Ginger Rogers

Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath on July 16, 1911 in Independence, Missouri, the only child of Lela Emogene Owens, a newspaper reporter, and William Eddins McMath, an electrical engineer. Her maternal grandparents were Wilma Saphrona ( Ball) and Walter Winfield Owens. She was of Scottish, Welsh, and English ancestry. Her mother gave birth to Ginger at home, having lost a previous child in a hospital. Rogers was raised a Christian Scientist and remained a lifelong adherent. Rogers said that she never saw her natural father again. In 1915, she was left with her grandparents, who lived in nearby Kansas City, while her mother made a trip to Hollywood in an effort to get an essay she had written made into a film. Lela succeeded and continued to write scripts for Fox Studios. One of Rogers's young cousins had a hard time pronouncing "Virginia", giving her the nickname "Ginger". When Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Rogers, whose surname she took. The family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper. Rogers attended, but did not graduate from, Fort Worth's Central High School. As a teenager, Rogers thought of becoming a school teacher, but with her mother's interest in Hollywood and the theater, her early exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of Ft. Worth's Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage. == Career ==

1925–1929: Vaudeville and Broadway Rogers's entertainment career began when the traveling vaudeville act of Eddie Foy came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. In 1925 the 14-year-old entered and won a Charleston dance contest; the prize allowed her to tour as Ginger Rogers and the Redheads for six months on the Orpheum Circuit. In 1926, the group performed at an 18-month-old theater called The Craterian in Medford, Oregon. This theater honored her years later by changing its name to the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. When the M.G.M film The Barrier premiered in San Bernardino, California, in February 1926, Rogers's vaudeville act was featured. The local newspaper commented, "Clever little Ginger Rogers showed why she won the Texas state championship as a Charleston dancer." At 17, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer/dancer/comedian/recording artist of the day who worked under the name Jack Pepper (according to Ginger's autobiography and Life magazine, she knew Culpepper when she was a child, as her cousin's boyfriend). Within two weeks of the New York opening of Top Speed, Rogers was chosen to star on Broadway in Girl Crazy by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography. Her appearance in Girl Crazy made her an overnight star at the age of 19. 1929–1933: Early film roles , Ruby Keeler, and Rogers in 42nd Street (1933) Rogers's first movie roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929: Night in the Dormitory, A Day of a Man of Affairs, and Campus Sweethearts. In 1930, Paramount Pictures signed her to a seven-year contract. Rogers soon got herself out of the Paramount contract—under which she had made five feature films at Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens—and moved with her mother to Hollywood. When she got to California, she signed a three-picture deal with Pathé Exchange. Two of her pictures at Pathé were Suicide Fleet (1931) and Carnival Boat (1932) in which she played opposite future Hopalong Cassidy star William Boyd. Rogers also made feature films for Warner Bros., Monogram, and Fox in 1932, and was named one of 15 WAMPAS Baby Stars. She then made a significant breakthrough as Anytime Annie in the Warner Bros. film 42nd Street (1933). She went on to make a series of films at Warner Bros., most notably in Gold Diggers of 1933, in which her solo, "We're in the Money", included a memorable verse in Pig Latin. She then moved to RKO Studios, was put under contract and with Astaire started work on Flying Down to Rio, a picture starring Dolores del Río and Gene Raymond. Rogers and Astaire "stole the show", an industry term for outshining the billed stars. 1933–1939: Partnership with Astaire in Follow the Fleet (1936) Rogers was known for her partnership with Fred Astaire. Together, from 1933 to 1939, they made nine musical films at RKO: Flying Down to Rio (1933), 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). The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) was produced later at MGM. They revolutionized the Hollywood musical by introducing dance routines of unprecedented elegance and virtuosity with sweeping long shots set to songs specially composed for them by the greatest popular song composers of the day. One such composer was Cole Porter with "Night and Day", a song Astaire sang to Rogers with the line "... you are the one" in two of their movies, being particularly poignant in their last pairing of The Barkleys of Broadway. Arlene Croce, Hermes Pan, Hannah Hyam, and John Mueller all consider Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, because