JOHN LUCCHESE
by Robert Crease

"The thing about ballroom dancing," John Lucchese says, "is that in three seconds flat you can be holding a woman in your arms closely. I don't know of any other human activity that can give you a male-female relationship that quickly."

John Lucchese understands a lot about dancing. He ought to he's been doing it for almost 60 years, teaching it for 50, and has appeared in shows and movies. He is a tireless promoter of the virtues of social, as distinct from performance, dancing and in particular of the social Lindy.

Lucchese was born in 1918 on 116th St. and the East River in Harlem, in what was then an Italian ghetto, but his family soon moved to Queens. "I was introduced to dancing the way most Italian kids were at weddings," Lucchese says. "The fathers would go into the back and play pinochle while the mothers would dance with the kids." In the evenings, Lucchese would sharpen his Lindy skills at what were called cellar clubs. Cellar clubs were formed by groups of young dancers who would rent a space in a building--usually the basement one or two nights a week to Lindy until 3 or 4 in the morning. "Nowadays, everybody associates the Lindy with the Savoy, " Lucchese says. "But you have to remember the Lindy Hop was done all over town. The Savoy had the name, because the big orchestras used to play there. But a lot of good, even great, Lindy Hoppers never went to the Savoy. They would go to Clinton Hall in Queens, Club Fordham in the Bronx, or one of the Brooklyn cellar clubs."

Lucchese spent a year and a half as a premed student at New York University, but flunked out; "I was dancing seven nights a week, he explains. He was already known as a good all- around dancer and was performing onstage; in 1937, he appeared with a Big Apple team in an entertainment short, TWO SHADOWS, filmed at Astoria Studios. The next year, Lucchese joined the La Playa dancers, a ballroom group whose first professional engagement was at the Earle Theatre in Philadelphia. In 1939, he worked at Leon & Eddie's, a New York

He toured Florida later that year and then Chicago, where his act was followed by Carmen Miranda's. After a spell in California, Lucchese returned to New York to finish college, with money he'd made through dancing. During the war, Lucchese did five years in the Army, then put himself through Brooklyn Law supporting himself, again, by dancing. He graduated in 1948 and spent six months working for nothing and a year with an Italian firm working for $25 a week before opening up his own office. For the next several decades, he would need both his dancing and his law office; the dancing to support him when the legal work was slow, the legal work to support him when dancing jobs were scarce. By this time, New York was in the grip of a Latin craze, and Lucchese's favorite hangout was the Palladium, emceed by Killer Joe Piro. "The Palladium was a swinging, wild place a real den of iniquity," Lucchese says. Usually clouded with marijuana smoke, it was periodically raided by the police. "One time when I was there," Lucchese says, "the lights went out for a moment, and when they came on, the ballroom floor was encircled by police with their arms linked. You should have heard the clatter as guns knives, and blackjacks hit the, floor! Then they searched us and made several arrests for cocaine." In the 1960s, Lucchese wrote two books, Pachanga and Joey Dee and the Story of Twist. They are not masterpieces, Lucchese freely admits, and consist of a collage of interviews, dance instruction, and descriptions of ballrooms and people. Nevertheless, these works are minor classics for aficionados of popular dance, for they thrust the reader into the New York dance scene of the day.

The Twist, however, was to herald hard times for ballroom teachers like Lucchese. "I thought it would spark a renewed interest in dance and bring new people onto the dance floor, which it did. But I also thought the end result would be an interest in all kinds of dancing, including ballroom . That was a sad mistake. Interest in ballroom dancing began to wane, and it cut into my business. Lucchese recently turned 70 and is semi-retired from his legal practice, but he still dances 7 days a week. Two evenings he teaches at the Colony Club and at Kismet. He's got an easy, relaxed style of instruction. "Let me show you a secret of an old street dancer," he'll say, while showing the apprentices an easier way of entering a step; the night I saw him teach, they included band leader Bob January and his wife, Betsy.

Lucchese likes his Lindy smooth. "There are two kinds of Lindy," Lucchese says, "stage Lindy and ballroom Lindy. The first is the exhibitionist stuff that Whitey's Lindy Hoppers used to do. That belongs only on the stage. It's not that I don't like that stuff; I did lifts and throws, too, in my dance acts. But on the ballroom floor, with other people around, you do ballroom Lindy-- the style of George Lloyd. Both forms existed side by side from the beginning, even at the Savoy. Kids today get the idea that at the Savoy Lindy Hoppers always used to throw each other all around. That's not true. I used to dance there with some of Whitey's girls, and on the ballroom floor they danced like George. But people think that in order to create an effect you have to do something ostentatious. You don't--you only have to do it well."

The Swing Dance Society invited Lucchese to their first Cat Club dances three years ago, but he didn't take to it. "What I saw was unsophisticated Lindy people throwing their partners wildly all over the place." I pointed out to Lucchese that he himself once wrote that all dances are wild during the initial period of excitement. "But the Cat Club crowd was copying bits of stage Lindy," he said, "and doing it badly." I offered that we've gotten better since then. Lucchese, however, holds himself and others to high standards. "I'll go back," he says, "when they start dancing more like George [Lloyd] and Margaret [Batiuchok]."