The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page J004

BLACK 4J pagelabeltag 4J THE PALM BEACH POST SUNDAY AUGUST 26, 2007 MAGENTA 4The Blackburn Twins were BflflHHIfljBEk9it IDENTICAL BUSTER BROWNS: A photo from 1931 shows Royce (left) and Ramon, Reagan and Virginia Mayo called She's Working Her Way Through College. As TV arrived, the twins did nine or 10 Ed Sullivan shows, lots more with Milton Berle. "You had to be a yes-man with Milton, but he was actually a nice guy. Once he called us from Lindy's in New York to tell us to put liquid shoe polish on our shoes for a TV show so it would look like we were wearing patent leather." In Las Vegas in the mid-'50s, they again worked with Ronald Reagan during that awkward period when his movie career was basically over, his political career hadn't begun, and he was emceeing a variety show. The money came in: $3,000 a week in the supper clubs, $7,000 a week in Vegas.

In 1952, Ramon met Joyce Seiger, a gorgeous Copa girl. They were married six weeks later. He was 27, she was 19. Fifty-five years, two children, four grandchildren and three great- grandchildren later, they're still together, although it wasn't always easy. Ramon and Royce both began to fall prey to the family curse of alcoholism.

In 1963, Ramon was drunk on stage at the Concord in the Catskills, and things didn't improve after they retired the following year. "When we stopped dancing professionally, we started drinking professionally," he says. Things got ragged. The twins had started a couple of dance studios as a hedge for retirement, but those disappeared, as did their savings. For a time, Ramon sold insurance.

Then he ran a restaurant in Glen Cove. Eventually, he was reduced to being a delivery man. He remembers one crystalline moment: He was delivering some pretzels and Italian ices to a store across the street from the Paramount Theater in New York. He noticed the marquee, and realized that he and his brother once had their names in lights on that marquee. Then, he went back to thinking about his next delivery and his next drink.

They came to Florida 35 years ago in the hope that a change of scenery might help sober Ramon up. Initially, it didn't work, but gradually, it did. Ramon took his last drink in 1975. Joyce stepped up, trained as a nurse and worked at Bethesda Medical Center for years. Ramon worked as a church organist, as well as contributing a lot of time to helping others in alcohol recovery, work that continues to this day.

In 1988, Ramon wrote Ronald Reagan, saying that he and his wife would love to see the White House sometime but that they knew he was busy and didn't want to intrude on him personally. A few days later, the phone rang. "Why don't you want to see me?" asked the president of the United States. Ramon and Joyce were scheduled for nine minutes of the president's time, but they ended up getting a half an hour, as they talked about old times. Royce never totally sobered up, but his drinking became more controlled.

He died in 1994. Today, Ramon and Joyce live in a comfortable condo in Boynton Beach that features posters from films that featured the Blackburn Twins. It's been a long and winding road from Long Island. More than anything else, Ramon seems grateful for his career, for his life, for getting sober. "We had a weakness," he says.

"Thank God I gave it up." scotteymanpbpost.com nun mJmB TWINS fromlj their career path at Ned Waybourn's dance school at Lexington and 60th. Waybourn had been a big deal at the turn of the century and through World War devising the dances for the Ziegfeld Follies, but by the time the boys got there, he had long gone to that big stage in the sky. Nevertheless, they learned everything they needed to, because the Waybourn school prided itself on preparing students for all facets of show business: eccentric dancing, tap, ballet, dramatics, even fencing. Their mother even found some stables, where they learned to ride on the off chance there would be a call for kids in westerns. In 1934, the Blackburn boys broke into Broadway at the top, working in Jerome Kern's Music in the Air, with Kitty Carlisle and William Gaxton, at the Alvin Theater.

They had no dialogue and served more or less as "atmosphere," but they made $25 a week apiece, which probably wasn't much less than their father was making. From then on, they worked constantly; as one show posted its closing notice, they'd start another round of auditions. To maximize the possibility of employment, the boys learned how to act, as well, which meant one or both of them could work in straight plays. For a time, they were Powers models, and the jobs became even more important after their father contracted tuberculosis. They appeared in 19 Broadway shows in all, the last of them Sons of Fun, with vaudevillian duo Olsen and Johnson in 1941.

