I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [146]
Lincoln
I am a ballet master,” Balanchine would say, “a maître de ballet,” meaning, “I am a master of all the arts that go into the making of ballets.” Lincoln Kirstein never felt he was the master of any art, and being around the imperial confidence of Balanchine kept him unbalanced. Lincoln often commented, “George is sinister.” The word connotes left-sidedness, as well as evil. Balanchine was in no way evil, but “sinister” also suggests a general or vague feeling of fear or apprehension on the part of the observer. Fearful that Balanchine might disagree any time he made a suggestion or offered an opinion, Lincoln endured relentless suspicions that the “sinister” Balanchine undermined him deliberately. Many ideas he presented to George came back to slap him in the face.
At a City Center dress rehearsal for the ballet Metamorphoses in 1952, Lincoln came running onto the stage from out front, excited, as if he’d had a revelation. “George, George!” he panted. “The boys’ tights! The color’s all wrong. They’re terrible! They should be pink! Put all the boys in pink tights!” (We were wearing nut-brown tights.) He was so wild—he’d grab a dancer and pull him over. “Look, George! He should be in pink! It’ll save the ballet.”
Though Lincoln had interrupted the dress rehearsal and every second was precious, Balanchine patiently turned to the wardrobe master: “Do we have pink tights for boys?” Then, for close to twenty minutes, waited patiently while the boys tried on pink tights, and then returned for a costume parade. We pirouetted, pranced, and posed under the stage lights for several minutes. Then, with everyone waiting expectantly, Balanchine turned to Lincoln, and said two words, “Better brown.” Lincoln may have been out front for the premiere, but we didn’t see him backstage for the next two weeks.
In spring 1982, we had just completed the second Stravinsky festival, and Balanchine and I were walking down the hall at SAB when Lincoln scurried up to join us, and reported, “George! Beverly Sills called me. She wants to do a production of Perséphone for City Opera and our company. I told her there’s not a chance we’d do anything with the City Opera or her—she’s ‘Jewish delicatessen’!”
Awaiting the sniff of approval, he got instead: “You know, Jewish delicatessen not so bad! Big, stuffed sandwiches. Pickle. Maybe we could do something with her.” Lincoln showed us his heels.
Lincoln was an ants’ nest of ideas, and I know his ideas inspired many of Balanchine’s works. At times, Lincoln would approach me and others with fascinating suggestions for an artist or a composer whose work he felt would be appropriate for a ballet. Melissa Hayden would say, “Oh, Lincoln with his ideas. Nine times wrong, one time right.” But how fantastic to be able to say that out of 100,000 ideas a thousand are fantastic.
In contract negotiations, the dancers often made outlandish demands—for example, threatening to strike if they were not guaranteed electric outlets at every makeup mirror in the New York State Theater and on tour. “We need them so that we can plug in our cassettes and study the music we have to dance to,” was their justification. In other words, “Rewire the theater for us.”
Balanchine did what he always did when he didn’t get what he wanted. He called a company meeting, and while we lounged around in our tights and leotards, a room full of cats in repose, he gave his stock speech. “We have to tour to keep company. This is not the first company Lincoln and I have put together. This is, let me think, one, two, three, four? Yes, fourth, and in between there was nothing. And even here, in this theater, if we don’t perform, maybe theater will close down, and I will go to Geneva and start another company.” Balanchine loved Switzerland;