Memo from a Dancing Master: transcript of a Fred Astaire interview in Picture Play magazine, 1940

A wee while ago I wrote a post about a fantastic interview with Fred Astaire that I discovered in an old copy of Picture Play magazine from May 1940.

I had a request from a reader (a big Astaire fan) for a transcript of the article. So ... here it is!


Memo from a Dancing Master

Interview with Fred Astaire
By Wilbur Morse, Jr.
In Picture Play magazine, May 1940

“You,” said the blond young lady with the black bow in her hair, “are only slightly less awkward than an elephant hobbled by a three-inch chain.

“Before you venture on the dance floor again, you should take a gymnasium course in co-ordination and … sit through the next five Fred Astaire movies nine times each!”

Even though the orchestra was playing her favorite tune, she flounced off the floor, picked up her coat from the table and paraded to the street as huffily as a pigeon picketing a peanut stand.

We parted at her door without the usual amenities and I walked morosely toward the East River. On the way to the pier from which I proposed to leap with a technique that if not graceful at least would merit tabloid headlines, I passed an all-night lunch stand. A draft of warm java would bolster my courage for the dire deed I contemplated. So I went in, and while brooding over my coffee, my eye fell on an early-morning newspaper paragraph announcing that Fred Astaire was in Manhattan for a few days on his way to a Florida vacation.

Maybe … maybe all was not as hopeless as I feared. Maybe, if he would only isten to my story–

“The first thing you want to realize is that dancing is fun, it’s not something to get all tense and strained and tied up in knots about. Dancing is a relaxation, not a drudgery!”

Fred Astaire leaned back comfortably on the green divan in the MGM office and eyed me, he petitioner for terpsichorean tutoring, and continued:

“The chief thing is self-confidence. Don’t be afraid to try anything. Try it and you find that it comes easier with each successive start.”

I asked Fred if he thought it best to practice new steps in the privacy of your best girl’s parlor or whether it was all right to experiment on the dance floor.

“Why not?” he answered. “Most people won’t notice you, anyway, and you’re apt to get going with a new or difficult step a lot more rapidly on the dance floor, where you feel you have to keep moving.

“However, one of my first rules is don’t be conspicuous. I mean that if everyone else is doing a quiet, modified fox trot, don’t go into an acrobatic jitterbug stomp. Not that jitterbugging doesn’t have its place. I’m half jitterbug myself–and definitely all for it.

“But let’s start from the very beginning. When you get up to dance, don’t grip your partner as if you were trying to get a jujitsu hold. You don’t strangle a golf club,” smiled the dancing star who is one of the film colony’s most enthusiastic golfers, “you grip it easily to get a free swing. The same thing applies to the proper way to hold a girl. Relax.

“Particularly, don’t hold the girl’s arm bent over backward, like a pump handle, so that she is thrown away back and off balance.”

“Where should your right hand be, on her shoulder or her waist?”

Fred jumped to his feet and motioned the mustachioed press agent to stand opposite him.

“Let’s see,” said Fred, and took a dancing pose. “Let me see where I hold a partner.” His right arm formed a curve. “Yes, that’s it. Just above the small of the back. Not too high, and especially not too low.

“Don’t start right out from the first step as if you were going to a fire, whirling, spinning and giving it everything you’ve got. Ease into it. Give your partner a little while to adjust herself to your style of dancing.

“And on the subject of spinning and whirling, beware of the spinner who doesn’t know when to stop. Spin if you must, three of four times. Girls say they like it, but don’t try for marathon records every time you turn.

“Keep one eye peeled on your course. There is no one more objectionable on the dance floor than the man who doesn’t watch where he is going and is continually bumping into other couples. But when, inadvertently, you step on your own partner’s foot, don’t go into a wordy apology. Chances are that a little later she’ll step on you, and then she’ll feel she has to apologize and that Gaston-and-Alphonse act could go on indefinitely.

“Don’t feel you have to keep up a flowing conversation every minute you’re on the dance floor. Save your sparkling line until you get back to your table.

