February 6, 2023 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, while working for Dick Cavett, Steve Stoliar met not one but two of Hollywood’s greatest dance legends.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American Stories. Previously on our show,
we've heard from Steve Stolier, who, as a UCLA student
in the mid seventies, convinced Universal Pictures to re release
the classic Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. It's a terrific story,
by the way, go to our American Stories dot com
and take a look. Stolier would then go on to
(00:32):
be Grout show Marks's personal assistant and historian for the
final years of the legend's life. Today we hear from
Steve again, still in show business, but excited as ever
to be surrounded by stage and screen legends. Here's Steve
(00:53):
grout Show. Marx was just at the top of my
pantheon of most admired entertainers, but running a close second
was fred Astaire Frederick Austerlitz of Omaha, Nebraska. He doesn't
seem as if he would have come from Middle America
(01:14):
like that, because he's known for the top hat and
white tie and tails, but in fact he's one of
those erudite fellows that came from Nebraska, along with Johnny
Carson and Dick Cavit and Marlon Brando and a number
of other people. I would have given anything to be
(01:34):
able to meet him. And in fact, when I was
working at Universal Studios in the late seventies after Graucho died,
I got a job working in the stenopool from eleven
am to eight pm every day, and I would be
typing episodes of The Rockford Files and Kojack and Baretta
(01:54):
and so on. But I loved working at Universal. On
lunch breaks or before or after work, I could go
wandering around there. You know, there wasn't much security at
the time. It isn't like now. Plus I was an
employee and I was always nosing around because of the
(02:15):
history of the place. I love the Universal horror films
and all that sort of stuff, the classics by Man Godfrey,
and so I would keep track of who was guest
starring on different shows and if they were filming on
the lot, and if I was lucky, sometimes I would
be able to cross paths with them. And then, of
(02:37):
all the unlikely things, I found out that Fred Astaire
was going to be guest starring on Battlestar Galactica. Apparently
his grandson his favorite TV show was Battlestar Galactica, and
he said, Grandpa, will you be on that? That would
be cool, and so a stare figuring, well, I can't
(03:00):
deny my own grandson a request like that. So he
got in touch with the producers and they wrote a
part for him where he played Dirk Benedict's conman father.
On a lunch break, I wandered over to the set
and I watched him shoot a scene inside the spacecraft.
(03:21):
And then during a break, he was just sauntering around
the sound stage with his hands in his pockets, and
I happened to have with me an original still of
him in Swing Time, nineteen thirty sixth film, and so
I went over and introduced myself and I said, I
(03:42):
just I want to thank you for all of the
magical moments, from flying down to Rio to a Family
Upside Down and everything in between. Family Upside Down was
a TV movie he had just done, costarring opposite Helen Hayes,
so at the time that was sort of like thanking
him for his whole film career. And he said, oh, well,
(04:05):
my goodness, thank you, and he was happy to sign
my photo. And so, for one brief, shining moment, I
got to meet one of my all time heroes. So
that was in seventy eight in nineteen eighty three, five
years later. I had moved to New York the previous
(04:27):
year to write for Dick Cavot, whom I met through
my Grouchow connection and who hired me away from Universal
to write for him at HBO on a short lived
show called HBO Magazine. But then I continued to live
in New York and write for Cavot and other things.
(04:48):
A Stair and Gene Kelly had both been honored by
the Kennedy Center. You see the edited down specials on
TV where they have someone from dance and music and
literature and they salute them. And the Kennedy Center had
a policy where after you've been saluted, they would appreciate
(05:12):
it if you would sit down for an interview, not
to be released or broadcast, but just for their library,
for the Kennedy Center's official library to have that for
people to be able to access. So Astare said that
would be fine with him, but only if Dick Cavot
(05:32):
does the interview, because he had had a good experiences
when Cavot had his ABC show and he felt comfortable
conversing with him. I was friends with and writing for Cavot,
and he knew what an astare fanatic eye was as
was he, and the Kennedy Center sent Cavot the list
(05:59):
of questions they wanted him to ask, and luckily he
gave those to me to rework because they were asking
thesis questions on, you know, compare and contrast the development
of tap as an art form from the Irish clog
(06:22):
through Vaudeville and the influence of the African American experience.
And I knew from previous experience that Astair is a
tough interview subject and he hates analyzing his art. He's
very much He was very much a I just do
it kind of guy. So what I did was I
(06:45):
very carefully chopped up their essay questions into more conversational
bites so that Cavit could ask him and get information,
you know, his answer on how a certain sequence happened.
