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Irene was nothing if not realistic, and she saw that she was never going to make her fortune as an actress. Her real reputation and talent was as a dancer.As early as 920 she was talking about forming a vaudeville act,and that same year she was in negotiations with British producer Charles Cochran about doing a revue in London (the show never came off, and late in the year she sued Cochran for $20,000, alleging breach of contract). In the fall of 92, Irene began auditioning prospective new dance partners. Her trade paper ad was answered by every two-legged man on the East Coast; when Irene entered the rehearsal room, “I felt as though I had walked into a pool hall in the bowery. Such an assortment of oddlooking men I had never seen.” She settled on “a gay little Irishman” named Billy Reardon, recommended by Elsie Janis and described in newspapers as “well-known as a society dancer, having appeared in vaudeville and the more prominent dancing places along Broadway.” Just as important were her choreographers , the brother-and-sister act Fred and Adele Astaire.The Astaires had recently closed in the successful operetta Apple Blossoms and were in rehearsal for The Love Letter (which opened and closed like a camera shutter in October 92). Already big Castles fans, the Astaires were delighted to take on the new project.“They were a tremendous influence in our careers,” recalled Fred Astaire,“not that we copied them completely, but we did appropriate some of their ballroom steps and style for our vaudeville act.” Irene hired pianist Dodo Hupfeld as her accompanist and laid in a selection of dancing frocks from Lucile (by 923, she switched loyalties to French couturier Molyneaux). She signed with producer B. F. Keith, who had presided over Vernon and Irene’s 94 tour. Keith and his much-feared associate E. F. Albee ran, by the time Irene encountered them, the United CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN  “JAZZ, JAZZ, JAZZ! . . . THE PARADINGS OF SAVAGES” 224 VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE’S RAGTIME REVOLUTION Booking Office, which held a virtual monopoly on vaudeville. Irene, under her new UBO contract, opened in Boston in November. Life intruded, as it has a way of doing. Irene’s mother had suffered a series of strokes in late 92 and early 922.After several months as a homebound invalid, she died on May , 922. Irene collapsed at her bedside and, according to her son, never really recovered from her mother’s passing; she burned their correspondence, feeling it was too painful to keep and too personal to be read by anyone else.“It was hard to go on without my mother ,” she wrote decades later. “Her passing represented the end of the beauty and graciousness of an era she carried with her.” Indeed, Vernon Castle and Annie Elroy Thomas left the scene just as the loosely termed belle epoque came to an end, and the Jazz Age began. Irene and the Jazz Age would never become friends. Not only had music and dance changed with the advent of the 920s, but New York and its cabaret culture, the world ushered in by the Castles, had faded away, too. Prohibition crippled many of the cabarets and dancefriendly restaurants. As the styles in dance and music changed, the old clubs seemed passé, and by the early 920s, they were being replaced by speakeasies. For every one of the “jay cabarets, gay cabarets” that Julian Street had complained about back in the early 90s, there sprang up two or three “speaks”: many of them dark, claustrophobic joints like the shortlived Sans Souci Irene had hated so. If Miss 1917 and being upstaged by Ann Pennington had made Irene feel old, she soon also started sounding old, and occasionally a bit of a prude. As early as 99 she was telling the Toledo Times, “Without wishing to appear narrow minded [never a good way to begin an interview], I believe that the shimmie and jazz are both improper and awkward.” The Castle walk had been left in the dust, and Irene was not going to take it like a good sport. “Jazz music makes them forget to really dance and they abandon themselves to unusual rhythm.” Irene was all of twenty-six years old, but she already sounded like a dowager glaring through a lorgnette.“It is a mistake for a woman to go uncorseted,” she complained of the 920s...

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