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It was Christmastime 1949 when Jayne Pepple, then a 15-year-old living with her family in Short Hills, N.J., received a letter that would suddenly kick her life into high gear.
“My mother and I had written to Radio City Music Hall months earlier, asking them if I could try out for the Rockettes,” said Pepple, who had been taking ballet, tap and toe lessons ever since she was 7. “We didn’t hear anything for a really long time, and then we got the letter saying they were having open auditions in New York City and that I was invited to attend.”
What Pepple didn’t know as her mother drove her into the city was that she’d be competing against hundreds of other girls for a single spot on the 36-dancer line.
“My mom sat downstairs in a hallway, waiting for me, while I went upstairs to dance. It was a huge audition. I’d never seen anything like it, and it went on for hours. Mom just waited and waited and waited,” Pepple said.
“Finally, I came down and I was grinning from ear to ear. I said, ‘I got it.’ I was so happy. I’ll never forget it.”
After all, the Rockettes, formed in 1925 by choreographer Russell Markert, were America’s most famed dance troupe, known for their kicks, precision and unparalleled glamour.
“I wanted to be a dancer. That’s all I ever wanted to be,” said Pepple, now 75 and living in Wabash. “The Rockettes were pretty much on the top of the dancing world. I couldn’t believe my luck.”
Having secured her place on the line, Pepple then had to persuade her father to let her quit school and become a full-time dancer. It took an entire weekend of arguing and cajoling, but eventually he relented. Pepple threw herself into the fast-paced world of the Rockettes, commuting from her home in New Jersey to New York City every day for 6 a.m. rehearsals and the troupe’s four-a-day performances.
She also went to school three to four times a week at the School for Young Professionals, where Roy Rogers Jr. was a classmate.
“It was a pretty rigorous schedule,” she said, “but there was downtime, too. We’d rehearse in the morning before the 9 a.m. movie, and there’d be a show, and another movie, and another show and so on. And then when the last show was over, I’d take the train back home, around 11 at night, and wake up and do it all over again.”
Not that Pepple would have had it any other way. Pepple’s fellow Rockettes were her best friends. When they weren’t on stage together, they were spending time in their backstage dressing rooms or heading out to the theater’s cafeteria or the local automat for lunch.
Pepple said the camaraderie between the 46 women – 36 took the stage each day, leaving the other 10 some time for a little well-earned rest – was truly incredible and, because of the demands of the job, necessary.
“We were one,” she said. “When you think about the dancing we did – the kicks, the timing that had to be perfect every time, the wheel that would turn on stage – we had to be.”
That unity is something Pepple hopes to see when the Rockettes make their way to Memorial Coliseum on Tuesday to perform Radio City Music Hall’s “A Christmas Spectacular.”
The Spectacular has been running at Radio City since 1933 and includes, in addition to performances by the Rockettes, singing, humor and traditional Christmas scenes.
Pepple said she can’t wait to see what has changed since her days of high kicks and quick changes and what remains the same.
“When I heard they were coming to Fort Wayne, there was no question that I would go to see them,” she said. “I might even try to get backstage to talk to some of the girls, to share a bit of my history with them.”
That history includes meeting her husband, Richard, who played trumpet in the Radio City orchestra – “He was right there in front of me while I danced, day after day,” Pepple said – and 15 years of tap shoes, glittery costumes and extravagant headwear.
And what about those intricate costumes? When 36 women are doing four shows a day – five during the Christmas and Easter seasons – it’s inevitable they suffer through a few wardrobe malfunctions.
“I remember one show where we were all grouped together on stage to make the corsage on a woman’s dress, and the costumes were really old. One of the girls did a kick and her costume just split right up the middle,” Pepple said. “She hurried off the stage and we closed in like nothing had ever happened.”
A foot injury brought Pepple’s career as a Rockette to an end. She suffered from Morton’s neuroma, or a growth on a nerve between her toes, and, after her third surgery for the problem, she found standing for long amounts of time extremely painful.
Dancing was no longer an option, and she traded her tap shoes for work at an insurance company and eventually her husband’s real estate office. Later they moved to Wabash, where Richard managed and later owned a Ford dealership.
Always an avid seamstress, Pepple has scrapbooks from her time as a Rockette that include several newspaper photos taken of her in the Radio City dressing room, making her own dresses and crocheting breathtaking afghans between shows. Pepple spends much of her time now working on quilts with members of her local quilt guild.
She said she sometimes misses her days in the footlights because, while it was hard work, it was also a dream come true.
“It was a different life, and it was the only life I ever wanted,” she said.
