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Overview
This meticulously researched and elegantly written story of a life's work is illuminated by photographs, enlivened by anecdotes, and grounded in insights into ballets and musical comedies that have been seen and loved all over the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780684869865 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2005 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 640 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 6: Choreographer on the Town
The success of Fancy Free changed Robbins's life in ways both gratifying and disturbing to him. Ballet Theatre immediately scheduled extra performances of the runaway hit, and, while the mingy ten-dollar royalty payments didn't add much to his soloist's wages, producers started nosing around, trying to figure out whether this bright new choreographer might be able to deliver on Broadway. The day after the premiere, he wrote to his cousin Bob Silverman, wounded overseas and recuperating in a British hospital, "Yesterday I was a schnook from Weehawken, and if I went to a producer's office, I couldn't get by the secretary; and this morning twelve producers called me and asked me to do their next show." Had he been any less talented, he wondered, a week ago? He signed with Century Artists to represent and advise him. He moved to a bigger apartment at 34 West Eleventh Street, around the corner from Oliver Smith. He was confident enough of his potential earning power to embark on psychoanalysis with Dr. Frances Arkin in order to free himself of the imps that beset him, whining in his ear: Not good enough! Not handsome enough! Not desirable enough! Not successful enough! And not heterosexual enough.
Sought out by a reporter for the short-lived NY PM not long after the premiere of his ballet, Robbins spoke with the unguarded enthusiasm of the inexperienced interviewee: "I've got a dozen ballets I'd like to do, as soon as I get a little time....I'd like to do several plays as ballets. Street Scene is one; Clemence Dane's Coming of Age is another. I'd like to do a life of Mark Twain, a ballet of Americana it would be. And I'd like to do a balletI did at Camp Tamiment ["à la Russe"], which was kind of a burlesque on classic ballet."
By May 1, 1944, however, the day after the interview appeared, he had completed a draft (originally designed for submission to the Theatre Guild) of what he conceived of as a "ballet dance play in one scene, combining the forms of dance, music, & spoken word into one theater form." This, in embryo, was a form he would wrestle with on and off almost to the end of his life. He may indeed have cooked up Bye-Bye Jackie practically overnight; however, it reads like a dramatic prelude to Fancy Free, and a letter from Robbins to Bernstein indicates that a trilogy was discussed. Seventeen-year-old Jackie is itching to get out of his safe Brooklyn neighborhood; he's surprised to find that the girlfriend he's known all his life is also restless, also yearning for something — she doesn't know what. Amid the rhythmic neighborhood games and chatter Robbins maps out, there's admiring talk of an older boy who's just returned from naval duty in the Aleutians. Jackie enlists. In Scene 4, he's in Navy attire, back sitting on his stoop: "...[T]he whole scene is based on his adjustment to the uniform...changing the way he walks, the way he leans against the post, the way he sits...he adjusts the hat till it gives him a cocksure look...he tries different ways of saying hello...of lighting a cigarette, of changing the whole moody adolescent boy to the exterior of a sure as hell of himself sailor...of looking secure and safe."
The successfully cocksure sailor, however, was destined to find a home in a sturdier package: On the Town.
It was Oliver Smith's idea to take Fancy Free's basic situation — three sailors on shore leave in New York — and expand it into a musical comedy. He would serve as set designer and, with Paul Feigay, as coproducer. Robbins would choreograph, Bernstein write the score. Both men, according to Smith, at first resisted the idea. Bernstein was ambitious to be known as a composer of symphonic works, and his mentor, Serge Koussevitzky, kept reminding him of his destiny as a conductor. Robbins was intent on developing his reputation as a ballet choreographer. Once Smith had persuaded the two of them, the question became, who'd do the book and lyrics? Bernstein took Smith to the Blue Angel to see one of the regular performances of Betty Comden and Adolph Green; the two at the time constituted, in their words, "the desperate remains of our old nightclub group, 'The Revuers'...hanging on by our still God-given teeth as a duo." Bernstein was not only a friend, he was a fan; they claimed he knew the words to all their songs better than they did. Robbins originally favored Arthur Laurents for the book and John Latouche for the lyrics but was easily persuaded to collaborate with these ardent fans of Fancy Free.
Comden and Green had never written a straight song, but blessed with the hubris of youth, they needed no persuading to work on the new musical comedy project as lyricists and bookwriters. The collaborative process that began in late June was probably Robbins's happiest. Four smart young people — all thirty or under — innocent of how painful getting a Broadway show onto the stage could be. Bernstein and Robbins had considerable input into the plot, and the collaborators met frequently, even though Bernstein had conducting commitments and Robbins, now a soloist with Ballet Theatre, was still going on the road. In August, while Jerry danced in Los Angeles and Lenny conducted Fancy Free, as well as a Hollywood Bowl concert on his twenty-sixth birthday, Smith sent Betty and Adolph out to California, and for several weeks the four continued to conjure up New York from a Spanish villa in the Hollywood hills. Sprawled on his bed, slightly drunk on a hot night in New York, Smith wrote Robbins a euphoric letter about the project so far and about his own preliminary sketches: "My Coney Island scene is a dream, very funny, and yet very beautiful, and slightly lascivious at the same time. You will love it...It will leave almost the entire stage free for dancing."
Initially, all were wary of the idea of three sailors as musical comedy heroes. Recalled Green, "I think we were all secretly afraid that once we presented, articulated, and moved around these three musical comedy sailors we might have what would turn out to be a grade-B movie." The 1943 Oklahoma! notwithstanding, Broadway musicals tended toward fluff like Mexican Hayride, with Bobby Clark, and Follow the Girls. On the Town was witty and occasionally zany, and all three sailors miraculously found girls they hoped to spend the rest of their lives with, but the level of craft and sophistication elevated it. As Bernstein said, "the subject matter was light, but the show was serious." For one thing, its pressured pace and bittersweet edge derived from the fact that these sailors have only twenty-four hours to see New York and possibly find love before they ship out. When the three couples said their good-byes at the dock and sang "Some Other Time," a line about time being "precious stuff" for folks in love would have struck 1944 spectators as especially poignant; the three, like so many other sons, lovers, fathers, and husbands, might never return home. Work had begun on the script only weeks after Allied troops had landed in Normandy and thousands had died. Comden's husband was serving overseas.
In light of all the songs Bernstein wrote and all the dances Robbins planned, it was fortunate that the script managed to attract the veteran director George Abbott — never one to quail at pruning a show into shape. Abbott had cowritten and staged On Your Toes, The Boys from Syracuse, and Pal Joey, among other hits; his name attracted hitherto reluctant investors to On the Town. Asked why he had signed on, he said, "I like the kids connected with the show." "Kids" is the operative word, and the collaborators, for the most part, accepted without protest Abbott's decisions as to what would work and what wouldn't. Who were they to argue with a Broadway pro? When Comden and Green went to him to plead for their original opening and ending, which would have made the entire action of the show a flashback, he said they could have their prologue or him. They didn't take long to make the choice.
On the strength of the script, a friend of Louis B. Mayer's convinced him to buy the movie rights to On the Town for MGM before the show opened on Broadway. The preproduction deal brought in money that helped cover expenses, but Robbins had no hand in the 1949 movie starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin. Only four pieces from Bernstein's score were retained, and Comden and Green wrote new lyrics for far blander tunes by Roger Edens. The opening New York montage, with the sailors careering all over town, is terrific, but the choreographic inventiveness doesn't match Robbins's.
On the Town broke some long-standing Broadway traditions. The three women Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie meet aren't dewy ingenues or their stereotypical smart-mouthed, sourpuss girlfriends. They're independent in the way American women had learned to be in wartime. Tough, heart-of-gold Hildy (a part tailor-made for Nancy Walker) drives a cab and is uncompromising about refusing fares she doesn't like the look of and forthright about dragooning a guy she fancies (Chip). Claire de Loon, the intellectual of the trio, is an anthropologist with a runaway libido. Ivy Smith, the Miss Turnstiles whose poster Gabey falls in love with, supports her ballet and singing lessons by doing a cooch number at Coney Island. The casting wasn't entirely conventional either. Early on, the role of Ivy was given to Sono Osato, whom Robbins knew from Ballet Theatre. She had just won one of the first annual Donaldson Awards for best female dancer in a musical, One Touch of Venus. Reviewing the show, choreographed by Agnes de Mille and starring Mary Martin, Wolcott Gibbs had referred to Osato as "a marvelously limber girl of cryptic nationality, who led the dancers and alarmed and fascinated me almost unbearably." Perhaps it's fortunate that her nationality was "cryptic"; this gorgeous dancer cast as an all-American girl was half Japanese, and her father was currently interned in Chicago (the irony was not lost on Osato). In addition, the team wanted a cast that reflected the diversity of New York, so they hired four black singers and four black dancers and mixed them in with the rest of the cast, unheard of on Broadway at that time. Dorothy McNichols and Flash Reilly did an eye-catching jitterbug in the "Times Square Ballet" that ended Act I, but both McNichols and her friend Jean Handy (the little cousin Robbins had advised about a career in dance was in the chorus) say On the Town was the first integrated show on Broadway without the stereotypes and without a separation of black and white dancers.
The three buddies' search for Gabey's elusive Miss Turnstiles sends them running all over town, and in a sense, the city is the star of the show: its subways, its skyline, its nightclubs, Times Square, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Hall (all revealed through Smith's vivid drops and flats that skimmed in and out). Smith called On the Town "a valentine to New York." Even its history gets into the act; Chip (Cris Alexander) reels off from his antiquated guidebook the names of long-gone desirable places such as the Aquarium and the Hippodrome while Hildy jerks her cut-out taxi around, insisting, "Come to my place!"
Bernstein's score captured the stress and relentless speed of New York, its changing rhythms, its ongoing traffic and lit-up nights. Like Oklahoma!, the show begins on a quiet note. No singing-dancing chorus. Just one sleepy Navy Yard watchman with a formidable bass voice, stretching as he sings, "I feel like I'm not out of bed yet. (yawns) A-a-a-a-a-a-a-h." But when he finishes his brief song and a whistle blows, a flood of sailors catapults onstage, and by the time the three heroes have finished their song, the men of the dancing chorus are vaulting across the stage, one hand reaching up to grab the skyline.
New York, New York, a helluva town,The Bronx is up and the Battery's down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun'.
New York, New York, it's a helluva town!!
It's as if the shipboard pressure has been building up until, released, the men explode into life, avid to seize not just the day but the whole city.
Robbins, Bernstein, Comden, and Green, with Smith's input, managed to make the musical reflect everything that mattered to them. It was "symphonic" in its fusion of elements. Comden and Green, who'd been auditioning unsuccessfully for shows as performers, wrote for themselves the fat parts of Ozzie and Claire de Loon. Green's rumpled looks became fodder for the witty scene in which the anthropologist mistakes the sailor for a museum specimen of Pithecanthropus erectus and starts taking his measurements. Robbins's dances were a vital part of the action, justified by Times Square's madhouse of human traffic, slow drags in nightclubs, and Coney Island orientalism, and culminating in a dream ballet. Bernstein put almost everything he knew and loved about American popular music into the score: jazz licks, swing, blues, Gershwin, the big baritone aria that makes you think of Show Boat, a fox-trot rhythm here, a hint of square dance there. But the vivid musical gestures, surprising textures, complex harmonies, and unexpected rhythmic shifts come from Bernstein, the twentieth-century classical composer. What other Broadway music man of the day would have exploded his opening chorus into raucous counterpoint? Abbott teased him about "that Prokofieff stuff" in portions of the score but didn't cut a bar of it.
During a 1981 symposium on On the Town that brought the collaborators together, Bernstein made it clear just how cooperative the process of putting the show together had been:
[Jerry] would say, "As a practical matter, I've got to have four more bars here or I can't get my dancers from left to right and offstage," and I would say, "I can't do four more bars, that would just drag it out," and I would do four more bars, then it would usually turn out to be a better piece with the extra material, because Jerry's instincts are incredible, musically.
When the composer loathed what he'd written for "I Get Carried Away" ("this little polka-like cowboy tune. It wasn't like me"), it was Comden and Green who suggested he try it in the minor key: "Suddenly we had this operatic feeling which dictated the whole form of the number, the whole duet quality of those two quasi-operatic voices that brought down the house."
Robbins had never choreographed for so many dancers before, and Abbott's busy schedule allowed only two weeks for out-of-town tryouts (in the end, they had ten days). He brought in his old Tamiment colleague Anita Alvarez to assist him and invited Mary Hunter to lead the dancers in some rather Stanislavskian preliminary improvisations (in one, they had to explore animal behavior) to get them suitably down to earth. However, he seems to have worked confidently and adroitly most of the time. His choreography for the Miss Turnstiles number cleverly pointed up the ephemerality of her sudden celebrity. A line of women sidesteps on, backs to the audience, bent forward, butts wiggling, while an announcer talks up the contest and a spotlight roams over the line. It finally stops, and Ivy Smith straightens up and turns in ecstatic surprise. After a dance of lightning changes reflecting all the inconsistencies in her effusive contest-entry description ("She's a home-loving type who likes to go out nightclubbing"), the line of next month's hopefuls sidles in and absorbs her back into anonymity.
