barbara mcnair

Although he's performed for millions of people now for more than 50 years, Dallas Johann still harbors the shy nature of the boy he was 52 years ago in California when he was Disney's first Mouseketeer.
He broke a sweat when the Thermal Belt Rotary Club prevailed upon him recently to be their evening speaker.
Such reticence is odd when you consider all Johann had done before moving to Columbus two years ago.
After watching the planes hit the World Trade Center from their balcony, Dallas and Susan Johann began looking all over for a retirement life, considering Italy, Montana, the West Coast, Vermont. Then they remembered Tryon, where Susan Johann's uncle and aunt, George and Ruth Gow, had lived.
Susan is a renowned professional photographer whose work was exhibited just last week at Dan Ferebee's Bravo Interior Design shop. They have two sons. Their eldest is an executive producer at Hallmark Hall of Fame.
Dallas started show business early as one of the 24 original Mouse-keteers. Later, in his teens, he got into show business as a professional dancer, and was recognized as one of the top 20 dancers in Hollywood. He didn't have to audition any more. Instead, when Hollywood was filming a musical, they would call him to see if he was available.
He was with Elvis and Ann-Margret in "Viva! Las Vegas" and again with Elvis in "Kissin' Cousins." He was one of the chimney sweeps dancing to "Chim Chim Cher-ee" on the rooftops in "Mary Poppins" with Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews. He became the dance partner to Ann-Margret and Juliet Prowse.
Johann danced on the "Danny Kaye Show" and "The Julie Andrews Show" on television.
He moved to Broadway, first appearing in "The Happy Time," playing the role of Ganache. He later did three other musicals on Broadway, including "Maggie Flynn" and "Rothchilds." In the Broadway revival of "The Pajama Game," starring Hal Linden, Barbara McNair and Cab Calloway, Johann was one of the featured dancers in the "Steam Heat" number, as well as the assistant choreographer.
That's just to list a few of his dancing credits, all garnered before his 30th birthday.

Director's TLT Debut
Johann left dancing and began acting and directing for the stage in his late twenties, working off-Broadway, summer stock, regional theater, and dinner theater, from Chatau-qua in New York to Theater Under The Stars in Houston.
He had long studied acting, in formal classes, but also while waiting in the wings for his next call, watching the stars work at their craft.
As a director, he says, he wanted to teach others to bring the joys of theater to audiences.
Dallas Johann makes his TLT directorial debut with Tryon Little Theater next week, directing the production of "When George Washington Slept Here" at the Tryon Fine Arts Center. (See story, pg. 9.)
The magic of theater, Johann says, is that it allows audiences to vicariously experience a range of emotions which they often "fence in," rather than express, in their day-to-day lives.
Theater is good for community, he believes. It can be a learning, bonding, growing experience.
What theater is not, Johann says, is a great way to make a living.
Unless they're in the stellar Hollywood circles, most show business folks "are unemployed more than they are employed," he explains.
Twenty years ago, while in his 40s, Johann started doing show people's taxes in order to stabilize his income. He now prepares tax returns for folks from opera singers to movie actors.
It's a specialty. Show people can have complicated tax returns, he says, since they often work all over the world.
"Their returns are multi-states, multi-countries, involving foreign currencies and international laws," he explains.
Johann's tax business has grown over the years. Today, working from his home in Beechwood, he's become North Carolina's number one tax "e-filer."
To talk with Johann about show business is to walk through the rooms of American theater history, populated by dozens of household names � writers, performers, directors.
Yet, he says, he is convinced local talents like Carol Cox and Mike Johnson, stars of Tryon Little Theater's "George Washington Slept Here," might, but for a few twists of fate, perhaps have become household names themselves.
"There is such talent in this small, little, beautiful community," he says.

