I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [111]
Some time in the early 1960s, Quentin contacted me. “I’m planning to buy a new camera, and my old one would be great for you, Jock-o. Do you want it?” Aware Quentin didn’t plan a gift, I asked, “How much?”
For something like forty bucks, I bought his Bell and Howell 16 mm cartridge-load camera. After all, it had traveled all over Africa, seen and filmed a lot. I tested it out with a few home movies of Miracle George misbehaving in Riverside Park with his five-year-old girlfriend, Katherine Hamer. I planned to use the camera intensively on NYCB’s first tour of the Soviet Union, scheduled for the fall of 1962.1
RUSSIA
Almost forty years before, Balanchine had left Russia. Now he was going back. I packed an entire suitcase with film cartridges and, with my roommate for the tour, Shaun O’Brien, planned how to record our adventures in Europe and the Soviet Union.
At my first company class, in September of 1949, Shaun stood in front of me at the barre, wearing lime-green ballet shoes. Dramatic and flamboyant, he had enormous turnout—I remember him doing ronds de jambe en l’air, staring intently over his shoulder at his lime-green foot tracing circles in the air. Glamorous, muscular, and handsome, he became a mentor to me. I hung around him, like a groupie, and he became my closest friend in the company.
Shaun’s dancing was neat, clean, and fluid, but his genius was doing character roles—he was brilliant as Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker, and in the ballet Harlequinade he was without equal. His special talent was commedia dell’arte characters—the fat buffoon, the comic grandfather. Lincoln never missed a performance of Harlequinade when Shaun was dancing. “High art,” Lincoln called it. In life, he was affected and fey, but never onstage—unless the role demanded it. His performance as Dr. Coppélius in Coppélia is legendary.
With Shaun’s wicked Irish sense of humor and ability to tell a story, he could elevate the mundane to the hilarious, and would regale you for hours with a story about a cab ride. His anger could be devastating (when I was complaining in the dressing room and being a brat, he once cowed me, bellowing, “Oh, blow it out your ass!”). There wasn’t a topic Shaun couldn’t dredge up information on; as you conversed, the more he seemed to know. Passing a statue in a plaza or museum anywhere in Europe, Shaun would spend the next twenty minutes describing relevant details and the entire history of the artwork. With his partner, Cris Alexander, a Broadway gypsy, superb artist and photographer, slim and elegant, crackling with intelligence, they made a partnership in life for every couple to envy. Our second son, Christopher, is named for Cris Alexander.
Partying with Cris Alexander and Shaun O’Brien, London, early 1980s (image credit 12.2)
THE PAPER BAG
Shaun O’Brien’s treatment for a filmed travelogue of NYCB’s tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, 1962: Suggested Scenes
I. About twelve inches high, and six wide, your ordinary brown paper bag sits, opened, on a table at the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel in Hamburg. The silverware and crystal gleam, embroidered napkins await unfolding. A pair of pale, delicate hands close the bag, carefully pleating its top, folding exactly twice. Could something be in it? It is lifted out of frame, then the camera pans to record the décor of the restaurant and hotel.
II. Off stage at the Staatsoper in Hamburg, ballerinas crush rosin with their toe shoes. Next to the rosin box sits the paper bag, observing.
III. Berlin Opera House. The paper bag watches