My 48 Hours with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

00:00:10 Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. Previously on our show, we’ve heard from Steve Stolier, who, as a UCLA student in the mid-seventies, convinced Universal Pictures to re-release the classic Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. It’s a terrific story, by the way. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and take a look. Stolier would then go on to be Groucho Marx’s personal assistant and historian for the final years of the legend’s life. Today, we hear from Steve again, still in show business, but excited as ever to be surrounded by stage and screen legends. Here’s Steve.

00:00:53 Speaker 2: Groucho Marx was just at the top of my pantheon of most admired entertainers, but running a close second was Fred Astaire, Frederic Austerlitz of Omaha, Nebraska. He doesn’t seem as if he would have come from Middle America like that, because he’s known for the top hat and white tie and tails, but in fact he’s one of those erudite fellows that came from Nebraska, along with Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, and Marlon Brando and a number of other people. I would have given anything to be able to meet him. And in fact, when I was working at Universal Studios in the late seventies after Groucho died, I got a job working in the steno pool from 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. every day, and I would be typing episodes of The Rockford Files, Kojak, and Baretta and so on. But I loved working at Universal because on lunch breaks or before or after work, I could go wandering around there. You know, there wasn’t much security at the time. It isn’t like now. Plus I was an employee and I was always nosing around because of the history of the place. I loved the Universal horror films and all that sort of stuff with the classics. My Man Godfrey. And so I would keep track of who was guest-starring on different shows and if they were filming on the lot, and if I was lucky, sometimes I would be able to cross paths with them. And then, of all the unlikely things, I found out that Fred Astaire was going to be guest-starring on Battlestar Galactica. Apparently, his grandson’s favorite TV show was Battlestar Galactica, and he said, “Grandpa, will you be on that? That would be cool.” And so Astaire, figuring, “Well, I can’t deny my own grandson a request like that,” so he got in touch with the producers and they wrote a part for him where he played Dirk Benedict’s con-man father. On a lunch break, I wandered over to the set and I watched him shoot a scene inside the spacecraft. And then during a break, he was just sauntering around the soundstage with his hands in his pockets, and I happened to have with me an original still of him in Swingtime, a 1936 film. And so I went over and introduced myself and I said, “I just, I want to thank you for all of the magical moments, from Flying Down to Rio to A Family Upside Down, and everything in between.” A Family Upside Down was a TV movie he had just done, co-starring opposite Helen Hayes. At the time, that was sort of like thanking him for his whole film career. And he said, “Oh, well, my goodness, thank you,” and he was happy to sign my photo. And so, for one brief shining moment, I got to meet one of my all-time heroes. So that was in ’78. In 1983, five years later, I had moved to New York the previous year to write for Dick Cavett, whom I met through my Groucho connection and who hired me away from Universal to write for him at HBO on a short-lived show called HBO Magazine. But then I continued to live in New York and write for Cavett and other things. Astaire and Gene Kelly had both been honored by the Kennedy Center. You see the edited-down specials on TV where they have someone from dance and music and literature and they salute them. And the Kennedy Center had a policy where after you’ve been saluted, they would appreciate it if you would sit down for an interview, not to be released or broadcast, but just for their library—for the Kennedy Center’s official library to have that for people to be able to access. So Astaire said that would be fine with him, but only if Dick Cavett does the interview, because he had had good experiences when Cavett had his ABC show and he felt comfortable conversing with him. I was friends with and writing for Cavett, and he knew what an Astaire fanatic I was—as was he. And the Kennedy Center sent Cavett the list of questions they wanted him to ask, and luckily he gave those to me to rework because they were asking thesis questions on, you know, “compare and contrast the development of tap as an art form from the Irish clog through vaudeville and the influence of the African American experience.” And I knew from previous experience that Astaire is a tough interview subject and he hates analyzing his art. He’s very much—he was very much a “I just do it” kind of guy. So what I did was I very carefully chopped up their essay questions into more conversational bites so that Cavett could ask him and get information, you know, his answer on how a certain sequence happened. The dance director Hermes Pan would come up with an idea, and I’d try it out in front of a mirror, and “Sure, great!” That would be how he would discuss how a dance step came to be. Kelly, because he was a director and choreographer, Kelly was the opposite. If you said, “Hi, Gene,” Kelly would say, “Dance is a three-dimensional medium and film is a two-dimensional medium. So, as a director or a choreographer, you have to take in that distinction and frame the image such that the two dimensions…” You know, he gave those kind of dissertation answers. But for Astaire, it was just, “Well, sure, great, let’s do it,” which doesn’t make for, you know, compelling listening. I flew out to L.A. with Cavett to interview both Astaire and Kelly. We were in a limousine. I was in the front seat with the chauffeur, which is just as well, because I tended to get nauseated sitting in the back of a limousine. And we stopped by Astaire’s house on San Ysidro in Beverly Hills. He got in the car and Astaire looked at me and he said, “Have we worked together before? You look familiar.” And I don’t know whether he was confusing me with someone else or if he really did remember from when I met him on the set of Galactica. But so on the way to the studio, I’m listening to Cavett and Astaire talking, and Astaire said, “Dick, did you look over these questions?” And I’m thinking, “Heh heh heh heh.” And Astaire said, “Some of them are asinine. What was I doing in vaudeville? I mean, for heaven’s sakes, that was fifty years ago! I mean, it’s ridiculous!” And I’m, you know, mentally slinking down in the front seat, thinking, “Oh God, you should only know what these questions were like before I—I made them sanitized for your easy digestion.”

