Billie Mahoney danced with the best of them — and at 80, this sexy number isn’t done yet
In a basement dance studio in Prairie Village, Billie Mahoney practices her tap to Tony Bennett’s “Shine on Your Shoes.” Her feet lightly caress the scuffed wood floor. Her black shoes make delicate clickety-click sounds. Her hips and legs swivel along with the music, and she throws in some graceful arm flaps. She does a sassy head bob to one side, which ruffles her cropped light-red hair, and catches her lower lip between her teeth. Then, she smiles broadly, and the rest of her dance troupe joins in to finish the song.
Billie turned 80 last November. Her eponymous dance troupe is made up of about a dozen women who meet the required minimum age: 50. (A woman in her 30s sometimes taps with them, too, though she’s sometimes asked to put her hair in a bun and wear her glasses to disguise her youth.) The number of people in the group varies, depending on the event.
The Billie Mahoney Dancers have a repertoire of 20 basic dances, which they perform about three times a year. They’re regulars at Senior Quest, a yearly event at the Overland Park Convention Center. Right now, they’re gearing up for their next appearance, a five-minute demonstration for a dance workshop in Paola.
Five minutes of a workshop is but a blip in Billie’s performance career. She worked in local nightclubs during the post-Pendergast years. She performed with Lionel Hampton at the Apollo Theater. She was summoned onstage by Gregory Hines at the Folly Theater’s 100th anniversary — he dubbed her a “legend in tap dancing.” She toured with Bob Hope and, as a drum majorette, led the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus into Madison Square Garden. She experienced Kansas City back when some clubs stayed open all night and attracted now-legendary jazz musicians.
But she and the troupe are excited for Paola, and with three and a half weeks to go, they’re focusing on relearning their routine. The early efforts sound a little like a herd of horses clomping in a parade.
“Dance lightly,” Billie says. “It’s supposed to be a soft shoe.”
She turns the volume of the CD player up as loud as it goes, but the women still strain to hear the music. After starting the song for another run-through, she stops when they get ahead of the beat.
“We can’t hear it,” calls out one of the dancers.
“Feel it,” Billie commands. “You’re not leaving that space” — the pauses between the steps, which need to be measured out.
“We’re old and deaf,” jokes another troupe member.
“Not quite,” Billie says.
At her house in south Kansas City, Billie flips through a scrapbook that she put together to display at her 80th birthday party. The front of the white plastic binder reads: “Billie Mahoney. Dancing for more than 3/4 century!”
Her house has just been remodeled, so mementos are still strewn about. A living-room wall holds about 40 framed pictures in a precise grid pattern. The photos document her career highlights, such as a 1961 photo of her interviewing Chubby Checker. They were both taking part in a dance forum analyzing the twist. Nearby, on a side table, is a photo album from her 2006 trip to India. A brass iguana with scales made of blue lapis lazuli stone — a souvenir from her December trip to the Galápagos Islands — lounges on a half-ledge wall that separates her new kitchen from her office area.
As she goes through the scrapbook, she punctuates stories from the past with her crackling, rousing laugh. Some anecdotes bring her to tears, which come quickly and make her voice shake and squeak. When she describes a dance routine, her compact body demonstrates limber moves as she sits in place in her office chair.
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Her hands sculpt the space around her when she talks, which is at a driving pace. She injects onomatopoetic noises into her descriptions for emphasis. When she talks about the first modern piece she danced in 1949, she makes a wrrroooooww sound, followed by a cat screech, to describe the atonal electronic music that accompanied the routine. “I didn’t know what the heck was going on,” she says.
On the first page in Billie’s scrapbook is a short Kansas City Star article dated October 20, 1932. The headline reads: “The Baby Parade Presented A Galaxy of Prize Winners.” The accompanying photo features five costumed kids. Five-year-old Billie is up front, gazing seriously at the camera. She’s dressed in an iridescent one-piece that resembles a baggy swimsuit. Huge, gauzy butterfly wings sprout from her back. She won the “most attractively costumed baby” category and took home a small gold piece that was worth $5 or $20 — she can’t remember which. Whatever the amount, it was a lot of money during the Depression. The third-place winner got a puppy — an injustice that made her cry.
Her mother, a talented dressmaker, made Billie’s award-winning costume. Rona Mahoney designed the women’s uniforms for the Kansas City Philharmonic and dresses for the Belles of the American Royal. She worked at different dress factories around town but spent the longest amount of time at Nelly Don’s. During those years, Billie and her older brother, Jack, performed at Nelly Don’s Christmas parties — Jack played the xylophone while Billie danced.
Their dad, Francis Henry “Jack” Mahoney, worked as a circulation manager for the Star. Both Billie and her brother were latchkey kids; they tagged along to each other’s drum and dance lessons. Billie also started taking baton-twirling lessons. She practiced five hours a day and wore down the grass in front of their house in east Kansas City, at 51st Street and Garfield. She became an expert at twirling two 1-pound batons.