For the action-packed "Times Square Ballet" that ended Act I, all the ensemble men are in uniform, throwing balls to win stuffed bears when they aren't dancing. Robbins created orderly but combustible traffic patterns for ensemble and principals and played with variants of social dancing as he had in Fancy Free — the sailor who slow-drags with his head on his partner's bosom, the girl who decorously keeps her hips pulled back as far as possible. Having composed a satiric "oriental" dance for himself and Anita Alvarez back at Tamiment, Robbins must have had fun concocting the cheap "Turkish" trio at Rajah Bimmy's where Ivy is employed picking up a handkerchief with her talented teeth. When lust and the displays at the Museum of Natural History not only carry Ozzie and Claire away but carry them back to a comic dream of 6,000,000 B.C., three skimpily clad female pterodactyls and three cavemen draw the pair into an improbable prehistoric social dance. Critic Edwin Denby found the most striking number of all to be Robbins's staging of "the monkeyshines of the principals" in the terrific "You Got Me," when Chip, Ozzie, Hildy, and Claire attempt to cheer up the despondent Gabey (he's been stood up by Ivy, who has to work) with a song and dance about all they have to give him. (Chip: "You got my whole family in Peoria, for you to see! And it's free, Gabey, it's all free.")
Robbins also had a chance to experiment with less light-hearted dances. One, a pas de deux, expressed the darker side of shore-leave pickups. After Gabey (John Battles) has sung Bernstein's lovely ballad "Lonely Town" and slumped onto a bench, a passing girl (Nelle Fisher), one of a group of teenagers, bumps — or gets pushed — into a sailor (Richard D'Arcy). This sailor wears a dark winter uniform instead of the summer whites of the "Times Square Ballet," and though he begins gently — sitting with her on a bench, measuring her hand against his, her foot against his — it's clear what he has in mind. In Robbins's notes, this guy knows "very well how to manage her, when to show affection, and when he can really come out with his hot lust when it is too late for her to back off." Their duet ends with a clinch, "his hands caressing her body." She pulls away, ashamed and embarrassed, and the sailor, according to D'Arcy, thinks, "What am I doing with this nothing?" When a more knowing blonde slinks by, he follows her without a backward glance. As the innocent backs up, she bumps into Gabey, and though he only means to offer sympathy, "she thinks, 'Oh no, not another one,' and runs off the stage."
The idea of a dream ballet that advanced the plot of a musical was a fairly recent invention, although dream sequences and visions figured in ballets, straight plays, and operettas at least as far back as Victor Herbert's Little Nemo (1904) based on the surreal comic strip. Lady in the Dark had dream sequences; Balanchine choreographed one, "Peter's Dream," for Babes in Arms. De Mille's masterful "Laurey's Dream" in Oklahoma! (1943) set a precedent with its somber Freudian undertones; it not only alerted the heroine to the true menace of Judd Fry, it revealed the sexual tension that accompanied her distaste for him. De Mille had also choreographed for One Touch of Venus a dream in which the goddess imagined herself a suburban housewife. The ballet in On the Town exists to show the doubts that creep into the exhausted Gabey's mind as he sleeps on the subway bound for Coney Island and to reveal how misguided are his visions of Ivy as famous and his seedy destination as a playground for the rich and famous. Cleverly, Robbins turned the rhythmic swaying of the passengers into a somnambulistic dance. "Then from the end of the subway," wrote Robbins in his plans, "Ivy appears, resplendent in a long flowing gown. She drifts toward the dreaming Gabey who looks up. Then she leads him invitingly to the center of the car which splits in half and rolls offstage leaving Gabey and Ivy in a black limitless void."
Actually, Oliver Smith's sparkling dream Coney Island materializes in blue as a "wonderful, suspended, fluid and dreamy sophisticated place for rich people." While the glamorous and coolly impersonal denizens of this space dance, Gabey fantasizes himself as "the Great Lover," and a dream double (Ray Harrison) enters to execute what's described in the script as a "jazzy, slick, ingratiating, torchy, sexy dance." "It was a long, hard dance," remembers Allyn McLerie, who performed in the ensemble and later played Ivy, "and he ended up on people's shoulders, but there was no applause." (Robbins became known for downplaying a climax or undercutting it in order to avoid breaking the flow he'd built.)
A prize ring of white ropes and poles is set up on a diagonal, and in it Ivy and this self-assured Gabey spar. Apparently Robbins, busy with the ensemble, left this "fight" until a few days before the traditional Boston tryouts that preceded a Broadway opening. According to Osato, he finally arrived at rehearsal, grinning and carrying a length of red jersey. He handed one end to her and the other to Harrison.
Next, with a slight shove, he set me turning into its length until I was wound in Ray's arms. It worked. Then we spent hours experimenting, winding the jersey around my waist, chest, and neck until it finally ended up as a turban round my head. Enormously pleased with his invention, Jerry said, "Now Ray will pull on one end and your hair will tumble down."
This fantasy-Ivy lassoes Gabey with her turban and wraps him up like a spider putting a fly into cold storage. She is declared the victor in the bout, which the real Gabey watches in horror.
Considering the complexity of the show and the short tryout period, it's not surprising that in Boston, Robbins apparently succumbed to nerves and disappeared for forty-eight hours. A few dances were still unpolished. A solo for Osato "in one" wasn't working, despite the promising idea of having her dance in a Carnegie Hall corridor to whatever music she hears coming from the studios: "[H]e had done a dismal little solo for me, really — listening at the doors of Carnegie Hall. I felt like an idiot. Just trip, trip, trip, listen at the door, trip, trip, trip, listen at the door. And I remember I danced it once and I think one person applauded one clap. And I remember thinking to myself, 'Oh-oh, it's got to be better than this.'"
According to Richard D'Arcy, the efficient and impatient Mr. Abbott called in Alice Dudley (an old Tamiment colleague of Robbins's) to finish the choreography, but before she could do anything, Robbins reappeared and created a simpler and more effective little solo — remarking years later how helpful and encouraging Osato had been. As Osato observed, "You know, most people don't come to rehearsal and say, 'This project is too immense for me.' They look as though they can handle it. But looking back, I think it just overwhelmed him and he got to the point where he had to go away and just sort of catch his breath."
As of December 15, while Jerome Robbins was polishing his On the Town choreography, the troublesome Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz ceased to exist — on paper anyway. Sometime in the fall of 1944, he decided to legalize his professional name. What is more remarkable is that he applied for the name change together with his mother and father. It was as Harry and Lena Robbins that they would hereafter attend his openings, proud to be acknowledged as his parents.
When On the Town sailed into New York on December 28, 1944, spruceand smart and ready to lure the holiday crowd, one critic, John Chapman of the Daily News, found it "dullish" and sighed, "Cripes, what I would give to see a good old hoofing chorus again!" Writers at the other New York papers, however, were far more enthusiastic about the show's originality. Jack O'Brien of the Associated Press relished the "opportunity to heave his hat into the stratosphere and in general start the sort of journalistic drooling over a musical comedy that puts an end to all adequate usage of superlatives." The most constructive criticism for Robbins came from Denby: "Just now, his ideas do not develop in space easily, but he doesn't try to cover up by complicated patterns or ornamental gestures; he concentrates instead on clarity of impulse and variety of pacing." Louis Biancolli, writing perceptively in the New York World-Telegram more than a month after the opening, thought he detected a revolutionary change in the world of musical comedy: "We're used to actors bursting into song in a musical. Now they burst into dance...and we accept it." He felt that the entire production
had been planned, worked out, and delivered in a ballet key. By that I mean the sense of kinetic action is felt, even where ballet isn't the featured factor. Ballet and song often appear geared to a dynamic pattern, as if any moment things will blaze again into dance. I sensed that repeatedly in the Bernstein music.
The collaborators were dazed to find lines at the box office. After the opening, Robbins and Nancy Walker hied themselves to one of those studios where anyone could record something on a tiny 78-rpm record. You can hear the euphoria crackling through as they try giddily to sing "New York, New York"; Walker manages to belt out a line or two, but Robbins keeps dissolving in giggles, and eventually they both crack up.
On the Town racked up 463 performances on Broadway (plus a national tour) and might have run longer had the end of the war not taken some of the edge off its subject matter. A February 1945 program contained a jingle by playwright George S. Kaufman urging the audience to buy war bonds ("The bonds that you purchase today, tra la / Go only for winning the war. / But each little dollar you pay, tra la, / Will bring you that dollar and more"); by May, Germany had surrendered, and, by August 14, Japan. No longer were sailors going off to a war from which they might never return.
Robbins's name appeared in the show's advertisements and programs not just as the choreographer; On the Town was "based on an idea by Jerome Robbins." If the success of Fancy Free had changed his life and his status in the dance community, On the Town pushed him a step higher on the fame ladder, bringing in offers and necessitating decisions. In a Cue interview published in March 1945, he mentioned that he was working on Aaron Copland's opera The Tender Land (a project that would not come to the stage until nine years later) and had been offered two productions of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pinafore (one with an all-black cast). Jerry, who'd acquired a reputation for pushiness among his Ballet Theatre colleagues and for being something of a user, told John Kriza that he could no longer be sure who really liked him and who simply wanted something from him.
He began his career as a dog lover by getting a squash-faced Belgian griffon that many of his friends thought horrid. He hired a clipping service to help him fill the scrapbooks his sister had started for him and, deciding he needed help handling phone calls and correspondence, enlisted an aunt — probably his Aunt Jean — to help him. Many years later, he told a young assistant, Rhoda Grauer, a charming story — undoubtedly dramatized for the occasion — about this "professional" relationship. When the phone rang and someone asked for him, his aunt would say, "Just a minute, please," call him, and hand him the receiver. He explained to her that the reason he needed someone to answer the phone was that he didn't wish to talk to everybody; she should please take down name, number, and message and tell the caller he wasn't in. Aunt Jean: "Jerry! I can't lie!" After some thought, her nephew worked out a solution: "All right, I tell you what. You say, 'Just a minute, I'll see if he's in,' and then you look for me, and if you don't see me, go back to the phone and say, 'I don't see him!' " Thereafter, every time the phone rang, he would hide in a closet.
At some point after On the Town proved to be a hit, Robbins assumed the mantle of the good and successful son and offered to finance his parents' retirement. Comfort Corset as a corporation had been legally dissolved in 1943; an outside company sent the factory the garments already cut, and Comfort's employees stitched them up. Harry and Lena could now move freely between their Weehawken apartment at 17 Fifty-first Street (for years Robbins's own legal address) and a cottage in Bradley Beach on the New Jersey shore and spend more time visiting with their grandchild, Cydney Cullinen (to be joined in 1946 by a brother, Robbin). Robbins felt munificent, but with leisure time to fill, says their daughter, Sonia, "they complained all the time."
Robbins kept no datebooks or calendars for 1945 (at least none seems to have survived), nor did he save — as was his later habit — every letter that dropped into his mailbox. Perhaps he was too busy juggling offers and plans, still somewhat unsure of what direction he should take or how much work he could reasonably manage. We don't know how he felt about a film deal with Samuel Goldwyn, the first of his edgy encounters with Hollywood. Articles in three different newspapers from February 1945 indicate that he had signed with Goldwyn to create the numbers for a film (possibly Wonder Man) starring his old Tamiment colleague Danny Kaye; one writer has Robbins and Kaye heading for Hollywood on May 1. Robbins told an interviewer for Cue that he had plans to involve the camera in the dancing. However, on April 2, Leonard Lyons reported in his syndicated column "The Lyons Den" that Robbins had told Goldwyn he no longer wanted to go to Hollywood. The columnist prodded Robbins: Was this a personal matter? Was he in love? Yes, Robbins told him. And she doesn't want to go to Hollywood? No. "OK, you can tear up the contract," concluded Lyons. Whether the "personal matter" and being in love had a connection was moot, and Jerry cleverly allowed Lyons to assume that the amour was a woman. His analyst, Frances Arkin, believed that homosexuality was "curable" and, with Robbins's cooperation, worked with him to that end. Gossip queen Dorothy Kilgallen's March 14 column mentions that Robbins and actress Lois Wheeler, then performing in Trio on Broadway, seemed to be "a Sardi romance," and in 1999 Wheeler told writer Greg Lawrence that a marriage between them had been mentioned. The real issue may simply have been a disagreement with Goldwyn.
Robbins still had one foot in the ballet world. In March, he wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine called "Ballet Puts on Dungarees," talking about the new informal, "American" tone in classical ballet — a tone that might help make ballet less of an elitist institution. A week before Lyons reported that the Hollywood deal was off, Robbins signed a new principal's contract with Ballet Theatre for the company's Metropolitan Opera season. It's clear that he dictated the terms to the new directors, Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith: He would dance only in Petrouchka, Fancy Free, and Helen of Troy for $150 per performance. He would do Petrouchka only on weekend evenings, except during any extension of the season. A substitute (probably Michael Kidd) would dance Fancy Free on the four Saturday matinees, and, during the possible extension, Saturday matinees and one evening each week. He would not rehearse these ballets. For the rest of 1945, he would be paid $50 per performance. With the advice of his agent, he was on his way to building his reputation as a shrewd businessman. Chase and Smith were undoubtedly eager to have him. The season's ad featured Fancy Free, and R.B. of the New York World-Telegram reported that on the first anniversary of the ballet, Sol Hurok presented Robbins with a gold watch onstage.
