1. Bernadette Soubirous, who died at the age of thirty-five in 1879 and was canonized in 1933, reportedly saw apparitions of Our Lady at Lourdes. In fact, she did suffer from tuberculosis of the bones.
2. There was always some truth to Boss’s cautionary tales. King Herod, the bloodthirsty Judean ruler who reputedly tried to kill the infant Jesus, died an excruciating death, probably brought on by kidney disease and finished off by gangrene. Henry VIII died of a variety of illnesses, and his body lay swelling in his bed for some days before embalming, while his court figured out the best way to break the news of his death.
3. “Go, you are sent forth” could be a good idiomatic translation of “Ite, missa est.”
4. Commonly used in Quebec, a calèche is a two-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle with a driver’s seat on the splashboard.
5. One who takes care of horses.
1. In later life, he represented the United States, competing in two Olympics and then coaching five more Olympic teams, the 1984 team winning the gold. In the summer of 2008, he was inducted into the Olympic Hall of Fame.
2. Established by the Heye Foundation and world-class, today much of the collection is in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
1. In 2008, while I was watching the Russian dancers from the Kirov perform at City Center, a lady in the row in front of me turned around. “Excuse me,” she ventured. “I’m Irene Rosner David. I know you’re Jacques d’Amboise, but you used to be Ahearn. My dad was Dave and had the candy store on your block. He always spoke of you and your dancing, followed your career.” I begged her for a photo. Two came within a week.
2. Anatole Chujoy, The New York City Ballet (Knopf, 1953). For both background and factual information regarding Balanchine, Kirstein, and the creation of the School of American Ballet and the companies that sprang from it, I am indebted primarily to Anatole Chujoy and Bernard Taper for Chujoy’s The New York City Ballet and Taper’s Balanchine: A Biography (1984 edition), along with Debra Hickenlooper Sowell’s The Christensen Brothers: An American Dance Epic (1998)—highly readable and thoroughly enjoyable accounts. The many conversations with Lincoln, Lew, his brother Willam, and Balanchine himself, I recorded in my diaries.
3. The Spellbound Child (L’Enfant et les Sortilèges), with music by Ravel, text by Colette, and decor by Aline Bernstein; and The Four Temperaments, with music by Paul Hindemith, scenery by Kurt Seligmann. The choreography was all Balanchine.
4. The second program of Ballet Society’s first season (January 1947) included three ballets: Pastorela, with choreography by Lew Christensen, music by Paul Bowles, based on the Mexican Christmas play Los Pastores, libretto by José Martinez, scenery and costumes by Alvin Colt; Renard (The Fox), with choreography by Balanchine, music by Stravinsky, scenery and costumes by Esteban Frances, and English text by Harvey Officer; and Divertimento, choreography by Balanchine to a score by Alexei Haieff, no scenery, and simple, stripped-down costumes. It was January 1947, and I was twelve and a half years old.
5. John would later have a lifelong and successful career as ballet master and choreographer in a variety of companies, eventually returning to join NYCB and hooking his life force to Balanchine.
6. How to make a zip gun? First, carve out of hardwood a model of a pistol (a barrel with a handgrip, no trigger guard). Second, on the top of the barrel, scrape out a narrow groove that runs its length. Place a steel pipe in the groove and secure it by wrapping tape and multiple thick rubber bands around the barrel. The diameter of the pipe must be exactly the right size to fit a .22 shell, inserted with the rim resting on the edge of the pipe. Too small and the bullet falls out. Too big and you can’t slip it in the pipe. Again using thick rubber bands, attach a big nail along the grip of the zip gun. The nail head functions as the hammer, pressing against the rim of the .22 shell that has been loaded into the pipe. Wedge a finger between the nail and the grip, pull the nail back as far as you can (cocking), and release it. The nail head slams into the bottom of the bullet, exploding the powder and propelling the bullet out of the pipe, occasionally blowing up your hand.
7. If I had to reflect on the finest classical male ballet dancers of my time, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi and the Danish dancer Eric Bruhn were, I feel, without peers.
8. As opposed to classical ballet—the term “character class” meant ethnic or folk dance, primarily Central European and Slavic.
9. Muriel Stuart collaborated with Lincoln Kirstein to write a technique manual, The Classic Ballet (1952), which has few peers.
1. Le Figaro, May 12, 1952. Quoted in Chujoy, The New York City Ballet, pp. 347–48.
2. This and other Balanchine quotes in this episode are from Nancy Reynolds, Repertory in Review: 40 Years of the New York City Ballet (Dial Press, 1977), p. 100.
3. Reynolds, Repertory in Review.
4. Paid for primarily by tax dollars, the New York State Theater changed its name to the David H. Koch Theater when the billionaire donated a reputed $100 million for renovations.
1. Sadler’s Wells Ballet evolved into the Royal Ballet, and a second company was formed, the Sadler’s Wells Theater Ballet.
2. In the “Black Fog” of London, England, in the winter of 1952, at least four thousand deaths were due to stagnant air masses of coal smog.
