Ginger Rogers

• 1. Introduction

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  Ginger Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath on the 16th of July, 1911, in Independence, Missouri, and she would become one of the most celebrated performers in the history of American cinema. By the time she died in 1995, she had made 73 films, won an Academy Award, topped the Hollywood pay scales, conquered Broadway twice, and performed in London's West End to a royal command audience. But the question that shadowed her entire career was one she spent decades answering without ever quite being asked: how do you become an icon when everyone assumes the man beside you is the real story?

  Her childhood offers one clue. A cousin who couldn't pronounce "Virginia" called her Ginger, and the nickname stuck. Her mother, Lela, was a newspaper reporter and aspiring screenwriter who eventually wrote scripts for Fox Studios. Her father kidnapped her twice before her mother divorced him. These early disruptions shaped a woman who would prove, over and over, that she could hold herself together under pressure no one else could see.

  By 1925, at fourteen, she had already won a Charleston dance contest in Texas and set off on tour. By nineteen, she was an overnight star on Broadway. By the mid-1940s, she was the highest-paid performer in all of Hollywood. The road from Fort Worth to that paycheck runs through vaudeville circuits, short films, a cancelled Paramount contract, a fateful move to RKO, and nine films with a man named Fred Astaire.

• 2. The Fort Worth Years

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  Fort Worth's Central High School counted Ginger Rogers as a student who never graduated, and that gap tells you something about the speed at which her life was moving. When she was nine, her mother married John Logan Rogers, whose surname Ginger took, and the family relocated to Texas from Kansas City. Lela Rogers became a theater critic for a local newspaper there, bringing the backstage world into the household.

  Waiting for her mother in the wings of Fort Worth's Majestic Theatre, the young Rogers began singing and dancing along with the performers she watched from the side of the stage. That informal apprenticeship ended abruptly in 1925 when the traveling vaudeville act of Eddie Foy came to town and needed a quick stand-in. Fourteen-year-old Rogers stepped in, and within the same year she entered and won a Charleston dance contest, earning a prize that launched her onto the Orpheum Circuit for six months as Ginger Rogers and the Redheads.

  In February 1926, when the MGM film The Barrier premiered in San Bernardino, California, Rogers's vaudeville act was featured at the same event. A local newspaper noted that the "clever little Ginger Rogers showed why she won the Texas state championship as a Charleston dancer." She was still fifteen. That same year, the group performed at an eighteen-month-old theater in Medford, Oregon, called The Craterian, which would later rename itself the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater in her honor, a recognition that was still decades away.

• 3. From Vaudeville to Broadway

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  At seventeen, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer and comedian who performed under the name Jack Pepper. The marriage lasted less than a year. The vaudeville double act they briefly formed was billed as "Ginger and Pepper", but when the partnership dissolved she returned to touring with her mother. When that tour reached New York City, Rogers stayed.

  She found radio singing jobs and then, on Christmas Day, 1929, she made her Broadway debut in the musical Top Speed, which opened at Chanin's 46th Street Theatre. The show had premiered in Philadelphia at the Chestnut Street Opera House on the 13th of November, 1929. Within two weeks of the New York opening, Rogers was chosen to star in Girl Crazy, with music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. Fred Astaire had been hired to help the dancers with their choreography.

  Her appearance in Girl Crazy made her an overnight star at nineteen. It was the first time her path crossed Astaire's, though neither of them could have known what that proximity would eventually mean. From Broadway, the next logical destination was Hollywood. In 1930, Paramount Pictures signed her to a seven-year contract. She made five feature films at Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens, before getting herself out of the deal. She then signed a three-picture arrangement with Pathe Exchange, made films for Warner Bros., Monogram, and Fox, and was named one of fifteen WAMPAS Baby Stars. Her breakthrough came with the 1933 Warner Bros. film 42nd Street, in which she played a character named Anytime Annie.

• 4. Nine Films with Astaire

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  Flying Down to Rio in 1933 was not meant to be a Rogers-Astaire picture. It starred Dolores del Rio and Gene Raymond. Rogers and Astaire were supporting players who, in the industry phrase, "stole the show." RKO recognized what it had, and the studio paired the two for a run that lasted until 1939: The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), Carefree (1938), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).