During Ballet Theatre's season, if Lyons is accurate, Robbins also found time to create an eight-minute song-and-dance routine with Edward Chodorov and Colonel Jay C. Flippen, "the veteran vaudevillian," for Chodorov's play about a touring USO troupe in Italy, Common Ground.
It was incumbent upon Jerry to choreograph a second ballet, and in the spring of 1945, he drew up a list of nearly twenty ideas. Some were rehashes of his Tamiment hits such as "Frankie and Johnny" ("might be very exciting done with colored cast"). One, working the Americana vein, was about "country life" — barn dance and all. One, hard to imagine as a ballet, was a psychologically charged glimpse into an ultimately tragic friendship between two men — one "wealthy, crude, yet sensitive," the younger, "bitter, slightly talented and vicious" (perhaps a painter and a critic, he thought). In keeping with his Communist Party connections and social conscience, he mentioned a scenario, not fully formed in his mind, that would deal with the rise of fascism and plotted a "Negro Ballet" that would contrast the South during slavery with a Harlem scene. He thought about approaches to Cinderella (using Eric Coates's music) and to the Pagliacci story. He jotted down in his list Copland's Quiet City (he finally got around to it in 1986). And he began to think about a ballet based on S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk (which materialized in 1974).
He also outlined in some detail an ambitious Cook Book Ballet, which was to be a compendium of the elements of theater: slapstick, production numbers, tragic scenes; he had myriad ideas for little acts. Never choreographed, the outline nevertheless generated ideas he would use later in shows and ballets; for instance, a tall-man-short-woman gag found its way into Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!, others into the hilarious "Comedy Tonight" opening of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The dancers for Cook Book would be onstage warming up as the audience entered, and, knowing the financial state of ballet companies, he would have them clad in practice clothes, "& use only those props you might find in the theater, a ladder — chairs — pail — horses — etc." (He took a similar approach to props and scenery in his 1946 ballet Summer Day and his 1976 Ma Mère l'Oye.) The above words were to be part of an opening speech delivered by Robbins, during which he planned to acknowledge to the audience the influence of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, with its Stage Manager narrator. In his patter, he would introduce members of the troupe by name and remark, "By the way, I'm Jerry Robbins — I dance in this now and then too. This is all very unorthodox, I know, but so is Saroyan — & I respect him."
He was apparently still reluctant to drop Bye-Bye Jackie. According to Bernstein's biographer Humphrey Burton, Robbins approached Bernstein about writing music for it and Lenny turned him down. Robbins's list of future projects noted that Jackie was to have a score by Paul Bowles. In his memoirs, Bowles, at the time a neighbor of Robbins's in Greenwich Village, recalled the choreographer talking to him that spring about composing music for the ballet that turned out to be Interplay. Bowles wrote of their conversations, "He worked in a very different way from the choreographers with whom I had previously collaborated. To me everything he said had the air of being supremely subjective, almost to the point of being hermetic. For Jerry it was somehow connected with the psychoanalysis he was undergoing at the time. We never managed to get anything decided during our discussions, and finally we gave up the project. Later Morton Gould wrote the score." Bowles was wrong about that last. Gould was not commissioned to write the score; his American Concertette for piano and orchestra predated the ballet. Robbins's list of possibilities included a work to the Gould piece: "This would be a bright dancey ballet to the Morton Gould suite which is in four movements and includes a polka and blues. The whole suite is based on [a] jazz flavor. Runs about fifteen minutes."
Bowles's words about Robbins's psychological approach seem more applicable to the story of Bye-Bye Jackie and its restless young hero than to Interplay, Robbins's frisky second ballet. Although later in his career, Robbins spoke as if he had always planned to follow Fancy Free with a plotless work, since "Fancy Free...was so specifically a story," one can speculate that Bye-Bye Jackie somehow became Interplay. Both were conceived for eight dancers. Robbins could have taken the Brooklyn neighborhood kids and the games they were to have played and abstracted them for his new ballet.
Interplay was not choreographed for Ballet Theatre, although it entered the company's repertory in October 1945. Robbins got an offer he was not about to refuse: Billy Rose signed him to find dancers and create a ballet for a new revue, Billy Rose's Concert Varieties, opening at the Ziegfeld Theatre in June of that year. For his $1,000 a week, with a guarantee of four weeks, he was also required to perform in his own work.
This was a show with ambitions. Louis Kronenberger, in a review titled "Culture Larded with Comedy," said it fell "halfway between art and entertainment." Music critic Deems Taylor served as master of ceremonies for a potpourri that included Spanish dancers Rosario and Antonio, Katherine Dunham's troupe, the Salici puppets, Mexican tenor Nestor Chayres, and boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson with Sidney Catlett on drums. Imogene Coca did several numbers, including the Tamiment "PM of a Faun" with William Archibald. The other comedians were Eddie Mayehoff and Zero Mostel (the latter imitating a politician, an opera singer, and a coffee percolator). Robbins remembered it as "a wonderful show." The critics were skeptical. Like most, George Jean Nathan thought that art and vaudeville were uneasy partners: "If you are going to mix culture and corn, it's better to serve the corn cob and not go for half measures."
Some of the highest praise went to Robbins, and when Ballet Theatre premiered Interplay on October 17, John Martin noted that "Jerome Robbins' Interplay set out quite deliberately to prove that not all American dance theatre works had to be storytelling, genre or period pieces, but that a purely formal approach could be made to composition in a strictly native vein and still be good. Mr. Robbins certainly made his point."
Irene Sharaff's costumes aided the ballet's bright, clear image. In the Concert Varieties version, Robbins had worn a yellow velvet shirt with green stripes and Janet Reed a yellow tunic with green stripes over a longsleeved green shirt (she loathed it). A backdrop showing swings and slides added to the kids-at-play look. Sharaff dressed all the men in black tights with different-colored long-sleeved T-shirts with modified turtlenecks and the women in black tights and long-sleeved black leotards topped with short colored tunics, open on the sides. The tights are footless and the ankles are bare, giving the illusion of bobby socks. Robbins cast Fancy Free buddies Harold Lang, John Kriza, Janet Reed, Muriel Bentley, plus Tommy Rall, Melissa Hayden, and Roszika Sabo; Michael Kidd was listed in the program, but Fernando Alonso danced instead. By then busy with a new musical, Billion Dollar Baby, Robbins only occasionally performed in the ballet. (In the Concert Varieties, he'd danced the leading role in every section of Interplay every night, plus Saturday and Sunday matinees, and nearly killed himself.)
In Interplay, Robbins took a lighthearted view of American teenagers, or rather of American dancers as teenagers; the games they play have both vernacular and balletic elements. The darker images of youth that he dealt with later in New York Export: Opus Jazz and West Side Story never found their way into this ballet. The swinging ponytails, leapfrogging boys, and considerate bumptiousness suited the war years' optimistic vision of American culture — an apple pie cooling on every windowsill.
A program note explained the title: "There is interplay among the dancers themselves. There is interplay of classical ballet steps and the contemporary spirit in which they are danced. There is the interplay of the dancers and the orchestra, interplay of piano and other instruments and an interplay between classical and jazz elements."
Robbins might well have taken to heart Edwin Denby's words about his choreographic ideas for On the Town not developing in space, and indeed, in reviewing Interplay, Denby praised Robbins's grasp of how time, generated by the "musical architecture" of the jazz-infused score, was made to interact with the architecture of the stage space. "Free Play," the ballet's first section, skedaddles all over the stage, its re-forming, developing patterns keeping the spatial picture building. One guy dances, a second enters, they travel stage right together to pick up a third, then dance down left to capture a fourth. Arms around one another's shoulders, backs to the audience, they step side to side. After one of them breaks into a brief, explosive, in-place solo in one corner, they absorb him into a line stretching from front to the rear of the stage, play a little canonic game about leaning sideways, and then take off as a squad. After the women enter, Robbins weaves all manner of patterns — playing vertical lines against diagonal ones and a snaking farandole against a grand right-and-left in a circle against two country-dance ranks — boys facing girls. At one point, all eight dancers come forward, peer into the pit, and boogie for a few seconds, as if each, carried away by the music, were improvising a wild response to Gould's hot licks.
Throughout the ballet, Robbins uses steps that allude to popular dance and games or stunts: leapfrog, hopscotch, cartwheels. The leader of the second section, "Horseplay," ends his solo balancing on one leg, the other stuck out to the side, hands clasped overhead in a victory gesture — the way Lang ended his Fancy Free number; also reminiscent of the earlier ballet is a competitive bit when two of the guys step wide over each other's feet, each trying to get ahead. The dancers whip off a variety of classical steps: many, many turns of different sorts, pas de chats, chassés, grands jetés. But the choreography emphasizes a more grounded preparation, so it looks as if they are bursting into spunky motion. Robbins also played around with ballet's courtly behavior: little bows and greetings (especially noticeable in the second section, which Gould titled "Gavotte," and in a pas de deux, "Byplay," which Reed performed with Kriza in the Ballet Theatre version). The duet featured conventional partnering techniques as well as some unusual lifts; in one of these, the woman is lifted high, then slides down and around the man's body as he turns, ending on the floor. The effect is both easygoing and sensual, as if both kids were enjoying the prolonged and variegated contact.
The tone of the ballet is breezy — even, at times, a bit cute — and for once it seems appropriate to call the performers "girls" and "boys" (as many ballet and Broadway choreographers traditionally do, even though some of these perpetual adolescents may be in their late thirties). The dancers seem to have an irrepressible energy and to change their minds every few seconds without pausing for thought. As critic Marcia B. Siegel has pointed out, the duet is "romantic out of all proportion to the casualness of the encounter." Often the two do the same steps side by side, like pals. The more sensual partnering suggests that these young people from a more innocent age find themselves trying on intimacy the way they'd investigate a new game, without committing themselves to it. They end sitting cozily close on the ground, but their pose is without erotic overtones.
In Interplay — relaxed, rough-edged, unpretentious, but fastidiously structured — Robbins established an aesthetic that was to remain crucial to his work. He built an image of community. The dancers may face the audience quite a lot of the time, but they seem to be dancing for each other and with each other. Inaugurating a device that heightened this impression — a device he would use many times — Robbins made them spectators too. The men lounge on the floor and watch the women as they weave nonchalantly around the area. One man, winded, sits in a downstage corner during the second section. As the third section begins, Reed tries to get him on his feet to dance with her, but he waves her away; it's almost accidental that she and Kriza begin to move together. During the duet, other dancers pick up the music's dreaminess and stand at the back or down in front, silhouetted, slowly shifting their hips from side to side. The last section, "Team Play," which presents balletic virtuosity as a competitive sport, uses "behavior" in a more obvious way. After a face-off in which two guys want to outturn each other, leaders choose teams, and each dancer gets a chance to shine for a few seconds. Out of the huddles, handshakes, and excited jiggling in place, every step becomes fodder for the competition; fouetté turns, tours en l'air, girls dragged in splits. A canon looks less like a compositional device than a bout of follow the leader. It was fortuitous that Interplay was made for only eight dancers; Robbins could teach himself the fundamentals of choreographing for a ballet ensemble before he had to deal with a full corps.
Interplay may be easygoing, but it's far from easy. Rehearsal footage from the 1990s that shows Robbins rehearsing members of the New York City Ballet reveals how critical timing, focus, and impetus were to him from the very beginning, as well as illusory spontaneity. He loved to have dancers look as if they were doing a step for the first time, no matter how many hundreds of times they'd practiced it. That air of discovery became one of the hallmarks of his style and, ironically, something to be labored over in rehearsals.
Robbins moved into a better apartment in mid-August 1945. For $165 a month, he leased the entire fifth floor and roof terrace at 24 West Tenth Street. It was furnished and included a piano, which "the landlord may remove if at any time he may desire to do so." Jane and Paul Bowles lived at 26, Oliver Smith (he and Bowles were distant cousins) at 28, Bernstein at 32. They used to visit one another by crossing the roofs. Years later, a young friend of Robbins's expressed awe at these giants of the theater behaving like kids. Jerry: "We didn't know who we were then."
In the 1970s, when he was jotting down memories for a nevercompleted autobiography, Robbins wrote nostalgically of his time on Tenth Street and the unplanned gatherings at Jane Bowles's late at night (the Bowleses, an unconventional couple, had separate flats). "Somehow we'd all be lying on Jane's huge bed, like at a picnic or on the beach. And we'd talk. I don't even remember about what. Someone would tell a story or play some music. Those evenings I felt as if Jane's bed became some special raft on which we all floated off, lolling, resting, talking, being silent but so easily comfortable in each other's presence." He loved Jane Bowles's writing and yearned to direct her play In the Summer House; "Oliver, producing it, chose someone else (wisely)."
