In 1933 Fred Astaire, a successful young dancer and comedian on the Broadway and London stage, made what turned out to be a decision that altered not merely his life but American popular culture: He left the stage and went to Hollywood, making two films — “Dancing Lady” and “Flying Down to Rio” — that almost immediately established him as a far bigger star. Those movies were just the beginning. Astaire went on to form a stupendously popular dancing partnership with Ginger Rogers, then briefer but not much less luminous ones with Cyd Charisse and Barrie Chase. Probably for as long as people watch movies, Astaire will be synonymous with grace, sophistication and what Kathleen Riley calls “ardent gallantry, restrained yearnings, self-deprecation, and self-confidence.”
What much of the moviegoing world does not realize is that Astaire had a remarkable life before Hollywood, one in which his dancing partner was his sister Adele. She left the stage in March 1932 to marry an Englishman, Lord Charles Cavendish, and pretty much disappeared from view. Today her name is probably best known to crossword-puzzle solvers, for whom the clue “Dancing Astaire” must be answered with “Adele” when five letters are available.
Unlike her brother, who left a vast archive of films, television appearances and — by no means least — superb recordings of the dozens of classic American songs that were written for him by the likes of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and others, Adele left almost no trail beyond the memories of those who saw her onstage, most of whom by now are dead. You can, and should, go to YouTube and listen to her and Fred singing“Fascinating Rhythm” — with powerful piano accompaniment by George Gershwin (!) — but that’s about it.
So it is good to have Riley’s “The Astaires: Fred & Adele,” a labor of love by an Australian scholar of the theater who is far too young to have seen or heard Fred and Adele when they were a team but for whom they are “a pair of performers who have held a powerful fascination over my imagination from childhood.” She writes:
“The story of the Astaires conjures up a vanished world. Born at the close of the nineteenth century, they, in effect, grew up together with the next century. Manifestly children of their time, they glamorously embodied the interwar style they had partly invented. At the same time, their appeal as performers, particularly in London, was based largely on their apparent defiance of the darker aspects of the interwar psyche, their modernism free of modernist angst. . . . The story of Fred and Adele Astaire is an extraordinary one and deserves to be told for its own sake and not merely as the prologue to Fred’s more famous solo career.”
Adele arrived first, in September 1896, followed 21/2 years later by Fred. They were born into circumstances with none of the devil-may-care joy that became one of their many urbane trademarks. Their birthplace was Omaha. Their father was Fritz Austerlitz, a luckless immigrant from Austria who loved his children deeply but moved from one unrewarding job to another; their mother, Johanna Gelius, was a second-generation Austrian American who became her children’s “manager, costumer, tutor, and constant companion” after a local dance instructor recognized the children’s gifts and urged that they be developed. Amazingly, in January 1905, when Adele was 8 and Fred 5, they were taken to New York and settled there with Anna (as their mother was known) as chaperone and home-schooler. It’s not clear how Fritz was able to underwrite this expensive and risky step, but somehow he did.
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