I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [124]
He’d been to the dingy apartment of a friend, “two rooms, tiny, dirty,” Balanchine said. His friend very proudly said, “We have it alone, George. We don’t even have to share the toilet. Do you want to make pee-pee?” Balanchine sighed, “Next week, I escape, you know. Go back for little while to New York. But back in time for Tbilisi.”
A few nights later, Melissa and I danced Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, and I looked forward to proving that my recovery was complete. When the curtain came down on Concerto Barocco, there was a smattering of applause. As Melissa and I waited in the wings for our entrance, I remember thinking, “Oh my God, they don’t like us; we’re going to flop.” It turned out to be the reverse. We danced the ballet. After my variation, I took a series of six bows. Milly and I spent more time taking bows than the eight or nine minutes the ballet took to dance.
Balanchine stormed backstage, apoplectic, and accosted me in the wings. Milly had escaped to her dressing room to prepare for the next ballet. He was almost incoherent. “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux is not for us! It is circus!” and “It’s Melissa’s fault!” He’d wanted to see Diana Adams doing those steps he had choreographed for her, and not anyone else.7 “Jacques, you can have this ballet for concerts and television! I’m taking it out of the company’s repertoire. I don’t want to see it. I give it to you.”
Despite his tirade, I was exhilarated. A little over nine weeks before, I had been a bloody, broken pile in front of the Hamburg Staatsoper. Tonight, I was back to the skills of the pre–streetcar smash.
The next day, I said au revoir to a shifty-eyed, nervous Balanchine, who was implementing his escape plan. “Mr. B, last night, you were so distraught. I know you didn’t mean what you said about Milly and Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, about taking it out of the repertoire and letting me have it for concerts and TV. Give my love to Tanny and please go see Carrie in New York. We’ll see you when you get back in Tbilisi.” He dropped his head and mumbled, looking like a wet dog being reprimanded, then left. He skipped our closing night in Leningrad.
Floating around in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, so happy, 1962 (image credit 12.5)
Kiev is the city that claims, “Russia was born here.” Assorted Viking princes—Vladimir, Oleg, and others—extended their powers over the Slavic cities, and established the river port city of Kiev as their capital. For a few centuries, it was the most important cultural and intellectual city in Eastern Europe. Built on a bluff that slopes down to the river Dnieper, it was home to the Cathedral of St. Sophia. Kiev is the seat of the Ukrainian church, and honeycombed beneath the church, as well as the city, are tomb-niches connected by miles of passages. Shaun, determined to film a paper bag scene in one of those tombs, requested a visit. And also a visit to Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the city, notorious for the over 100,000 people slaughtered there by the Nazi SS. A year before, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko had written about Babi Yar, and many among us had read his poem. Our Russian guides were reluctant to admit that the slaughter had been primarily Jews. “Mostly Russian comrades,” they’d insist, “our people, not just Jews, it was anyone who spoke out against the Nazis.”
“Babi Yar, you can visit on your own. But we will arrange for you a tour of the catacombs,” said our Intourist guide. Outside the bluff, we lined up single file to enter a doorway and snake our way through the underground maze. Off to the sides of our tunnel were niches containing mummies—at times, a pile of something wrapped in rags, other times a carved wooden figure covered with jewels and gilded crowns. “These jewels are paste. The real ones were stolen from the people by monks,” our lady guide informed us. As we inched along, she would point to some niche on the right and announce, “This is not real mummy; it is fabrication.” Then, pointing to the left, “This is real mummy. Pass this down to your comrades, please.” So, through the tunnels of the catacombs,