Tapping into his talent

review

Biography examines Astaire's work as a dancer-singer and his partnership with Rogers

Fred Astaire

by Joseph Epstein

Yale University Press / 224 pages / $22

Fred Astaire, writes Joseph Epstein, the veteran critic and essayist, "was the very model ... of the democratic dandy, itself an innovative figure." He adds that G. Bruce Boyer called Astaire in his movie roles "the democratic ideal: a classless aristocrat." If T.S. Eliot calling the mature Henry James "a European of no known country" isn't the same thing, it's close enough.

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. (His sister Adele, his first partner, went him one better by marrying a son of the duke of Devonshire.)

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." Ginger Rogers told Family Circle magazine: "I thought I knew what concentrated work was before I met Fred, but he's the limit. Never satisfied until every detail is right, and he will not compromise. No sir! What's more, if he thinks of something better after you've finished a routine, you do it over."

But without that 1 percent inspiration, the perspiration is just sweat. Astaire had the inspiration, too. 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.