I was a dancer, p.38
I Was a Dancer, page 38
Lightening the gloom at the NYST was Nutcracker, with children dancing joyfully on the stage while families watched gleefully from the audience. Frank Moncion, as Drosselmeyer, fixed his hair to look like a crown roast and played a goofy, doddering figure—delighting all of us onstage and in the wings. Except Jerry, who hated the interpretation and was livid. Lincoln was furious, as well. The rest of the company cheered. Our pent-up sadness needed a release valve.
The day before Christmas, Carrie brought Balanchine a small tree, encrusted with hanging fruits. She remembered him speaking of his struggling Russian childhood, and how they hung fruit from the branches of their trees, as they had no ornaments.
Early in the morning on December 26, the hospital seemed deserted. “Hi, Mr. B. Is this a good time? I’m on my way to class!” He ignored me. His balance unsure and with trembling legs, he shuffled over to the bathroom and went in, leaving the door ajar. I kept jabbering. “Carrie has a new soup for you. Chris danced last night, he was so great. I rehearsed the NDI children in your tango.11 You can come see it when you get better!” and so on, an avalanche of blather. More shuffling sounds. “You okay in there, Mr. B?” He was standing over the little aluminum sink, with his false teeth in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. He couldn’t manage to clean them; the teeth kept slipping out of his fingers and falling into the sink. “Here, let me do that for you.” Seeming somnambulant, he allowed me to take the teeth and toothbrush. I cleaned, polished, and rinsed his teeth, returned the toothbrush to the plastic cup on the sink, placed his teeth in his hand, turned my back, left the bathroom, leaned against the wall, and wept.
The next day, Tanny in her wheelchair, Carrie, Chris, and I made a quartet in his room. A bit later, the stunning Christine Redpath came by with our chief of wardrobe, Leslie Copeland, aka “Ducky.” We tried to be silly and light. Balanchine proclaimed drolly, with a woeful expression, “There’s no more cabbage in my soup! What’s borscht without cabbage?” We giggled, and debated the virtues of various recipes. “The hell with cabbage, what about beets?” Ducky queried. “They’re more ’ealthy,” he continued, exaggerating his Cockney accent. Tanny piped up, “The hell with the health and the beets, it’s the dollop of sour cream that counts!”
On the way out, Tanny was grim. Angrily, she told Carrie and me, “God should have let George get old, like Churchill or Adenauer. It’s so unfair. He survived a lung operation, giving up smoking, cutting down on drink, a triple bypass, and now this! THIS is to finish him—defeat him? I feel so betrayed. George is losing the ability to see, hear, and communicate.” She speculated that though his illness seemed sudden, several incidents in retrospect made her think that it may have been going on for a long time. “Ten years ago,” she recounted, “George was talking to me about plans for his Audubon ballet, describing a section he envisioned for Diana Adams, called ‘Lady Skunk,’ and described her costume in detail. ‘Very chic.’ Not long after, when I talked about ‘Lady Skunk,’ he looked at me as though I was nuts, as if he had no idea what I was talking about.”
“Tanny,” I commiserated, “it’s a tragedy, his mind is shorting out.” Tanny shot back, her voice hoarse, “That may be a blessing. He isn’t aware that his own legs are worthless. Let’s hope he dies off. Who knows how old he really is, he may be lying. We should feed him lots, get him fat so he won’t last long, so the next heart attack will work.”
In silence, we took the elevator down. I got Tanny out of her wheelchair and into a cab. Carrie and I trudged home.
Returning from her morning visit a few days later, Carrie said, “A rotund, motherly nurse told me in a soft Caribbean accent, ‘He was very bad today. Abusive. He calls “Karin, Karin,” and can recognize her footsteps in the hall. He counts them, and, when she has to go, doesn’t want her to leave.’ ”
New Year’s Eve, 1982. Did my morning class, then over to visit at one thirty p.m. Balanchine alone, talking in Russian, and crying. I held his hand, and petted and stroked his face and head—he kept scratching his own head and stroking it himself, then started pulling the sheets over his mouth and up to his face, as if hiding from something frightening. I too was frightened and shaking and needed to move, so I took him for a tour in his wheelchair, zooming up and down corridors and careening around corners for half an hour. Then we took the elevators, and visited other floors. When we returned, one of the musicians came by to thank Balanchine for the new wooden floor under our orchestra pit (they had all signed another card, “Happy New Year’s Day/Get Well”). Eddie Bigelow helped organize a little gathering—Bill Hamilton, Carrie, and a few others, less than ten. Suzanne showed up. I was surprised, remembering her dramatic statement a few weeks earlier. We drank champagne and toasted the New Year, with little hope. Tanny had articulated what we all felt—no elegant exit for him, just a long, undignified end with a wail.
