I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [67]
After the success of Filling Station and back in rehearsals, I was still my boisterous and effusive self. Then … Carrie would walk into the room. Her friends would wave and shout, “Hi, Carrie!” I would repair to the rosin box and pretend to fix my shoe. Carrie and her friends thought, “What an arrogant brat! Success has gone to his head! He’s creepy.”
WOOED BY HOLLYWOOD, OCTOBER 1953
Dancing Filling Station that summer in San Francisco, I came offstage on a high. During the performance, I had knocked off thirteen pirouettes in slow motion, my record to that date. In the wings, two suntanned guys accosted me—Hollywood types, good-looking, laid-back, and dressed in polo shirts, brown loafers, and sport coats splashed with pastel-colored handkerchiefs. “I’m a producer and filmmaker, Jack Cummings,” one barked at me. He pointed. “And this is Stanley Donen, he’s the director. We’re doing a movie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and we want you to be one of the brothers.” They stared at me expectantly, waiting for the significance of their statement to buckle my knees.
Over dinner they later filled me in with details. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was to be the title of their movie, a sunny, Hollywood adaptation of Plutarch’s dark tale Rape of the Sabine Women. Michael Kidd was to choreograph. I was ignorant of Stanley Donen’s or Jack Cummings’s accomplishments (and there were many), but I’d read Plutarch, and I knew of Michael Kidd. Michael had had a career with American Ballet Theatre, and was well known as a superb dancer, performer, and choreographer. He had even danced with Ballet Caravan, the early company Lincoln Kirstein had conjured.
When I told Balanchine Michael Kidd was choreographing the movie, he raised a finger like a pontiff, sniffed, and pronounced judgment, “Good!” Then he warned, “You know, Jacques, if you’re not careful, they will own you. You will have sold your soul for seven years.” He arranged for his lawyer, Mr. Krohn, to negotiate my contract with MGM. On Balanchine’s advice, Krohn contracted me to return from Hollywood by February 1954, in time to star in Balanchine’s new production of The Nutcracker. Within the week, Balanchine gave me a three-month leave of absence from the company, though it meant missing the last few weeks of our upcoming European tour and part of our winter season in New York.
ITALY 1953
So I said yes to Cummings and Donen and went off with the NYCB to Europe. The tour was grueling and glorious, with most of it in Italy, and I danced dozens of new roles—some of them with Carrie. Every time I took her hand to go onstage, I felt a surge in my heart. Offstage, I wouldn’t speak to her, even in Italian.
Dancing Hugh Laing’s role in Lilac Garden was my big challenge of that tour. My dressing-room mates thought it hilarious that this teenager (me) was dancing as the object of Nora Kaye’s affections in Antony Tudor’s great romantic ballet. Nora, the ballet diva, was some fifteen years my senior, already in her thirties and thinking of retirement.4 My role had been created for Hugh, who was much older than I. He was graced with matinee-idol looks and had passionate, dramatic energy. There I was in his role, boyishly welcoming the amorous advances of an older woman. “You change the whole dynamic,” the elegant Brooks Jackson drawled in his nasal voice. “She’s robbing the cradle …” Brooks played Nora’s elderly husband in the ballet. “Seducing a baby in his playpen.” The sophisticated Italian audiences loved the ballet, and we were a big success. As youths, many