Dancing Girl

No. 1 current trend in U. S. cinema is biography. Biographical cinema got off to a good start three years ago when Warner Bros. made The Story of Louis Pasteur, followed it with The Life of Emile Zola. At Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl Zanuck played up the vogue with such million-dollar footnotes to history as Lloyd's of London, In Old Chicago, Suez, Jesse James and Alexander Graham Bell.

Production schedules for this spring and summer read like headings in an encyclopedia. Every major studio has at least one biography already in production, more on the production line. Under way are Young Mr. Lincoln, Stanley and Livingstone, Beethoven, Man of Conquest (Sam Houston), Man in the Iron Mask, Juarez, Brigham Young, Knute Rockne. Promised for next season are Mme Curie, Thomas Edison, Rudolph Valentino, Steinmetz, Lillian Russell, Simon Bolivar, Nobel. Last week the first spring shoot of this bumper crop appeared on U. S. screens. The biggest job to date of Hollywood's sole socialite director, Henry Codman ("Hank") Potter, it is a $1,500,000 close-up of Irene and Vernon Castle, produced by RKO Radio's Pandro Berman with 1) the advice of one of its biographees, 2) the eminently suitable talent of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

The Castles' career was a preview of subsequent Hollywood story patterns. They literally became famous overnight. It was a night in March 1911, in Paris. There & then, at the Cafe de Paris, they launched the dancing era by performing to the extraordinary sounds of Too Much Mustard. Within the next five years, the Castles became by far the most celebrated dancing personages of their era. They popularized the Maxixe, the One-Step, the Castle Walk. They opened a chain of four ballrooms and made about $15,000 a week. When Irene Castle bobbed her hair, a million other U. S. women aped her. Vernon Castle enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. When he was killed in a crash at Fort Worth, Tex., on Feb. 15, 1918, the Castles' career became a legend, commemorated by a dance craze that is not over yet.

The Castles starts when Vernon (Fred Astaire) is working as stooge in a revue sketch with Lew Fields (Lew Fields). When he meets Irene Foote (Ginger Rogers), daughter of a New Rochelle doctor, he is first horrified by her amateurish version of Bessie McCoy's Yama Yama dance, then by her brash assumption, after watching him cut loose with a few tap steps on the station platform, that the future holds more for him than a putty nose and a wig.

The sensation of the Castles' debut a year later is adroitly prefaced with sequences showing Vernon Castle teaching his new wife his routine and then failing utterly to impress Fields; the genesis of the tip-toe Castle Walk, designed not to disturb the occupants of the Paris apartment below their own; and their meeting with Maggie Sutton (Edna May Oliver), who gets them their first engagement in return for a dinner.

Without catering to the jitterbug trade, The Castles modernizes somewhat the mood of daring pre-War dances which would seem shockingly sedate to modern audiences. It does so, however, without demolishing their charm and elegance. The songs that tinkle across the sound track--In My Merry Oldsmobile, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, Oh, You Beautiful Doll and a dozen others--are calculated to evoke an era when alligators lived only in swamps, or zoos. And they succeed so completely that when Vernon Castle's plane crashes at Fort Worth, even the inevitable closing shot, in which Irene tells the band to keep on playing, acquires dignity.

American Girl. To say that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are well fitted to fill the Castles' dancing slippers is an understatement. Astaire and Rogers symbolize their era quite as completely as the Castles symbolized theirs. Astaire, born Austerlitz in Omaha, is eleven years younger than Vernon Castle. With his sister Adele, now Lady Cavendish, he was the top U. S. stage dancer of the 1920s. With Ginger Rogers he has been the top cinema dancer of the 1930s. In popularity, proficiency, appearance and earning capacity, Ginger Rogers is at least the equal of Irene Castle in her best days.

And Ginger Rogers has one overwhelming advantage over Irene Castle: the cinema. Although she is now a worldwide legend, only a few thousand people saw Irene Castle dance. The Wartime movies which The Castles shows her making were not a tremendous success. When Rogers and Astaire first danced together in Flying Down to Rio, movie producers were still apprehensive that audiences would not be enthusiastic about full-length dances on the screen. Rogers and Astaire light-footedly kicked that apprehension into a cocked hat, and in the process (eight pictures) have grossed a total of $18,000.000 for RKO. Irene Castle had her thousands of admirers, Ginger Rogers has her millions.

Ginger Rogers has glamor, acting ability and a pair of lyric legs. But her outstanding quality as a movie star is a frank and homegrown air which both U. S. and foreign audiences recognize as essentially American. In spite of her two marriages (moderate for Hollywood) she represents the American Girl, 1939 model--alert, friendly, energetic, elusive. Less eccentric than Carole Lombard, less worldly-wise than Myrna Loy, less impudent than Joan Blondell, she has a careless self-sufficiency which they lack. As a dancer, Ginger Rogers has been immensely improved by her association with Astaire, who works out the routines for most of their numbers, then teaches them to her. She now has no screen rivals.

Miss McMath. Ginger Rogers was born in Independence, Mo. on July 16, 1911, just about the time Irene Castle was starting her U. S. career. Before Ginger was born, her mother, Mrs. Lela Emogene Owens McMath, took to visiting art galleries and other prenatal pastures. She did this because she was convinced that she was about to bestow something unusual on the world, and while not sure of the effects of prenatal influences, she did not wish to miss any bets. Mrs. McMath's premonitions were confirmed. As soon as she had given birth to her daughter, she visited a local photographer who made a portrait of mother and child. This turned out so well that an enlargement of it entitled Modern Madonna was hung in the Missouri State Building at Jefferson City.

