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.
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