Solid!

Born

• April 4, 1895
• New York, NY

Died

• March 3, 1991
• Honolulu, HI

Real Name

• Moses Teichman

Marriages / Children

• Kathryn (1925)

Arthur Murray

• BIOGRAPHY
• FILMOGRAPHY
• REVIEWS

Arthur Murray's name is synonymous with ballroom dancing. In lessons sent through mail order or in one of many studio franchises across the country, Murray taught America how to dance. He was, however, more than just the king of dance teachers, he was also a pioneering businessman. Many of today's direct marketers and chain stores owe much to Murray's entrepreneurial spirit.

Arthur Murray grew up as Moses Teichman on New York's Lower East Side. He studied drafting in his early years and started to teach dance as an evening job in 1912. He soon began making more money as a dance instructor than from his day job at an architectural office. Feeling he needed more instruction himself, Murray took lessons from Irene and Vernon Castle and later applied for a job with their studio. He was sent to the Devereaux Mansion in Marblehead, Massachusetts, to teach summer residents from Back Bay, Boston. In 1914 he met Baroness de Kuttleston, who invited him to partner with her in teaching dance at the Battery Park Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. She also suggested that he change his name to make it sound less German, as World War I had just begun.

In 1919 Murray enrolled in a business administration course at Georgia Tech and taught dancing in his spare time at the Grill Room of the Georgian Terrace, the leading resort hotel in Atlanta. The following year he hit upon the idea of selling dance lessons by mail using a kinetoscope, a toy moving-picture device. Though the idea itself was a huge success, problems with the company that made the kinetoscope forced him to absorb the loss himself, wiping out his savings.

Forced to rethink his business model, Murray came up with the idea for the now famous footprints. Instead of selling moving pictures to teach dance he would sell printed lessons with footprints depicting the movement of the feet when dancing. This idea proved very successful and he gave up teaching personal dance lessons and concentrated on his mail-order business.

Changes in magazine ad rates forced Murray to quit mail-order in 1925, and he opened a studio in New York. After suffering through the first part of the Great Depression he finally received a break when the general manager of the Statler Hotels asked him to send dance instructors to each of the hotels in the chain. Murray set up a system where he took a percentage of the profits from the instructors and allowed them to keep the rest. This was the beginning of the franchise system.

The first official Arthur Murray franchise was opened in Minneapolis in 1938. Many more soon followed. In 1950 Murray bought fifteen minutes on CBS television to present a dance program. His wife, Kathryn, hosted. The program soon moved to ABC and expanded to thirty minutes. In 1952 the show signed its first sponsor, General Foods, and moved back to CBS, where it continued until 1960.

As his business expanded Murray commissioned a series of recordings to be used during lessons. Performed by studio orchestras under Murray's name, these recordings featured instrumental versions of popular favorites as well as dance-oriented rhythms. Arthur Murray retired in 1964 and passed away in 1991.