Sex and the Storyworld: Narrativizing Desirability in the Early Films of Fred Astaire

From the moment Fred Astaire arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, studio executives and Hollywood columnists wondered, both privately and publicly, whether a ‘homely,’ ‘skinny,’ ‘sophisticated’ dancer would be able to function as a leading man. The fact that the answer proved to be a resounding yes has been largely credited to the woman who danced by Astaire’s side in nine of his first eleven film outings.1 According to John Mueller, for instance, “the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable” (8-9), while according to Katharine Hepburn, more famously and more cuttingly, the basis of Astaire and Rogers’ unprecedented collaborative success is that “He gives her class; she gives him sex” (qtd. in Levinson 75). Egalitarian as Hepburn’s quid pro quo parsing of the partnership may be, the Astaire-Rogers films do much to undermine the neatness of such a dichotomy. As Margaret T. McFadden has noted, the characters played by Astaire are often required to shake off their “effete, highbrow” ways and embrace Rogers’ earthier, more working-class aesthetic by the films’ endings (693); if anything, according to this reading and others like it, Rogers “gives” Astaire the right kind of “class” to please Depression-era viewers.2 What interests me in this article, though, is the giving of sex rather than of class. While I agree with Katharine Hepburn that it was Astaire who stood as the primary