In the spring of 1981, Fred Astaire climbed the stage of the Beverly Hilton ballroom to accept the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. At eighty-one, his body had shrunk inside the suits he once wore, but his steps still carried a trace of rhythm and grace. The room was crowded with the faces of the golden age of Hollywood, the people he had spent his life dancing alongside. Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, all of them on their feet, applauding the man who had taught American cinema how to move.
When he spoke, his voice was soft, almost fragile. He said that his sister Adele was the real reason he entered show business. She was the whole act, he insisted, the bright light, while he was merely the one who pushed her away. Three months earlier, Adele had died.
His words were not false modesty. They were the truth, arriving late, as truth often does. Adele Marie Austerlitz was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in September 1896. Her father, Fritz, was the son of Austrian Jews who had converted for safety in a parish that Adolf Hitler would later attend.
He arrived in America in 1892 with a conductor’s scores and a man’s belief that the world would give him a chance. The panic of 1893 crushed that optimism. By the time Adele was born, Fritz was working behind a stove in a Broadway saloon. Her mother, Johanna, known as Anna, was the engine of the family.
She had grown up with an alcoholic father and a stern mother, and she carried a hard-won determination that her own children would not suffer the same fate. When Adele was born, healthy and dark-eyed, the house seemed to exhale. Fritz pulled his chair to the piano and began to play again, and little Adele gave those melodies a body, spinning around the sitting room while the family drank beer with supper, turning an ordinary meal into a quiet performance. Fred was born in May 1899, nearly dead at birth, too large at first, then shrinking like a balloon.
Anna’s father looked at the frail blue-eyed infant and said the child would never live. Anna, already grieving a lost child, sat over Fred’s crib, feeding him, watching him, willing him forward. Fred survived, but the music in the house changed. Adele remained the family’s light, but Fred became Anna’s project.
She enrolled Adele at Chambers Academy in West Farnum, where the girl was not a student but an event, moving with an instinct no teacher had planted. Fred attended for different reasons, not to dance but to strengthen a body weakened by illness. Quietly, a rare talent emerged. Fred could balance on his toes with an artistry that rivaled even Adele.
Chambers watched the siblings move together and saw what no one else had: not two children, but a complete act. The word New York echoed through the house like a struck match. Fritz saw an opportunity to point his children toward the art his life had missed. Anna saw an escape from a marriage that was already over, a ticket out without scandal.
In January 1905, Anna took the children east by train. Fritz stayed behind, reduced to a signature on a check. New York hit them with violent intensity. At the Alvian Masters School, the audition was over when the director touched Fred’s head and declared they would make him a great star.
Adele stood there and felt the moment stick in her throat. That evening, Fritz took them to a Viennese restaurant. When Fred repeated what the director had said, Fritz wept openly, not for what his son might become, but for what his daughter had always been. The family settled into a boarding house on West 23rd Street, three souls packed into a room no larger than a stage wing.
At night, Adele lay close enough to hear her mother’s breathing change as sleep took her. Sunday brought small mercies, a ride on the trolley, Central Park, a cake from Macy’s eaten slowly, as if sweetness could soften the city’s cruelty. Anna read aloud at night, the Bible, with dramatic pauses. When the children begged her not to go out, she answered with absence, disappearing into the night and sometimes returning only at dawn.
Adele sat awake, holding the crying Fred, watching the trolley lights flicker through the bay window, praying for her mother’s return. Anna took the children everywhere. Burlesque shows, vaudeville, ballet, serious theater. At the Metropolitan Opera, they saw Pavlova, and Adele memorized every movement, storing them like jewels.
She watched Adeline Genée from the third-row balcony nearly thirty times, learning how stillness could command a room as firmly as motion. In stolen hours, Adele gathered the neighborhood children for dramatic performances, haunted houses, villains with knives, twist endings no one expected. She learned when to pause, when to let the silence stretch, when the breath would catch and the laughter would break. She was practicing without knowing it, learning the art of holding attention.
Anna experimented with stage names until a certain gaze settled on one: Astaire. Adele chose it for herself, and Anna Austerlitz became Anna Astaire, mother of the act. At a school recital performing scenes from Cyrano de Bergerac, Adele took the lead and stole the light. Fred wore a blonde wig and satin slippers, playing Roxane, uncomfortable and on the verge of tears until the applause came.
It was a perfect portrait of what they would become: her audacity, his precision, and the applause that made everything worthwhile. By the fall of 1905, Alvian judged them ready for vaudeville and built a twelve-minute act called “The Wedding Cake. ” The children stood as miniature bride and groom atop two six-foot cakes wired with electric lights, then descended and launched into pure vaudeville madness. They were booked in the worst slot, third in the program on a weekday afternoon, in a theater where the only sounds were barking seals and scattered applause from a juggling comedian.
