I am a ballet master,” Balanchine would say, “a maître de ballet,” meaning, “I am a master of all the arts that go into the making of ballets.” Lincoln Kirstein never felt he was the master of any art, and being around the imperial confidence of Balanchine kept him unbalanced. Lincoln often commented, “George is sinister.” The word connotes left-sidedness, as well as evil. Balanchine was in no way evil, but “sinister” also suggests a general or vague feeling of fear or apprehension on the part of the observer. Fearful that Balanchine might disagree any time he made a suggestion or offered an opinion, Lincoln endured relentless suspicions that the “sinister” Balanchine undermined him deliberately. Many ideas he presented to George came back to slap him in the face.
At a City Center dress rehearsal for the ballet Metamorphoses in 1952, Lincoln came running onto the stage from out front, excited, as if he’d had a revelation. “George, George!” he panted. “The boys’ tights! The color’s all wrong. They’re terrible! They should be pink! Put all the boys in pink tights!” (We were wearing nut-brown tights.) He was so wild—he’d grab a dancer and pull him over. “Look, George! He should be in pink! It’ll save the ballet.”
Though Lincoln had interrupted the dress rehearsal and every second was precious, Balanchine patiently turned to the wardrobe master: “Do we have pink tights for boys?” Then, for close to twenty minutes, waited patiently while the boys tried on pink tights, and then returned for a costume parade. We pirouetted, pranced, and posed under the stage lights for several minutes. Then, with everyone waiting expectantly, Balanchine turned to Lincoln, and said two words, “Better brown.” Lincoln may have been out front for the premiere, but we didn’t see him backstage for the next two weeks.
In spring 1982, we had just completed the second Stravinsky festival, and Balanchine and I were walking down the hall at SAB when Lincoln scurried up to join us, and reported, “George! Beverly Sills called me. She wants to do a production of Perséphone for City Opera and our company. I told her there’s not a chance we’d do anything with the City Opera or her—she’s ‘Jewish delicatessen’!”
Awaiting the sniff of approval, he got instead: “You know, Jewish delicatessen not so bad! Big, stuffed sandwiches. Pickle. Maybe we could do something with her.” Lincoln showed us his heels.
Lincoln was an ants’ nest of ideas, and I know his ideas inspired many of Balanchine’s works. At times, Lincoln would approach me and others with fascinating suggestions for an artist or a composer whose work he felt would be appropriate for a ballet. Melissa Hayden would say, “Oh, Lincoln with his ideas. Nine times wrong, one time right.” But how fantastic to be able to say that out of 100,000 ideas a thousand are fantastic.
In contract negotiations, the dancers often made outlandish demands—for example, threatening to strike if they were not guaranteed electric outlets at every makeup mirror in the New York State Theater and on tour. “We need them so that we can plug in our cassettes and study the music we have to dance to,” was their justification. In other words, “Rewire the theater for us.”
Balanchine did what he always did when he didn’t get what he wanted. He called a company meeting, and while we lounged around in our tights and leotards, a room full of cats in repose, he gave his stock speech. “We have to tour to keep company. This is not the first company Lincoln and I have put together. This is, let me think, one, two, three, four? Yes, fourth, and in between there was nothing. And even here, in this theater, if we don’t perform, maybe theater will close down, and I will go to Geneva and start another company.” Balanchine loved Switzerland; it was where he got his neat, clean, “everything-works-perfectly” fix. As a cop has a backup piece, Balanchine had Pat Neary and the Geneva Ballet. “Some of you can come with me, if you like. Others can stay.” I ran home to tell Carrie, “We may be moving to Geneva!”
It was Lincoln who worried about the theater, the board, the company, and the succession. Balanchine never made arrangements for anything in the future—his apartment, the contents of his closets, his friends, his ballets, anything. He said, “After me, I don’t care. I want my cake now to eat.” So if there is a New York City Ballet today, it is because of Lincoln Kirstein. But without Balanchine, who would want to come?
Without Balanchine, what would have happened to Lincoln’s vision of a uniquely American ballet? We have a little idea through the early companies Lincoln birthed—Ballet Caravan, the American Ballet—where he functioned with more artistic control. Whenever he tried to do something that Balanchine wasn’t involved in, it fell apart. Because Lincoln was unpredictable, the edifice trembled under his control. Poor Lincoln was an instigator, not a leader … and that awareness was corrosive.
Lincoln worked hard at inventing an image for himself, and an important component of that image was the costume—a navy blue suit, black socks, black shoes, white shirt, thin black or navy blue tie, in winter a Navy pea coat. This uniform—routine, unchanging—was a crutch in his attempt to establish an order, a sense of control in his erratic and frightening mood swings. A manic-depressive and God knows what else. Winds in him had met, conversed, argued, and generated a tornado. Medication, probably lithium, allowed him to function. If his crutch broke, a routine was missed, or a medication forgotten, everyone would know, because he would appear in Army fatigues and combat boots.