Then came the war. The brothers wanted to be flyboys, so they went into the Air Force. But they were spotted by a young lieutenant named Irving Lazar, who went on to become the legendary agent "Swifty" Lazar. He plucked them out of training and put them into Moss Hart's Winged Victory, the official Air Force show that competed with Irving Berlin's This is the Army. "It wasn't just the audiences that loved us," says Ramon.

"Everybody loved us. Bogart and Bacall addressed the company and said, 'You fellows are doing a wonderful And one day, we had a pep talk from Generals Eisenhower, George Marshall and Hap Arnold, all three of them right there in front of us." Among their castmates in Winged Victory was a comedian named Louis Nye, and a young singer named Mario Cocozza, who, under either his real name or his stage name of Mario Lanza, was one of the most delightfully crazy people the twins ever encountered. Cocozza's party piece involved making the sounds of bodily functions in differing but accurate musical keys, while Nye's bit was telling bedtime stories as a raging queen. It was not a dull company. The twins spent a year on Broadway with Winged Victory, earning their Air Force pay of $29 a week, then went to Hollywood to make the movie.

After they were mustered out, they put together a double act for nightclubs and theaters, dubbing themselves the Blackburn Twins. Their style combined an eccentric, Ray Bolger-like manner, with jazz and tap. They honed a high-gloss song-and-dance act, although they were much better dancers than they were singers. Nevertheless, professionalism and polish can carry you past a lot of imperfections, and Ramon had perfect pitch. They got by.

"The Blackburn Twins were strikingly graceful, tall and elegant," says Miles Kreuger, show business historian and head of the Institute of the American Musical. "Elegant is the word. There are dancers who are superb, such as Bob Fosse, but you couldn't call them elegant. But the Blackburn Twins, they were elegant." Despite their obvious twin-ness, it wasn't actually that hard to tell them apart. Ramon was slightly taller than Royce, and his face was rounder.

Personality-wise, Royce was more laid-back, Ramon was more serious, more driven. "I had to pull Royce along. I was the clothes-horse, I handled the money, I made the investments. And when he got married, he married a girl with the same personality as me." They played their first engagement in Las Vegas in 1947 at the Flamingo. There were precisely three hotels in town at that point: the Flamingo, the Last Frontier and El Rancho Vegas.

Ramon met Moe Photos courtesy Ramon Blackburn who were soon to be working on Broadway. missary with June Allyson, Arthur Freed, Walter Pidgeon and Peter Lawford; every once in a while, Mario CocozzaLanza would join them. The wild card was Lawford, who was cheap and hated to pick up a check, which meant that he got stuck with the check as often as possible. Freed was always very sweet and fatherly with the boys, interested in their families, and terribly apologetic when a proposed second number in Words and Music was canceled because the picture was running long. The boys were tall and handsome, and certain opportunities naturally came their way.

Ramon remembers a couple of invitations from a particularly uninhibited Lana Turner, one of them involving the additives of cocaine and Ava Gardner. Unfortunately, just when things were about to get extremely complicated and extremely interesting, the phone rang. It was Frank Sinatra, who was met with a torrent of verbal abuse from his estranged wife. Sinatra decided to come over anyway and have it out with Gardner. On the general principle that four definitely constitutes a crowd, Ramon called a cab.

The experience on Take Me Out to the Ball Game soured Ramon on the movies. He was impatient about his progress, and worried that sooner or later the studio would say, "We can only use one of you." What would the other twin do then? Finally, after a year on the lot, they decided to ask Freed to release them from their contract. Freed sighed and said, "I see what you mean. I'll speak to Louis." Released from lucrative bondage, the Blackburn Twins spent the next 15 years on the road, in nightclubs and theaters, breaking in a new act every year, with Ramon doing most of the deciding. They hired Janet Blair to work in their act, only to have Richard Rodgers steal her away for the road company of South Pacific.

