ASTAIRE WAS ALWAYS IN GOOD HANDS

When that myopic minor executive advised his studio years ago that a Broadway performer named Fred Astaire “can dance a little,” it was not a grudging concession but the ultimate dismissal. He might as well have been saying Astaire could play the musical saw, talk backwards or do bird calls. There wasn’t much need for those skills, or for a star dancer. Astaire had to invent himself for the movies, and did he ever.

I always thought Fred Astaire’s hands were a tip-off to the real man. A dancer’s legs usually suggest a stevedore’s, capable of holding up the whole proscenium arch. I don’t remember that we ever saw Astaire’s legs: only what they could do. But I have imagined they were slim and possibly hollow-boned, like birds’, to make possible that lighter-than-air and unstrained defiance of gravity that made his dancing seem miraculous.

But his hands were strong and large, perhaps even disproportionately large, and they gave away the tireless perfectionist, the very hard worker who dwelt within that diffident and even faintly foppish public persona.

I have a photograph of Astaire, taken when we were doing an interview a few years ago. He was already in his 80s and his face had surrendered that gaunt fragility of the young years. In the picture you glimpse a hand, and it is still the hand not of a salon sitter but of someone who has done work.

Ah, yes, he could dance a lot. But he was uniquely appealing off the dance floor as well, even before he did “On the Beach” and the other dramatic roles in his post-dancing years.

He made dancing seem a wonderful but quite impossible dream for all the lead-foot males in the audience. (How often did a lot of us make little lurching leaps on the way home from an Astaire movie, only to be rudely reminded of our earthbound clumsiness, and his genius?) But Astaire, as stars sometimes do, also reconciled lesser males to other aspects of themselves. (Gable’s ears, said to be oversized, reconciled me to mine which were also oversized. It was all we ever had in common, but it helped.)

Astaire proved that you could sing charmingly without being Caruso or even Bing Crosby. He demonstrated that thinning and slicked-down hair could have its own appeal, and so could a face that seemed to be all grin and cheekbones, open and attractive but certainly not a profile from a Greek or Roman coin.

Dimensionally, except for those hands, he was closer to the chap who got sand kicked at him on the beach than he was to Charles Atlas. But he always got the girl, on a combination of charm, niceness and talent. And, by all the powers of implication and extension the movies always have, there was hope for all the guys who were shy, tongue-tied and perennially wistful.

But there were also subtler guidances to be taken from Fred Astaire. He was a difficult interview because he so disliked talking about himself and particularly about his past achievements. His own shyness and reserve were real enough; never was there a more modest man with less to be modest about.

Another star once said, with an edge of hostility, that all you owe the public is a good performance. In an operational sense, I think Fred Astaire believed the same thing, minus any edge of hostility. There had been sadness as well as triumphs in his life. The sadness and the private pleasures were his to contemplate, he would have said. The public triumphs are ours to celebrate and revive as we will. Let him, he seemed to be saying, in the gentlest of voices, get on with day-to-day living and contemplations of tomorrow rather than yesterday.

There have been stars who paused at newly waxed fenders to take another appreciative glance at their own reflections. Astaire stood in movie lines in Westwood in a battered hat and nondescript raincoat, pleased beyond measure to go unrecognized.

Like Cary Grant, Fred Astaire had become a citizen of the world, his Omaha as remote, finally, as Grant’s Bristol. As with Jimmy Cagney, there was something about the work and discipline involved in being a dancer that produced in Fred Astaire (or perhaps attracted in the first place) a special kind of man--with the great gift of inner grace and balance, and an ultimately tranquil vision of himself in the world. He gave lessons that in the end were only incidentally about dancing.