The Untold Story of Fred Astaire’s Soulmate, Choreographer Hermes Pan

Glimmery and lavish, racy and absurd in their extravagant Art Deco sumptuousness, the movie musicals that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made for the RKO studio—nine in total, from Top Hat, Swing Time, and The Gay Divorcee, all hits of the Depression era, to The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, made in the last year of 1930s (and not counting the one-shot reunion, The Barkleys of Broadway, produced at MGM in 1949)—were gleeful escapism and something more. They were giddily cogent acts of ideological persuasion—dream visions of capitalism not in crisis, but in perverse triumph through the imagination.

"It's fascinating that at a time of economic catastrophe, America fell in love with these movies about the lives of the very, very, very rich," notes the historian Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call, a narrative history of the Prohibition era. "Audiences identified with Astaire as he went to the Rainbow Room or flew off to Venice. Instead of stirring resentment or scorn, the films inspired people. There was a dream aspect to them." Populated almost entirely by impossibly wealthy characters reveling in penthouse splendor, the Astaire-Rogers movies argued with high style against the proposition that the material and social rewards of wealth were dubious. Fred, Ginger, and the friends and lovers they frolicked with in ballrooms, ocean liners, and French resorts embodied high living as an aspirational ideal—irrational but great fun for 80 minutes.

"Everyone was spectacularly dressed in ermine and silk, and the sets were so magnificent they couldn't exist anywhere except in the fantasies of Thirties Hollywood, and the public flocked to these movies, because they were wish-fulfillment," said Robert Osborne, a longtime host on Turner Classic Movies. “Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced America out of the Depression, at least in America's mind."

They had a third partner, one unseen.

In the 21st century, few people outside of show-business circles still know about the essential role of Astaire's behind-the-scenes collaborator, Hermes Pan. Astaire, whom generations of fans, critics, and dancers (including the ballet master Mikhail Baryshnikov) have recognized as peerless, called Pan "the only person I ever saw who could dance like I could." Pan is most significant, however, not as a performer or a technician, but as a creative spirit, an originator or co-creator of some of the most inventive and influential dances ever put to film, including the Astaire-Rogers numbers—and also Astaire's famous duet with a hat rack (Royal Wedding), his dance with his own shadows (the "Bojangles of Harlem" number from Swing Time), and his ensemble routine with disembodied flying shoes (The Barkleys of Broadway).

As Astaire once explained in an interview, "It's the ideas that are the hardest to get—I mean, getting steps in another thing." Astaire called Pan his "ideas man." Away from Astaire, moreover, Pan happened to be the choreographer on dozens of films including Porgy and Bess, Flower Drum Song, Pal Joey, Kiss Me, Kate, and My Fair Lady. There were Academy Awards for dance direction for only three years, from 1935 to 1937, and Pan was the only choreographer nominated all three times; he won, in '37, for Damsel in Distress, a musical Astaire made at RKO without Ginger Rogers.

Pan was "Fred's alter ego, and he could do everything Fred could do, and he did something which was wonderful, [and that] was come up with the creative things and keep Fred going—that was Hermes," recalled the dancer and actor Marge Champion, who performed on screen with Astaire and Rogers, dancing Pan's choreography in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. "It was impossible to know where Hermes left off or Fred left off and the other took over, as far as the choreography. Fred was Hermes, and Hermes was Fred." On the set, Champion once saw one of them, Astaire or Pan, strolling, and, from the back, she couldn't tell which man she was looking at. "Their walk, the posture, was identical—everything about them. To this day, I don't know which one of them that was."

As Audrey Hepburn once remarked in an interview about her experience in the musical Funny Face, "I met [Astaire] when I got to Paramount, on the big, big stage, where there was just a piano and a darling choreographer named Hermes Pan. Hermes was terribly like Fred; it's unbelievable how much of Fred rubbed off on Hermes, and perhaps of Hermes on Fred."

Much the same, the late screenwriter Leonard Gershe, who wrote the scripts to Funny Face and Silk Stockings, told an interviewer, "No one must ever minimize the contribution of Hermes Pan to the legend that is Fred Astaire. Fred rarely worked without Hermes. They were together forever. Both of them were very modest, shy people, so nobody ever said who did what."

Both Astaire and Pan were veterans of brother-and-sister acts—that is, both had begun as performers in sexless theatrical partnerships—and both were struggling when they set out to make careers of their own in the movies. Astaire had grown up on the stages of Broadway and London, working with his older and more celebrated sister, Adele, and he found himself alone when she married an English nobleman, Lord Charles Cavendish, and she moved into his place, Linsmore Castle, retiring from performing. Fred, widely considered the junior and lesser member of the family act, hardly seemed movie material. Indeed, he and Adele had once submitted to a screen test for Paramount Studios but were rejected as unsuitable for film—the specifics are unknown—and Astaire's later test for RKO yielded a response that has (in various tellings) fallen into pop-culture legend: "Can't act. Slightly bald. Also dances."