For the next three months, while paddling in the stream of life, there was always an inner cry in my throat, “When will he die? When will he die?” Karin seemed never to leave his side. A great, loving mother, she would sit next to him on the bed, holding his head against her breast, stroking his hair like a child, and softly singing lullabies in German.
Guten Abend, gut’ Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht,
Mit Näglein besteckt, schlupf unter die Deck’!
Morgen früh, wenn Gott will Wirst du wieder geweckt.
Morgen früh, wenn Gott will Wirst du wieder geweckt.
Good evening, good night, with roses adorned,
With carnations covered, slip under the covers.
Early tomorrow, if God wills, you will wake once again.
Early tomorrow, if God wills, you will wake once again.
Carrie put it beautifully, “She [Karin] received from him lots, but gave back even more and is still giving back.” Once, when there seemed to be some improvement, a cute nurse, Ana, from Cali, Colombia, and I each took an arm and walked Balanchine halfway down the hall and back. Because he claimed to have vertigo, he had not walked in weeks. Propped against the wall, he sang a Mexican conga while Ana and I danced for him.
I wrote a note to myself: “Jacques, something is wrong with you. You’re too tired and listless—and you have let your body go, it’s getting weak and functioning poorly. Balanchine is wasting away. Are you doing the same thing to yourself?”
I went over to see Mr. B on Easter Sunday and found him unconscious, with two nurses feeding him intravenously. “His pneumonia is back,” was their grim statement. I stayed only a minute.
April 30 was a glorious, glittering spring day. I was awakened at six a.m. by a phone call from Barbara Horgan, reporting quietly, “Mr. B died around four a.m.” “Thank God!” I thought. “He didn’t drag on anymore.” It was spring renewal, but with tears.
Later that day, at the theater, rehearsing half a hundred children for our coming NDI Event, Shaun told me he was there the night Balanchine died.
Daisy, there was such a bustle outside his room, with agitated nurses running in and out. One of them said, “He can’t see anyone,” and shut the door. I stood outside … for over an hour. I kind of knew what was happening, but couldn’t leave … Then, through the closed door, I heard Balanchine calling, “MAMA!”
On April 30, 1983, at the age of seventy-nine, Balanchine died.
Working with NDI children at the State Theater’s rehearsal hall, I found myself foggy and disoriented. Balanchine used to hear the dancing feet of NDI children from his office below and come up to watch. Today, it was Lincoln who stuck his head in, stared for a moment, and left—I suspected he wouldn’t let us use the theater’s studios for our Saturday-morning rehearsals anymore. Outside the theater were the dance critic Jennifer Dunning and a swarm of cameras and paparazzi. “Hey, sir, wait. Don’t you want to make a statement?” I didn’t answer, pushed my way through.
Late that evening, I met with Gail Papp at the Public Theater to discuss a project, but it was impossible to talk, so Gail and I opened a bottle of champagne, and drank toast after toast to Balanchine.
Balanchine’s Burial
Tuesday, May 3, 1983. Balanchine’s funeral commenced at nine a.m. The church, located on Ninety-third Street between Madison and Park avenues, has a mouthful of a name: Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign, Synod of Bishops, Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. At Russian Orthodox rites, there are no pews or padded kneeling pillows, so STANDING ROOM ONLY means more than a packed house. By eight a.m., the church was already full, but my family and I squeezed ourselves in, got a candle each, lit them, and by nine o’clock were immovable. A few people fainted standing, unable to fall. Packed together and unaccustomed to standing in place, we undulated in a slow dance, shifting our weight from foot to foot—hot, tense, bereaved, seeking comfort. As I looked up, I’d swear the figures in the icons layered up the walls were rocking too. Hundreds gathered outside the church, blocking the doors.
