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.”