Charles Eaton, 94, One of a Family of Broadway Stars of the 1920s

Charles Eaton, who died August 15 at age 94, was the original Andy Hardy on Broadway, a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and in the 1920s was billed at one point as “the leading boy actor in the country.”Eaton was a member of the celebrated Eaton theatrical family, five of whom danced and acted on Broadway as children and young adults. Although things looked exceedingly bright for Eaton in 1928, his progress was checked by a trio of ills: adulthood, sound movies, and the Depression.Raised at first in Washington, D.C., Eaton first appeared on stage in a nonspeaking role at age 3 1 /2 in a production of “Mrs. Wiggs and the Cabbage Patch,” a combination comedy and drama of a family struggling to pay the rent. Eaton’s three older sisters had more substantial roles in the production; Mary Eaton, later to be the biggest star among the siblings, uttered the line that regularly brought down the house: “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”In 1915, the Eaton family moved to New York after Mary and Doris Eaton were cast in “The Blue Bird,” a revival at the Shubert Theater on 106th Street. Charles – always known as Charlie – and his older brother Joe, the babies of the family, both were subsequently cast to be among the large number of children in “The Blue Bird.” The family lived in a series of small theatrical boarding houses, living off the children’s wages, while Father Eaton struggled to find work in the union-dominated Linotype industry. Mother Eaton cooked family meals on a portable Sterno stove and accompanied her children when they toured.Along with his sister Doris, Charles was cast in a touring company of “Mother Carey’s Chickens” in 1917, his first serious role.The three Eaton girls, Pearl, Mary, and Doris, were featured dancers in various incarnations of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway between 1918-1922, and Charlie was cast as the French Dauphin for the “Follies of 1921.” W.C. Fields played the court jester, and the two struck up a friendship.Acting was always a family affair for the Eatons, and when Charlie was called to make the film “Peter Ibbitsen” later in 1921, Joe took over the role of the Dauphin; Mary later took it over for the touring company.When Eaton wasn’t in plays, he was doing vaudeville; at age 12 he toured extensively doing the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” opposite a 10-year-old actress. In 1924, Eaton was cast in “A Royal Fandango,” which closed after just 24 performances. The play was unremarkable except that it featured Ethel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson, and also marked the Broadway debut of Spencer Tracy.In 1928, when he was 18, Eaton starred in “Skidding,” the play that introduced the character of Andy Hardy. Mickey Rooney portrayed Hardy in a series of films, starting with “A Family Affair” in 1937. “Skidding” ran for 472 performances, an extremely long run at the time, an by the time it closed, Eaton had moved to Los Angeles, to try to get work in “the slave pits of the articulate cinema,” as one contemporary reviewer put it.Eaton starred as a comically inept Sherlock Holmes imitator in “The Ghost Talks” (1929), only the second sound feature made by Fox. Mordaunt Hall, reviewing the film for the Times, called Eaton’s performance “most competent,” but seemed understandably more interested in the “very true” sound of a train at the start of the film.With “The Ghost Talks” apparently doing well at the box office, Mary Eaton appearing with the Marx Brothers in “The Cocoanuts,” and Charlie’s other sisters continuing to dance on Broadway (brother Joe was away at college), the Chicago Tribune on April 7, 1929 dubbed the Eatons “a family that is perhaps the most remarkable in the theatrical world.” Eaton’s sister Pearl was married to Harry Levant, Oscar’s brother and a formidable director of Broadway musicals. The young George Gershwin often visited to practice piano, and various family members were to be found with the smart set at Sardi’s, Delmonico’s, Dinty Moore’s, and Luchow’s.But like the market, the Eatons were more or less at their apex, and the coming years would see their fortunes drastically diminished.Work came hard during the Depression, and the family had not saved much against professional setbacks. Eaton’s film career stalled, and he moved back to New York. Soon, he was reduced to living in a tiny walkup with his father and sister Doris. He would spend the 1930s in a series of fizzled comeback attempts.In 1939, Eaton joined Doris in Detroit, where she had recently become the first franchisee of the Arthur Murray Dance studio. Eventually, Doris would open 18 dance studios in the Detroit area, and Eaton served as an instructor for many years.After serving as a major in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Eaton returned to teaching dance. Latin dances like the rumba and chacha became the rage, and Eaton took research trips to Brazil and Cuba. Later, he ran vacation dance programs aboard cruise ships and at a studio at the Hotel Nacional in Havana.The Cuban revolution put an end to the business.Doris Eaton closed down her string of dance studios in the late 1960s, and Charlie never worked again. “Charlie had this rising sense of loss and a growing awareness that he had nothing to do and nowhere to go,” she wrote in her 2003 memoir, “The Days We Danced.” After years of living alone as an alcoholic, he spent his last years at Doris’s ranch in Oklahoma.Earlier this year, he returned with Doris to Broadway for the first time in more than 50 years to appear at a Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS benefit.In her memoir, Doris described her brother as “a born comedian never having reconciled being out of show business.”Charles EatonBorn in Washington June 22, 1910, died August 15, 2004, in Norman, Okla.; survived by his sister Doris; he never married.

Charles Eaton, 94, One of a Family of Broadway Stars of the 1920s

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