Backstage Report: Is Cloris About to Gain a Big Advantage?
Cloris Leachman and Corky Ballas, Dancing with the Stars
On Monday night's Dancing with the Stars, Oscar-winner Cloris Leachman finally got her props.
Make no mistake, she always gets respect from the crowd: She's the only dancer who gets a standing ovation from the 300-plus fans in the studio audience every single time she hits the dance floor. But for the fourth week of competition, the judges finally coughed up their first "7s," and an "8," for her tango.
"We went from a total score of '16' to a '22' tonight, and that's huge," says Corky Ballas, who was wondering if the judges would ever look at his 82-year-old partner as something more than comic relief. The thing is, Leachman is forging completely new territory. Senior citizens on this show – whether it be George Hamilton, Jerry Springer or John Ratzenberger – have never been expected to really pull off the dances.
But Leachman is actually learning the steps, and performing many of them to an astonishing degree. "When I'm 82 years old, if I can get half of what she gets done, it would be wonderful," says her competitor, NFL bruiser Warren Sapp. Says another competitor, Olympian Maurice Greene, "She's doing stuff out there that most other people wouldn't even try."
Leachman may tweak the judges on air, tell them their scores are ridiculous and call the judges themselves "prejudiced." But behind the scenes, her real attitude is that she should be judged just as harshly as any 20-year-old. "If you're going to enter a competition," she says, "you have to play by the rules. This isn't golf. I don't expect any special dispensation. I think their scores are pretty on target."
But here's the kicker: Next week, one of the four new dances being introduced on the show is the jitterbug. If she's lucky enough to be assigned to that dance, it will be familiar: Leachman did the jitterbug 67 years ago, when she was in high school. "We called it the Roosevelt Hop," she says.
So for once, the old girl may have an advantage.