3. Three translations of this stanza from Eugene Onegin:
Nabokov translation (revised ed. 1975):
Gently he lays his hand upon his breast
and falls. His misty gaze
expresses death, not anguish.
Thus, slowly, down the slope of hills,
in the sun with sparks shining,
a lump of snow descends.
Walter Arndt translation (1963):
In silence to his bosom raising
A hand, he took no other breath,
And sank, and fell. Opaquely glazing,
His eyes expressed not pain, but death.
So, gently down the slope subsiding,
A sparkling sheet of snow comes sliding.
Douglas Hofstadter translation (1999):
And on his breast he gently places
His hand, then crumples to the dirt.
The foggy look upon his face is
Of death expressive, not of hurt.
Once, slowly down some sloping mountain,
Aglow as though sun’s frozen fountain,
A lonely snowball fell and rolled.
1. This city built by Tsar Peter the Great juggled the names Petrograd, St. Petersburg, and Leningrad.
2. Danilova and Balanchine never actually married, but they lived together in what may be considered a common-law marriage.
3. Lydia Ivanova, a promising ballerina, was included among the original members of the group. Before the group received permission to depart, she drowned in a mysterious accident. Ivanova was rumored to be mistress to a high party official, Danilova told me: “He did not want her to leave, so he had her, as you say in your country, rubbed out.”
4. At the Royal Opera House, empty between matinee and evening, a fellow corps de ballet dancer, Kaye Sargent, and I would slip into the Royal Box to neck passionately, panting in regal style. She subsequently married the head electrician at the opera, Bill McGee, and moved to London for good. In later years, we would get together with several dancers from the Royal Ballet and laugh, gossiping over the conditions we overcame on ballet tours. The worst I remember was the Liceu in Barcelona—the one toilet in all of Europe, it seemed, that did have a bowl sporting a wooden rim, only the rim was encrusted with dried feces (other toilets were just holes in the ground). Shaun O’Brien, a fellow dancer, solved our Liceu problem by saving local newspapers and cutting out covers for the rim. (“The problem, Daisy,” Shaun called me endearingly, “is the newsprint rubs off and tattoos your buns.”) Dancers from the Royal Ballet described their tours in the deserts of the Middle East, where they danced on raised wooden platforms built for the occasion—with the orchestra abutting the stage, ensconced in fold-up chairs, at ground level. “If you needed to go to the loo, you had to go under the stage, squat and do your duty, staring at the orchestra members playing while over your head, the sounds of the dancers’ feet reverberated.” And ubiquitous flies. Kaye’s friend Anne, an ex-member of the corps, recounted, “I do think the worst horror was putting on your makeup. The flies were so thick, they covered the mirror. You would whisk them away with your hand, or blow with your breath to open up a clear space on the mirror, and by the time you’d put on your lipstick, the mirror was full of flies again.” I imagine that Ballet Caravan’s tour had tales to equal or outdo these.
5. Over the years, I got to know and care a great deal for Lew and Willam. Carrie, my wife, danced with and for Willam when he was director of San Francisco Ballet. Willam then formed the ballet company at the University of Utah, which evolved into Ballet West. I was a regular guest with both groups, and headed Ballet West’s first European tour. Bill always importuned me to come codirect Ballet West with him, and then take it over. He was such a creative force, constantly planning new ballets, never playing it safe, teaching every class. When in his nineties, I heard he had been moved to a nursing home, so I called him. “My time has gone!” he yelled into the phone. “It’s too late for me! I can’t move! I can’t demonstrate a dance step! I can’t teach a class! Time has passed me by.” Then, in a subdued voice, “I always loved you, Jacques, from the first time I saw you dance.” It touches such an emotional chord in me. Ironic, too, that the two brothers, unbeknownst to each other, spoke almost identical words—“My time has gone.” Lew, speaking of the end of his career as a dancer in the early fifties; Bill, speaking of the end of his career as a ballet master.
6. Rhymes of a PFC, 1964; Rhymes and More Rhymes of a PFC, 1966, first printed edition for the public. Both have the “Vaudeville” poem and one called “Patton,” in which the general takes a leak.
Inspecting cots of amputees, unshaken obviously,
Approves the stitch above the wrist,
the slice below the knee;
Hides in th’enlisted men’s latrine so he can quietly
Have one good hearty cry.
This soldier has to take a leak, finds someone sobbing there.
To my horror it’s an officer; his stars make this quite clear.
I gasp: “Oh, sir, are you all right?” Patton grumbles: “Fair.
Something’s in my eye.”
1. Virgil, famous for his collaboration with Gertrude Stein on the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, was to become a good friend. He introduced me to the artist Maurice Grosser. Partners in the past, they had split but remained loving friends. “Jacques, it’s Virgil Thomson here. Could you come over for lunch? I have someone I want you to meet. Maurice Grosser. He wants to paint a portrait of you. I’m at the Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-third Street.” I answered, “Sure, I know the place. George Kleinsinger lives there. He composed the music for a Broadway show I was in, Shinbone Alley.” Virgil continued in his fey and pouty St. Louis, Missouri, voice, “Oh, George. He’s got so many tropical plants in his apartment, it’s a rain forest … he keeps a python for a pet! I don’t know how he can play his piano with a snake wrapped around the piano legs and its head on the pedals,” then coyly, “or further up.”
