Back Story 3: The Astaire Biographies
A Survey of Books about Fred Astaire (1959-2012)
When I started my Young Man of Manhattan research in 2015, I had read only four books on Fred Astaire. The first had a completely different focus from where my exploration would take me: Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, published in 1972. As I recall, I purchased this book soon after it was first released at the time I had first fallen in love with the Astaire-Rogers musicals in a film history class I had taken during my senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. The book focused on the ten films that Fred and Ginger made together in Hollywood, though there was a nice introductory section (titled “Prehistory”) that provided a biographical background where I first learned about Fred’s vaudeville and Broadway career with his sister, Adele.
Croce’s book provided wonderful details about the nine RKO films that Astaire and Rogers made from 1933 to 1939 (from Flying Down to Rio to The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle) and their final collaboration in The Barkleys of Broadway. The book contains many photographs from each of their movies, and a distinctive series of pictures in the upper righthand and lefthand corners of each page that the reader can flip to see a sequence of the “Waltz in Swing Time” number from Swing Time and “Let Yourself Go” from Follow the Fleet. This was the closest you could get to an on-demand viewing of a Fred Astaire dance routine before the days of home videotapes and DVDs.
My second Astaire book was a coffee-table volume: Starring Fred Astaire by Stanley Green and Burt Goldblatt. Published in 1973, it looked at all films featuring Fred, not just the musicals, so it included the movies he did after Silk Stockings and included listings of his radio and television appearances as well as his extensive discography. Green & Goldblatt included an extensive introductory section on Fred’s vaudeville and Broadway career with some rare photographs and clippings that he likely obtained from Ann Astaire’s scrapbooks.
The third Astaire book I read was John Mueller’s Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films, published in 1985. This remains the authoritative analysis of Fred’s Hollywood musicals, with a detailed description of each dance number in his 31 films from Dancing Lady to Finian’s Rainbow. Again, there is a good background biography of Fred. Nothing comparable to this book has been written about any other Hollywood star, a testament to the impact that Astaire has had not only on movie fans but also on film scholars. (An interesting side note is that Mueller had a dual career: a professor of films studies and political science with a focus on international affairs.) Similar to Croce, Mueller did his close analysis in the days before the Astaire films were available for repeated viewing on videotape.
It was nearly 30 years later that I purchased another Astaire biography, and this was the one that helped set me on my Young Man of Manhattan research: Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires: Fred & Adele (2012). The previous books had all focused on Fred’s film career. Riley’s carefully researched book put the emphasis on vaudeville and Broadway, ending when the brother-and-sister team split in 1932. Like Mueller, Riley has a notable background as a scholar, focusing on dance history.
Riley’s book then set me to the primary source, Fred’s own autobiography published in 1959 Steps in Time. The pre-Hollywood reminiscences comprise more than half of the book, and with its wealth of details about his life in New York City including the addresses of where he lived, worked, and played, I found the distinctive hook for my research: how the young boy from Omaha became a young man of Manhattan and how both the city and the man were transformed from 1905 to 1933. Astaire credits his friend Noel Coward with suggesting the title for the book, which was released after Astaire made his last full-scale Hollywood musical, Silk Stockings, and had begun his first forays into television and straight acting roles in films such as On the Beach. Apparently draft manuscripts of the autobiography, carrying a different tone, are available to researchers at the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library. If I ever make it to Los Angeles, I hope to peruse that manuscript to learn what Fred decided to redact from the published version.
The next steps in my research involved delving into every other published biography. I discovered more than a dozen. Some were beautifully written homages; others were slapdash affairs with numerous stylistic weaknesses and substantive errors. And at least one was another distinctive analysis of a key feature of Astaire’s artistry.
The first and most fruitful scholarly work that I found at the Library of Congress was a book published in 1997 by Larry Billman: Fred Astaire: A Bio-Bibliography. It is part of a series of Bio-Bibliographies in the performing arts covering nearly every major stage and screen star from the 20th century (including several co-stars of Fred’s, such as Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, and Bing Crosby). I found the book an invaluable starting point for my serious research. It begins with a 28-page biography, and then follows with an annotated bibliography of hundreds of books, magazines, and newspaper articles about Astaire. This gave me a start for doing my own research. I later found several notable omissions and inaccuracies, especially in vaudeville dates, but I had the advantage over Billman of being able to search digitized copies of publications such as Variety and the New York Clipper that were not available when he did his research. Billman also appears to have relied extensively on Ann Astaire’s scrapbooks in archives at Boston University, and there may have been dating errors or omissions in those journals. Consulting those scrapbooks is high on my list for further research.
Benny Green was the author of two significant books about Astaire. The first was his script for a 13-part BBC Radio program titled The Fred Astaire Story, which was broadcast in 1975. Green authored a souvenir program that was sold to accompany the radio series. I found a copy at the Library of Congress, and then my wife, Barbara, was able to purchase a copy of this rarity and gave it to me for Christmas in 2016. The program contains many rare photographs, especially from the vaudeville and Broadway periods. I was later able to hear the full 13-part radio series at Manhattan’s Paley Center. I will describe that experience in a later Substack article.
Around the same time as the BBC series, Stephen Harvey published a short biography of Astaire in 1975, as part of the Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies, a series of dozens of short books about classic Hollywood movie stars published in the mid-1970s during the film nostalgia craze.
Four years after the BBC series, Benny Green used the research for his radio script to pen a 1979 biography of Astaire. Published in a folio format, but not quite hefty enough to be called a coffee-table book, it is lavishly illustrated and contains some interesting quotes from newspaper reviews during the Astaires’ vaudeville years.