The dance director Hermi's pan would come up with an
idea and I'd try it out in front of a mirror,
(07:08):
and sure, Gretty, that would be how he would discuss
how a dance step came to be. Kelly, because he
was a director and choreographer, Kelly was the opposite. If
you said, hi, Gene, Kelly would say, dance is a
three dimensional medium and film is a two dimensional medium.
(07:29):
So as a director or a choreographer, you have to
take in that distinction and frame the image such that
the two dimensions. You know, he gave those kind of
dissertation answers, but for a Stare it was just well, sure, great,
let's do it, which doesn't make for you know, compelling listening.
(07:51):
I flew out to La with Cabot to interview both
Astare and Kelly. We were in a limousine. I was
in the front seat with the chauffeur, which is just
as well because I tended to get nauseated sitting in
the back of limousines. And we stopped by a Stair's
house on Sanye Cidro in Beverly Hills. He got in
(08:13):
the car and a Stair looked at me and he said,
have we worked together before? You look familiar. And I
don't know whether he was confusing me with someone else
or if he really did remember from when I met
him on a set of Galactica. But so on the
way to the studio, I'm listening to Cavit and a
Stair talking, and a Stair said, Dick, did you look
(08:36):
over these questions, and I'm thinking he and A Stair said,
some of them are assinine. What was I doing in Vaudeville?
I mean, for Heaven's sakes, that was fifty years ago.
I mean, it's ridiculous. And I'm mentally slinking down in
the front seat, thinking, oh God, you should only know
(08:57):
what these questions were like before I made them sanitized
for your easy digestion. And you've been listening to Steve
Stolier talk about his brush with greatness again when we
come back, more of the story of Fred Astaire and
Steve Stollier here on our American Stories, and we're back
(09:40):
with our American stories and Steve Stolier's story. At the time,
he had the privilege of meeting and working with Fred Astair.
Steve was working for Di Cavit at the time, and
Astair had just been selected to be honored by the
Kennedy Center. Cavitt was going to interview A. Stair and
had asked Steve to rewrite the Kennedy Center's questions, and
even so, Astair still found stoles versions of the questions
(10:02):
X nine. Let's get back to Steve. So I was
sort of on edge after that because I thought it
was going to be this wonderful time, and now he's
attacking the questions and all that, and I didn't let
on that I'd had anything to do with them, because
I didn't want to be the target of his annoyance.
(10:22):
But we got to the studio, and as a favor
to a Stare, to show respect, they had him go
into the makeup room first before Cavt to get ready
for the cameras. So then he came out in makeup,
and then it was Cavt's turn, and the director said
(10:43):
to me, will you sit down with Fred and talk
to him until Dick is ready? And I thought, oh,
dear er, yeah, sure. I The next thing I knew,
I was in a director's chair, next to a stair
in his director's chair and trying to make pleasant conversation
(11:07):
with someone who had just torn apart the questions I
had carefully crafted, and who was notoriously difficult to draw out.
But one of the things I brought up was, you know,
this was in eighty three. It was the same year
that the musical My One and Only had opened on Broadway,
(11:29):
and I had seen that with Tommy Tune and Twiggy
and Honey Coles, and it was basically a loose reworking
of the Gershwin show Funny Face, which Fred and his
sister Adele had starred in in nineteen twenty seven. And
I loved it. And I felt like seeing Tommy Tune
(11:50):
do some of those intricate tap numbers was as close
as I was going to get to seeing a Stare dance.
And I mentioned that even though the show was filled
with a lot of standards, the song my one and
only was semi obscure. But I knew it because I
(12:11):
had a record of a Stare and Adele singing that
from Funny Face. And I said, so, it's interesting because
now that song is getting well known by the average
public because of this new Broadway show. So we started
talking about new releases of classic songs, and we got
around to Putting on the Ritz and he mentioned, he said,
(12:38):
last year, that was that version by that German fellow,
and I must say I didn't care for it. The
German fellow was a guy named Taco, and it was
sort of a synthesized, mechanized version of Putting on the
Rits that got a lot of airplay in nineteen eighty two.