Virgil was ovoid and infirm, stuck in his chair like a decadent cardinal glued onto a throne. Hairless, with fat little jowls and round eyes that seemed to have no eyelashes, he stared without blinking, and his rosebud cupid’s mouth would open and close like a little fish. An ancient baby, who summoned maternal instincts—you wanted to stroke and cuddle him. Pricilla Rey, a dear friend of Virgil’s and of mine, laughingly remarked, “All those women around him, their milk flowed in his presence.”
Virgil was clever with a biting wit that somehow avoided nastiness; it was barbed, but without pain.
I arrived to find him surrounded by lady friends, and a nurse. “Jacques, dear, you’ve caught me with my court. These are my ladies. They worship me. Don’t you, ladies? Oh, and this is Maurice Grosser. I know him well,” glancing coyly at Maurice as if they had just been caught necking, “and you, Jacques, don’t know him at all. But you will.… “ A statement, pregnant with mysterious import, implying that the secrets of the Addams Family awaited me.
Maurice was nondescript, of medium height, medium everything, with a sallow complexion, but he had a gentle charm. And a few days later, I found myself sitting for a portrait by Maurice.
Awed by Lincoln Kirstein, Virgil often asked me, “What does Lincoln think of my music? … Does he mention me? You think Lincoln would want me to do another work for the ballet company?”
2. Paul Cadmus, a contemporary visual artist, was Lincoln’s brother-in-law, and was hired by Lincoln to create scenery for many ballets. His sister, Fidelma Cadmus, was married to Lincoln, and they loved cats. Whatever love Fidelma and Lincoln shared was symbolized by their love for cats. Fidelma was fragile—around her, you felt she could crack and disintegrate. Paul had done a series of lifesize paintings of the Seven Deadly Sins, which were filled with brilliant colors, twisted shapes, vibrant, energetic, Gothic. They made you uncomfortable. Paintings you don’t want to sleep with. Lincoln adored them. They lined the hallway of his house.
3. Choreographer José Limón’s There Is a Time, based on verses from Ecclesiastes, was groundbreaking, still a classic in the world of modern dance, as is his Moor’s Pavane. He was very handsome and dramatic. I just remember him standing there trying to talk to me—I was trying to change costumes, he kept talking—and he had beautiful hands, and knew they were beautiful, so whenever he addressed you, he made sure his hands were between your faces—gesturing, posing, demonstrating, revolving so you could get a look at them from every angle. I liked him very much.
4. After that 1953 tour of Europe, Nora (who inspired Jerry Robbins’s fantastic ballet The Cage) and her lover, the to-be-world-famous movie director Herbert Ross (Pennies from Heaven, Turning Point), decided to quit dance. They bought a Mercedes, and were passing through the Black Forest at breakneck speed on the autobahn, when, on a whim, Nora opened a window and flung her toe shoes out. “Enough, I’m going to live! I’m not going to dance anymore, I’m going to eat! Herbert, head for Italy,” she demanded. Within a few weeks, she was the size of a horse. When she died in 1987, Herbert arranged for a spot at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles (also the site of the graves of Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and many other entertainment luminaries), and, when he died, Herbert had himself buried there—on top of her! Isaac Stern, who had previously been married to Nora, refused to speak to her for years after she and Herbert toured Europe. He was furious because they’d bought a German car. Slights real or imagined are hard to let go of—Isabel Brown told me that on her deathbed, Nora refused to let Jerry Robbins in to say goodbye—because he had named several artists during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. Jerry was left sobbing outside her closed hospital door.
5. Years later I asked a friend, the financial genius George Soros, how to invest in currency exchange. His answer: “DON’T!”
6. Years later, I had the privilege of partnering Carla Fracci in the pas de deux from Swan Lake in a tiny space on a floor of cement. It was a television special and Carla’s first performance in the U.S.
7. Yuri went on to marry the ballerina Patricia Wilde, one of NYCB’s stars.
8. Candy, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg (G. P. Putnam, 1964).
9. Betty introduced Carrie, and many others, to the art of tai chi. She coauthored a book on tai chi with Edward Maisel. In the years after Balanchine’s death she led a class in tai chi until she lost her appetite for living, stopped eating, was hospitalized, and died.
