Race, Taste, and Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire epitomized taste as both dancer and singer. As the first to sing many songs in movies and on Broadway that entered the Great American Songbook, from “Night and Day” and “Cheek to Cheek” to “A Foggy Day” and “One for My Baby,” he delivered them faithfully, as written. Although his limited voice could sound thin and reedy, he had impeccable intonation and presented lyrics with precise diction that communicated the pop poetic cleverness of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Fields, Irving Berlin, and others. Songwriters adored him because he revered their work. His dancing expanded the songs imaginatively, whether in a tap, jazz, ballroom, or semi-balletic idiom, and his ability to hear and then realize what the music wanted to express, often with the assistance of his collaborating choreographer, Hermes Pan, had no equal in the twentieth century except for George Balanchine.
Astaire made propriety thrilling, experimenting with ballroom forms so that waltzes, polkas, and fox trots evolved into complex, emotionally rich works of art that continually offered musical and rhythmic revelations. He also made impropriety proper, transforming social imbecilities such as dancing on the furniture, or spilling a large ashtray’s gallon of sand onto his hotel room floor and performing a softshoe lullaby for Ginger Rogers, falling asleep in the room below, into gestures of exuberance or elegance.
One number, however, challenges our admiration of Astaire as a paragon of taste: “Bojangles of Harlem,” his extraordinary, three-part tap dance from Swing Time, directed by George Stevens in 1936. From where we stand, well into the twenty-first century, we have every reason to regard it as a failure of taste and sensitivity because, for the first and only time in his career, Astaire performed in blackface. Artistically, however, it is one of Astaire’s greatest numbers, and its middle section, in which he dances with three gigantic shadows, marks his first use of trick photography for expressive purposes.
“Bojangles,” I tell myself intellectually, fails in taste because of its use of blackface. Yet every time I watch the dance, I find myself thrilled by its choreographic and athletic virtuosity, as well as by Astaire’s complex rhythmic musicality and remarkable expressiveness. Some years ago I compared the problem to the famous duck/rabbit optical illusion, suggesting that some viewers can only see the number as a blackface travesty and thereby find themselves unable to engage with its artistry, while others, including myself, must ignore its racial elements in order to enjoy it as a dance masterpiece. This is largely the position that the hosts of Turner Classic Movies, including MacArthur-winning film scholar Jacqueline Stewart, arrived at in evaluating Swing Time’s racial content in 2021 for its “Reframed Classics” series.
“Bojangles of Harlem” contains some appalling elements, most of all the lyrics Dorothy Fields wrote for Jerome Kern’s melody:
Ask anyone up Harlem way
Who that guy Bojangles is;
They may not know who’s President,
But ask ‘em who Bojangles is.
Fields exploits the trope of Black ignorance at a time, the Depression, when New Deal programs made Roosevelt popular with African Americans as well as with whites. Then, as the lyric winds up, things get worse:
Oh, Bojangles of Harlem, the whole town’s at your heels,
Leaving their flats, missing their meals,
Running like rats, going astray;
Throw those long legs away.
The ugly simile comparing “the whole town” of Harlem to rats alludes to the “Pied Piper of Harlem” number that Bill “Bojangles” Robinson danced earlier that year in The Big Broadcast of 1936. In his 2011 book, Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz, Todd Decker points out that in Swing Time the chorus sings the lyrics, not Astaire. That’s true, and you have to strain a bit to make them out. But as with most of the songs from his RKO films, beginning with Top Hat in 1935, Astaire did record a 78 RPM of “Bojangles” for the Brunswick label with his usual, tasteful respect, even for this tasteless lyric. It was the flip side of “Never Gonna Dance,” the song from the film’s sublime climactic duet with Rogers.
Decker strives to absolve Astaire of responsibility for the number’s racism, quoting his comment that, owing to Robinson’s popularity, “they thought it would be a good idea to have a takeoff on the Bojangles name.” “That ‘they’ is telling,” Decker says, arguing that the blackface makeup “feels arbitrary,” because Astaire does not alter his dancing style into a more stereotypical blackface parody, like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney’s grotesque “Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones” number from the 1942 Babes on Broadway. Decker cites evidence that RKO added “Bojangles” to the film almost as an afterthought, accounting for what he finds its slapdash construction: “In the end, the element of racial caricature, which under most circumstances would have shaped every element of the number, had little real effect on Astaire’s contribution to an unsatisfactory whole.”