(13:00):
But a Stair said, the way he does it is
just boom boom boom putting on the ritz, boom boom,
putting on the rits. I didn't care for it, he said,
Now when Irving wrote it, meaning Berlin, he wrote it
like this, And a Stair started tapping his foot, dadda
(13:27):
da da da da. And I'm thinking Fred Astaire is
tapping and singing, putting on the rits to me, only me,
this special moment, just from me. I would say, dancing
as fast as I could verbally to keep him occupied
(13:48):
until Cavitt came out. But it ended up being this
wonderful little pocket of conversation. And then Cavet came out
and they started taping, and actually, between my having cut
the questions up and Cabot's brilliance as an interviewer and conversationalist,
(14:11):
he was able to draw Fred Astare out in that
interview and actually got him to talk about a lot
of things that were essentially things that I had wondered
about that I would have asked Fred to stare if
I ever had the chance. So I put them through
Dick Cabot's mouth and he ended up you know, at
one point he said something like, gosh, Dick, you're you're
(14:35):
making me remember things I hadn't thought about in forty years,
which I took as very gratifying because it was unlocking
some of these old memories. One of my questions was
did he ever have an understudy, because you think about
Broadway shows and how unique a stair was. Was there
(14:57):
someone who, if he was sick, would have gone on
the way Cabot asked it was. He said, for instance,
if you were under the weather, did the manager come
out before the show and say, we're very sorry, mister
as Staire can't be here tonight. Instead please enjoy Leonard Crunchman.
(15:18):
That was the name he came up with on the spot,
Leonard Crunchman. And as Stare said, Oh, no, I never
had an understudy. I just no matter what, you just
went on, you know. And it was that kind of
that trooper mentality. And he said, I remember one time
in London I had a boil remove from my head
(15:42):
and the doctor bandaged it. But I still went on
that night, and I had my top hat and this
bandaged head and nobody explained anything. And I guess the
people in the audience were thinking, oh, I suppose the
old fellow broke his skull or something, and every time
I put the top hat back on top of my head,
(16:04):
it hurt, but you know, you just went on. So
it turned into this really fascinating conversation. I mean, a
Stair was in his mid eighties at the time and
just beginning to slow down a bit. I mean, he
wasn't as lively as he was on the ABC Cabot shows.
And that you know, there was no audience, there was
(16:25):
no band. It was just this conversation. Then the following
day we went over to Gene Kelly's house, and he
was the absolute opposite because he was able to dissect
and come at his films and the dance sequences and
(16:45):
the combination of ballet and tap in the athleticism and
the choreography because I had researched him when I was
in New York. HBO at the time was located in
the Time Life Building, so I had access to Time
and Life magazine's archives and they would have bulging Manila
(17:10):
folder files with stretched out rubber bands trying to keep
them from exploding, and inside would be old clippings and
old photos and stuff. You know, it was like a
morgue of old newspaper and photographic things from previous stories.
This was, you know, I hastened to add before Google,
(17:31):
so you couldn't just go to IMDb or Wikipedia or something.
But I had this rare access. And in the file
for gene Kelly was a story about when he was
working on the nineteen forty two oh Cover Girl with
Rita Hayworth. The music was by Jerome Kern. So there
(17:53):
was one news story that said that after filming was completed,
Jerome Kern presented gene Kelly with a silver plate and
that was engraved to g K from JK in honor
of Cover Girl. And so after the cabin had finished
interviewing gene Kelly, I thought this will floor him that
(18:16):
I know this bit of triviat and so I said,
do you still have that plate that Jerome Kern gave
you after Cover Girl? And I expected him to laugh
or something, and instead he's got this scowl on his
face and he said, where did you hear about that?
(18:37):
That was stolen from me some years back and I've
never seen it. There was a theft at my house.
How do you know about that? And all of a
sudden I was like you know, sitting in a chair
with the cops going over me with the third degree
in a bright light. And I said, it was in
your file at the time life archive of the thing
(19:01):
and I and I think he was placated. But it
was a strange note to end on because I don't know,
but he ever completely got over that trace of suspicion
that the thing, the one thing I brought up that
I thought would put a smile on his face instead
triggered his irish anger. But it was still a great
(19:23):
afternoon to be sitting at the feet of Gene Kelly
and listening to him talk about his career. And only
one day after spending the afternoon with Fred Astaire so
I had, in one visit back to la from New York,
I had managed to spend time with two of obviously
(19:45):
two of the greatest dancers that have ever appeared on film.
And great job is always by Robbie on the production
and everything else. It's a terrific story in Steve Stallier.