After her came an act with Vivian Blaine (who became famous for playing Adelaide in Guys and Dolls). There was some more work in shorts, and a musical with Ronald THE LAST FRONTIER: Ramon (left) and Royce with Evelyn Ward, mother of singer David Cassidy, and then-actor Ronald Reagan at the Hotel Last Frontier in Las Vegas in 1954. They played members of the baseball team managed by Kelly, but, oddly, they had no musical numbers whatever, with Kelly or anybody else. Since casting dancers in non-dancing parts was not common practice at MGM or anyplace else, they wondered what was up. June Allyson, who had known Kelly since they performed in Best Foot Forward on Broadway, told them what the problem was.

Gene Kelly refused to dance with anybody taller than he was. Since Kelly was 5-9, that left out the 6-4 Blackburn twins but then, they were left out in more ways than one. "I don't think we said two words to him, or vice versa," says Ramon. It was a strange situation. Ramon remembers Lena Home watching the film being shot.

She told him she knew exactly how he felt. The studio kept trying to cast her as a maid a la Hattie McDaniel and she kept refusing. "I stuck around," she told him, "and I'm still a singer." The other premiere dancer on the lot was much friendlier. Fred Astaire came over to them one day and invited them to watch him rehearse. "He was putting together a routine," says Ramon.

"He had a piano player and a drummer with him in the rehearsal hall. (Choreographer) Hermes Pan was there, but he was invariably late. Fred was always smoking, if you can believe it. Fred worked out the steps first, and added whatever props he used last. He was easily one of the nicest, least pretentious guys in show business." These were heady times; the twins would sit in the MGM com- Dalitz and a bunch of the other boys from the Cleveland Mob, who made sure to be in Vegas the week Bugsy Siegel was murdered in Los Angeles.

Unbeknownst to them, during their run at the Flamingo, a man named Arthur Freed came to see them. Long story short: Freed was the producer of the best musicals in history, such as Show Boat, Gigi and The Band Wagon. At MGM, he was treated with awe and deference, even by studio head Louis B. Mayer. As the boys finished their Vegas gig and headed back east, they got a telegram from Freed.

He wanted them to come to Hollywood to make a movie he was planning called Sin-gin' in the Rain. A couple of weeks later, he called and said, "Sorry, the movie's been postponed." But he still wanted to use the boys. And then he offered them a spot in Words and Music, a musical biography of Rodgers and Hart. They were to dance with Vera Ellen, a fantastic talent who could do tap or ballet, but they ended up stopping the show with Thou Swell, opposite June Allyson. They were paid $1,000 apiece.

Even before the picture was released, the reaction was instantaneous, and Freed offered them a seven-year contract with the studio, at a considerable boost: $750 a week apiece. The only downside to the MGM deal was that the studio wouldn't let them work in nightclubs when they weren't needed at the studio. Their next assignment was 1949's Take Me Out to the Ball Game, with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. DOUBLE DATES: Royce (left) and Ramon with Judy Garland at the Sands in Las Vegas in 1954. The brothers rubbed shoulders with many big stars of the '50s.

What are you reading, Henry Winkler? Dwfel Henry Winkler has a new generation of fans, not for The Fonz but for his 12 novels about Hank Zipzer, a rascally middle-schooler. "I was Hank. I was constantly in trouble in school," says Winkler. Q. What is on your nightstand? A.

I read all Daniel Silva's books. His newest, Secret Servant, is great. Q. I picture The Fonz reading Mad magazine, but what did Henry Winkler read while growing up? A. Actually, I was even on the cover of Mad in the '70s, but I didn't read Mad.

I wasn't a reader as a kid. Q. When did you become interested? A. My wife and I were working with our son, who had learning problems. That's when I realized I had dyslexia.

When my agent told me I should write about my life, I said, "I can't do that. I'm stupid." Q. If you could rewind, would you still call yourself stupid? A. Nope. That's what I tell kids Hank is all about.

You don't know what greatness you have inside you until you try. Piper Jones Castillo, St. Petersburg Times Winkler.