Decker could not be more wrong about the quality of “Bojangles,” which choreographically is a masterpiece—not because of its racial elements, but because of its ingenious structure and the artistic brilliance of each of its three main sections. Its construction inverts our usual expectations of a big number, which we expect to keep building and building to a huge finale. Astaire and Pan take things in the opposite direction. “Bojangles,” performed on the stage of the film’s Silver Sandal nightclub, begins with twenty-four women wearing sepia makeup, bowler hats, and short frilly dresses, half in black, half white. They enter six at a time, dancing tap figures as they bend left and right, and then a V-shaped screen slides open upon a pair of gigantic black shoe soles, turned into a racist caricature by a bowler hat up top, a bowtie beneath, and a pair of exaggerated lips. These features quickly disappear, and the long legs to which the shoe soles are attached separate, revealing Astaire. The women remove his fake legs (“Throw those long legs away”), and he springs up to dance. His sailing arm gestures suggest some African American hoofers of the time, his hands rotating forward in the air, or forming arcs overhead, but nothing he does looks foreign to his own expressive vocabulary. Soon he is dancing with three of the women, who have split up into eight trios. Then, partnering one woman, he sweeps back and forth across the stage, each sweep picking up another six dancers, until, his back to us, he partners all twenty-four in a line extending upstage from us.
Arlene Croce, in her 1972 work, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, calls this opening section “as inventive a group number as any I’ve seen on the screen—it reminds me of Balanchine,” and just at this point comes the most Balanchine-like moment. Astaire, his back still to us, swings his first partner to his right, and all twenty-four flow horizontally across the stage. Croce’s reference is spot on: Balanchine may very well have had this sequence in mind in 1941 when he choreographed Ballet Imperial (now called Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2), whose middle movement, at one point, features the principal man dancing with ten women, five on each hand, unfurling them across the stage first in one, then the other direction, like elegant waves, a legato version of Astaire’s rippling line of tappers.
The stage clears, and we cut to Astaire dancing a fast solo to a descending piano vamp, devised by rehearsal pianist Hal Borne to provide a jazzier accompaniment than Kern’s melody permitted. Suddenly three gigantic shadow-Astaires appear behind him, all four figures dancing in unison. Hermes Pan devised the sequence after seeing a stage light throw three shadows and discovering, to his delight, that RKO’s special effects department could produce that effect on a larger scale. Just over a minute into the sequence, Astaire stoops and shoots his arms out to the sides while the shadows continue dancing, and we delightedly realize they are actually filmed projections. Astaire then dances in and out of unison with his shadows, developing a mind-boggling visual and rhythmic counterpoint, until, unable to keep up, the shadows gesture Phooey! and stride off. As the “Bojangles” melody returns, slowed to half-time, Astaire concludes with a brilliantly complex tap-and-hand-clapping solo, the taps and claps marking two different rhythms, both of them off the beat. Suddenly he winds things up, gives a little, lazy “nothing to it” wave, and strolls off, the most casual of endings to the most formally exquisite of dances. There is nothing tastier.
Astaire and Pan turn everything upside down, dwindling the task force from twenty-five to four (Astaire and his shadows) to one—and no other solo performer fills a stage or a screen like Astaire. In spite of all our misgivings about its racial trappings, I believe the serious artistry and joy of the number as a performance, as a choreographic marvel, and as an homage, turn its use of racial stereotype, and our expectations for blackface numbers, upside down as well.
Any evaluation of “Bojangles,” however, crashes into a raft of “Yes buts.” His sepia-toned makeup covers his entire face, unlike the cartoonish Al Jolson-like black shoe polish that Garland, Rooney, and company wear in “Roosevelt Jones,” leaving a big white ring around the mouth—but it’s still blackface makeup. Astaire’s apparent distancing of himself from the distastefulness of blackface—his ascribing the idea to “them,” his mention of the number only once, in passing, with no mention of blackface, in his 1959 autobiography Steps in Time—doesn’t quite apologize for the enthusiasm with which his character, Lucky Garnett, applies the makeup after a makeup smooch with Penny Carroll, played by Rogers.
There is, however, the important distinction that Swing Time intends “Bojangles” not as a minstrelsy satire filled with racial ridicule, but as a tribute to another great dancer, Robinson. Croce talks of its “deep dignity of homage … of one great artist to another. And it is homage, not impersonation,” as many writers have made clear. Astaire makes no attempt to imitate Robinson, who danced almost entirely from the waist down, and his characteristic use of his entire body more readily pays homage to a different African American tapper, his exact contemporary John W. Bubbles, whom Astaire often cited as an inspiration.
