Back in 1927, in the days of the Harlem Renaissance, Manning was a 13-year-old boy who, on his way to Sunday school one afternoon, followed a group of older teens into a ballroom that happened to be along the way. What he saw and heard inside would change his life. "It was only five cents to go in, and they had this big band playing swing music," remembers Manning, now 85. "I was too shy to ask a lady to dance." It wasn't long, though, before he had conquered his bashfulness—and the dance floor too.
The craze for big bands and swing dancing began sweeping the nation in the mid-'30s, and Manning rode it all the way to Hollywood, where he appeared in a half dozen movies like Hot Chocolates and Hellzapoppin'. He invented new steps—including one in which he used his back to vault a partner over his head—and performed his gravity-defying acts on stages shared by Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Milton Berle. Once he even danced for British royalty.
But then the music seemed to die. Bebop, R&B and rock and roll had pushed swing offstage by the mid-'50s, and TV kept would-be rug-cutters glued to their sofas. Manning, who had made a good living dancing, found a new job at the post office, where he toiled for 31 years. "He figured things would pick up and he'd be back on the road," says Manning's son from an early relationship, Charles Young, 66, a dancer living in Las Vegas, "but they didn't."
And so, Manning says, "I adjusted to a new life." After all, it wasn't the first big change he had dealt with. Born in Jacksonville, Fla., he moved to New York City as a 3-year-old with his mother, Lucille, a laundress, shortly after she split with Frankie's father. "I didn't know I was poor," says Manning. "I always had shoes on my feet, food to eat and clothes on my back." And music. "I used to go to parties with my mother and watch her dance," he says. "I guess that's where I get my instincts."
Manning got a chance to hone those skills after catching the eye of Herbert "Whitey" White, a bouncer at the city's famed Savoy Ballroom, who was putting together a dance troupe. With Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, Manning toured the country and performed in Europe, Australia and South America. After World War II Army service he returned to find that musical tastes had started to change. Manning formed his own troupe, the Congaroo Dancers, but had to hang up his dance shoes in 1954. "Television was taking over everything," he says.
Manning, whose marriage to nurse Gloria Halloway produced two more children before ending in 1989, might today be living quietly in Queens had it not been for the dogged enthusiasm of a pair of Pasadena, Calif., swing aficionados who looked him up in 1986. "We got him on the phone and said, 'We're swing dancers. Would you be willing to work with us?' " says Erin Stevens Key. Manning told Key and her dance partner, Steven Mitchell, that he was retired, but he changed his mind after the pair flew to New York City to dance for him in person.
Today, Manning is once again traversing the globe, this time as a highly sought-after swing instructor and choreographer, and HBO is planning a movie of his life. "He's the last living vestige of a whole style and school and vocabulary of dance," says Norman Rothstein, general manager of the 1989 Broadway musical Black and Blue, which earned Manning a Tony award for choreography.
On May 26, Manning celebrated his 85th birthday at Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom with nearly 1,800 admirers, including new pupil Bette Midler ("I love Frankie. He taught me how to swing"), and wowed the crowd with some of his old steps. "It's like a cure for all my ills," says Manning. "Dancing keeps me going."
Patrick Rogers
Jennifer Longley and Eve Heyn in New York City
- Contributors:
- Jennifer Longley,
- Eve Heyn.
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