Dancing Master Made His Mark in AC
It was a turkey farm when a middle-aged dancer with an artificial
leg purchased these seven acres in the Catskill Mountains in 1952. Brawny and gruffly
sweet, his talent exceeded only by his will, there was nothing artificial about
this man who was ahead of his time much the same way he always anticipated the beat.
To the disappointment of its owner, the Peg Leg Bates Country Club failed to integrate
the Borscht Belt, but it did provide a final showcase for an entertainment legend
and his stories.
And man, did he have stories to tell.
Like the time he danced all day for the wounded soldiers at Atlantic
City's Thomas England General Hospital, Haddon Hall's alter ego during
the World War II years. He was in town for a gig at the Paradise Club when Army
officials asked if he could give the guys a few minutes. He gave them five hours,
dancing in every ward to the keyboard accompaniment of a man named Count Basie.
The dancer had at least one crucial thing in common with his audience - some
of the vets likewise were missing limbs.
Like the times he danced at the Moulin Rouge in Paris and the
Cotton Club in Harlem and for the king and queen of England. Or the days when minstrel
shows closed prematurely and left him stranded and, long before that, the afternoons
when he danced - barefoot and five years old - for pennies in the town
barbershop.
Or that black night when he lost his leg. Well, that was one story
he didn't like to tell. Alibis were not part of his routine. "Don't
judge me as a one-legged dancer," he said. "Judge me as a dancer."
Clayton Bates was born to sharecroppers in Fountain Inn, South
Carolina in 1907, and indeed, he could virtually dance before he could walk. Another
war - World War I - thinned out the male population in the region and
a 12-year-old Clayton pitched in at the local cotton mill, whose crop was converted
to oil needed by the military. In the dim light of the graveyard shift, the young
man's leg was mangled by a threshing machine. Instead of a hospital, which
was not hospitable to blacks in the rural South of 1919, Clayton was taken home
for an amputation on the kitchen table. His left leg was gone from eight inches
below the knee; the accident also had claimed two fingers.
But Clayton Bates was born to dance, and he would dance again.
His uncle hammered out the boy's first peg leg, and a teenage Clayton was soon
walking to school, building his strength and adjusting his coordination. The road
beckoned, and one of those times when he was hitchhiking between jobs, he hailed
the private bus of Eddie Lemon and the "Dashing Dinah Revue." The troupe
was headed north to the big cities and Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates soon found
himself on Broadway with Lew Leslie's famous Blackbirds. His world had
changed in a hurry.
Onstage, Peg Leg exhibited courage, athleticism, and personality.
The leather butt of his peg made a sound that complemented the clack of his shoe's
metal tap, and his physical on-the-edge style was high drama. His outrageous "Jet
Plane" punctuated many a performance, as he leaped above the stage and landed
on his peg leg, then hopped backward, the band wailing all the while. He was a showstopper
... literally, the night at the Paradise when his peg leg wedged in a hole in the
wood. "I've gone through floors all over the world," he said.
Indeed, he joined Louis Armstrong for a tour in Australia, and
Basie once more at Radio City Music Hall. He captured Atlantic City's Club
Harlem crowd with his dancing gymnastics, and became the first black to perform
on the Ed Sullivan Show en route to 22 guest spots on the then Sunday night
TV staple, the last one at age 60. He was always immaculately tailored and engaged
a New York designer to make his peg legs in different colors. For swankiness, he
wore top hat and tails. In character, though, he could be less sartorial but quite
convincing as the likes of peg-leg pirate Long John Silver. Perfect casting.
Speaking and dancing onstage in the showroom, or roaming the grounds
by day in a golf cart, Peg Leg was a formidable presence at his country club. In
later years, twin hip replacements slowed him down but they were easy compared to
what he'd been through. He performed into his 90s, a potent blend of artificial
parts and genuine heart. His daughter, Melodye, said that almost to the day he died
in 1998 near the South Carolina site of that long-ago fateful accident, he did his
daily morning exercises. As Gene Kelly once shouted, memorably, on-screen, "Gotta
dance."
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