John Mueller’s 1985 Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films, notes that Bubbles, whose real name was John W. Sublett, had created the role of the flashy drug-dealer and pimp, Sportin’ Life, in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess the year before, and that his costume, a smart suit and bowler hat, clearly inspired Astaire’s in “Bojangles.” But the “Bojangles” outfit, designed by John Harkrider, shoots beyond flash to caricature. In a loud blazer spangled with little white squares and letter “B’s” (Bojangles, but perhaps also Bubbles), a floppy polka-dot bowtie, white gloves with metal clappers in the palms, and a white bowler with a black-trimmed brim, he becomes a caricature of the Black trickster. Although it would not have been so intended in 1936, the visual elements of “Bojangles”—the blackface, albeit modulated, and the costume—conspire to make the dance uncomfortable for some twenty-first-century viewers, and unwatchable for others.
Halfway through the last century, Susanne K. Langer, in discussing the symbolic nature of art, proposed that the experience of watching dance involves seeing “a virtual entity” created by the physical forces unfolding before us onstage, but does not consist of those real forces. As she explained in 1957, in Problems of Art,
watching a dance, you do not see what is physically before you—people running around or twisting their bodies; what you see is a display of interacting forces, by which the dance seems to be lifted, driven, drawn, closed, or attenuated, whether it be solo or choric… . One human body may put the whole play of mysterious powers before you. But these powers, these forces that seem to operate in the dance, are not the physical forces of the dancer’s muscles which actually cause the movements taking place. The forces we seem to perceive most directly and convincingly are created for our perception; and they exist only for it.
Taste sours in dance when the physical—the prosaically visible—in some way triumphs over the virtual, imaginative forces that constitute the key, necessary illusion of dance. Something in the presentation refuses to become imaginatively symbolic, instead remaining stubbornly physical, and that bugs us. For this reason, the literal act of kissing in ballet rarely conveys the erotic charge that can come across more imaginatively in choreographed sequences.
In Grosse Fuge, for example, a 1971 work by the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen that I saw performed by the Royal Birmingham Ballet, choreographic clichés blunt the dance’s virtual forces, while the distracting literalism of its visual elements, both gestures and costumes, prevents us from entering the rich imaginative world promised by Beethoven’s stunning music. Reviewing a 2012 performance, I called it a “pretentious, supposedly sexually daring piece of twaddle” and a “vulgar use of great music”:
The choreography teems with clichés—kicks and spins on the beat, fists raised, fists lowered—just what about Beethoven (here bombastically rearranged for string orchestra) makes some choreographers think “fists”? The men dance barechested, in long black skirts, till they whip them off and perform in skimpy black briefs and heavy leather belts; the women wear white 1950s corsets, much too hideous to titillate and designed for what ads used to call “the fuller figure,” not dancers’ svelte bodies. The action grows soft-core and dull, despite a number of grotesquely suggestive encounters involving heads posed before crotches. We forget about … the enticements of choreography, even about Beethoven; we just feel sorry for the poor dancers.
Watching, I couldn’t escape from the dance’s literal trappings, which added up to an exercise in bad taste, with gestures failing to contribute to an imaginative vision, costumes stealing attention from music and movement, and mime more interested in sexual display than in ballet. If, as here, a ballet makes us think of what it is doing to the dancers, we are far from engaging with it. We see movement as merely physical rather than symbolic and imaginative, and the dance collapses.
As with blackface performance generally, “Bojangles” presents problems of taste impossible to ignore because they are so obviously, physically in front of us. Astaire’s makeup is “physically before you,” as Langer says, yet we do see it because it is part of the number, a participant in the imaginative world of the dance as a tribute to Bill Robinson. Croce justifies the dance not only as tribute, but also for its artistic brilliance, while emphasizing that there is nothing naïve about “Bojangles’s” 1936 use of blackface:
Astaire isn’t simply beyond good and evil, he’s beyond good and better. The we-don’t-do-these-things-anymore people should be told that we didn’t do them then either, but beyond that, if they cared remotely for the art of dancing, they might recognize the deep dignity of homage that is in this piece.
“Bojangles” is of course a historical artifact, and for decades dance, ballet especially, has wrestled with presenting classic dances traditionally inflected with racism. The blackamoor characters, whether antagonists like the villain in Petrouchka or the dancing dolls that once appeared in The Nutcracker’s party scene or Dr. Coppélius’s magic workshop, disappeared long ago, well before George Balanchine’s 1954 Nutcracker set the modern standard. Asian stereotypes have more recently gotten attention, and thanks in large part to Final Bow for Yellowface, the arts activist organization begun by modern dancer Phil Chan and ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin, the New York City Ballet has modified the orientalizing costumes and port de bras in its Nutcracker’s Tea number (often called the Chinese Dance) and has reconsidered the Chinese doll in Balanchine’s Coppélia. Updated productions of one Petipa classic, La Bayadère have likewise tried to soften or eliminate the South Asian stereotypes often attached to the Temple Dancers.