10. Later to be Catwoman in the 1960s television show Batman.
11. They call it “huit” (eight, in French) because the four changes are multiplied by two since there are two feet.
12. Phil showed up to visit New York in June 2004. He came to watch National Dance Institute’s Saturday children’s class, and I introduced him to the dancing star Donlin Foreman, saying, “This is my buddy Phil. We’ve known each other from ancient times. He’s eighty years old and in a hell of a lot better shape than me. Feel those pecs.” “How do you do it?” asked Donlin. “Three times a night!” Phil proclaimed. Phil’s falling through the glass door feat was topped only by an incident I didn’t witness, but heard about. I was living on 163rd and St. Nicholas Avenue, and must have been ten or eleven years old. An old couple lived in my building. The old man, Albert, got out of bed one morning. Stiff and tired, he was having trouble getting his leg into his pants. He got one in, and then, as he was trying to get the other in, he lost his balance and started hopping to catch up, all the while conversing with his wife, who was sitting in bed. He hopped himself right out the window, fell four floors, and died.
13. In later years, whenever I choreographed a ballet, Balanchine would send me a case of Mouton Rothschild along with a note: “For your ballet.”
14. We loved to eat, Tanny and I; dancing kept us slim, so the sky’s the limit on the cuisine. Tanny even did a cookbook where different ballet friends gave their favorite recipes. I gave her a stack and most of them ended up in her book. The number of mine she included is second only to Balanchine’s.
15. With a few exceptions, all who have used the Order of the Garter have been ballet stars or well-known performers: Pat Johnston and F. N. Bibbins (June 13, 1951); Joan Vickers and Stanley Davis (December 18, 1952); Sally Streets and Alex Nichols, parents of NYCB ballerina Kyra Nichols (October 1955); Carolyn George and Jacques d’Amboise (January 1, 1956); Edith Brozek and Frank McMann (May 26, 1957); Sally Bailey and John Flynn (June 22, 1957); Marilyn George and Dan Sheffield (July 22, 1957); Jillana and Ben Janney (May 27, 1960); Vida Brown and Stanley Olinick (June 26, 1964); Wintress Perkins and Warren Wetzel (February 17, 1968); Kyra Nichols and Daniel Duell (September 3, 1978); Kay Mazzo and Albert Bellas (December 21, 1978); Marcia Rubine and John Masten (July 22, 1979); Marjorie Spohn and Alexander Hyatt (September 13, 1981); Diane Lyons and Eli Boatwright Jr. (April 14, 1990); Catherine d’Amboise and Peter Brill (April 20, 1991); Charlotte d’Amboise and Terrence Mann (January 20, 1996); Kathleen Donlin and John Badalament (July 29, 2000). After Kelly Crandall and Christopher d’Amboise married in August 2008, the pink garter went to Kay Gayner for her marriage to Frank Wood, September 26, 2009, and the garter is presently awaiting its next limb.
1. Katherine Dunham, a titan in the world of modern dance, was renowned for bringing traditional Haitian dance forms to America and incorporating these forms into contemporary dance idiom. She and Balanchine met in 1940, while she and her troupe appeared in the musical Cabin in the Sky, directed by Balanchine. She died in 2006, at the age of ninety-six, destitute. Friends were paying her apartment costs.
2. François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, was elected President of Haiti in 1956. By 1964, he had installed himself as President for Life. That life left him in 1971 and left his power to Baby Doc, his son, Jean-Claude.
3. The polio vaccine had just come out before we left for tour, and many of us had been immunized. Some, including Tanny, opted not to have the vaccination then. Shortly after Copenhagen, Ann Crowell, one of the dancers in the corps de ballet, complained of a pulled muscle in her shoulder blade, which didn’t seem to get better. Years later, a doctor told her she had had polio, and the muscle in her shoulder had died. Rumor had it that the consul general’s wife in Cologne contracted polio after the party they had given the company. Who knows how many others could have gotten it, had we not been immunized or lucky.
4. Maria Tallchief first brought Dr. Jordan to Balanchine. I think Maria had been injured and went to Lenox Hill Hospital for treatment, and that’s how she met him.
When I knew Jordan, he said, “Maria Tallchief brought me to the world of ballet. After dealing with broken bones and withered bodies all my life, what a wonderful thing it is to see the ballet, to see what these joints can do, how they can be transformed into the most beautiful of art, gravity-less. It fills my dreams and inspires me never to give up on my patients. The human body is extraordinary.”
Jordan continued in his soft voice, “In the early fifties, I went to a cocktail party and, standing around in conversation, met a Frenchman. We were both reminiscing about World War I, “Oh yes, I was in the squadron, so and so …” “Oh, yes!” the Frenchman said. “A fighter pilot.” “I was one too, but against the Luftwaffe.” Jordan modestly told him, “I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good pilot. For I got shot down over France early on, crashed in a farmer’s field.” It seemed his French opponent landed, arranged for an ambulance to take care of him, and then took off again. Jordan spent the rest of the war mending his multitude of broken bones. The experience inspired him to seek a profession in orthopedics. He later inquired and learned the name of the Frenchman who had shot him down but never saw him. Now, speaking to this Frenchman, Jordan asked, “Did you ever know a pilot named so-and-so?” The man replied, “You’re looking at him!”
Dr. Gould, I met through Dr. Jordan. Wilbur James Gould was an ear, nose, and throat specialist and would become a close friend to my family, as did the surgeon Dr. Liebler, who handled my first knee operation.
