Remembering the Original Dancing With The Stars

Decades before there was a Dancing with the Stars, there was a network television show that ran for 11 years all about dance. It featured stars, music and dancing in the very first network show that featured dance.

Arthur Murray and his wife Kathryn, starred from 1950 to 1961 on The Arthur Murray Party, which featured guests like movie idol Errol Flynn, Merv Griffin, Eva Gabor, singer Connie Francis, comic genius Groucho Marx and first lady of the theater Helen Hayes. Celebrity winners received prizes like a trip to Europe, a sports car, or a giant bottle of Arpege. And while the glitz and glamour of a weekly television show was being featured on camera, Arthur and Kathryn's daughter Jane sat in the wings, a witness to the spectacle, and a passenger on the celebrity train that ran for that decade.

Now, daughter Jane Heimlich is reminiscing about those days in her memoir Out of Step (www.orangefrazer.com), and she is also collaborating with her childhood friend, Dick Clark, to assemble some clips from the show in a TV documentary about the series.

"There are some amazing moments on those shows, and I don't think I'm being overly proud by saying that it was the type of show that paved the way for shows like Dancing with the Stars," said Heimlich. "And even though I watched from the wings, I was able to get into the act as a writer. My mother was given a segment on the show in which she would perform a pantomime skit, featuring a new character each week. On the show, she discovered her gift for comedy, and I was able to help that along by writing some of her skits for her. The pay was handsome -- upwards of $250 per skit, which was a month's salary for most women of that period -- and the reward was that each week I'd see the product of my imagination on the screen."

Jane, now an author and respected expert in homeopathy (having written two of the seminal books on the topic), had a second brush with fame when her husband, a little-known chest surgeon named Henry Heimlich, invented a first aid technique that would later be named for him -- The Heimlich Maneuver. Having lived in the spotlight of celebrity both as a child and as an adult, Jane has a unique perspective on the celebrity-driven world of today.

"It wasn't always rosy," she added. "My father was a perfectionist, and his demanding nature earned him the nickname "The Monster of Television." Still, I grew up surrounded by amazing talent, I am able to say I was a writer on a top-rated television show, and I even received a satirical note from Groucho Marx when it became known I was marrying Hank. He lamented that he always felt that he and I would be together one day, and then warned me to make sure that all of Hank's nurses were ugly. How many people can say they've received wedding congratulations of that caliber?"
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Tony Panaccio is a staff writer at News & Experts.