I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [154]
At every meeting with me, Mr. B was a torrent of ideas for the future, a kaleidoscope of intentions—Chris in Apollo with Darci, reviving Native Dancers,6 wanting me to choreograph for Merrill Ashley. “Merrill never asks for anything,” he noted. “She’s so dependable.” My heart sank. He’s dying, and imagining a nonexistent future, cramming it with ideas and plans—as if dreaming of projects will keep him alive. Talking of another song he wrote for the children of NDI, he boasted, “Schirmer7 wants to put out a book of my songs.” Balanchine dreaming reminded me of William Golding’s Pincher Martin, where a drowning man, in the few seconds preceding his death, lives out in his imagination the thousands of details leading to his survival and rescue.8
Bill Hamilton, at that time the company doctor, told me Balanchine was “deteriorating rapidly,” and Bill believed it was a hardening of the arteries in the brain. Everyone was speculating, struggling to diagnose Balanchine’s symptoms—the falling over, the forgetting, the agitation and fear, the cataracts in the eyes, maybe a tumor on the ears.
Something was eating Balanchine’s brain. But what?
On August 20, 1982, Carrie, Christopher, and I were in the Hamptons with our friends Dan and Joanna Rose when Balanchine called. “I am counting on Jim Gould to save me!” How did Balanchine find me at the Roses’? I envisioned him sitting on his bed with the phone in his hand, staring at the life-sized cardboard cutout of Wonder Woman he had pasted on his bedroom door. When we had visited in the past, he had always delighted in displaying her to us. She reminded me of Diana, cold and aloof.
“I am counting on Jim Gould to save me!” he repeated. “Do I have any appointments? Does Dr. Gould understand that I am not right? I’m still having my ear trouble. I only hear high notes, and they come from far away. Maybe hearing aid will fix everything,” and then he spoke of contacting his doctor in Switzerland. I assured him that for ear, nose, and throat, Jim Gould was among the best in the world, and promised to go with him again to his next appointment.
Back in New York a few days later, I picked him up at nine thirty a.m., and Mr. B spoke of the demands made on him, how everyone was jockeying for position and asking about their place in the future. He was tormented. “Suzanne was up to see me. She feels I have not done enough for her. I told her there are lots of ballets in the repertoire for her, that you, Jacques, can make good ballets, that Peter can make good ballets, that there is Jerry, and others.” He became vitriolic, expressing anger at Suzanne’s marriage to Paul.
Like everyone else, I was imagining my own life without Balanchine, so I asked again, “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to teach classes? Do you want me to be ballet master and continue to choreograph? I’ll try to do whatever you need.”
The response was mumbling about positions and titles: “They mean nothing. There is title ‘regisseur,’ there is ‘assistant ballet master’ … Russian titles, French titles. Rosemary [Dunleavy] is a ballet mistress. There is me, there is Jerry, and then there is … uh, uh, uh [like he couldn’t remember] … Taras. And then, somebody else. I don’t remember. Assistant. Or something else.” And so on. “I need to find another title, another way of listing all of us, and I haven’t found it yet. Anyway, I don’t think title. You are ballet master.” Frustrated, he continued, “You see where is my name on program? Ballet master. Not big boss, just ballet master. That’s what I am—master of putting together ballets. Peter is ballet master, Jerry is ballet master … you all know how to put ballets together. We don’t need other names for this.”
The conversation turned to teaching. “I don’t like Stanley Williams