Pan, born Hermes Panagiotopoulos in 1910, had a privileged early life in Nashville and Memphis as one of three offspring of a Greek consul. He and his older sister Vasso had learned to dance from one of the family's Black maids, and they turned to dancing, the one thing they knew how to do, when their father died suddenly and they needed to work. (According to family lore, a "crazy uncle" held their mother at gunpoint and burned her late husband's stock certificates in rage over being cut out of his will.) Hermes, 13 and educated only to the eighth grade, moved to New York with his mother, his sister, and their young brother, and he and Vasso sang and danced for change in speakeasies. Within a few years, Pan began to drift from performing to choreography, despite his pleasant looks and bright personality, because "that's where he got work, and he needed it bad," according to one of his nieces, Vasso's daughter Mary Ann Johnson.

Astaire and Pan came to Hollywood around the same time, and they met soon afterward, in 1933, on the set of the first movie in which Fred and Ginger were cast together, Flying Down to Rio. Rogers, a rising comic actress at RKO, was billed fourth, behind the one-time stars Dolores Del Rio, Gene Raymond, and Raul Roulien; Astaire, who had appeared briefly (as himself) in only one prior film (Dancing Lady, with Joan Crawford), was fifth in the acting credits. At the time, the Busby Berkeley conception of musical film as outlandish spectacle was the choreographic vogue. In fact, the films that Astaire and Pan choreographed for Astaire and Rogers transformed screen dance so completely that it is almost impossible now to process how different movie musicals were before they started partner-dancing together. Rows of look-alike chorines would position their limbs in formation to create enormous kaleidoscopic designs, functioning in precision like an all-blonde, semi-nude, female Marine troop. In Berkeley's films, the camera did the only dancing.

"When I arrived in Hollywood, it was during the Berkeley era, all of those geometrical designs, top shots and huge numbers," explained Pan to John Kobal, the film historian. "The curtain would go up on a small stage [on screen], and you'd go into a number that seemed to take place on a stage the size of a football field. This was something that was imaginative, but you actually didn't see much dancing on the screen. I think it's true to say that Astaire and Rogers were the first ones to really do a dance routine in its own right.

"I love dancing as such, and I always liked to see the more intimate dancing, a few people rather than a huge number where the dancing gets lost."

Working under a Berkeley acolyte, Dave Gould, Pan was assigned to choreograph Rio's preposterous finale, in which chorus girls do maneuvers on the wings of biplanes in flight. Pan obliged, leveraging the task to persuade Gould to let him do another number his way—a romantic variation of the ballroom style. "I made up another routine to show [Gould] my conception of a dance," Pan would recall, "which we used in the film and called it 'The Carioca.'" The number brought Astaire and Rogers together, dancing on screen for the first time. It initiated a revolution in screen dance and stirred a craze for ballroom dancing.

"Astaire, Rogers Start New Team Vogue," reported The Los Angeles Times in 1935. "The Hollywood scene changed overnight. It was the second step in the evolution of dance-on-film....Team dancing is in!" The revolution was an intimate one, grounded in a simple vision of heaven as a place for dancing cheek to cheek. As cultural historian Richard Barrios has said of the dances Astaire and Pan created for Fred and Ginger, "They [Astaire and Pan] were the ones who developed a new language in dance and in film."

It worked both to Pan's advantage and Astaire's benefit that Pan's "conception of a dance" was wholly compatible with Astaire's. "Fred and I thought alike," Pan said. "This is what I'd always dreamed a dancer should be. This was the sort of dancing I loved, and I think Fred recognized a kindred spirit in me."

Astaire, who disliked interviews in general and was especially reluctant to discuss his craft, was always vague but broadly flattering when asked about his method of working with Pan. "I thought he was a very talented young fellow," Astaire recalled in an unpublished interview for an oral-history project. "Hermes is—he's a very—I call him 'the rock.' You know, the kind of—he's a very fine gentleman to work with, you know....He was very, very helpful in every way."

When they worked in seclusion on their RKO films, the third person in the rehearsal studio was Hal Borne, the house pianist, who later described the sessions to one of Astaire's biographers, Bob Thomas. "Hermes' contribution was always great," Borne told Thomas. "Hermes was a very good dancer, also a singer. His rapport with Fred was sensational. Sometimes they'd walk around in circles, scratching heads. No one would talk and I wouldn't play. I just let them figure out what they were trying to figure out. Fred would say, 'Let's try this: You go over there and you'll be the Ginger part.' And he would start. It was hard to figure who contributed what to the choreography."