A Mouseketeer
After years in show business, invariably, what people most easily recall about Johann's career is his short stint as a Mousketeer.
That was just one of his life's fateful twists.
As a boy, Johann says he had an All-American look � freckled face, red hair. Disney producers, trying to cast a new show, spotted him in a ballet class in southern California.
The show was "The Mickey Mouse Club," a live, variety television show for children which was just going into production in 1955.
"How would you like to be on TV?" they asked the 10-year-old Dallas.
"You mean like the Little Rascals?" he asked. "Wonderful!"
Dallas was the first of the 24 original Mouseketeers hired. He was also the first fired.
He was too shy.
As the shortest member of the new cast, Johann recalls being seated at the very end of a height-ordered row when it came time for the one of the first Mouseketeer Roll Calls.
Each of that day's line-up of regular performers was to chirp out his or her name for the television audience. "Annette! Tommy! Darlene!"
After Cubby O'Brien, the next shortest, hollered "Cubby!" Dallas froze.
He couldn't say, "Dallas!" He couldn't say anything.
He cried.
Every parent, watching an adolescent attempt something new, especially something so public, has known this pain.
But that was at least part of Dallas' problem. His parents weren't there.
The other parents, many of them, were show business parents. They were behind the cameramen, available to encourage their budding television stars. Dallas' parents, both working real jobs, had dropped him off before sun-up to meet a Disney van.
Dallas' father was a chemical engineer with Richfield Oil.
"He worked on the Alaskan pipeline," Johann recalls. "After Dad died, I read some of his papers. He wrote papers on the fusion of gas that were studied at major universities."

No audition song
Johann was born in Madison, Wisconsin on June 15, 1944. Dallas was just six weeks old, however, when his Dad took a job with West Coast, offshore refineries. Dallas grew up in West Covina, Calif.
In 1955 � post World War II � West Covina, located just east of Los Angeles on the San Bernardino Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley, was the fastest growing city in the U.S. Its population was 4,900.
Disney casting agents found Dallas while visiting a dance studio in greater Los Angeles where he was taking tap and ballet lessons.
Dancing was the one outlet at that time where his shyness did not outmaneuver his passion to perform, Johann says. But dance was his only stage-ready skill.
At early rehearsals, the Mickey Mouse Club producers asked Dallas to sing. But he says he had no prepared "audition song."
"Sing 'Happy Birthday!'" they suggested.
He cried.
The producers tried to work with Dallas for a few weeks, during which time he was the only Mouseketeer not yet under contract. It didn't work out.
Johann still recalls Head Mouseketeer Jimmy Dodd putting him on his lap and gently delivering the news.
A songwriter and leader of the Mickey Mouse Club on and off the screen, Dodd was known for his "Doddisms," short homilies he gave encouraging young viewers to make the right moral choices.
"He (Dodd) was so kind," Johann recalls.
Johann was not upset though. "I was so relieved when he told me (I was fired)," he recalls. "The pressure was just too great for me to handle."
Disney would go on to hire Dallas' older brother, John Lee Johann � known as "Lee!" because there was already a "Johnny!"
Johann says he believes Dis-ney hired Lee to further ease the transition for the Johann family.
Besides, Dallas still got to hang around. When the Mouseketeers performed at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., Dallas was invited with his brother just to hang out. He was assigned to warm up the rides prior to the park opening each morning while his brother and all the other on-air Mouse-keteers had to work. A tough assignment for a 10-year-old, Johann recalls.
The Mickey Mouse Club aired live on ABC, each weekday afternoon, from 1955 to 1958, three seasons only. In the fourth year, 1958-59, ABC showed half-hour re-runs of the first two seasons. After that, the Club was off the air.
Wikipedia.com says Disney's merchandise sales were minimal and sponsors were uninterested in educational programming for children.
Mickey Mouse Club re-runs aired a couple years in the 60s, again in the 70s, and most recently on the Disney Channel's Vault Disney channel from 1995 to 2002.
Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake were Mouseketeers in a 1990s revival of the show.