The first full-length biography of Astaire was written by Michael Freedland in 1976. Freedland was a BBC entertainment reporter and also wrote biographies of Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, and James Cagney. I found several small errors in his work. Freedland says that Fred was in New York on his 17th birthday when he received an offer to work for the Shuberts. Astaire’s 17th birthday was on May 10, 1916, and my research shows that they were performing in St. Louis on that date. They did not receive a contract with the Shuberts until June 1917, and on Fred’s 18th birthday they were performing in Denver. (I was later able to see the actual Shubert-Astaire contract at The Shubert Archives.) Another error of time and place occurred in Freedland’s reporting on Apple Blossoms, the first big Broadway hit in which the Astaires appeared in 1919. He says they had a trial run for the show in Atlantic City, but my research shows that the out-of-town opening was in Baltimore. Apple Blossoms came to Atlantic City in February 1921 as part of the show’s 1920-21 tour.
Bill Adler’s biography of Astaire was published in 1987, shortly after Fred’s death. Perhaps the speed with which it went to press to capitalize on Astaire’s recent passing explains some of the sloppy editing and research. There are several errors of dates and spelling, but the most egregious was Adler’s confusing Claire Luce, Fred’s lovely co-star in his final Broadway show, The Gay Divorce, with Clare Booth Luce, the author of The Women, the wife of publisher Henry Luce, and a conservative politician.
Also published in 1987 shortly after Astaire’s death and riddled with even more errors than Adler’s book is Tim Satchell’s Astaire: The Biography. Like so many of Astaire’s biographers, Satchell relied heavily on Steps in Time, but he made numerous copying mistakes: misreporting the significant salary increase offered by producer Charles Dillingham to snatch the Astaires from the Shuberts ($350 vs. the $550 reported by Astaire), incorrectly spelling costars’ names, such as “Joe Cawton” instead of “Joe Cawthorn,” and the wrong date for the opening of the Astaires’ first production in England. According to Billman’s commentary, the Astaire family notes similar errors, including the misdating of Adele’s birth and a story about Frederick and Ann Austerlitz having a still-born child before Adele’s birth.
Another coffee table book, but not nearly as comprehensive as Stanley Green’s Starring Fred Astaire was Roy Pickard’s 1985 book with the beautiful Rita Hayworth on the cover. While a lovely book, since it concentrated on his film career, it had limited value to my research focus.
Another mid-1980s biography came from Bob Thomas: The Man, the Dancer, the Life of Fred Astaire. According to Billman this is one of the most balanced of the Astaire biographies, as Astaire uncharacteristically participated in the book. Thomas has written a number of popular biographies of Hollywood celebrities, including stars like Marlon Brando, Bing Crosby, and Joan Crawford, as well as moguls such as Irving Thalberg, Jack Warner, and Harry Cohn. I found some especially useful information about the Astaires’ vaudeville career in Thomas’ book.
Sarah Giles’s book Fred Astaire: His Friends Talk was published in 1988, two years after Astaire’s death. It is a lovely book, filled with pictures not published in other biographies. As the subtitle indicates, it consists primarily of extended quotations from dozens of Astaire friends and colleagues, organized around varied themes. I have found it a good “second level” book adding perspectives and details not found in the straightforward chronological biographies.
There was a drought of nearly 20 years between the Astaire biographies that appeared shortly after his death and one by Peter Levinson published in 2009: Puttin’ on the Ritz: Fred Astaire and the Fine Art of Panache. I found a number of new facts about Astaire’s life both in New York and Hollywood in Levinson’s book. He is the only biographer to report that the Astaires lived in the Hotel Woodward while working for the Shuberts, though he got the address wrong, saying that it was located at Broadway and 51st Street rather than the correct 55th Street. Levinson’s writing career focused on jazz musicians, with biographies of Harry James, Nelson Riddle, and Tommy Dorsey. Levinson died in 2008, with the Astaire bio published posthumously.
What I found to be the most interesting Astaire book is also not a traditional biography but more a close exploration of the role of music in the Astaire mystique: Todd Decker’s Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz published in 2011. Drawing his title from a song in Astaire’s first film with Ginger Rogers – Flying Down to Rio (1932), Decker analyzes Astaire’s career with a focus on the importance of music to his dancing. He covers Astaire’s many recordings from his earliest disc in 1926 to a beautiful two-album collection The Astaire Story done with the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in 1952. If you love good jazz and the Great American Songbook, that album is well worth the search.
Perhaps the best written book about Astaire came from the pen (or rather the keyboard) of one of my favorite contemporary essayists, Joseph Epstein. While better known as a conservative commentator on culture and politics with essays in the New Republic, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal, Epstein often covers other topics. While I didn’t discover any new biographical details in Epstein’s short book, published in 2008, I admired his ability to pull together so much material so eloquently and how deeply he appreciates the varied elements of Astaire’s genius.
I’ll briefly mention two other books. Peter Carrick’s A Tribute to Fred Astaire (1984) is a slim book without much to recommend it. On the other hand, John Franceschina’s Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire (2012) is a well written biography of the choreographer who worked with Astaire on nearly all of his films and became a close friend. While Pan did not work with Astaire during the period I am researching, I did find some interesting oblique connections and enjoyed the book.
After consuming all of these books, what conclusions do I draw?
First, is there any other dancer who has had so many books published about him? I doubt it. That’s clearly a sign of Astaire’s continuing stature among both fans and scholars.
If you have not read any Astaire books, which do I recommend most highly?
Levinson’s Puttin’ on the Ritz is the most comprehensive. Epstein’s is the best written (and shortest). Mueller’s Astaire Dancing can’t be surpassed, if you love the movie musicals and want a deep dive into the dancing. Decker’s Music Makes Me is the most eye (or ear) opening, especially if you are an audiophile. And you can always wait for Young Man of Manhattan to be published or keep reading the serialization in Substack.