The Master's Muse, page 12
Jerry and I took a day trip to Staten Island.
“There’s life outside of a theater!” he exclaimed on the ferry.
“You bet, boy,” I said. He stood beside my chair at the ferry railing and wind whipped the cables, they snapped and rattled the chains; my hair slashed my face—God, I loved sensation. I felt my being rush out of myself and flash over the choppy waves, bolt into the sky, skim the bridges, soar over the tankers and barges and tugs, touch the skylines, and then, as if it had been on a long cord and was now tired, it reeled back and nestled into my body, calm and contented, and I sat happily with my friend.
“What do you see in the clouds, doll?” Jerry asked.
“They’re silvery, like antique mirrors.” The ferry bobbed on the swells, the crisp air carried motor oil, salt, and tar. Gulls with ragged feathers chattered and called. “Here is this island,” I said, “that’s been sitting there my whole life, and it may as well have never existed!” It transformed from watery gray to green bluffs, trees, rocks, the wharf emerging, people’s faces taking on features and expressions. I had read up on the island’s history and spun out a running commentary as we explored. We drove around all day, got drunk at night on Chianti, eating spaghetti in a ramshackle wood structure without any sign near the terminal.
“It exists,” Jerry said.
“Definitively,” I answered.
At Warm Springs, Sophia had cautioned me, “You’re a polio and you’ll always be a polio. You’ll live your life to the hilt and woe to anyone who tries to stop you.”
“Sophia,” I’d said, “don’t you feel my enthusiasm may also derive from who I am as an individual?”
Sophia lifted a shoulder and replied doubtfully, “Could be.”
But I believed—and believed it more as I got older—that even the most extreme forces that shape us are only one cause of who we become. There are five stories to one story, turn it to one and it’s false. They are all false independently. Life and causality are a braid that gets more intricate as one goes along.
Shortly after my illness Jerry had left New York City Ballet. He claimed everything he had done for the company was for me and without me it wasn’t the same. He continued to work on Broadway and occasionally in Hollywood. But he remained haunted by his testimony for HUAC. Ironically, his celebrity was the reason for his subpoena, and he named names fearing that his affairs with men would be exposed and wreck his career. But his naming destroyed others’ careers, and he was hated for it. The world lauded him, people hated him, and this was Jerry’s particular burden.
His treatment of dancers, the lengths he went to in getting the performances he wanted, were legend. He had always been insecure, edgier with his dancers than George ever was. I didn’t know two men more different, one supremely confident and the other impossibly insecure. Dances flowed from George. Jerry overanalyzed and doubted his every invention, although most of what he came up with was usually, right off, extremely good. When he made Afternoon of a Faun he couldn’t decide until the last minute whether he wanted us facing the audience or facing stage right. Drove me nuts. In the end George and Jerry both produced significant work, but Jerry suffered for his, and in time the suffering seemed to intensify, rather than lessen. I heard nonstop gossip about Jerry’s behavior in rehearsal rooms, which were of course filled with people, making the situation for someone as nervous and conspicuous as Jerry even worse. But hearing things saddened me, given the gallant man I knew.
The first time I had braved the ballet in my new incarnation Jerry met Carl and me at the freight elevator, poised in his tux, his complexion strikingly dark against the white shirt. Carl pushed me out in my gold lamé gown with the décolletage and my hair in a hundred-dollar chignon intended to give me the confidence of a goddess.
It had. But as soon as I got there and what I was about to do became actual, I felt I couldn’t. My breathing quickened. I started to hyperventilate.
“Let’s go home, Carl,” I said. Here was dashing Jerry, my squire, and Carl with his physique women’s eyes tracked as if he were pastry, employed by my husband to cater to me, and I felt like an absolute flop, but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t afraid of the dancing, it was simply appearing. I’d been undone by the premiere of me. “Bad idea,” I said. “I’d go if I could but I can’t breathe, oh, shit, what’s going on?”
“Slow, steady,” Jerry coached me, wresting the chair’s handles from Carl.
