City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [84]
Balanchine knew how to program one “white” ballet and one sublimely simple pas de deux, then a “difficult” modern work and a bang-up Stars and Stripes high-kicking finale. I suppose he was teaching us (without meaning to) the concessions that even the most serious artist (visual or literary) had to make to “show business” and crowd-pleasing if he or she was going to survive and keep an audience’s attention. In a quite different way I suppose he was showing us how the supreme manifestations of the mind require sweat and muscles, how the spatial and temporal meditations of an old man can be realized only by willing young bodies with flushed cheeks and taut rumps and long necks and a good turnout. There was nothing charitable about his collaboration with the young; it was a partnership essential to him and to them, especially since he often created a new ballet “on” particular dancers, tailor-made to their limitations and gifts.
And even the most high-minded balletomane such as me had to acknowledge one drama being played out before our very eyes: Balanchine’s unrequited love for Suzanne Farrell. She was quite literally his Dulcinea, for he had returned to the stage to mime the role of the besotted, aging Don Quixote in a full-evening ballet that had much more story than anything else we’d seen from Balanchine—his own story, of course. Suzanne, who was too good a Catholic girl to sleep with Balanchine, left the company in 1969 with her dancer husband and went off to Europe to join the company of the vulgar, talentless Maurice Béjart with his vast outdoor spectacles complete with dry-ice fog and wind machines worthy of the Third Reich. Béjart’s company was no place for the greatest ballerina of the day—or even for a woman. In his works the hunky men were stripped down to their loincloths and the women bundled away in burkas; everything was as tackily homoerotic as a bad Cocteau porn drawing.
Only six years later did Suzanne Farrell come back to the New York City Ballet. Her return, full of wisdom and tenderness but still sexless, crowned Balanchine’s last days with an unexpected but entirely deserved happiness. This love story, unrequited and, paradoxically, fertile, was a breathtaking drama unfolding for us, his greedy audience.
David had a new lady to squire about and to invite to the ballet—Lillian Hellman. She was then at the height of her fame, since decades after her most successful plays she had begun to write short, punchy memoirs in which she played le beau rôle of quiet heroism. After her death we would all discover that Mary McCarthy had been right—Lillian was a liar. She hadn’t taken money into Central Europe to save Jews in the late 1930s. The person who’d done that was a psychiatrist in Princeton. The two women hadn’t known each other but they did have the same lawyer—who must have told Hellman the story of these brave exploits. Hellman had simply appropriated them. That story, joined to her well-known and well-publicized defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee—”I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions”—had elevated her to the dubious distinction of becoming the Pasionaria of the American Left, though in fact she was an old-fashioned Stalinist without scruples. Obeying Stalin’s party line, she had opposed the U.S. government’s granting of asylum to Trotsky. She admitted to being a Stalinist to her biographer Joan Mellen.
In everyday life she was an appalling person. She would pick a fight with other customers in a store. The New York State Theater had no central aisle, and to get to the best seats one had to slide past a line of seated people. One night, with David accompanying her, Hellman had deliberately aimed her high heel and stabbed the foot of a seated woman, a complete stranger, then cursed her out for howling in pain.
I met her at David’s apartment, where she was extremely nice to me. Strangely enough, she shared one virtue with her greatest enemy, Mary McCarthy. Both