FLASHBACK

Vanity Fair, February 1928

Twenty-nine-yearold Fred Astaire was starring on Broadway in Funny Face— stopping the show, night after night, with a number called "Top Hat," which became the centerpiece of the 1935 movie Top Hat. This Steichen photograph froze the flickering figure momentarily among Expressionist tophat shadows. Bob Thomas's new book, Astaire (St. Martin's), quotes Graham Greene: "Mr. Astaire is the nearest approach we are ever likely to have to a human Mickey Mouse; he might have been drawn by Mr. Walt Disney, with his quick physical wit, his incredible agility." He also quotes George Balanchine: "He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times... .You see a little bit of Astaire in everybody's dancing—a pause here, a move there. It was all Astaire's originally."