Vernon and Irene Castle were a husband-and-wife team of ballroom dancers of the early 20th century. They are credited with invigorating the popularity of modern dancing. Vernon Castle (2 May 1887 – 15 February 1918) was born William Vernon Blyth in Norwich, Norfolk, England. Irene Castle (17 April 1893 – 25 January 1969) was born Irene Foote in New Rochelle, New York.
The couple reached the peak of their popularity in Irving Berlin's first Broadway show, Watch Your Step (1914), in which they refined and popularized the Foxtrot. They also helped to popularize ragtime, jazz rhythms African-American music for dance. Irene became a fashion icon, and the two were in demand as teachers and writers on dance.
After serving with distinction as a pilot in World War I, Vernon died in a civilian plane crash in 1918. Irene continued to perform and made silent films over the next decade. She remarried, had children and became an animal-rights activist. In 1939, her life with Vernon was dramatized in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.
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Rise to fame
Vernon, the son of a publican, was raised in Norwich, England initially training to become a civil engineer. He moved to New York in 1906 with his sister, Coralie Blyth, and her husband Lawrence Grossmith,[1] both established actors. There he was given a small part on stage by Lew Fields, which led to further acting work, and he became established as a comic actor, singer, dancer and conjuror, under the stage name Vernon Castle.[2]
Irene, the daughter of a prominent physician, studied dancing and performed in several amateur theatricals before meeting Vernon Castle at the New Rochelle Rowing Club in 1910. With his help, she was hired for her first professional job, a small dancing part in "The Summer Widowers". The next year, over her father’s objections, the two were married. The English-born Vernon had already established himself as a dancer in comedic roles. His specialty was playing a gentleman drunk, who elegantly fell about the stage while trying to hide his condition.[2]
After their marriage, Irene joined Vernon in The Hen-Pecks (1911), a production in which he was a featured player. The two then traveled together to Paris to perform in a dance revue. The show closed quickly, but the couple was then hired as a dance act by the Café de Paris. They performed the latest American ragtime dances, such as the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear. The Castles were soon the rage of Parisian society; their success was widely reported in the United States, preparing their way for a triumphant return to New York in 1912.
When they returned to the U.S., their success was repeated on a far wider scale. Making their New York debut in 1912 at a branch of the Cafe de Paris operated by Louis Martin, who had given them their start in Paris, the duo were soon in demand on stage, in vaudeville and in motion pictures. They also became staples of Broadway. Among their shows were The Sunshine Girl (1913) and Watch Your Step (1914), which boasted Irving Berlin's first score, written for the Castles.[2] In this extravaganza, the couple refined and popularized the Foxtrot. After its New York run, Watch Your Step toured through 1916.
In 1914, the couple opened a dancing school in New York called "Castle House", a nightclub called "Castles by the Sea" on the Boardwalk in Long Beach, New York, and a restaurant, "Sans Souci". At Castle House, they taught New York society the latest dance steps, by day, and greeted guests and performed at their club and cafe at night. They also were in demand for private lessons and appearances at fashionable parties. Despite their fame, they often found themselves treated as hired menials; if a rich client was too demanding, Vernon would quote a fee of a thousand dollars an hour for lessons and often get it.[2]
Film and fashion
As America’s premier dance team, the Castles were trendsetters in a number of arenas. Their infectious enthusiasm for dance encouraged admirers to try new forms of social dance. Considered paragons of respectability and class, the Castles specifically helped remove the stigma of vulgarity from close dancing. The Castles’ performances, often set to ragtime and jazz rhythms, also popularized African-American music among well-heeled whites. The Castles appeared in a newsreel called Social and Theatrical Dancing in 1914 and wrote a bestselling instructional book, Modern Dancing, later the same year. The pair also starred in a feature film called The Whirl of Life (1915), which was well received by critics and public alike.
As the couple's celebrity increased in the mid-1910s, Irene Castle became a major fashion trendsetter, initiating the vogue for shorter skirts. She is also credited with introducing American women to the bob – the short hairstyle favored by flappers in the 1920s. Her elegant, yet simple, flowing gowns worn in performance were often featured in fashion magazines. These were often supplied by the couturier "Lucile", but Irene also designed some of her clothes herself. The whisper-thin, elegant Castles were trendsetters in other ways: they traveled with a black orchestra, had an openly lesbian manager, and were animal-rights advocates decades before it became a public issue.[3]
The Castles endorsed Victor Records and Victrolas, issuing records by the Castle House Orchestra, led by James Reese Europe, a pioneering figure in African-American music. They also lent their names to advertising for other products, from cigars and cosmetics to shoes and hats.
World War I: Vernon's death
Vernon returned to the UK to become a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Flying over the Western Front, he shot down two aircraft and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1917. He was posted to Canada to train new pilots, and then promoted to Captain and posted to the U.S. to train American pilots.
