Chorus Girls: For 2 Cents a Kick

Like many an out-of-towner visiting New York for the first time, pert Schoolgirl Linda Farmer headed straight for the cavernous Radio City Music Hall to see the big bash of a stage show. One gander at all those spangled chorines kicking away like a centipede with a hotfoot and she knew that she positively had to be a Rockette. Her qualifications were typical: head cheerleader at Hampton High in Hampton, Va., winner of the local Junior Miss contest, solo tap dancer at the Elks Club benefit and, most important, possessor of a great pair of gams. At 17, right after she graduated from Hampton High,she auditioned for the job and got it. “This is it!” she exulted. “I’ve hit the top!”

Bunions & Shin Splints. Last week, two years older and a lifetime wiser, Linda helped lead the 49 Rockettes and 28 members of the corps de ballet in a strike that revealed how low life at the top can be. The girls, members of the American Guild of Variety Artists, are demanding a 40% raise in salary over the next three years; the management is offering only a 15% hike. A first-year Rockette currently makes $99 a week, or $26 less than the lowest-paid Music Hall stagehand. That breaks down to $4.12 a performance or roughly 20 a kick. The dancers must rehearse 120 hours without pay for the nine new extravaganzas mounted every year at the Music Hall, perform four shows daily for 21 consecutive days followed by six days off. Even then they are on call as replacements, and friends of the Rockettes have learned to use a telephone code system (ring twice, hang up, and then redial) to let them know that it is not the Music Hall calling.

Typical of many of her sisters, Linda Farmer lives in a one-bedroom apartment with another Rockette on the city’s unfashionable upper West Side, spends $400 a year for makeup ($80 of which goes for false eyelashes alone). Because of her long hours (from noon to 10:30 p.m.), she dates only sporadically; the most popular reading material in the Rockettes’ dressing room these days is a dog-eared copy of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Manhunting. During their 90-minute break between shows, which one dancer wearily describes as “too short to do anything important and too long to do nothing,” the girls sleep or nurse their bunions and shin splints.

Camel Droppings. After mastering the Rockettes’ patented eye-high kick, explains Linda, the next most difficult task is simply learning how to survive on the Music Hall’s big stage, a kind of block-long obstacle course with a jolting, linoleum-covered concrete floor. The three huge elevators that make up the sectional stage are so warped with age that they meet unevenly, varying as much as an inch in many spots. With that hazard, as well as puddles from a simulated April Showers, or droppings from camels in the Nativity pageant, or oil slick from a fleet of autos used to ferry the chorus onstage, the girls are lucky to land on their toes and not their backsides. On one occasion a Rockette slipped in a cloud of steam hissing up through holes in the stage, plummeted into the orchestra pit and squashed a violinist.

Now that the Rockettes have stepped out of the chorus line and onto the picket line, they have won a host of sympathizers. At least one retired Rockette has joined them, and the Music Hall musicians have donated 25% of their salaries to pay for the girls’ meals. Box-office receipts at the Music Hall, which has slapped together an interim show of flashing lights and music, have dropped by an estimated 15%. By week’s end, the two sides were nearing agreement, but whatever else they accomplish, the Rockettes have made it clear to star-struck cheerleaders that, as Linda Farmer says, “all the glamour is on the audience side of the footlights.”