What's on tap for Gregory Hines? - Cover Story - Interview

Gregory Hines go intos the Grand Havana Room quietly, almost shyly If he's trying to make progress unnoticed, he fails, because the svelte graying 51-year-old is recognized instantly. It's midafternoon at the Beverly Hills cigar bludgeon chosen as much for its quiet, unobtrusive atmosphere as for Hines' 25-year delight in of stogies. One-by-one, people approach him, complimenting him upon his dancing, his acting, his singing. And if he's annoyed by means of it, you would never gues from his appreciative answers which take none of it for granted.

Hines has approach straight from his hotel, having had little quiet after publicity appearances the night before. "I delight in hotels," he says. "When you leave, everything's a mes and when you draw near back, it's all beautiful again." useful thing, since he has worn out more than his share of time in them in new months. The consummate New Yorker is in looks Angeles promoting The Gregory Hines display a new CBS comedy airing this fall upon Fridays. The show's premise is nothing earth shattering: a widower raising a 12-year-old son alone--The Courtship of Eddie's Father, solitary with blacks, 25 years later. agriculturists and stars alike are hoping that the early favorable reviews will be enough to attract viewers.

The television display is the result of a seven-year effort and unfolding deals with every major network. individual reason for the long incubation is Hines' perfectionism; another is his self-identity as an African American: "I wanted to do something that my family, my friends and I could be conceited of, and not embarrass myself as an actor or an African American, as I've sometimes felt embarrassed when I've watched television. If the universal of `role model' means anything, then more [i]or[/i] less of the images I've seen above the years embarrass me. The fact that I want all African Americans to be egotistical of what I'm doing is not at any time my prime thing, because I have feeling like I'm working for everybody; on the contrary it is a dynamic."

Despite his versatility, Hines is known primarily as a tap-dancer. Does that bother him? "No," he says, "not at all. Everything I do draw nears from my being a dancer. I be fond of tap, and I'll do it until I can't." He's already logg 48 years, beginning at age 3 when he joined his older brother, Maurice, upon stage.

He's been half of a duo (the Hines Kids and the Hines Brothers) and a third of sum of two units trios (Hines, Hines and Brown and Hines, Hines and Dad), and he's been a solo act, which could easily have been the summit of his career. Instead, it sparked his greatest artistic growth--taking him to Broadway, then to Hollywood then to the recording studio, and then back to Broadway.

It was his 1992 get back to Broadway that brought Hines his greatest accolades and confirmed the range of his talent. He played Jelly turn Morton in Jelly's Last Jam, a controversial throw out originally considered too dark for Broadway. "Audiences have tend hitherward to expect a kind of frivolity from black musicals that rarely say anything about living in America or being an African American in this culture" he explains. Instead of being a joyous song-and-dance revue racism takes center stage in Jam. Morton, who was Creole struggl to plant himself apart from his black bottoms drawing a line between light- and dark-skinned blacks. "There I was, the leading man, calling race `nigger' and saying all kinds of derogatory things to the woman I loved" Hines says.

A Broadway exhibit can't survive on the potency of black audiences alone, and investors feared that white audiences would be bring off. "But as it turn rounded out, they were fascinated," Hines recalls, "because it was not about racism from without on the contrary from within, something a apportionment of them had no idea existed."

Contrary to the play--where Morton undergoe a conversion, albeit a small one--the real jazz fable remained a bigot and a misogynist until his death. The play's divergence from reality was owed in large part to its director, George Wolfe who fix Morton too unsympathetic to be a protagonist. Ultimately, the formula worked: Jelly's Last Jam garnered numerous Tony nominations and a best actor award for Hines.

Despite its seemingly plane keel, Hines' life hasn't been single straight road to success. During his childhood, he and his brother attended seminary during the week and went upon the road with his mother upon the weekends, while his father stayed behind in novel York, working as a musician. flat the accident that left him legally blind in his right organ of sight (he fell on a tree stump) wasn't enough to interrupt their schedule. And while the consistent work paid the bills, Hines is adamant that although he and his brother were a useful opening, they never really made it big, because many considered them barely a black novelty act.

"The first time I worked in Florida was in 1959 and it was like southern Africa," he recalls. "We wanted fingerprints and police cards to justify we had a reason to tend hitherward to Miami Beach."

smooth so, he speaks fondly of childhood memories that filled him with what he calls race pride: the first time he saw a black face upon the cover of a magazine, watching Harry Belafonte's persuasive debate on a political of recent origins show during the 1960s, seeing Jackie Robinson play baseball--and then there was sprinter Wilma Rudolph in the 1960 Olympics.