Like Kissing Your Sister

Astaire—something in the name suggests brilliance, dazzle. Astaire implies “a star;” so, too, a stairway, (“with a new step every day”); Astarte is also, the mythologies report, the name of a minor goddess, one of high and productive energy. The name Astaire enlivens even the otherwise somewhat stodgy name of Fred. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Academy is proud to honor that greatest of all dancers, male or female, classical or modern, ballet or ballroom, rap or tap, break or flake, highbrow or low, Mr. Fred Astaire.” Thunderous, nearly unrelenting applause follows.

In fact, Fred Astaire’s name at birth—he was born on May 10, 1899—was Frederick Austerlitz, II. His father, Frederic I, known to family and friends as Fritz, had left the Austrian army in 1892 and come to the New World to strike it rich, but struck it, from most accounts, scarcely at all. After settling in Omaha, Nebraska, Fritz Austerlitz took a series of dead-end jobs: in the leather business, as a cook, as a drummer of fancy goods, and eventually as a salesman for a brewery. At 27, Fritz met, married, and in fairly short order made pregnant a seventeen-year-old girl named Johanna Geilus; no one seems to know the precise fate of the child of this early pregnancy, who must have died either in a miscarriage or at birth. Two years later the Austerlitzes had a daughter Adele, and two and a half years after that a son Frederick, “Fred.”

The Austerlitzes were nowhere near the top of the city social heap, being closer to lower middle class, with some danger of sliding a touch or two farther down the splintery pole of the early 20th-century American class system. The Austerlitzes appeared to be a family going no place fast, but the children, Adele and Fred, were normal and happy enough. They did decently in school; they enjoyed each other’s companionship. Johanna enrolled Adele, who early showed promise of being a great beauty, in a local dancing class along with her younger brother. A bad moment came when Adele and Freddie lost out in a contest to be among the attendants for a king and queen parade put on by a local lodge called the Kings of Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backwards). They lost not for want of talent but because only the well heeled and well born, by the Omaha standard of the day, were picked. The experience gave Johanna Austerlitz an overpowering sense that her children’s fortunes were best sought outside Omaha.

When her daughter was not yet eight, her son still five, she herself twenty-six, Johanna took them to New York to prepare for a living in show business. The Austerlitzes arrived in New York knowing no one but the name of a dancing teacher given them by the children’s instructor in Omaha. They checked into a hotel near the dance studio at 23rd Street near Eighth Avenue. Frederic remained in Nebraska, sending money to pay for dance lessons and necessaries, though it is unclear whether he did so in a sustained way. On the advice of their new dance teacher, a man named Claude Alvienne, the children’s surname was changed to Astaire; the mother later dropped the Joh and became Anna Astaire, later Ann to friends. Alvienne recognized the Astaires’ talent, though he was not about to say for certain that they had a real future in show business.

Alvienne created routines for Adele and Fred as a brother-and-sister act, and such an act they would remain until Adele’s retirement in her early thirties. In one of their childhood numbers, Adele, then the taller of the two, played Cyrano to Fred’s Roxanne. Alvienne arranged bookings at small fees for them at secondline New Jersey theaters. Soon enough they went on the road, where their bookings were neither plentiful nor hugely rewarding. They continued their dance education; in New York they lived in a small furnished apartment. Adele was the natural of the two children, all shimmering beauty and spontaneity, with great élan; Fred, who had to work harder at everything, took his dancing more seriously.

The contrast between Fred and Adele had appeared early in their partnership. Along with being hardworking, a perfectionist, Fred was a worrier: worried above all about little screwups in performance that would get in the way of his modest but unrelenting ambition, which was, as he told Edward R. Murrow much later in his life, “to knock ’em in the aisles as often as I could.” He was a man who lay awake at night working out ideas for new dances, and put relentless effort, into making his own vision about the art of the dance look perfectly effortless. But without Adele as his partner at the beginning of his career, Fred might have ended up a suburban husband, selling the swank high-line cars for which he had a lifelong taste. Once married, he was a homebody. His wife was his dearest friend, and perhaps his only confidante.

Adele lacked Fred’s strong work ethic, and was not much given to the ardor for perfection that was central to his character, but most theater managers who booked them considered Adele the one with the smashing career ahead of her. She was beautiful, effortlessly talented, candid, one of those rare women who could be attractively coarse. She was the perennial live wire, highest possible altitude and voltage. From an early age she knew that men were interested in her, and she could tell you, with blatant precision, why. At seventeen she allowed that “I’ve already got quite used to people grabbing my fanny backstage.” She didn’t mind asking someone she caught looking up her skirt whether he saw “the ace of spades.” Adele was stimulated by worthlessness in men. She is said to have lost her virginity to George Jean Nathan, the theater critic who was H. L. Mencken’s partner on the Smart Set, a man many years older than she, and, from various accounts, far from an appetizing specimen. She later bedded Cecil Beaton, providing him a pause (evidently not one that much refreshed) in an otherwise largely gay life (though Beaton and Greta Garbo were often thought, in the phrase of the day, an item). She found rehearsals a drag, and perfection nice enough in its way, though scarcely worth giving up the charms of social life; certainly nothing to lie awake at night for. “It was different for me,” she said, once comparing herself to her brother, “but show business and dancing and worrying were in my brother’s blood—it was not just his work, it was his life.”