Dr. Gould told me, “Jordan is a saint. In New York City when you start to cross the Triboro Bridge to Queens from Manhattan right around the tolls there is an enormous beige stone building to your right. It’s the hospital for the criminally insane. Every time I pass that building I think of him. Each week Jordan maybe had a day or sometimes half a day off. He donated that time making the rounds, treating the inmates incarcerated there.”
1. Christopher d’Amboise, Leap Year (Doubleday, 1982).
2. According to Bernard Taper, in his Balanchine (p. 10), a pianist friend of Balanchine’s had seen a performance of Apollo at City Center and had been so impressed that he went backstage to congratulate the dancers, and found Balanchine rehearsing first Patricia Wilde, then me. “Balanchine turned to d’Amboise, and the visitor could see them going over various sequences together—facing each other, like one man looking in a mirror, while both of them danced. Occasionally, they would stop for a few words of comment. D’Amboise would nod vigorously. Balanchine would smile agreement at something d’Amboise said, and then they would spring into action again, face to face, about three feet apart. Time passed as they continued to work, and the backstage visitor watched them wonderingly. Dancers began to gather onstage for the next ballet, which was to be Agon. Bells could be heard ringing, announcing the imminent curtain. Stagehands hurried to their places. Totally preoccupied, Balanchine and d’Amboise ignored it all. When the pianist finally left, without having a chance to congratulate anyone, they were still at it. They were gone from the stage, though, when the curtain went up on Agon. At the very last second, perhaps, the stage manager had taken each of them by an arm and led them off. The visitor, back in his seat, could not help wondering if they might not still be working away in the wings.”
3. Decades later, I received a letter from Captain Hench’s daughters. Apparently, he was recently deceased, and had saved, among his effects, stacks of newspaper clippings about our family.
1. Sister Maeve is the finest principal, teacher, and most loving human being I know. A Druid … wearing the insignia of the Sister of Charity, she represents the best in Christianity and the true message of the “Prince of Peace”: “Love your neighbor.” Best of all is her Irish sense of humor, which leavens and pops up accompanied by a raucous laugh.
1. In 2003, at the age of eighty-one, Quentin died of spinal cancer. For over fifty years, he brought high school students, on their summer breaks, to Africa, believing the experience would change them from adolescents to men. Many of them did follow that change during those summers. His library of books and manuscripts brought in well over six million dollars at auction.
2. Early on, Brooks and Shaun had given me the nickname Daisy. Another backstage ritual—everybody called you by your mother’s name. They’d say, “Who’s dancing Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux tonight? Georgette!” Deni Lamont was Alice, and Shaun was Elsie.
3. A Russian friend, Grisha, tells me that Russia’s boss, Vladimir Putin, recently banned Borzhomi and Georgian wine, in an effort to punish Georgians for their rebellious separation from Russia.
4. Arthur Mitchell joined the company in 1954, and became a principal dancer within a year or two. Every time we toured Europe, he was a sensation—this beautiful black American ballet dancer of such accomplishment and grace. There would literally be hundreds of fans at the stage door waiting for him after perfor-mances. At that time, as far as I know, there wasn’t a black dancer in any other major ballet company in America.
5. Several years later, I put that dream to a test, dancing Nutcracker in Salt Lake City. I invented and danced a different variation every night to the same music, for ten performances in a row.
6. Bert Martinson died from an insect bite. In 1989, I would lose my right index finger to the bite of a brown recluse spider.
7. Earlier, Mr. B had described to me his plans for the premiere of his full-length Midsummer Night’s Dream. The tall and regal Diana would be his Titania, and a canopy of fat leaves created by the set designer David Hays would be lowered to make her appear even taller. “She will look like giantess, big, beautiful.” Her choreography would be slow, with long, sweeping movements, and her handmaidens, the tallest girls in the corps. Whereas when Oberon was onstage, a new canopy of leaves above would be smaller and suspended as high as possible, so the compact Eddie Villella would seem diminutive by contrast. His choreography would be quick, electric, virtuoso, and buzzing all over the stage. To further enhance the effect, Oberon would command a court of tiny creatures of the forest, butterflies and elves—danced by bevies of children from SAB, to contrast with Titania’s tall entourage. But as it happened, when it all came to pass, Diana didn’t make the premiere. Melissa replaced her as Titania. Before Balanchine died, he left Midsummer Night’s Dream as his gift to Diana, whom I never saw dance the role.
Every time Diana opted out, Milly came to the rescue. To his ire, Balanchine had to depend on her. Eventually, Milly won him over, but it took most of her career.
