Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s

9. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: Modernizing Class

196 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 9 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Modernizing Class ADAM KNEE The screen partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was, with one exception, entirely limited to films of the 1930s, after which both actors had prolific and successful individual careers lasting many decades—and yet the star image of each has remained strongly informed by association with the other. This is in some sense understandable, in that it was their initial coupling in 1933 that gave birth to the high visibility and success of their film careers, with the pair, as a pair, being ranked among the top ten moneymaking stars in a wide survey of theater exhibitors (the Fred Astaire. Collection Adrienne L. McLean. Ginger Rogers. Movie Star News. Quigley Poll) in 1935, 1936, and 1937 (Jewell, Golden Age 268–69). But this fact raises the question, addressed in much of the scholarship on the couple, of why they seemed to resonate with their contemporary audiences and what made their particular teaming click.1 I argue that Astaire and Rogers projected the image of a distinctly modern American couple, not only in their style but in their implicit social attitudes, which, while not radical, nevertheless had a modern openness and progressiveness. For all their onscreen perfection and success, there was a welcoming, ordinary, nonexclusive dimension to their star images; as Arlene Croce describes it, “they were the two most divinely usual people in the history of movies” (171). The sense of a paradoxical ordinariness in combination with certain exceptional qualities is most evident in the reception of Fred Astaire, whose slight build and lack of conventional handsomeness or sex appeal were from time to time commented upon in the press, for example in a characteristic Atlanta Journal feature that wonders at the popularity among female fans of an actor whom the paper describes as “one of the homeliest men on the screen” (“Homeliest Star Is Favorite,” 25 August 1935, 7). But the negative connotations of these characteristics are negotiated through discourses about athleticism, supreme dancing skills, perfectionism, and personality. Astaire is described as “slight” but also as having a “trim” build that is carefully maintained, and a work ethic (reported in numerous articles) that drives him to hours of rehearsal and many takes of dance numbers. His skill and personality, along with his debonairness and grace, are regularly posited as what dominate in the impression he gives, rather than his atypical physique. This kind of negotiation is evident, for example, in a Spectator review (15 February 1936) of Follow the Fleet (1936): “There is no one else like [Astaire] on the screen. He lacks a stalwart frame and manly beauty to make him physically arresting as something good to look at. But he has a purely masculine personality more charming than any other actor can boast, a fine sense of comedy values, a pleasant singing voice and knowledge of how to use it, and matchless grace in every movement he makes. . . . He makes us like him, and therefore we like everything he does.” On a similar tack, regarding the actor’s unconventionality as a romantic lead, a Hollywood Citizen News review of the same film notes, “Astaire, whose homeliness seems to emphasize his personality, would be ridiculous in passionate love scenes, but on the other hand he projects romance of a different caliber. He is never a lover, but always is romantic” (24 February 1936). Yet other publications more directly assert Astaire’s sex appeal, such as a Modern Screen profile which, with self-deprecating humor, emphasizes how the female staff of that publication swoon over Astaire (“the gray suit FRED ASTAIRE AND GINGER ROGERS 197 he wears,” the profile tells us, “is benefited by the fact that he wears it, by the lean, active lines his body lends it”) (“Much Ado over Astaire,” November 1935, 75). It is perhaps evidence of a growing awareness that Astaire possessed a certain kind of sex appeal that, while he is not figured as irresistible to women in his earlier films, in both his first solo outing, the underappreciated A Damsel in Distress (1937), and in his follow-up with Rogers again, Carefree (1938), there are repeated references to his immediate and strong appeal to women (on Astaire’s unconventional looks and unconventional appeal, see also Goldensohn 69–71). Although Ginger Rogers’s physical appeal required far less explanation and qualification, one of the...