I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [156]
Then in the spring of 1974, shortly after watching Saltarelli, a ballet I was choreographing, Balanchine covered me with flattery: “Your future is choreography and teaching. You have excellent sense of judgment in gesture, and taste in choreography.” He continued, “You should not have let so long a time go by without doing work [choreography].”
Sure enough, if one day Balanchine made a statement about something, the next day, you’d hear Lincoln embellishing on it. The next morning, he came to the NYST and got me out of class and, in an alcove off the main rehearsal hall, backed me up against the wall.
Lincoln was his usual erratic self, leapfrogging from one topic to the next. Jerome Robbins’s ballet Dybbuk had premiered the night before, and this morning Lincoln started off on Robbins. “Jerry has no idea what to do with Dybbuk. It’s all what has been seen before! The music was marvelous; the set and costumes, terrific; and the dancers not to be faulted, but Jerry’s ballet was shit, dreadful, ‘sub-Clifford.’ ”11 Lincoln was furious, insisting that if Balanchine were to retire or step down, “JERRY ROBBINS WILL RUN THIS COMPANY OVER MY DEAD BODY!”
Lincoln growled that Jerry had complained that I refused to be in his ballets.12
This enormous man, Lincoln, had me pinned between two bathrooms. “I can’t escape,” I thought. “If I slip left, I’m stuck in the men’s room; right, in the ladies’ room …”
“George’s ability generates hate and envy, and there are a lot of people out to get him!” For years, Lincoln said, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts had been hesitant to donate big money because of uncertainty about a successor. “George and I have to play politics, we need Jerry for the Jewish money, and the press and publicity value of him.”
Lincoln’s voice continued. Staccato bullets from an Uzi:
“Jerry is insisting that if he does not get more rehearsal for Dybbuk, he will pull it out. If he does that, I will go to the press and publicize that it is out of the repertoire because it is NO GOOD … and FUCK YOU, JERRY ROBBINS!”
Ranting on: “Balanchine is seventy-two, not seventy, and I am sixty-seven,” he confided,13 adding that he, Lincoln, planned to devote the rest of his life to securing an artistic successor to run NYCB. As neither he nor his brother or sister had children, Lincoln planned to leave a fortune of “six million dollars to the company! and the Ford Foundation will give eight million dollars as an endowment for an academy of dance,” provided there was a clear successor to Balanchine.
Lincoln waved a finger in my face. “George says you can put steps together by virtue of your ability as a dancer, and you have musical and analytical sense.” Right then and there, Lincoln gave me carte blanche to create any ballet at any time, on any theme I wanted, and insisted that I must choreograph for the fall of 1974, advising, “Work with John Braden, like George works with Rouben Ter-Arutunian and Karinska. John Braden has taste, painting is not his forte, but he is the ultimate craftsman.
“On the basis of Saltarelli14 and your ability as a dancer, Balanchine wants no one else to run the company. George says you are the only choreographer in the world who can make steps and that you are the one he wants to succeed him. That is what we have always planned, but for the last years, it looks like you didn’t have