8. I did my best to become a mixture of two styles: Chabukiani’s excessive, grand, powerful gestures, macho, folk-derived; and Vladimiroff’s, with gentle ease, tossing off virtuoso steps as if glory was the day-to-day garment he wore, all simplicity. Chabukiani was out there, arms flying, full of bravado. The great Russian dancer Vladimir Vasiliev could swim easily in both styles, but the superb Danish dancer Eric Bruhn would find it hard to be Chabukiani—he was inherently a pure, simple classical dancer. Besides Chabukiani, the other male dancers who inspired me as a boy: Igor Youskevitch, in my memory flying out of the wings in the ballet Coppélia; and in every performance of Ballet Society, the art of Todd Bolender, and the smooth bouncing power of William Dollar. When André Eglevsky joined NYCB, he became my mentor and a model for me.
9. Balanchine insisted that he be listed only as ballet master. “I am not big director. Just ballet master.” When you have the power, it makes no difference your title. Stalin was known as the “secretary” of the Communist Party.
10. At the Carter Barron, on its enormous stage, I had to cross 120 feet of space with three cabrioles. It meant making tremendous preparations, trying to eat up space. Melissa, my ballerina, threw herself into dives, flinging herself off a cliff, and trusting me to catch her. Backstage afterward, Shaun gave his imprimatur: “Daisy, you and Milly just gave the performance of a lifetime.” That night at the Carter Barron, the humidity remained in the air but the temperature dropped suddenly, so hot bodies literally smoked. Inhaling my own body’s steam, I was trembling with joy.
Memorable, but in a negative way, was my first Apollo in 1957, where I was so ashamed of my performance, I wanted to quit dance. In a later positive memory, I was on a high, performing Apollo at the Staatsoper in Hamburg, in honor of Stravinsky’s eightieth birthday, with him conducting. Three nights in a row. Still later, a low that bothers me to this day, again in Apollo, dancing the role in the outdoor theater at Ravinia, in Highland Park, Illinois, I cheated myself by not preparing adequately to be at my peak when the curtain rose, and felt my performance reflected it. But that never happened again. There was joy in every Apollo after that—in each one, I worked on something different to master. And each performance became a challenge, and an achievement, but never the pinnacle.
1. Extremely gifted as a designer, Ruth created the costumes for Jerome Robbins’s masterpiece The Cage in 1951.
2. In 1956, Maria married a sweetheart of a man, Henry Paschen Jr., “Buzzy,” a Chicago businessman who had long courted her. They soon had the baby Maria so desired—and named her Elise. That love child evolved into a stunning woman of high intelligence; deeply passionate about poetry, she earned a Ph.D. from Oxford. You may find, while riding the NYC subway and avoiding eye contact with fellow travelers, your gaze wandering to the printed announcements. If lucky, you’ll come across short poems among the ads—“Poetry in Motion”—Elise’s baby.
3. Balanchine admired Tudor, in particular the ballet Lilac Garden: “I could never make ballet like this,” he commented. “Lucia [Chase, director of Ballet Theatre, later American Ballet Theatre] made mistake. She should have built her company around Tudor and given him everything, to see where his choreography could go.” Nevertheless, when Diana divorced Hugh, Balanchine soon got rid of both Tudor and Hugh.
4. Although inspired by and choreographed for her, most of these works were not premiered by Diana, but by replacements. Diana would work out—consciously or unconsciously—something to keep herself off the stage.
5. Months later, Allegra gave birth to her first child, the lovely Trista (meaning sad or sorrowful).
6. Richard Rapp did perform the role and superbly, and in later life went on to teach at SAB, and did so masterfully. He truly understood Balanchine’s technique and aesthetic.
7. A very young Judy Fugate, who grew to grace the stage in later years as an exquisite ballerina.
8. Francis and Paul are highly intelligent and unconventional, with the blood of Spanish caballeros running in their veins.
9. Shaun and I had dubbed Suzanne “the Princess” because Balanchine had referred to her as “my alabaster princess.” We nicknamed Balanchine “Breath” or “the Breath” because, like God, he breathed the essence of life into his dancers.
10. Robert Weiss presently runs Carolina Ballet, a company in Raleigh, and is a brilliant choreographer—inventive and tasteful.
1. One painting always stopped him cold. “This is my favorite painting,” he’d exclaim. On a giant canvas, it depicted the rear end of an enormous white horse—a horse’s ass.
2. If Balanchine were alive today, how he would have worshipped Lisa Randall, a gray-eyed, golden beauty whose specialty is exploring ideas of other dimensions and other universes. Today she is a world-class cosmologist and professor at Harvard University.
3. Gurdjieff was many things to many people: mystic, guru, businessman, opportunist, confidence man, health food promoter, and, possibly, crook. And maybe he was all of them at one or another time in his life, or a combination of some of them, when necessary. He died in 1949.
1. From Carrie’s scrawled notes: Robert Indiana’s Borscht: 1) BROWN 1 lb. BEEF CHUNKS on all sides in oil in skillet; 2) HEAT 2 quarts (8 cups) CHICKEN BROTH in large soup pot; 3) ADD beef chunks; 4 CARROTS, quartered lengthwise and half; 4 TURNIPS, peeled and quartered; 2 ONIONS, peeled and halved; 1/2 bunch CELERY, halved (use upper branches and leaves, reserving lower half for another use); 4) PLACE 1 CABBAGE, cut into 8 wedges (gently place cabbage wedges on top, in a wheel shape); 5) CENTER (on top) 1/2 bunch PARSLEY, 1–2 lb.; 3-oz. can ITALIAN TOMATOES (with half of the liquid); 6) ADD 1 tsp. DRIED DILL, 4 BAY LEAVES, 1 tsp. FINES HERBES, SALT, and PEPPER; 7) SIMMER covered for 2 hours (when reheated, use sour cream dab). SERVES 8.
