23 FASCINATING RHYTHM: FRED ASTAIRE AND THE DANCE-HALL BOOM
Astaire and Rogers were fortunate: they embodied the swing music, white telephone, streamline era before the Second World War, when frivolousness wasn’t decadent and when adolescents dreamed that ‘going out’ was dressing up and becoming part of a beautiful world of top hats and silver lamé.
Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
By 1935 dancing was becoming a lyrical preoccupation, and this was mostly down to one emaciated man with thinning hair and a jutting chin who just happened to have a very nimble tread: Fred Astaire. ‘The dancing crowds look up to some rare male’, wrote Lorenz Hart in awe, ‘like that Astaire male.’ Their popularity had been bubbling on the screen for a while, but it wasn’t until 1935 that RKO realised they had box-office gold in Astaire and his partner, Ginger Rogers. Later on he would dance with better dancers (Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth) and more charismatic actresses (Judy Garland, Betty Hutton), but none of them was Ginger, none of them looked quite as happy to be dancing with Fred.
Tin Pan Alley began writing for a situation in which the hero was always about to break into a dance. Luckily for the writers, Astaire had a voice that was adaptable and likeable, breezy even, the perfect blackboard for George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter to draw character sketches on. He was the embodiment of the new sounds on the east and west coasts. Urban and urbane, he would never have touched the novelty songs, country corn or Irish tear-jerkers that Bing dotted throughout his catalogue. He was pure top hat, white tie and tails. His only question was, ‘Shall We Dance’. He could also be smoothly seductive: there is passion in ‘Night and Day’ and ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’. George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘Slap That Bass’, from the 1937 Fred and Ginger vehicle Shall We Dance, had an ahead-of-its-time call-and-response levity (‘Well, slap my face!’); much more in thrall to rhythm than melody, it anticipates Louis Jordan, or even the more riotous Prince items like ‘Housequake’ (‘Shut up already, damn!’). Astaire sings like a dancer. Most often he would calmly communicate the lyric, the story, with the minimum of fuss and the friendliest of dispositions. He was a lyric writer’s dream.
Top Hat (1935) was the film that heralded a new age of dance halls and available urban sophistication. It was there from the start in the art deco font of the titles, with Astaire swapping the stuffy gentlemen’s club for a sparse modernist apartment in the opening scene. The storyline was a minor comedy of misunderstandings. Astaire reckoned: ‘It certainly is escapist fare, but it’s timeless. It’s certainly going to hold up.’ Its songs – ‘Cheek to Cheek’, ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)’, ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’ – came from Irving Berlin. ‘I’ve seen several of my pictures previewed and thought they were terrible,’ fussed Berlin. ‘You take Top Hat – we went to Santa Barbara for the preview, and I thought the thing was a complete flop. But after it opened, we knew what we had.’ What they had was the world on a string, a modern American world that looked like a beautiful, possible tomorrow, a necessarily hopeful one given the grim economic news and even worse from continental Europe.
Pretty quickly, people would become nostalgic for this future that never arrived. In 1946 Blue Skies teamed Astaire with Bing Crosby, with a score, again, by Berlin. It was flagged in detail at the beginning of the film that the story took place in the mid-1930s, as if to emphasise how much Berlin had soundtracked the era. There were a few new songs, notably ‘You Keep Coming Back Like a Song’ (it’s hard to think of a more self-referential film), but it was most memorable for a rewrite of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, which had been a best-seller for Harry Richman in 1931.
In Blue Skies the song belonged to Astaire (Richman’s version is all but forgotten), and he had a dance routine to match. He moved in slow motion; he toyed with his cane, alternately playfully and violently; he made it look effortless and graceful, but at the same time was clearly at full stretch, challenging anyone to match his technique. One reason for this ferocity was that Astaire intended it to be his last Hollywood performance: now forty-seven, and with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland hot on his heels, he didn’t want to cut corners or fade away; he wanted to leave the world remembering possibly his greatest dance routine.
The suave modernism of Top Hat wasn’t confined entirely to Hollywood. The London revue Spread It Abroad (1936) featured one of the most romantic and sensuous songs of the decade. ‘These Foolish Things’ was a ‘list song’, the kind that Cole Porter had mastered with ‘You’re the Top’ (‘You’re Mahatma Gandhi!’) in 1934, and which the Gershwins would lampoon beautifully (‘the way you sing off key’) in 1937 with ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’. It had been written by relative unknowns Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey. Maschwitz, born in London to Lithuanian parents, also worked under the name of Holt Marvell and had been a BBC radio producer and the editor of the Radio Times. He was dating the Chinese American film star Anna May Wong – feline star of 1929’s silent, Limehouse-set shocker Piccadilly – at the time he wrote ‘These Foolish Things’. Quite the Jazz Age playboy, he had also had a dalliance with the writer Jean Ross, Christopher Isherwood’s model for his ‘divinely decadent’ Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin.
