Paul Savatte was born in the late 1890's in a small American town.  He developed a natural ability to dance - specifically tap - at an early age.  A poor student, Savatte was easily distracted with tap dancing and in frustration, ran away to a larger city to practice his trade as a teen-ager in 1909.  For twenty years, Savatte enjoyed a career as a star performer but the stock market crash of 1929 wiped out many of the venues in which he performed.  For years during the depression, Savatte struggled to sustain himself, selling off his belongings from his glory days to survive.

In 1943, desperate and broke, Savatte pawned his last belongings and wandered the street.  Coming among a charity bazaar, he finds a fortune-telling booth manned by Terry Sloane.   Sloane offers to tell Savatte his fortune and tells him that his surname means "to fight with one's feet".  Inspired, Savatte decided to abandon honest pursuits and using a roundhouse kick to subdue Sloane, robs the cash register at the booth.  He drops his pawn ticket as he flees, allowing the recovered Sloan to give chase as Mr. Terrific.  The hero finds Savatte attempting to recover his belonging and the two engage in a brawl until Savatte pulls the pawnbroker into the middle of the fight and manages to escape.

The following day, Savatte spies a talent contest at Funland and enters as a dancing bandit.  He loses to the strong man act and subdues the winner and takes the cash.  Having seen the same ad, Mr. Terrific guesses that Savatte will be in attendance and arrives as the criminal is escaping with his loot.  The chase ends at the park's ferris wheel, where Mr. Terrific managed to corner and capture his foe.  Not recognizing that Savatte was once a famous dancer, Terrific ourchases him a book on tap-dancing and urges him to go straight.  Enraged at this final insult, Savatte flings the book back at him in a flurry of invective (Sensation Comics #13).

Any later activities of Paul Savatte  are unrecorded.