Somewhere in my magpie mind I had a memory of a story about the dress that Ginger Rogers wore during the famous dance sequence of “Cheek to Cheek” in the movie Top Hat. All I could remember was that something had happened with the feathers coming off the dress and that Fred Astaire’s wife, who had trouble saying her r’s, had said, ““Fwed will be so embawassed.”
Well, there are two versions of the story. The first one with the commentary from Astaire’s wife Phyllis says that the dress was covered with red feathers and that Phyllis, who had come to the set with David Niven to watch the filming and who was a little jealous of Rogers, said “She looks like a wooster.”
The dress had been finished at the last minute by the costume department and perhaps the feathers hadn’t been well attached, so as the couple started dancing the feathers started coming off, first one at a time and then in bunches. Fred and Ginger pressed on, but finally the last feather came off and there was Ginger, clad in only the transparent undergown, for all the world to see. That’s when Phyllis tugged at Niven’s arm and said they’d better go because of Fred “embawassment.” I don’t know where the original story came from; I managed to find it in someone’s blogpost from 2012, but he doesn’t give his source.
The other version makes much more sense. If you watch the scene (video is below) you’ll see that the dress is obviously made of ostrich feathers and that it’s much too pale to be red. According to this story, Rogers had conferred with the costume department and requested a dress of blue “like you find in the paintings of Monet” and covered with $1,500 worth of ostrich feathers which were sewn onto a bias-cut satin gown, not some sort of transparent netting. (If you look at the video you’ll see that the whole midsection of the gown, which is not covered by feathers, is clearly satin.) But the second part of the story does agree with the above: the costume department had rushed through making the gown and as the two started their dance,
Feathers flew everywhere, sticking to [Astaire’s] clothes and face, not to mention covering the floor. Director Mark Sandrich and Astaire tried convincing Rogers to wear a different dress, but she stood her ground and threatened to walk off the picture if she couldn’t wear the gown. After the wardrobe department pulled an all-nighter to reinforce each feather individually, Sandrich and Astaire, after watching the rushes of the dance number, admitted to the gown’s beauty and perfection in the scene.
(From the website Pretty Clever Films.)
A parody of the song memorialized Astaire’s hatred of the feathers:
Feathers, I hate feathers / And I hate them so that I can hardly speak / And I never find the happiness I seek / With those chicken feathers dancing cheek to cheek.
I get very tickled by the lines: “Oh, I love to climb a mountain, and to reach the highest peak . . . Oh, I love to go out fishin’ in a river or a creek.” A more unlikely outdoorsman than the Astaire’s character couldn’t be imagined, with his faultlessly slicked-back hair and tuxedo. I think we can safely assume that those lines were inserted mainly because they ended with words that rhyme with “cheek.”
As to the actual plot of the actual movie, well, it’s not very interesting. Ginger’s character Dale thinks Fred’s character Jerry is married to someone else because it’s one of those cases of mistaken identity, but she’s in love with him and he’s in love with her. Everything eventually gets sorted out, but not before Dale marries an Italian fashion designer, except that the ceremony is performed by Jerry’s valet Bates who has been commissioned by Jerry to keep an eye on her, and since he isn’t really a priest the marriage is invalid. (These “I thought you were someone else” plots never seem very convincing to me; honestly, have you ever seen Twelfth Night? Or Comedy of Errors? Nope. I just don’t buy it. But never mind.) As has been pointed out numerous times about musical comedies, the plot is often just an excuse for the singing and the dancing. We won’t argue about that!
But since this is a choral music site, here’s an arrangement for a group. I got a little tickled that there’s an arrangement by the group VOCES8, which I associate with very high-toned classical music:
© Debi Simons
