Fred Astaire by Michael Freedland

W.H. Allen, 1976,  270 pages.

It can be easily said that in the life of Fred Astaire one can chart the evolution of entertainment in the 20th century. Mr. Astaire, one of the century's greatest entertainers, was born in May, 1899 and his career went from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood, with several memorable stops in radio and television. In every way he came to epitomize the transitory nature of the industry of entertainment: it changes in accordance with the times and woe to the entertainer who does not try to change with it. This was not Fred Astaire, as Michael Freedland easily demonstrates in his informative, if slightly pedantic, biography.


Now out of print, Mr. Freedland's account was an unauthorized biography written while Mr. Astaire was still alive (Fred Astaire died ten years later). Although Mr. Freedland acknowledges a merry band of informants in his introduction, there is little evidence of it in the book and much of this biography reads as a jaunty entry in an encyclopedia - Fred danced like this, then he filmed that, then he danced like this again. It could be said to be a public biography in which Mr. Freedland, like the gossips and journalists of the days he's writing about, tries to pierce through the wall of privacy Fred Astaire erected around his life.

Thus, although we know he had a happy marriage, there is only conjecture regarding what went on behind the scenes; similarily, we are given nothing of his romantic or personal life that could not be gleaned from newspapers and magazines at the time. Mr. Freedland had a tough assignment in this book, for even in his own autobiography ("Steps in Time"), Fred Astaire is noticeably reticent about his private life. His anathema to being reinterpreted by biographers and artists even led to him inserting a clause in his will in which he forbid anyone from ever portraying him on film. (Consequently, in the wildly inaccurate film version of George Gershwin's life, one of Mr. Gershwin's young dancer friends remained without name).

What one takes away from Mr. Freedland's book, then, is a great respect for Fred Astaire, both for his immense talent and for the way he successfully balanced his professional and personal life. The 20th century is filled with tales of celebrities whose private lives become front page news, yet Fred Astaire managed to weather the storm and emerge largely unscathed. Some artists leave behind a legacy of personal troubles that overshadow their work, but when Fred Astaire died of pneumonia in 1987, he bequeathed to the world nothing but his art. There can be nothing more satisfying to any artist. A perfectionist, Mr. Astaire treated every project as if his career depended on it and today, almost twenty-five years after his death, his work remains as impressive as it ever was.

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