The scrapbook photos from her college years show a curvy, strikingly pretty woman with auburn hair in a Bettie Page cut. Starting at age 14, Billie performed at conventions, local bars, nightclubs and military bases. Her main routine back then was set to a military medley played live — the musicians’ union didn’t allow recordings. It started with a strut onstage to the Air Force song, with its familiar off we go into the wild-blue yonder riff. She tap-danced to “Anchors Aweigh.” “The Marines’ Hymn” brought on high kicks, splits and backbends as she twirled two batons. She’d pass the batons under her legs and do the “fingertip trick” — making both batons spin horizontally on her fingers. The routine ended with “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
“There was constant applause — if not from the tricks, then from the music,” she says.
The military-base shows helped her get booked at Kansas City bars in the 1940s. Long before she could drink, she worked the roadhouses and bars that could stay open all night because they were outside city limits. At Mary’s Club, a “county” bar at 80th Street and Wornall, Billie did three shows a night starting at 11:15 p.m. and ending around 4 a.m. Mary’s was a “big barn of a place,” she says, with a huge dance floor that was always packed. She also performed at neighboring Tootie’s, which resembled a house with additions. Tootie and his wife lived in a bedroom, which also served as a dressing room. A live chicken usually roosted on the headboard, Billie says, and a big bulldog slept on the bed, which caused some consternation for Billie and her mother because the bed was the only place to lay out costumes. She remembers that legendary Kansas City jazz stars Jay McShann and Myra Taylor also played at Tootie’s. Taylor was 10 years older than Billie. “She was slender and cute with red hair,” Billie says. “She’s still kickin’ around.”
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She also grew up with what she calls “all that racial stuff.” Once, in the ’40s, she and a few other entertainers met their agent downtown for a gig. They didn’t know where they had been booked, so when the agent drove them to a club near 12th Street and Vine — she thinks it might have been called the Mardi Gras — they were shocked. “We’re in the black neighborhood? We’d never been in a situation like that,” she says. “Anyway, we did our show. It was a wonderful audience, and we were greatly received. And my girlfriend and I thought, boy, this is fun. We were adventurous. But tell our parents? No way. I never, ever told my parents. You just don’t do that. That’s another world,” she says about the segregated neighborhood. The next week, The Call ran a two-page spread on the performance, complete with pictures of Billie. Because her dad worked at the Star, she was terrified that he’d see the pictures. But he didn’t.
Organized crime had a big presence during that time. Many of the bars on Route 40 were mob-owned. “They were always good to me. They put me through college,” she said. They also taught her not to drink. She was told that the liquor was only for selling to customers. “They didn’t drink, the club owners. I had my first drink in New York at 23. I was trained well,” she says.
Her stage work helped pay her tuition at the University of Kansas City (now UMKC). Billie’s dancing didn’t endear her to her college classmates, though. “They thought it was sinful or whatever. They were drunk under the tables at the clubs, and I’m dancing and earning my tuition,” she says. The dean of women told Billie that she didn’t approve of dancing. The dean cited Salome’s dance, which got John the Baptist beheaded.
Years later, Billie won an alumni award. She was the only female recipient in 1973. At the reception at the chancellor’s house, one of the deans said, “Well, this is quite an achievement for you.”
“I think it’s an achievement for the university,” Billie responded. He looked at her, and she added, “For the university to recognize dance, I think that’s a great achievement.” She imitates his response: an outraged, throat-clearing, harrumphing noise.
UMKC still plays a part in Billie’s life. On a recent Tuesday night, she hustles into the Roeland Park Community Center for a rehearsal of the UMKC-affiliated New Horizons Band. Behind her, she’s hauling a battered, square green case on a metal luggage pulley. Nestled inside is a red, glittery snare drum.
The New Horizons Band is a woodwind-and-percussion ensemble; players have to be 50 or older to join. The program is mentored by UMKC’s music-education students. Once a week, they gather in a large, rectangular room to sight-read pieces such as “At a Dixieland Jazz Funeral,” “Sleepy Village” and “Dam Busters.” Off to one side of the simple practice room is a table laden with potluck fare, in honor of the band members who have recently celebrated birthdays.
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Billie sets the drum up in the back, next to another snare that belongs to her co-percussionist, Kandy Kahn. The conductor, Lindsey Williams, sports a shaved head and an oxford shirt and tie. He starts with a B-flat scale warm-up. Billie wields her drumsticks with a flourish — her left hand holds one stick like a pencil, and her right hand holds the other stick with her wrist facing down. After hitting the drum, she does a quick flick of the wrist and dramatically snaps the stick up high.
