I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [102]
Balanchine was our God. It’s not so easy to explain. We didn’t pray to him. We asked for help for our dancing because he was all knowing, all seeing, you believed with all your heart that what he saw in your dancing was absolutely true, and right. No one else I have ever known had such a clear vision of what we were each struggling to do.
The enormity of this only became apparent to me much later.
What a luxury—a God, a leader, you believe without doubt, and can follow in blind faith. You can accomplish 100% more because you don’t have to question every move you make … just follow … As soon as you comprehended & executed one more step in the progression he had set up for you—Mr. B was quick to give assurances.
Each individual was different and he never tried to make the techniques the same for each, and his goals for each dancer were different—using their differences in physical and mental make-up to bring out their individuality rather than make a dance mold for all.
Everyone goes on and on about “the Balanchine technique”—analyzing it to death … it was so simple.—Each dancer must learn to move as fast as possible … jump as high as possible … use your feet so that they were like a hand … arabesque as high as possible. This was America & his dream of America was BIG—BOLD—FREE … and in some cases RAUNCHY.
That’s why I was so shocked to see him petty about Cranko, or jealous because Ashton was working with Diana Adams, or pissed off because he didn’t think Birgit Cullberg’s ballet Medea was as good as the applause it received, or peeved that William Dollar’s ballet The Duel was always a smashing success. His own ballet Minkus Pas de Trois, a star vehicle for André Eglevsky, he later claimed he hated because the Minkus music was so bad. The truth was, though, the audience screamed for Eglevsky. And Balanchine’s reaction to the brilliance of Jerome Robbins’s The Cage, choreographed to Stravinsky music, the turf Balanchine claimed as his own, was sad. If the ballet was being performed, he would avoid the stage, and if I mentioned “Jerry’s Cage,” he would look away and change the subject. On the other hand, HOORAY! If Balanchine didn’t have those flaws, he’d be hard to take, too perfect. I mean, thank God there were those streaks of pettiness.
Of the two, the more sympathetic, to me, was Lincoln—a flawed savant, stumbling through a minefield. Being subjected to the wild oscillating stylus of his emotional electrocardiogram did not put me off. I’d want to calm him and stroke him, “It’s all right, Lincoln.” But when Balanchine revealed a jealousy, I’d want to deny it, walk away, tuck any criticism of him in the bottom of the drawer and forget it.
“Miracle” George
The birth of our son George had interrupted Carrie’s career, but she got back to dancing with NYCB in Australia, and when Nutcracker performances ended our fall season in January 1959, she took two-year-old George to visit her family in Highland Park, Texas. While there, she noticed a tiny, pebble-like growth on the inside of his right nostril. Off they went to the hospital to have it checked. The doctors removed the pebble and did a biopsy of the tissue. The results were devastating: “It’s rhabdomyosarcoma, a deadly cancer.” Carrie grabbed George and flew back to New York, to find me in bed with the measles.
At Lenox Hill Hospital, Dr. Jordan brought in Jim Gould. A second biopsy confirmed rhabdomyosarcoma and further revealed that some of the cells at the edge of the growth had been cut in half, indicating that the cancer had not been “encapsulated,” and had probably spread.
Within a week, a handful of doctors—all experts in their varied fields—held a closed-door meeting to confer on George’s diagnosis and treatment. We had been waiting outside for more than an hour when a long-faced Jim Gould came out. “This kind of cancer is rare and very deadly. There’s nothing we can recommend—not radiation or surgery. Radiation will burn and scar him terribly. As for surgery, even the chief surgeon