  Arlene Croce, Hermes Pan, Hannah Hyam, and John Mueller all considered Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, citing her rare combination of dancing skill, beauty, and ability as a dramatic actress and comedian. John Mueller put it precisely: Rogers was outstanding not because she was superior to others as a dancer, but because, as a skilled and intuitive actress, she understood that acting did not stop when dancing began. Mueller argued that the reason so many women fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire was that Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him was the most thrilling experience imaginable.

  Astaire himself, shortly before his death in 1986, recalled: "All the girls I ever danced with thought they couldn't do it, but of course they could. So they always cried. All except Ginger. No, no, Ginger never cried." In a 1976 episode of the British talk show Parkinson, host Michael Parkinson asked Astaire directly who his favorite dancing partner was. Astaire answered: "Excuse me, I must say Ginger was certainly the one. You know, the most effective partner I ever had. Everyone knows."

  Of the thirty-three partnered dances Rogers performed with Astaire, scholars have particularly noted the infectious spontaneity of her comic numbers, including "I'll Be Hard to Handle" from Roberta and "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time, alongside her use of a remarkably flexible back in romantic routines such as "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat. The choreography was credited to Astaire and his collaborator Hermes Pan, but both testified to Rogers's consummate professionalism during periods of intense strain, as she juggled other film commitments alongside Astaire's punishing rehearsal schedule.

• 5. The Oscar and the Peak

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  In 1941, Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Kitty Foyle, a film released in 1940. The win confirmed what her non-musical work had been demonstrating since the mid-1930s: she was not simply a dancer who could act, but an actress who happened to be able to dance.

  Stage Door (1937) had shown her dramatic range opposite Katharine Hepburn. Vivacious Lady (1938) paired her with James Stewart. Bachelor Mother (1939), with David Niven, cast her as a shop girl falsely thought to have abandoned her baby. In Primrose Path (1940), directed by Gregory La Cava, she played a character trying to conceal being the daughter of a prostitute. In The Major and the Minor (1942), Billy Wilder's first Hollywood feature, she played a woman who disguises herself as a twelve-year-old to afford a train ticket home and is forced to maintain the disguise at a military academy. Her mother Lela played her mother in that film.

  In Roxie Hart (1942), she played a wisecracking flapper on trial for the murder of her lover, in a story based on the same play that would later become the musical Chicago. After the Oscar and a series of successes at other studios, including Tender Comrade (1943), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), Rogers became the highest-paid performer in Hollywood. Arthur Freed reunited her with Astaire in The Barkleys of Broadway in 1949, stepping in after Judy Garland was unable to take the role.

• 6. Later Life and Legacy

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  In 1965, Rogers returned to Broadway playing Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, earning the Photoplay Special Editor's Award in 1967 for that role. Four years later, she took the lead in Mame at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London's West End, arriving by ocean liner aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 from New York City. Her docking at Southampton brought what the source describes as the maximum of pomp and ceremony. She became the highest-paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time. The production ran fourteen months and included a royal command performance for Queen Elizabeth II.

  In 1985, at seventy-four, Rogers directed an off-Broadway production of Babes in Arms in Tarrytown, New York, produced by Michael Lipton and Robert Kennedy. She wrote her autobiography, Ginger: My Story, published in 1991, and in 1992 was recognized at the Kennedy Center Honors. Her final screen appearance was a guest role in the Aaron Spelling series Hotel in 1987.

  Her birthplace in Independence, Missouri was designated a Historic Landmark in 1994, and on the 16th of July that year she signed more than two thousand autographs at a Ginger Rogers Day celebration held by the city. She died at her Rancho Mirage home on the 25th of April, 1995, from a heart attack, at eighty-three. Her ashes were interred alongside her mother Lela at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her number fourteen on its list of the greatest female stars of classic American cinema. The Craterian theater in Medford, Oregon, where she performed as a vaudevillian in 1926, was comprehensively restored in 1997 and renamed in her honor, a full century after the building first opened its doors.