Jazzed

Born John Ewing Richter, Jack Cole (1911-1974) was a one-of-a-kind artist who initiated a gripping style of theatrical jazz dance that forever vanquished the vaudeville kick line. Starting in the Great Depression, Cole led a distinctive four-decade career choreographing for stage, screen, and his iconic nightclub act. 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 The Ziegfeld Follies (1943), Kismet (1953), and Man of La Mancha (1965). But his greater renown came as a film choreographer, with quintessential contributions to Gilda (1945), 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 two non-dancing stars, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, through an array of eye-catching production numbers. His pinnacle in Gentlemen, "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," catapulted 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, struggle with depression and alcoholism, proclivity for violence, and encounters with homophobia as a gay man. Levine winnows fact from fiction to deliver an insightful, entertaining biography of a dance renegade whose legacy persists as theatrical jazz dance remains popular in nightclubs, music videos, and musicals today.