I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [112]
IV. Vienna, inside St. Stephen’s Cathedral. We see a shadowy figure place the paper bag on a pew, next to local patrons, enjoying an organ concert.
At the School of American Ballet, Vladimiroff had a request. He had heard NYCB would leave in the spring of 1962 for a tour of Europe that would culminate with some two months behind the Iron Curtain. Vladimiroff regaled me with his memories of the beautiful Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where I would be dancing, and, in particular, he dwelt on the dance studio above the stage. How glorious it was, with its decoration and enormous high ceiling. How he had spent a lifetime exercising there, honing his art. He sketched me a map of the studio, located his exact spot at the barre—his place—and handed me the map. “When you do barre at Maryinsky, do it in my place.”
For close to four months, the paper bag traveled with NYCB from theater to hotel, opera house, museum, and stage, starting in New York and ending in Baku, Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea. Shaun’s inventive imagination garnered many of the company’s dancers to star in his paper bag travelogue.
Our tour started in Germany at the Hamburg opera house. Hamburg was a sister city to New York, and Balanchine’s ballets were an important part of the Hamburg Ballet’s repertoire. The intendant, Rolf Liebermann, was a Balanchine groupie.
While there, Shaun recruited me to star in his travelogue, but a smashing event took me out of the picture.
HAMBURG
Thursday, August 30, 1962. A fantastic rehearsal with Balanchine. I floated through the new choreography in the first movement of Symphony in C. He had decided to replace musical repeats previously deleted and had invented stunning variations for the ballerina and me.
The company had a free night, so Vicky Simon, a ballerina friend, agreed to be my date for dinner. A charming brunette, she met me at the streetcar stop in front of the Staatsoper. I was delighting in the life and light of Vicky’s darting brown eyes, above a pair of lovely breasts, oblivious to my surroundings.
A streetcar hit me.
A day later, I came out of a coma at the Hafenkrankenhaus, a hospital in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district. With multiple ribs broken on my left side and one on my right, each breath hurt, and so did the hole in the back of my head, which matched another in the front. The right side of my face was steak tartare, scraped from forehead to chin. I thought to myself, “Maybe better to die.”
Another day later, less foggy, I became aware that Betty Cage and Mel Kiddon were holding my hands. A comforting pair—Mel, of course, was a doctor, and Betty, a witch, but a good one. Swarthy, with intense brown eyes and hair, she was rumored to be spiced with Native American and African blood. She read the Tarot, and always had a prophecy. At her dinner parties, the exotic foods she prepared were followed by séances and Ouija board magic. Her most successful spells, though, kept Lincoln’s madness and Balanchine’s creative genius in balance, so that somehow, NYCB did not fragment. I needed her magic and Mel’s medicine.
According to the police report, a streetcar had rounded a corner and slammed into my back. Witnesses described how the impact sent me flying into Vicky and then crash-landing onto the pavement, where I slid along, for a while, on my forehead and face. Poor Vicky went airborne, too, and eventually thudded down and smashed her face into the curb, splitting her lip and knocking out her front teeth. Midflight, Vicky took down two overweight German Hausfrauen like dominoes, and they joined the aerials, windmilling, somersaulting, and, on landing, breaking legs. Mel’s description made me laugh, but not for long; it hurt.
“Your clothes were shredded and we can’t find your shoes!” He seemed delighted. “We think the streetcar knocked you out of them, then ran over them!” Betty finally spoke up in her dry, matter-of-fact monotone: “The report says the streetcar conductor complained, ‘I rang my bells! Why didn’t he hear me?’ ”
“I’m so sorry,