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By Root 1238 0

days at SAB. Everyone was in love with Phil, men and women, but he was straight, as far as I knew. Endowed with a beautiful, triangular face, and gorgeous blue eyes, topped with black eyelashes half the length of my thumb, he had the most perfectly proportioned body, amazing elevation, and the energy of a herd of antelope. It was nothing for Phil to get up at dawn and run a six-mile loop in Manhattan’s Central Park. Occasionally, he’d sprint toward a tree, and, using that momentum, run up the trunk, leap, and seize a limb sixteen or eighteen feet off the ground. He’d swarm the tree to the top, then descend like a gibbon, swinging and dropping off branches to land on his feet, and bound off to continue his run—all before his early-morning ballet class. By early evening, he would have completed at least two more dance classes, and be abroad for a night of partying or servicing his slew of girlfriends.

Phil tried to fix me up with a blond teenager at the Ballet Arts studio in Carnegie Hall. I was sixteen, and protested, “She wouldn’t be interested in me. I’m sure she’s in love with you, Phil. Why don’t you make out with her?” “No, too young!” he said. “Older women are better. It’s her mother I want!”

One day, after ballet class at a studio in Los Angeles, Phil claimed he could do a sequence of double tours, alternating with flamenco spins and multiple pirouettes, and keep repeating them. Immediately, he launched off, calling out, on each double tour, “There’s one!” “There’s two!” “And three!” Unfortunately, around number eight, he landed crookedly and started ricocheting to his side. A panicky look came to his eyes, but he was determined, continuing to count. As he yelled out, “Fourteen!” he fell through the glass door at the entrance to the studio. Phil injured his leg, and the shattering glass badly cut the tendons in one of his wrists. After recovering in the hospital, he did get back to dancing—to find himself a legend. “You heard about Phil Mosco? The guy who double-toured through a glass door!”12

Dancing in movies was an experience worlds from the ballet. From morning to night in a ballet company, it is dance, dance, perform, perform. In movies, eight bars of music into a sequence, the director yells, “Cut!” and you wait twenty minutes or a half hour before hearing, “Let’s shoot that again …” It may use most of the day to do eight takes for one little dance sequence. I found it difficult to sustain enthusiasm when you stop and start, stop and start, and, by the end of the day, you’ve only done a few dance steps. Performing with a ballet company, you’re in conversation with the audience, not a camera; it’s immediate, and there’s no going back to redo, repair, or camouflage. If you leaped high, you leaped high; no camera angle enhances your elevation. In a movie, the cameras could dance for us, come into our faces, focus on the feet, and even spin around and capture our dancing from behind or above. Later, the editor can restructure everything. Audience and applause can be added. I felt somehow truth was missing. I had to learn a different mindset.

We were scheduled to wrap the film shortly after the new year, but were so far behind that shooting had to be extended. Balanchine was mounting the first production of Nutcracker back in New York, and I was supposed to be there. So, to the shock of the producer, director, and entire cast and crew, I said no to extending my contract, but I eventually agreed to an extra few weeks. And then, “After that, no matter what, I’m going back to the ballet.” Stanley and Michael reorganized the shooting schedule, cramming in as many of the brothers’ scenes as possible before I left. The assistant director has the worst job in the film business—the front man, spokesperson, overseer, major domo, gofer, mule driver, and scapegoat describe that rotten job; my leaving the movie to return to the ballet company pissed him off. He got his revenge with his “mispronunciation ploy.” Broadcasting over the speaker system, he’d say, “All right, cast, your break is over. Hurry up! Drambuie is in a