Astaire—something in the name suggests brilliance, dazzle. Astaire implies “a star;” so, too, a stairway, (“with a new step every day”); Astarte is also, the mythologies report, the name of a minor goddess, one of high and productive energy. The name Astaire enlivens even the otherwise somewhat stodgy name of Fred. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Academy is proud to honor that greatest of all dancers, male or female, classical or modern, ballet or ballroom, rap or tap, break or flake, highbrow or low, Mr. Fred Astaire.” Thunderous, nearly unrelenting applause follows.

In fact, Fred Astaire’s name at birth—he was born on May 10, 1899—was Frederick Austerlitz, II. His father, Frederic I, known to family and friends as Fritz, had left the Austrian army in 1892 and come to the New World to strike it rich, but struck it, from most accounts, scarcely at all. After settling in Omaha, Nebraska, Fritz Austerlitz took a series of dead-end jobs: in the leather business, as a cook, as a drummer of fancy goods, and eventually as a salesman for a brewery. At 27, Fritz met, married, and in fairly short order made pregnant a seventeen-year-old girl named Johanna Geilus; no one seems to know the precise fate of the child of this early pregnancy, who must have died either in a miscarriage or at birth. Two years later the Austerlitzes had a daughter Adele, and two and a half years after that a son Frederick, “Fred.”

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