00:09:06 Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Steve Stolier talk about his brush with greatness. Again, when we come back, more of the story of Fred Astaire and Steve Stolier here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories. In Steve Stolier’s story of the time he had the privilege of meeting and working with Fred Astaire.

00:09:47 Speaker 1: Steve was working for Dick Cavett at the time, and Astaire had just been selected to be honored by the Kennedy Center. Cavett was going to interview Astaire, and had asked Steve to rewrite the Kennedy Center’s questions, and even so, Astaire still on stole these versions of the questions. Etxnine. Let’s get back to Steve.

00:10:07 Speaker 2: So I was sort of on edge after that because I thought it was going to be this wonderful time, and now he’s attacking the questions and all that, and I didn’t let on that I’d had anything to do with them, because I didn’t want to be the target of his annoyance. But we got to the studio, and as a favor to Astaire, to show respect, they had him go into the makeup room first before Cavett to get ready for the cameras. So then he came out in makeup, and then it was Cavett’s turn. And the director said to me, “Will you sit down with Fred and talk to him until Dick is ready?” And I thought, “Oh, dear—er, yeah, sure.” I—The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a director’s chair, next to Astaire in his director’s chair and trying to make pleasant conversation with someone who had just torn apart the questions I had carefully crafted, and who was notoriously difficult to draw out. But one of the things I brought up was, you know, this was in ’83. It was the same year that the musical My One and Only had opened on Broadway, and I had seen that with Tommy Tune and Twiggy and Honey Coles and it was basically a loose reworking of the Gershwin show Funny Face, which Fred and his sister Adele had starred in 1927. And I loved it. And I felt like seeing Tommy Tune do some of those intricate tap numbers was as close as I was going to get to seeing Astaire dance. And I mentioned that even though the show was filled with a lot of standards, the song My One and Only was semi-obscure, but I knew it because I had a record of Astaire and Adele singing that from Funny Face. And I said, “So, it’s interesting because now that song is getting well-known by the average public because of this new Broadway show.” So we started talking about new releases of classic songs, and we got around to Putting on the Ritz. And he mentioned, he said, “Last year, that was that version by that German fellow, and I must say I didn’t care for it.” The German fellow was a guy named Taco, and it was sort of a synthesized, mechanized version of Putting on the Ritz that got a lot of airplay in 1982. But Astaire said, “The way he does it is just boom, boom, boom, ‘putting on the ritz,’ boom, boom, ‘putting on the ritz.’” “I didn’t care for it,” he said. “Now, when Irving wrote it—meaning Berlin—he wrote it like this.” And Astaire started tapping his foot. D D D D D d d d d D D D dad. And I’m thinking, “Fred Astaire is tapping and singing Putting on the Ritz to me, only me, this special moment, just for me.” I would say, dancing as fast as I could verbally to keep him occupied until Cavett came out. But it ended up being this wonderful little pocket of conversation. And then Cavett came out and they started taping, and actually, between my having cut the questions up and Cavett’s brilliance as an interviewer and conversationalist, he was able to draw Fred Astaire out in that interview and actually got him to talk about a lot of things that were essentially things that I had wondered about that I would have asked Fred Astaire if I ever had the chance. So I put them through Dick Cavett’s mouth, and he ended up, you know. At one point he said something like, “Gosh, Dick, you’re making me remember things I hadn’t thought about in forty years,” which I took as very gratifying because it was unlocking some of these old memories. One