of her ability to combine dancing skills, beauty, and ability as a dramatic actress and comedian. The pair's song and dance partnership proved popular with audiences. Of the 33 partnered dances Rogers performed with Astaire, Croce and Mueller have highlighted the infectious spontaneity of her performances in the comic numbers "I'll Be Hard to Handle" from Roberta, "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet, and "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time. They also point to the use Astaire made of her remarkably flexible back in classic romantic dances such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta, "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat, and "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Follow the Fleet. '' (1938) Although the dance routines were choreographed by Astaire and his collaborator Hermes Pan, both have testified to her consummate professionalism, even during periods of intense strain, as she tried to juggle her many other contractual film commitments with the punishing rehearsal schedules of Astaire, who made at most two films in any one year. In 1986, shortly before his death, Astaire remarked, "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". John Mueller summed up Rogers's abilities as: "Rogers was outstanding among Astaire's partners, not because she was superior to others as a dancer, but, because, as a skilled, intuitive actress, she was cagey enough to realize that acting did not stop when dancing began ... the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable". According to Raymond Rohauer, curator at the New York Gallery of Modern Art, Astaire gave Rogers this salute: "Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success." In a 1976 episode of the popular British talk-show Parkinson (Season 5, Episode 24), host Michael Parkinson asked Astaire 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." After 15 months apart and with RKO facing bankruptcy, the studio paired Fred and Ginger for another movie titled Carefree, but it lost money. Next came The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, based on a true story, but the serious plot and tragic ending resulted in the worst box-office receipts of any of their films. This was driven not by diminished popularity, but by the hard 1930s economic reality. The production costs of musicals, always significantly greater than regular features, continued to increase at a much faster rate than admissions. Success in non-musicals Both before and immediately after her dancing and acting partnership with Fred Astaire ended, Rogers starred in a number of successful nonmusical films. Stage Door (1937) demonstrated her dramatic capacity, as the loquacious yet vulnerable girl next door and tough-minded theatrical hopeful, opposite Katharine Hepburn. Successful comedies included Vivacious Lady (1938) with James Stewart, Fifth Avenue Girl (1939), where she played an out-of-work girl sucked into the lives of a wealthy family, and Bachelor Mother (1939), with David Niven, in which she played a shop girl who is falsely thought to have abandoned her baby. In 1934, Rogers sued Sylvia of Hollywood for $100K for defamation. The fitness guru and radio personality had claimed that Rogers was on her radio show when, in fact, she was not. On March 5, 1939, Rogers starred in "Single Party Going East", an episode of Silver Theater on CBS radio. 1940–1949: Career peak and reuniting with Astaire for Kitty Foyle depicting Rogers' cover appearance on Life magazine for her Oscar-winning 1940 role In 1941 Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's Kitty Foyle. She enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period. In Roxie Hart (1942), based on the same play which later served as the template for the musical Chicago, Rogers played a wisecracking flapper in a love triangle on trial for the murder of her lover; set in the era of prohibition. Most of the film takes place in a women's jail. In the melodrama Primrose Path (1940), directed by Gregory La Cava, she plays a character attempting to conceal being a prostitute's daughter being pressured into following the fate of her mother and grandmother. Further highlights of this period included Tom, Dick, and Harry, a 1941 comedy in which she dreams of marrying three different men; ''I'll Be Seeing You'' (1944), with Joseph Cotten; and Billy Wilder's first Hollywood feature film: The Major and the Minor (1942), in which she played a down-on-her-luck woman who masquerades as a 12-year-old to get a cheap train ticket home and finds herself obliged to continue the ruse at a military academy. Rogers' mother, Lela, played her mother in the film. After becoming a free agent, Rogers made hugely successful films with other studios in the mid-'40s, including Tender Comrade (1943), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), and became the highest-paid performer in Hollywood. However, by the end of the decade, her film career had peaked. Arthur