Jerry's cousin Robert Silverman recalls the heady game playing that went on in those apartments — not only charades and word games, such as Twenty Questions, but a sort of musical quiz with dollar stakes. They'd sit in a circle on the floor and put one player in the center, along with a hat for the money, and he or she would try to identify musical excerpts sung by the others in turn. Silverman, himself a musician then training at Juilliard and much later the publisher of Piano Quarterly, was awed by the brilliance of the company. On one evening, the players were "Jerry, Adolph, Lenny, [composer] Marc Blitzstein, myself, and maybe a couple of other musicians, and we'd throw out things like the second theme from the Borodin String Quartet, second movement." Adolph Green could beat everyone at this game. Jerry must have held his own. In one testament to his musicality, which Silverman calls "tremendous," the two of them sang in the car all the way from New York to Providence, playing around with Bach's two-part inventions. "I'd give him the theme; he'd start, and I'd come in. We also made up rounds; we harmonized."
Robbins later wrote that in the Tenth Street days, he had affairs with men and women and went to meetings of his Communist Party cell: "Both seemed to be conducted under water." During this year stretching from summer 1945 to summer 1946, he enjoyed the company of duo pianists Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold (who at some point rented the apartment of the inveterate traveler Paul Bowles), Edwin Denby, and the dancers Francisco Moncion, Todd Bolender, and Tanaquil Le Clercq (shortly to become founding members of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein's new Ballet Society), as well as the up-and-coming actor Montgomery Clift, with whom he was beginning a sustained and well-camouflaged affair.
A pattern was developing in Robbins's professional life. From 1944 to 1955, he choreographed a musical comedy a year and one or two ballets almost every year. The alternation seemed to suit him. Broadway shows inevitably involved compromises; in the ballet world, he had near autonomy. And the two mediums yielded different sorts of satisfaction — one significant difference between them being the amount of money each brought him. The two also fed each other artistically; devices, even movements, from a ballet might find their way into a musical and vice versa. However, none of the musicals he worked on between On the Town and West Side Story twelve years later was constructed on a dance impetus. Finding ways to brighten an existing plot with clever numbers had its attractions but wasn't ultimately as satisfying.
He discovered that he loved doing research. Three of the 1940s musicals he choreographed after On the Town were set in the American past: Billion Dollar Baby (1945) in the late 1920s, High Button Shoes (1947) in 1913, and Miss Liberty (1949) in the 1880s. He immersed himself in each period, discovering the popular dance forms on which he might build, as he did with the Charleston for Billion Dollar Baby. He explained to an interviewer that he had studied magazine cartoons of the twenties for this show and gone to the Museum of Modern Art to look at silent movies of the period. Four of his successful ventures were directed by George Abbott, which meant that they were lean and fast-moving despite their intricacies of plot — true musical comedies, rather than romantic plays with singing like Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Robbins was in the middle of choreographing Interplay when he began work on a second project involving Gould's music. Among the offers Bernstein turned down in April 1945 was Oliver Smith's new Broadway venture, which Smith had hoped would unite the On the Town team. Koussevitsky had given Bernstein holy hell after On the Town. "His attitude was unequivocal: a potential great conductor must not dissipate his talents." That summer, Gould joined Comden and Green — who were still performing in On the Town — in turning out the book and music for Billion Dollar Baby, a cautionary tale about the late 1920s, and in October rehearsals began. Robbins signed a six-week contract to serve as choreographer at $750 per week plus 1 percent of the gross. Abbott directed, and Smith designed the decor, as well as producing the show.
Billion Dollar Baby appears to have puzzled the public. Gould's music was bright and sophisticated but not of the caliber of Interplay's American Concertette. Twenties nostalgia had not yet burgeoned; Helen Gallagher, who danced in the show, thinks even the costumes and hairstyles may have jarred 1940s audiences. More importantly, as Comden and Green point out, Billion Dollar Baby viewed the 1920s from an unusual perspective. Their book was no Jeeves and Wooster romp or as giddy as the 1949 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the much later retro hit The Boy Friend."We tackled the end of the twenties when the crash came. The whole show built up to the 1929 stock market crash....It was a very sardonic show and was not totally merry because it has this very tough ending." And a comedy that related Prohibition not just to wild parties, bobbed hair, and short skirts but to mob killings had a dark side. The critics, perhaps inevitably, compared it with Pal Joey because of its intermittently comedic gangster population (one song, "Speaking of Pals," referred to the many former cronies it had been necessary to bump off ). John Chapman of the Daily News liked it better than On the Town, and Howard Barnes of the Tribune called it a "honey," but most reviewers, such as Ward Morehouse of the New York Sun, equivocated, saying that the show displayed not much humor but had "considerable life." Louis Kronenberger's thoughtful review in NY PM was titled "A Fine Try Just Misses," and amid the praise and respect that he doled out for the venture, he zeroed in on what he saw as a major flaw: "For one thing, it can never quite make up its mind whether to burlesque an era or to catch its real quality of melodrama." He also disparaged a "hammer and tongs quality that never lets up, that begins as exhilarating but winds up as wearing." Toward the end of his life, Abbott ungenerously and rather inaccurately blamed a part of the play's less-than-dazzling success (it managed 220 performances) on its leading lady, Joan McCracken: "She had fat legs and you can't have a great beauty queen have fat legs and have it convincing. She had what we called ballet legs in those days."
This heroine was not the good girl audiences root for. Maribelle Jones is pretty and charming, apparently innocent, and absolutely without scruples. It's not that she loves money, she says, it's that she loves the things you can buy with it. Having missed out in the finals of the Miss America contest, she abandons her nice boyfriend, who works on the Staten Island Ferry and enters marathon dance contests, and works her way dubiously upward — seducing a bootlegger's shill; his gangster boss (played with comic ferocity by David Burns), who runs a speakeasy; the boss's bodyguard; and finally a billionaire. As a result of her machinations, men are killed and romances wrecked. By way of a moral message, things end well for the nice guys, and news of the Crash comes at Maribelle's wedding to her billionaire. Pandemonium invades the ceremony as half the people, unaware of what's happened, celebrate and the rest panic. As the bride is tossing an expensive bracelet to the crowd, the groom is scrabbling to pick it up.
The show gave Robbins fine choreographic opportunities, the most memorable of which was "Charleston." Adolph Green thought it was one of Jerry's best show numbers. It happened downstage, outside the speakeasy. One of its impressive aspects was the way Robbins individualized the chorus dancers (he and Agnes de Mille were among the few Broadway choreographers who took pains to do this). Each person has a distinctive, if stereotypical, character and attacks the Charleston in his or her own way. Besides the policeman, who begins the number by walking perkily into view on his toes, flipping a foot out in a hint of a Charleston and swinging his club, Robbins delineated a Park Avenue couple (long cigarette holder), a collegiate couple wearing raccoon coats and swigging from a flask, another young couple, an old couple, a red-hot mama, three identical flappers, gangsters delivering boxes of booze (the cop turning a blind eye). They don't arrive onstage all at once but come and go, infected by the dance and emitting little cries of "Whoopee!" or "Hotcha!" by way of punctuation. A shy girl, shocked by the drinking of the college pair, gets dragged into the speakeasy by a "good-time Charlie" hoping to wash away her primness with bathtub gin. Ann Hutchinson Guest, who played the part, recalls what happened: "A bit later, the door opened, the gangsters rolled out backward, and then I came out, just pushing them away, and then went into this terrific shimmy (which was why the costume had to have a lot of fringe). And then the music went silent while I suddenly looked down and saw [my] hips going and [shocked scream] stopped them." In the end, Robbins brought everyone onstage to exhaust themselves with a knee-twisting, foot-flinging dance that lands them flat on their backs, weakly lifting a leg or an arm now and then and half sitting up to sigh a "Whoopee!" or two before gathering their strength to rise, jump, enter the speakeasy, and dash out again for an applause-grabbing group pose.
The plot included two dream sequences. In one, Robbins satirized silent-movie clichés, at the same time hinting at Maribelle's voraciousness. She imagines herself as a succession of film queens driving men mad. First, she's a little darling like Lillian Gish, whose bashful country-boy suitor (supposedly based on Hollywood star Richard Barthelmess) holds out a bunch of flowers. She's so overcome he has to chase her around the couch with it. Their lips move exaggeratedly. "For me?" she mouths as he proffers a ring, and then she whacks him with the bouquet in her delight. Next, a slinky Maribelle is swept off her feet by a whip-wielding Rudolph Valentino type who trades her rose for his cigarette and pulls her into a tango. Finally she's a Theda Bara-style Cleopatra, seducing a slave (Robbins was thinking of Ramon Novarro) who's fanning her. He kisses her foot; she points to her knee; he kisses that. Then, at her command, he drinks poison and dies at considerable length. In the end the men all fight over her, and, in a comic melee, as all three struggle for a knife, she gets stabbed. The startled suitors drop kisses on her as they leave.
In the other, darker dream, Maribelle, contemplating a future with Rocky, the bodyguard, imagines a dank scene in a nightclub, where a couple of hookers in singlets and tight short pants flirt and indulge in rather acrobatic shenanigans with thuggish customers. McCracken performed a steamy pas de deux with James Mitchell (as Rocky's dance double). The dream ends when he grabs her by neck and ankle and flips her upside down, evidently making it clear to her that any future life with him will involve danger on every level.
Telling a reporter of his many ideas for "ballet plays," Robbins mentioned that he had used these ideas a bit in Billion Dollar Baby's "final psychological ballet." He created the duet before the show ever went into rehearsal. Like McCracken, Mitchell was dancing in Bloomer Girl, a show celebrated for Agnes de Mille's choreography, when Jerry invited him to be in Billion Dollar Baby. Mitchell accepted. Then Robbins said he'd have to audition. As Mitchell remembers it, the "audition" turned out to be two weeks of rehearsing for several hours a day: "He choreographed the entire pas de deux that I did with Joan McCracken. The entire thing. Lifts, everything. He was small enough that I could lift him." The union, Actors' Equity, was not as strong then as it later became, and Robbins was without shame; he finally said that he guessed Mitchell could do the part.
Dancers remember with delight the funeral procession for Dapper that was added during tryouts in New Haven. The gangster's henchmen and girlfriends cross the stage "in one," holding up signs betokening revenge on Rocky, as well as such sentiments as "I was Dapper's best girl." Each "lady's" bouquet of calla lilies is larger than the one before. As Arthur Partington (the cop in the Charleston) remembers it, "Dapper's girls were all in black and white with big hats and veils and doing Black-Bottomdirty bumps and grinds....The guys would stop and do a buck-and-wing for about sixteen counts and then continue on." Several critics singled out a number that satirized the Ziegfeld showgirls, with lavishly befeathered singers, who doggedly continue to flute, "A lovely girl is like a lovely bird," even as Rocky is shooting his boss, Dapper Dan.
A couple of numbers Robbins did not choreograph occurred during a dance marathon. Danny Daniels, the tap dancer extraordinaire who played Champ, Maribelle's original boyfriend, had auditioned for the show with a solo he'd choreographed while in the Army. The creative team liked the dance a lot. As Daniels tells it, when Champ and his partner, Esme, are declared victors in the marathon, "They [Robbins, Abbott, and Gould] arranged for the winner to go kind of berserk and grab the drumsticks from the announcer." Then Champ launches into the virtuosic solo. Daniels also choreographed the dance steps that accompanied a song he had to deliver, "I've Got a One-Track Mind," while Jerry labored over the Charleston and the second-act ballet. Daniels received neither program credit nor extra pay: "I never even thought of it, to be honest with you; I just wanted to do a good number."
Robbins won his first Donaldson Award (a precursor of today's Tony) for Billion Dollar Baby's choreography. Doubts the critics and the public had about the musical did not apply to him. He was, wrote Lewis Nichols in The New York Times, "generally accepted as the hero of the new show." Billion Dollar Baby closed in the fall of 1946, but Robbins wasn't finished with it. Sometime during the next summer, he began to map out in detail a potential film version. Penciled inside a script are the words "screen version — I did or wrote dance sequences & discussed whole picture with J. [Jerome] Chodorov."
In the projected movie Maribelle is nicer — a gullible Staten Island kid, pushed by an ambitious mother. Robbins thought of her as adapting to the driven ways of the people she meets, her conscience dizzied by the mad whirl of late-twenties gaiety. In the end she returns to her home and good old Pa and looks pleased when her original modest-income boyfriend comes calling.
Robbins's notes reveal his fascination with cinema, the acuteness of his visual sense, and the way dance rhythm underlies some of his most ambitious ideas. The beauty contest was to have a "jazzy distortion....It is the contest as seen through the eyes of nerve-wracked Maribelle [Miss New York] and from our looking back at the disjointed twenties. It should look somewhat like a more humorous version of the fair grounds of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." He wanted the camera to tilt down, cut diagonally across, and peer up at people to give the feeling that everything was going too fast and edging out of control. The floats on which each contestant entered were to be "exaggerated symbols," and he saw Maribelle perched on a papier-mâché skyscraper, her pose as precarious as her future. He envisioned the judges' inspection of girls and ensuing consultations occurring at lightning speed (he used the technical term "undercranked") with the bevy of girls diminishing accordingly.