In the sanctuary, the environment of loss was thick and darker than a shadow’s shadow. On my left, almost crushed by the mass of people, was Tusia, the mouse-like Russian seamstress, four feet tall, weighing about fifty pounds. She had been a devoted serf her whole life to the great costume designer Madame Karinska.1 As a pagan sorceress or goddess has a familiar to do her bidding (the black cat to a witch, Jiminy Cricket to Pinocchio), so Karinska had her Tusia.
Occasionally, my gaze would meet other pairs of tearful eyes, pause a moment, then sadly move on. Familiar friends nearby received a hug and then a silent separation: Allegra Kent, Merrill Ashley, Kay Mazzo, Tanaquil LeClercq. Across the way stood Alexandra Danilova, the legendary ballerina assoluta (in the ballet world, there is no crown higher). Danilova was known for her gorgeous legs and, at seventy-something years old, she was still teaching. At that time, I was taking her class regularly and admired how beautifully those still-elegant legs demonstrated a battement tendu.
She headed a cluster of balletomanes—a White Russian mafia—seamstresses from Karinska’s costume shop, teachers and administrative staff from the School of American Ballet, and other Russian friends and cronies, all paying homage to the man who epitomized and carried forward pre-Soviet culture through the art of ballet.
Balanchine had preserved vestiges of another time and culture, and to Danilova and all the Russians, he represented St. Petersburg and the Maryinsky Theater before it became Leningrad and the Kirov. As many present-day Cubans loathe Castro, so the White Russians loathed anything Soviet. Balanchine choked with anger when, at the UN in October 1960, Nikita Khrushchev spoke vehemently about how the Communists would someday crush capitalism. Khrushchev took off his shoe and slammed it into the desk before him repeatedly, and said, “We will bury you!” Though you rarely saw Balanchine lose his cool, he was still choking the next day, complaining, “They’re not translating it truthfully! Khrushchev is cursing and using foul language, spewing vulgarities of the most common Russian of the street! Peasant pig talk!”
Over a multitude of heads, I spotted Frances Schreuder, the underwriter of Balanchine’s ballet Davidsbündlertänze, her back to the wall, her face expressionless. Her son had been convicted of murdering his grandfather, and she was accused of conspiring and instigating the murder. Her trial was scheduled for the fall and she was the only person standing in that church who had space around her.2
Eddie Bigelow was at my shoulder. Stuffed into a tall, bony frame with a surly exterior was the heart of a caring, loving man. I reflected—Eddie was there, in thrall to Balanchine and Lincoln, from the earliest days of Ballet Society in 1946. Eddie performed in anything and everything, and was a lifelong servant to dance and dancers. Eddie—filling in for injured corps de ballet dancers; acting the character roles, the monster roles; holding a banner at the back of the stage in Firebird; fixing costumes; running errands; dyeing shoes; carrying injured dancers to the hospital—Eddie could always be counted on. If you needed a moving man, Eddie carried your furniture up and down stairs. A chef? He would cook giant pots of spaghetti, supply the vodka, Chianti, or scotch, and argue with you incoherently for hours, rambling off lots of words that sounded like they meant something, but we never could zero in on what his subject was. We loved to play cards together … canasta, poker, bridge. God bless him. In service his whole life! Behind the scenes Eddie and the self-effacing Betty Cage gave their love, labors, and most of their lives to the ballet company. They should have their Oscars, along with Balanchine and Lincoln.
Suzanne Farrell, white-faced and sheathed in black, stood near the coffin, holding lilies in her arms, like Albrecht in Giselle.
The young, imposing Father Adrian, standing over six feet tall, officiated from the altar. He had been Balanchine’s priest. Russian liturgy echoed off the walls, intoned by Father Adrian and answered by the many Russians in the church. The power of ritual, communally shared, is meant to establish an architecture of order and become a road to healing, yet throughout the ceremony all I registered was the murmuring and the subdued sobs of those around me, as if my brain heard only the bass line of an orchestra. The presence of deep sorrow generates loss, fearfulness, and even anger. The only comfortable person present and at peace was the deceased.
In my unease, my mind wandered and focused on Bigelow, imagining him in the role he created in the ballet La Valse: cloaked in black velvet, white pancake makeup on his face, black circles under his eyes, a shadow of Death; a timeless presence overlooking Balanchine in his coffin.
The high point in the British 1949 movie of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades takes place at the funeral for the old Countess Ranevskaya. The army engineer, Hermann, who brought about her death, leans over the open coffin to kiss her forehead, and her eyes pop open!