Freed reunited her with Fred Astaire in The Barkleys of Broadway in 1949, when Judy Garland was unable to appear in the role that was to have reunited her with her Easter Parade co-star. 1950–1987: Later career , Cary Grant, and Marilyn Monroe Rogers's film career entered a period of gradual decline in the 1950s, as parts for older actresses became more difficult to obtain, but she still scored with some solid movies. She starred in Storm Warning (1950) with Ronald Reagan and Doris Day, a noir, anti-Ku Klux Klan film by Warner Bros. In 1952 Rogers starred in two comedies featuring Marilyn Monroe, Monkey Business with Cary Grant, directed by Howard Hawks, and ''We're Not Married!. She followed those with a role in Dreamboat alongside Clifton Webb, as his former onscreen partner in silent films who wanted to renew their association on television. She played the female lead in Tight Spot (1955), a mystery thriller, with Edward G. Robinson. After a series of unremarkable films, she scored a great popular success on Broadway in 1965, playing Dolly Levi in the long-running Hello, Dolly!'' and Rogers in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway (1964) In later life, Rogers remained on good terms with Astaire; she presented him with a special Academy Award in 1950, and they were copresenters of individual Academy Awards in 1967, during which they elicited a standing ovation when they came on stage in an impromptu dance. In 1969, she had the lead role in another long-running popular production, Mame, from the book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the West End of London, arriving for the role on the liner Queen Elizabeth 2 from New York City. Her docking there occasioned the maximum of pomp and ceremony at Southampton. She became the highest-paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time. The production ran for 14 months and featured a royal command performance for Queen Elizabeth II. From the 1950s onward, Rogers made occasional appearances on television, even substituting for a vacationing Hal March on The $64,000 Question. In the later years of her career, she made guest appearances in three different series by Aaron Spelling: The Love Boat (1979), Glitter (1984), and Hotel (1987), which was her final screen appearance as an actress. In 1985, Rogers fulfilled a long-standing wish to direct when she directed the musical Babes in Arms off-Broadway in Tarrytown, New York, at 74 years old. It was produced by Michael Lipton and Robert Kennedy of Kennedy Lipton Productions. The production starred Broadway talents Donna Theodore, Carleton Carpenter, James Brennan, Randy Skinner, Karen Ziemba, Dwight Edwards, and Kim Morgan. It is also noted in her autobiography Ginger, My Story. 1988–1995: Final years and appearances In her later life, Rogers mainly resided at her ranch near Shady Cove, Oregon, a property she had purchased in 1941. After the property was sold, Rogers divided her time between homes in Medford, Oregon, and Rancho Mirage, California. The city of Independence, Missouri designated the birthplace of Ginger Rogers a Historic Landmark property in 1994. That July 16, Ginger and her secretary, Roberta Olden, attended a “Ginger Rogers' Day” celebration presented by the city. The affixed a plaque to the building Rogers signed over 2,000 autographs at one of her last public appearances. The home was purchased in 2016 by Three Trails Cottages, which restored, then transformed it into a museum dedicated to Ginger Rogers and her mother Lela. Open seasonally until 2019, it contained memorabilia, magazines, movie posters, and many items from the ranch the pair owned, and hosted numerous events. Rogers made her last public appearance on March 18, 1995, when she received the Women's International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award. For many years, Rogers regularly supported, and held in-person presentations, at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997 and posthumously renamed in her honor as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. == Personal life ==

Relationships and marriages in the 1950s Rogers married and divorced five times and had no children. On March 29, 1929, Rogers married for the first time at age 17 to her dancing partner Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper). They divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding. Rogers dated Mervyn LeRoy in 1932, but they ended the relationship and remained friends until his death in 1987. In 1934, she married actor Lew Ayres. They divorced six years later in 1940. In 1943, Rogers married her third husband, Jack Briggs, who was a U.S. Marine, before divorcing in 1948. In 1953, she married Jacques Bergerac, a French actor 16 years her junior, whom she met on a trip to Paris. A lawyer in France, he came to Hollywood with her and became an actor. They divorced in 1957. Her fifth and final husband was director and producer William Marshall. They married in 1961 and divorced in 1970, after his bouts with alcohol and