In boarding houses that smelled of other people’s meals, in train stations where they ate standing up, in shivering seats that rattled with the engine’s rhythm, the family survived. Anna became the operation’s mechanic, pressing costumes between shows, drilling the children on arithmetic, keeping them polite without being friendly, building a wall between them and life’s cruelty. Vaudeville was a hierarchy that began at the bottom. The first positions on the bill were hell.
The lights came up, the audience was still finding its seats, and conversation drowned the music. Adele learned to read a crowd like a sailor reads weather, scanning faces for any shift. Critics would spend decades trying to name what she had: an ease that concealed careful calculation, a charm that seemed spontaneous but worked like a precise instrument. Fred became her opposite, analytical, exact, studying the hidden mechanics of applause.
Together they became something neither could achieve alone. Between the pages of a booking agent’s paperwork, a line emerged that would haunt Fred for years: “The girl seems gifted, but the boy is hopeless. ”
The act succeeded. Their picture appeared on the cover of Variety.
But while the children lived under stage lights, a shadow reached from Omaha. Rumors arrived of another woman, that Fritz had remarried and was raising a child. During a twenty-week Orpheum tour that brought them back to Omaha in December 1908, someone handed Adele a white Pomeranian puppy from a cigar store window. She buried her face in its fur, pretending for a moment that some things could be kept.
But the Gerry Society was watching them. Agents in every city hunted underage performers, and the law did not distinguish between a child in a sweat factory and a child on stage. Parents forged birth certificates and passed off their children as dwarfs. Anna dressed nine-year-old Fred in long trousers and coached both children to lie to Gerry agents with the ease of practiced fugitives.
When the Society canceled their date in Los Angeles in February 1909, Anna fought back with cold administrative fury, argued, pleaded, and won. But she saw how easily the world could take everything she had built. By then, biology was overtaking them. Adele was growing into a young woman while Fred remained on the edge of puberty, two bodies moving at different speeds toward different futures.
Critics called the act mechanical and monotonous, looking at Fred with impatience, as if childhood itself had become a burden. Anna pulled them off the stage and withdrew to a small house in Weehawken, New Jersey. For the first time in five years, Adele sat in a classroom with children who did not know the smell of glue or the meaning of a drop curtain. In a school recital in 1909, they played the triangle and the xylophone.
At Christmas, Fritz sent Adele a red diary. She drew herself alone in the middle of the stage, in a blue dress and blue ballet shoes. The rest of the pages filled with elegant ladies and actresses. Every drawing was a small insistence: I am still here.
She said later that she had felt quite lonely. By the summer of 1911, Fred had grown enough that Anna paid Ned Wayburn a thousand dollars for a new act. Wayburn gave their rhythm a name, tap, a language Fred was already speaking with his feet. He wrote them a sketch about a rainy Saturday, a drunk father, a mother waiting at the door, a reconciliation that was not the ending their own family had known.
They performed it with the ease of people who had rehearsed the material their whole lives. Two years off the stage had made them invisible. Wayburn arranged an appearance at a charity matinee on Broadway. The reviews prompted a booking at Proctor’s Fifth Avenue for the week of February 19, 1912.
They arrived for the Monday matinee and found their names at the top of the bill. Half the seats were empty. The applause faltered and died while they stood in the crossover, suspended in silence, hearts beating louder than the echo of the last line. When they returned at seven to check the call sheet, they were not listed.
The rainy Saturday act was canceled. After Proctor’s, they descended without ceremony into the small-time circuits, abandoned opera houses and converted halls where the curtains smelled of wet hay and old cattle. In Indiana, a trained-seal act received the dressing room while Fred and Adele changed in an alley between broken crates and refuse. On New Year’s Eve in New Jersey, pennies rained from the balcony, hard enough to sting.
Adele kept dancing. When the act ended, she knelt on the stage floor and collected the pennies one by one. Fred was in a daze. Adele suffered differently.
She admitted she never wanted to rehearse. She felt natural on stage. Fred could not afford that ease. He worked where she sparkled.
To make her rehearse, he bribed her with candied violets, ribbons, small offerings laid at the feet of the sister whose spontaneity amazed him and nearly drove him mad. In the summer of 1913, Augusto Cacha arrived, a Romanian-born teacher whose first lesson was destruction. He taught them the tango, taught them the Apache, stripped away the sweetness of the wedding-cake act and replaced it with the roughness of the alleys they had known. The new act opened with Fred shouting that they were under arrest and Adele responding with a song before he pulled her into movements that had nothing to do with children on glowing cakes.
The climb began again, harder and sharper this time. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson watched them and said simply that they really knew how to dance. By November 1914, the Palace in Chicago booked them. Six curtain calls.