While he was away, late in 1917 Irene appeared in a star-studded revue, Miss 1917. Although she was singled out for praise by reviewers, she was unhappy performing on stage without her husband: "I found myself hopelessly lost as a solo number. I had no training for dancing alone and I should never have tried it."[4] Though successful with critics, the revue failed to attract an audience; at least not enough of one to pay for the lavish production.[4][5] Castle's specialty song was challenged on copyright grounds, and management cut it. In addition, her business was scheduled for late in the evening, around 10:30, and she found it difficult to perform so late and then do film work during the day. As the show failed, she and others were let go by the producers. She later sued successfully, but by then the production company was bankrupt.[6] For the rest of 1917, she made fashionable and successful appearances on behalf of the war effort.[6]
On 15 February 1918, on a peaceful flying field at Benbrook Field, near Fort Worth, Texas, he took emergency action shortly after takeoff to avoid a collision with another aircraft. His plane stalled, and he was unable to recover control in time before the plane hit the ground. Vernon was the only casualty. He died soon after the crash, on 15 February 1918 (aged 30).[7] Irene paid tribute to Vernon in her memoir My Husband, 1919. There is a street in Benbrook, Texas, named in his honor, and placed on the street is a monument dedicated to him. Vernon was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. The grieving memorial figure on his grave was designed by Irene Castle's friend, the American sculptor Sally James Farnham (1869–1943).
Life without Vernon
On 3 May 1919, Irene remarried. Her second husband was a scion of Ithaca, New York's Treman family, Robert E. Treman.[8] They resided in Ithaca's newly-cut Cayuga Heights subdivision, north of Cornell University. Irene starred solo in about a dozen silent films between 1917 and 1924, including Patria (1917), and appeared in several more stage productions before retiring from show business. Treman took Castle's money and lost it in the stock market. They divorced in 1923. She married two more times; the same year, she married Frederic McLaughlin (a man 16 years her elder), and two years after he died in 1944, she married George Enzinger (d. 1959), an advertising executive from Chicago. During her marriage to "Major" McLaughlin, who was the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks, she is credited with designing the original sweater for the Blackhawks Hockey Club.[9] She had two children with McLaughlin, Barbara McLaughlin Kreutz (1925–2003), who was Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Bryn Mawr College, and William McLaughlin (1929–2012).[10]
Castle mostly retired after William's birth in 1929, concentrating on animal rights activism.[11] Around 1930, "the best-dressed woman in America" presented serialized, quarter-hour radio dramatizations of her European travels with her husband, bulldog Zowie and Walter ("father's coloured servant") around the capitals of Europe in "The Life of Irene Castle". Only one episode (episode #4) is known to exist.[12]
In 1939, the Castles' life was turned into a movie, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, produced by RKO and starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Edna May Oliver played their agent, and Lew Fields was his 33 years younger self. Irene Castle served as a technical advisor on the film, but clashed with Rogers, who refused to short bob or darken her hair. Castle also objected to Rogers' inauthentic wardrobe demands and to white actor Walter Brennan playing their faithful friend and manservant servant Walter, since Walter was African-American.[citation needed]
For the rest of her life, Castle was a staunch animal-rights activist, ultimately founding the Illinois animal shelter "Orphans of the Storm", which is still active.[13] In 1958, Castle appeared as a guest challenger on the TV panel show "To Tell the Truth".[citation needed]
Castle died 25 January 1969
(aged 75) and was interred together with Vernon at Woodlawn Cemetery.Fashion gallery
Associated dances
Notes
- ^ Lawrence was a son of George Grossmith, the Victorian comic actor, singer and writer known for his work with Gilbert and Sullivan
- ^ a b c d Cohen, Selma Jeanne. "Castle, Irene and Vernon", International Encyclopedia of Dance, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 1998 pp. 78–80
- ^ Golden, Eve. Vernon and Irene Castle’s Ragtime Revolution. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
- ^ a b Golden, p. 191
- ^ Jasen, David A (2002). P.G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a Master. Music Sales Group: Music Sales Group. pp. 71–72. http://books.google.com/books?id=9L2kjKQ8CvYC&pg=PA71.
- ^ a b Golden, p. 192
- ^ Eastern Daily Press, 18 October 2008
- ^ "Irene Castle, Bride of Captain Treman", The New York Times, 4 May 1919
- ^ "The Blackhawks Sweater", Geocities.com, accessed 30 July 2009
- ^ Golden, pp. 233 and 248
- ^ Golden, pp. 233–34
- ^ The recording of episode #4 is in the audio archive of the J. Fred and Leslie W. MacDonald Collection at the Library of Congress.
- ^ "Our History: About – Irene Castle and Orphans of the Storm", Orphans of the Storm, accessed 3 March 2012
- ^ Burbank, Emily. Woman as Decoration. New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1917, online as
References
- Golden, Eve. Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution, University Press of Kentucky, 2007, ISBN 081312459X
External links
- Vernon Castle at the Internet Broadway Database
- Irene Castle at the Internet Broadway Database
- Watch Your Step at the Internet Broadway Database
- Vernon Castle at the Internet Movie Database
- Irene Castle at the Internet Movie Database
- The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle at the Internet Movie Database
- Irene Castle at the TCM Movie Database
- The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle at the TCM Movie Database
- Vernon Castle at Find a Grave
- Irene Castle at Find a Grave
- Radio Nostalgia Network - "Radio Journeys", Episode 17, including "The Life of Irene Castle"
- United States Library of Congress; American Memory. Dance Instruction Manuals: Modern Dancing By Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle
- Orphans of the Storm animal shelter founded by Irene Castle