I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [133]
“If I’m an angel, it’s one with tattered wings! And as for floating around with him,” Tanny would gesture to me, “he can only get me off the floor by pinching my waist on the lift.”
With every muse, it was a variation on the same script. Allegra’s reaction—sitting silently, fiddling with her fingers, she’d widen her eyes and look uncomfortable. Diana would sit, erect and unmoving, serene and glacial. Suzanne would lower her eyes, tilt her head, look modest, and pout a bit. Karin, totally open, would blast out, “Oh! That sounds exciting! Vonderful! Vhat music?” Tanny, self-effacing, would quip, “Come on, George, I’ll never be an angel. You must be blind.”
Before I was born, Balanchine had been married to Tamara Geva, then Alexandra Danilova (in a common-law arrangement). When I was doing my first pliés at the barre at SAB in the early forties, Vera Zorina was his wife, and we hardly ever saw Mr. B during that time. He was off to Hollywood, Broadway, or Europe, choreographing for Zorina—until they broke up. In 1946, he married Maria Tallchief, and made marvelous ballets for her, but their home life was miserable. “I was very unhappy living with Maria,” he reminisced. “It was so difficult. She would play poker with friends from her Ballet Russe days—in our bedroom—til four in the morning. I would have to sleep on cot in hall.”
No ballet dancer from the United States had achieved international stature before Maria, and Balanchine, with his ballets, did that for her. The English had their Fonteyn; the French, Chauviré; the Russians, Ulanova; the Cubans, Alonso; and now the U.S. could claim their Tallchief. It helped that Maria was a princess. Her mother, a Scotch-Irish lady, had married a full-blooded Native American chief of the Osage tribe. Maria was grand in every way—the whole company loved it when she would come for company class in the morning, robed in a stunning mink over her practice clothes. As we started our pliés, she’d slip off the mink and, nonchalantly, drop it on the floor, its edge in the rosin box.
When Zorina left him, Balanchine was brokenhearted; when Maria left, he was relieved. In 1951, there were headlines in the New York papers: “Tallchief Leaves Balanchine! Marriage Annulled.” The papers quoted Maria explaining, “I wanted to have a baby.”
Maria was the company’s star, but Balanchine had shifted his passion and attentions elsewhere—to coltish Tanny, and the exquisite Diana Adams, who had recently joined the company. To his chagrin, he needed Maria and continued to create ballets for her, but she had lost her place as primary muse. Maria declared publicly, “I will accept alphabetical billing, but I will not be treated alphabetically.”2 I never saw the two of them more miserable than when he was creating the ballet Gounod Symphony (1958). Inventing the pas de deux for Maria and me in the rehearsal room on the fifth floor of City Center, he was frustrated with every step he devised, and so was Maria. They’d growl at each other, and several times he walked out in the middle of rehearsal—unheard of for him (I had never seen him do it, ever—before or after).
Tanaquil was intelligent, acerbic, witty, beautiful, graceful, and chic. Balanchine choreographed inspired works for her—but I noticed his fascination with Diana Adams immediately. On tour, I once had a dressing room situated so that I could peek across the alley into the girls’ dressing room. There were Tanny and Diana, in their bras and panties, sitting around with Balanchine, smoking cigarettes. I was shocked that they didn’t cover up. He had it so easy! I had to skulk around, a teenage peeping Tom. Balanchine found himself pulled between these two long-legged beauties. Had Diana been available, I believe he would have chosen her as his next wife, but she was married to a handsome, dramatic ballet star, Hugh Laing, in a bizarre and torturous relationship. Hugh was bisexual, and his lover,