Soon they were moved to third position on the bill, crossing the dead zone, passing the animals, passing the place where the ax had disappeared. By the end of the year, they were earning $350 a week. In a New York office, Fred met a young song plugger named George Gershwin, who sat at the piano and said he would write a show for the Astaires someday. Then the war reached into the theater.
After the Lusitania sank in 1915, anti-German sentiment curdled into suspicion. Returning from Canada, the family was roused at four in the morning by War Department officials who confiscated their luggage because Fritz’s brothers served in the German army. At dawn, the luggage was returned. The lesson was older than vaudeville and crueler: in America, belonging could still be stolen by rumor, accent, and blood.
The White Rats strike of 1916 shut down the system. The family was stranded in Detroit for eighteen months. Fritz was already failing. The Omaha breweries had been closed by the temperance movement.
Anna pawned everything, clothes first, then the diamonds, then her fur coat. In 1917, the Shuberts offered Broadway, but the contract was a meat grinder, $250 a week and mandatory unpaid Sunday concerts. During rehearsals, the director J. C.
Huffman interrupted a tango the trio had built from grit and pride and memory. Adele stepped forward and said it was almost sacred to them, their way of performing it. Huffman sneered and asked if they could now move on to the sacred-cow dance. When influenza swept the houses, their salaries were cut.
When business returned, the money did not. Fred wrote asking for the pay they had earned. Silence was the answer. In 1918, Fred registered for the draft and nearly entered history in the worst way possible.
The armistice arrived before the army did. When the Shuberts contract ended, Charles Dillingham was waiting on the other side. Adele remembered that he took a personal interest in them, not just hiring them but nurturing them, indulging them, pulling them into a world of silk-lined drawing rooms and weekends in Atlantic City with the Vanderbilts. He presented them in “Apple Blossoms,” an operetta built on Vienna and elegance, with designs by Joseph Urban and a score by Fritz Kreisler.
They had only two dances, but two were enough. Critics found the operetta charming more than brilliant, the score memorable. And once again, the house rearranged itself around two dancers who were not supposed to be the focus. Increasingly, the focus returned to Adele.
The Boston Record reported that the longest and loudest applause of the evening belonged to the Astaires. In October 1920, they returned to Omaha for the last time, to the Brandeis Theater. Caruso was in town that week and monopolized the press. But Fritz was there.
His children were earning $550 a week, and they wanted him in New York, wanted him to see that the dream he had carried from Vienna to Nebraska had finally taken shape in them. He loved “Apple Blossoms” for its Viennese atmosphere, its music, its refinement, everything that would have sounded to him like a lost language returning. But he could not stay. Illness, failure, and pride kept him from the life his children had built.
He died of throat cancer on October 1, 1923, without ever standing beneath the marquee and looking up at his children’s faces three times larger than life. The show that was supposed to crown their success, “The Bunch and Judy,” failed. Fred hated the wig he was forced to wear. In one catastrophic number, they danced atop a banquet table carried by chorus members, a table so unstable that rehearsal after rehearsal sent them crashing to the stage.
From those spills came Adele’s verdict on the whole project: what a miserable way to become a star. The show closed. But from the failure came a dance, the runaway number, shoulders together, arms extended as if holding a bicycle handlebar, spinning across the stage at increasing speed until absurdity turned to joy. Yet again, the stars of the show were stranded while the Astaires were called back.
Alex Aarons, who had met Fred by chance in a Broadway haberdashery, saw the dance’s meaning. He offered them something newer, more intimate, more American, with music by George Gershwin. The dance became “The Hinges. ” For the first time on Broadway, Fred and Adele were given major speaking roles and a love story of their own.
Fred described it later as the strongest jump in quality in their careers up to that point. He began taking greater control of the choreography, becoming the maker of the work. Adele remained its spirit, the comic gleam, the sudden warmth that kept the design from becoming merely correct. Robert Benchley put it simply: when they danced, everything seemed brighter.
Critics struggled to define Adele. She was not conventionally beautiful. Syl Phett later compared her to Felix the Cat, a comic oversized head on a wonderful small body. She had no great singing voice.
Yet under the lights, these supposed defects became part of her appeal. One critic called her the embodiment of youth and grace, a light personality from her nimble fingertips to her flying curls. Another used the phrase “purple flame. ” She could be boyish and attractive, playful and elegant, fragile and warm.
George Jean Nathan, the most cynical critic in America, wrote about her as if she carried more real theater than the serious playwrights he was paid to defend. He described a whirl of skirts, a flash of two little electric legs, a rain of a thousand dancing shoes. His infatuation was not only professional. He courted her, briefly, and Anna hated him.
Fred did not trust him. Both had reason. Adele was entering a different phase of life, one in which admiration was no longer abstract or safe. Then, after the New York run of “Funny Face,” the body intervened with a violence no admirer could control.
