Coming Sunday in The Sun: Fred Astaire
This Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, you'll find a review of Fred Astaire by Joseph Epstein, (Yale University Press/224 pages/$22). Here's a review excerpt:
Fred Astaire, writes Joseph Epstein, the veteran critic and essayist, "was the very model ... of the democratic dandy, itself an innovative figure." ... Astaire’s career is full of paradoxes like these. Born in 1899 in Omaha, Neb., to a struggling immigrant Austrian father (he was born Frederick Austerlitz II), he had a rougher childhood than the self-consciously proletarian Gene Kelly, on the road with his mother and sister while his father sent what support he could.
Yet he grew up to dress like, and hobnob with, European royalty — and befriend horse jockeys as well — while playing a classic American regular guy. ... Astaire’s singing voice was no better, by the standards of the time, than his looks, but, Epstein writes, he changed popular-singing style from operatic to intimate, and "added a touch of eastern seaboard upper class to the proceedings."
Astaire never claimed to be more than a popular entertainer, but "the great dancers and choreographers of the 20th century all agreed on Fred Astaire’s brilliance." What made all this possible? Epstein refuses to call Astaire a genius, but Thomas Edison’s definition of it fits Astaire: "1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." ...
Perceptive and subtle as Epstein always is, he admits that analyzing Astaire’s inspiration is like trying to analyze magic, but he does his considerable best. "The root and base" of Astaire’s talent, Epstein writes, "... was an astonishing feeling for rhythm. ... Because Fred Astaire heard the music better than anyone else, he danced better to it than anyone else."
And the entertainment world was moving his way. Movie musicals were changing from the mass choreography of Busby Berkeley (skewered once and for all by Mel Brooks’ rotating swastika in the original Producers) to a close-up style that favored Astaire’s kind of dancing. And he sang with such precision and expressiveness that the great generation of American songwriters — Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, the Gershwins — loved to work with him.
Epstein’s strengths show best when he explains why Astaire achieved immortality with Rogers, whom he doesn’t seem to have liked much, instead of with better dancers like Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell or Cyd Charisse. ... Besides having the perfect size build, and age for Astaire, Rogers had the perfect screen personality for him. "She was a beautiful doll," wrote Sheilah Graham, "who looked innocent and very happy." She fit Astaire’s dancing, which is, as Epstein says, "energetic, joyous, honest delight."
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