Onstage at the New York State Theater, a half hour before an NYCB performance in the late 1970s: Balanchine, alone in his usual place in the first wing on stage right, had propped himself on a stool, tired and pensive. Nearby, I was warming up. The only other person in sight, Ronnie Bates, was preparing for the show. Lincoln appeared, in his camouflage outfit, and he headed straight for Balanchine. There was no doubt that trouble was brewing. Imagining Lincoln was about to strike Balanchine, I prepared to throw myself between them. I saw Ronnie slowly starting to edge toward Lincoln, probably hoping to grab him if the need arose. With saliva spraying out of his mouth, Lincoln bellowed at Balanchine, “YOU’RE FIRED!” I think even dust motes in the theater’s atmosphere froze. Slowly, Balanchine leaned back until he was bent like a bow and, tilting his chin upward so he could look down his nose at Lincoln, slowly uttered one word, “Ohhhh.” Lincoln fled out the door.
Balanchine sought me out. “I told Lincoln, ‘Maybe not be around theater so much anymore. Stay at the school, set up office there, play with little boys, make school secure, and write. You are wonderful writer. Write. That’s what you should do, keep out of theater.’ ” And then, to me, he confided, “Lincoln’s judgment is totally destroyed by his homosexuality, and he has no taste. He only sees boys onstage … However, nobody can write better about ballet than Lincoln.”
Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein by Jamie Wyeth, 1965. Jamie told me, “He was always rushing off somewhere, so I painted his back.” (image credit 14.1)
The next time I saw Lincoln was at SAB, and the military togs were gone. “George banished me from the theater,” he grunted.
Walking fast was a trademark of Lincoln’s—in a hurry, rushing from or to somewhere. Pausing, a momentary halt in his various migrations, seemed to anger him. Jamie Wyeth, the artist, captured Lincoln in a brilliant portrait. His back turned, the hawk-like profile radiating power. “I had to paint him that way,” Jamie said. “He wouldn’t be still for a portrait. So I painted him the way I remember him—barking over his shoulder, ‘I don’t have time for you now, Jamie!’ ”
Lincoln would invite me to his house to parade me around for potential funders, and there would be Jamie Wyeth at the same party. Jamie was a beautiful man, married to Phyllis, who, due to an accident, was wheelchair-bound. Lincoln gushed, “Jamie’s a great painter. He’s better than his father or grandfather. He’s marvelous, I love him! He did my portrait.” Lincoln was extremely proud of the portrait, and kept it on his living-room wall. Every time I visited his town house, he’d drag me in front of it. Then one night, his manner changed. “That was his last good painting! He wasted his talent; he’s nothing now! Once he sold a painting for one hundred thousand dollars it stopped his creativity cold!” It was Lincoln’s usual cycle of praise and denigration.
He had an unpleasant habit of accosting his friends and acquaintances and, without provocation, insulting and denouncing them, leaving them sputtering, crushed, and stunned. He also had a knack for zeroing in on people’s insecurities and attacking. The assaults were vicious: “What makes you think you can make a photograph!!? Your photographs are shit!” Snarling and glaring at another victim, “You’re an amateur; you think you’re doing anything new? You haven’t done anything new in your whole life, and you never will!!! You’re a NOTHING!” All this, to an artist who, a week before, he had espoused at some party: “I’ve bought his works, they’re fabulous, they’re too good for the Museum of Modern Art!” If the recipient of such an attack didn’t have a strong belief in himself, he would, forever after, be hoping to get back into Lincoln’s good graces, inventing excuses. “He didn’t really mean that. He was crazy.” Many of the people Lincoln built up, then harshly rejected, continued to seek his imprimatur.
Virgil Thomson had been a classmate of Lincoln’s at Harvard, and was the composer of the music for Filling Station, the ballet that, in its 1953 revival, launched my career. This giant of the music world became a friend, and quite often we visited together. On every occasion, Virgil brought up Lincoln. “Does he talk about me? We were friends, you know, but he turned against me. You know he treated me terribly. He does that to people. He used me, when he needed me, and then when I thought he’d need me some more, he would insult me instead—in public.”
If Lincoln’s victims bit back—“You’re a horse’s ass, Lincoln. You’re describing yourself! Fuck off!”—Lincoln would pivot and run.
January 11, 1983. The company was abuzz, “Mary Tyler Moore took morning class!” In the past, Mary had occasionally joined us, and Balanchine welcomed her. He was a fan of her show. A message came to me: “Go to SAB. Lincoln wants to talk to you in his office.”
Within a second of my arrival at his office, he leaned over me and snarled, “How dare you bring your show-business friends to take our company class!” as if “show business” would somehow tarnish the purity and loftiness of ballet. I remained calm and replied, “She’s taken class before. And I didn’t invite her, Balanchine did. And Lincoln, don’t you think that Balanchine’s ‘show business’ too?” He stared at me, froze for a moment, then grunted, pushed past me, and disappeared down the hall, leaving me alone in his office.