“And don’t sing in your partner’s ear unless you have a very good voice. Even then, don’t!”

Fred had several other commandments regarding small talk on the dance floor, and these, he said, applied to members of the chatty sex.

“Don’t,” Fred advised girls who would be popular, “ever tell a man who cuts in on you what a good dancer your last partner was. In fact, never tell any man he’s a good dancer. If he is, he knows it. If he isn’t, you make him all the more self-conscious.

“Don’t try to conduct a conversation with some other couple halfway across the dance floor. If you simply must, wait until you are within elbow distance.

“When you are getting up from your table to dance, don’t stop and go into lengthy greetings at another table, on your way to the floor, leaving your partner like a dead duck out there on the edge of the floor.”

These were several niceties that Fred insisted should be observed at private parties. When a girl refuses a dance to one man she should sit out the rest of that dance and not go right off to the floor in the arms of another more acceptable partner. A man, when he is cut in on, should not cut right back in until at least one other man from the stag line has broken in on the partner to whom he has surrendered his girl.

At proms and other parties, where the music is playing almost continuously, it is up to the girl just how many encores a couple should dance. “But,” cautions Fred, “the girl should suggest at reasonable intervals that they retire from the floor for a rest or intermission.”

Fred’s favorite music, he said, is a fast fox trot. He is not very partial to the waltz. “I guess I’m strictly a swing man,” he said.

I asked Fred if he had ever deliberately designed a dance for one of his pictures with an eye to its becoming a fad.

“Once,” he replied, “and then the results were disappointing. In ‘Carefree’, Ginger Rogers and I created the ‘Yam,’ thinking it might become popular. It was a comparably simple step in which I tried to get the beat of the drums,” and as he spoke he began to move across the narrow office floor in the rhythmic pattern of the “Yam,” a sort of pigeon-toed strut, step-step–step-step–step-step-step-step-step; a one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four-five count.

His heels beat a drumlike tattoo on the rug, his whole body moving straight ahead in an easy rhythm. “But”–and Fred resumed his seat–“all anyone seemed to remember of the dance was the end, in which I whirled Ginger over table tops and chairs for a flash finale. Several dancing teachers said, ‘How can Fred expect us to adapt a dance for ballroom which takes a whole stage for Ginger and himself to do?’

“As a matter of fact, there are not many dances originated on the screen which are picked up and adapted to ballroom use. Designed as spectacles they cannot be fitted into the confines of the ordinary floor.

“Ginger and I did two dances which were picked up somewhat, the ‘Carioca’ and the ‘Continental,’ and in my newest picture, ‘Broadway Melody of 1940,’ Eleanor Powell and I do a dance which may be adapted to ballroom dancing. It is our interpretation of the Beguine, a variation of the Cuban dance which Eleanor and I worked out for Cole Porter’s lovely tune, ‘Begin the Beguine.’ A lot of it is pretty involved, almost semiballet, but there are other steps in it which might do on the dance floor.

“The main thing about it is its unusual tempo, a modification of the rumba tempo that is becoming so popular these days. Any couple can create their own steps to it, the chief requisite being to get smoothness into the dance above all else.”

What his next dance creation would be, Fred could not tell. He has no immediate plans for his next production. His contract with RKO-Radio, where all the musicals in which he was costarred with Ginger Rogers were made, has terminated, and his ticket with MGM, where he just made “Broadway Melody of 1940” with Eleanor Powell and George Murphy, was for only one film. As a free lance, Fred hopes for better stories.

“Who,” I asked, “are the best dancers in Hollywood?”

Fred Astaire named Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Eleanor Powell and Ginger Rogers as the most graceful among the girls; Randolph Scott, James Cagney, Cesar Romero, and–surprise surprise!–Mickey Rooney as the best dancers who start with their left foot.

P.S.: Last night I took out the girl who wears the black bow in her hair and we went dancing again. This time we lingered at her door for the usual amenities. I guess my footwork has improved. Or maybe it was the autographed picture I gave her of Fred Astaire!