CASTLE, VERNON 1887-1918 AND CASTLE, IRENE 1893-1969

Dancers

A Whirlwind Career

In just three years, 1912 to 1915, Vernon and Irene Castle rose from a nightclub act to the most famous ballroom dancers in the world. Three years after that their partnership ended in tragedy. Yet by 1918 this husband and wife's choreography—together with the high-class aura they lent the new and controversial phenomenon of public dancing—had transformed popular entertainment and brought millions of Americans onto the dance floor.

The Beginning of a Team

Though Vernon Castle preceded his partner into show business, it was Irene Castle's ambition that steered the couple toward stardom. Born Irene Foote on 7 April 1893 in New Rochelle, New York, she spent much of her comfortable, upper-middle-class childhood appearing in local amateur productions and dreaming of acting on Broadway. In contrast Vernon Castle—born Vernon Blyth in Norwich, England, on 2 May 1887—studied engineering in college and was planning a career in that field when he took a vacation to New York City, where his actress sister was appearing in a play. He got a small part in it and, to avoid appearances of nepotism, chose a made-up last name, Castle, for the program. Vernon Castle remained in New York, appearing in Broadway comedies for the next three years. During the summer of 1910 he met the Foote family, and through his intercession Irene was cast in a small part in a musical in which he was appearing. Their friendship grew to romance, and on Christmas Day 1910 they became engaged. They were married the following May.

First Success. In early 1912 they got jobs in a small show in Paris, for which they improvised a ballroom-dancing act based on American ragtime music (then the rage in Paris). The show flopped, but the Castles did not. They were invited to star at an exclusive nightclub, becoming the darlings of a wealthy European set. In mid 1912 they returned to New York and began a similar career there, dancing regularly at a posh club and at parties given by wealthy Americans. One night they added a variation to their act. As Irene Castle described it later, "Instead of coming down on the beat as everybody else did, we went up—that became known as the Castle Walk." Soon they were making more than $1,000 a night.

Respectable Role Models

In 1913 the couple opened Castle House, an exclusive daytime club on Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan, opposite the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The enterprise was backed by several society ladies (some of whom were taking private lessons from Vernon Castle). As new dance styles—from the exhibitionist turkey trot to the erotic tango—became extremely popular, they were also widely criticized as immoral. The Castles had a far different image. As Irene Castle explained in her autobiography, "We were clean-cut; we were married and when we danced there was nothing suggestive about it. We made dancing look like the fun it was." They published Modern Dancing (1914), a book defending public dancing as moral and good exercise. They won over even the conservative Ladies' Home Journal, which ran step-by-step photographs of the Castles demonstrating the steps they had invented.

Nationwide Fame

Irene Castle's fans considered her the epitome of style and class. When she appeared on-stage in simple, flowing dresses (because she could not dance in a hobble skirt, a corset, or a bustle), millions of women copied her dress style. When she cut her hair in 1914 (for convenience while she was hospitalized for an appendectomy), women swarmed to salons demanding Castle Bobs. In spring 1914, during their four-week Whirlwind Tour of thirty-two cities with James Reese Europe's band, their train was greeted by crowds at every stop, and thousands of couples showed up for the dance competitions held along the way. Their popularity peaked that December, when they opened on Broadway in Irving Berlin's musical Watch Your Step. In 1915 the Castles starred in a movie version of their story, The Whirl of Life. Yet by mid 1915 Vernon Castle was concerned about the war in Europe, and he left the show that fall to enlist.

A Tragic End

In 1916 and 1917 Irene Castle sold Liberty Bonds, acted in several movies—including William Randolph Hearst's pro-American Patria (1916)—and danced solo in Florenz Ziegfeld's Miss 1917. Work did not alleviate her worry over her husband's dangerous assignments as an aerial photographer of enemy territory in Europe, for which the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre. Later in the war, while he was training American flyers in Texas, he was killed in a plane crash, on 15 February 1918. The train bearing his body back to New York was met by crowds of mourners all along its route. For a few years after Vernon Castle's death, Irene Castle danced with a new partner, Billy Reardon, but by the end of the 1920s she was no longer dancing regularly, devoting herself instead to animal welfare. She remarried three times and had two children with her third husband. Most of her subsequent entertainment work was related to her past fame, including her service as a technical adviser for The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers played the Castles. She died on 25 January 1969.

Source:

Irene Castle, as told to Bob and Wanda Duncan, Castles in the Air, foreword by Ginger Rogers (New York: Da Capo Press, 1958).

Castle, Vernon [né Blythe] (1887–1918), dancer. Coming to America from his native England, he made his debut in About Town (1906), the first of seven Lew Fields shows in which he danced and often served as Fields's stooge: The Girl Behind the Counter (1907), The Mimic World (1908), The Midnight Sons (1909), Old Dutch (1909), The Summer Widowers (1910), and The Hen‐Pecks (1911). After he married Irene Foote (1893–1969), who danced in the chorus of the last two shows, they went to Paris, where they perfected their ballroom technique and became a dancing sensation. On their return they almost single‐handedly initiated a rage for ballroom dancing in America, starting what was called “the dancing craze” and introducing or popularizing such dances as the tango, the Maxine, the Castle Walk, and the Turkey Trot. Vernon appeared briefly in The Lady of the Slipper (1912), a Victor Herbert musical Irene had walked out of during rehearsals, but they then danced as a team in The Sunshine Girl (1913) and in Irving Berlin's ragtime musical Watch Your Step (1914). The Castles were also applauded for their vaudeville appearances. While Vernon was training pilots for the war, Irene appeared alone in Miss 1917. After her husband was killed in a training accident, she retired from performing, although she helped later Broadway shows re‐create period dances. Autobiography: (Irene): Castles in the Air, 1958.

Vernon Castle, and Irene Foote 1893–1969, husband-and-wife dance team. Vernon Castle was an English dancer, who studied civil engineering before turning to the stage and making his debut in 1907. In 1911, he married Irene Foote, b. New Rochelle, N.Y. In Paris in 1912 their versions of such dances as the "Texas Tommy" and the "Grizzly Bear" brought them fame. The team originated the "Castle walk," the one-step, and the "hesitation" waltz, and Irene Castle introduced bobbed hair and the slim, boyish figure to the ballroom and the world of fashion. Castle was a pilot during World War I and was killed during a training mission in Texas.

Bibliography: See I. Castle, Castles in the Air (1958).