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By Root 1365 0

house to parade me around for potential funders, and there would be Jamie Wyeth at the same party. Jamie was a beautiful man, married to Phyllis, who, due to an accident, was wheelchair-bound. Lincoln gushed, “Jamie’s a great painter. He’s better than his father or grandfather. He’s marvelous, I love him! He did my portrait.” Lincoln was extremely proud of the portrait, and kept it on his living-room wall. Every time I visited his town house, he’d drag me in front of it. Then one night, his manner changed. “That was his last good painting! He wasted his talent; he’s nothing now! Once he sold a painting for one hundred thousand dollars it stopped his creativity cold!” It was Lincoln’s usual cycle of praise and denigration.

He had an unpleasant habit of accosting his friends and acquaintances and, without provocation, insulting and denouncing them, leaving them sputtering, crushed, and stunned. He also had a knack for zeroing in on people’s insecurities and attacking. The assaults were vicious: “What makes you think you can make a photograph!!? Your photographs are shit!” Snarling and glaring at another victim, “You’re an amateur; you think you’re doing anything new? You haven’t done anything new in your whole life, and you never will!!! You’re a NOTHING!” All this, to an artist who, a week before, he had espoused at some party: “I’ve bought his works, they’re fabulous, they’re too good for the Museum of Modern Art!” If the recipient of such an attack didn’t have a strong belief in himself, he would, forever after, be hoping to get back into Lincoln’s good graces, inventing excuses. “He didn’t really mean that. He was crazy.” Many of the people Lincoln built up, then harshly rejected, continued to seek his imprimatur.

Virgil Thomson had been a classmate of Lincoln’s at Harvard, and was the composer of the music for Filling Station, the ballet that, in its 1953 revival, launched my career. This giant of the music world became a friend, and quite often we visited together. On every occasion, Virgil brought up Lincoln. “Does he talk about me? We were friends, you know, but he turned against me. You know he treated me terribly. He does that to people. He used me, when he needed me, and then when I thought he’d need me some more, he would insult me instead—in public.”

If Lincoln’s victims bit back—“You’re a horse’s ass, Lincoln. You’re describing yourself! Fuck off!”—Lincoln would pivot and run.

January 11, 1983. The company was abuzz, “Mary Tyler Moore took morning class!” In the past, Mary had occasionally joined us, and Balanchine welcomed her. He was a fan of her show. A message came to me: “Go to SAB. Lincoln wants to talk to you in his office.”

Within a second of my arrival at his office, he leaned over me and snarled, “How dare you bring your show-business friends to take our company class!” as if “show business” would somehow tarnish the purity and loftiness of ballet. I remained calm and replied, “She’s taken class before. And I didn’t invite her, Balanchine did. And Lincoln, don’t you think that Balanchine’s ‘show business’ too?” He stared at me, froze for a moment, then grunted, pushed past me, and disappeared down the hall, leaving me alone in his office.

Lincoln could not play his promoting/rejecting game with Balanchine. Instead, Lincoln was the little boy chasing after the heels of genius. When I came along, he expected me to be the new Lew, but I was destined to disappoint him. Lincoln expected Balanchine to be a servant to his vision, but instead Lincoln was in the shadow of Balanchine all his life. He had brought a ballet master to America who turned out to be Mount Everest.

Balanchine described to me how Diaghilev had led him “like little puppy dog” around the great museums of Europe, and then left him sitting on a bench in front of a Piero della Francesca or a Caravaggio, with a command: “Sit in front of this painting and look at it the rest of the afternoon.” On several occasions, Lincoln did this same number on me, running me through the Metropolitan Museum. With a gesture, he’d indicate, “This is worthless,