I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [134]
Diana was a beauty, aristocratic, with flawless ballet technique. Her milk-white skin and elegant, serene demeanor would make her a lodestone for Balanchine. A Blessed Virgin Mary type—mysterious, small-breasted, seemingly modest and retiring. But married to Hugh, she was decidedly unattainable. So Balanchine married Tanny.
Diana Adams, the Dew Drop in The Nutcracker, 1954. Who could be more perfect? (image credit 13.1)
Though he was married to Tanny, Balanchine lavished more and more attention on Diana. When Diana divorced, he would have jumped at the chance to have her, but by then, Tanny and Diana were the best of friends. There were rumors Tanny and Balanchine were going to separate, but before any conflict surfaced, Tanny got polio. Balanchine, traumatized, redevoted himself to her. No matter what any doctor told him, he was determined to get her out of that wheelchair and back dancing again, if only by the sheer force of his will. Until that occurred, he believed he was no longer free to pursue Diana or anyone else.
Tanny was doomed to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, so she adapted. “When I need something, I call the appropriate person to help to run an errand—Eddie Bigelow, he never turns me down—to make a complaint about a failed delivery. I get black Natasha, Natasha Molostwoff, to call them—she has the meanest phone voice!” When Tanny needed someone to take her to a party, I would sometimes get summoned. “Jacques, come pick me up, George is busy.” My function? To help her into her chair, to the elevator, and out of the building. “Now go get a cab,” she’d order.
“Tanny, you’re so brave,” I used to say. “There’s nothing brave about it, Jacques. You make the best of the way things turn out. I’m in a wheelchair now. And there’s some compensation. Before, if I didn’t have to dance the matinee, I’d wake up on a Saturday morning and be noshing a danish and slurping coffee, when the phone would ring. ‘Patty Wilde is sick. You have to go on in Swan Lake.’ I’d hang up the phone and go into the bathroom and throw up. Now, I’ll never have to be afraid of going onstage as the Swan Queen again.”
Tanny was tall and skinny. She didn’t want to be the Swan Queen—“I’m not a swan, I’m a crane,” she’d protest. But she forced herself to be a Swan for Balanchine. He would push her onstage—literally, he would stand in the wings and shove her, and she’d stumble on for her entrance.
By 1959, Balanchine had given up hope that Tanny would dance again, and his fixation on Diana increased. Look at the works he choreographed for her between 1959 and 1964: Episodes, Panamerica, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Agon, The Figure in the Carpet, Monumentum pro Gesualdo, Liebeslieder Waltzer, Ragtime, Modern Jazz: Variants, Electronics, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Noah and the Flood, and Movements for Piano and Orchestra.4 Once, Diana asked me to rehearse Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, but when the time came, I was exhausted, and canceled. The next day, Balanchine ranted at me on the phone, “How dare you cancel a rehearsal with Diana?”
If anyone came close to being the equivalent of what Lew Christensen was for Lincoln, it was Diana Adams for Balanchine. Few realize the passion he had for her; Diana was arguably the most important in the succession of muses in his life. Much later, Suzanne Farrell came along to become, for a while, an extension of Diana.
After the triumph of his ballet Illuminations (1950), Frederick Ashton was invited by Lincoln to do another work. Freddie chose the legendary romance of Tristan and Isolde and called his ballet Picnic at Tintagel (1952). Diana Adams would be Isolde, and I was told to show up for rehearsal. Two hours into rehearsal, it finally dawned on me that I was playing