Putting On The Ritz: Broadway Success And The Fred Astaire Phantom I

What is fascinating is that this love started well before Hollywood, before Ginger Rogers and his many partners, before what we think of as his heyday. This song-and-dance man, who revolutionised his art by taking stiff, formal dance conventions and making them looser, freer, jazzier, who continues to inspire today (think academy-award winning film La-la Land, for instance) – originally made his name not on film, but on stage.

Astaire wowed audiences of musical theatre on both sides of the Atlantic with his first partner – his older sister Adele. The pair were chalk and cheese. Fred was serious, meticulous, professional, a perfectionist when it came to their routines and intensely private. Adele was altogether wilder in spirit, spontaneous (she hated rehearsing), gregarious and captivating both on stage and off. But no matter how poor or lightweight the shows they appeared in, reviewers always singled them out as worth the price of admission. By 1917, when Fred was just 18 and Adele 21, the duo were on Broadway, earning enough to feed their habit of eating in the best restaurants and being seen at the swankiest nightspots and resorts around the US.

Fred took up golf and, more importantly, learned how to act around wealthy sophisticates. It was his first step toward joining their set. At the suggestion of Noël Coward, backstage at one of the pair's performances in 1923, the Astaires travelled to perform in Great Britain. Given the royal seal of approval by Prince Albert (later George VI) and the Prince of Wales, the siblings became not just stage superstars, but also firm fixtures in high society.

Astaire transformed himself into a consummate mid-Atlantic man, taking the English style but softening and relaxing it, adding a bit of New World informality, as he had with dance. He could look just as good in top hat and tails as a sports jacket, although, he worked hard to achieve such apparently offhand stylishness. Astaire soon developed a lifelong love of horse racing, went grouse shooting and bought his first Rolls-Royce, a black 20hp 'baby' Rolls.

But a more famous model was to come. In 1927, Fred and Adele appeared in Funny Face in New York, which then opened at the New Prince's Theatre (now the Shaftesbury Theatre) in London in 1928. Reviews were fabulous, advance box-office healthy and, a week after the opening, Fred ordered a Hooper-bodied Rolls-Royce Phantom I. There was no doubt that they had made it. But change was looming for the partnership.

In the meantime, when not on stage, Fred and the new Phantom – a right-hand drive single cabriolet town car, with Hooper coachwork finished in Brewster Green livery with black wings and a black leather roof – enjoyed a life straight out of Downton Abbey, touring the UK's premier race meetings, stately homes, golf courses and shooting estates.

His arrival by chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce was an integral part of the Astaire style. Leslie Kendall, Chief Curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles says, “One of my favourite features of the car is the upholstery in the passenger compartment, which is a delicate fabric and offers a dramatic contrast to the hard-wearing leather in the chauffeur's compartment. So equipped, the car becomes a rolling embodiment of the ‘upstairs, downstairs’ distinction prevalent at the time.” Yet somehow any hint of snobbery was absent from this love of luxury and high living, and Bruce Boyer, in his book Fred Astaire Style, describes him as a 'classless aristocrat'.

On the last night of Funny Face, the ‘Playboy Prince’ Aly Khan, another Rolls-Royce owner, came to the theatre with Lord Charles Cavendish, the second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire. Cavendish became besotted with Adele and the pair married four years later in 1932, and she danced her last with Fred and retired to Ireland with her new husband.

Now solo, Fred was a bachelor-about-town in New York for a time, squiring dates in the grand Phantom, which had followed him from England. Ginger Rogers admitted in her autobiography that they shared a steamy after-dinner kiss in the back of the Rolls-Royce. But the relationship fizzled – Fred was heading for Hollywood and a screen test.

The most frequently repeated story about Astaire is that an unnamed casting director's summation of him after that first screen test was: 'Can’t act. Slightly balding. Can dance a little.' But that report, if it ever existed, was ignored, and in 1932 MGM signed the dancer to a three-week contract at $1,500 a week to appear with Joan Crawford in Dancing Lady.

It was a rather forgettable film, but it turned out Fred was mesmerising on screen. The well-groomed charm he possessed in real life somehow radiated out into the audience. A celluloid star was born.

As Astaire gradually cemented his place in the Hollywood firmament, the Phantom also underwent a makeover. In those days it was perfectly usual to update a car, even a Rolls-Royce, to reflect the latest styles. And so, sometime in the mid-1930s, Inskip, a New York agent well known for its own coachwork, was commissioned by Astaire to refurbish the Phantom. Changes included scalloped wood door fillets, special door handles, valance panels on both sides and Art Deco arrowed indicators.

The Phantom today has some charming accessories – an extremely rare Louis Vuitton motoring trunk, which carries a top hat, white bow tie, cuff and collar boxes, a Turnbull & Asser silk scarf, a 'tea-for-two' picnic set, plus both dancing and tap shoes. In the lid of the trunk are a period tennis racket, cricket bat and shooting sticks. A secret locker contains a full set of vintage golf clubs.

Astaire kept the Phantom until 1950 (although it wasn't his last Rolls-Royce), by which time he was famous for his partnership with Ginger Rogers, in movies such as Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936). Despite announcing his retirement in 1946, he was back and entering a new Golden Age with musicals such as The Band Wagon (1953), opposite Cyd Charisse, Funny Face (1957) with Audrey Hepburn, and Silk Stockings (1957), once more with Cyd Charisse.

If you want to relive that first pre-war Golden Age, when he was picking up his top hat, putting on the Ritz and flying down to Rio, make a date to see ‘The Fred Astaire Phantom I’ at ‘The Great Eight Phantoms’, a Rolls-Royce Exhibition in Mayfair, London late in July.

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