“Jerry, what are you doing?”
“We’re going.”
“Stop,” I said. “Turn around, we’re going back. Carl!”
But against Jerry, Carl didn’t stand a chance. He walked at my side, a hulk of concern.
We got to the stairs, beyond which the chair couldn’t go.
“Listen,” Jerry said, facing me, “you think there isn’t drama and excitement in a beauty who can’t walk? Play it. Come on, like George said, you’re the queen. You’re almost killed and you’re prettier than Lana Turner.”
He picked me up out of the chair and cradled me against his chest. “Think Being Beauteous, baby.” My Ashton dance. I soared in the air; five guys held me aloft.
“Knock it off,” I said. “You don’t have to pull out the repertoire.”
“Why not?” We reached the main doors to the theater. “You ready?”
“Heave ho,” I said. “How’s your lower back?”
And we entered and went down the aisle as heads turned and didn’t stop until we were seated and there was applause. I waved and smiled, and at the curtain Lincoln brought roses to me, and George blew me a kiss from the stage and Jerry beamed and Carl reported what he had heard during intermission, without censorship. It wasn’t bad, not as I’d feared. I felt free that night, lucky, reborn.
George insisted that I wouldn’t like the first dance he made for Suzanne.
“Oh, why?”
“Nobody likes anything different.”
“Really? Aren’t you being contrary?”
“No. I did Prodigal Son and nobody liked it. I did Apollo, guy says, ‘Young man, when did you see Apollo walk on his knees?’ I said, ‘When did you see Apollo?’” Delighted with himself, George laughed. “Now for those ballets, they whistle.”
“Tell me about the new one,” I said.
“It’s Russian character essay, it’s miniature in vein of Kasyan Goleizovsky. I picked the music and it came to me.” Goleizovsky had been a choreographer and an early mentor of George’s in Russia.
“Go on,” I said.
“Simple dance,” George said. “Young man is troubled. Young woman comes to him and they dance and then again he is alone.”
George did all kinds of ballets, his best-known neoclassical works, but also story ballets, extravaganzas, and mood pieces. But he was right, not about my opinion but about the opinions of others. Most of the reviews of this short dance, Meditation, accused him, the cool modern master, of Russian schmaltz.
A New York Times critic wrote: “The dance is an unabashedly sentimental image of a man recalling his lost love.” Many were shocked that Balanchine could be so blatantly romantic and emotional.
I saw nothing hackneyed about it. I liked its soft naturalness, how it unfolded in one unending stream, and Suzanne for all her lack of technique danced it with sweep, understanding in her movement that the dance was a single idea—though this objective opinion, this considered opinion, was arrived at well after the jolt of the premiere. Seeing the dance in the flesh was something else. I attended the performance with Jerry. As the lights dimmed there was the typical extra edge of anticipation, more throat-clearings and program-flipping.
The curtain opened to reveal Jacques, Suzanne’s champion and my last partner—we had danced Faun together—on his knees, his face in his large hands. Suzanne stepped out of the dark in a white chiffon dress, her hair loose across her bare shoulders. The piece rode an aching violin, the music Tchaikovsky, who was, with Stravinsky and Mozart, the composer George most esteemed. The partnering was sinuous; the ballet essentially a long embrace. I felt, sitting and watching, how George would have held her, making the dance, and I knew that although she’d been prepared in adagio classes for handling by a man, she had not been prepared for the prolonged physical contact, the intimacy of rehearsing a classical pas de deux. George pushed the male dancers aside and worked with the women, demonstrating, better at partnering, stronger and easier than the young men. As I watched the ballet, I thought: So he yearns for her but can’t have her, except in the studio. Or she might have stood for me when I danced—or for all mortal women, all loss, including the primal loss of his mother. But as it went on I didn’t believe that because of the pitch of the adoration and grief. There was no distancing effect; it was raw and immediate need; Jacques lifted her face-to-face and raised her up, holding her by the shoulders against him, and she wrapped his head with her arms. I pictured George watching her, from his customary place in the wings downstage right.
