JoAnn Dean Killingsworth died at the age of 91 of cancer in Brea, Calif., on June 20, 2015.
There was no mention on any of the Disney fan sites, despite the fact that the death occurred less than one month before the start of the official 60th Disneyland Diamond Celebration.
Killingsworth had been the dancer hired by ABC-TV to portray the character of Snow White on the famous “Dateline: Disneyland” television special that aired on Sunday, July 17, 1955, to debut the new Disneyland theme park.
In 1955, when Killingsworth was 31 years old, she was hired by actor and dancer Gene Nelson’s wife, Miriam, who was in charge of choreographing the dancers for the ABC show. Killingsworth had often performed with actor and dancer Nelson (Oklahoma) since 1940.
“I thought JoAnn looked like Disney’s Snow White, with her dark bangs,” Nelson recalled. “She was very enthusiastic, bubbly, and always in good spirits. I knew she’d do a good job.”
Killingsworth used to joke that “My hair used to be dark, dark brown but somehow I got blonder as I got older.”
Killingsworth was a professional figure skater and dancer who appeared in several Hollywood films. She was born in Minneapolis, Minn., in September 1923, and moved with her widowed mother, Marion, and her older brother Donovan to Los Angeles in 1931 during the Great Depression.
Marion Dean ran a small café in their Beverly Manor apartment complex near Beverly Boulevard and Normandie Avenue to cover their $45 a month rent. She served a full meal of soup, salad, entrée, vegetable, baked potato, bread, coffee and dessert for just $0.35 cents. The success of the small restaurant allowed JoAnn Killingsworth to take dance lessons.
When she was 12, Killingsworth worked at the restaurant as a waitress, while her brother washed dishes and bussed tables. In 1939, at the age of 15, she begged her mother to let her audition for a local ice skating show in Long Beach and, to everyone’s surprise, she was selected.
The following year, she toured with another ice skating show Hollywood Ice Revue, in an installment called “Ice Queen of Norway,” alongside Gene Nelson that featured Norwegian skating legend Sonja Henie. The show was performed at the famous Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Killingsworth finished her schooling through the mail.
She then joined Nelson again for a two-year engagement at New York’s Center Theatre for It Happens on Ice. The prestigious theater was known for its live skating spectacles.
After that engagement at the age of 18, she returned to Los Angeles to concentrate on acting and dancing roles. In addition, she did some print modeling and advertisements, including one for Chesterfield cigarettes.
She appeared with British Olympic figure skater Belita Jepson-Turner in Monogram Pictures’ “Silver Skates” (1943), the first of many films in which she performed. Killingsworth estimated that she appeared in roughly 100 films during the next decade and a half.
She appeared in Something for the Boys (1944); Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair (1945); Roy Rogers’ Rainbow Over Texas (1946); Doris Day and Gene Nelson’s Lullaby of Broadway (1951), where she also appears on the film poster next to Day; in 1954 Rosemary Clooney’s Red Garters; as well as Sabrina and Nob Hill.
A very prominent credit was Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born (1954), where Killingsworth stood in for the star, performing all her songs and dances at the technical rehearsals.
“One of the best things that happened,” Killingsworth remembered, “was when Judy Garland said to me, ‘You have a very nice voice.’ And I said, ‘Oh no, no, no!’ and she replied, ‘I SAID you have a very nice voice!’”
Amusingly, Killingsworth once told me she wasn’t exactly sure how many movies she was in but she knew that she hadn’t seen them all.
“It’s hard to keep track of everything. I wish I had written them down. I was just too busy doing them,” said Killingsworth, who did keep a scrapbook with some of her print work cut out of newspapers and magazines as well as some publicity shots.
From 1953 to 1956, she was a “Redette,” one of the dancers on television’s The Red Skelton Show.
“I got lucky, because when TV first got popular, the screens were so small compared to motion pictures that somehow they thought it made sense to have small girls in the shows,” Killingsworth said with a laugh.
She retired from performing in 1958 when she and her husband Jim Killingsworth moved to Newport Beach where they published a weekly tabloid newspaper and a lifestyle magazine that centered on Orange County.
They divorced in 1977 (he died in 1993) and Killingsworth became a sales person at Neiman-Marcus, which is where she was working when she was found for the 50th anniversary celebration of the animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1987.
Disneyland wanted to honor 50th anniversary of Snow White with a reunion of the “Snow Whites.” Killingsworth performed on the float during the opening day ceremonies.
When Disneyland decided to mark the milestone anniversary, they decided to hold a reunion of performers, on Friday June 5, 1987, who had assisted in the portrayal of Snow White at the parks.
In particular, they wanted to find the performer who was Snow White for the opening day ceremonies on July 17, 1955. Snow White rode on a float and later in the special, appeared in Fantasyland to inaugurate her dark ride.
No one at the park could match a name to the face in the photos of the opening day parade. Her name wasn’t in the Disney personnel records, but a friend of hers who heard about the search called the park with the tip.
“I worked for ABC, not Disneyland, so there was no record of me in the park. I didn’t know they were hunting for me until a friend read about it in the paper and told me. I really didn’t realize Disney was looking for me,” she said. “If I had I would have called somebody and said, ‘Here I am. Here’s Snow White!’ I was living within 15 miles of Disneyland, working at Neiman-Marcus, doing some golfing and painting. I was taking some tap dancing lessons.
