IN A FIT of uncharacteristic generosity, the American government had agreed to pay for the higher education of its former indentured servants, the armed forces. I waived a college education. But when, as physical therapy, I began to attend a ballet class given by George Chafee, I let the government pay. At first, I was only interested in the barre exercises, for my arthritic knee. Then I got interested in how ballet worked technically and so, for a season or two, I took class, talked to dancers, went to the ballet, and learned the language of ballet.
In the late forties, balletomania hit New York City. For years there had been the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, a spin-off of the prewar Diaghilev company with a small but loyal audience. The principal dancers were Alexandra Danilova and Frederic Franklin, as well as Leon Danielian, a character dancer best known in such Massine ballets as Gaîté Parisienne. Leon and I became friends; he was exuberantly funny about his fellow dancers; himself, too. Whenever he played the prince’s friend in Swan Lake, a very showy part indeed, he would bring down the house with his turns, “which consist of,” he would grin, “three turns to the left and, with luck, two to the right. They applaud because of how I hold my head, and shake it triumphantly when I finish. Also, I’ve got almost no elevation, so I make my leap on the down—not on the up—beat. No one knows the difference and I seem to soar—just an inch or two off the ground.”
I was backstage once when Anton—known as Pat—Dolin was guest-partnering Alicia Markova in Swan Lake. Pat was an amusing, vain Englishman, now a bit long in the tooth. Backstage, during the overture, he was doing barre exercises in the wings. Leon whispered as he passed him, “Too late, Pat, too late.”
From the wings, I watched Pat and Markova. The two quarreled constantly during the pas de deux, and I was amazed that the audience didn’t hear them over the music. “Put me down! It’s the third beat,” muttered Markova. “Since when could you count?” he snarled as she struggled free from him, landing on beat, on perfect point, and then to fifth position. Thus was one of my pseudonymous novels born, Death in the Fifth Position.
But the real art of the dance was not to be found at the Ballets Russes in those days; rather, it was Ballet Theatre that excited a public that would never have gone much—if at all—to the ballet. The master whose work I became addicted to was Antony Tudor. Tudor had lived many years with a handsome dancer called Hugh Laing, who in turn had taken up with Diana Adams, a rising ballerina. The ménage à trois looked to be comfortable. I met Tudor in 1948 or 1949 in the entr’acte of a ballet at the Paris Opera House. Bald and lean, with a sly crooked smile and a deadly sense of humor, he said, “I’ve always wanted to see Serge Lifar. Now I have. And it’s all true . . .”
“What is true?”
“He is every bit as bad—no, dreadful—as I’ve always heard.” Even I could tell that the flabby-buttocked man onstage was, if not bad, oddly repellent as he struck his poses. Years later, Nureyev said that when he was in charge of the Paris Opera Ballet, his most difficult task was to exorcise the malign ghost of Lifar. “Is everywhere. In rehearsal halls. Backstage. We name rooms after this one, after that one. They make me name Lifar Room. Always evil in that room.” Rudi would shudder. “Bad ghost.”
Between Tudor ballets and Tennessee Williams’s new plays, something visceral was happening to those of us lucky to be in New York at the time, and able to go from play to ballet. Now, for the time being (which may be the only time—being or not—we may ever have in either dramatic form), there is not much excitement, or if there is, then that passionate, hungry, postwar audience no longer exists.
As an artist, Tudor tends to vanish in one decade to be revived in the next, but revival is never the same thing as now in the sense that what one is experiencing is truly novel or new. Tudor made a place for himself between classical ballet and modern dance, between Diaghilev and Martha Graham; his ballets were known as “psychological”; that is, they had real—as opposed to fairy-tale—plots. But they were classically balletic in movement. With Pillar of Fire, Tudor managed to define an entire generation that was finding a transient religion in psychoanalysis. Nora Kaye was his principal interpreter. She was a droll woman with a good business sense. At fourteen or so, she had been married to James T. Farrell, a marriage that was annulled. I told her once that I knew about Farrell.