My goodness, what a great storyteller. Steve Stallier's story, his
(20:05):
two brushes with greatness here on our American story
And we continue with our American Stories. Previously on our show,
we've heard from Steve Stolier, who, as a UCLA student
in the mid seventies, convinced Universal Pictures to re release
the classic Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. It's a terrific story,
by the way, go to our American Stories dot com
and take a look. Stolier would then go on to
(00:32):
be Grout show Marks's personal assistant and historian for the
final years of the legend's life. Today we hear from
Steve again, still in show business, but excited as ever
to be surrounded by stage and screen legends. Here's Steve
(00:53):
grout Show. Marx was just at the top of my
pantheon of most admired entertainers, but running a close second
was fred Astaire Frederick Austerlitz of Omaha, Nebraska. He doesn't
seem as if he would have come from Middle America
(01:14):
like that, because he's known for the top hat and
white tie and tails, but in fact he's one of
those erudite fellows that came from Nebraska, along with Johnny
Carson and Dick Cavit and Marlon Brando and a number
of other people. I would have given anything to be
(01:34):
able to meet him. And in fact, when I was
working at Universal Studios in the late seventies after Graucho died,
I got a job working in the stenopool from eleven
am to eight pm every day, and I would be
typing episodes of The Rockford Files and Kojack and Baretta
(01:54):
and so on. But I loved working at Universal. On
lunch breaks or before or after work, I could go
wandering around there. You know, there wasn't much security at
the time. It isn't like now. Plus I was an
employee and I was always nosing around because of the
(02:15):
history of the place. I love the Universal horror films
and all that sort of stuff, the classics by Man Godfrey,
and so I would keep track of who was guest
starring on different shows and if they were filming on
the lot, and if I was lucky, sometimes I would
be able to cross paths with them. And then, of
(02:37):
all the unlikely things, I found out that Fred Astaire
was going to be guest starring on Battlestar Galactica. Apparently
his grandson his favorite TV show was Battlestar Galactica, and
he said, Grandpa, will you be on that? That would
be cool, and so a stare figuring, well, I can't
(03:00):
deny my own grandson a request like that. So he
got in touch with the producers and they wrote a
part for him where he played Dirk Benedict's conman father.
On a lunch break, I wandered over to the set
and I watched him shoot a scene inside the spacecraft.
(03:21):
And then during a break, he was just sauntering around
the sound stage with his hands in his pockets, and
I happened to have with me an original still of
him in Swing Time, nineteen thirty sixth film, and so
I went over and introduced myself and I said, I
(03:42):
just I want to thank you for all of the
magical moments, from flying down to Rio to a Family
Upside Down and everything in between. Family Upside Down was
a TV movie he had just done, costarring opposite Helen Hayes,
so at the time that was sort of like thanking
him for his whole film career. And he said, oh, well,
(04:05):
my goodness, thank you, and he was happy to sign
my photo. And so, for one brief, shining moment, I
got to meet one of my all time heroes. So
that was in seventy eight in nineteen eighty three, five
years later. I had moved to New York the previous
(04:27):
year to write for Dick Cavot, whom I met through
my Grouchow connection and who hired me away from Universal
to write for him at HBO on a short lived
show called HBO Magazine. But then I continued to live
in New York and write for Cavot and other things.
(04:48):
A Stair and Gene Kelly had both been honored by
the Kennedy Center. You see the edited down specials on
TV where they have someone from dance and music and
literature and they salute them. And the Kennedy Center had
a policy where after you've been saluted, they would appreciate
(05:12):
it if you would sit down for an interview, not
to be released or broadcast, but just for their library,
for the Kennedy Center's official library to have that for
people to be able to access. So Astare said that
would be fine with him, but only if Dick Cavot
(05:32):
does the interview, because he had had a good experiences
when Cavot had his ABC show and he felt comfortable
conversing with him. I was friends with and writing for Cavot,
and he knew what an astare fanatic eye was as
was he, and the Kennedy Center sent Cavot the list
(05:59):
of questions they wanted him to ask, and luckily he
gave those to me to rework because they were asking
thesis questions on, you know, compare and contrast the development
of tap as an art form from the Irish clog
(06:22):
through Vaudeville and the influence of the African American experience.
And I knew from previous experience that Astair is a
tough interview subject and he hates analyzing his art. He's
very much He was very much a I just do
it kind of guy. So what I did was I
(06:45):
very carefully chopped up their essay questions into more conversational
bites so that Cavit could ask him and get information,
you know, his answer on how a certain sequence happened.