“I had dinner with some people from Disney public relations who told me they weren’t actually looking for the first Snow White, but some over eager reporter had written a story that they were and it had gotten national publicity,” she said. “So when I contacted them, they were excited that they could take advantage of the publicity and announce they had found me.”
As she got older, she sold the Balboa cottage she and her husband lived in and moved into Capriana, a retirement community in Brea. Her paintings were on exhibit in the art room and she often gave them away to friends and family rather than selling them. She was well loved in the community.
She spent her days writing, taking arts-and-crafts classes, listening to swing music on the radio, and visiting with her brother and sister-in-law, Donovan and Doris Dean, who also lived at the retirement community. While she never had children, her stepson Bill visited once a week. She had another stepson named Larry.
Her apartment was decorated entirely in white and lime green. In fact, she always kept a few of her fingernails painted lime green at all times to use as a portable color sample in case she was out and saw a vase or sofa pillow she liked.
“If it matches my finger, by golly I’ll take it,” she told a reporter.
On her vanity was a little blue-and-white jewelry box with a cameo of Snow White that was given to her in 1987.
Here is a short interview I did with JoAnn around 1995. By then, she, like others I have interviewed, had some “canned” standard stories to share with the media but she did give me some things that didn’t appear elsewhere.
Two things she told me that I have never been able to confirm and probably never will is that because of her extensive theatrical experience, she was also tapped by Nelson during the opening day broadcast to be that surprised young lady kissed by host Bob Cummings in front of the Golden Horseshoe Revue and the feisty little dancer who grabbed Davy Crockett’s Old Betsy during that musical number.
She certainly had plenty of time to change into a Frontierland dancer’s outfit after the parade and then change back to Snow White before the dedication of Fantasyland, especially since the dressing room was in that area. There were also dressers to help the dancers. The two performers also look very much like her but there was no documentation.
Of course, none of the other dancers hired for that special have ever claimed to do those two routines.
“It was a different world back then. Of course, I was impressed seeing some of the stars but it was just a work day. We all did the best job we could do and then went home like any other job. I often spent the evenings roller skating along Hollywood Boulevard.
“If later I ran into someone I worked with on a picture, like John Wayne, I never brought it up. I didn’t want to be one of those people—‘Remember me?’ I’m sure he didn’t.
“I adored Gene and we worked well together. He and Miriam knew about the work I was doing and that I was reliable and hard working and never caused trouble so it was no surprise when she called me with a job offer.
“What was surprising is I had no idea what Disneyland was and no idea where Anaheim was. I never watched ABC either. All of that is funny now looking back on it.
“I was 5-foot-3 and brunette. I guess they wanted smaller girls because my girlfriends were in the dwarfs’ costumes on the float and they were small, as well.
“We rehearsed for about a month at the ABC Studios on Sunset, and then about another week at Disneyland. In the last three days we worked furiously as they were rushing to complete the park. We danced over the gardeners planting flowers under our feet.
“We couldn’t believe this place, all the pastel paints and flowers. It was quite unbelievable back then and still is. We wondered where Anaheim was back then. There was a lot of wondering: ‘Why Anaheim?’ It was the boonies then. We traveled through bean fields to get here.
In addition to riding the float, JoAnn Killingbeck had to dance into Fantasyland as well.
“We all traveled to Disneyland on a bus and were given box lunches.
“It was all so pretty with pinks, blues and yellow and these cute little shops. We were all sure they would never be able to maintain it.
“One day, we got a special treat. We were volunteered to spend a half a day riding the carousel while the engineers tried to balance it properly.
“Regrettably, I never got to meet Walt Disney personally. Things were just too rushed and he was running around everywhere. I did see a lot of him. He helicoptered in all the time and while we were rehearsing, everyone always looked up and said, ‘Oh, there’s Walt!’
“I later heard he got a pretty good look at me. He wanted to see what I looked like through the camera during a rehearsal. Sometimes someone looks good in person but on camera it is a different thing entirely. Fortunately, cameras seemed to love me.
“Still, I was worried for a minute, because Snow White was his favorite and he was very particular. But he gave me the ‘OK’.
“Basically my stage direction in Fantasyland was to ‘run pretty’ and I tried my best. When the drawbridge dropped, we all feared we would be trampled by the children. We had never rehearsed with the children and didn’t realize there would be so many of them or that they would be so excited.
“We used a dressing room behind New Orleans Street and we sometimes had to run to a location, shouting at people to get out of the way so we would get there on time.
“They loaded us on a flatbed truck to be transported behind the buildings to get to some areas. Once, the driver got lost backstage going to the float where I was supposed to be Snow White and we panicked. We barely made it on time. We were yelling at him ‘Go there’ or ‘Turn here’.
“It was at least 100 degrees that day, so I was glad I was out in the open with a little breeze rather than cooped up inside a coach like Cinderella. She was reacting with her prince, but I had camera experience so I played to where the cameras were.
“The reviews weren’t great. There was a local radio personality called Dick Whittinghill who was very popular. On his show, he joked he could take his kids to Disneyland or put them through college but not both.
“We were told not to tell people what characters we had played because they wanted to preserve the mystique that these characters were real.
“At the reunion, I went around with Mickey Mouse, and I saw a sweet little girl approaching. I was holding Mickey’s hand and the girl started getting very emotional. And I felt emotional, too. I thought, ‘I’m with the biggest star in the world.’
“I did return a few times after the ’87 reunion. They let me in for free. I just called them up and said, ‘Hello, I was the first Snow White’.’
“I’m so lucky. I’ve had a great life.”