They start the rehearsal with the melodic “Sleepy Village” before trying to play the march-tempo “Dam Busters.” The conductor focuses his attention elsewhere, so Billie taps a little shuffle in her purple-and-white Gitano tennis shoes.
“I bet Billie could do a Jimmy Cagney dance,” calls out a guy from the brass section when they start on the patriotic “Melodies That Were Broadway.” Billie responds by holding both her drumsticks in one hand high above her head, bending one leg slightly at the knee and striking a drum majorette pose.
Later that week, Billie heads to UMKC’s Performing Arts Center to teach her twice-a-week class on Labanotation, a standardized system of charting dance moves. Billie first studied Labanotation in the 1950s and is now a specialist. She has contributed to a textbook on notation, and she has traveled all over the world to teach and chart it.
On that late Friday afternoon, there’s a faint smell of sweaty bodies in the hallway. Billie’s 20 students filter in and take off their shoes to protect the soft, synthetic floor. Clad in loose, comfortable clothes, they gracefully lower themselves to the floor before Billie takes roll call. “OK, I’m still trying to get to know you. Mackenzie?”
“She threw out her back in class this morning and had to go to the chiropractor,” someone answers.
The students take out a packet. On the second page is a movement sequence set to “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Labanotation consists of a series of triangles and rectangles that are set on a vertical staff. Notches and shades in the triangles and the rectangles indicate how the dancers are supposed to move.
Billie instructs the students to produce a live dance from what they see on paper. The students dutifully form a couple of haphazard rows. They start humming the song as they translate “Lf step F” on beat one and “Rf step F” on beat two. “There’s No Business” turns out to be a basic side-to-side, forward-backward dance. The students giggle as some of their classmates move in the wrong direction.
Next, they try a sequence set to “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” The notation is more difficult, and a woman in an orange hoodie becomes frustrated. “I’m just slow, Billie,” she says.
“Can you see patterns and memorize them?” Billie asks.
“I’m slow. I’m not used to this,” she responds. But after a couple more run-throughs, she nails it.
The students sit down on the floor again, and Billie quizzes them on the four pioneers of modern dance. She mentions that she studied under two of them at Connecticut College and Colorado College after she graduated from UKC.
“You see how connected you are?” a student says under her breath. Then she raises her voice to ask a question. “Technically, are we the next generation of pioneers? If you studied from them, and we’re studying from you … ?”
Billie deflects the question and says something about how some of the dancers who come to town to perform were her students at Juilliard. She taught for 15 years in the ’70s and ’80s in Juilliard’s dance division and worked alongside José Limon and Alvin Ailey.
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The class ends when the clock hits 5:10 p.m. The students clap and call out their thanks to Billie as they leave. A man lingers to talk.
“This changed my life,” he says. Labanotation is completely new to him. He explains that he’s a musician and that he missed having the notes written down.
“It changed my life, too,” Billie replies.
Billie graduated from college in 1949 and moved to New York City a year later. In 1954, she joined the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, a five-ring spectacle that began its season at Madison Square Garden. Mike Todd — later one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands — produced the opening night. Billie led the band in, drum-majorette-style and twirled her batons in the center ring.
Billie did the New York dates for Ringing Bros. for a couple of years. The circus was filled with glamour then. One year, James Cagney sang “Yankee Doodle Dandy” while Billie twirled. Marlene Dietrich served as the ringmaster while floats representing each month of the year rolled in. Martha Raye rode the Halloween-themed October float, and Sonja Henie wore ice skates on the December float. The finale was January’s Happy New Year float, featuring Marilyn Monroe atop a pink elephant. Billie also led the band from astride an elephant. Getting off the elephant was the tricky part, and she often tore her tights on the jeweled harness or the elephant’s bristly hide.
She recalls her circus days fondly. “Everyone in New York was, ‘Billie! You’re with the circus!’ Everyone says, ‘How great, Billie, you worked with Hamp at the Apollo.’ So in show business, I am a big star.”
Her mother saw things differently. One night, on the phone, Rona Mahoney spoke contemptuously of Billie’s career choices. She didn’t like that Billie performed with a black band, and she viewed the circus as something people ran away to join. “How low can you sink?” she asked.
The words still sting. Billie’s voice quavers, and the tears start flowing when she recalls her mother’s disdain for her most important gigs.
She recovers a bit and gives a little laugh. “And I thought, How little do you know.”
Billie’s early New York years were filled with nightclub dates, dance rehearsals and dance classes. She worked as a cigarette girl and a coat-check girl at the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana Club. She once helped Frank Sinatra with his coat. He slipped her a buck, four times the average tip, and said, “Here you go, sweetie.”
A professional choreographer helped her polish her act. She still incorporated the batons, and Variety described her performance in classic ’50s language: “Gal really scores with sock flash terp-stuff … and her twirling’s boffo.”
