I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [57]
With their dancing partners, the brothers invented and choreographed an acrobatic-cum-ballet tour de force spiced with virtuoso “tricks.” They would fling the girls dramatically in the air and snatch them back safely to earth. They got themselves onto the vaudeville circuit, and their schedule was grueling—two shows a day, more on the weekend—and Lincoln went to see them.
“I fell in love with Lew Christensen,” he bellowed again and again. “One look was all it took!” Lincoln always sounded angry, even when he wasn’t.
On tour with their partners, from right, Willam Christensen and Lew Christensen, late 1920s. The third brother, Harold, opted for West Point and later became a respected teacher of ballet. (image credit 6.1)
He was schizophrenic and multi-frantic, and tortured by ideas and ambitions, pebbles in his brain case, rattling. In every field and in every way, his ballooning and bizarre imagination birthed idiotic concepts and projects, as well as brilliant ideas, spewing out from the boiling soup that was his psyche. He was obsessed with a romanticized dream of the American Blue-Collar Worker. The laborer, muscles gleaming as he toils in steel mills, cornfields, or garages—courageous, with a rough humor, unsophisticated, but with dignity; unspoiled, yet with discipline. The doughboy, the sailor in bell-bottoms, the gymnast, the baseball player, the boxer, the teenager mowing the lawn on a hot summer day with sweat glistening on his arms, sensual and innocent, all were in Lincoln’s mind’s eye.
Lew ignited this vision. A god from Brigham City, Utah: but sim-ple, modest, and American, he was the Apollo of the Desert, and a classical ballet dancer to boot. Lew became the muse to Lincoln’s dreams, the lodestar that drove him to succeed in realizing his greatest achievement—founding the School of American Ballet, and its affiliate, New York City Ballet. Lincoln brought Balanchine to the U.S. because of Lew. That’s what Lincoln meant when he said, “I did everything for Lew.”
Who wouldn’t do everything for him? Lew Christensen in 1937. Such a beauty! (image credit 6.2)
Did Lincoln go backstage after Lew’s performance and say, “I’m going to start a ballet company for you”? If he did, how did Lew respond? I have no idea. On this, Lincoln never enlightened me.
In his time, Napoleon the conqueror had been appalled with the way graveyards littered the city of Venice—neither orderly nor sanitary—so he cleared out the nearby island of San Michele and made it into the Isle of the Dead. Barges served as hearses on the watery byways of Venice, conveying the deceased to the cemetery. In 1929, Lincoln was touristing his way through Venice, and in his wanderings stumbled onto a funeral ceremony. A corpse was being loaded onto a black and gold barge.
After inquiring, Lincoln discovered that the principal attraction, the corpse, had been the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Thunderstruck, Lincoln felt he had a message from God. He would be the next to wear Sergei’s shoes.
Lincoln would be the Gardener in Chief of a ballet company for all time. Outdoing Diaghilev, he would choose and commission choreographers, dancers, painters, scenic designers, costumers, librettists, poets, photographers, composers, musicians—he would guide architects in designing plans for rehearsal studios and theaters for dance, and artists in writing books on ballet technique. He even took classes in ballet. Hard to imagine he could find ballet shoes of a size to fit his feet, or tights to cover his legs; he was some six foot four, over two hundred pounds, doing pliés at the barre, an elephant at a tea party. No earthbound ambitions for Lincoln—he planned to be the artistic tsar in the creation of a New World.
Lincoln needed a ballet master to come