Pan himself explained, "[Astaire] would come in before Ginger would come in, and we'd work on things, and I would, often times, be Ginger. We would do the things together, you know, and when Ginger came in, I would show Ginger, because I knew her part.

"With Fred, I was Ginger, and with Ginger, I was Fred."

As Katharine Hepburn famously distilled the formula of Astaire and Rogers, "Fred gave Ginger class, and Rogers gave him sex [appeal]." Although his roles were ostensibly romantic leads, Astaire had an almost radically unorthodox appeal—one that, in its urbanity, cosmopolitanism, elegance, and grace, challenged the prevailing standards for male movie stardom. From the earliest days of his film career, fan magazines and movie columnists fixed on the unconventionality of Astaire's image. "It is Astaire's star—or is it a meteor—that now shines so brightly on Hollywood's celluloid horizon; so brightly that Freddie has stolen all fan mail honors at the RKO studios, by several hundred letters a week," gushed a writer for Picture Show magazine in 1933. "Most of the well wishers are sweet young things. This significant fact indicates to this writer that the affections of the fair fans seem to be switching from those big strong men who rescue them from all sorts of situations, to an esthetic young chap who can give them a dancing thrill. Astaire is the world's foremost exponent of that particular variety of heart throb!"

The following year, from The New Movie Magazine: "His personality caught on right away. No wonder! It's one of the most unusual personalities ever to hit Hollywood. Fred Astaire is Hollywood's first real cosmopolite, you see." And in 1935, from Harriet Parsons, the syndicated columnist, who...actually wrote...like this...in hiccups of ellipses: "He's a gay Lothario...with the accent on the gay...his enchanting nonchalance...and joy-in-life...are his chief charms..."

Parsons didn't mean gay gay…not exactly. In 1934, RKO released The Gay Divorcee, the Fred-and-Ginger adaptation of the Cole Porter musical that Fred and Adele had done on Broadway (originally The Gay Divorce, retitled so as not to imply that dissolving a marriage could be cause for joy), and the studio advertised the film with the slogan, "The nation's gone gay!" The term was then most commonly understood to mean merry, roguish, or carefree (a word that provided the title for another Astaire and Rogers movie); still, "gay" had begun to take on its contemporary meaning among homosexual men and women, and its use in the context of Fred Astaire's image always carried a tinge of the transgressive. "The male ideal in American movies until that time was, typically, tough and a little rough around the edges, probably a country boy, and he proved his worth with his bravery and strength, rather than grace or charm," explained Krin Gabbard, the film scholar. "Astaire was something completely different, and the mise-en-scene of those early Astaire-Rogers films, with their focus on high fashion and society, was thought of as very feminine or stereotypically gay."

These issues are separate from the matter of Astaire's own sexuality, of course. He was known to be straight. Astaire, like everyone else in show business, worked regularly with a great many gay men and women, and the fact of his close collaborative relationship with Hermes Pan tells us nothing in particular about either man's sexual identity. It's not Astaire's private behavior, nor even his public persona, solely, but the larger world of his films—especially the RKO pictures he made with Pan and Ginger Rogers during the Depression years—that is of a piece with certain Thirties-vintage ideas about the gay male sensibility, notions that reinforce stereotypes of effeteness while subverting them through droll parody.

Hermes Pan was an impish, self-effacing man, a much-loved social creature widely known to be homosexual but discreet about it, in the manner of his generation. He had many friends, most of them veteran show folk like Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Randolph Scott, Paulette Goddard, and Ann Miller—a mixed crowd, men and women, straight and gay. "I had the biggest crush on him," Miller once remembered, "then gradually found out he was gay."

Slim and soft-featured, Pan had what balding men like to think of a high forehead, which he, like Astaire, hid with jaunty hats. Most everything about Pan was jaunty—his bouncy gait, his bright eyes, his easy grin. He dressed smartly in cashmere jackets and silk shirts, and he lived in a sweet little cookie-jar house with beveled-glass windows, a homey place cocooned from the rest of Beverly Hills by virtue of high stone yard walls, which Pan topped with shards of broken glass because a robber had once broken in, bound him to a chair with his neckties, and stole a few things. "It didn't seem to faze him," said Mary Ann Johnson. "He wasn't hurt, and the ties weren't damaged."

Pan loved to entertain, cooking Italian meals with herbs he grew in his backyard. "He had wonderful parties with all kinds of food, and celebrities would come and go, and he took it all in stride," said Johnson.

