High society

One evening in 1923, Edward, Prince of Wales, pretty as paint in his white tie and a cutaway-coat, went to the theatre to see a new Gershwin musical. It was called Stop Flirting. Always one to ignore instructions, the Prince returned to enjoy this froth no less than nine times more. Obsessed by anything and eventually, disastrously, anyone American, the heir to the throne was fanatical about the new-fangled craze then being displayed at the Shaftesbury Theatre by a dazzling young brother-and-sister act hot-foot from Broadway: ballroom dancing.

Practising the charleston and the black bottom rather than studying charters and red boxes occupied the heir to the throne’s days, to the intense irritation of his father. Edward ‘continues to dance every night. People will think he’s mad … or a bounder’, George V fumed to the Queen, adding laconically, ‘Such a pity.’ In the meantime, with friends like the Mountbattens or Thelma Vanderbilt, his son would foxtrot and quickstep in one or other of the newly fashionable nightclubs — the Embassy, Kit-Kat, Riviera or Ciro’s — till the waiters piled up the chairs.

Now the future king was to succumb to the tidal wave of ‘Astairia’. After several visits to Stop Flirting he befriended these comets of musical comedy, the dazzling Adele and Fred Astaire, toast of America and Europe. The attraction was mutual — Adele was rather taken by Edward’s favourite brother, George, Duke of Kent — and after their performance the Astaires would often join the royal table at a nightspot; as dawn flushed over the West End, the Prince would ask them back to St James’s Palace to punish the parquet with the latest steps.

Besides dancing, Fred and the Prince had much in common. Their shared passions included somewhat outré clothes; both men were small but well-proportioned, and Fred was soon aping the royal style, having his suits made by Edward’s tailors, Anderson and Sheppard, using his shirt and shoe-makers, and even taking hero-worship so far as trying to walk and talk like the Prince.