Works Like Magic

The New York State Board of Education gravely ruled last week that educational allotments under the G.I. Bill of Rights could be spent for courses in "social dancing" ($5 an hour) at Arthur Murray's Manhattan studios.

Arthur Murray will welcome G.I.s, but they will be only a minor item in the ambitious expansion program with which he hopes to dance into the ranks of Big Business. He has incorporated his $12,000,000-a-year enterprise, is readying a $10,000,000 public stock issue to raise capital to open 50 new studios in the U.S. and abroad.

The Wallflower. Arthur Murray's success grew out of his extreme shyness. As a boy on Manhattan's lower East Side he couldn't work up enough courage to dance with girls. On the theory he has held ever since, that personal popularity parallels dancing ability, he grimly learned to dance, soon won a settlement house "flatfoot waltz" contest. From that he went on to be a dance instructor for Vernon and Irene Castle, among others. When he was making $100 a week, he quit to study business administration at Georgia Tech. Said he: "I didn't want to be a hoofer."

In college, he conceived the idea of selling fox-trot lessons by mail, advertised in a pulp magazine: "How I Became Popular Overnight." When 40,000 people responded, Murray moved from Atlanta back to New York, decided the hoofing business was his business after all.

The Professor. His New York and Los Angeles studios alone employ 350 full-time instructors, 65% girls. (Among his pupils: John D. Rockefeller Jr., Bing Crosby, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.) Instructors are strictly forbidden to have off-hour dates with patrons. Murray pays them from $1.60 to $2.10 an hour, allows them $25 a month extra for clothes and $3 a week for meals, gives them free milk and vitamins and earthy advice (samples: "Your clothes will smell fresher if dry-cleaned regularly"; "Sitting down only enlarges the hips").

The Murray studios in 61 other U.S. cities are owned independently (mostly by ex-New York instructors), operated under a franchise system through which Murray gets 10% of the gross. Last year all this paid Murray and his wife a net profit of $500,000. This year he hopes to boost his gross to a record $15,000,000.

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