High school mentors
Though the original became part of Americana, Johann's tenure as a cast member was so short that the "Original Mickey Mouse Club Show" website, originalmmc.com, calls him "The Vanishing Mouseketeer."
The only picture Johann even has of himself wearing Mouse Ears, he says he recently found on that site (see photo, page 7).
"Dallas is the closest thing the Mickey Mouse Club has to an urban legend," the website proclaims.
After taking off the ears, Johann was convinced he was not cut out for show business.
"I cried until I was a junior in high school," he recalls. "I couldn't get up in front of people."
Childhood speech difficulties likely caused this phobia. Until his parents and doctors discovered the problem, Johann was tongue-tied � literally. That band under your tongue � the frenulum � was too restrictive in Johann's mouth.
His parents had it clipped � but Johann says he had a "lazy tongue" throughout his youth.
"I was in speech class from the first day of school," he says.
It wasn't until his senior year at West Covina High School that three determined mentors brought him out of it.
A drama teacher, social studies teacher and the principal decided to pry Johann out of his shyness.
"I was forced to give a public address in every class," he recalls. "My voice would quiver." He blamed his watery eyes on the smog.
But he wound up that year as president of 16 school clubs and organizations, he says. Trees he planted on the high school campus for a civic project now cast shade from canopies 40 feet in the air. A plaque honoring him was placed on the grounds.
Somehow, in the midst of his extreme adolescent shyness, Johann was always a performer. He tried playing music. "I learned how to play every instrument poorly," he joked.
But at dance, he excelled. He and John Lee formed a brother act and perfomed in community theater in West Covina, and in recitals at the county fair.

Meeting Elvis
A casting director from CBS came to see a community theater production of "Bye, Bye Birdie" in which Johann was performing. (Note to TLT players: This only happens in L.A.) CBS signed Johann to be a contract player, providing "atmosphere" in its productions.
Johann's first movie was "Hootenanny Hoot," a comedy featuring country music stars like Johnny Cash.
"I hated it, but it was good money," he says. He demonstrates the silly "cantering horse" dance step he was required to perform, the one where you "hold the reins" out front.
Anyway, it wasn't the kind of dance Johann wanted to do. He slid to the side while other dancers clamored for their face time on camera.
There was a dinner theater, Melodyland, across from Disney Land, where he began doing what he considered to be more serious work. Stars from Hollywood would play the leads in Melodyland shows. Johann's career developed and flourished there, starting as a chorus dancer and ending as a figured actor in "She Loves Me."
Later in Hollywood, he met Gene Kelly in "What A Way To Go," and became his double in films and television.
As a dancer in two Elvis movies, Johann befriended the King himself.
Johann recalled saying hello while passing Elvis along a studio sidewalk.
Elvis stopped to talk.
"Elvis was a wonderful human being," Johann says. "It was on the set, and he was just out of the make-up trailer. If you said 'hi' to him, he would stop. We started talking and the studio wanted to get in a final shot with Elvis. They kept calling him on the broadcast speakers, and I said he should go. He said, 'No, no, no. I'm talking to you now. They can wait.'"
Johann knew Elvis loved karate and would talk with him about the sport.
"His two knuckles were as big as my hand," he says.
Like Johann, Elvis also loathed the silliness of the movies they were doing.
"He wanted to be an actor," Johann says, "a serious actor." Some years later, while visiting Las Vegas, Johann sent word to Elvis that he was in the building and Elvis invited him up to his suite.

'Chim Chim Cher-ee'
Not all Johann's dancing assignments were silly. He says the chimney sweep dance in "Mary Poppins" was to his mind the finest dancing scene in the movies since "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers."
He recalls high kicking on the "Poppins" set, a "rooftop" of narrow width with a "picket fence" in front. Not far behind the dancers was a long drop. Below that were huge klieg lights which were lit to mirror the lights of the supposed London streets below. In nine months of rehearsals, the dancers knew that if they fell, and survived the fall, they'd be fried on those lights.
The dance ended with the dancers disappearing into the chimneys. Jumping into the chimney flues required the confidence that your chin, or some other body part, would not be smashed on the rim as you dropped through, Johann says.
There were so many cameras set, at so many angles, that even though he knows where he was, Johann says he can't find his own sooty face among all the look-alikes when he watches "Mary Poppins" now.
But he'd become a top flight dancer, and the show business world had come to know it.
Gower Champion, choreographer and director for "a bunch of movies, and Broadway plays" took 24-year-old Johann with him to New York when he went to cast the dancers for "The Happy Time" on Broadway. The show won the Best Musical in 1968.
Broadway producers and directors at that time had an annual, behind-the-scenes award they gave for the "Most Talented Rookie." Johann won and was given a scholarship to study with the greatest teachers in the arts in New York City in whatever classes he wanted for one year.
He went to Hackness Studios and studied dance, historical movement, theater history, diction, acting.
He met Jose Quintero that same year at a New York party and was invited to sit at his side and observe while he directed "Annie Christie," a Eugene O'Neill play which had won the Pulitzer for Drama in 1922. Quintero was staging a revival in 1977, starring Liv Ullman and John Lithgow.
Although Johann had been invited, by the time rehearsals started Quintero had forgotten. Johann says he just sat on a bench outside the stage door for two weeks until Quintero finally asked him who he was and what he was doing there.
The invitation was renewed, but only after Ullman agreed.
"A lot of doors opened for me and I don't know why," Johann says.