Ginger Rogers was named Virginia Katherine McMath. Shortly after her birth, her mother separated from her electrical engineer husband, Eddins McMath, and, taking small Ginger, went to Kansas City, where she got a $9-a-week job as typist in Montgomery Ward. Thereafter Ginger's childhood was nomadic. Jobs took her mother all over the country but always nearer the movies. In 1919, Mrs. McMath, by this time divorced, married a Dallas insurance man named John Rogers. In 1922 the family moved to Fort Worth.

One of the indirect consequences of the dance craze launched by the Castles was the Charleston, which broke out in 1925. One of the consequences of the Charleston was a series of Charleston contests which raged in all U. S. cities in 1925 and 1926. These Charleston contests bred Hollywood stars (Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard) as swamps breed mosquitoes. When little Ginger Rogers won a State Charleston contest in Dallas in November 1925, her destiny was settled.

Geegee and Leelee. Ginger Rogers had one of the most determined mothers of the period. Mrs. Rogers, by this time a reporter on the Fort Worth Record and the highly efficient business manager of the Fort Worth symphony orchestra, quit her jobs after Ginger's Charleston victory, helped manage the tour which was first prize. Four years later, after the customary interludes of night-club engagements and vaudeville acts, Ginger Rogers reached Broadway as ingenue star of Girl Crazy. During the 45-week run of Girl Crazy (at $1,000 a week), Ginger Rogers made five pictures at Paramount's Astoria Studio. When Girl Crazy closed she went to Hollywood, where she has remained ever since.

Ginger Rogers' precocity was not confined to her stage career. At eleven, she played a piano solo of MacDowell's To a Wild Rose in a Fort Worth auditorium. At 17, she married a vaudeville hoofer named Edward (Jack) Culpepper. Ginger left Culpepper three months later, divorced him, married Hollywood Actor Lew Ayres in 1935, separated from him the same year. At present unattached, she lives with her mother in the highest house on Beverly Crest, in Beverly Hills.

Designed and furnished by Ginger and her mother, the Rogers house is equipped with standard Hollywood conveniences of tennis court, bird's-eye view, projection room, outdoor bath, and such eccentric Hollywood conveniences as a built-in soda fountain. Ginger enjoys making herself chocolate sodas behind the fountain, but goes around to sit properly in front of the counter to drink them. In her studio, she makes portrait sketches and sculptures.

Ginger Rogers is a model member of Hollywood society. She does not get drunk or make public scenes. Unlike many stars, who refrain from associating with other stars because the company of economic inferiors is more flattering, she is friendly with Janet Gaynor, Jack Benny, Myrna Loy, Anne Shirley, Joan Bennett. Not averse to cabaret-crawls, Geegee appears in public less than Leelee. Salient trait in Ginger Rogers' behavior is competitiveness. At school she competed with her teacher, who used to let her mark papers. Later, her competitiveness enabled her to make herself almost as good a dancer as Teacher Astaire. In her private life, this competition is harmlessly projected into all forms of sport. Ginger Rogers bowls, swims, dives and plays tennis as though she were trying to make an Olympic team. During the making of The Castles, Ginger Rogers was engaged in a personal feud with the technical adviser. "Technical adviser" is Hollywood lingo for a big name hired mainly for publicity purposes. This definition of her functions naturally failed to suit energetic Irene Castle McLaughlin. Since Vernon Castle's death she has occupied herself by writing about him. marrying two husbands (of whom the second is Major Frederic McLaughlin. owner of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team), and running a home for 90 stray dogs near her home in Lake Forest, Ill.* At RKO, where she was in constant attendance except for three days spent in an antivivisection campaign that included throwing leaflets out of an airplane over Los Angeles. Mrs. McLaughlin says she spent her time "squeaking, squawking and protesting," principally at Ginger Rogers' clothes.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire are generally supposed to hate each other intensely. As a matter of fact, they are old and good friends. They met first when he was in Smiles, she in Girl Crazy. After Ginger Rogers' first Hollywood screen appearance she got exactly eight fan letters. One was from Astaire. It said: "Glad to see you're doing so well. Hurry back." Rogers owed her presence in Flying Down, to Rio to Astaire. When the picture was going badly and he wanted someone to dance with, he said: "Where is Ginger Rogers? Isn't she on this lot?" She had been lent to Paramount for bit parts, but was recalled. Her dance with Astaire turned out so well that the whole picture was re-shot to get her into the story. Since then, relations between herself and Astaire have been as smooth as relations between actors (who are always rivals) can be. When The Castles ended, Astaire and Rogers both announced their desire to continue working together. They may do so after her next pictures, which will be Little Mother and Fifth Avenue Girl.

*Last week, Secretary Mildred FitzHugh of Mrs. Mclaughlin's Orphans of the Storm dog refuge learned of a scheduled saloon fight between a dog and a badger, sent James Hagen to stop it. When Employe Hagen reached the saloon he was not surprised, since jokes of this sort are a Chicago specialty, to find that the "badger" was a chamber pot.

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