“No one’s supposed to know about that,” she said, more resignedly than annoyed. “How do you?” I said that Farrell had told me. We had met at Milton Klein’s, our common dentist, in Fifty-fourth Street. At seventeen I had got Farrell to autograph my copy of Studs Lonigan. Over the years, I came to like him rather more than the books—naturalistic stories of proletarian life in Chicago—that I had devoured at Exeter.
Other Nora marriages were equally haphazard: One was to a descendant of Martin Van Buren, whom I would write so much about in Burr. Then there was the violinist Isaac Stern. I went to their wedding reception on New York’s West Side. Neither looked as if he had met the other, but all the town was on hand. A hot summer day, I remember, with white curtains billowing at open windows. That marriage was soon over. “I couldn’t stand it,” said Nora. “That squeak, squeak, squeak all day when he practiced.”
Onstage, Nora was like no one else. As a classical dancer, she was barely in the second rank. As a dancer-actress, there has never been, and perhaps never will be, another like her. Nora’s scream at the end of Agnes de Mille’s Fall River Legend still resounds in my head forever as an actual scream, although it was soundless as she stood, writhing, at center stage, white dress splashed with parents’ blood. In Jerome Robbins’s The Cage, Nora played a sort of preying mantis—“queen of the bugs,” we called her: She was terrifying.
A few years ago, Nureyev and I got to know each other when he moved to an island off Positano, and I would come down from Ravello to visit him; then, with seigneurial courtesy, he would come to me by sea and let his AIDS-wasted body collapse beside the pool.
Nureyev’s knowledge of American ballet before his defection was spotty. One day, he asked me to tell him everything that I could remember about the Tudor ballets that were no longer in the repertoire. After I had described several pieces, no doubt inaccurately, he said, “Is different now.” He knew, of course, the Tudor ballets that are still done occasionally, like Lilac Garden, but works like Undertow have slipped away forever. I’m told that one of the last ballets, La Gloire, was recently revived. Antony was uncommonly slow, which meant expensive, as he endlessly pondered moves, particularly in the case of La Gloire, based upon the life of Bernhardt and set to the music of Beethoven’s “Egmont Overture,” an unlikely piece for dancers to dance to. “But then,” as the sharp-tongued composer Samuel Barber observed, “Tudor only uses music that he happens to already have in his notoriously small record collection.”
On Nureyev’s last visit to us in Ravello, the August before he died, he lay, exhausted, on a sofa, drinking white wine, not speaking, until we got on to the latest ballet gossip. “Peter Martins—he kill wife, no? No. Sad. Saw him when sixteen. In class. Big cock hangs there. I make move. Erik Bruhn say, ‘No. Too young. Go to jail.’” Rudi smiles; face ravaged but beautiful, still very much Tatar king. The upper body has begun to waste away, but the lower is still unaffected, legs powerful, and the feet—for a dancer—not too misshapen, no hammertoes.
“Two kinds of dancer,” he said, suddenly. “Perfect steps. Perfect technique. Then there is music dancer. Not so perfect. Make mistakes. But music go right through body and onto audience.” He did not say which he was, but then he had always been both in youth. Now, with age and illness, he was saying that he relied on the music to use up what was left of him.
One of my favorite ballets of the period was Loring’s Billy the Kid. It was exciting to see my early role model incarnated by John Kriza, a manly youth from Berwyn, Illinois. Copland’s music certainly flowed through that strong body, particularly the percussion. Loring’s Billy killed sadly, with revulsion. In life, many men and women loved Johnny, who responded wholeheartedly in an absentminded way. He had a large car that he called Florestan, and together we drove down the east coast of Florida, receiving the homage of the balletomanes in their beachside houses. Eventually, he married another dancer; drank too much; went swimming one day in the Gulf of Mexico and drowned.
