I recently enjoyed reading Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution, Eve Golden's 2007 biography of the most famous dance couple of the 1910s. This is not the fantasy-romance of the 1939 Astaire & Rogers film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, nor does it spend as much time on their actual dance accomplishments as I would have liked. The author is a silent film aficionado, and the book focuses more on the Castles as celebrities and stars of theater and film than it does on the specifics of their influence on dancing. (She devotes a fifteen-page appendix to a filmography, but dances are not even listed by name in the index!) That said, it adds a great deal of interesting background and thoroughly debunks the entire misty romantic myth of the Castles in favor of a more realistic portrait of their marriage as affectionate but later primarily a business relationship. From hints that Vernon might have been bisexual to Irene's affairs to their impending divorce at the time of Vernon's death (so that he could marry another woman), this book carefully puts back in as much as can be reconstructed of what Irene Castle left out of her own books, My Husband (1919) and Castles in the Air (1958). Those interested in the off-the-dance-floor escapades and accomplishments of the Castles and their associates will find it absolutely fascinating.
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