07/30/2026
Fyi jic
The man who made The Wiz died counting out dance steps with a morphine drip in his arm. Geoffrey Holder spent nine days unable to make a sound, and when they finally pulled the tube he danced from the bed. A doctor started talking over his counting and he roared at her for breaking his concentration. Those were his last words.
There was a bag of gold fabric on the floor of the intensive care room. Gold, naturally.
The fabric and the trim were for a new dress he was making for his wife, and he was eighty-four years old with a breathing tube down his throat. There were sculptures in there too, built out of rope and baseball caps and wire hangers.
Geoffrey Holder had nine days left.
You know the voice even if the name never stuck, six foot six with a laugh that came up out of the floorboards, the man in the white suit calling 7 Up the Uncola. Baron Samedi in the Bond picture, Punjab in Annie.
That voice sold America soda for the better part of twenty years. For the last nine days of his life it made no sound at all.
He had been in this position before.
At Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, the elite boys' school in Trinidad, a student named Geoffrey Holder would stand up to read aloud and nothing would come out. The other boys laughed.
Years later he could still quote his teacher exactly. "At school, when I got up to read, the teacher would say, 'Next,' because the boys would laugh," he said.
Next.
He was not slow and he was not lazy, he simply stammered, and the man at the front of the room would not give him the extra few seconds it took. It followed him through his childhood and through his teens, and it was still there when he was a grown man in his twenties.
So he learned to say everything another way.
His brother Boscoe was nine years older and already everything Geoffrey wanted to be, a painter and a dancer and a musician inside one house. Geoffrey trailed him from morning to night.
"I listened to Boscoe play Chopin's Nocturnes in the morning, became intoxicated inhaling turpentine and linseed oil from his oil paint in the afternoon, and followed his footsteps in the evening when he rehearsed with the dance company," he said.
He joined Boscoe's dance company at seven years old, and money was thin in the Depression, and their father bought the children a piano anyway. He sold his first two paintings at fifteen.
He admitted later that he was a shy man underneath all of it, and that the way he handled it was to strut. His father had given him the line he built a life on.
"You mustn't go in looking for atmosphere, you must bring it with you."
The stammer did not end with a doctor or a cure. It ended in New York, in a room where people were saying foolish things about the Caribbean.
Geoffrey Holder had heard enough of it, and he stood up and talked about Trinidad for a solid hour without once stopping.
It never came back.
In 1954 he was standing in a rehearsal studio when the door opened and a dancer from Los Angeles walked in with her friend Alvin Ailey to audition for House of Flowers. Holder took one look and thought, "I'm gonna marry that girl."
Her name was Carmen de Lavallade.
He proposed inside the week. Carmen told that story herself for years in her one-woman show, and she always got the laugh she was after.
"Three days later, he proposed. Four months later, I accepted."
They married in 1955 and stayed married fifty-nine years. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, the critic John Lahr asked him how a man holds on to a muse that long.
Holder did not say one word about himself.
"Carmen de Lavallade is not Mrs. Holder, she's Carmen de Lavallade," he answered. "Mrs. Holder is my mother."
He meant it as policy and he ran his household on it. She danced for Lester Horton, for Alvin Ailey and for John Butler, and she followed her own cousin Janet Collins as principal dancer at the Metropolitan Opera.
He was the loudest man in any building he ever walked into, and he never once stood in front of her. Asked after his death why the marriage lasted, she gave three short answers.
"He allowed me to be myself. He was my champion."
"He was my biggest fan."
Around 1973 a producer named Ken Harper caught him on Third Avenue with an idea about redoing The Wizard of Oz with Black music and a Black cast. Holder went along to a backers' audition just to be supportive.
He sat there while the old man with the money asked who on earth could play Dorothy, since Lena Horne was too old and there were no stars. "This old man, the only black he knew was Lena Horne," Holder said.
He went home angry.
That Sunday, in his apartment at 92nd and Broadway, he sat down and drew the entire show, the Lion and the Tin Man and Dorothy and the Tornado and every other character in it. Then he handed the drawings over for nothing.
Twentieth Century Fox looked at them and put up six hundred thousand dollars of the show's six hundred and fifty thousand dollar budget. Then came the contract.
Somebody in that room said he did not see how one man could direct and choreograph and design a musical all at once, and told Holder to take a co-director or walk. "That's an insult to my energy," Holder told him.
He walked. On the way out he asked for the only thing he actually wanted.
"May I have back my drawings?"
They refused him, because the drawings were the concept and the concept was what Fox had paid for. The show went into tryouts without him and started dying in Baltimore in October 1974.
Detroit came next, then Philadelphia, with Harper weighing whether to shut the whole thing down at every stop. He worked his way down a list of directors, Hal Prince and Donald McKayle and Patricia Birch, until Patricia Birch told him the only person with any real vision for that show was Geoffrey Holder.
He came back and took all of it.
