I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [215]
6. She became the single most loyal patron of, and believer in, Lincoln Kirstein’s dream, and was a devoted friend to Tanaquil LeClercq.
7. Carol Sumner, a very attractive ballerina with NYCB, danced in the company for years, and later became a teacher.
8. Mary Tyler Moore
9. There were several attempts to find a title. Eventually the ballet was called Celebration. It was thrown on in a hurry and disappeared just as fast.
10. Eugenia Doll was an ex–Ballet Russe corps de ballet girl who had married Henri Doll, a multimillionaire.
11. Balanchine’s song for NDI’s 1983 Event of the Year (for which we were, at that point, rehearsing) was eventually performed by my son Christopher and Janet Eilber, along with roughly a thousand New York City schoolchildren and a group of New York City police. The whole show was narrated by the actor Kevin Kline. Bits of this dance are featured in the Academy Award–winning documentary He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ (1983).
Balanchine’s Burial
1. Karinska retired in 1977 after designing Vienna Waltzes. She died in October 1983, some six months after Balanchine. She was ninety-seven years old. An excerpt from my diary, December 11, 1954: “Karinska told me a friend asked her what she had put in the costumes that made Jacques stay in the air so long? ‘Love,’ she had answered.”
2. She was later convicted of the crime and spent thirteen years in a Utah prison. Several books and television movies have been written about her (among them Nutcracker by Shana Alexander, and At Mother’s Request, by Jonathan Coleman). She died in 2004.
3. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale were duo pianists, and for decades close friends of Balanchine and Tanny’s. They had a home nearby.
National Dance Institute
1. Lee Norris I knew through Michael Tolan, the actor I had met when I was directing and choreographing Lady in the Dark. Lee became musical director and composer for NDI for the next twelve years. I think he’s a genius.
2. John Avildsen and I worked together with John Travolta on Saturday Night Fever. Avildsen was the director and I was the choreographer. I spent several months disco dancing with Travolta, working on moves. Using the studio on the top floor of our house, with Carrie filling in for the love interest (not cast yet), we experimented on a pas de deux. Avildsen, after winning his Oscar for Rocky, got into an altercation with Robert Stigwood, the producer of Saturday Night Fever, and was replaced by another director. Even though I was assured by Stigwood and Travolta that they wanted me to stay on as choreographer, I quit, feeling loyal to John Avildsen, as well as holding the belief that the new director should pick his own choreographer. A friendship was forged with Avildsen that continues to this day.
3. In the summer of 2010, NDI’s artistic director Ellen Weinstein and NDI teacher Kaye Gaynor flew to China to collaborate with Dou Dou Huang and dancers from the Children’s Palace in Shanghai. They invented a beautiful dance to a Chinese take, The Red Thread. The work had its premiere that summer with the Shanghai children coming to America to dance with our New York City dancers.
4. Today Ron Pundak is the general director of the Penes Center for Peace.
5. Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium (New York: Vintage, 1994).
6. Recently, Grace told me Evgeny burned to death in his country home. A Michael Moore–type of journalist, Evgeny was a gadfly, calling governments and the powerful to transparency and accountability, and was not one to bow to the Russian version of a mafioso threat: “Desist, or we will make you very unhappy.” Grace is convinced it was arson.
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Abdu (Ethiopian interpreter), 19.1, 19.2
Academy Awards
Adams, Diana, 5.1, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5, 19.1
Balanchine’s obsession with, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.6, 13.1, 13.2
performances missed