He was a child hoofer who parlayed his quicksilver dancing style into a high-profile career. Like Sammy Davis Jr., without the self-parody. With his wit and soul-eyed charm, Hines has become an engaging screen presence: he’s danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov (“White Knights”); clowned with Mel Brooks (“History of the World, Part I”) and Billy Crystal (“Running Scared”), and held his own against a heavyweight actor like Albert Finney (“Wolfen”). But Hines is foremost a master of the unique American art form of tap dancing. “I feel that when I go onstage and dance it’s not just me dancing, it’s Honi Coles and Sandman Sims and Teddy Hale and Baby Lawrence,” he says. “I get very emotional about it.” And yes, those are real tears in his eyes and real cracks in his voice. Gregory Hines could never run for president. Too straight, sweet and sincere.
That sweetness is a big part of Hines’s appeal. Audiences love him, whether in the movies or in his three previous Tony-nominated performances in “Eubie!” “Comin’ Uptown” and “Sophisticated Ladies.” In “Jelly’s Last Jam,” Hines’s sweetness is the key to the vulnerability that underlies the racist outbursts of Jelly, the light-skinned Creole who rejects his black heritage. In one riveting moment, after Jelly has wounded a friend with “nigger” insults, Hines is frozen into immobility for the first time. It’s as if his racist cruelty has killed the dance impulse and therefore his soul.
At first Hines couldn’t utter Jelly’s malicious words. “It took me weeks to say, ‘Why don’t you be a good little nigger’,” he says. “Racists are deficient as human beings,” says George C. Wolfe, 37, “Jelly’s” brilliant writer-director. “What Greg has aside from talent is a charm and warmth that make an audience willing to go along with his portrayal of such a character.”
Hines’s own lessons in racism came early. As a kid, he and his older brother, Maurice, tapped their way across America and Europe, with their father, Maurice Sr., on drums, as Hines, Hines and Dad. Inevitably, they encountered bigotry: in Miami 11-year-old Gregory saw two water fountains marked COLORED and WHITE and, deciding he wouldn’t like drinking colored water, he headed for the nice white water until someone yanked him away. And there was racial anxiety in his own family. His mother was light-skinned, his father dark. “My mother’s father refused to come to their wedding,” he says. “My mother’s folks used to boast, ‘We have relatives in Cork, Ireland.’ That never helped when I was on tour in Terre Haute, Ind., trying to get a ham sandwich and the waitress said, ‘Get out.’ I couldn’t tell her, ‘You don’t understand, I have relatives in Cork’.”
Hines toured with his brother Maurice long into adulthood, but they always had a stormy relationship. When Hines played Josephus, a slave in ancient Rome in “History of the World,” Maurice accused him of selling out. But Hines says, “I loved it. I saw Josephus as a survivor.” In the ’70s the brothers split up. Their deep differences resurfaced in their reunion for the 1984 movie “The Cotton Club.” Before filming started, a taping session for director Francis Ford Coppola turned into a confrontation. “For two hours we improvised,” says Hines. “We went right at each other, everything coming out; it was real.” Maurice “is one of the most talented people in the world,” says Hines. “We worked together for 27 years. Do I love him? I don’t know. Does he love me? I don’t think so. But I don’t judge him because of that. He’s a good person. Relationships sometimes don’t work out, even blood ones.”
After the breakup with his brother, he fled dancing, his first wife and their daughter and went to Venice, Calif., a last outpost of the ’60s counterculture. He experimented with every drug, he says, “except heroin,” started wearing an earring, joined a single-fathers group and a men’s feminist group and played guitar in a jazz-rock band. Then he met the woman he eventually married, Pamela Koslow. “Pam opened me to the world in a way I never was,” says Hines. They’ve been together 19 years (they were married 11 years ago) and have a son, Zachary, 9. They also have a show: Koslow is the coproducer, along with Margo Lion, of “Jelly’s Last Jam.”
When Hines came back to New York in 1978, he had abandoned conventional tap for a style that was more improvisational, introspective, a dance analogy to jazz. In “Jelly,” he dances some dynamite duets with the 18-year-old prodigy Savion Glover (from “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Black and Blue” on Broadway), who plays the young Jelly. “He’s the greatest tap dancer I’ve ever seen,” says Hines. “When Savion was 13 he looked up to people like me and Jimmy Slyde. Now 13-year-olds want to be Savion.”
But he’s also using the skills he’s developed as an actor in a complex role, including that of a romantic lead. “I was always a big fan of love scenes in movies,” he recalls. “But at 16, I realized I saw black men shoot people but I never saw a black man kiss a black woman.” He helped break that barrier when he persuaded Coppola to let him play a passionate love scene with Lonette McKee in “The Cotton Club.” In “Jelly’s Last Jam,” there’s an erotically intimate scene-almost unheard of in a musical-in which Jelly and his girlfriend Anita (Tony winner Tonya Pinkins) enact the entire sexual and emotional history of their relationship. Hines sees “Jelly” as a new musical form. “I was happy to be in shows like “Eubie!’ and “Sophisticated Ladies’,” he says. “But I knew they weren’t saying anything. “Jelly’ is different. It entertains, but it dares to have an audience think in between the dancing and singing.”