A funny bit
To close this story, here are just a few of the people Johann either worked with, knew, or befriended in American theater circles.
The names are given in the random order in which they arose in conversation with this reporter: Jayne Mansfield (no reason she came up first, honey, except Dallas was telling me about the time a director designed a bit in which Dallas had to, well, put his nose, well, right in her cleavage... for a laugh, you know, and so, well, we were just talking about that), Jim Houghton, Ed Albe, Tom Stoppard, Moss Hart, Jimmy Dodd, Cubby O'Brien, Johnny Cash, Ann-Margret, Juliet Prowse, Gene Kelly, Lawrence Welk, Shirley McLaine, Lee Remington, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Charles Bronson, Elvis, Richard Chamberlain, James Darren, Patty Duke, Julie Andrews, Jimmy Durante, Sammy Davis Jr., Tommy Tune, George Abbott, Hal Linden, Cab Calloway, Barbara McNair, Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, Claudet Colbert, all the Redgraves, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Orbach, Jose Contero, Liv Ullman and Jimm Brink.
We hear that Brink may even show up next week at the Tryon Fine Arts Center for "George Washington Slept Here." Tickets are on sale now.
Break a leg, Mouseketeers!

Barbara McNair (March 4, 1934 - February 4, 2007) was an African-American singer and actress.

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Racine, Wisconsin[1], McNair studied music at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Her big break came with a win on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, which led to bookings at The Purple Onion and the Cocoanut Grove.

She soon became one of the country's most popular headliners and a guest on such television variety shows as The Steve Allen Show, Hullabaloo, The Bell Telephone Hour, and The Hollywood Palace, while recording for the Coral, Signature, and Motown labels. Among her hits were You're Gonna Love My Baby and Bobby. In the early 60s, Barbara made several musical shorts for Scopitone, a franchise of coin-operated machines that showed what were then the forerunners of today's music videos.

McNair's acting career began on television, guesting on series such as Dr. Kildare, I Spy, Mission: Impossible, Hogan's Heroes and McMillan and Wife. She caught the attention of the movie-going public with her much-publicized nude sequences in the gritty crime drama If He Hollers Let Him Go (1968) opposite Raymond St. Jacques, then donned a nun's habit alongside Mary Tyler Moore for Change of Habit (1969), Elvis Presley's last feature film. She portrayed Sidney Poitier's wife in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970) and its sequel, The Organization (1971).

McNair's Broadway credits include The Body Beautiful (1958), No Strings (1962), and a revival of The Pajama Game (1973).

McNair starred in her own 1969 television variety series, but it lasted only one season, despite the wattage provided by A-list guests like Tony Bennett and Sonny and Cher, and offers began to dwindle. In 1976, her husband, Rick Manzi, was murdered, and Mafia boss-turned-FBI-informant Jimmy "The Weasel" Frattiano later claimed in his book The Last Mafioso that Manzi had been a Mafia associate who tried to put a contract on the life of a mob-associated tax attorney with whom he had a legal dispute. The ensuing publicity did little to help McNair's floundering career.

Her recordings include Livin' End, I Enjoy Being a Girl, and The Ultimate Motown Collection, a 2-CD set with 48 tracks that include her two albums for the label plus a non-album single and B-side and an entire LP that never was released.

Into her seventies, McNair resided in the Los Angeles area, playing tennis and skiing to keep in shape on a regular basis