An Introvert as Entertainer
Let’s consider some themes in the life of dancer, singer and actor Fred Astaire, an introvert to the core.
If I ask you to imagine someone who had a world-class career as an entertainer, you’d probably picture someone taking a bow after a performance, flushed with joy at the audience’s appreciation. This doesn’t gibe with the personality of Fred Astaire (1899-1987), one of the greatest dancers who ever lived.
Born Frederick Austerlitz in Omaha, Nebraska, he moved to New York City with his mother because his older sister was thought to have talent as a dancer. Both siblings took dance lessons, and the two children, now “Astaires,” soon toured the country as a brother-sister vaudeville act. Theater managers considered Adele the naturally talented one, and said so, leading Fred to work harder, studying and practicing steps, turns and arm movements. By 1917, their act had reached Broadway. Critics praised Adele’s effervescent charm and Fred’s “lank lissomeness.”
After Adele retired from performing to marry an English lord, Fred floundered a bit, then headed to Hollywood. The camera – and movie audiences – loved him. Accordingly, Astaire had some leverage to demand working conditions that were important for his sense of craft: an unprecedented six weeks of rehearsal time, approval of the staging of dance sequences so they favored one-take full-body shots, and input on editing. Precision mattered intensely to him. Biographer Peter J. Levinson writes, “He was a terror in the cutting room, insisting on the exact synchronization of picture and sound.”
Astaire’s concern with form and artfulness over adulation by the public fits with the interior, contemplative orientation of the introvert personality. It’s the opposite of someone in the same line of work who feels that whatever the audience loves most counts most. Instead, the introvert artist has a mental image of their art that they work hard to live up to. In his autobiography Astaire himself remarked, “Believe it or not, there is even an artistic way to pick up a garbage can.”
With that said, the all-star dancer acknowledged the downside of his perfectionism and worrying. When they’d performed together, his sister Adele gave him the nickname “Moaning Minnie” for his jangly nervousness off the stage. “I really am bad-tempered, impatient, hard to please, critical,” he acknowledged as an adult, putting a humble interpretation on behavior that some people would explain away as the prerogative of a world-renowned celebrity. Some actors who had scenes with him described him as snooty, aloof or remote, which is how introverts often come across to non-introverts.
As his Hollywood career flourished, Astaire formed important one-on-one friendships with people like songwriter Irving Berlin, composer George Gershwin and actor David Niven, but like several other introvert artists I’ve profiled, he rarely showed up at industry parties or movie premieres and rarely granted interviews. A British journalist who did interview him remarked, “Being questioned by a stranger embarrasses him. Fred Astaire isn’t selling Fred Astaire.” He preferred relaxing with his family, his racehorses and his fruit-growing projects. For Astaire, glamour belonged not in his personal life but on the film set, where it helped dramatize his debonair, joyful performances.
As he approached the age of 60, Astaire kept at his art, including a TV dance special that won a record-breaking nine Emmy Awards. In his seventies he took up skateboarding and branched out into character acting, with his last film appearance at age 82.
Despite his being such an American icon, his will ordered that no film biography ever be made of his life. “Because I have no particular desire to have my life misinterpreted, which it would be,” he once explained. My understanding of this is that he didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed, with dramatists creating motivations that would belie his fundamental, lifelong love for the art of dance. “I have no desire to prove anything by it,” he said. “I never used it as an outlet or as a means of expressing myself. I just dance.”