Memory Lane

By A. T. Baker

THE FRED ASTAIRE AND GINGER ROGERS BOOK by ARLENE CROCE 191 pages. Outerbridge & Lazard. $9.95.

He had an undernourished clown's face, an indeterminately skinny body, and a sophistication that he wore with uncertainty--even in his white tie, top hat and tails. She was soft-and sunny-looking--not beautiful or exotic, but pretty in a way that suggested both sexual challenge and the sisterly virtue of the girl next door.

But somehow, somewhen, he always got her to dance. Suddenly, this bony, nervous little man became masterful. Invariably, the scornful, the superior, the prickly Ginger Rogers responded. Their dances, begun as wary fencing, ended in mesmerized fascination. Nowhere in film has dance thus become the delectable yet decorous expression of the mating impulse. It embodied every man's fantasy and every girl's hope of being swept off her feet. It did not hurt that Fred Astaire was almost as unlikely looking a romantic lead as you or the next ordinary moviegoer.

In this heavily illustrated, highly readable short book, Arlene Croce, editor of Ballet Review and freelance critic, has traced in meticulous detail the happenstance that brought about the partnership and produced that wondrous series of nine Astaire-Rogers movies in only three years, 1934-36. Among them: Top Hat, The Gay Divorcee, Flying Down to Rio. Astaire was 34 when the series began, and distinctly the lesser half of the famed Broadway act he made up with his sister Adele, who had abruptly quit her career to marry an English lord. Twelve years younger, Ginger was a knockabout ingenue with a track record of some success but no public personality of her own. Astaire was unquestionably the architect. He designed the dances, demanded complete control of the cutting and synchronization.

The result of this technical skill was an illusion of total spontaneity. Though knowing dance experts might point out scornfully that Astaire faked some of Ginger's taps, Astaire never again or before had a partner who produced the same alchemy as Ginger. As Author Croce, who can turn a nice phrase, notes. Ginger had her own qualities: "That beautiful supple back that let her arch from his arms like a black lily," while he produced "those ratcheting tap clusters that fall like loose change from his pockets."

Well, alas, the partnership broke up, mostly because Ginger had higher ambitions. Observes Croce, who does not admire Ginger as a straight actress as much as some of us: "She's an American classic just as he is: common clay that we prize above classic marble. The difference between them is that he knew it and she didn't." To adapt a phrase from Thomas Nash, brightness fell from the air. Its particular gleam has never been recaptured--except perhaps in this book. . A.T. Baker

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