The Loop

Fred Astaire, trick-shot artist

December 01, 2016

Fred Astaire's proudest achievement in life, he told an interviewer in 1982, was "a 4-wood I hit on the 13th hole at Bel-Air Country Club in June of 1945." (It landed on the green and rolled into the cup.) His handicap was 10, approximately. He was a worse player than Humphrey Bogart, but a better one than Glenn Ford, who portrayed Ben Hogan in "Follow the Sun," very possibly the worst movie ever made.

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Astaire wanted to incorporate golf into a dance routine. "Fooling around at Bel-Air one day," he recalled, "I did a few impromptu rhythm steps just before hitting one off the tee, and was surprised to find that I could really connect that way." He demonstrated for the director of the movie he was working on -- Carefree, co-starring Ginger Rogers, released in 1938 -- and they incorporated it into the film.

There's a widely told story that Astaire did the sequence in one take, and that his shots all landed within a few feet of each other -- all untrue. RKO set up a driving range on its lot in Encino three weeks before principal photography began, and Astaire practiced the moves for two weeks. "I had about 300 golf balls and five men shagging them, a piano and Hal Borne to play for me," he recalled. The final sequence involved many takes over two days, and what you see in the movie was pieced together from the best bits. In the clip below, the golf stuff starts about a minute in. Notice that Astaire wears two golf gloves (with buttons!) throughout.

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