The man who wasn't there

WHO was Fred Astaire? A dancer and singer, he starred in 32 Hollywood musicals along with other films, beginning during the Depression in the early 1930s and continuing until shortly before his death in 1987. Although the titles of many of those films are now forgotten, there are also a handful of works that can justly be called unforgettable, including “Swing Time”, “Shall We Dance?” and his masterpiece, “Top Hat”. In almost all of his most memorable works Astaire was partnered by Ginger Rogers, a lesser artist who by temperament and adaptive talent somehow managed to be both match and foil. None of the films was burdened with plot, dialogue or characterisation that could be called credible. What they did display was a dizzying record of what the choreographer George Balanchine called “the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times.”

So that is who he was. Yet look a little harder and Astaire begins to disappear. Born Frederick Austerlitz in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1899, his background was painfully modest: his story reads like the plot of a Broadway musical about a simple provincial boy who makes it in a Broadway musical. There was a serially unsuccessful immigrant father (“a bit of a bust” is how Joseph Epstein describes him in this book), and a doggedly ambitious mother fixated on show business. It was a gruelling childhood and, later in life, Astaire would just say that he didn't want to talk about it.