Golden Girl

First I moved the muscles up top. Then I moved the muscles below, with the top stationary. Then I moved the muscles on the right side, with everything stationary on the left. Then I moved the muscles on the left. Then I sort of rippled all the way up from my feet, with everything.

Until she died of heart failure in Hollywood last week at 58, "Shimmy Girl" Gilda Gray never forgot a single convolution of the dance that had made her famous. Sometimes, when she thought about it, she remembered those rhythmic shivers as a spontaneous creation -- something that just came naturally one night when the band played ragtime. Sometimes the shimmy was born to the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner. But always it all began when Gilda was still Maryanna Michalska, a 14-year-old Polish immigrant, belting out sentimental ballads in John Letzka's saloon in Cudahy, Wis.

"I was just shaking my chemise." Maryanna explained to a popeyed customer, but her pronunciation was a little awk ward, and the shimmy got its name. World War I had just ended, and the new dance and the girl who invented it sluiced east ward toward Broadway on a rising tide of bathtub gin and needled beer. By then, Maryanna had become Mary Gray. But Red Hot Mamma Sophie Tucker caught her act and told her that Mary was no handle for a hoofer. Sophie looked at the spun-gold hair above the lithe, slim shape and decreed that Mary should be Gilda.

Bright Boom. In the garish '20s of the black bottom and the Charleston, Gilda's shimmy seemed to sparkle with a special sheen. She danced in the Ziegfeld Follies and George White's Scandals. She worked with the big names: Will Rogers, Gallagher & Shean. She earned the reputation of being one of the highest paid performers in the world, and she could brag of having made $4,000,000 in only ten years on the stage.

In those bright years of the boom, Gilda's private life could not keep up with her public success. She had married at eleven, borne a son at twelve, and she was deserted by the time she was 14. She married her manager, one Gil Boag, in 1924, and was divorced again in 1929. She tried once more in 1933 with a Venezuelan diplomat named Hector Briceno de Saa. That marriage ended in 1938.

More Fun. By then the shimmy was something that belonged to the past, along with speakeasies and a stock market where anybody could cash in. Gone, too, were Gilda's fortune and her health. She filed a petition in bankruptcy and went out to Colorado to pull herself together on a friend's ranch. Later, there were a few moments of notoriety: she stirred up the town of Sterling, Colo, by consenting to appear at a high school dance; she sued Columbia Pictures for a million dollars, claiming that the movie Gilda was an invasion of her privacy (she settled out of court). There were also a couple of comeback attempts. In 1951 in Milwaukee, Florenz Ziegfeld's "Golden Girl" was packing them in once more; she even announced that she was getting gifts from anonymous gentlemen admirers. But now Gilda was somewhat more skeptical than she had been in the old high times. "I didn't know whether to accept the gifts or not," she said. "When I was married and my husband gave me a $7,000 bracelet, I always got the bill next month. It made me very cagey."

Caginess was not enough. The comeback trail petered out in Hollywood where Gilda settled down to live quietly with her memories. "Legs," she complained, "seem to have gone out of fashion lately, with the emphasis on beauty centered above the waist." And she yearned for the era of short, spangled skirts when everything seemed livelier. "They might roar more today, honey," she told a friend recently, "but we had more fun."

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