2. Later the Felt Forum was renamed the Paramount Theatre.
3. Rosemary was functioning as NYCB’s ballet mistress at the time, doing 90 percent of the work in rehearsing and staging the repertoire.
4. After his death, Balanchine’s assistant Barbara Horgan informed me that Balanchine left Noah and the Flood to me.
5. Kip Houston went on to dance principal roles with NYCB.
6. Native Dancers, with music by Vittorio Rieti, was a ballet inspired by racehorses, choreographed by Balanchine for Patricia Wilde and me (1959). In the early 1950s, Balanchine had given the music to Jerry Robbins for a possible ballet. Jerry workshopped it with some seventeen members of NYCB whom he manipulated and cajoled into working for him for nothing in the off-season. I was one of them. It was never realized. Several years later, Balanchine called Patricia Wilde and me in for rehearsal on Native Dancers; I recognized immediately the music I knew so intimately.
7. G. Schirmer Inc., well-known publishers of classical music.
8. William Golding, Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin (Harvest Books, 2002).
9. Stanley Williams was brought to SAB from Denmark as a teacher. Balanchine was impressed with the dancers’ footwork from the Bournonville school of dance and wanted it for his company. Stanley was low-key, unaggressive, and gave a simple, easy, and slow class without too much repetition and no pressure. A cult of NYCB dancers formed around him, in many ways, perhaps, as a relief from the intense pressure, speed, and multiple repetitions of Balanchine’s classes.
10. Celebration, January 20, 1983.
11. John Clifford, an electrifying dancer in the company and a choreographer.
12. I assumed that Jerry had given up trying to use me in his choreography. I still danced Afternoon of a Faun, and loved it, but had weaned myself out of his ballet Interplay. Years earlier, sitting around during the creation of his ballet The Concert (1956), waiting for him to use me, I up and told him, “Jerry, I’ve read half the contents of the New York Public Library waiting around for you to decide what you want me to do. I’m not coming anymore.” That had been decades before. A few days after his triumph with critics and audiences with Goldberg Variations (1971), we were riding the NYST elevator with a few fellow dancers. Suddenly, he spun his frame to confront me. “Hen, hen, Jock, hen, hen. I’d like you to learn and dance the role that Helgi’s doing. Hen, hen. I’d like to see you dancing it.” You know how you sometimes grin with embarrassment? Baring my teeth in a frozen smile, I noticed that both of my hands went up involuntarily and clutched my throat. I stammered, “Jerry, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t handle your rehearsals or perform more. I’m too old for that.” An anguished, high-pitched “EEEEE-YOU!” issued from him. He balled up a fist and hammered one quick blow to the top of my head. We both stood, stunned and unbelieving. The elevator doors springing open on the ground floor ended our little play. As uncomfortable as he was around me, he loved and lit up like sunlight around Carrie. He admired and cared for both Christopher and Charlotte, and choreographed for both of them brilliantly.
13. Where did Lincoln come up with that? Is it true? Most accounts agree that Balanchine was born January 22, 1904, which would have made him seventy years old.
14. Saltarelli (May 30, 1974), music by Antonio Vivaldi, and scenery and costumes by John Braden.
15. When NYCB was spending summers in Saratoga, we had Mondays off. I would ask Elise Ingalls, a lovely ballerina, to join me at a theater in Woodstock, New York, where we would perform various pas de deux and variations from Balanchine’s ballets. They paid us maybe a thousand dollars for the performance. One memorable Monday, I introduced the pas de deux from Swan Lake. Elise was perhaps nineteen years old, and I had rehearsed and rehearsed her, but she was quivering with nervousness. The music began and she danced so exquisitely, a performance full of innocence, tenderness, and fragility, and trembling the whole time. After the final note, the audience, rapt, sat in silence, then burst into applause. After our bows, I announced to the audience, “I have never danced this pas de deux with a ballerina that gave a more moving interpretation than the one Elise just gave you.”
16. Today, when I teach at NDI, I’ll demonstrate a step for the group, and when a student is having difficulty, I help up to a point—“Come here. Let me show you.” If, after a minute or two he or she still doesn’t get it, I’ll say, “Great. Marianne [or some other teaching assistant], could you work with her?” Or sometimes I’ll ask another student who knows the step well (a “peer mentor”) to help, and they go off into a corner. And then I keep going, and I know that the assistant will be working with the struggler, and out of the corner of my eye, I’m watching. When they return, I’ll have the struggler and his teacher demonstrate for the rest of the class. We do that all the time. It’s an excellent way to train teachers and, at the same time, make sure no one falls behind in class.
