Tommy Dix, ‘Best Foot Forward’ Actor and Singer, Dies at 101
Tommy Dix, who starred as a young military school cadet opposite Lucille Ball in the 1943 MGM musical comedy Best Foot Forward after appearing in the Broadway original, has died. He was 101.
Dix, of Williamsburg, Virginia, died Jan. 15, his family announced. “He was, for those who knew him well, a living link with some of the great American personalities of the 20th century. He will be missed,” they said.
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Dix was a popular baritone on network radio and had just made his Broadway debut in The Corn Is Green, starring Ethel Barrymore, when he was hired to play cadet Chuck Green in Best Foot Forward, directed by George Abbott and choreographed by Gene Kelly.
The Broadway musical, which bowed in October 1940 and ran for 326 performances, starred Rosemary Lane as Hollywood star Gale Joy, who accepts an out-of-the-blue invitation from Winsocki Military Academy student Bud Hooper (Gil Stratton) in Philadelphia to be his date at the junior prom.
Bud’s girlfriend, Helen (Maureen Cannon) is not happy, and she precipitates a brawl at a dance as Dix belts out the rousing fight song “Buckle Down, Winsocki.”
When MGM turned it into the film that featured Harry James and His Music Makers, Dix moved up to the Hooper role alongside other returning players June Allyson and Nancy Walker. Ball, playing herself, took Lane’s part, and Virginia Weidler portrayed Helen.
Dix got to perform “Buckle Down, Winsocki” again and take part in another song, “Three Men on a Date.”
In his review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther noted that Dix “is slightly over-pretty but very amusingly distraught as the hapless hero.”
Born in New York on Dec. 6, 1923, Thomas Paine Navard had serious health issues as he was raised by his single mom, Anna.
Inspired after seeing Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy perform “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” in the 1935 film Naughty Marietta, he began singing in the neighborhood and became known as the “Boy Baritone of the Bowery.”
In the late 1930s, Dix performed on NBC and CBS radio shows including the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, which invited him back often, and he sang for the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air when he was just 15.
He was awarded a four-year scholarship at the Manhattan High School of Music and Art and offered a fellowship at the Julliard School of Music.
In 1940, Dix performed his original composition “The March of Dimes,” which he dedicated to the charity, after which Sara Roosevelt, the mother of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, visited him backstage to offer her congratulations.
Also that year, he made it to Broadway — and sang in Welch — as a member of The Corn Is Green ensemble.
Dix entered the U.S. Army in 1943 and made appearances in uniform to help sell $3 million worth of war bonds in the U.S. south when an injury in training left him unable to serve in the field.
After World War II, he performed in nightclubs and hotels around the country and signed a deal with Coronet Records but soon had enough of show business. He accepted a job at his father-in-law’s lumberyard in Birmingham, Alabama, and eventually became vice president of the lumber company while earning an associate degree in architectural engineering from the University of Alabama.
Dix later was involved in real estate and construction in Joppatowne, Maryland, and Sarasota, Florida, before he retired in 1986.
Married four times (twice to the same woman), Dix is survived by his “sweetheart,” Catherine; his son, Grayson; a grandson; and several nieces, nephews and cousins.
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