I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [200]
A principal dancer with NYCB, he danced most of the repertoire, and starred in works created for him by Balanchine, Robbins, and Peter Martins. He tried everything, even a stint on Broadway, costarring with Bernadette Peters in Song and Dance. Bernadette the song. Chris the dance.
A voracious reader and an excellent writer—Leap Year, his teenage autobiography, was published early in his twenties, with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as his editor. The poet Yeats wrote plays where music and dance are necessary to the presentation. And Chris’s play, The Studio, could be called a ballet with music, dance, and words. It’s a study of a choreographer and a pair of dancers, and is to the ballet world what A Chorus Line is to musical theater. Anyone who has ever worked in the performing arts will immediately understand the line from his play, “Everything happens here—in the studio.”
The play is packed with incidents recounted by Carrie, me, and the family around the dining-room table. I recognized, in the role of the older man, a hodge-podge of choreographers: Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and Balanchine. In the female role, a combination of burning talent and ambition—Melissa Hayden, Merrill Ashley, and Suzanne Farrell. And, in the role of the young male, the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of practically every danseur noble that ever graced the stage.
Perceptive Chris—just as, from a chord played in another room, he can hear a note that is out of tune, he spots falseness in people, and analyzes them constantly, their behavior, as well as his own. George has that gift too. Chris has little tolerance for things that waste time. Once he has accomplished something, he bounces off to something else. His closet shelves are overloaded. But today he shares them with a dream of a dancer, Kelly Crandall. “Like Carrie,” a touch of Texas and a charmer. They married the summer of 2008 in Taos, New Mexico, and as they danced the sacred skies applauded in thunder and blessed the ceremony with the most precious gift of the desert, a deluge.
CATHERINE (CATE)
After Charlotte’s birth, Carrie’s doctor said, “Oh, there’s another!” Twenty minutes later, Cate came out, and forever after spent her time trying to please. I’d complain, “Carrie, I can’t find my shoes, where the hell are they?” A flash of child in my periphery, Cate was out and back in the room in half a second, beaming, “Here they are, Daddy! They were under a towel in the bathroom.”
Karinska gave us a gift of a woolen blanket woven from the wool of sheep she had at her farm and announced, “When your girls can do their first position, bring them to me. I will make them beautiful tutus.”
Getting their tutus at Karinska’s costume shop, twins never agree, late 1960s (image credit 23.3)
In her last year of high school at the Calhoun School in Manhattan, Cate starred in the musical Cabaret, and was superb. Everyone in the audience buzzed: “Is she getting an agent?” “What are her plans?” That night, Cate climbed into our bed and confessed, “I don’t want to take a chance with a life in the theater. I can’t stand the tension and stress of auditions, and being rejected. Ben, my costar, has no doubts or fears. He told me, ‘I’m going to be an actor.’ Maybe I should try college.” Ben Stiller was her costar. Years later, at the fiftieth anniversary of Joe Papp’s Public Theater, I saw Ben. The first thing he said was, “How’s Cate?”
After graduating from Denison University, she became a specialist in early childhood development, married, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and delivered to the world two fabulous children, Shane and Sam. They have their father’s, Peter Brill’s, strength and tenacity, and Cate’s sweetness and champagne sense of humor. She is loved by everyone. Lucky friends of Cate, and lucky Santa Fe. Kay Gayner, who knows Cate well, gushed,