One novelty routine — which she performed in Lionel Hampton’s show — was a duet with a metronome. While the band played “Time on My Hands,” the metronome ticked, and she tap-danced during the pauses in the song. The ticks got faster, and so did her dancing. Then the metronome stopped. She looked at it. The band kicked in with a brassy finale, and she picked up the metronome and triumphantly left the stage.
Billie says people often told her, “‘Oh, you’re from Kansas City, that wide-open town.’ So they expected me to be very wild,” she said. When Billie appeared on the Arthur Godfrey and His Friends TV show, the announcer whispered to her, “Arthur’s quite taken with you and wants to know if you would want to come to his place after the show.” Billie declined.
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When she auditioned at the Latin Quarter, an 18-year-old Barbara Walters sat in with her dad, who owned the club. After Billie performed, she says she was asked whether she would work topless. “I said, ‘No thank you. I’m talented. I do an act,'” she recalls with a laugh.
Toward the back of her scrapbook, Billie appears with her auburn hair cut short. Her dance outfits — which previously featured embellishments such as fringed epaulettes — changed to plain black leotards. In other photos, she’s clad in a black turtleneck paired with a long pendant necklace. Her act changed, too. By the mid-1950s, many hotels had installed ice tanks, so she learned how to twirl her batons while ice-skating.
She married in 1961 and divorced her husband after 20 years. She moved back to Kansas City in 1992 to be with her mother, who, at 87, was still going strong. Her father had died of pneumonia the year before.
Billie’s schedule today is still as hectic as it was in the ’40s. In addition to teaching, she’s active in the Worldwide Church of God and volunteers for the food kitchen at the Willa Gill Center in Kansas City, Kansas. She also hangs out at the Mutual Musicians Foundation for jam sessions with her friends. She is already planning her next big trip: Next fall, she’d like to go to Warming Island, a newly discovered island off the coast of Greenland. She’ll take the cold-weather gear from her 2003 trip to Antarctica.
Before that happens, though, there’s that trip to the less-exotic Paola. With a week and a half to go before the workshop, she’s a little worried about the timing of the numbers. She and her troupe are planning to perform three routines, one of which involves grabbing props from the sidelines — it’s clocking in at seven minutes instead of the allotted five. The women are still dancing a little too heavily for Billie’s tastes.
“It’s a soft shoe. It’s a slower dance than all the others. Ride the beat, don’t push it,” she says. They’re also still rushing through the pauses. Billie demonstrates that the pauses should be loaded. “Like a grenade with the pin off,” she explains.
On the day of the Paola show, Billie and her troupe arrive at the Paola Community Center
in a maroon van. The women emerge with freshly done makeup and hair. They’re clad in black pants and turquoise, long-sleeved T-shirts that read: “I love to tap dance.” In the gorgeous 1916 theater, the Midwest Cloggers are warming up onstage. The cloggers are a group of mainly grade-school-age girls in royal-blue dresses with sparkly plaid accents. When they’re done, Billie calls out, “Gals, let’s do a warm-up.”
The mood of the theater is relaxed, with about 20 people in the audience. One of the organizers announces that this demonstration is a teaching opportunity for fellow dancers and will be “very, very casual.” Also performing is the StepCrew, a Canadian group that specializes in Celtic-style dance. The Midwest Cloggers take the stage first and do a hoedown clogging routine.
The Billie Mahoney Dancers are next. The women are still sitting in the front row when Billie summons them. “Come on, gals, get the heck on the stage!” she says in an impatient whisper. They line up in two rows. The opening notes to “New Soft Shoe” play over the loudspeaker. They daintily tap out the routine, stage smiles beaming on their faces. There’s a brief pause after the end of the song, and the audience claps politely.
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Next, the jazzier bass notes of the Tony Bennett song floats up. Billie, who is front and center, starts grooving her shoulders and arms to the snappy opening refrain. This routine is more ebullient, and the dancers take it away. As Billie does her solos, a broad smile appears on her face, and the joy that she derives from dancing is apparent. Her solos are greeted by a burst of applause. On the last notes, the troupe members raise their arms, flick their wrists for that “tah-dah” flourish and hold the pose while the applause envelops them. Together, they bow and then move to form a single line and bow again, hand in hand. As they walk offstage, Billie and a couple of women clap back to the crowd.
Afterward, an organizer asks Billie to talk about her life. Standing in front of the stage, she takes the microphone and mentions highlights: working with Nat King Cole, appearing on Ed Sullivan’s show and The Tonight Show with Steve Allen, touring with Bob Hope. “When you’re in New York for 40 years,” she says, “you do a lot of stuff.”
Then she relates the story of Gregory Hines calling her to the Folly’s stage and introducing her as a legend. “I went home and looked up legend in the dictionary. It said, ‘A story, not necessarily true,'” she says. She ends her talk to enthusiastic applause, passes the microphone back and then blends into the audience.