Among his elaborate plans were a yacht sequence involving a rolling ship and Maribelle's growing drunkenness as she wheels between Dapper and Rocky. He suggested that three girls being pursued by three gangsters be suspended slightly on piano wires "so they can achieve weird balances in compensation for the boat tilts." Here's how he saw the final wedding plus-stock-market-crash: "The picture bursts and flies into pieces and becomes confetti-like as it swirls about." Amid the montage are shots of a banker's car being sucked from his garage, his wife's jewels and furs falling from her.
He ended his notes, "In other words treat the whole film as a musical sequence, so that the all over feeling of the picture has a complete style of its own as Henry V [he had seen Laurence Olivier's film in June] and Caligari." We may never know if it was a version of these ideas that he submitted to Hollywood or what was made of them. Were they found pretentious, too fancy, or out of line coming from someone who'd been consulted primarily as a choreographer? In any case, in August, Robbins was paid $2,500 for his work on the screenplay, but the picture never materialized. (At the same time, he also made some kind of contribution during the shooting of David O. Selznick's film of Portrait of Jennie, starring Jennifer Jones, for which he also received $2,500.)
Hollywood sang him a siren song, but firmer commitments on the West Coast continued to elude him.
Copyright © 2004 by Deborah Jowitt
Chapter 13: Exporting America
Between the opening of West Side Story at the Winter Garden in September 1957 and the release of the film in the summer of 1961, Robbins fielded and tossed a multitude of offers. His files bulged with requests for interviews, for money (from the Lena Robbins Foundation — since 1970 the Jerome Robbins Foundation — which he set up in 1957 to give grants to artists), for jobs, for recommendations; with invitations to sit on a panel, serve as an honorary chairman, write an article, come to a party. Would he read this script? Would he consider directing this play? This musical comedy? Could Ballet Company X please do Interplay? With the help of the invaluable Edith Weissman, he acknowledged them all. Letters to friends, colleagues, and well-known people he dictated or wrote himself, but Weissman knew how to speak in Robbins's voice. Many responses begin along the lines of "The project sounds interesting, but my schedule is too full for me even to consider it..." or "I'm sorry, but I'll be out of the country..."
He made time, however, to compile lists of possible funders to facilitate Inbal's American tour, writing a testimonial to accompany the solicitation, and was proudly present when the company made its much-praised New York debut on January 6, 1958. He and Anna Sokolow gave a party in the company's honor at Fizdale and Gold's apartment. And in 1960, the American Israel Cultural Foundation thanked him and Martha Graham for their inspiring talks at a gala that raised $9,500 for Inbal's choreographer-director, Sara Levi-Tanai.
He was good about recommending dancers who had worked with him. Michiko of The King and I hoped for Rockefeller Foundation funding to study Balinese and Javanese dance. He wrote a letter on her behalf. The Greater New York Chapter of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis solicited a donation. In 1957, with Le Clercq much on his mind, he signed over his royalty fee of $488.50 from the performance of Afternoon of a Faun on Canadian television. He was glad to be interviewed by Bernard Taper for Taper's biography of George Balanchine. And he was on hand in 1958 to receive a Dance Magazine award from Agnes de Mille. He must have laughed upon reading a letter that began, "The Relaxation Guidance Center is conducting the first of a series of studies on how wellknown people relax."
Photography was one way Jerry relaxed, and he was tremendously pleased when David I. Zeitlin, who was planning a book of photographs by famous people and had solicited some from him, praised his pictures highly. He had no trouble clearing the decks to send the requested comments about each photo selected for the book, sounding very knowledgeable. "Clown" he had shot from the ring in Madison Square Garden with a telephoto lens:
The negative is somewhat larger, including a blurred raised arm and some distracting elements in the background. I cropped it to that shape because I was struck by the compositional effect of the strange areas of black and white. By so cropping it, it made the contrast and balances a little eerie, and the impression of mystery of what goes on behind a clown's face was thus heightened. I printed it on #5 Kodbromide paper to heighten the contrast and increase the grain. The eyes of the clown were a bit dodged so they didn't come out as black holes.
His social life was, as usual, full during these years, judging by a long, newsy letter he wrote Richard Buckle about the 1959-1960 holiday season (just after which he'd had to fly to Chicago because the national company of West Side Story was "falling apart"). Dickie, or "Bucky," as Robbins sometimes addressed him, was a wit, and Jerry enjoyed rising to his epistolary level, manifesting a certain glee as he told of Balanchine and Le Clercq's Christmas Eve dinner party for ten or twelve. Suzanne, a maid who did Jerry's heavy cleaning, came to help: "She walked into the kitchen and I introduced her to George who was in a terrible old shirt, carving up a turkey, way past his elbows in grease. I said, 'This is Monsieur Balanchine who speaks French also.' She immediately launched into a torrent of tu-toyed French thinking it was one of the help!"
West Side Story had redefined his status in the theater, and he seems to have been veering between exercising the lighter side of his musical comedy bent and investigating more "high art" ventures. On one hand, in October 1957, he tried hard to interest Leland Hayward in an idea he'd had for a musical he envisioned for Mary Martin and Ethel Merman that
could be a hell of a show for both the girls. Start them out almost dowdy, living together in some mid-west town, school teachers, put them on a real Cook's tour (about which I have many wonderful ideas) take them through Europe and have some marvelous and fantastically funny things happen to them, some sort of romance, and finally a returning back to the U.S. mid-western school, richer, wiser and a little sadder and happier in experience.
He went on to propose possible writers, lyricists, composers. But he also wrote to Rudolf Bing, director of the Metropolitan Opera — who had several times approached him about taking charge of a production — wondering if Bing had selected a director for Alban Berg's Wozzeck (he was too late). Leo Kerz, a stage designer turned producer, aroused his interest in directing Bertolt Brecht's Man Is Man in 1958 and then in 1960 excited him by proposing that he direct Eugène Ionesco's first full-length play, Rhinoceros, which was to star Zero Mostel, but Robbins was unable to make a commitment at the time Kerz needed one. His participation in another project of Kerz's — a new version of the Brecht-Kurt Weill The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny — was scotched by the West Side Story movie's schedule.
Robbins kept being drawn back to the New York City Ballet, and when Balanchine, in Warm Springs with Tanny, sent word that he hoped Jerry would do Stravinsky's Capriccio for the company's winter season of 1957-1958, he did start work on a ballet (though perhaps not that one). However, he wrote Robert Fizdale that he felt that the atmosphere of the company had changed and after two rehearsals "found myself settling for poor stuff." He fled to a favorite spot, Trunk Bay, in a remote part of the Caribbean island of St. John. A year later, in response to a request that he do something for the company's tenth-anniversary season, he offered a plan for Capriccio that charmed Lincoln Kirstein — "a horrifying children's fairy tale about birds" — but by then he was too embroiled in another project to take it on.
During the almost four years between West Side Story's Broadway opening and the release of the film, he brought off two major achievements: directing and choreographing the musical Gypsy and founding his own company, Ballets: U.S.A.
Ballets: U.S.A. came about rather by accident. In 1957, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti approached Robbins about contributing to a threeweek festival he was planning to inaugurate in Italy during the summer of 1958 — one that would honor the classics of European music and theater and introduce contemporary American composers and artists in all fields to Italian audiences. The lovely Umbrian hill town of Spoleto won out over nearby Todi, because it boasted two theaters: the Caio Melisso, a seventeenth-century jewel box (at that time, run-down and used for showing movies), and a crimson-and-gilt nineteenth-century opera house, the Teatro Nuovo.
For that summer and for many summers thereafter, the attractions were, on the whole, small scale and the Festival of Two Worlds atmosphere intimate. Spoleto was not Edinburgh, with its seven halls and crowds large enough to justify simultaneous performances. Alberto Moravia, in his 1958 program essay, "The Arts in Spoleto," speaks of events such as the Festival dei Due Mondi as being "inspired by what I might call 'nostalgia for the Court'" — for a time when rival dukes vied with one another to see whose dancing master, whose court composer, and whose painter could produce the most exquisite entertainments. The souvenir program attests to the elegant, erudite, and slightly offbeat taste that guided some of the choices. The best-known and most elaborate of the summer's operas was Verdi's Macbeth. The young American composer Lee Hoiby premiered a three-character work, The Scarf. The other three presentations were examples of the Italian Baroque — comic and entrancingly suitable to the stage of the Caio Melisso — such as Il Maestro di cappella, Domenico Cimarosa's witty intermezzo about a conductor who can't control his orchestra.
Conductor Thomas Schippers, not yet thirty, was Menotti's artistic director for music, while José Quintero was in charge of drama, John Butler of dance, and Giovanni Urbino of fine arts. One of the three plays chosen was an Italian comedy; the others were Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Kiley, and Alphonse Daudet's L'Arlésienne, with incidental music and choruses by Georges Bizet. The dance offerings were companies assembled by Robbins and Butler. Butler had a long-standing professional relationship with Menotti; he had choreographed the annual productions of the composer's Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, since 1950, in addition to staging his "madrigal opera," The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore, with the New York City Ballet in 1957.
When he was invited to participate, Robbins's initial plan — since many fine musicians would be assembled in Spoleto — was to tackle Stravinsky's Les Noces, a project he had been pursuing unsuccessfully for some time, and invite Herbert Ross to stage his hair-raising The Maids, based on Jean Genet's play, but with the vicious and demented serving women played by men. Les Noces fell by the wayside, in part because it was impractical to tour with (it called for four grand pianos, chorus, and percussion), and after the Spoleto Festival, Robbins's group was to perform at the World's Fair in Brussels for a week; he was also hoping for more European engagements. The Maids was dropped because it was shocking and, therefore, in terms of Cold War diplomacy, not the best thing to represent American culture at a World's Fair. John Martin, attending a New York run-through in practice clothes of the newly christened Ballets: U.S.A. program, just before the company was to leave for Italy, was pleased to note that "wiser heads have eliminated [it] from the schedule." In a telegram dated April 18, 1954, to the Spoleto Festival office in Rome, Robbins indicated that he had given up Les Noces and The Maids in order to secure the American National Theatre and Academy's "financial endorsement" (he gained additional support from Philadelphia's Catherwood Foundation).
ANTA had been chosen to administer the President's Emergency Fund for International Affairs, set up by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 to export American art as a weapon in the Cold War. Since the end of World War II, ANTA had been acting as the State Department's agent in securing services and raising money for companies deemed worthy of traveling abroad. Peer panels in each discipline, like those later set up by the National Endowment for the Arts, sought art that would present America in a favorable light as a cultured nation.
Instead of Les Noces and The Maids, Robbins would present his comic gem, The Concert (now to have decor by Saul Steinberg), Afternoon of a Faun, and Todd Bolender's Games, set to the Stravinsky-Pergolesi Pulcinella. In Games, Robbins gained a piquant opener that showed his pickup company at home in classical steps, plus Bolender himself to reprise his comic turn as the henpecked husband in The Concert. Robbins was also working on a new jazz ballet with decor by painter Ben Shahn and music by a young composer, Robert Prince. It was this work, New York Export: Opus Jazz that he came to consider one of his best and that would knock Europe on its ear.
The company of sixteen dancers was scheduled to perform in the Teatro Nuovo nine times during the festival's three-week June schedule. Butler's smaller ensemble, which included Buzz Miller, Carmen de Lavallade, and Tina Ramirez, would also perform nine times, but in the Caio Melisso, which the festival had restored to its ancient splendors.
Menotti had requested that Robbins find young, relatively unknown dancers, rather than established ballet stars. Auditions began in January. They were more like unpaid rehearsals (common before Actors' Equity ruled against them). Robbins invited dancers he liked to come in and do a little work, and colleagues recommended others. In February they were given morning class and taught excerpts from the repertory, including the material that he was developing for Opus Jazz. Carolyn Brown — available because the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, of which she was a vital part, had no work in May and June — learned most of Afternoon of a Faun, with Jay Norman as her partner. In the end, of the around twenty picked, only sixteen could go; the others found out by scuttlebutt that the budget had been tightened.
Only a few of those chosen for Ballets: U.S.A. were primarily classical dancers. Barbara Milberg and Joan Van Orden had been in the New York City Ballet, for example, while Jay Norman came straight from West Side Story and Sondra Lee was not notably balletic (she was overheard assuring Robbins at the "auditions" — where she was learning Le Clercq's role in The Concert — that since it was only February, she had plenty of time to brush up her pointe technique). Says Lee, "I think we all in some crazy way spoke his language — but in different tongues, because we all came from different places in the dance world — and in our training as well; we were all very well trained." And together they fit the "U.S.A." part of the company's sobriquet, especially as Europeans might perceive it: young, fresh, peppy, up for anything, and coming from a variety of cultural and racial backgrounds.
