Last Ziegfeld chorus girl dances on at 102
NORMAN, Okla. — Frank Sinatra croons in the background as Doris Eaton Travis and her dance partner glide across the floor, her silver shoes sparkling in the light that bounces from the studio's mirrors.
Suddenly, a funky Latin beat takes over at the Macias Dance Studio in Oklahoma City, and the dancers slide into a cha-cha.
After more than 90 years as a hoofer, dancing still comes easy to Travis, who was a chorus girl in the extravagant Ziegfeld Follies that enchanted Broadway from 1907 into the 1930s.
"I'm the last of the Ziegfeld Follies girls now," she says.
She is 102, with a few wrinkles and white curly hair that frames her eyes of blue. She credits her longevity to her ongoing love affair with dancing and other lifestyle choices — "I didn't drink or smoke. I didn't abuse myself physically," she says.
Not only has Travis survived physically and mentally, but professionally as well, with annual appearances on Broadway, a small role in a Jim Carrey movie and her recent memoir, "The Days We Danced: The Story of My Theatrical Family From Florenz Ziegfeld to Arthur Murray and Beyond."
Back at her 400-acre ranch, about 10 miles northwest of the University of Oklahoma, Travis saunters around her 1970s Dodge Rambler.
Interest in the 5-foot-2 centenarian has piqued since a 1997 reunion with four other Ziegfeld Follies girls for the reopening of the New Amsterdam Theater in New York City, where she danced about 80 years earlier.
That led to her annual involvement in the "Broadway Cares/Actors Equity Fights AIDS" benefit, where she caught the eye of Carrey and director Milos Forman, who were making the movie "Man on the Moon," about the life of comedian Andy Kaufman.
"I played this woman who was supposed to be an actress who was no longer popular. I had to ride a stick horse and faint and then get resuscitated," Travis says, laughing.
Travis was born March 14, 1904, one of seven children to newspaper linotype operator Charles Eaton and his wife, Mary, in Norfolk, Va.
Some of the children, who became known as "The Eatons of Broadway," got their first break when a stock company production of "Blue Bird," appeared in Washington, D.C., in 1911. But their lives drastically changed when the play — and the family — went on the road. That split the family, with the mother, three daughters and youngest son going to New York and the father remaining in Washington.
By then, the Ziegfeld Follies had become an entertainment staple. Inspired by the Folies Bergeres in Paris, Ziegfeld Follies was part Broadway show, part Vaudeville, featuring top entertainers such as W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Will Rogers. Juicing up the show were beautiful female dancers who performed elaborate chorus numbers.
Pearl Eaton nabbed a part in the chorus of the "Ziegfeld Follies of 1918," and Travis became the youngest Ziegfeld Follies girl when she was hired at age 14 (she lied to producers and said she was 16). She became a principal dancer in 1920. Travis recalls Ziegfeld as a "very nice and very pleasant" man who became a good friend to her family.
She turned to silent movies with "At the Stage Door" and "The Broadway Peacock" in 1920, and "Tell Your Children" in 1922. But she never really got into film. "I think I enjoyed musical theater much more than the movies," she says.