Adele was on Long Island, preparing to board a speedboat, when the engine exploded. Oil, fire, fabric, skin. It happened in a moment. She was rescued before the boat itself exploded.
She spent the summer in a New York hospital, burns healing in stages, bandages removed slowly to reveal skin that was blistered, tender, pink and white like a newborn’s. She lay motionless, a woman who had never been still, whose whole life had been motion. In June 1929, the London run of “Funny Face” closed. Adele Astaire left the stage that year at the age of thirty-three.
She had been on stage since she was five. She had watched her brother dance without her for the first time in their lives, from the audience, weeping at the sight of him. She had received from him a bracelet of small medals, each engraved with the name of a show they had done together, including three marked “flop. ” She was generous about what her departure meant.
She felt that when she left him, he had the chance to show what he could really do, because he had always supported her while she took the laughs. She called herself the clown, not a good dancer, while he was the better dancer by far. But she had what she called personality. What Adele found after leaving the stage was grief.
She married Lord Charles Cavendish, the younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, in 1932, after performing cartwheels across the library floor of Chatsworth to win over his disapproving family. She was baptized into the Church of England on the morning of the wedding, in the seventeenth-century chapel that had never hosted a wedding before, and by noon was in her wedding dress. The couple settled at Lismore Castle in Ireland, two hundred rooms of history. Adele joked that the castle had only one bathroom, and while other Cavendishes had married women who brought grand dowries, her family had brought a second bathroom.
Humor had limits. Lismore was beautiful, immense, and silent, farther from anywhere she had ever been than any place she had known. For the first time in her life, there was no show coming, no next train, no twelve minutes to justify her existence. There was only stone and sky and a river below, and two hundred rooms that required no performance from her.
The marriage deteriorated as Charles descended into alcoholism. Adele had seen this before, in the Omaha parlor, had watched her mother watch it, had understood from childhood exactly what a man looked like when he drowned in drink. She lost a daughter in a premature birth in November 1934, then twin boys, stillborn, a year later. They were buried beside their sister in the cathedral graveyard at Lismore.
Three children, three small graves in Irish soil. A final miscarriage came in May 1939. Charles died on March 23, 1944, at thirty-eight, and was buried beside his three unborn children. Adele wrote that his soul was troubled and he was not meant to live in this cruel world.
Before the war, David Selznick had offered Adele a film role, a chance to revive her career. She tested. What she saw horrified her. The camera caught something stiff and flat and unrecognizable, the same betrayal that had been trapped in the Kokoschka portrait years earlier.
Adele could not be captured in stillness. Her authority had always rested on motion, on the live exchange with a room responding in real time. The medium that would make her brother immortal had nothing to offer her. She refused the part.
But the war gave her something the cinema could not. At the Rainbow Corner club near Piccadilly, Adele worked seven days a week. She danced with the GIs, helped at the information desk, and wrote letters to the families of soldiers who could not write themselves. She signed them “Adele Astaire, Fred’s sister.
” The woman who had once been the center of the show now used her brother’s name as proof of her identity. She found these years the most satisfying since she had left the stage, not because they returned her to the spotlight, but because they returned her to purpose. After the war she married Kingman Douglass, an investment banker and former intelligence officer who also began to drink. The pattern held.
He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1971, and Adele moved to Arizona, settling into a quiet life that barely resembled the one she had lived. She and Fred spoke on the phone for hours, discussing the plots and characters of their favorite soap operas, two people who had spent their lives in drama now watching it from the outside, together and apart. When Anna died in her sleep in 1975 at ninety-six, Adele told her guests, more seriously than they expected, that she and Fred were orphans now. In 1980, Fred married Robin Smith, a jockey more than forty years his junior.
A close friend of Adele’s was convinced the marriage contributed greatly to her death. Whether true or not, something in Adele changed after she heard the news. The last bond she had believed was hers alone now belonged to someone else. In early 1981, Adele suffered a severe stroke and fell into a coma.
She never regained consciousness. She died on January 25, at eighty-five. Fred was on location in New York when the news came. His grief was so great that he could not bear the solitude.
He asked his costar Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to move into the adjoining hotel room so he could leave the door open at night, the same feeling Adele once had as a girl in a West 23rd Street boarding house, listening for the sound of footsteps on the hallway boards, praying for someone to come back. Some of her ashes were buried beside her mother in Chatsworth, California. Some were scattered at Lismore, around the graves of Charles and the three children, and over the castle wall into the air above the Blackwater River.
A small portion was kept by her niece Ava, who scattered it over the garlic field in her garden in West Cork, for Adele’s love of garlic. Even in death she remained singular, a mix of duchess and dancer and girl, still spinning in an Omaha parlor. She had been the center of attention. First, a captivating gaze.
And only now, her name.