1. The story of the Brad Bishop murders has been featured on a number of television shows, including America’s Most Wanted. I believe the State Department, CIA, FBI, and police continue their search for Brad Jr. to this day.
1. Charlotte had no doubts that she would be a Broadway star, and Cate, full of doubts, had opted for Denison University and a career in pedagogy.
2. Two brothers, Joseph and Dan Duell, joined NYCB and eventually became principals. As a student at SAB, Dan lived with Carrie and me at our home. Joe was the type of dancer that was a magnet to Lincoln—pale white skin, muscled, handsome, quiet, soft-spoken, gentle, serene.
3. I once asked Balanchine, “Jerry is such a big Broadway star, but he has been willing to work under you for all these years? Why?” His answer: “He wants to be close so he can analyze what makes Balanchine Balanchine—and steal it.”
4. Martha Swope was NYCB’s premiere photographer for many years. Each season, Balanchine, while setting the lights for his ballets, would demand, “We need it brighter,” and Martha would have to adjust the f-stop on her camera to a lower setting than her records for the previous season indicated (the f-stop controls the size of the iris opening of the camera lens—higher settings create a smaller iris). Those mysterious and murky pools that defined the early lighting plots of Jean Rosenthal were gradually being erased. I knew his eyes had been fading for quite a while. Subsequently, when Carrie became the company photographer, she noticed it, too. “Mr. B’s eyesight’s going,” she said, “but the brighter lights he’s demanding are great for taking pictures!”
5. When it was announced that Jerry and Peter would share the role of artistic director (they called themselves “ballet masters in chief”), I called Rosemary Dunleavy and suggested, “The company needs you. Jerry and Peter need you. While they need you, make sure you get official recognition. Otherwise, they’ll replace you as soon as they can.”
6. She became the single most loyal patron of, and believer in, Lincoln Kirstein’s dream, and was a devoted friend to Tanaquil LeClercq.
7. Carol Sumner, a very attractive ballerina with NYCB, danced in the company for years, and later became a teacher.
8. Mary Tyler Moore
9. There were several attempts to find a title. Eventually the ballet was called Celebration. It was thrown on in a hurry and disappeared just as fast.
10. Eugenia Doll was an ex–Ballet Russe corps de ballet girl who had married Henri Doll, a multimillionaire.
11. Balanchine’s song for NDI’s 1983 Event of the Year (for which we were, at that point, rehearsing) was eventually performed by my son Christopher and Janet Eilber, along with roughly a thousand New York City schoolchildren and a group of New York City police. The whole show was narrated by the actor Kevin Kline. Bits of this dance are featured in the Academy Award–winning documentary He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ (1983).
1. Karinska retired in 1977 after designing Vienna Waltzes. She died in October 1983, some six months after Balanchine. She was ninety-seven years old. An excerpt from my diary, December 11, 1954: “Karinska told me a friend asked her what she had put in the costumes that made Jacques stay in the air so long? ‘Love,’ she had answered.”
2. She was later convicted of the crime and spent thirteen years in a Utah prison. Several books and television movies have been written about her (among them Nutcracker by Shana Alexander, and At Mother’s Request, by Jonathan Coleman). She died in 2004.
3. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale were duo pianists, and for decades close friends of Balanchine and Tanny’s. They had a home nearby.
1. Lee Norris I knew through Michael Tolan, the actor I had met when I was directing and choreographing Lady in the Dark. Lee became musical director and composer for NDI for the next twelve years. I think he’s a genius.
2. John Avildsen and I worked together with John Travolta on Saturday Night Fever. Avildsen was the director and I was the choreographer. I spent several months disco dancing with Travolta, working on moves. Using the studio on the top floor of our house, with Carrie filling in for the love interest (not cast yet), we experimented on a pas de deux. Avildsen, after winning his Oscar for Rocky, got into an altercation with Robert Stigwood, the producer of Saturday Night Fever, and was replaced by another director. Even though I was assured by Stigwood and Travolta that they wanted me to stay on as choreographer, I quit, feeling loyal to John Avildsen, as well as holding the belief that the new director should pick his own choreographer. A friendship was forged with Avildsen that continues to this day.
3. In the summer of 2010, NDI’s artistic director Ellen Weinstein and NDI teacher Kaye Gaynor flew to China to collaborate with Dou Dou Huang and dancers from the Children’s Palace in Shanghai. They invented a beautiful dance to a Chinese take, The Red Thread. The work had its premiere that summer with the Shanghai children coming to America to dance with our New York City dancers.
4. Today Ron Pundak is the general director of the Penes Center for Peace.
5. Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium (New York: Vintage, 1994).
6. Recently, Grace told me Evgeny burned to death in his country home. A Michael Moore–type of journalist, Evgeny was a gadfly, calling governments and the powerful to transparency and accountability, and was not one to bow to the Russian version of a mafioso threat: “Desist, or we will make you very unhappy.” Grace is convinced it was arson.