I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [64]
When I accused Boss of throwing Pop out, she replied, “It’s between your father and me. I don’t talk about it.”
My father wrote letters to all Boss’s relatives in Lewiston, Maine, and demanded a hearing. Then he went up to Maine and filled the ear of anyone who would listen with his message, “Georgette’s gone crazy. She’s insane.” He was persuasive, and convinced my aunts—Boss’s sisters—to hold a tribunal. With letters and phone calls, the aunts summoned my mother and me to Maine. (Ninette extricated herself from the tornado. She was hot and heavy with Dr. Mel Kiddon.)
In Maine, I was interviewed by each of the aunts about my father and mother’s relationship, and to my shame, I parroted my father’s statements, “She must be crazy. Menopause, you know. It makes women crazy!” (Diagnosis from a seventeen-year-old.) Boss stuck out her chin and told her sisters, “Mind your own business. It’s my marriage.” Balanced against my father’s ranting and raving, her confidence was unshakable and her reasoning true. “Vas y!” the tribunal told my father, and the whole chimera collapsed.
My mother never said a word in defense of herself for leaving my father. She’d clench her jaw, put her nose in the air (the “Napoleon” stance), and say, “I’m not divorcing him. We just can’t live together.” She did divorce him, eventually, but it took a while.
Pop, in New York, rented a room in a boardinghouse near our block. He went back to Columbia Presbyterian. Now he spent his eight-hour shift (never a minute more) going up and down the newly automated elevator, this time as a nurse’s aide. When he wasn’t working, he walked all over the city, from Washington Heights to the Battery, sometimes circumnavigating the whole of Manhattan Island. He bought newspapers, smoked his cigars, ate and read alone at various workmen’s cafeterias.
Boss sought out “private-duty” clients, with sleepover duty. I was rarely home, leaving at eight o’clock in the morning for class and rehearsals, returning at midnight after performances, raiding the icebox for whatever Boss may have left. I was breaking out on my own, earning a salary, and falling in love with a ballerina, Carolyn George.
Carolyn George
In spring 1952, a lovely, effervescent dancer showed up for company class, and I spotted her the minute she walked into the room. She had hazel eyes, a slim body. Quirky, she leaped and flitted all over the dance studio. She flew, and I was hard put to match the height of her leaps! Although her torso was considered skinny, she had a ballerina’s muscled legs, and probably part of the reason for her extraordinary elevation was her combination of quick-twitch muscles and thin bones.
She came full of dreams to New York City and filled her days with dance. As she wrote in her diary:
I shall never forget my first drive down the great white way. I was so excited, I planned to be a Broadway star, a dancing star. I moved into a room on 125th St. at Claremont Avenue. It was a small, dingy, green room, smeared with dirt. I tried to wash the walls clean with Spic and Span. One window looking out on a dirty air well and a shared bath, which I would timidly sneek into. Was I miserable? NO! My heart sang from dawn to dusk. I was alive and living in New York City. It was the center of the universe and when anything happened here it was headlines around the world.
The School of American Ballet was said to be the best, so that’s where I spent my time and my few dollars. Two to three classes a day. Mostly I ate caramel popcorn, sandwiches and coffee at Chock full o’ Nuts. What an adventure for a nice girl from Dallas, Texas, Highland Park, sheltered from the realities of the outside world. But I seemed to be efficient. I found out about auditions.
Carrie in Times Square, 1946 (image credit 8.1)
She got into the cast of Bloomer Girl and toured the country, switched to the show Oklahoma! and eventually ended up as a ballerina at the San Francisco Ballet. After