Talk with Your Heel and Toe

George Gershwin’s friends Oscar Levant and Irving Caesar wrote “Talk with Your Heel and Toe” for the 1930 Broadway show Ripples at a time when Americans were feeling the first effects of the Great Depression, and Oscar Levant, struggling to make a name for himself, was couch-surfing at Gershwin’s Riverside Drive apartment. The show ran in the New Amsterdam Theatre for 55 performances, and later had some touring success.

The Star Who Broke a Leg (and the Other Leg Too)

Fred Stone

Comedian-actor-singer-ventriloquist-tightrope walker-acrobat-clown Fred Stone starred as Rip, the distant grandson of Rip Van Winkle whose modern day life in New York parallels his famous relative’s experiences. You can see Fred Stone in action in this clip from the Academy Award-nominated Alice Adams starring Katharine Hepburn.

Ripples marked Stone’s return to Broadway after surviving a solo plane crash in Connecticut just two years prior. He had logged 14 hours of solo flying, and on August 3, 1928 he flew with his daughter Paula and his instructor Johnny Campion to Groton, Connecticut. After landing safely, his flying companions deplaned while Fred went up again for more solo time. After ten minutes, he was ready to land and flying low when his engine died, and with Fred powerless to control the plane, it nose-dived to the ground. Neighbors who heard the crash came to help extricate Stone, who was dazed, trapped, and whose legs were badly broken.

Bed-ridden for months and with both of his legs in casts until mid-December, Stone would face newspaper headlines like “Stone May Never Dance Again.” For a showman of such agility, this was not a diagnosis he could accept.

“I’m feeling just a little bit mad about the way that solo flight turned out. But just as soon as I get out of here, I’ll try it again, and next time I’ll make a go of it.”

But he was also quoted at the time:

“I’m learning to walk all over again.”

Stone was scheduled to start rehearsals for the Broadway show Three Cheers the week after his crash. Now the show was missing its star attraction. The man who filled in for badly injured Stone was one of Fred’s best friends in the world, Will Rogers (who himself would die in a plane crash in 1935).

Stone had flown across country just two months before his crash to visit Will Rogers in California. After hearing of the crash, Will Rogers wrote in his syndicated newspaper column:

“If you ever said a prayer, say one for the return of Fred Stone to the stage. He has given more people real clean, wholesome laughs than any man that ever stepped on our stage. What a character of a man he is! To see him is to admire him, to know him is to love him.”

How dedicated was Will Rogers to his friend Fred Stone? Rogers decided to cancel his upcoming lecture series in order to take over the lead role of Three Cheers. If you need even more proof of the depth of their friendship, Rogers even named one of his sons Fred Stone Rogers.

So the show did go on, though rather than emulate Fred Stone, Rogers largely played himself in the Three Cheers role, ignoring the script and improvising his way through, and of course the audience adored him for it.

Eye on the Family Stone

On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. L-R: Carol, Allene, Fred, Dorothy (co-starring with her father in Criss Cross), and Paula Stone, c.1927

Fred was not the only member of the Stone family to fall hard. Fred’s daughter Dorothy Stone starred as the title character Ripples, who falls in love with a rich bachelor. The quadruple threat (actor-singer-dancer-hotty) Charles Collins playing that role later followed his character’s lead and assumed the role of husband to Dorothy Stone.

But wait, two more Stones appeared in Ripples: Paula and Allene!

Fred was also the father of Carol Stone, who played Doc Holliday’s wife Kate on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp TV show in the late 1950s; the father of Paula Stone, who played Mary Meeker in the 1935 film Hop-a-Long Cassidy; and the uncle of Milburn Stone who played Doc Adams on Gunsmoke. For the second generation of Stones, there was evidently more work acting in Westerns than there was in being acrobat-ventriloquist-clowns. Fred’s bona fides as a cowboy were best exemplified by his roping, his horsemanship, and the fact that upon her death, Annie Oakley willed her unfinished autobiography to Fred.

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Burt Ward, Adam West, and Madge Blake in Batman (1966)

There was yet another actor/relative of Fred’s, though his niece Madge Blake is not known for acting in Westerns. You may know her best as Batman’s Aunt Harriet from the mid ’60s TV show, but you’ve seen her in countless other parts on sitcoms of the ’50s and ’60s.

The song “Talk with Your Heel and Toe” has some fun rhymes, but it reads like more of an excuse for a dance number, and that’s probably why it has not passed the test of time. The music is catchy, and I find the intro with its major 7th harmonies particularly compelling. There is a chance that this number had a special effect on its audience at the time. Fred Stone danced a number in Ripples, possibly this one, using his crutches, only to toss the crutches aside to finish the dance routine, all to heartfelt applause of an astounded and grateful audience.

Download the PDF of the simplified sheet music to “Talk with Your Heel and Toe” here: Talk with Your Heel and Toe

Lyrics to “Talk with Your Heel and Toe” by Irving Caesar

High knowledge ain’t my knowledge.
I shake knowledge that’s fake knowledge.
Brain homework is vain homework.
I say it doesn’t pay.
I’d rather do no work.
Just plain heel and toe work.

I’ve never read a book on botany.
And brains perhaps I haven’t got any.
If that’s so, I talk with my heel and toe.
A single thing about astrology,
or any other kind of ology,
I don’t know. I talk with my heel and toe.

Once, by mistake, I heard a symphony.
A dozen cellos moaned a melody.
They might have played for art,
but they weren’t playing for me.
Whenever highbrows try to question me,
my answers have originality.
Where I go, I talk with my heel and toe.