Memory Lane: George and Betty, the dancing stars of The Breakers

On long-ago nights when George and Betty Montgomery fluidly waltzed or foxtrotted together with the skirted layers of her dress twirling, the surrounding hum of chit-chat and clinking silverware in The Breakers’ dining room would cease.

Were it not for an orchestra playing melodies in the cavernous space, the hush among awed guests might have been audible as a tall and tuxedoed George and a fair-haired and elegant Betty glided on the dance floor.

Before long, the Montgomerys would invite everyone to dance, in part so their pupils could shine. After all, the couple taught ballroom dancing at The Breakers for decades and even one lesson could be a revelation.

“There was a man who would take lessons from us and he knew the steps, but he seemed lost,” Betty, who died in 2008 after retiring in 1997, once said while demonstrating the “loud, soft, soft, loud, soft, soft” beat of a waltz.

“Here was this wonderful dancer and he didn't hear the beat. After some lessons, he finally heard it and yelled out, `I have it!’”

When the Montgomerys began teaching ballroom dancing at The Breakers 70-plus years ago, anyone yelling out anything — except perhaps “fore!” on the golf course — was rare.

Propriety reigned among guests who stayed for weeks, making the hotel a home away from home amid white-glove service, activities and three meals a day. Even through the early 1980s, the same couples — or their surviving spouses — came. And ballroom-dancing was on their itinerary.

The Montgomerys also taught generations of Palm Beachers and their children at dance cotillions. Marjorie Merriweather Post also engaged them for 1950s and 1960s square dances at Mar-a-Lago.

The couple first came to The Breakers in 1949.

Ballroom-dancing programs then were common at high-end hotels; the Montgomerys taught dance in the summers at The Homestead in Hot Springs, Va. — where their two daughters were born — and later the Mountain View in Whitefield, N.H.

At The Breakers, their first dance studio was located in a white cottage on the Pine Walk overlooking the golf course. Then they taught daytime classes in other spaces, including in a studio along the hotel’s mezzanine.

When they danced together during early evening tea or dinner shows in the dining room, guests said the Montgomerys seemed born to dance as a pair.

But when the couple first met after World War II while teaching at New York’s Arthur Murray Dance Studio, 6-foot-tall George, a native New Yorker and dancer fresh from piloting planes in the war, was hesitant about dancing with Betty.

She was 5 feet tall in her bare feet. Too petite, he thought. But, boy, could she dance, he soon concluded.

She’d started dancing at age 6, ruining the wood floors of her family’s Tennessee home as she tap-danced with tin-can tops tied to her shoes.

She majored in dance at Christian College in Columbia, Mo. (the school later was renamed Columbia College of Missouri), and considered a career as a ballet dancer. When she danced with George for the first time, she could tell “he felt the music the same way I did.”

George felt the same way about her.

During their early years at The Breakers, the Montgomerys took all of their meals at the hotel and dressed for the occasion. When Betty once rushed from the dance studio without the bolero jacket that matched her dress, a dining room captain draped a napkin over her bare shoulders.

Once The Breakers began year-round operation in the 1970s, the Montgomerys bought a North End home. Daughters Katherine “Katie” (Edwards) and Bonita (Guyer) attended Palm Beach Public and the now-gone Graham-Eckes Academy.

“Mother and Dad would go to teach at their dance studio at The Breakers in the morning and then have lunch at the hotel,” Katie Edwards, a North Palm Beach-based interior designer, told the Daily News. “Then they’d come home and we’d have family time before they’d dress up formally and go back to The Breakers to dance for and with guests in the evening.

“My mother sewed all of her dance costumes and my sister and I used to play dress-up in them and twirl around in the living room,” she said. “My Dad had a collection of ties and embroidered cummerbunds, but he was known his warmth and readiness to take a guest out on the dance floor. And he loved music, with a collection of records from the floor to the ceiling.”

Bonita Guyer remembered summers in New Hampshire with her sister and parents, who would move the table out of the dining room so they could dance. “When they did (a dance called) The Peabody, I can still almost hear the china shaking in the dining-room cabinet,” she laughed.

After George died in 1987, Betty, who remarried a decade later, continued to teach dancing at The Breakers, including at summer etiquette camps.

Just before she retired in 1997, Paul Leone, the hotel’s president and CEO, honored her, noting that she’d taught dance “eloquently” and been “an integral part of our social experience” for nearly 50 years.

Most of those five decades featured George, too. "It was such fun to watch them dance," daughter Guyer said.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: The couple, who seemed born to dance as a pair, also taught at other hotels during off-season