Obituary: Doris Eaton Travis, 106, was a chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies

(Photo courtesy of Ziegfeld Club)

After leaving the Ziegfeld Follies in 1920, Mrs. Travis appeared in a number of Broadway plays, revues and forgettable silent films, among them "The Broadway Peacock" (1922) with Pearl White of the cliff-hanging silent serials.

Mrs. Travis's sister Mary, meanwhile, enjoyed a brighter stage and movie career, notably singing in the early Marx Brothers film comedy "The Cocoanuts" (1929), before her career dried up. She descended into alcoholism and died in 1948.

"Ballet dancing and the theater was really my sister's whole life," Mrs. Travis told Playbill magazine. "With me, it was just a job. I never had stars in my eyes about the theater. With Mary, her dancing was part of her soul. And when she had no place to go, I think she just died inside."

Several of the Eaton siblings became alcoholics, and Pearl died in an unsolved murder in 1958. Mrs. Travis's brother Charles Eaton died in 2004 at 94.

Mrs. Travis's first husband was Joseph Gorham, a theater producer twice her age. She called him a cruel, abusive man; he died from a heart attack six months after their marriage in 1923. She later had a long affair with Nacio Herb Brown, who wrote "Singin' in the Rain," which Mrs. Travis sang in the Hollywood Music Box Revue.

In 1949, she married one of her Michigan dance pupils, Paul Travis, an engineer who became wealthy from a doorjamb he invented and used on many cars. He died in 2000, and they had no children. Mrs. Travis had no immediate survivors.

Operating dance studios was fun and profitable, she said, but rock-and-roll "sort of put a damper on the ballroom dancing business," and in 1970 the Travises moved to Oklahoma from Michigan. They oversaw an 800-acre ranch and made a small fortune by renting out parcels of land.

In her spare time, she earned a high school diploma and, at 88, a bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma. One of her American history professors told the New York Times, "It was unnerving when she came up to me after I lectured on World War I and said, 'I met Mr. Wilson.' The first thing that went through my head was, 'Did I get everything right?' "

In addition to her memoirs, Mrs. Travis was the subject of a 2006 biography, "Century Girl," by Lauren Redniss.

Mrs. Travis never retired. In recent years, she was regularly featured in an annual Broadway AIDS benefit, most recently in April, when she danced a few steps with the help of two shirtless young male dancers. After rapturous applause, she walked off stage by herself.