I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [71]
On the first day in a new city, heading for the opera house, we dancers often stopped, agog, to watch the Italian stage crews unload from the lorry four-hundred-pound costume and scenery trunks. The crewmen—most of them scrawny, some of them aged, and all of them smoking—would strap one of these trunks to the back of one of their fellows, who, in turn, doubled over, would wend his way up the stairs, transporting the load to a stage-level storage area. We were their audience, and they loved our applause as, one by one, they would stagger up the stairs, their cigarettes cramped in their mouths, puffing like a locomotive. It was their moment in the spotlight.
Our company class also had its dramatic performers, and the star was Janie Mason. A superb dancer with excellent technique, Janie was extremely beautiful, and so nearsighted that without her glasses, her world was a blur. Think: full breasts, high on her torso, and, balancing those breasts, lower down, a pair of perfect, rounded buttocks—a petite, teenage Brigitte Bardot. Janie arrived for morning class early, even before the stage crew had turned on the work lights. When the rest of us showed up, Janie would have dramatically posed herself on center stage, splayed in a split under the ghost light (a bare light bulb on a stand in center stage), and reading an enormous book. Every once in a while, she would shift her split, sometimes with the right leg front, then the left, then back again, without ever interrupting her reading. Engrossed, Janie would read right up until Balanchine started the pliés. “What are you reading that’s so interesting?” he sometimes asked. Janie’s act never changed, though the books did! For several weeks, she pored over the dictionary; next, her nose was buried in a volume of Encyclopædia Britannica, or some philosophical tome, Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. A week later, it was Buddhist texts, then she switched to The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. It seemed she carried her own library.
Janie Mason in LA, during NYCB’s tour in California (image credit 8.7)
When I read Terry Southern’s book Candy,8 I thought he must have known Janie. An easy mark, Janie handed out money to anyone on the street she thought looked needy. Often, the stage doorman would have to bar crowds of street urchins and beggars who had followed her to the theater. Big-hearted Betty Cage,9 our company manager, paid Janie’s hotel bill several times, as she had given away her paycheck.
Janie had other idiosyncrasies. One day, she went to the dressing room early, collected all the ballerinas’ tights (more than forty pairs), and, as a favor, laundered them. The problem was the tights were different colors, so, when laundered together, they came out splotched and tie-dyed. “Oh, I didn’t know that would happen,” her heart-shaped lips pouted.
Carrie told me that more than anything, Janie’s eating habits irritated those who shared her dressing room. She would purchase food and bring it to the theater, leaving most of it uneaten overnight on her makeup table. You would think the rats would get it, but no! It was the cats! Brought in as pets to rid the theater of vermin, they had long ago staged a coup and taken over. Treated royally by the stage crew, they were talismans, fearless and arrogant. They would head for Janie’s makeup table, gobble up her food, declare squatting rights in the practice bags and costumes, and mark their new territory with urine. No one dared touch them. They especially liked to lick the glue that hardened the tips of the dancers’ toe shoes.
The feline capital of Italy’s opera houses was the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, where cats easily outnumbered ballerinas. On opening night, in the middle of Balanchine’s ballet Symphony in C, we discovered their power. In the finale of that sunlit celebration of Bizet’s