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The most likely first question that most visitors to this site would pose is probably the hardest to understand. It is really a mystery that we will probably never know the answer to for sure:
Why did young Virginia Myers not follow up her successes at Carnegie Hall to do what nearly everybody was sure would be the next step in her dance career? Yet instead of heading overseas to star in an expected series of solo dance performances in principal cities like Paris, London and Rome, none of that happened. In fact, as far as we can determine, she totally turned away from the famous creative dancing she had been doing all her young life, never to perform it again in front of an audience.
Since that next major step was something that both her parents had planned and dreamed for Virginia, it would have seemed inevitable. Even if Jerome & Ethel didn't have the money to launch such a tour on their own (which could easily have been true), there were many wealthy and powerful people in New York who had long been among her admirers and could easily have taken on the rather modest costs involved.
So it is almost certain that this decision had to be a choice of Virginia herself. She was not an unintelligent teenager (as we can already recognize from her diary entry about the activities on the day of her first major Carnegie Hall recital.) She had to realize her decision would be a blow to her parents and it would not be easy to convince them of her decision. Many others would be disappointed as well.
Yet in writing about her feelings on the day of her first Carnegie Hall performance, she confides in her diary that “hearing the strains of the orchestra rehearsing filled me with a throbbing wonder at the stakes again.” She had been dancing virtually all her life and it seems clear from the reporting that dancing was something she did that was totally joyous and natural to her. From her viewpoint at the time there was really nothing to be frightened of, nothing at stake. She was just “doing what comes naturally,” It was one of the reasons critics had commented on how calm and truly professional she was whenever she appeared on stage.
But now, after a three year interval of not dancing, starting at 13, without having given even a single public dance performance, Virginia was now returning, no longer to be seen just as an extremely talented child, but rather as a young woman with her now beautiful woman’s body that would need the strength and grace to be able to perform a full solo dance program running to as much as two hours or more. Since this was to take place on the main stage of Carnegie Hall, one of the most important and famous sites for a musical performance to take place in the world, it would indeed be a major “coming out party.” The act of dancing now did involve stakes; and one had to feel the need to be a success, even if one never had felt that way before. (We’ll continue our investigation of why Virginia probably made this decision and never looked back.)
The second question: How could any child ever be able to accomplish without any lessons or guidance or rehearsal, except for the inspiration of the music she heard playing when she came out on the stage, yet dance so brilliantly over an entire afternoon or evening of solo performances that by the age of five leading critics were already calling her a “genius.”
The third mystery: Why did Virginia Myers never tell anyone, as far as we know, seemingly over the whole next half-century of her life, about the fame she had known as a young dancer and what she had accomplished during those exciting early years? Even her son, who she had had a close and loving relationship with until her death at 68, never heard her speak, or even hint, of that life except for a mention of once dancing in Carnegie Hall at 16 and later memories of two Broadway shows she appeared in as one of the dancer/performers.
One involved a tragic dance accident for another dancer in a giant musical revue titled “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” which marked Virginia’s first Broadway appearance. At one point a group of the dancers were required to each dance on very small platforms high above the stage with spotlights flashing over them in the dark. When Virginia looked down to check the dancer below her at one moment in the routine and she was horrified to find the platform empty. The young dancer having fallen to the stage far below had been seriously injured. (An historic reminder of how important the organizing of Actor’s Equity was in protecting performers in so many ways in those early years.)
Her only other memory that she mentioned was of the musical “Animal Crackers” starring the Marx Brothers. Their mother Minnie Marx was not only an important agent for her sons in the business, but also a great cook, and she used to invite the girls from the show up for a real home cooked dinner with the family on a number of occasions. It was a lovely memory for Virginia.
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We will try to supply some possible explanations or insights to these questions after other work on this site has been completed.
One other interesting note: Virginia Myers also did have the opportunity to meet and chat with Fred Astaire on the evening of April 30, 1973 at Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. Her son had been the co-producer and writer for a highly-praised black-tie Film Gala in tribute to Fred Astaire, which Astaire said over the years was probably the best night in his life. Of course Mr. Astaire had no idea of the place in the history of dance the woman to whom he was talking to had once held. Too bad, if he had been introduced to her as Virginia Myers, the very young girl who had become so famous for her solo dancing in New York, Fred quite possibly might have remembered her since they were both dancing in New York over many of those same years. It might have turned into quite a conversation between them. We’ll never know.
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