Harold Lang was a short, stocky, blue-eyed dancer, best known for Jerome Robbins’s ballet Fancy Free: three Second War sailors “on the town,” as the musical based upon it would be called; the other two sailors were played by Kriza and Robbins himself. For a time Bernstein’s music from On the Town was a sort of marching song for all of us set free from war and, as the lyric went, “Lucky to be me.” By the time I met Harold, he had moved on to musical comedy; and he was about to be starred in Look, Ma, I’m Dancing. Harold was a chameleon-lover who could become, instinctively, whatever the other person wanted. Since I thought (for only an instant) that this was Jimmie come back again, I did not in the least mind that Harold was, simultaneously, having affairs with the author of the musical and its star, Nancy Walker, not to mention as much of the British navy as he could take aboard when we were in Bermuda for a week. This hardly bothered me, since I was almost as promiscuous as Harold. But during our short time together I was obliged to face the fact that I was never going to make the journey from homoerotic to homosexual and so I was never going to be able to have anything other than one-sided passing sex. Thanks to Harold, this belated revelation was to prove a great time-saver over the years.
When Lenny Bernstein, in his sixty-ninth summer, came to stay with us in Ravello, I mentioned Harold. “Oh, God! Not that conversation! Practically everyone I know—or used to know—liked to tell me how one thing we have in common is the cast of Fancy Free.”
“Well, I did go to bed with two thirds of your cast.”
“And I,” said Lenny, competitive to the bitter end, “went to bed with all three. But I will say Harold’s ass was one of the seven—or whatever number it is—wonders of our time.”
In 1982, I was a candidate for Senate in California and I came to speak at the university in Chico. There was Harold in the audience. He taught ballet; and had his own undergraduate company. He was unchanged except for a rosy blotch or two about the nose. He drank more than any athlete that I’ve ever known, but then, like the other hard-drinking dancers of that day, he sweated it all out the next day in class.
After I had made my speech, Harold and I went off to a bar. He bought a cellophane bag of pretzels. “Dinner,” he said. He still looked as he did in Pal Joey on Broadway. He seemed content. He had come originally from Daly City, close to San Francisco. As an adolescent, he had been a Western Union boy, delivering telegrams on a bicycle; then someone—upon receipt of a telegram?—proposed he become a dancer. He did. He was prodigious; with an astonishing elevation. In Fancy Free, he would leap, without perceptible preparation, from floor to tabletop, as the audience gasped; then, without a break, do his tour en l’air on the beat.
He was dead a year after I last saw him. Cirrhosis, I heard. But I wonder if he might not have been an early AIDS victim. Because of his methodical heart breaking, he was known as the Beast of the Ballet. In the bar at Chico, I asked him why he felt so great a need to enchant then desert others.
“It all started with the nose.” Like everyone else in those days, Harold had done a grand jeté or two through psychoanalysis. “I had this big nose, and no one would go with me. Then, after I started dancing, I cut the nose off and everybody who’d ignored me before now said they were in love with me, and so I . . .” He munched on a pretzel, analysis finished. Plainly, those who did not like his real nose deserved what punishment they later got when they were attracted to the new one, and its bright protean attachment, Harold himself.
My days as a balletomane—and lover of dancers—ended when Balanchine appeared on the scene and swept American ballet off the stage. Balanchine’s ballets have mathematical charm, but I wanted Nora Kaye to illuminate our generation, to the music of Copland or Bernstein.
My knee was helped by barre exercises. Finally, I learned from Harold that an affair with a man was neither possible nor desirable for me, and so, with relief, I gave up any further attempts along those lines. Women were sometimes tempting, but my early exposure to the Marriages of My Family proved to be a reliable, unbreakable prophylactic. I might have negotiated Tolstoy’s last station with style, but it was the first station that looked ominous, to say the least. Thus, I was able, at twenty-five, to settle down with Howard Austen, age twenty-one. We had met anonymously at the Everard Baths.
“How,” we are often asked, “have you stayed together for forty-four years?” The answer is, “No sex.” This satisfies no one, of course, but there, as Henry James would say, it is.