Do You Rhumba?

Castle Society Dance Folio

Do you rhumba? Groucho Marx famously asked this question in the zany movie A Night at the Opera. Groucho took special pleasure in spoofing ballroom dancing. But along with the rhumba there was the foxtrot, the bunny hug, the hesitation, the maxixe, the Boston, the one-step, the tango, the turkey trot, and most especially the Castle walk, named for New Rochelle’s lively dance couple Vernon and Irene Castle (1893-1969). 

Irene was born Irene Foote on April 17, 1893 in New Rochelle. Her father was a local physician. Her romance with Vernon – born William Vernon Blythe – began at the New Rochelle Rowing Club in 1910. Within a year they were married and launched in a career that put them in the forefront of the ballroom dance craze in America and Europe.

Irene was a fashion trend-setter in many aspects of pop culture beyond dance – her bobbed hair style was a hit and copied widely; she appeared in silent films; and many women envied or emulated her elegant lifestyle. She traveled to Paris with Vernon and achieved instant popularity in ragtime dance. In 1914, the couple opened a dancing school, and the two illustrations here (from the Library’s Archive) of the Castle Society Dance Folios are evidence of their popularity – everyone wanted to dance like the Castles and step out to their music. 

Castle Society Dance Folio No. 2 

The jazz historian Phil Schaap has pointed out that the ballroom dance craze of the 1910s and 1920s was a major factor in the breakthrough of jazz to the very pinnacle of pop music. Before jazz and swing, ballroom dancing ruled pop music in America. Dancers were the music stars, and the ballroom styles of dance fostered an orchestral concept. Jazz merged with the social ballroom phenomenon to create the jazz orchestra in the 1920s, usually with the extra vitality of a hot tempo. Not only that, paired couples like Irene and Vernon Castle countered sexism in instrumental music at the time by bringing the talent, grace, and audacity of female performers to the forefront. 

The Castles made ballroom dancing respectable and fostered much enjoyable entertainment during the years of the Great War. Tragically, Vernon lost his life in an aviation accident in 1918, but Irene went on to star in many silent films. For more on the Castles, see the 1939 film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (another famous dance couple), and the biography by Eve Golden, Vernon and Irene Castle’s Ragtime Revolution (2007).

March 1, 2021 / David Rose / New Rochelle Public Library Archive