In a Sept. 2, 1939 review of George White’s “Scandals of 1939,” a Broadway critic reserved his highest praise for a teenager from Texas named Ann Miller, who stopped the show every night with her high-energy tap dance.

The future fixture of Hollywood musicals in the 1930s and 1940s was born Lucille Ann Collier at her grandparent’s place near Nacogdoches.  The year was 1923, and that is important because she would later change it to find work in Tinsel Town.  

 Her disappointed father, who had his heart set on a son, insisted upon calling her Johnnie, and the rest of the family went along. She was just three years old, when her mother Clara bought her dance lessons to strengthen tiny legs weakened by rickets. 

Johnnie Collier loved to dance from the start and loved it even more after a chance meeting at a local theater with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.  The legendary vaudevillian, who is credited with creating the tap dance, gave the little girl a quick demonstration and a few well-chosen words of encouragement, but that was enough to change her life.

Johnnie was ten when she came home from a visit to her grandmother’s and found her cheating father in the arms of another woman. The moment her hearing impaired mother walked in the door, the girl shouted, “Mother, pack your bags!”   

Mother and daughter left the next day and never looked back.  They drove to Hollywood, sold the car for living expenses and began beating the bushes for gainful employment.

Job prospects were bleak for a deaf single mother in the middle of The Depression.  Johnnie, on the other hand, had reached her adult height of five-foot-seven and possessed a maturity far beyond her 11 years.  She had no trouble finding work as a dancer in a club that fronted for an upstairs gambling den.

Times were tough, but the runaways survived on Johnnie’s weekly wage of $25 and the motherlode of tips from customers blown away by her tap dancing.  Before walk-on appearances in two motion pictures, Johnnie adopted the stage persona of “Ann Miller,” and that was the name she danced under in the 1936 film “Devil on Horseback.” 

With her brunette beauty and dazzling talent, it was only a matter of time until Ann was “discovered.”  She had yet to turn 14, when actress Lucille Ball and comedian Benny Rubin “found” her dancing at a popular San Francisco nightclub. 

The redhead later known to the television viewing audience as “Lucy” introduced her underage protégée to all the right people at RKO Studios.  With a fake birth certificate provided by her lawyer father that “proved” she was 18, Ann soon had a seven-year contract and a part in “New Faces of 1937.”

That busy year and the next, Ann danced with Ginger Rogers in “Stage Door” and rubbed shoulders on the set with the entire stable of RKO stars including Katherine Hepburn, Eve Arden, Jimmy Stewart, Jean Arthur and, yes, even the Marx Brothers.  But budget-conscious RKO decided she was not worth $200 a week and cut her loose.

Ann was free to try something she had been dreaming about – Broadway.  An absolute sensation in “Scandals of 1939,” she was the first person George Abbott thought of when RKO hired him to direct “Too Many Girls.”  Stingy studio bosses that balked at a measly $200 a week now had to pay her $3,000 four times a month.

Ann spent the war years at Republic, where she gave Gene Autry his first on-screen kiss, and Columbia, where she made patriotic puff pieces intended to boost home-front morale.  Harry Cohn, the studio head at Columbia, wanted to showcase her in an expensive full-color extravaganza, but she turned him down to marry an heir to a steel fortune.

Ann was eight months pregnant the night her husband in a drunken rage threw her down a flight of stairs breaking her back.  She gave birth in a steel harness, but the baby lived only a matter of hours.  Her husband’s wealthy relatives stole the tiny body, and for the next half century the grieving mother had no idea where her child was buried.  

Ann filed for divorce from her hospital bed and upon her release went to work for MGM.  She actually danced in a back brace in “Easter Parade,” the 1948 box-office hit co-starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland.  Rewarded with a seven-year contract, she turned in memorable performances in such musicals as “On The Town” (1949), “Small Town Girl” (1952), “Kiss Me Kate” (1953), “Hit The Deck” (1955) and “The Opposite Sex” (1956). 

After her movie career wound down, Ann traveled the world as MGM’s “Goodwill Ambassador.”  Under occupation, her passport listed “star,” which must have raised a lot of eyebrows going through customs.

In 1979 at the (real) age of 56, Ann made an epic comeback in “Sugar Babies.”  The wildly popular musical co-starring Mickey Rooney ran for two years on Broadway and seven more on the road.  

Not long before she died from lung cancer in 2004, Ann Miller quipped, “I can still tap, but who wants to pay an old lady to tap sitting down?”  Five years earlier, a friend had located her missing baby’s grave, and in death mother and child were reunited at last. 

Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at barteehaile@gmail.com or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549 and invites you to visit his web site at barteehaile.com.