Lincoln could not play his promoting/rejecting game with Balanchine. Instead, Lincoln was the little boy chasing after the heels of genius. When I came along, he expected me to be the new Lew, but I was destined to disappoint him. Lincoln expected Balanchine to be a servant to his vision, but instead Lincoln was in the shadow of Balanchine all his life. He had brought a ballet master to America who turned out to be Mount Everest.
Balanchine described to me how Diaghilev had led him “like little puppy dog” around the great museums of Europe, and then left him sitting on a bench in front of a Piero della Francesca or a Caravaggio, with a command: “Sit in front of this painting and look at it the rest of the afternoon.” On several occasions, Lincoln did this same number on me, running me through the Metropolitan Museum. With a gesture, he’d indicate, “This is worthless, don’t waste your time,” and as I looked around to figure out what painting he was talking about, he’d rush down the hall to another exhibition. I’d scamper after him, only to have the experience repeated. For close to a full minute, he lingered at the giant Assyrian stone friezes from Nimrud—winged, powerful, and hawk-nosed. I thought, “That’s Lincoln on those panels!”1 Those conflicting forces in him—ambition and compassion, brazen energy, determination and fear, bravado and insecurity/self-loathing/distrust of himself—were two-by-fours bashing him around through life. An enemy to himself, yet somehow, he functioned, and managed to accomplish so much good.
Lincoln and Balanchine came together like two elements in an alchemical reaction, and together, their visions and energies (Lincoln’s of a uniquely American, male-dancer-driven ballet inspired by Lew, and Balanchine’s of distilled and refined choreography in service to women and the art of ballet) transmuted to make a third body, joined entities, NYCB and SAB, that, for a time, bore the marks of both parents. Their presence remains, diluted today, fading, too.
Each could not achieve alone what they accomplished together. Lincoln parlayed this treasure he had—George’s artistry—into getting his vision realized. Balanchine parlayed Lincoln’s drive and genius into founding a school to develop his dancers, a company to use to create his ballets, an orchestra of high quality with first-class conductors to play the music he chose, and a theater to present his ballets—that’s all he cared about. Without Balanchine, Lincoln would have done what he always did—build up, lose interest; support an artist, then turn on him; create something to be proud of, then discard it with distaste. He never did achieve his place as tsar of all the arts in America. He did, however, find a place to channel his energies, as a promoter and facilitator for Balanchine.
Without Lincoln’s entrepreneurship, Balanchine, unconcerned with legacy or anything that might survive him, might never have found a permanent home. “Me. Here. Now.” Balanchine undoubtedly would have found other venues to refine and explore his choreography, but here in NYC he had his own school, ballet company, orchestra, and theater. Plus—Lincoln Kirstein, the buffer, the fund-raiser and public relations man, press agent and marketer extraordinaire.
Balanchine admired Shakespeare, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was fond of quoting Bottom: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (act 4, scene 1). Then Balanchine would expound about how there are things going on at different levels and we’re unaware of them—there are other planes, dreams, invisible worlds, and, maybe, other universes. “We need different kind of access, beyond mind, to imagine these other worlds.”2
“We see here, and we think this is what is. But we see only tiny little bit. There are other places. Maybe there’s here,” Balanchine would gesture the shape of a box, “but there is inside, and we don’t see inside. But we know there is an inside. Maybe there is inside an inside, like Russian nesting doll … We are little, and know very little.”
He’d continue, expounding on geometry—dimensions—and a hodgepodge of the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, the Armenian mystic. “His follower, Ouspensky, was better,” Balanchine claimed. “Everything is now, you see—past, present, future—over and over again—is now. Now, now, now, now, now. Even now is not what you think.” I was lost and confused, but I think what he meant was that no matter how fast you could grasp, the present is continually becoming the past. Later, on attempting to read Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, I would get even more confused, and put aside their books, thinking, “What a lot of mystic hodgepodge.”
Lincoln claimed to be a follower of Gurdjieff. Was it because of Balanchine? Gurdjieff had taught in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and had a school in Tbilisi; maybe Balanchine had first been exposed to him there. Lincoln met Gurdjieff in France in 1927, when Lincoln was twenty years old. Did they ever discuss Gurdjieff together? I doubt it. Throughout their long collaboration, how much did Lincoln influence Balanchine, and how much did Balanchine influence Lincoln?
I suspect Balanchine drew more out of Gurdjieff than Lincoln, who, when he was young, seemed mainly to have wanted a guru in his life who would “shape him up.”3
Without Lincoln’s invitation in 1933, Balanchine might have tried to wrest back control of the Paris Opéra from Lifar, or gone to opera houses in Denmark, London, Argentina, Milan, or Monte Carlo. But the U.S. was the future, and the right place for Balanchine. Nowhere in the world would Balanchine ever find a patron to equal Lincoln. Besides, with his riotous imagination, extensive connections, knowledge, willpower, and drive, Lincoln had the tenacity to stick it out with the ungovernable genius Balanchine. Thanks to them, SAB and NYCB were born, and my attendance there allows me to claim that this wild, untamed youth learned nobility through art.