The dance director Hermi's pan would come up with an
idea and I'd try it out in front of a mirror,
(07:08):
and sure, Gretty, that would be how he would discuss
how a dance step came to be. Kelly, because he
was a director and choreographer, Kelly was the opposite. If
you said, hi, Gene, Kelly would say, dance is a
three dimensional medium and film is a two dimensional medium.
(07:29):
So as a director or a choreographer, you have to
take in that distinction and frame the image such that
the two dimensions. You know, he gave those kind of
dissertation answers, but for a Stare it was just well, sure, great,
let's do it, which doesn't make for you know, compelling listening.
(07:51):
I flew out to La with Cabot to interview both
Astare and Kelly. We were in a limousine. I was
in the front seat with the chauffeur, which is just
as well because I tended to get nauseated sitting in
the back of limousines. And we stopped by a Stair's
house on Sanye Cidro in Beverly Hills. He got in
(08:13):
the car and a Stair looked at me and he said,
have we worked together before? You look familiar. And I
don't know whether he was confusing me with someone else
or if he really did remember from when I met
him on a set of Galactica. But so on the
way to the studio, I'm listening to Cavit and a
Stair talking, and a Stair said, Dick, did you look
(08:36):
over these questions, and I'm thinking he and A Stair said,
some of them are assinine. What was I doing in Vaudeville?
I mean, for Heaven's sakes, that was fifty years ago.
I mean, it's ridiculous. And I'm mentally slinking down in
the front seat, thinking, oh God, you should only know
(08:57):
what these questions were like before I made them sanitized
for your easy digestion. And you've been listening to Steve
Stolier talk about his brush with greatness again when we
come back, more of the story of Fred Astaire and
Steve Stollier here on our American Stories, and we're back
(09:40):
with our American stories and Steve Stolier's story. At the time,
he had the privilege of meeting and working with Fred Astair.
Steve was working for Di Cavit at the time, and
Astair had just been selected to be honored by the
Kennedy Center. Cavitt was going to interview A. Stair and
had asked Steve to rewrite the Kennedy Center's questions, and
even so, Astair still found stoles versions of the questions
(10:02):
X nine. Let's get back to Steve. So I was
sort of on edge after that because I thought it
was going to be this wonderful time, and now he's
attacking the questions and all that, and I didn't let
on that I'd had anything to do with them, because
I didn't want to be the target of his annoyance.
(10:22):
But we got to the studio, and as a favor
to a Stare, to show respect, they had him go
into the makeup room first before Cavt to get ready
for the cameras. So then he came out in makeup,
and then it was Cavt's turn, and the director said
(10:43):
to me, will you sit down with Fred and talk
to him until Dick is ready? And I thought, oh,
dear er, yeah, sure. I The next thing I knew,
I was in a director's chair, next to a stair
in his director's chair and trying to make pleasant conversation
(11:07):
with someone who had just torn apart the questions I
had carefully crafted, and who was notoriously difficult to draw out.
But one of the things I brought up was, you know,
this was in eighty three. It was the same year
that the musical My One and Only had opened on Broadway,
(11:29):
and I had seen that with Tommy Tune and Twiggy
and Honey Coles, and it was basically a loose reworking
of the Gershwin show Funny Face, which Fred and his
sister Adele had starred in in nineteen twenty seven. And
I loved it. And I felt like seeing Tommy Tune
(11:50):
do some of those intricate tap numbers was as close
as I was going to get to seeing a Stare dance.
And I mentioned that even though the show was filled
with a lot of standards, the song my one and
only was semi obscure. But I knew it because I
(12:11):
had a record of a Stare and Adele singing that
from Funny Face. And I said, so, it's interesting because
now that song is getting well known by the average
public because of this new Broadway show. So we started
talking about new releases of classic songs, and we got
around to Putting on the Ritz and he mentioned, he said,
(12:38):
last year, that was that version by that German fellow,
and I must say I didn't care for it. The
German fellow was a guy named Taco, and it was
sort of a synthesized, mechanized version of Putting on the
Rits that got a lot of airplay in nineteen eighty two.