The company flew to Europe in May to learn the repertory and complete New York Export: Opus Jazz. The kids were wild with excitement on the plane, despite snafus that delayed their arrival until late at night, and, says Lee, they faced television crews at the airport in Rome bedraggled and resembling "a shipload of immigrants." It must have been well after 2:00 A.M. when the bus got them to Spoleto and they were taken off to the various private homes where they were to be billeted. Lida Gialoretti, Menotti's assistant in charge of housing, had to reassure one woman, who finally opened her door, took one look at the very beautiful young John Jones, and shut it again, crying out that she was afraid. She had never seen a black man before, and no one had prepared the festival staff for such a possibility. However, the Spoletini quickly fell in love with all the young Americans, especially after the first performance.
The whole Ballets: U.S.A. (BUSA) experience was a new one for many of the dancers and for Robbins as well. The first morning, they met in the Piazza del Duomo, near the top of the hill. At one end was the thirteenthcentury cathedral, the vault above its altar resplendent with Fra Filippo Lippi's immense fresco of scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary; opposite the cathedral, a stone stairway that Robbins later described as "[draping] like a swag down into the piazza. There is something exhilarating about its sweeping descent, [which] broadens & eases as it arrives at the square." Everything was enthralling: the narrow, ancient streets, the view of the valley and the Apennines, the outdoor cafés within walking distance of the huge rehearsal hall above the elegant opera house, or the gym of a nearby convent, where the dances were hammered into shape. The place seethed with celebrity artists: Samuel Barber (he was on the board of advisers, along with Lincoln Kirstein); Alexander Calder, supervising the mobile he had designed for Butler's The Glory Folk; Ben Shahn creating the backdrops for New York Export: Opus Jazz. Saul Steinberg designed a witty new frontcloth for The Concert, depicting an audience at the Melisso. At the restaurant Pentagramma, where the festival elite regularly lunched, they were served by its owners, one a daughter of Arturo Toscanini, the other the widow of Guido Cantelli. For some company members, this was the first time they'd found boxes full of ballet slippers made to their size waiting for them. Romances blossomed, and everyone reveled in working together in a ravishing environment for nearly two months.
In 1961, two years after Ballets: U.S.A. toured Europe and was visiting England again, the London Observer likened New York Export: Opus Jazz to a "hurricane...sweeping over Europe to leave a holocaust of broken brisés and bent arabesques in its wake." Spoleto was the first to feel that force, and the reaction was equally extravagant. In 1958, no one in Europe had seen a ballet with movement that was contemporary in quite this way — respectful of form, obstreperous in content. A triumph of astute theatricality.
The disaffected young people of New York Export: Opus Jazz might have migrated from West Side Story. The ballet is to the musical as Robbins's Interplay is to his Fancy Free. In making Interplay, Robbins abstracted the behavior of Fancy Free's boisterous sailors and girls into a classical ballet with jazz elements that celebrated youthful verve, friskiness, competition, and budding romance. New York Export: Opus Jazz, despite elements of a mean-streets narrative akin to that of West Side Story, is, like Interplay, a suite of dances, formally constructed to give the impression of spontaneity, even of improvisation. Almost all the movement is rooted in the vernacular, as is Prince's music. The orchestra, under its thirty-two-year-old conductor, Werner Torkanowsky, was augmented by four jazz musicians.
Robbins was not the only choreographer of the 1950s who was dealing with the alienated young people of the day. In the spring of 1958, Juilliard Dance Theatre — then a semiprofessional company directed by modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey — premiered a work by Anna Sokolow called Session 58 to a jazz score by Teo Macero. It's possible that Robbins saw it; not only was Sokolow a friend and admired colleague, but Humphrey had been trying to get him to choreograph a work for the company since the group had been formed in 1954. The title of the influential book The Lonely Crowd, by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, might have applied to any number of Sokolow's works, including her 1956 masterwork Rooms. Although her dancers flocked together, they often seemed mired in private but explosive misery; potential lovers averted their faces or threw their heads back even as they reached out to each other. Session 58 began with the dancers at the back of the stage. Suddenly they all raced forward, stopped dead at the edge of the pit, as if some hostile force were emanating from the audience, then backed up slowly, staring.
Robbins used a similar belligerence at the beginning of Opus Jazz, and one can also posit an homage to Sokolow in two later works he made for Ballets: U.S.A.: Moves (1959) and Events (1961). The first of Ben Shahn's five backdrops for Opus Jazz suggests wires or television antennas against a pale sky. The dancers saunter onstage, giving the spectators long stares before clustering at the back and swaying from side to side. Like the gang members of West Side Story, these kids draw confidence from being together. Their movements, building on the forms and style of social dance, are jazz-infused but joyless. They snap their fingers and crouch over to strut, holding their hands in front of them like paws. Occasionally, they throw both arms straight up or cock a hip. Traditional patterns — couples facing each other in a line, semicircles, chains — unroll via "cool," into-the- floor steps. In the third section, "Improvisations," Robbins creates the illusion of a jam session by having those not dancing hang around watching, clapping to egg on their friends. Three guys do show-off moves — squats, spins on their knees; one does a satiric little "bump" as he leaves.
The elegantly composed last section is just what its title says, "Theme, Variations, and Fugue." One dancer begins with simple, deliberate moves to Prince's ABCs-elementary theme. Reach a foot to the side, return it. Repeat to the other side. Step back, return the foot. Step forward, etc. Speed it up. As the compact variations develop, Prince adds instruments and Robbins accumulates dancers — now a couple performs, then three women, now five men. Three couples break into a Lindy step, eight burst from a Texas Star pattern, and the men turn their partners like rambunctious musicians spinning bass viols. Then, from a clump, they all erupt again, singly or in small groups, into the fugue, until all of them are going at once, following their separate strands, which — true to fugal practice — shorten here and lengthen there until everyone's together again.
The second and fourth sections introduce darker elements. In "Statics," three wary, aggressive men dance to percussion alone, as if they indeed had rockets in their pockets. When a woman (Patricia Dunn) walks in, they hurl themselves randily about on the floor and watch. She's dreamily alluring, aware of their interest. One of them pulls her into a rough sexual duet that turns the others on. When she gets up, they're ready for her — five of them now — but she's still composed, not prepared for what happens. Eventually, they spin her from one man to another and hurl her offstage. Given the stylized New York skyline effect of Shahn's backdrop, it looks as if they're throwing her off the roof, but the dancers don't believe that Robbins intended to give that impression; after gang-raping her, they just toss her roughly away, in BUSA dancer James Moore's words, "like she was a piece of garbage." "Passage for Two" was originally performed by a black man and a white woman (Jones and Wilma Curley), and that casting subtly emphasized the discomforts and tensions that would plague an interracial relationship in the fifties. The two size each other up and edge into a pas de deux in which sensuality and wariness merge. When, kneeling, he slides his face up her body, she arches in response. But they rarely look at each other, and sometimes it seems as if they're trying — and failing — to fit their bodies together. Toward the end, she wraps one leg backward around him and grabs her foot, ensnaring him; the snare alters as he lifts her to his shoulder, but he remains within it until she reclines precariously (no hands) at a slant on his back. They exit in opposite directions.
The New York Times's music critic Howard Taubman's review from Spoleto was titled "Ballet: Rousing Success." Here was a company that truly represented America. Why not export it and show the Russians a thing or two? Within days, Robbins heard from Leland Hayward (or "Haywire," as he occasionally signed his cables to Robbins). The producer wanted to present BUSA on Broadway. And how about a one-hour television special? He'd already met with William Paley, head of CBS.
After performing at the Brussels Fair, at the Maggio Festival in Florence, and in Trieste, BUSA opened at the Alvin Theatre in Manhattan. Works by Robbins were simultaneously on view in four other theaters: New York City Ballet was performing at City Center and Ballet Theatre at the Met; Bells Are Ringing and West Side Story were running on Broadway. Perhaps in order to have an all-Robbins repertory, Jerry dropped Bolender's ballet and concocted a new curtain raiser, 3 x 3, to music by Georges Auric. Variety called it a "delightful improvisation to the now whimsical, now plaintive accompaniment of a wind trio." It was not just the sound of the music that was whimsical; the bassoonist, oboist, and clarinetist wore very long tail coats with outsized top hats and sat on stepladders. A rehearsal excerpt shown in a film prepared by the United States Information Agency prior to the company's 1959 European engagements reveals little that looks improvisatory. Three women in pointe shoes scamper and skip in close formation, while the choreography plays rhythmic games with six-count measures: 1-2-3-4-5-6 versus 1-2-3-4-5-6. Three men replace them with the same rhythms and similarly perky steps. Robert Sabin of Musical America gave 3 x 3 grudging praise by comparing it to a work by the French choreographer Roland Petit (whose company had appeared in New York in April) that he had really hated: "[3 x 3's] attempted French chic, brittle cuteness and thinness of texture is a masterpiece compared to Mr. Petit's 'Contre-Pointe.' " John Martin disliked the ballet, and in fact, Robbins wasn't satisfied with it either.
Martin also found fault with the casting of Afternoon of a Faun (Jay Norman and Wilma Curley). However, he loved The Concert (with Maria Karnilova appearing in Le Clercq's role for the Alvin season) and New York Export: Opus Jazz. As did everyone. Opening-night telegrams took BUSA's success for granted. "YOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFY THAT YOU ARE BEING INVESTIGATED FOR MONOPOLY OF CHOREOGRAPHIC SUCCESS," wired dancer-choreographer Paul Godkin. West Side Story's Chita Rivera and Tony Mordente teased the young cast: "NOW DON"T BE NERVOUS. ITS ONLT THE BIGGEST OPENING OF YOUR CAREER NOTHING TO BE ALARMED ABOUT." Jule Styne sent the following ebullient message as one Jewish male to another:
YOU MURDERED THEM IN SPALETTO [sic]AND IN GOOD OLD BRUSSELS TOO.
THEY WILL BE CGHEERING YOU FROM THE GHETTO
BECAUSE YOU ARE THE DANCING JEW.
GOOD LUCK AND LOVE...
Lincoln Kirstein was already hungering for Opus Jazz. He'd seen it in rehearsal in Spoleto and praised it lavishly: "[N]o one but you has understood Jazz so well in its flexibility and no one has had the gift to make it so interesting." The opening-night wire signed "George and Lincoln" said, "BEST WISHES FOR THE MOST BRILLIANT SUCCESS AND WE ONLY HOPE THAT WE WILL BE THE RESIDUAL FRAME FOR YOUR MASTERPIECES."
Despite the acclaim, the U.S. tour didn't last as long as had been hoped; there hadn't been sufficient time to publicize it. It did, however, recoup the cost of the New York season. In June 1959, Robbins again took BUSA to Spoleto and then shepherded it on a tour of sixteen European countries — playing international festivals in seven of these. The reviews touting the company as a perfect cultural export had reached the U.S. government. This time, the troupe of twenty dancers, two conductors, six musicians, and a staff of four was presented by Leland Hayward in association with the International Cultural Program of the United States, administered by ANTA. The program had already had excellent success with the José Limón Company's tour of South America in 1954 and the Martha Graham Company's Asian tour of 1956. The imprimatur, however, didn't mean that the State Department and the President's Emergency Fund paid all the bills. Barbara Horgan (then an assistant to Betty Cage at the New York City Ballet), who had been loaned to Robbins for the summer, mentioned in a letter to Jerry the likelihood that he would get the $50,000 he needed from ANTA (the net cost of the tour turned out to be $248,000). The United States Information Agency, and American embassies in the countries visited, were expected to run interference, play host, and inform the local press — functions they did not always perform with skill or grace. A USIA documentary film was sent around to introduce the company. It showed the choreographer leaving his house, lighting a cigarette, climbing into a taxi, and rehearsing his dancers, after which they performed the last section of New York Export: Opus Jazz. Leon Leonidoff agreed to act as impresario, as he did for the New York City Ballet's tours of Europe, despite ANTA strictures that limited his freedom to make bookings.
Those strictures proved to be as galling to Robbins as Broadway's compromises. The toppling of Wisconsin's Red-hunting senator, Joseph McCarthy, in the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 had not dispelled the nation's fear of communism as a creeping menace, and the government was determined to win the crucial worldwide popularity contest that the United States was waging with the Soviets. ANTA's Dance Panel in 1959 included many dance notables. They were obligated to consider what companies and, indeed, what dances, might promote understanding and appreciation of American culture and, in some sense, to grapple with the impossible: How might such and such a country respond to such and such a ballet, to what degree might its people misunderstand a choreographer's ideas? Should they have been able, for instance, to predict that some Poles would be disturbed by The Concert, fearing that Robbins was making fun of Chopin, their national treasure? During the tour, while being lauded by the foreign press and public, Robbins received worried and admonishing letters from ANTA's general manager, Robert C. Schnitzer, written on the letterhead of the International Cultural Exchange Service of the American National Theatre and Academy. And Schnitzer must have become accustomed to bracing himself for the angry responses.
