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Catherine earns Sonja Henie’s trust and helps make her skating more balletic. She also adapts ballets to ice for the Center Theatre shows. She moves to Manhattan and dates barrel jumper Jimmy Caesar for several years. She choreographs more Broadway shows, including Follow the Girls, a musical comedy starring Jackie Gleason and Russian ballerina Irina Baronova. Follow the Girls is a hit, but its revue-like formula will soon be eclipsed in popularity by the musical play genre as represented by Agnes de Mille’s Oklahoma! In 1944, Ballet Theatre revives Barn Dance. It is not successful, as the vogue for ballet Americana has begun to fade. The Littlefields open a studio in New York, where Dorothie teaches. Carl flies seventy combat missions as a pilot in World War II and receives medals for his heroism.

Joan McCracken leaves the Littlefields to perform at Radio City Music Hall and eventually on Broadway. Catherine stages dances for the large-scale “American Jubilee” pageant at the World’s Fair in New York in 1940. Her innovative bicycle ballet in the pageant is a tremendous hit. Al Jolson hires her for his comeback show on Broadway, Hold On to Your Hats. She is then enlisted to choreograph ice-skating routines for New York’s Center Theatre, which has been converted into an ice theater by Chicago entrepreneur Arthur Wirtz and his business partner, Olympic skating champion Sonja Henie. Wirtz soon installs Catherine as choreographer for Henie’s touring Hollywood Ice Revues as well. She takes her Littlefield Ballet on an eight-week national tour. She and Philip officially separate, although they remain friends and business associates. She and her Littlefield Ballet return to Chicago for the 1941 opera season. The company disbands after Pearl Harbor is bombed and many of Catherine’s male dancers, including Carl, enlist in the military.

This chapter looks at Power’s work within the genre of musicals. Despite his lack of singing and dancing ability, he was cast as the lead in five musicals between 1937 and 1939, although he made no more films in this genre after the decade ended. To compensate for his lack of musical talent, Power was cast opposite female stars who were skilled musical performers, being paired with ice-skating champion Sonja Henie twice and singer-actress Alice Faye three times. This move by Twentieth Century-Fox demonstrates the actor’s appeal to contemporary audiences at a time when musicals were extremely popular and its plans for his maximum exposure. Power’s characterisations in all five musicals are slightly different, some building on his already established screen image and others advancing it either slightly or significantly. Indeed, while his films with Henie have many similarities to his comedic pairings with Young, Faye provides his most sensual screen pairing to date, suggesting a new sexual maturity to his image at the end of the 1930s.