Then, I heard it. A little sniff. Didn’t anyone else hear it? It came from Balanchine. One nostril, a slight twitch. Didn’t anyone else see it? I saw it! And then another, and then his mouth twitched. A woman near the coffin began gasping, backing up. Balanchine sitting up! Screams! Bodies paralyzed, frozen with disbelief. Others scrambling to get away. Balanchine was looking around. I pushed my way through the backing multitudes to embrace him. And he announced, “I was sleeping …”
The service was reaching its end, and lights faded on the stage. Many of us stayed, lined up to approach Balanchine on his bier. At my turn, I stepped up, touched his hand, petted it, really, tears dripped off my cheek. I leaned over to kiss his forehead. Luckily, I did not drip on his face. What did I expect? Balanchine’s forehead to be cold on my lips! It was warm.
Leaving the church, Shaun told me that Danilova didn’t cry at Balanchine’s funeral because, she claimed, “Makeup and tears don’t mix.”
Carrie, Chris, and I joined Tanny and her buddy, the boyish-looking Randy Bourscheidt, New York City’s deputy commissioner for cultural affairs. We packed ourselves into a limousine, supplied by Nancy Lassalle for Tanny’s use, and followed the cortege, a line of black beetles traveling in limbo-land along the right lane of the Grand Central Parkway. We were being drawn toward Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, New York, where Balanchine’s plot lay open, calling.
There was no small talk in our vehicle, until …
“I don’t believe it!” Randy declared. He was looking out the window. In the left lane, hurtling by, was Frances Schreuder, alone in the back of her limousine and desperately determined. She passed our entourage, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz melded with Carabosse from Sleeping Beauty.
The cemetery, beautiful with its newborn foliage emerging from winter sleep, was a landscape to rest in. The weather was far from restful, a tumultuous, windswept, gray, watercolored day, but appropriate for the occasion. Lost in grief, we gathered on a knoll a short distance from the roadway. Our small group, less than half a hundred, stood around the coffin—each of us touched in different ways by the monument that Balanchine had been.
A large part of our identities was molded by our association with him. As musical themes introduced in the early movements of a symphony come together in the last movement, so did grief, palpable during the ceremony at the cathedral, unite all of us at the gravesite. Few were without tears. I felt divided—a part of me was separate—watching myself and everyone else in a slow-motion dream. I was playing my part in a silent movie, surrounded by a trio of Balanchine’s ex-wives: Tanny, next to me in her wheelchair; Alexandra Danilova; and Maria Tallchief, a few feet away. The set, a vision of tree branches running their fingers through the wind. Grieving nearby were Karin von Aroldingen; her handsome, salt-and-pepper-haired husband, Morty; and their yellow-haired, teenage daughter, Margot.
Balanchine never had a family of his own in the traditional sense, except the one Karin, Morty, and Margot gave him. They opened up their home to him, and he was Margot’s godfather. He had a comfortable, homey life with them, the kind where you sit around in your underwear reading the morning paper, or watching TV late at night with your feet up on the coffee table and eating junk food. Years earlier, Karin and Morty had acquired a condo for their family in a development in Southampton, and they had persuaded Balanchine to invest in a small one for himself. He loved it there and would cook scrumptious feasts in his sandals and bathrobe. With Karin, Morty, and Margot, he had a life of the ordinary, a world away from Lincoln Center, the State Theater, and his New York City Ballet. The Sag Harbor cemetery is a few miles away from his condo.
We formed a circle, clustered around the grave. Some of us stood alone, others huddled close, perhaps trying to find solace in one another, but, just as in all death, the solitary is supreme. A quartet of lumpy gravediggers waited on the outskirts, leaning on their shovels, routine for them, since they probably bury half a dozen people a day. Outside our circle, on a solo knoll some twenty-five to thirty yards away, stood Frances Schreuder. Conducting the ceremony, Father Adrian led the prayers, the wind blowing his long, curled hair and belly-warming beard into fluttering black-brown ribbons. After the prayers, one by one we went up to the hole and dropped flowers into it. I pushed Tanny there in her wheelchair, her hands like eagle’s claws gripping the chair’s arms; it seemed all her life forces centered in those clutching fingers. I split the flowers I had, and we threw them on the casket.
