I've spent most of the last week reading my way through a sizable new biography of Fred Astaire by the late Peter Levinson with the unwieldy title of Puttin' on the Ritz: Fred Astaire and the Fine Art of Panache (St. Martin's Press, 2009). It's a lot of material (400+ pages, not counting notes) to digest, so I've been taking it in small bites in the evening and at lunchtimes. Even though Astaire's career was in theatrical dance while my interest is in social dance, Astaire's sheer skill makes me happy just to watch him. My copy of The Gay Divorcee
is permanently rewound to the beginning of "The Continental," which I watch over and over again. I'm eternally grateful for Astaire's insistence that his dancing be filmed in full-body shots with minimal or no cutting.
Levinson starts with Astaire's family background, with his father's family being Austrian Jews who converted to Catholicism. His father immigrated to Nebraska and married a girl of German Lutheran stock; young Fred Austerlitz and his older sister Adele were born in the late 19th century. Both were showbiz prodigies, starting out young on the vaudeville circuit as a brother-sister dance and comedy act and quickly changing their name to the more romantic and less ethnic Astaire. Chaperoned by their mother (who remained deeply involved in Fred's life until her death in her 90s) they became a famous dancing team in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in London's West End, playing in several highly successful musical shows on both sides of the Atlantic. When Adele retired to marry an English nobleman, Fred continued on to a solo career for which, of course, he is best remembered today for his ten-film dance partnership with Ginger Rogers. Less well known is that after that series of films ended, he had a varied career in radio, movies, and television as a dancer, actor, and singer, partnering with Cyd Charisse, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, and more, and working all the way into the 1980s. Despite their professional breakup, his closeness with his sister continued until her death in 1981. His offscreen relationship with Rogers appears to have been much rockier. On a personal level, a first marriage left him with a son, daughter, and stepson; a late second marriage to a woman decades his junior caused serious family tension. His second wife declined to be interviewed for the book, and despite a layer of politeness, Levinson clearly found her management of Astaire's legacy (particularly the rights to many of his film appearances) appalling.
Levinson interviewed hundreds of Astaire's friends and associates and must have spent years going through Astaire's films and television productions. He includes a wealth of personal and professional anecdotes, many hugely entertaining. I was fascinated by the chapter on Astaire as a man of fashion (and fashion leader), with its myriad details about his style of dressing and little quirks like using a necktie as a belt. But the most enticing part for me was the brief analysis of just about every dance Astaire ever performed in any recordable medium. I've seen relatively few Astaire films, but now I have a little list to look for. And I plan to have this book in hand to read over the information on each dance before watching it; I think it will greatly enrich my experience.
The book isn't flawless. Levinson divides his chapters thematically, which means the book skips back and forth in time when (for example) his later television and film careers, covered in separate chapters, overlap temporally. This can be confusing, especially since Levinson often does not repeat dates, so some page-flipping is necessary to figure out exactly when things are occurring in relation to each other. And the huge cast of characters introduced, while wonderful for presenting a multilayered picture of the American entertainment industry in the first half of the twentieth century, was very hard to keep track of. Levinson also gets repetitive: Astaire's obsession with rehearsal must have been mentioned thirty or forty times, supported by a dozen or more anecdotes. The comprehensiveness is impressive, but the point could have been made less repetitively. The copyediting also does not appear to have been thorough; there are a number of stray phrases pretending to be sentences. Since Mr. Levinson died in 2008, perhaps he was unable to fine-tune and tighten the book before publication.
But while I could have wished for a more straightforwardly chronological arrangement of events and a comprehensive index of names with identifying notes, this is a wonderful book about a man who was one of the top song-and-dance men and superstars of the twentieth century. I read a library copy, but I'll be buying my own for future reference.
I highly recommend Puttin' on the Ritz for fans of dance, film history, musical history, and social history.
Astaire's insistence that his dancing be filmed in full-body shots with minimal or no cutting
I remember hearing about that, in regards to Coppola's Finian's Rainbow, and in Lennon's Imagine. I enjoy his old pre-War movies, but I think I like his 1950s movies the best, especially The Band Wagon.
Posted by: Serge | October 15, 2009 at 11:44 AM
We watched Top Hat a few weeks back and I meant to say at the time that 1930s romance looked very like what today we'd call creepy stalker behaviour. Fortunately the plot diverted into mistaken identity farce before it weirded me out too much.
Posted by: Neil Willcox | December 02, 2009 at 08:04 AM
That's an interesting way of describing those old movies, Neil. I guess I never thought of it that way because I automatically made accomodation for the era in which the movies were made. I do notice that, in those old movies, if a man who isn't the leading man shows interest in the leading lady, and if he happens not to be Anglo-Saxon, he usually isn't to be trusted to be honorable toward the wimminfolk.
Posted by: Serge | December 02, 2009 at 09:46 AM
Ordering all the flowers in a flower shop delivered to a lady one has just met: Overenthusiastic 1930s romance.
Accosting said lady in public and declaring your feelings for her: Overenthusiastic 30s romance.
Replacing the driver of the horsedrawn cab and putting on a terrible Cockney accent: Creepy Stalker!
Waiting in the woods for the lady to ride by on her own: Creepy stalker!
Fred Astaire is very charming which is why he gets away with being a creepy stalker but he's still attempting to find a woman on her own when she doesn't want to be alone with him.
I enjoy these films, but I still think that his behaviour sometimes tips from outrageous to creepy.
Posted by: Neil Willcox | December 06, 2009 at 07:21 AM
Right on all counts, Neil. One thing I'm not sure about is whether it's more creepy than the 'courting' rites depicted in the other movies of the era. It's like the unthinking racism of the 1930s. Come the 1950s, racism was still there, but it was conscious racism because there were more and more people questioning the assumptions of the older era.
That being said, my favorite Fred musical probably remains 1953's The Band Wagon.
Posted by: Serge | December 06, 2009 at 10:21 AM
PUTTING ON THE RITZ there arent 8 images of fred -there are 9 but are they all him?..and i'm sure some are duplicates as if you zoom in there seem to be pairs...
Posted by: bobchewie | January 02, 2010 at 10:49 PM