Word: gilda
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Until she died of heart failure in Hollywood last week at 58, "Shimmy Girl" Gilda Gray never forgot a single convolution of the dance that had made her famous. Sometimes, when she thought about it, she remembered those rhythmic shivers as a spontaneous creation - something that just came naturally one night when the band played ragtime. Sometimes the shimmy was born to the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner. But always it all began when Gilda was still Maryanna Michalska, a 14-year-old Polish immigrant, belting out sentimental ballads in John Letzka's saloon in Cudahy...
...needled beer. By then, Maryanna had become Mary Gray. But Red Hot Mamma Sophie Tucker caught her act and told her that Mary was no handle for a hoofer. Sophie looked at the spun-gold hair above the lithe, slim shape and decreed that Mary should be Gilda...
Bright Boom. In the garish '20s of the black bottom and the Charleston, Gilda's shimmy seemed to sparkle with a special sheen. She danced in the Ziegfeld Follies and George White's Scandals. She worked with the big names: Will Rogers, Gallagher & Shean. She earned the reputation of being one of the highest paid performers in the world, and she could brag of having made $4,000,000 in only ten years on the stage...
...Metropolitan Opera has a dazzling new coloratura soprano. She is Atlanta-born Mattiwilda Dobbs, 31, pert, appealing to the eye, solacing to the most opera-worn ear. She made her debut as Gilda in Rigoletto last week, and the event was doubly important, for she is the first Negro to sing a romantic lead...
Rigoletto, despite some of the most grippingly grisly melodrama in grand opera, is distinctly dated. Whenever Gilda has a spare moment, the orchestra lapses into a kind of soft-shoe accompaniment, leaving wide-open spaces for her graceful vocal glides and glitters. Soprano Dobbs sounded smooth as cashmere beside the tweedy textures of Tenor Jan Peerce and Baritone Leonard Warren. Her phrasing was always neat and true; in lyrical passages her voice floated with never an edge. In Verdi's showy old coloratura bits, e.g., Caro Nome, it glittered clear and bright as a glockenspiel in a football band...