"I was considered arrogant. I was considered grand," he said.
"And I am arrogant, and I am grand, but I know what I know, and I know what I want."
He bought a hundred yards of black silk, had it sewn onto a bonnet and flown over a trapeze, and turned the tornado into a woman dancing. "And we stopped the show within the first two minutes," he said.
When the company got low out of town he paid out of his own pocket for a Kentucky Fried Chicken and rum party and put everybody in one room together. The Wiz opened at the Majestic on January 5, 1975, drew mixed reviews, and got its closing notice that same night.
Fox put in another hundred thousand dollars and gambled it on television commercials, and then the buses started pulling up outside the theater, carrying church groups and families who had never once sat in a Broadway house. It ran 1,672 performances and did not close until 1979.
On April 20, 1975, The Wiz took seven Tony Awards.
Geoffrey Holder won two of them, and he was the first Black man ever nominated in either category.
Thirty-nine years later he had pneumonia and a tube down his throat at Mount Sinai St. Luke's. Nine days of it, with his son Leo the best in the family at reading him and still catching maybe forty percent.
It enraged him. He was eighty-four years old and it could take four people to keep him from pulling the wires out of his own arms.
Two attempts at removing the tube went badly, so he made his decision and mouthed it to his son.
No, I am not afraid.
There was something else he had been trying to say all week and nobody could get it. On the Saturday, Leo brought music into the room, Bill Evans with Symphony Orchestra, one of his father's favorites.
Geoffrey started to sway in the bed. Then the arms went up.
Then he reached for his son's hands and pulled himself up off the mattress, reaching, and the higher he got the higher he wanted to go. That was when Leo broke the code.
His father was telling him he intended to dance his way out.
Leo had to ease him back down, because there were people still flying in from out of town, and he shrugged and shut his eyes and went to sleep. That Saturday, Leo wrote afterward, had been the dress rehearsal.
The next morning Leo asked him if he was still game for their dance that night, and he got a nod, a smile and a wink, with the tube still down his throat. From noon on they came through the ICU, ages one to eighty, dancers he had built ballets on and young designers he had pushed forward and friends flying in from all over the world.
Then everybody cleared out so Carmen could have him to herself.
Fifty-nine years, and she got five minutes.
She talked to him and stroked his forehead, and then she folded a note she had written into his hand and left the room. Leo stayed, and he had asked the doctors to hold off on the morphine, because he wanted his father to have the solo on his own time.
They took the tube out. Leo took the mittens off his hands.
He started the music, took his father's hands, and swayed them back and forth. Then Geoffrey Holder let go of him and did it himself.
Breathing on his own for the last time, eyes closed, on a hospital bed, he danced to Bill Evans playing Fauré's Pavane.
The arms took flight and the hands articulated through the air. Leo whispered one word to him, shoulders, and his father's shoulders rolled into a shimmy like water moving.
His timing never slipped, and he came off the notes exactly, playing his own duet with the piano. He stretched out his right arm and gave the finger gesture that had always meant you cannot afford this.
For the finish he did not lift himself off the bed the way he had planned it. He rocked the torso once, crossed his arms, turned his head to the side, and he was smiling.
The orchestra ended when he did.
They gave him the morphine and put an oxygen mask over his face, and Leo sat down to watch his father go. Twenty minutes went by, then several more, and he was still breathing.
Then the right hand started to move. Carmen's note was still in it, and he was dragging it across the bedsheet like a pencil.
He was drawing.
That stopped, and the left hand began tapping. Leo heard something coming from under the mask and leaned in close to catch it.
Two, three. Two, three.
He was counting, and it kept getting stronger until it came out sounding like the low purr of a lion.
Arms, two, three. Turn, two, three.
Swing, two, three. Down, two, three.
He was choreographing.
Leo picked up the phone and called his mother at home, where the house was already full of people telling Geoffrey stories and crying and laughing at the same time. "Who the hell did you marry?" he asked her.
He told her the man had a morphine drip running and a mask over his face and his eyes shut, and he was working. It was the first time she laughed all day.
A doctor came in to read the machines and started explaining the process out loud, over the counting. Geoffrey Holder's eyes snapped open.
He roared at her with everything he had left in him.
"Shut up! You're breaking my concentration!"
The two of them froze, and he stared them down, long and hard, before he closed his eyes again.
Arms, two, three. Turn, two, three.
He counted until it faded out, and he took his last breath at 9:25 that night, October 5, 2014.
He had spent nine days unable to make a sound. The last thing anybody heard him say was an instruction.
Carmen de Lavallade went on another eleven years without him, kept performing into her eighties, and took the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017. She died on December 29, 2025, at ninety-four, in a hospital in New Jersey, and their son Leo confirmed it.
Nobody ever learned what she wrote on that note.
She folded it into his hand and walked out of the room, and a few hours later he was moving it across a bedsheet, drawing something none of them could ever see.
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