The equally dapper, dashing Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson made ‘These Foolish Things’ a smash, a Grenada-born British star who also led a divinely decadent life: before he had even moved to Britain, his lovers had included Cole Porter, Merle Oberon and Tallulah Bankhead. He made his name in London by playing after-hours private parties for society’s aristocratic bright young things. With this crowd, Hutch would slip into an Oxford-educated accent; with friends, he used American slang. He may have been the epitome of mid-1930s style, but there had to be more than one Hutch to fit into a country that viewed him as not just a talented singer but an exotic creature. A terribly handsome man, women would pass their cards to him backstage, and he didn’t hesitate in following up with a dalliance; he would eventually father seven children by six different mothers. But when he performed in Liverpool, a city with one of Britain’s larger black communities, he had to use the rear entrance to the hotel where he was playing. He wasn’t even allowed a room there.
When Hutch visited Eric Maschwitz’s studio one afternoon in 1935, searching for new material before a Parlophone recording session, he found the sheet music to ‘These Foolish Things’ on top of Maschwitz’s piano. He picked it up, played it through and asked if he could use it. Within weeks it was simply known as ‘Hutch’s song’; within a year it had been recorded by Carroll Gibbons, Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson (with Billie Holiday) and Benny Goodman. Before Hutch happened to pick it up, Maschwitz had spent two years just trying to get it published.
Hutch’s voice was slick, tremulous but powerful, and on his versions of ‘Begin the Beguine’ or ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ you can hear an emotional richness that was largely absent from British singers of the era and closer to the French chanson singers. His fame even survived a media furore around his affair with Lady Mountbatten (who had first seen him in New York and had convinced him to come over to London). At least it seemed like he had survived: he would never receive any acknowledgement for the work he did entertaining the forces in World War II, was shunned by high society, and would eventually die poor and largely forgotten in 1969. Such is the snide way racism in Britain can operate, almost invisible but more than obvious to the victim. Accompanying himself on the piano, Hutch was captured in the full flower of his fame by a Pathé news team in 1933, singing Irving Berlin’s ‘How Deep Is the Ocean’ at London’s Café Malmaison. It is a remarkably intense performance. The clip survives, but sadly a 1965 TV appearance on a show called That’s for Me, hosted by Annie Nightingale, on which Hutch performed alongside Lulu and Cleo Laine, has been wiped. How strange to think of Hutch and Annie Nightingale, symbols of such totally separate eras, sharing a TV studio.
Like Hutch, American session players came over to Britain and stayed – too many of them, according to the Musicians’ Union, which argued that British musicians were losing out. In March 1935 Melody Maker ran with the headline ‘NO AMERICAN BANDS NEED APPLY’: ‘Whatever plans may now be hatching to bring any American bands to this country, for any class of work whatsoever, are likely to be completely frustrated as a result of an entirely new policy adopted by the Ministry of Labour. The immediate effect will be to veto projected visits on the part of Duke Ellington’s Band and Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians.’ The American musicians’ union did likewise. The cross-fertilisation between British and American bands came to an end and, the war aside, American bands weren’t seen here again until the 1950s.
Other than Top Hat, maybe the most significant musical event of 1935 was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences coming up with the Best Original Song Written for a Motion Picture category at the Oscars. The first winner was ‘The Continental’, a wonderful swish of a song from another Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicle, The Gay Divorcee. 1935’s best song, awarded the following year, turned out to be Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s ‘Lullaby of Broadway’, beating Berlin’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’ (from Top Hat) and Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh’s ‘Lovely to Look At’ (from Roberta). It was a worthy winner, sung by Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler as the soundtrack to Busby Berkeley’s beautifully bogus version of Broadway, Gold Diggers of 1935. Actor George Raft called it ‘something to wipe out the dirty smell of Depression. All you had to do in those days was go to a movie and Berkeley could do the rest: give you a date with a great-looking dame; give you a top hat and tails; put plenty of green stuff in your pocket; and get you to hit all the right joints on the Great White Way.’ Crooners emerged from waterfalls; chorus girls created the shape of a daffodil. Of course, Berkeley’s Hollywood was choking the life out of Broadway. But the clubs and dance halls were full, and the next wave of new music meant theatres and cinemas, too, would soon be bursting at the seams with dancers.