The lights came up and I chatted and smiled, friends and acquaintances feigned nonchalance, and in a back booth at a steakhouse—Jerry and I didn’t tackle Sardi’s that night—Jerry said, “I don’t get it. What’s great about her? She has no technique.”
“She will,” I said.
“Why does he have to—” Jerry scowled. We were artists, and as worldly sophisticates anything went, right?
“Go ahead, Jerry. There isn’t much you could say that wasn’t already said.” I saw it clear: the dance was a tribute to George’s inspiration, a public announcement.
“It’s disrespectful to you,” he said.
“Except for getting his kicks in the studio,” I said, sounding hard—I didn’t care—“and a couple extracurricular flirtations, there hasn’t been anyone but Diana.” Then, pensive, I added, “He was gone on Allegra, but she resisted him.”
Jerry shifted uneasily. “I haven’t heard anything, Tan. They aren’t seeing each other.”
“I don’t care what he’s doing in private, well, I do care, but tonight was public. Yes, it’s disrespectful, I’m sitting there—I didn’t think he could shock me. He has.” Tamara, Alexandra, Vera Zorina, Maria, me, the five marriages, each to his prima ballerina at the time. Everyone knew this.
“Have you met her?” I asked, my inflection telling all.
“No,” he said. “What?”
“Forget it. She’s nice, she’s sweet, and I like the damn dance. Oh, why isn’t he a pianist?” I thought of Carl, reading the newspaper outside in the station wagon in the cold. “I should go,” I said.
“It’ll burn itself out,” Jerry said. “It could just be dancing. He’s getting older. . . .”
No, dancing threw gasoline on the flame, and I hadn’t seen any evidence that maturation, in his case, changed him; getting older only hurt him.
“I still demonstrate jumps sometimes,” he’d told me wistfully. “Two minutes ago I could fly.” He had looked so sad. I had tried to reassure him, reminding him of what Patty McBride said just this year about his dancing: that his demonstrations for her were more beautiful than what she believed she could ever do. But lost in regret, in a reverie of the past, he didn’t hear me.
There was agency in my contraction of polio. George didn’t know. He assumed I’d been infected in Venice because of the timing, the heat, and the unsanitary conditions. I myself didn’t think of my secret, the incident—what I had done—or it would have destroyed my resolve to proceed. I wouldn’t let myself think of it for a long time. But then, other things happened and it bled to the surface. As I got better, but things got harder, it bled.
At first, when I got sick, the rest of the tour was going to be canceled. But it was decided to continue. In Copenhagen as I lay fighting to breathe, the company waited to board a train for Stockholm. Solemnly, each dancer was given a paper explaining that I’d been infected and describing symptoms. If anyone had these symptoms they were honor-bound not to get on the train. They waited outside in the freezing cold reading their papers. Once in Stockholm, they were instructed, they should report any symptoms that appeared. I imagine the words they spoke to one another as soft and excited and frightened. They were worried for me but more for themselves. It was dramatic and terrible. Everyone boarded. In Stockholm their nightmares would have begun. The serum arrived and they were inoculated. There were no symptoms but one, a dancer in Firebird raised his arm to salute the princess and it wouldn’t come down.
A few minutes later it did. A mild case, perhaps. Most people with polio never knew of their infection, felt only that they had a cold or flu. The severity of the individual cases depended on the immune system, among other causes—but that was something else I allowed George to understand: for his pushing me on the tour, for his wandering, I was exhausted, I was vulnerable, and this was only partially true.
Some of the dancers waiting on the train platform reading their papers in the frigid air knew, remembered the night in Venice that neither Mother nor George knew about.
We’d performed, and I raced with adrenaline taking off my makeup, puffing a cigarette, and it was hot. I wouldn’t sleep if I went back to the room, and George might not be there. I’d wait up, we’d quarrel.
So when Shaun, a fellow dancer, dashed by, I called to him, asked what he was doing.