(13:00):
But a Stair said, the way he does it is
just boom boom boom putting on the ritz, boom boom,
putting on the rits. I didn't care for it, he said,
Now when Irving wrote it, meaning Berlin, he wrote it
like this, And a Stair started tapping his foot, dadda
(13:27):
da da da da. And I'm thinking Fred Astaire is
tapping and singing, putting on the rits to me, only me,
this special moment, just from me. I would say, dancing
as fast as I could verbally to keep him occupied
(13:48):
until Cavitt came out. But it ended up being this
wonderful little pocket of conversation. And then Cavet came out
and they started taping, and actually, between my having cut
the questions up and Cabot's brilliance as an interviewer and conversationalist,
(14:11):
he was able to draw Fred Astare out in that
interview and actually got him to talk about a lot
of things that were essentially things that I had wondered
about that I would have asked Fred to stare if
I ever had the chance. So I put them through
Dick Cabot's mouth and he ended up you know, at
one point he said something like, gosh, Dick, you're you're
(14:35):
making me remember things I hadn't thought about in forty years,
which I took as very gratifying because it was unlocking
some of these old memories. One of my questions was
did he ever have an understudy, because you think about
Broadway shows and how unique a stair was. Was there
(14:57):
someone who, if he was sick, would have gone on
the way Cabot asked it was. He said, for instance,
if you were under the weather, did the manager come
out before the show and say, we're very sorry, mister
as Staire can't be here tonight. Instead please enjoy Leonard Crunchman.
(15:18):
That was the name he came up with on the spot,
Leonard Crunchman. And as Stare said, Oh, no, I never
had an understudy. I just no matter what, you just
went on, you know. And it was that kind of
that trooper mentality. And he said, I remember one time
in London I had a boil remove from my head
(15:42):
and the doctor bandaged it. But I still went on
that night, and I had my top hat and this
bandaged head and nobody explained anything. And I guess the
people in the audience were thinking, oh, I suppose the
old fellow broke his skull or something, and every time
I put the top hat back on top of my head,
(16:04):
it hurt, but you know, you just went on. So
it turned into this really fascinating conversation. I mean, a
Stair was in his mid eighties at the time and
just beginning to slow down a bit. I mean, he
wasn't as lively as he was on the ABC Cabot shows.
And that you know, there was no audience, there was
(16:25):
no band. It was just this conversation. Then the following
day we went over to Gene Kelly's house, and he
was the absolute opposite because he was able to dissect
and come at his films and the dance sequences and
(16:45):
the combination of ballet and tap in the athleticism and
the choreography because I had researched him when I was
in New York. HBO at the time was located in
the Time Life Building, so I had access to Time
and Life magazine's archives and they would have bulging Manila
(17:10):
folder files with stretched out rubber bands trying to keep
them from exploding, and inside would be old clippings and
old photos and stuff. You know, it was like a
morgue of old newspaper and photographic things from previous stories.
This was, you know, I hastened to add before Google,
(17:31):
so you couldn't just go to IMDb or Wikipedia or something.
But I had this rare access. And in the file
for gene Kelly was a story about when he was
working on the nineteen forty two oh Cover Girl with
Rita Hayworth. The music was by Jerome Kern. So there
(17:53):
was one news story that said that after filming was completed,
Jerome Kern presented gene Kelly with a silver plate and
that was engraved to g K from JK in honor
of Cover Girl. And so after the cabin had finished
interviewing gene Kelly, I thought this will floor him that
(18:16):
I know this bit of triviat and so I said,
do you still have that plate that Jerome Kern gave
you after Cover Girl? And I expected him to laugh
or something, and instead he's got this scowl on his
face and he said, where did you hear about that?
(18:37):
That was stolen from me some years back and I've
never seen it. There was a theft at my house.
How do you know about that? And all of a
sudden I was like you know, sitting in a chair
with the cops going over me with the third degree
in a bright light. And I said, it was in
your file at the time life archive of the thing
(19:01):
and I and I think he was placated. But it
was a strange note to end on because I don't know,
but he ever completely got over that trace of suspicion
that the thing, the one thing I brought up that
I thought would put a smile on his face instead
triggered his irish anger. But it was still a great
(19:23):
afternoon to be sitting at the feet of Gene Kelly
and listening to him talk about his career. And only
one day after spending the afternoon with Fred Astaire so
I had, in one visit back to la from New York,
I had managed to spend time with two of obviously
(19:45):
two of the greatest dancers that have ever appeared on film.
And great job is always by Robbie on the production
and everything else. It's a terrific story in Steve Stallier.
My goodness, what a great storyteller. Steve Stallier's story, his
(20:05):
two brushes with greatness here on our American story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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