Wild but Polished

She played the first couple of numbers straight--the melody always there, easy and obvious. Then she leered from between her big rhinestone earrings and let the crowd know that she was about to take off. She basted Lazy River with a wild boogie beat. Her knees bounced up and down like runaway jackhammers. She jumped from her bench as if kicked by a mule, grimaced like an ulcer case on the way out, writhed like a belly dancer, sucked her thumb, tugged at her bra, groaned. Sometimes she struck some keys with her elbow, but she never missed a note, and her hands pounded away with incredible precision. Dorothy Donegan. 32, was giving the well-heeled, well-liquored crowd just what it came for, and the Embers, Manhattan's pseudo-ranch-style jazz joint, pulsed with enthusiasm all the way up to its pseudo-adobe ceiling.

No one could miss for a moment that for all her arm-flinging antics, Dorothy can really play. There are those who insist that she is not the best female jazz pianist in the U.S., but while it soaked up her lyric black magic last week the crowd at the Embers would have been willing to argue.

The Top Spots. Old jazz fans can remember when Dorothy was known merely for her music, not for her mugging. That was 16 years ago when she started swinging the classics for Chicago, her home town. Still, the roots of the clown were there. Even when she was an eight-year-old, baseball-playing tomboy in the South Side black belt, her piano teachers could not wipe off her unconscious grimaces. But for a long while she managed to hold the rest of her contortions in check. An agent got her a job in a Dearborn Street gin mill--the kind of place where she could show up in sweater and skirt and had to keep her purse on top of the piano--and soon she was a big name in jazz, playing the top spots across the country.

In the late '40s, Dorothy's career began to sag. "I'd acquired the temperamental tag," she says. "I felt persecuted. I like to tell the story of the Southerner who came up to me and said: 'Loved your playing. I had a Negro mammy myself.' I snarled back, 'So did I.' " She had trouble with cafe owners, lost much of her following, finally decided she had better change her act. Says Dorothy: "Instead of just sitting there and playing, I've added personality. I feel I'm a new Dorothy Donegan."

Wriggle in Radius. The new Donegan has been so successful that she has a contract with the Embers (through 1961) that brings her $2,000 a week and calls for two eight-week stints a year. This sort of payoff has drawn her to the attention of Internal Revenue men who argue that her gyrations constitute a cabaret act, that the club ought to pay the 20% entertainment tax rather than the 3% charged for purely instrumental gaiety. "If I had to stop groaning," Dorothy groans, "I'd be out of business." So a compromise was arranged. "I can still wriggle as long as I keep within the radius of the piano."

After another week's work in Manhattan she will head for the Embers (no kin) in Fort Wayne, Ind., then the Embers (no kin) in St. Louis, to assault a few more trembling pianos. Says she: "I'm better technically today than I ever was. I'm wild, but I'm polished."

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