Ann Miller Stories?

Updated On: 1/24/04 at 12:36 AM

As I heard the "Where's Oscar?" story, it was only a couple of years after he died and Richard Rodgers was the guest of honor at the affair. Ann thought it odd that Rodgers' long-time collaborator wouldn't have come, so she asked "Where's Oscar?" It was pre-MAME, so her response to being told Oscar was dead was simply, "Oh, I've been on the road a long time!"

In the mid-1970s, I happened to catch her on one of the afternoon talk shows (Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin), where her co-star in a tour of PANAMA HATTIE told the story. The studio audience howled with laughter; Ann looked at the host and said, "I don't know why everyone finds that so funny, I HAD been on the road a long time!" Which of course only made the audience laugh even harder.

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That tour of HATTIE opened at the theater where I was a PA in South Florida, so I worked with her for a short time. I agree with the poster above who said Ann wasn't stupid. I think she was just so focussed on whatever she was doing, that she didn't always have a good sense of what people were thinking around her, or even things that were "common knowledge" to everyone else.

(Ginger Rogers came through the following summer, BTW, and I didn't find her stupid either. I think performers who grew up in the studio system or touring in vaudeville were just fairly isolated back in the day. They had laser-like focus on anything to do with their performance, and not a lot of knowledge of anything else.)

Ann did indeed write "S T A R" as her occupation on her W2 form.

She used to coat her teeth with Noxema before her first entrance each night, to make her teeth "sparkle". I was never brave enough to try eating cold cream.

The Wig was carefully styled by her assistant and was present every moment Ann was on stage. Her actual hair was coal black and straight: beautiful, but not the "image" she had nurtured since her days at MGM.

No matter when a show was set nor the character she played, Ann always found a number in which to do her famous "100 taps in 60 seconds" (or whatever it was called). This involved ripping off her skirt, then executing a series of tap pirouettes from one wing to the other in a giant semi-circle. Someone here will know what movie that came from, but Ann took it with her, whether she was playing Hattie or Mame. (My terminology may be off, but if you ever saw the routine, it was unforgettable. And audiences exploded over it!)

Ann's co-star (not the one from the TV show above) used to have sex with his boyfriend up against the wall between his and Ann's dressing rooms after "half-hour" of each performance. The thumping was quite audible on Ann's side of the wall. Every time she had to kiss her leading man during the show, she would turn upstage afterwords and wipe her mouth on her sleeve.

Otherwise, she was generally lovely to co-workers in my experience and always ready to do extra work to promote the show. She made a grand entrance before the Latino Press Association and announced, "I'm so glad to be here for the members of the L.P.A. Some of my best friends are Latinos!" (That's what I mean: not stupid or malicious, but by 1976 most of us knew better than to say that.)

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My own personal favorite Ann Miller encounter isn't funny and doesn't make her look bad. But a year or so after she did HATTIE with us, my producer was in negotiations with her to do another show in Florida. I had to call her at her home in LA about something, I forgot what decades ago.

Her mother (who lived with her) answered the phone in LA and I asked for Ann. Without covering the phone, mother screamed, "ANNNNNNNNNNIEEEEEEEEE!"

And I swear I heard "Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap ... tap, tap! Hello?" I later learned Ann had been rehearsing in the garage, but the moment was so perfectly "Ann Miller!" I was on the floor laughing by the time she picked up the receiver.

Updated On: 6/28/20 at 12:09 AM

daisy hilton said: "*gasp* Ginger wasn't stupid!!!!"

It sounds odd to me. She was a notorious queen bee whom Betty Grable silently dissed at Mame the last night Rogers was playing the role before Gable took over. A loaded curtain speech about "my dear, dear friend," though she'd treated Grable horribly in their RKO days. So Grable walked out before the speech was over, and when Rogers named her, and the spotlight went to her seat--no one was there.

But I never heard about her being stupid.

Ginger won the best actress Oscar in 1940, over Bette Davis (The Letter), Joan Fontaine (Rebecca) and Katharine Hepburn (The Philadelphia Story, one of my fave films)

Looking this over, the other three probably split the vote.

I've seen Kitty Foyle and it was pretty good but not memorable, which is probably why no one remembers it.

James, thanks for that video!

"I'm pissed but I'm elegant."

That's a star!!

Looks like there is a new biography to be released in August of this year.

Ann Miller: Her Life and Career