I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [61]
“I was put in a stone room, small, with a hole in the middle of the floor. In the corner was a metal bed stand, no mattress. I kept telling them, ‘Call the American embassy, it’s a mistake!’ After several hours, an American consulate aide came. I was so relieved, and told him to call Nelson, that I was working for him, and he had given me authorization to send back reports. It was early in the day, and the aide said he would be back shortly to get me out. He never came. I spent the night crouching on top of the bed frame—the floor was covered with vermin—assorted bugs and rats. I didn’t dare use the hole, because I would have had to walk cross the floor, and God knows what would have come out of it.”
Recounting the story, Lincoln implied he spent a terrified night sobbing. An over-six-foot giant, manic-depressive, in a claustrophobic South American prison, imagining he would be buried forever. “The next day, late in the morning, that embassy prick came by to get me out, all smiles and friendship. When I was free of that prison, I screamed at him, ‘Why did you let me spend the night there? Why didn’t you come sooner?’ ‘Oh, Lincoln, that was on Nelson’s orders,’ the aide smirked. ‘He said an overnight stay would teach you a lesson. Humility, you know.’ ” As Lincoln was filling my ear with this story, I kept thinking—did Nelson truly give those orders? Were the diplomats at the American embassy pissed off and playing with Lincoln? Or was it Lincoln’s own paranoia, embellished? Why was he arrested? For sending covert information to Nelson, or because the authorities were aware he had been soliciting and picking up young men? Lincoln had a habit of frequenting the gay baths in New York (especially in Harlem). Some of my fellow dancers at the ballet told me they had been there with him.
“He was showing me that he held the cards.” Lincoln continued, “Buster, a favor given could be taken away, and don’t you forget it.” Lincoln needed Nelson; Nelson didn’t need Lincoln. The same dynamic would define (and condemn) Lincoln’s relationship with Balanchine.
Ballet Caravan, Lincoln’s child, faded away and disbanded.
WORLD WAR II
Everything changed on December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor.
Lew was drafted, and Lincoln ran to the nearest recruiting station. He could have had a commission as an officer, but he enlisted as a private—a man in his mid-thirties lined up, volunteering with teenagers. He liked the idea of being with the grunt workers and doughboys and in the forefront of the fighting, sweating with the men in the trenches.
After completing basic training, a dismayed Lincoln found himself sweating, not in the trenches, but behind a desk at an Army base, screaming in frustration while others fought battles raging all over the world. “I enlisted in the Army. I wanted to get right out to the front lines. Instead, they punished me. Kept me in an Army base down south—guarding a stove. I couldn’t stand it!” (Who did he mean by “they”? Nelson? Lincoln’s enemies in the State Department? The Pentagon?)
Lew ended up in the European theater, assigned to head a detail whose miserable task was to search the battlefields for the maimed and the dead. Whenever there was a lull in fighting or an engagement terminated, Lew and his squad would collect bodies, search for identifying dog tags, try to match them with body parts, assemble them, bag them, and get them off the field for burial.
Meanwhile, manic that the war might pass him, Lincoln was pulling every string he could. Eventually, Nelson and old Joe Kennedy’s lobbyist in Washington made calls and wrote letters, and Lincoln found himself in Europe. He was to become part of a team designated to track down and rescue artwork confiscated by the Nazis. “It wasn’t all honey, Buster. It was hairy,” Lincoln recounted. “I was assigned to drive a jeep