Most of the difficulties concerned a ballet that was supposed to be set to a commissioned score by Aaron Copland, perhaps the major "American" composer. As New Yorker critic David Denby has written of him,
[H]e established what most people still think of as the very sound of American classical music. This new "American" sound was rangy, bigbodied, and clean-limbed — rarely sensuous. Its lyrical element emerged in the tender gravity of hymnal tunes. There are two inimitable Copland moods. One is a stomping, pounding exuberance in which, say, some threadbare cowboy song gets recharged with dance rhythms as complex and exciting as any that Stravinsky ever came up with; the other is elegiac and beautifully forlorn. His music, both rugged and touching, evokes the gathering strength of a newly powerful country — the open spaces and the metallic hardness of the industrial present — and also the isolation felt by people living on the plains or amid skyscrapers and empty streets.
Is it any wonder that all concerned were delighted to learn that Copland was writing music for Robbins?
The work, tentatively titled Theatre Waltzes, was to show off the company in "pure dance terms" using the ballet vocabulary. In a letter to Copland, Robbins hoped the piece would be "a declarative statement — open, positive, inventive, joyous (rather than introspective)." Although Jerry's scrawl to Aaron at the top of his notes asserts that "These are only ideas — and all can be thrown out if anything suggests something else. Feel Free [underlined twice]," he lists twenty-two possible waltzes, such as "Tea Room Waltz," "Ice Skating Waltz," "Cartoon Waltz," "Waltz for an Odd Number of People."
To ANTA's and the panel's dismay, Robbins decided not to proceed with the ballet. Justifying himself after the fact, he reminded Robert Schnitzer that he hadn't received Copland's full score until the day before leaving for Europe. According to a later explanation of the genesis of Moves, Robbins wrote that Copland, in the midst of composing, had warned him that the music wasn't turning out exactly as either of them expected. He'd found the few pieces Copland played for him to be "a beautiful score, quite lyric and much more serious and difficult than I had expected....Subsequently Aaron made me a tape of the music and on listening to it I realized that because of fatigue from my work on Gypsy [the musical had premiered on May 21, 1959] and the depth of his score, it would be foolhardy to attempt it if I rushed into rehearsal without assimilating the score. Meanwhile I had started to try some movements with the company (when I was in town for a day) to see if I could begin to grasp any of the mood of the Copland piece." James Moore has a memory of working briefly on steps that were in 3/4 time, and Erin Martin thinks that the company pianist Betty Walberg may even have played some of the music. However, she also recollects that a couple of days later, Jerry said, "Let's try something." She thinks "that it caught fire with him and he forgot about the waltzes." The "something" turned out to be working with no music at all, and he was intrigued with the way the movements looked when performed in silence. The ballet Moves was born.
Schnitzer predicted that the State Department would be very unhappy. The company showed Moves at a run-through before leaving for Spoleto. Although Robbins acknowledged that it needed some cutting, it was enthusiastically received — even, apparently, by Copland, who came backstage: "[H]e said he felt Moves was exactly the kind of work we should show all over Europe because it's so different and provocative and controversial for a European audience." The panel disagreed and strongly advised that the ballet not be shown in certain countries — notably in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Spain, and Greece. Polled, the panel members suggested that Interplay be prepared as an alternate, in part because half the program was set to European music. Robbins had suggested this himself but then demurred because he felt Interplay was in some ways too similar to New York Export: Opus Jazz.
While the company enjoyed new sights and appreciative audiences, the letters and cables that crossed the Atlantic were frequently acrimonious. "Dear Jerry" kept telling "Dear Bob" how much Moves was appreciated, how the attaché in Dubrovnik had felt the public had been slighted because it didn't get to see the new work. Having roasted in Tel Aviv's summer with Erin Martin down with something, two dancers injured, and another, Jane Mason, giving notice, and having had to cope with a few more problems, Robbins whined and lashed out, "It is absolutely cruel and unthinking, and practically fascistic, for you to maneuver me into a position where you place the whole responsibility of the whole President's Touring Program onto my shoulders" (this letter he wisely decided not to send). Eventually Schnitzer, perhaps soothed by the glowing reports of the company, gave up and allowed Robbins to program the ballets as he saw fit; cordial relations were reestablished. The disputes show how extremely wary ANTA was on the government's behalf and the amount of secondguessing the panel felt was necessary.
Moves, remounted in 1970 for the Joffrey Ballet and later for the New York City Ballet and other companies, accomplishes for the viewer very much what it did for Robbins. He wrote that this intense scrutiny of dance on its own, without music, costumes, or scenery, "places the dancer's body under a magnifying glass. The relationships on stage are different in silence. Nothing is holding the dance or the emotion but the movements and their relationship to each other." The dancer's entrance is as confrontational as that in Opus Jazz but suggests no particular social sphere. They walk onto the stage in a line across the back, then turn, come forward, and look at the audience inscrutably. Their first strident gesture — thrusting their hands forward, palms out — softens as they melt into a slight bow. Without music, their moves — one man sliding a foot out, another relaxing and folding his arms, and so on — seem to come in response to one another. When one ducks and runs, hands seeming to brush something unpleasant from around her head, the others follow suit. The fact that they can't rely on music makes them seem preternaturally aware, listening for the sound of a footfall, sensing a stirring in the air, watching out of the corner of their eyes.
The ballet's striking duet has something of the same feeling as the duet in Balanchine's 1957 Agon. The man slowly manipulates the woman into cruelly uncomfortable positions, surveying the results of his molding and pondering the next move. The beginning is almost like a dark modern version of the moment in Swan Lake, Act II, when the Swan Queen sits folded over with one foot stretched out in front of her, and Prince Siegfried gently bends, takes her hands, and raises her onto one delicate pointe. Here, the woman is facedown on the floor; she lifts her bracing hands and, arched up in extreme tension, twists to look from side to side. After she has slid one leg around into a split, her partner pulls her into a sitting position and, brusquely but without rancor, folds her arms behind her and bends her head back. Seconds later, he presses down on her lifted palms, testing how far this one, now that one, will lower. Even after she stands, everything looks difficult, uncomfortable. Their rhythms become those of a sparring match, the two watching each other's steps, she hurling herself at him like a projectile; but in the end, he carries her off nestled in his arms like a child.
You can almost hear music during a men's quintet; their bold unison struts and jumps in place, as well as their athletic combats, beat out a rhythm. In contrast to their brisk, macho display, four women dream in a pool of light, sweetly helping one another into arabesques and making soft gestures that suggest they're pulling sounds out of one ear, then another; even when they strike out in space, weave a "London Bridge," or pose like pinup girls — one leg straight, the other coyly bent — they seem docile. The next movement contrasts partners supporting each other in slow, smooth balances (three pairs: man-woman, man-man, woman-woman, plus one extra woman) with various of them leaving one relationship to walk matter-of-factly into another or exit the stage. One person always does the sequence unsupported, while another, far away, partners air.
The last section reminds the audience that this is a community of dancers. It begins like a warm-up with one man stretching up, then bending, over and bouncing to relax his muscles. The exercises escalate until what seem like hordes of dancers are bounding across the stage, flying into lifts. But they finish by reprising moments we've seen before, and, in a line again, they repeat their opening gestures, turn, and walk away into blackness.
When the company presented Moves in New York in 1961, John Martin said it was the Jets and Sharks gone "arty." But in Copenhagen, the critic of Politiken wrote, "It's like having lost one sense and having another sharpened." The work further formalized and, to a degree, balleticized the choreographer's vision of alienated young people.
Today's dance audiences may need to be reminded how innovative Ballets: U.S.A. seemed in its day, especially in Europe. In the end, the company garnered exactly the responses that ANTA and the State Department hoped for and justified its mission as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. Houses were packed. Belgrade added a Sunday matinee to the four performances already planned, and tickets sold out within an hour of the announcement. Julian Holland's review of the company's London opening, titled "The Greatest Thing in Ballet for Twenty Years," noted that "There was Dame Margot Fonteyn clapping her hands ten minutes after curtain fall," and suggested that the Foreign Office cancel the dancers' visas so, they'd have to stay indefinitely. Le Figaro also mentioned the enthusiastic responses of Parisian theater and dance luminaries. The critic of Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel announced that
None of the illustrious ensembles of the new world has loosened the ties to the classic tradition of Europe like this one and none has more unmistakably turned nationality into movement. The nonchalance and, when it matters, the terse, unchangeable consciousness. The self-irony and the naturalness of taking possession of space.
The "tour analysis" that reported triumphs and difficulties country by country summed up BUSA's impact in words sure to delight U.S. government circles:
There have been brilliant successes before and since — symphony orchestras, choral groups, jazz ensembles, other dance companies, and so on. But only "Ballets: USA" was hailed everywhere as something new, fresh, original, and inherently American, growing out of and depicting the vitality of American life and art, and more, acclaim for an American creative genius.
Robbins weathered the four-and-a-half-month tour and its preliminaries with unusual grace, agreeing to interviews and preparing statements about his creative process ("[I]t's like rolling a snowball down hill, not quite sure what kind of a figure you are going to have at the end of it or what kind of patterns you're going to leave behind you as you go along"). He went out on a limb with a program essay to prime audiences ("We in America dress, eat, think, talk and walk differently from any other people. We also dance differently"). As a goodwill gesture, he handed out boxes of tights and ballet slippers in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Israel. He waived his usual fees for the USIA film and agreed to let the Yugoslavian television station broadcast Opus Jazz so all those who couldn't get into the theater could see it. He delighted a state department official by arranging, while in Reykjavík, a scholarship at the School of American Ballet for a seventeen-year-old Icelandic dancer, Helgi Tomasson.
As usual, Robbins snarled at certain dancers when under rehearsal stress, while confessing to another, "You know, I have no control over it....When I start working, my focus is so intent on what I want that everything else is an interference. Everything else is a bother, and I push it away. I don't see it. I lash out. I do. It's not good. I can't help it." Yet he fraternized with them as if he were their age instead of twenty years their senior. He invited his favorites to share his Spoleto quarters. While rehearsing in New York, he, Muriel Bentley, James Moore, and designer Bob Mackintosh formed the Alte Kocker Kosher Kasha Kard Klub, a Friday-night group to play poker or hearts that included occasional mystery guests such as Stephen Sondheim and Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick and expanded to games of hide-and-seek or Sardines (one of Jerry's favorites). And he was tremendously proud of "his" dancers. He refused to attend a press conference luncheon with just a few of them in Salzburg; all twenty must come, or none. To Leland Hayward, he praised, as well, lighting designer Nananne Porcher, pianist Betty Walberg, and Jeannot Cerrone, the company's manager ("a treasure, a diamond mine, and the Big Father of us all, and a wonderful person all put together. I have never seen anyone work so hard...even moving luggage.").
Robbins seems to have enjoyed himself tremendously, despite the hassles. He visited historic sites in Israel. He ran into Bernstein in Salzburg ("The kissing bandit was at his best," he wrote Fizdale). A small diary that he kept off and on has the following entry for Thursday, July 23: "Fabulous day at Speigle's [producer Sam Spiegel] yacht. 11:30 Pat [Dunn, of whom he was becoming enamored], Tom [Abbott], Betty [Walberg], Normans & Stones [Jay Norman and Gwen Lewis were married; so were Erin Martin and production stage manager Tom Stone] — off to Cap Ferrat — swam and waterskied — bravo! ate great meal on boat slept — swam, skied, sunned — off to Menton for dinner there then back around 12. Just beautiful the whole thing. Incredible life can be such a joyous thing with friends."
Fortitude was called for on many occasions. He cracked a rib in Belgrade. At the last minute before the company was to fly from Stockholm to West Berlin, a U.S. Embassy official in the latter city balked at the flight plan: The airplane was scheduled to land in Communist East Berlin; the company would have to pass through the Brandenburg Gate on foot to waiting buses, which seemed to "invite adverse propaganda." In the absence of any other offered plan, BUSA boarded. An embassy official in Copenhagen managed to have the plane land in Hamburg, where the company had to wait for eight hours, arriving in Berlin at 1:30 A.M. Another Cold War snafu developed around the trip to Warsaw.
En route from Athens to the Edinburgh Festival in stormy weather, the small plane carrying BUSA's scenery, costumes, and some of the company members' personal effects went down some fifty yards off the Italian coast, with no loss of life. Everyone rose to the occasion, including friends in the London company of West Side Story. ANTA came up with financial support. The dancers and others foraged in Edinburgh department stores for substitute clothes, practice wear, ballet slippers, and sneakers that could, in a pinch, cover the repertory (Afternoon of a Faun, New York Export: Opus Jazz, Moves, and The Concert). The New York City Ballet sent its Faun set.
Robbins, at his charming best, made a curtain speech when the company opened at the Edinburgh Festival, describing what the audience would have seen had all the proper costumes, scenery, and props been there. Then he and some of the crew went down to London, the next tour stop. Ben Shahn flew over from New York, and in the week before the company was due to open in Covent Garden, the scene shop there reproduced his drops for Opus Jazz.