of my questions was, did he ever have an understudy? Because you think about Broadway shows and how unique Astaire was. Was there someone who, if he was sick, would have gone on? And the way Cavett asked it was he said, “For instance, if you were under the weather, did the manager come out before the show and say, ‘We’re very sorry, Mister Astaire can’t be here tonight. Instead, please enjoy Leonard Crunchman.’” That was the name he came up with on the spot, Leonard Crunchman. And Astaire said, “Oh no, I never had an understudy. I just, no matter what, you just went on, you know.” And it was that kind of—that trooper mentality. And he said, “I remember one time in London I had a boil removed from my head and the doctor bandaged it. But I still went on that night, and I had my top hat and this bandaged head, and nobody explained anything, and I guess the people in the audience were thinking, ‘Oh, I suppose the old fellow broke his skull or something.’” And every time I put the top hat back on top of my head it hurt, but, you know, you just went on. So it turned into this really fascinating conversation. I mean, Astaire was in his mid-eighties at the time and just beginning to slow down a bit. I mean, he wasn’t as lively as he was on the ABC Cavett shows. And that, you know, there was no audience, there was no band. It was just this conversation. Then the following day we went over to Gene Kelly’s house, and he was the absolute opposite because he was able to dissect and come at his films and the dance sequences and the combination of ballet and tap and the athleticism and the choreography because I had researched him when I was in New York. HBO at the time was located in the Time-Life building, so I had access to Time and Life magazines’ archives, and they would have bulging Manila folder files with stretched out rubber bands trying to keep them from exploding, and inside would be old clippings and old photos and stuff. You know, it was like a morgue of old newspaper and photographic things from previous stories. This was, you know, I hastened to add, before Google, so you couldn’t just go to IMDb or Wikipedia or something. But I had this rare access. And in the file for Gene Kelly was a story about when he was working on the 1942, oh, Cover Girl with Rita Hayworth. The music was by Jerome Kern. So there was one news story that said that after filming was completed, Jerome Kern presented Gene Kelly with a silver plate, and that was engraved “To GK from JK” in honor of Cover Girl. And so after Cavett had finished interviewing Gene Kelly, I thought this will floor him that I know this bit of trivia. And so I said, “Do you still have that plate that Jerome Kern gave you after Cover Girl?” And I expected him to laugh or something, and instead he’s got this scowl on his face and he said, “Where did you hear about that? That was stolen from me some years back, and I’ve never seen it. There was a theft at my house. How do you know about that?” And all of a sudden, I was, like, you know, sitting in a chair with the cops going over me with a third degree in a bright light. And I said, “I—it was in your file at the Time-Life archive of the thing, and I did.” And I think he was placated. But it was a strange note to end on because I don’t know, but he ever completely got over that trace of suspicion that the one thing I brought up that I thought would put a smile on his face instead triggered his Irish anger. But it was still a great afternoon to be sitting at the feet of Gene Kelly and listening to him talk about his career. And only one day after spending the afternoon with Fred Astaire. So I had, in one visit back to L.A. from New York, I had managed to spend time with two of—obviously two of the greatest dancers that have ever appeared on film.

00:19:53 Speaker 1: And great job, as always, by Robbie on the production and everything else. It’s a terrific story, in Steve Stolier. My goodness, what a great storyteller. Steve Stolier’s story—his two brushes with greatness—here on Our American Stories.