Background
He was born George Alviel Weitz, in a Lower East Side tenement in New York City, the son of Lena White. His father, whose full name is not known, was an extremely religious and improvident Jewish garment manufacturer.
Actor choreographer director producer
He was born George Alviel Weitz, in a Lower East Side tenement in New York City, the son of Lena White. His father, whose full name is not known, was an extremely religious and improvident Jewish garment manufacturer.
White had little formal education and was essentially on his own from the age of five.
When White was about ten, his father's business failed. The family then moved to Toronto, Canada, where White joined a gang of street hoodlums who pilfered and spent their leisure hours buck dancing on the sidewalks. About a year later White ran away from home, going to Buffalo and later to Detroit, where he made money dancing in the streets while playing his own accompaniment on a harmonica. During this period he worked as mascot to a regiment, stable boy, jockey, newsboy, and bellhop. By the age of thirteen he was back in New York working as a messenger for the Postal Telegraph Company. Assigned to the late shift, White delivered a telegram early one morning to a Bowery honky-tonk run by "Piggy" Donovan. When he saw a young black dancer there being showered with coins, he requested his own hoofing time and picked up $12. 30 from the floor. Although he never returned to his office, he did keep the uniform and was soon called Swifty White, the Dancing Messenger-Boy. For the next several months White danced in various Bowery saloons for pennies and nickels until he teamed with another dancer, Benny Ryan. Samuel Scribner, who became the president of the Columbia Burlesque Wheel, saw them and put them in a burlesque show called Gay Morning Glories. After several other burlesque and vaudeville engagements, Ryan and White, who had become headliners, joined the cast of Charles Dillingham's show The Echo in 1910 at the Globe Theater, with White making his Broadway debut. White and Ryan separated after this show. White's subsequent appearances included a brief engagement in the 1911 Ziegfeld Follies; a Winter Garden revue, Vera Violetta (1911), with Al Jolson, in which he helped to popularize the turkey trot; a tour of The Red Widow (1912), with Raymond Hitchcock; The Whirl of Society (1912), as a dancer; another Winter Garden revue, The Pleasure Seekers (1913), in the role of Jack Heminway; The Midnight Girl (1914), as François; the 1915 Ziegfeld Follies; and in 1917 a role in the revue Miss 1917. At about this time, White produced one of the first elaborate miniature revues for vaudeville. In 1919, with $12, 000 in cash and $35, 000 in credit, White produced the first of his musical revues called the Scandals. In all, White produced, directed, and often performed in, thirteen editions of his revue up to 1939. Between 1926 and 1931 the Scandals were the paragon of annual revues, reaching their high point with the 1926 edition, in which Ann Pennington introduced White's dance invention, the black bottom. His revues, lavish shows for the edification of the tired businessman, captured for many Americans the giddy 1920's. He never owned his own theater; most of the Scandals were presented at the Apollo on Forty-second Street. The Scandals sometimes earned White as much as $20, 000 a week, much of which was left at racetracks. The 1921 edition netted $400, 000, despite bad reviews, typified by Burns Mantle's famous comment that White's Scandals "prove that a hoofer should stick to his dancing. " After 1931 many of White's ventures failed and he was in and out of bankruptcy. White also produced and directed Runnin' Wild (1923), in which the Charleston was introduced; Manhattan Mary (1927), with Ed Wynn and designs by Erté; Flying High (1930), with Bert Lahr; George White's Music Hall Varieties (1932 and 1933); and Sigmund Romberg's Melody (1933). White became interested in films, and produced, directed, wrote, and performed in film versions of the Scandals, in 1934, 1935, and 1945. He also appeared as himself in the 1945 film biography of George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue. White found little success during the last twenty-five years of his life. In 1940 he opened a theater-restaurant called George White's Gay White Way on the site later occupied by the Latin Quarter, but he had to close it in 1941 and then moved to California. In 1942 he filed a voluntary bankruptcy petition in which he listed his liabilities as $500, 000 and his assets as $500 and a Rolls-Royce. A hit-and-run conviction in 1946 led to his serving almost nine months of a year's sentence. After this dark period, his most successful ventures were several cabaret revues produced at New York's Versailles Club in the early 1950's. In 1960 he put all of his money into a revue for El Rancho Vegas in Las Vegas, but the casino and café burned down prior to its opening. He tried his luck again in New York with a revue at Jack Silverman's International Restaurant, without success.
As the last of the three best-known purveyors of the American revue, along with Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll, White made unique contributions to the form, placing it undeniably in the machine age. His shows were known for their simplicity, cleanness, and fast pace, reflecting his love of dancing. No other revue produced as many durable musical standards, including Gershwin's "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" (1922) and "Somebody Loves Me" (1924); De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson's "Birth of the Blues" (1926); and Brown and Henderson's "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" (1931). Although his casts were relatively small compared to those of Ziegfeld or Carroll, he featured such performers as Ann Pennington, the Howard Brothers, Harry Richman, Ethel Merman, Rudy Vallee, Ray Bolger, Eleanor Powell, Helen Morgan, and Ann Miller. As a dancer and choreographer, he will be remembered for his creation of the turkey trot, the Charleston, and the black bottom. White died in Los Angeles.
White, an authentically Runyonesque character, was a small, neat man known for his raffish style, cockiness, showmanly instincts, and tirelessness. He claimed never to have missed a performance of one of his shows and was frequently seen selling tickets at the box office.
Despite his good looks, White never married.
