Status Updates From Puttin' On the Ritz: Fred A...

Apparently, having dinner with Fred and Hermes Pan in their later years was like eating with Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show?? They were always doing bits and trying to one-up each other??

Fred wanted to play Willy Wonka in the 1971 film but got rejected?? I mean, Gene Wilder gave an incredible performance, but Fred could've also done amazing things with the material even at age 73! I'm picturing him singing Candy Man or Pure Imagination and it's making me sad now...

"Whatever gave you the impression that I would be interested in giving money to start a workshop to help black kids? You've got the wrong guy." YIKES FRED. It seems like he respected people of color for their talent, if they had it, but he didn't respect them enough to treat them as peers or friends or even talk to them outside of direct work contexts, despite the strong influence of Black culture on his dance style.

Things the chapter on Astaire’s fashion has:

- A table listing his exact coat and trouser measurements (in case you want to make clothes tailored to the late dancer's measurements??)
- A lot of disdain for jeans and the concept of casual Fridays, inexplicably.

Jane Powell was only paid $15,000 for doing Royal Wedding, while Fred got his usual $150,000???

Ginger only got paid more than Fred when they did The Barkleys of Broadway?? She got paid $162,000 and he got $150,000?? (And that’s not adjusted for inflation as far as I can tell- that’s how much they got paid in 1949 money.)

"A mechanical manner, an occasional look of bewilderment, and a frigidity tended to overwhelm [Lucille Bremer's] presence onscreen." -Excellent summary of why her acting didn't work in Yolanda and the Thief, though I do appreciate that he also gives the Dream Ballet and Coffee Talk their rightful flowers and emphasizes that the film is visually gorgeous.

He claims that the number Fred did in yellowface in Ziegfeld Follies was one of his best, and that Fred said once it was his favorite dance number, but I find that difficult to believe since it was mostly ballet and Fred had a longtime noted aversion to ballet.

Fred hired Charles Dickens' granddaughter to be his son's governess??

If I had a nickel for every time an Astaire biography suddenly veered into blackface apologia, I'd have a depressingly large number of nickels. How hard is it to go 'yes, he did it. yes, he had good intentions. yes, it was considered relatively normal at the time. it is still *bad* that he did that. sometimes your fave is problematic and you just have to live with it instead of trying to justify why it was okay.'??

Calling The Continental (a seventeen minute-long dance sequence) just "a bit long" is like calling the Pope a bit Catholic!

Levinson has *really* done his research- he's found and corrected mistakes or omissions that Fred made in his own autobiography!

EXTREMELY funny to start your biography with 'yeah, I never met the guy in person, but one time he called me on the phone and explained in no uncertain terms that he disapproved of me writing an article about his daughter and told me to stop, and then his daughter called the next morning and said she'd talked him into it, so it was fine to go ahead writing it.'