MLQ Loved Tripping the Light Fantastic at Arthur Murray’s
/Arthur Murray was “the immigrant baker's son who danced his way to fame and fortune as the world's best-known teacher of ballroom dancing,” according to the New York Times. The “Murray method,” the New York Times wrote, included three elements: precise diagrams to illustrate dance steps, which Murray turned into a hugely profitable mail-order business; a national network of dance studios that Murray kept immaculately clean and featured attractive, “well-groomed” staff; and “newly fashionable dance steps” that Murray helped make popular. At the time of his retirement in 1964, he was overseeing an empire of 300 dance studios and earning over $25 million a year.
Arthur Murray’s “How to Become A Good Dancer”
Murray’s rich and famous pupils included Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, The Duke of Windsor, John D. Rockefeller, and many others. And Murray had numerous tales about them. (In Atlanta, the tenor Enrico Caruso came for an hour of lessons worth $4. “Will you give me a discount if I pay for six in advance?” Caruso asked. In Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt took dance lessons and specifically asked for something “vigorous.” They taught her the rhumba, but she protested that “it wasn’t vigorous enough.” “She wore out two male instructors at every session,” Murray recalled.)
And arguably the most famous (to us, at least!) among Murray’s pupils was…Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon.
“While on a visit to the United States, President Quezon of the Philippines took lessons twice a day,” Murray’s wife Kathryn wrote in her memoirs. This is echoed in Sol Gwekoh’s biography of Quezon. “In these periodic commutings to the United States and Europe and points between, Quezon took a fancy to the dances,” Gwekoh wrote. “As a result he made a serious study of the tango under Arthur Murray.” Although archival documents are unable to offer a precise date for when Quezon and Murray first met, Gen. Carlos Romulo’s memoirs suggest that it might have been in late 1935. “My wife and I spent a month of gaiety in New York [in December 1935],” Romulo wrote. “Quezon had just been there and had taken lessons at the Arthur Murray dancing school.”
“One of my most accomplished pupils was Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippines,” Murray said. “He was adept, not only at the Latin American dances which was expected to perform at state functions, but at the more involved (to him) routines of the North American ballroom dances.” Quezon also inspired the younger Philippine generation—Virginia Benitez Licuanan wrote about “boys who learned the tango by watching Quezon dance a-la-Arthur Murray.”
President Manuel L. Quezon dancing (Source: Quezon Family Collection)
As with anything legendary, the superlatives and the numbers grow in the retelling. “In his lifetime he was a charming ballroom dancer,” Gwekoh said. “In tango dancing he was peerless in the Philippines.” “He was one of the best ballroom dancers in the world, once taking out 16 of Arthur Murray's dance instructors on a single party,” the South Bend Mirror wrote. “He delighted the American press once by taking no less than 30 Arthur Murray instructors out at once to do the night spots in New York,” Florence Horn said.
“Dancing is ‘conversation’ to music,” Murray once said, “When you dance, you express yourself.” Quezon, the master politician—“He had the gift of tongues, which enlisted Americans to his cause as it held the Filipinos together,” the Washington Post wrote—would have understood that fully. “President Quezon blends dancing [and] politics perfectly,” the syndicated columnist Lemuel Parton wrote.
He would have also understood that gifts, such as rhythm and grace, are nurtured. “He used to spend four hours a day at our studio whenever he was in town,” Murray said. “He danced from 10 to noon, had lunch until 1, conducted his business in a private room office I supplied him from 1 till 3, then resumed his dancing lessons from 3 to 5.” Quezon, Murray recalled, was tireless.
SELECTED REFERENCES
“Arthur Murray, Dance Teacher, Dies at 95,” New York Times, March 4, 1991, Section D, p. 9.
“Manuel Quezon”, The Washington Post. Aug 2, 194, p. 6.
Arthur Murray, 1942. “There’s More to It Than You’d Think,” Detroit Times, Monday, August 3, p. 11
Carlos P. Romulo, 1961. I Walked with Heroes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 200.
Florence Horn, 1941. Orphans of the Pacific. New York: Reynal and Hitchock, p. 80.
Lemuel F. Parton, 1942. “Who’s News This Week,” The Frontier, January 22, p. 6.
Kathryn Murray, 1960. My Husband, Arthur Murray. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 83.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis II, 1944. “Hero of the Tuberculosis World,” The South Bend Mirror, August 11, p. 2.
Sol Gwekoh, 1948. Manuel L. Quezon His Life and Career: A Complete Biography. Manila: University Publishing Company, pp. 104-105.
Posted with permission from the Philippines on the Potomac (POPDC) Facebook page.
Erwin R. Tiongson is an economist and teaches at Georgetown University. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Washington Post, and Washingtonian.
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