dance renegade whose unique brand of theatrical jazz dance still resonates in nightclubs, music videos, and musicals today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface. “Diamonds” Are Forever: Jack Cole’s Pink Cadillac for Marilyn Monroe Still Runs on High-Octane Fuel
• Chapter 1. Barefoot Beginnings: Rooted in the Soil of Modern Dance
• Chapter 2. Finding Fast Footing: First Forays into Nightclubs
• Chapter 3. Dancing on Top of the World: At the Rainbow Room
• Chapter 4. Mafia Made Man: Knee Slides for the Mob
• Chapter 5. Cultural Voyager: In Time of War
• Chapter 6. Dancing Americana: Hep to the Jibe
• Chapter 7. Enter the Dancing Movie Goddess: From St. Denis to Dietrich
• Chapter 8. “Harry Told Everybody to Leave Me Alone”: Auteur Choreographer
• Chapter 9. Resident Dance Company: Los Angeles’s Greatest
• Chapter 10. Noir Choreographer: “A Hundred Z Musicals”
• Chapter 11. Gilda: Put the Blame on Jack Cole
• Chapter 12. Paradise Lost: “We Just Went”
• Chapter 13. “Sing, Sing, Sing”: With a Swing
• Chapter 14. Nightclub Headliner: “Cyclone Hits Slapsy’s”
• Chapter 15. Art or Money: Magdalena, the Copa City
• Illustrations
• Chapter 16. Alive and Kicking: The Jack and Gwen Show
• Chapter 17. In Zanuck’s Kingdom: The Riviera on Pico Boulevard
• Chapter 18. Lydia Bailey Meets The Merry Widow: Black and White and Pink All Over
• Chapter 19. Jack Cole Cares: Galvanizing Gaynor and Grable
• Chapter 20. Dazzling “Diamonds”: A Girl’s Best Friend
• Chapter 21. On Fire in the Fifties: Blondes, Brunettes, and a Redhead
• Chapter 22. Kismet, on Stage and Screen: Woman Warriors of Dance
• Chapter 23. At MGM, with Ladies: Designing Woman, Les Girls
• Chapter 24. Cruising the Caribbean: Dancing for the Mafia in a G-String
• Chapter 25. Let’s Make Love (or) Let’s Not and Say We Did: Last Dance with Marilyn
• Chapter 26. Dawn of a Decade: A Stinging String of Flops
• Chapter 27. Jack Cole’s Unswinging Sixties: Man out of Time
• Chapter 28. Burning Through Beirut, Birmingham, Bomarzo: Anger Gets the Best of Cole
• Chapter 29. On Kew Drive: With David Gray
• Chapter 30. Death of a Dance Renegade: Passing It On
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Screen Classics