I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [153]
Some years went by, why don’t we try to find each other,
Our roses still in bloom?
Be mine, I’ll be your groom.
I know I loved you then and still I love you now,
And I know you love me too.
I tendered him a check. “It’s a five-hundred-dollar honorarium, Mr. B.” He sniffed and tore it up. He was fated never to see his tango performed.
Nineteen days later, on June 11, Balanchine was rehearsing the revival of his ballet Noah and the Flood, and I had been assisting him for a couple of weeks. That day, he suddenly became agitated, fluttering around, disoriented. Uncharacteristically, he vented furious anger at the boys in the corps, berating them for the way they were manipulating a giant snake-like prop. Pushing them aside, Balanchine seized the snake and started flaying the stage with it. We all backed away. Just as abruptly, he dropped the snake on the stage and, spotting me watching, open-mouthed, rushed over, clutched my shoulders, put his lips to my ear, and whispered, panic-stricken, “Can you continue? Stage it for me? My doctor is coming, I have to see him.” Him? (Mr. B’s doctor was a woman, Edith Langner.)
Somehow, I continued rehearsal, and with Rosemary Dunleavy’s help, plus overtime, we forged on successfully.3 Balanchine would pop onto the stage, look around with a vague and distracted gaze, exit into the wings, head toward the elevators, spin around, come back, and stare at us, as if surprised we were there. Sometimes he would rush to Ronnie Bates, the stage manager, mumble something, and disappear, only to reappear a few minutes later. No doctor came and he didn’t leave—he just wandered around.
I never considered Noah a great ballet, but that evening, it went beautifully, and I was happy. Lincoln, ecstatic, scurried around from one person to another, praising excessively. Only later did I discover that Balanchine had given me credit in the program (revised staging, with Jacques d’Amboise). Unfair! Rosemary deserved the credit; I did very little. I was too distraught.4
June 14, 1982. Balanchine’s ears have gotten much worse in the last few days, so I took him again to Dr. Jim Gould. I hung around while he underwent various tests. Later, while waiting for the test results, he spoke about repeating Noah next spring, and launched again into a description of his plans for Birds of America, a full-length ballet, inspired by Audubon’s art, with music by Morton Gould. “I will do ballet, and you will be Audubon, passing through countryside with sketchpad, sketching birds of America. We will see history, and the myths of America.”
Audubon would encounter Johnny Appleseed and the entire corps de ballet as various apples; later, crows would represent Salem witches. Traveling north to south, the ballet was to touch on the legends of Pocahontas (rescuing John Smith from being burned at the stake), Daniel Boone, Ohio and Mississippi river boatmen, and end in New Orleans with an octoroon ball presided over by the lost Dauphin of France.
He then described dreams of next year’s season that, I believe, we both knew would never happen—Peter Martins and I alternating in teaching company class; then, with Jerry Robbins, making a trio, choreographing Birds of America. I ventured, “Mr. B, Lincoln is acting like a madman. He’s worried about you.” Balanchine replied, “Lincoln doesn’t know anything,” and added that he, Balanchine, had always done what he wanted to do without Lincoln. “He only likes boys and is crazy. He needs his pills.” There I was, with the two most important men in my life, one dying and the other crazy.
Switching the subject, he lamented, “All ballerinas make demands. They want this role only because someone else does it. Suzanne is envious of Kyra, and you never hear her say Darci’s name. I have to be like juggler—everybody wants my attention.” Returning home, I found that my teenage daughter Charlotte (already launched in her career on Broadway) had sprained her ankle, and needed love, sympathy, and attention. I don’t think I gave her enough.
Balanchine kept his sense of humor.