I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [21]
At Madame Seda’s school, my sister was the best dancer, by far. At SAB, the classes were filled with her equals, and a star among them was a long-limbed teenager named Tanaquil LeClercq. Everyone knew Tanny was special. Before Tanny, George Balanchine had drawn inspiration from a chain of dancers: Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Toumanova, Irina Baronova, Vera Zorina, Marie-Jeanne, and Maria Tallchief. All of them were short, fast, virtuoso dancers. Tanny was different. She was elongated and stretched out, and fascinating to watch, an elegant praying mantis, but in no way predatory. Balanchine’s aesthetic changed with Tanny. She was to become the new prototype for his ideal dancer—long neck, small head, and mile-long limbs.
“She’s too skinny!” the Boss would announce to Tanny’s mother, Edith LeClercq. “She should eat more!” Boss always had something to say to the cabal of ballet mothers. Presided over by Edith, they would sit and gossip in the hall outside the studios during their children’s ballet classes, the Boss moving among them like a ferret.
It was from Edith that the Boss found out about the King-Coit School, an after-school program run by two little old ladies in a town house they owned together. They were prim Victorians, and created a place where kindergarten play and games were taken to a sophisticated performing-arts level. Tanny was enrolled, and I don’t know how the Boss swung it, but she had Madeleine and me enrolled as well, on scholarships. The town house teemed with activity—plays, recitals, poetry readings, dramatic recitations, costume making, anything in the performing arts that tickled Miss King and Miss Coit’s fancy. Over the course of some six months, we performed in little vignettes, variety shows, all forgotten by me—with one exception. In that recital, I played a sailor dancing a hornpipe with two belles. The teenage Tanny was on the same program, but the star was a plump little girl, a pasty-faced dumpling with red pouty lips, who recited a poem. Her voice, strident and ear-scraping, would cut through an Alaskan oil slick faster than carbolic acid. That voice is so ingrained in the memories of King-Coit alumni that, fifty years later, I could pick up the phone, call Tanny, and, mimicking THE VOICE, screech, “Eat little bird and think no more of sorrow!” and Tanny would immediately parrot the next line, “I’ll feed you every day at this time!” Then, amid laughter, she would quip, “Are you soliciting me for an invitation to dinner?”
Dancing a hoedown, 1943 (image credit 3.2)
Hanging around SAB, Boss queried the other mothers, “Where can I find a great acting teacher for my children?” Eventually, she zeroed in on Theodore Komisarjevsky, reputed to have been a superb actor and noted director in Moscow. He was eking out a living in New York City, teaching and coaching. After ballet class, Madeleine and I would rush to his studio. For a few dollars a lesson, he had my sister and me—he claimed, “the only children I teach”—memorize, speak, and perform for him excerpts from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Weekends in our living room, my sister and I would rehearse. “Through the forest have I gone, but Athenian found I none …” I didn’t know what I was saying, but the Boss relished her power as coach and director. In “Pyramus and Thisbe,” she would stand between Madeleine and me, playing the wall, arm extended, fingers spread to form the chink, “I see a voice! Now will I to the chink to spy an I can hear my Thisby’s face.”
The School of American Ballet had been my home for less than a year when Balanchine snared me for the role of Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Boss went into paroxysms of joy.
In rehearsals for Midsummer, I couldn’t take my eyes off Balanchine’s nose. He was plagued by a nervous twitch, sniffing continually, his mouth playing second fiddle to the nose. Cigarettes moved from fingers to mouth to ashtray,