Even without the racist trappings of makeup and stereotyped gesture, ballet companies have long perceived race from a cowardly perspective. Although dance is a supremely unnatural art, companies worried that audiences would not see past skin color to enter fully into the balletic illusion and remained white. Not until 2015 did a world-class company—American Ballet Theatre—cast a Black ballerina, Misty Copeland, in Swan Lake, when she was already thirty-three years old. Back in 1957, for his New York City Ballet, Balanchine made a point of casting an interracial couple, Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams, as the principals in his revolutionary Agon, whose sexually charged pas de deux dramatically contrasted their skin colors. Mitchell argued all his life that the Black-and-white casting for this ultimate black-and-white ballet was essential to Balanchine’s conception, both formally—how the dance looked—and politically—what the dance meant—although through the years white couples also danced Agon. Balanchine’s casting marked an important gesture for the civil rights struggle, but at the same time, he knew a sensational interracial pairing would boost ticket sales. He was simultaneously daringly avant-garde and shamelessly retrograde, and his approach to race smacked of both good taste and bad.
Unlike live ballet, Astaire’s “Bojangles” number, as a filmed performance, is frozen in time, forever panting and forever young. Were it to be adapted for the stage, the dance surely would benefit from an update, letting us marvel at the choreography without the worrisome problems of makeup or costume. Of course it would be a dance without Astaire, and Astaire makes it great, despite—or because of—its being stuck at that time, in that place, in that performance, forever.
Swing Time shows multiple symptoms of being frozen in a particular time and history. Astaire’s character Lucky is a “Depression dandy,” as Croce puts it, dressed for his wedding, who hops a freight to New York. He follows Penny to her job at a ballroom dancing school, a nod to the enormous popularity of the new Arthur Murray Dance Studios. When Penny refuses to speak with Lucky after a misunderstanding, he and his sidekick, Victor Moore as Pop Cardetti, walk a picket line in front of her hotel room, spoofing 1930s labor troubles.
Beyond “Bojangles of Harlem,” Swing Time also reflects its period by indulging in several additional ethnic stereotypes; curiously, though, while each provides material for laughs, Howard Lindsay and Allan Scott’s screenplay takes a gentle approach, so none of the stereotypical characters becomes a laughing stock. Near the beginning, when Lucky’s fellow dancers make him miss his wedding by insisting his formal trousers need cuffs, Schmidt the tailor, played by Abe Reynolds, tells Pop irritably, “As long as I am living, I have never seen cuffs on pants like these.” As he opens pattern book after pattern book, he continues, “Millions of no cuffs! More than that, positively not one cuff!” While his Yiddish inflections are funny, he also displays his expertise, which goes unchallenged and bestows on him a comic dignity.
The Romanian actor Georges Metaxa plays Lucky’s rival for Penny’s love, a vain and sour Latino bandleader named Ricardo Romero (his name may have inspired that of Desi Arnaz’s Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy). The Astaire-Rogers series included many musical jokes, such as having the grand sound of a full orchestra emanate from a nine-man combo; in another of Swing Time’s comic motifs, likely unintentional, Romero’s conducting rarely keeps time with the music. Although his character is overdramatic and excessively jealous of Penny, the script scores points off him not for his character’s ethnicity but his pomposity: “Where Ricardo Romero goes,” he brags, “the others come.” Romero has a Black butler who doesn’t appear until the final scenes of the film. Played by a large actor named Floyd Shackleford, he speaks his few lines with Hollywood’s stereotypical version of African American inflections: “Mr. Romero is seeing nobody today; he’s getting married” and “Excuse me, boss: here are your baggage checks. All your bags are on de boat.” Yet when the butler becomes implicated in another trousers gag, this time played by Lucky and Pop on Romero, it’s the bandleader who becomes the comic target. With his own pants stolen, Romero shows up to marry Penny in his butler’s trousers, which are so colossally huge that he must hold them up with one hand. The trouserless butler, in a top hat and a long coat that reveals his socks and garters, maintains his dignity while his boss’s wedding falls apart.
As in “Bojangles of Harlem,” everything has turned upside down, Lucky and Penny—Astaire and Rogers—have found each other again after all the topsy-turvy plot devices, and that has made it all come out right. All of Swing Time, though flecked with ethnic humor throughout, vibrates with a generous spirit. For all the distasteful aspects of some of its surface elements, “Bojangles” comes out right through its ingenious artistry and the generosity behind its homage, far from the cruelty of other Hollywood blackface numbers. Ninety years later, we may recoil at its naïve approach to tribute, but the persuasive spell of Astaire’s artistic daring makes it, finally, tasteful.
