I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [126]
The police had gone to our hotel and taken all the film footage found in our room—including my cassettes. “They stuck me in a cell,” Shaun continued, “while they developed the film! I kept thinking I’d be released. But by six o’clock, I was terrified. They took me to a room with three generals, glittering in medals!” Shaun recounted how they had plied him with questions about Kennedy, the U.S. government, and how he felt about communism. “I have no opinion, I’m an artiste. I know nothing. Balyet, balyet, Balanchine!” Finally, one of the generals spoke up, in perfect English. “We have watched the film you have taken, and what is the paper bag in front of church? And if you are artist, what is so artistic about a toilet bowl flushing?” “I’m sunk now,” Shaun thought, but answered, “Well, it’s what you call a cutaway. You zoom in on the waters of a flushing toilet bowl, and come up with the image of a windshield wiper in the rain, and find you’re in a new city …” Eventually, late in the evening, they returned all the confiscated film and my cassettes to Shaun and dumped him at our hotel’s dining-room door.
In 2010, when I recounted this incident to my Russian friend Grisha, he angrily commented, “It’s no different now. The police!” he yelled. “They need to discover spies—if there are no real ones, they invent one! That’s how they get promoted; uncover a spy, move up a notch in power! Today it’s a terrorist!”
Mr. B showed up at the end of our engagement in Kiev. I’d exited the stage between variations, breathing heavily in the wings, dripping with sweat, and there he was. I wet him with my hug, and just before I went back onstage for the finale, he called out, “In New York, I see Carrie.” Balanchine returned with more than just good news. He had a stack of mail for everyone, and from Carrie came a photograph Cris Alexander had taken of our Chris. Not yet three years old, he sits at Hermione Gingold’s makeup table, adorned with her costume jewelry, a diamond tiara on his head. Taken with his own beauty, he beams the essence of delight. I made myself a pest showing it to everyone.
Chris d’Amboise, 1962 (image credit 12.6)
Two days later, we were in Tbilisi, Georgia, home of Balanchine’s ancestors. Also where Vakhtang Chabukiani reigned supreme.
TBILISI, GEORGIA
Chabukiani was a great star of the Soviet ballet, and a supernova in his native Georgia. I had been inspired by old black-and-white footage of him in the film Stars of the Russian Ballet. I watched it over and over again at the bygone Cameo movie theater, below Forty-second Street, on Seventh Avenue. Nicholas Kopeikine had played piano accompaniment for Chabukiani on his tour of the States in the 1930s, and was a fan as well. He often shook his jowls as he declared to me, “Oooh, ooooh … you are the American Chabukiani. Oooooh.”8
The first night in Tbilisi, I went to see Chabukiani dance in a three-act ballet, Laurencia. He had a fabulous, charismatic personality onstage, and exuded energy, like a roaring furnace. The audience screamed for him. Most of the dancers in the company were not of high quality. I wondered, “Could it be that he doesn’t want good dancers around him? Or maybe he’s just a lousy teacher, if he teaches them at all.” I went back to visit him in his dressing room. Like so many charismatic male dancers, you think they’re over six feet onstage, then on meeting them, you find out they’re half a foot less than you’d imagined. Chabukiani was short, about fifty-four years old, slim, sinewy, and sort of ugly. He greeted me graciously.
A couple of days later, I saw him dance in his ballet Othello. He played the title role in blackface, with some kind of white paste smeared on his teeth, a sort of thick Elmer’s