the financial collapse of their joint film production company in Jamaica. Rogers, an only child, remained close to her mother, Lela Rogers, throughout her life. Lela was credited with pivotal contributions to her daughter's early successes in New York City and in Hollywood, and gave her much assistance in contract negotiations with RKO. She also wrote a children's mystery book with her daughter as the central character. Rogers was lifelong friends with actresses Lucille Ball and Bette Davis. She appeared with Ball in an episode of ''Here's Lucy'' on November 22, 1971, in which Rogers danced the Charleston for the first time in many years. Rogers starred in one of the earliest films co-directed and co-scripted by a woman, Wanda Tuchock's Finishing School (1934). Rogers maintained a close friendship with her cousin, writer/socialite Phyllis Fraser, the wife of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf. Rita Hayworth's maternal uncle, Vinton Hayworth, was married to Rogers's maternal aunt, Jean Owens. Politics and beliefs Rogers was a lifelong member of the Republican Party and campaigned for Thomas Dewey in the 1944 presidential election, Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and Ronald Reagan in the 1966 California gubernatorial election. She was a strong opponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking out against both him and his New Deal proposals. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Rogers was raised a Christian Scientist and remained a lifelong adherent. Christian Science was a topic she discussed at length in her autobiography. Interests Rogers was a talented tennis player, and won the Texas State Charleston Championship in 1926. She later entered the 1950 US Open. However, she and Frank Shields were knocked out of the mixed doubles competition in the first round. == Death ==

Rogers died at her Rancho Mirage home on April 25, 1995, from a heart attack at the age of 83. She was cremated and her ashes interred with her mother Lela Emogene in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. == Legacy ==

• Likenesses of Astaire and Rogers, apparently painted over from the "Cheek to Cheek" dance in Top Hat, are in the "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" section of The Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968). • Rogers's image is one of many famous women's images of the 1930s and 1940s featured on the bedroom wall in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a gallery of magazine cuttings pasted on the wall created by Anne and her sister Margot while hiding from the Nazis. When the house became a museum, the gallery the Frank sisters created was preserved under glass. • Ginger The Musical by Robert Kennedy and Paul Becker which Ginger Rogers approved and was to direct on Broadway the year of her death was in negotiations as late as the 2016–17 Broadway season. Marshall Mason directed its first production in 2001 starring Donna McKechnie and Nili Bassman and was choreographed by Randy Skinner. • Rogers was the heroine of a novel, Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak (1942, by Lela E. Rogers), in which "the heroine has the same name and appearance as the famous actress, but has no connection ... it is as though the famous actress has stepped into an alternate reality in which she is an ordinary person." It is part of a series known as "Whitman Authorized Editions", 16 books published between 1941 and 1947 that featured a film actress as heroine. • The Dancing House in Prague, sometimes known as Ginger and Fred, designed by the Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić in cooperation with Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry and inspired by the dancing of Astaire and Rogers. • In the 1981 film Pennies from Heaven, Bernadette Peters's character dances with Steve Martin's as they watch Fred and Ginger's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" sequence from 1936's Follow the Fleet, using it as their inspiration. • Federico Fellini's film Ginger and Fred centers on two aging Italian impersonators of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Rogers sued the production and the distributor when the film was released in the U.S. for misappropriation and infringement of her public personality. Her claims were dismissed. According to the judgment, the film only obliquely related to Astaire and her. • Rogers was among the sixteen Golden Age Hollywood stars referenced in the bridge of Madonna's 1990 single "Vogue". • Rogers is the namesake of the Ginger Rogers, a cocktail containing gin, ginger, and mint. • Rogers was the subject of a quotation summarizing women's capacity to achieve that is popular among feminists: "Rogers did everything [Astaire] did, backwards . . . and in high heels." The quote comes from a 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip by Bob Thaves. • A musical about the life of Rogers, entitled Backwards in High Heels, premiered in Florida in early 2007. == Filmography ==