Through practice and persistence in the early days the Astaires eventually connected with the Orpheum theatrical circuit, which sent them on the road for a fee of $150 a week plus expenses. A dance teacher and director named Ned Wayman wrote a new act for them, at the price of $1,000, payable in installments. In big-city theaters the glow of their performance was dimmed by such glamorous names on the same bill as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. They continued to work hard, to grind it out, appearing alongside animal acts, acrobats, and low comedians. It was onward and upward, but in what must have seemed excruciatingly slow motion.

The dance team of Astaire and Astaire slowly rose on the marquees of the theaters they played, as did their fees, soon hitting $350 a week. This was the age of the impresario, of Abe Erlanger, Flo Ziegfeld, and the Brothers Shubert, with their revues and extravaganzas. The Astaires were bidden by the Shuberts to appear in Over the Top, a show originally called The Nine O’Clock Revue because of a plan to start half an hour after most theatrical performances in New York. The show did decent business in New York, with Louis Sherwin of the New York Globe writing: “One of the prettiest features of the show is the dancing of the two Astaires. The girl, a light, spritelike little creature, has really an exquisite floating style in her caperings, while the young man combines eccentric agility with humor.”

Next, the Astaires garnered more praise for The Passing Show of 1918. Journalist Heywood Broun awarded them this gentle critical kiss: “In an evening in which there was an abundance of good dancing, Fred Astaire stood out. He and his partner, Adele Astaire, made the show pause early in the evening with a beautiful loose-limbed dance. It almost seemed as if the two young persons had been poured into the dance.”

On Broadway, the Astaires appeared on bills with such great names of the day as Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, and Charlie Ruggles. Their price went up to $550 a week, enough for Fred to think about acquiring a sports car. By 1920 the Astaires were making $750 a week.

Backstage one night in their dressing room appeared a brilliant young Englishman named Noël Coward, a contemporary who would become a lifelong friend and who suggested that the Astaires take their act to London, where they were certain to be a knockout. A young not yet fully fledged producer named Alex Aarons, whom Astaire met when Aarons was working at Sulka’s, the men’s shop noted for its robes and dazzling neckties, later pushed them to take his show For Goodness Sake to London, which they agreed to do. Their English success was instantaneous. “Your success here is assured,” Coward told Adele. “You’ve got youth, energy, humor, looks, and fun. That’s exactly what the English like.”

Soon Fred Astaire—in his accent, his clothes, his general manner—came to appear mid-Atlantic, so strong did the English influence on him seem, while his sister married an Englishman and eventually became Lady Adele Cavendish. At one of the Astaires’ early shows in England, Prince Albert—the future King George VI—turned up. He adored the Astaires and brought his friends and family to see them. He began inviting Fred and Adele out to dinner and parties after performances. The King of England is supposed to have said of the Astaires: “They seem a decent sort of American.” They couldn’t possibly have been any more in. England still had what the journalists called Smart Society—a blend of pedigree, money, and talent, the beau and haute monde combined—and Fred and Adele Astaire found themselves very much in the thick of it.

Fred acquired an English valet, began his habit of buying racehorses, shopped Savile Row, eventually acquired a small black Rolls-Royce, known as a baby Rolls. The Astaires could have served as characters in an Anthony Powell novel, though perhaps Adele’s raucous candor would have made her a better fit in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. They were comfortable in England, and the English were comfortable with them, on and off the stage. The Prince of Wales claimed to have seen their show Stop Flirting no fewer than ten times, and Fred made a note of the elegant cut of the lapels on the prince’s white waistcoat, which he had English tailors imitate for him. James Barrie and George Bernard Shaw were both quite gone on Adele, with Barrie suggesting that she consider playing Peter Pan.

Back in America Jock Whitney and Alfred Vanderbilt were part of their circle, or, more accurately, the Astaires were part of theirs; Tallulah Bankhead, Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, and Gertrude Lawrence were also friends. They were the toast of two continents. Even Fred, with the dubious talent of always being able to see the worst of things, had little about which to complain. They were leading the good life, the high life, a fine breeze stirring them gently on their way in the fast lane. Nor did the Astaires suffer greatly during the Depression, which in fact was good for show business, causing people to seek out escapism more ardently than ever. In America, Flo Ziegfeld paid them$5,000 dollars a week to be in one of his shows. They scored in The Band Wagon, a Broadway hit that Fred would later redo, with major surgery, as a movie with Cyd Charisse. The reviews they received sounded as if they had written them themselves. Brooks Atkinson, the then still quite young New York Times theater critic, wrote, “This revue is without flaw.” Other papers spoke of Fred’s graduating from mere hoofer to a genuine comic talent. In the Astaire partnership, Fred was emerging from his role as the lesser, younger brother; some reviewers thought that he had surpassed his sister in energy and flair.

