The man who made top hat, white tie, and tails famous actually hated formal wear, held up his slacks with an old necktie, and in his late seventies joined the National Skateboard Society and broke his wrist skateboarding in his own driveway. This episode explores how a reluctant kid from Omaha, born Frederick Austerlitz in 1899, became the architect of the modern movie musical, starting as the less-praised sibling in a vaudeville act with his sister Adele, dancing in a lobster costume and dodging child labor investigators.

The conversation traces how a forced two-year hiatus let the teenage Astaire take control of the act's choreography and arrangements, his early friendship with sheet-music plugger George Gershwin, the trauma of Adele's 1932 retirement, and the infamous screen test that dismissed him as a balding guy who could dance a litt ...