Fond of travel but afraid to fly, Pan would take longish vacations in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, or Mexico, sometimes accompanied by his nieces. "He was far more worldly than my father," recalled Ava Astaire McKenzie, Fred's daughter, who moved in 1975 to County Cork, Ireland, with her husband, Richard McKenzie, a memoirist and painter. She came to Manhattan in June of 2009 to speak at the annual Fred and Adele Astaire Awards, given each year to screen and stage dancers and choreographers in the name of her father and her late aunt. A bubbly, kind-faced woman who seems to have inherited her father's poise and humility, Ava McKenzie had resisted doing interviews for years but was eager to talk about her father's close association with Pan. "Pan was very sophisticated, and that was one of the reasons he and my father were so compatible," she said. "Pan experienced the world through his travels, and my father learned from him."

On a trip to Mexico in 1943, Pan met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and he and Rivera became lifelong friends. "My uncle loved Mexico, and it was kind of a thing for Hollywood people to go down there," recalled Pan's niece, Michelene Laski, a painter herself. "He and Rivera became really close, because my uncle could engage him in conversations about art and abstract things that my uncle would tell me about—God, the nature of beauty, that kind of thing." In a cafe in Mexico City once in the mid-Fifties, Pan spurred Rivera into a debate that Pan believed to have led Rivera to change the most controversial element in one of his most scandalous works.

"Rivera told him, 'I don't believe in anything I can't see,'" Laski said, recalling her uncle's account. "And Hermes said to him, 'What about beauty? What about love? Can you touch beauty? Can you hold it in your hands?'" Some years earlier, Rivera had painted a mural for the Del Prado Hotel, and it depicted the Mexican writer Ignacio Ramirez Calzada holding a sign that read, "Dios no existe"—"God does not exist." Because of this inscription, the hotel had refused to show the mural. "Rivera and my uncle went back and forth and back and forth, and eventually Rivera said he saw that my uncle had a point, and he went back and painted over the inscription." Blocked from public view for nine years, the mural was finally displayed in 1957.

Around the same time, Rivera painted a full-body portrait of Pan dancing, and Pan hung the painting in the parlor of his house. "It was his prize possession," said Laski, "because he knew that Rivera was a man of very strong passions, and he only painted things he cared a lot about, and he cared a lot about my uncle."

Pan "was not impressed by the trappings of fame or power," according to another of his nieces, Christa Meade. Meanwhile, at least a few members of the powered classes seemed drawn to Pan, with his casual grace, dishy charm, and trunk of Hollywood stories. In the late 1940s, at a Hollywood function, he met a young woman from Iran, Ashraf Pahlavi, and they hit it off so well that she invited him to visit her and her twin brother, the Shah. "He went over there, and he didn't really know who they were," said Laski. "He was invited to visit at their house, so he went, and when he got there, there was this fantastic estate, like a castle." Pan returned nearly every year after that and stayed for a week or so each time.

"He would just go and be himself, and I think they just loved having him around, because everybody loved having him around," said Laski. "He was very cultured and always very down-to-earth at the same time. He was a very likable person, and he always made you feel like you were special, and he was also a special person, and he made you feel like you were likable." On a visit to Princes Pahlavi and the Shah in the early Sixties, Pan brought, as a house gift, the latest Beatles album.

In Hollywood, Pan was a celebrity among the dancers. "If there was a party, Hermes would be there, very charming—everybody would sit at his feet, and he would puff on a cigarette and sip on a glass of wine and make little witty comments," recalled Larri Hoy, who, as Larri Thomas, was a chorus girl in 1955 film of Guys and Dolls and performed with the Hermes Pan Dancers in the Fred Astaire television specials of the Sixties.

"You would meet him at a party, and he was very quiet but delightful, and he had this very sweet face, and he would look at you and smile, and you would say, 'I want to be his best friend,'" recalled the singer and dancer Lee Roy Reams. "Because Fred Astaire was Fred Astaire—you can't get more famous or more revered—Hermes never got the recognition that he deserved, at least not with the general public. But the people who knew him? They loved him, and dancers worshipped him."

No one probably knew Hermes Pan better than Fred Astaire, and no one was closer to Astaire than Pan, outside of Astaire's family. Astaire's daughter Ava said she grew up considering Pan "part of the family," her "favorite uncle"—the man most important to her father, both professionally and personally. "They were inseparable, and I don't mean just on the set," said Ava Astaire McKenzie. "Next to my mother, who also loved Pan very much, and he loved her—they used to garden together and cook—Pan was the best friend my father ever had," said McKenzie. "The leaned on each other. They went to movies together. They talked every day—oh, several times a day, sometimes, all hours of the day and night. It was more than a work association. It was the friendship of a lifetime."