“Well, we’re going out,” he said. Cute guy from Bay Ridge, a sweetie, a whole lot of fun. He was one of my retinue in Being Beauteous. He used to crack jokes to me in the air about my weight and I’d squash my lips tight not to laugh. After my marriage I had run into Shaun the next day at the theater, which was abuzz, and he had said, “Is it true? You naughty, naughty child.”
I called, “Where are you going?”
“To the Grand Canal for gondola rides!”
“When in Venice,” I said. “May I come?”
“We’d love it.”
We had to get properly lubricated on wine at a hole in the wall. Hot, the sweat glowed on our faces. Eight of us, five girls and three guys, laughing and stumbling through the narrow and winding alleys, one of us reading a map by the flashlight and shining it up at his face, a proper ghoul, his nostrils lit red and his eyes dark pits.
“Shine the light on the walls,” somebody said, “you see they’re marked, that’s how we’ll know where to go.”
The walls sweated. I saw them dripping under the light, but I discovered, touching the stone in the hot night, that it was cold, clammy.
Venice of pestilence, vapors, of cholera and malaria, of looted cultures, a city of jewels built of blood. I had seen pictures before I first saw it, but none did it justice. One couldn’t imagine anything so theatrical, everywhere I looked was a stage set, every scrap constructed, artificial, no foliage, only statues and carvings and glaring color rising in mist, getting larger and more insistent until you were in it and you might as well have been inside the mad dream of a doge, a medieval city reeking of pillage and vengeful gods—within the immensity of Santa Maria della Salute’s high dome I believed for the first time in the primacy of crushing power and the nearness of obliteration.
So night, my head hot, my feet sore, and I tasted the wine and smelled fishy water, a dank fetid smell.
How we even got there, I don’t know. But we tumbled out of an alley and the black water flickered beneath the half moon, where gondolas creaked and rocked in the canal.
We hired two. Shaun sat beside me and I said I felt sick and he yelled, “Help! Let me out.”
“I’m joshing you, shush.”
Out to the end of the island, we were under a spell. I felt the menace and the magic—the slap of the water, dankness, glitter of moon on a hand, the dipped oar, the shiver of light on the lagoon.
The stage sets of Venice receded, became little humps on the horizon as we neared the open sea. I floated hazily in the dark.
We quietly talked.
“God, we’re way out.”
“It’s peaceful.”
“I don’t feel drunk anymore.”
“Do you think we’ll drown?”
The Italians called to each other, and we turned back.
At the turning: “What is the water out here? Is it salt water or fresh?”
Our gondolas drew close.
“Who speaks Italian?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, what do you think? Is it salt water or fresh?”
I put my pointer finger into the black water.
I tasted it.
I declared, “Fresh.”
Showing off, making fun, not thinking, one of those moments of carelessness that we all have and don’t pay for.
But how could I?
Dip of the finger.
Fresh.
3
I brought up nothing to George on the night of the Meditation premiere. I came home loopy on a couple martinis and we played with Mourka on the bed. The next morning was one of those when I awoke and thought I was in my pre-polio body. I heard George clank pots in the kitchen. It all came back. I couldn’t face him yet, and I went and drew a bath. I watched the gushing water, thinking of how much I didn’t want to go through a Diana phase again. It hadn’t been so awful when George and I were estranged and I suspected them before I got sick. But when I was better and we were supposedly mended as a couple and it started once more, less than a year after I wanted to kill myself, it was dreadful, confusing—how could he love me and do this? I kept thinking, no, not with Diana. We had been close from the time she came to dance with us in 1950. Mother, Diana, George, me, and Nicky Magallanes, one of my partners and a nice unassuming person, formed a clique, sharing houses on tour and vacation. People called us the Royal Family. Diana and I danced together and chummed around backstage. We alternated the same role in Serenade. One day George rounded us up and lectured us about our entrances. “The two of you are doing it all wrong,” he scolded. “You are sneaking onto stage as if you were dancing Giselle or Les Sylphides. I want you to roar out onto stage like lion.” I’d sidle up to Diana in the wings and silently roar. She’d make like a big cat and pounce.
