Book description
Vernon and Irene Castle popularized ragtime dancing in the years just
before World War I and made dancing a respectable pastime in America.
The whisper-thin, elegant Castles were trendsetters in many ways: they
traveled with a black orchestra, had an openly lesbian manager, and
were animal-rights advocates decades before it became a public issue.
Irene was also a fashion innovator, bobbing her hair ten years before
the flapper look of the 1920s became popular. From their marriage in
1911 until 1916, the Castles were the most famous and influential
dance team in the world. Their dancing schools and nightclubs were
packed with society figures and white-collar workers alike. After
their peak of white-hot fame, Vernon enlisted in the Royal Canadian
Flying Corps, served at the front lines, and was killed in a 1918
airplane crash. Irene became a movie star and appeared in more than a
dozen films between 1917 and 1922. The Castles were depicted in the
Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
(1939), but the film omitted most of the interesting and controversial
aspects of their lives. They were more complex than posterity would
have it: Vernon was charming but irresponsible, Irene was
strong-minded but self-centered, and the couple had filed for divorce
before Vernon's death (information that has never before been made
public). Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution is the
fascinating story of a couple who reinvented dance and its place in
twentieth-century culture.
""Eve Golden writes an engaging story filled with
interesting tidbits of information about her subjects and the period
in which they were most well-known." --Ren?e Camus, Founder and
Artistic Director of Centuries Historical Dance" --
