Jockey Robyn Smith’s remarkably quick journey from aspiring Hollywood starlet to respected professional athlete was the basis of a 1972 Sports Illustrated story by scribe Frank Deford. But her greatest fame was still in the distance, occurring by virtue of an unlikely 1980 marriage to legendary film dancer Fred Astaire. An excerpt from the SI profile of Smith, who was given to telling tall tales about herself:

As a kid she played boys’ games, and certainly jockeys don’t intimidate her because she is, after all, taller than everybody she rides against. “The men jockeys have treated me terrific,” she says, “but then, all my friends have always been men. I resented being called a tomboy, though, because I wouldn’t want to be a man. I like them too much. I just get along with them, period. Women resent this for some reason. My mother used to resent this. Like when she and my father would have people over, I’d hang around with the men.” Robyn always addresses married couples as “you guys.”

She exercises every morning, runs religiously, and indulges herself only in a little wine and brandy. She is a fine golfer, long off the tee, and picks up any sporting activity easily. Ransohoff, the film producer, took her deep-sea fishing. “We hit a school of albacore,” he says, “and I mean they were rolling. Robyn hung more albacore in that hour than any man on board.”

“I’m thin, but I’m strong,” Robyn explains clinically, getting set to flex again. “I always had good muscles. I’m a rare physical individual—and I’m not trying to be narcissistic about it. It’s just that I’m very unusual in that way.”

Yet Robyn has taken off so much weight that she appears to have no emotional reservoir to sustain her. Her system is littered with the residual effects of weight pills, water pills, hormone pills, big pills, little pills, pill pills that she gobbles indiscriminately. Even when she was a world-beater at the spring meeting, she was constantly at a temperamental flood tide. She breaks into tears regularly, not only over losing a race but, say, while watching some banal TV drama. The least aggravation unnerves her. People fall out of her favor upon the smallest alleged slight, only to return just as whimsically to her good graces. Her fetish for freedom borders now on mania; it is easier to schedule an appointment with the Dalai Lama than Robyn Smith. She has become less receptive to criticism, and woe to the most well-intentioned innocent who forgets and idly tells her the same thing twice.•

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Smith profiled in 1985.