Their friends and family conjure images of close pals sharing the quotidian pleasures meaningful only to them. Since Pan loved to cook and Astaire was not so domestic, Fred would come to Hermes' house, and Pan would make dinner for the two of them—something simple, like white-bean soup and fish, say. If Ava or one of Pan's niece dropped by, they might find the men eating on the patio or just sitting together, having after-dinner smokes. Both of them liked to scour the daily paper for odd bits of news, and they would call each other and read the stories over the phone. "They shared a sense of refinement. They didn't like vulgarity," said Michelene Laski. "But they both had a really keen sense of the absurd, and they loved to people-watch, and they were always laughing, and they loved to pull little practical jokes on each other."

One afternoon in the late Sixties, Pan and Astaire were at Hermes' place, puzzling over the counter-culture, which clearly ran counter to their conception of culture. Together, they hatched a plan to try the hippie experience, and they called a friend, a studio costumer, for help. Pan and Astaire decked themselves out in long wigs, caftans, round sunglasses, and love beads. They rolled down the top of Pan's convertible and drove up Hollywood Boulevard singing Beatles songs. When they found some real hippies gathered on the sidewalk, they got out and chatted them up. On the way back to Pan's, they stopped to see Ava. "I think they really wanted to see what the hippies were all about," she said. "so they went in disguise." What did they learn? "I don't know, but they sure had a good time!"

Astaire and Pan worked together often, though not exclusively with each other through the days of Astaire's final television specials. After their RKO years, Pan took a contract with Paramount, where he created dances for Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable, and Astaire went to MGM. Whenever possible, Astaire brought Pan onto his projects, if only for one showpiece number such as the "Shoes with Wings On." Always Astaire's ideas man, Pan relished the challenge of pushing Astaire to try new things. "Pan always says how precise Fred was about detail," the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. once said, "and Fred used to give Pan credit for being a very hard taskmaster."

For Silk Stockings, the romantic Cold War musical that Astaire made at MGM, for instance, Pan persuaded Astaire to try a tricky lift with Cyd Charisse. "If it hadn't been for Pan," Astaire said. "I don't think I ever would have done it. He said, 'Oh, you can do it, you can do it,' and he showed me kind of a way to do it. And I did it. I got her, and I was pleased. He always used to beat me down and get me to do something that I thought I couldn't do, which I was grateful for."

As Pan once explained to the author Sarah Giles, "He took my judgment a lot, but we'd disagree sometimes. I would suggest something, and he would say he didn't want to do it, and I would ask him to try it. When we were rehearsing Let's Dance [with Betty Hutton in 1950], I suggested to him that he step over the back of a chair, or three or four, as an exit. Fred said he wouldn't do it, that he would break a leg. I begged him to try it, and still he insisted he couldn't do it. I held his hand and he did it, and then he said, 'I told you I can't do it.'"

They did only once dance together, as a duo, on film: a stunningly bizarre number for Second Chorus, a musical Astaire made with Paulette Goddard for Paramount in 1940. In the picture, Astaire plays a big-band singer, and one of his numbers is a novelty swing tune called "Waiting for the Ghost Upstairs." After the vocal chorus, Astaire sees an apparition—Pan, costumed in Halloween drag. Pan's legs are bare; he is wearing high heels; a flowing outfit, essentially a sheet, covers his body; and he has a white shroud over his face. In heels, he is a bit taller than Astaire, and he seems, in that outfit, beefier. The two of them dance mostly side by side for a time, until the ghost, Pan, whispers something in Astaire's ear. Astaire rejects whatever he hears, shaking his head. The ghost whispers again. Astaire points to himself and then crosses his arms in front of him, as if to say, "Me? No chance!" The ghost bends a knee and clutches his hands, begging.

Astaire shrugs his shoulder, giving in, and he and the ghost begin a partner dance. At the climax of the number, Astaire does a lindy-hop swing to Pan's right side, then another swing to his left, and then he hops up and straddles Pan, wrapping his legs around Pan's torso. The number was cut from the film but survives on YouTube.

"You can see why it was cut," said Robert Osborne. "It was a distraction, it took you out of the story, and it was really strange."

When Fred Astaire died, at age eighty-eight in 1987, the only person at the burial who was neither a member of the family nor clergy was Hermes Pan, who followed Astaire's ghost upstairs three years later. "My father wanted him there," remembered Ava Astaire McKenzie. "My father always liked to have Pan there."