"The dancers themselves were magnificent," Robbins wrote Bob Schnitzer. "All of them went to work, made hats, painted butterfly wings, sewed snaps, cut costumes, put in elastics, and you would have been very proud of their not only rising to the situation, but, in Edinburgh, [they] actually surpassed themselves dancing like they've never danced before." He couldn't resist emphasizing for the State Department's benefit: "We were all very proud of being Americans, I can assure you." He had lost his luggage in the crash too. In London, Jenny Nicholson Cross, Robert Graves's daughter, who was one of the Spoleto Festival's two press representatives, bought him shoes and socks (and caviar). After BUSA had gone on to Copenhagen, Tony Mordente, in London with West Side Story, flew over bearing trousers.
The dancers' resourcefulness certainly did them no harm in the eyes of the press. One Edinburgh critic raved that "Jerome Robbins' Ballets: U.S.A. is tremendous; it lives, it works, it's about them, it's about you, it's about dancing, it's about music, it's one of the three most important ballet companies to visit Britain in thirty years."
Ed Sullivan and Robbins seemed to have established amicable professional relations in the years since Sullivan had exhorted the House Committee on Un-American Activities to summon Robbins to testify. Obviously he approved of Robbins's performance as a friendly witness. The Broadway Jets had performed "Cool" on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958. On November 29, 1959, after BUSA's triumphant tour, Sullivan presented the company in excerpts from The Concert, fulsomely inviting Jerry to stand up from his seat amid the studio audience and be applauded.
Robbins's professional life was marked by the impetuous way in which he would express interest in a project and then pull back. This extended to his private life. He loved to be needed but sometimes regretted offering help. During BUSA's week in Brussels, he composed an extraordinary letter to Robert Fizdale. Fizdale's relationship with the designer Arthur Weinstein had just foundered, and the pianist was desolate. Jerry poured out sympathy and wondered tentatively if he and Fizdale might forge a closer relationship and whether doing so might imperil their friendship, whether the "Arthur G. [Gold] thing" would work out, and whether Fizdale could stand Jerry's personality over time ("God knows I'm a lot to handle, but I feel you'd bring out the best in me"). "You mustn't worry about me or this letter," he went on, "I mean if you weren't absolutely honest in your heart & reply we wouldn't be as strong friends as we are now. What I mean to say is that I love you very much, that if this does or does not happen will not change my feelings toward you because I don't think I could ever feel rejected by you. I guess I really love you so much with a deep deep friendship that the move to become lovers is a little step — & that if it did not happen would not change the base and strength of my feelings for you."
He worried over the letter the minute he'd composed it and the next day added a note explaining that he had made the gesture because of his love for Bobby and distress at his suffering. But, he said, he hadn't thought out "the consequences or actualities." Was he withdrawing the offer? Did he send either letter?
In 1959, he responded to another friend's need, and this time he didn't go back on a spontaneously generous offer. The marriage of Leland and Slim Hayward — two people he loved very much — was breaking up. He thought of them as "practically my foster parents." Slim was the needier, the one being left. Robbins cabled her to come to Spoleto. "I have to work all the time," he told her, "...but you can be in the theater, eat every meal with me, and never leave my side. If that's what you want to do." She came. In her autobiography, Slim — by then Nancy, Lady Keith — wrote that
That was just the beginning of his kindness. Once Jerry had finished his work in Spoleto we rented a car and drove all over northern Italy. We stayed in funny, small hotels, stopped at quaint restaurants, looked at beautiful things. We were on a safari to track down every Piero della Francesca we could find, and we saw quite a few of them. The trip was a great comfort, as if the world had reached out to put its arms around me.
Perhaps it was during this excursion that Robbins's fascination with the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca began. "He's so cool — so objective — he's like Balanchine," he wrote years later. Like the ideal Balanchine dancer, whom the master likened to angels, the ravishing heavenly celebrants in Piero's nativities do not comment on the message they deliver or the joyous event they praise. It was, in part, the wealth of Quattrocento art that kept drawing Jerry back to Italy.
Robbins's commitment to Ballets: U.S.A. remained strong, despite obstacles. Menotti asked him to be the festival's artistic director for dance for the summer of 1960, although a letter from Robbins to Richard Buckle indicates that Menotti did not invite the company. In any case, Robbins, adroit as he was at juggling jobs, couldn't have managed both a Spoleto season and the filming of West Side Story. And, while he was busy with the movie, he received news from ANTA's Robert Schnitzer that State Department sponsorship for a 1961 tour was not possible. The powers in government wanted to "balance the program," feeling that orchestras and dance companies had received the "lion's share" of the overseas assignments and that the focus for the next two years should be on dramas and musical comedies.
Enter Rebecca Harkness, the widow of Standard Oil Corporation heir and philanthropist William Hale Harkness, whose death had left her a multimillionaire. At first it seemed as if this ballet-struck Lady Bountiful wanted to corral Robbins to head the "American Ballet Company of Monaco," which she proposed to establish in December 1961. Instead, she was persuaded to sponsor BUSA in its 1961 Spoleto appearances and subsequent European tour. Robbins, while agonizing over the editing of the West Side Story film, planned a company of twenty-four, trying to reassemble his dancers and inviting others to audition. A dozen BUSA veterans signed on. Among the newcomers were Glen Tetley (as a guest artist), Scott Douglas, Veronika Mlakar, Richard Gain, Susan Borree and Francia Russell of the New York City Ballet, NYCB apprentice Kay Mazzo, and, fresh from the West Side Story movie, Edward Verso.
For what was to be the final season of Ballets: U.S.A., Robbins mounted Interplay, Afternoon of a Faun (most often featuring John Jones and the delicate fifteen-year-old Mazzo), and The Cage (Mlakar and Martin shared the role of the Novice). The new work was Events — another look at an alienated society, with a score by Robert Prince, which, Robbins wrote Nora Kaye, was "just the end...more of one piece than the first score and much more weird twelve toneish full of all new kinds of sounds and dynamic theatrical sections."
Some spectators thought they had detected an allusion to the atomic bomb in New York Export: Opus Jazz, perhaps at the end of the first section when the clustered dancers all look skyward and then tumble down. The reference was even stronger in Events. This is not surprising. Between 1958 and 1961, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States underwent a series of tensions and crises — over the status of Berlin, over Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba (which came to a head in the Bay of Pigs episode in the spring of 1961), over what appeared to be the Soviets' considerable lead in missile capability. Concerns about the threat of imminent thermonuclear war were escalating, and Soviet rockets could carry large bombs. In Events, which Robbins conceived in eight flowing together sections, he approached several kinds of fallout. His rough notes for himself speak of a society both numbed by crises and waiting for the next one to strike:
The fall out (non-radioactive) that we are subjected to seems to be quite subjective and not connected directly or consciously to any nuclear explosions (testings). A deep and pervading radiation seems to be abroad — the subjecting of humans to day to day living crammed full of views and acceptance of an unstable teetering world.
Four dancers stood out. Something about the relationship of these protagonists to the group evokes memories of the four protagonists of Robbins's 1951 Age of Anxiety. They seem to be participants and leaders, as well as wandering observers in a society at risk. The crowd's bouts of fevered gaiety and panic and its brief worshiping of an inappropriate god also recall the earlier ballet. Shahn's backdrop for the first section suggests a stylized array of buildings. In a silent, hard-to-see black-and-white record film of Events (with most of the performers in rehearsal attire), Patricia Dunn, Glen Tetley, Edward Verso, and Richard Gain slump on a haphazardly placed group of chairs, from which they erupt in nervous, jagged spurts, then relax again. Everything they do looks edgy, cautious. Verso seems to sense danger from above. Others join them in a version of the Twist that is so somnambulistic as to be barely recognizable. At one point, Dunn stretches and preens in a disaffected way, arms clasped overhead. A man seated at her feet suddenly snaps his legs around hers like pincers. She seems oblivious. As he scrabbles about her, she wipes her cheek, strokes her neck, lifts her arms again.
Two of the episodes tell dark tales. In one, Tetley very explicitly seduces the younger Verso. The boy is restless, clearly an innocent. The man wanders in. At first they communicate in looks and gestures, but then Tetley walks Verso into a series of sexually charged negotiations that also, symbolically perhaps, suggest lessons in flying — pulling one of Verso's arms and one foot up backward, forcing him to arch until his foot almost touches his head; lifting him; tipping him upside down; finally laying him on his belly, taking his hand, and running in a circle to make him spin. When Tetley leaves, Verso makes a gesture that looks angry or disgusted, knocks a couple of chairs over, and sprawls across two others. In his notes, Robbins titled this part "A Walk in the Air." (Erin Martin also learned Verso's part. Perhaps Robbins was uncertain how audiences would respond to a male pas de deux; perhaps he was experimenting with onstage gender roles for his own edification.) The next section he called "An Entertainment," and there's little doubt that he intended a statement about racism by casting John Jones as one separate from the others. The goingson prefigure the emergence of "radical chic," whose beginning was officially marked by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein's 1970 party in support of the Black Panthers. The crowd admires Jones, mocks him, butters him up, and, finally, forgets him. When he dances, fast and wild and showy, the others, flanking him, stare and imitate. At one point two men grab him and bat him back and forth between them, as if he were some kind of toy. While he dances with a woman, they clap his rhythms, beat on pretend drums. As if playing the savage he thinks they think he is, he pretends to devour his partner. They attack, then stroke him. He scatters them by swinging a chair and letting it go. He's carried off like a champion in a rhythmically clapping procession, but as they exit, he gradually slips off backward and slides to the floor. Only the four notice and stop. He gets up, walks slowly away, and then aims at them a jitter of gestures with an angrily ironic Uncle-Tom edge.
In another scene, a woman (Kay Mazzo) is lifted high; people swing in on crutches, dropping them as if in the hope of a miracle cure by this temporary goddess, then dragging them away, little better than before. At the very end, a curtain billows down and the atmosphere becomes more frantic. People cluster, then break apart, race about, leap, and fall quivering. Some sit on the chairs and twitch, some stand limply. The curtain rises again. Fragments from the earlier sections recur like passing memories. Near the end, a man runs in, slips, falls, and wriggles, and Shahn's large cutout of a torso with a bent arm and fist descends on him from above.
(Shahn was not happy with the "falling man" and offered to redesign it for free but wrote that he was "pleased and profoundly moved by the entire work. I am wholly convinced that you have extended the scope of ballet as an art form, and I am happy to have played some part in that realization.")
Walter Terry noted in the Herald Tribune the resemblance between Events and Age of Anxiety and posited "a quest to find something, bad or good, in a world of uncertainty." But this foursome is not a group brought together by chance embarking on a search for truth; these comrades — if that's what they are — are themselves stalkers and victims in a world dominated by fear. And the choreographer leaves us in no doubt as to what terrifies them. Richard Buckle wrote in London's Sunday Times that "The bomb which was threatening in Opus Jazz falls at last, and we think, christmas, Robbins has the bomb like some choreographers have gypsies." Events was flawed, but no one could deny its flashes of brilliance. When the company opened in New York that fall with two different programs, Terry spoke of "many marvelous and pertinent and even powerful episodes" but thought that "the final impression also includes a realization that things seemed a bit forced and that a jazz dance vocabulary was pushed beyond its inherent assets." Despite his remark about Gypsies, Buckle — who saw the ballet both in Spoleto, before some set pieces were eliminated, and in London — praised it: "The choreography as a whole is so finely wrought, fitting so loosely in the brash and thrilling post-jazz score of Robert Prince, and certain episodes shine out with such poetic intensity, and there is so much drama and invention in it that the ballet is a kind of landmark."
Robbins may have come to think of Events as too literally linked to nuclear disaster. Of the three major works he made for Ballets: U.S.A., it has never been revived, and on May 19, 1962, at Madison Square Garden, as part of a birthday salute to John F. Kennedy, Ballets: U.S.A. made its final appearance.
Copyright © 2004 by Deborah Jowitt
What People are Saying About This
Ms. Jowitt's book has the authenticity that comes only from being there.
Opportunist and genius, tyrant and self-doubter, lover and enemy, Jerome Robbins may be one of the most complex and protean characters ever to dominate our theatrical and dance life. Deborah Jowitt's biography is an amazing feat of research and writing that keeps a steady focus on the staggering amount of high-quality work produced by this tormented whirlwind. I read it in a state of sweet appreciation of the past and chagrin over the present.
Distinguished in her field, compassionate and generous, Deborah Jowitt reveals just about everything Jerome Robbins would have wanted known about his work, particularly in ballet. In less detail, she also reveals more than he probably would have wanted known about his conflicted life and his shifting demons.
Deborah Jowitt's book on Jerome Robbins is a dignified and thoroughly objective study of an extraordinary man who changed the direction of twentieth-century musical theater. It captures the essence of this haunted perfectionist whose choices in life were as fraught with self-doubt as those made in the rehearsal room. Paralleling the fruits of his creative brilliance with the fallout of personal decisions, Jowitt gives us a three-dimensional look at a charismatic and complex character. I thought I knew Jerome Robbins well — I was wrong.
Deborah Jowitt's biography of the 'many selves' of Jerome Robbins is essential reading for anyone interested in American musical theater and ballet. As someone lucky enough to have worked with this genius, I can only say that Jowitt's re-creation of him while creating is so vivid that it gave me an ocular migraine.