Nearly thirty-five, Adele was ready to toss in the taps, and did so by marrying the dipsomaniacal Charlie Cavendish. The last time Fred and Adele danced together on stage was March 5, 1932, in a road-company version of The Band Wagon. Adele had been in most ways her brother’s perfect partner; just the right size (5-foot-3 and 106 pounds), with great physical charm centering on her large eyes, wittily pouting mouth, and easy comic gifts. Their increased fame as a brother-and-sister act allowed them to ignore the need to dance romantically as a couple. With his sister’s retirement, Fred Astaire faced the question of whether he could make it on his own. Before taking up that problem in earnest, he had met and fallen in love with a divorcée named Phyllis Potter. She was roughly the same height as Adele, slender, and also, in looks, again like his sister, the type of the gamine. She was socially well connected, brought up by an aunt and uncle when her mother had remarried. The uncle, Henry Bull, was president of the Turf and Field Club; she pronounced her r’s as w’s, as in “Fweddie, Fweddie, dawling.” According to Fred, when they first met, at a golf luncheon given by Mrs. Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt, Phyllis had never heard of him. He was thirty-two, she twenty-four, and he tactfully laid siege to her. His mother was less than pleased, thinking her son would make his way more easily in the world unencumbered by a divorced woman with a four-year-old son. Fred, not his mother, prevailed. He and his wife would have two children of their own, Fred, Jr., and Ava, neither of whom ever danced professionally.

Not much is known about Fred Astaire as a ladies’ man. No stories exist about him as a masher, roué, or even a serious chaser. The man who taught America to dance “The Continental” (“You kiss while you’re dancing”), who held Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, Paulette Goddard, Audrey Hepburn, Barrie Chase, and other beautiful women in his arms, bending them gently backward, whirling them about—but who himself didn’t often kiss on stage, claiming that he did his lovemaking with his feet—this same man seems to have been too well mannered and otherwise centered on his work to give women other than second place in his life. He was a faithful and good husband, whose life almost came apart when his wife died of lung cancer at the age of forty-six, leaving him a widower at fifty-four.

Many stories are told about Fred Astaire’s solo entrée into Hollywood. The best known—alas, never authenticated—has to do with the unidentified studio operative who, after watching Astaire’s screen test, is supposed to have reported: “Balding. Can’t sing. Dances a little.” In different versions the wording is altered slightly.

In fact, David O. Selznick, then the head of RKO, though soon to become an executive at MGM, where his father-in-law Louis B. Mayer most powerfully presided, thought Fred Astaire likely to be a great movie performer. “I am tremendously enthused about the suggestion New York [by which he meant his agents there] has made of using Fred Astaire,” he wrote in 1933 to two underlings at RKO. “If he photographs (I have ordered a test), he may prove to be a really sensational bet. . . . Astaire is one of the great artists of the day: a magnificent performer, a man conceded to be perhaps, next to Leslie Howard, the most charming in the American theater, and unquestionably the outstanding young leader of American musical comedy.” Selznick later showed some hesitation, but didn’t finally back down: “I am a little uncertain about the man, but I feel, in spite of his enormous ears and bad chin line, that his charm is so tremendous that it comes through even in this wretched [screen] test, and I would be perfectly willing to go ahead with him [in a movie then in the planning stage].”

MGM signed Fred Astaire to a three-week contract at $1,500 per week. He was to dance, playing a character named Fred Astaire, with Joan Crawford in an eminently forgettable flick called Dancing Lady. They gave him, in other words, a shot. He volleyed it back at them for an authoritative winner. Whatever his screen test might have shown, whatever his physical deficiencies, Fred Astaire came across splendidly on the screen. He was the masculine equivalent of what the French call a belle laide: a feature-by-feature homely woman who is somehow nevertheless stunning. His attractiveness may have resided partly in his clothes and the way he wore them; it had a great deal to do, of course, with the way he moved, including his most casual moves. Whatever the magical ingredients that made for movie charm, he possessed them. He lit up the joint—any joint he may have been in—turning the silver screen quite golden.

Of what did Astaire’s magic consist? Why even now, more than twenty years after his death, more than fifty years since the days of his prime as a dancer-singer-actor, why do his old movies still shimmer with glamour, why do so many people still find the sight and sound of him enchanting, why does the very idea of Fred Astaire continue to cast its own lovely lilting glow? We are, my dear Watson, obviously in the presence of a mystery.

Excerpted from Fred Astaire, by Joseph Epstein, just published by Yale University Press. Reproduced with permission.

—Joseph Epstein is author of, among other books, Snobbery, Friendship, and Fabulous Small Jews, He has been editor of American Scholar and has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Commentary, Town and Country, and other magazines.