I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [110]
Quentin explained, “The Dark Rapture crew filmed over several days, and the dancing never stopped, day or night.”
The quality of the film was poor, the sound, tinny, but in the parlor of a New York City brownstone in the East Fifties, in 1952, I thrilled to the music and dance in this flickering old film. The clips captured a life force as awesome as Niagara Falls, as natural as a thousand whales cavorting, flopping and smashing their tails on the ocean’s surface, or the thundering migration of a million buffalo across the plains for days on end. In the nineteenth century in America, passenger pigeons once flew so thickly in the sky, they blocked out the sun, and day plants closed their petals, thinking it was night. Roosting at night, the pigeons so covered the branches of the forests that their weight would crack and break tree limbs. The gathering of tribespeople in Dark Rapture was no less monumental—human culture expressed through rituals of music and dance. And, of course, bouncing breasts and genitals were titillating to a teenager. “Well, Jock-o, I’m going to Africa this summer. Do you want to come along?”
Quentin’s passions included book collecting—Charles Darwin and James Joyce, foremost, as well as any account of adventuring in Africa. His idol was the adventurer-explorer Sir Richard Burton, and he snapped up anything written by or about Burton. To finance his indulgences, Quentin gave lectures and showed his movies in prep schools all over England and the United States. He never took a hotel room and avoided paying for any meal. Driving a fancy sports car and sponging off people wherever he went, he’d spend most of the school year enticing teenagers to pay a fee to join him on his next safari. By late spring, perhaps nineteen or twenty youths would have signed up. Their monies covered his and the expedition’s expenses, and any leftover funds helped expand his book collection. Quentin got a free trip and a slew of gofers. “We’ll set up camp here. Who’s going to volunteer to go for water?” Quentin would ask. The boys would also become his film crew, camera and gear carriers. “Jock-o, everybody pitches in.”
“I should go,” I imagined, and saw myself winning the admiration of the natives, cavorting, dancing, and leaping, the white boy soaring over bonfires—naked, naturally. But at the ballet, principal roles were tumbling to me. And there was talk of a European tour after the spring season. “If I go to Africa, I’ll miss ballet class, just when I feel I’m beginning to learn how to dance.” So I put it off. “Maybe someday, Quent.”
Quentin and I became good friends. Quentin drove the Boss crazy, and, later, Carrie, because without notice, he’d appear on the doorstep and say, “I can park my car in the street when I stay with you!” He loved to be catered to. “Oh, at breakfast, I drink a lot of tea, could you keep the kettle on? I take at least twelve or fifteen cups. And it’s got to be hot. Thanks, dear, you make such wonderful tea. Could you get me another pot?”
I introduced him to Jimmy Comiskey, and another lover of books, Dick Boehm. Dick was a buddy, about my age, who attended every performance of ballet and opera in New York City. Dick and Jimmy were automatically added to Quentin’s “Do you mind if I stay with you?” list.
In Milan, during the company’s 1953 Italian tour, Quentin drove up to the theater in a brand-new Austin Healey convertible. “Where can I find Jacques d’Amboise?” he demanded. For the next ten days, he attended every performance, and my fellow dancers ached with envy at my being picked up at the stage door by this mysterious man in his roaring sports car. But he never treated for a thing. I treated him. Tickets to the ballet and our meals.
He wandered in and out of my life for years (and Jimmy’s, too; less so with Dick, as he was more adept at fending Quentin