Lucking Out - James Wolcott [107]
“Everybody was there,” a statement that affixes the royal seal of cachet, brilliant evening or no. The cachet hadn’t diminished in the seventies, but it had acquired a brow of canonical sobriety, despite the raffish omnipresence of the artist Edward Gorey in his fur coat and tennis shoes, who was said to have attended every performance of New York City Ballet, racking up more Nutcrackers than mental health authorities should have allowed (he didn’t even like Nutcracker!). The literary critic Richard Poirier, whose essay “Learning from the Beatles” was a landmark moment of highbrow recognition of the new Atlantis of pop culture, wrote about Balanchine and New York City Ballet for Partisan Review, Susan Sontag was a regular attendee, and even the easily chafed socialist thinker and literary critic Irving Howe had succumbed to the tulle, publishing an essay in Harper’s in 1971 called “Ballet for the Man Who Enjoys Wallace Stevens” (a play on the title of the dance and music critic B. H. Haggin’s primer for the harried mind, Music for the Man Who Enjoys “Hamlet”). In a 1972 entry in his journals, published posthumously under the title The Grand Surprise, the former Vogue and Vanity Fair editor Leo Lerman records the NYCB’s principal dancer Edward Villella’s effusion while standing on the pavement at 3:00 a.m., the hour of Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, but not for Villella. “This is where it is right now. This is where I want to be—lucky to be. Ballet’s here with the New York City Ballet—the center—the living center—Balanchine’s given us glory—the glorious opportunity.”
To the faithful, New York City Ballet was the only true team in town, the diamond crown. I once asked a literary intellectual if he followed ballet, and his response was, with a distinct note of corrective, “I follow New York City Ballet,” as if any other brand were simply too lower shelf. NYCB was the monarch Yankees and its closest rival for attention, American Ballet Theatre, the patchwork Mets, its bench strength and institutional heritage nowhere near as deep or storied. NYCB prided itself on not being fame-driven in its casting and promotional material (it didn’t import internationally renowned dancers for B-12 ass-bumps of glamour) or yoked to lavish-scenery warhorse story ballets that made you wish the nineteenth century would go back where it came from. ABT, albeit performing works by Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor, relied on a more MGM approach, refreshing yesterday’s favorites with the stars of today. Hence there was more bravoing and brava’ing at its curtain calls, more flower-bouquet lobs from the balcony, accepted with courtly bows of humble gratitude from the gallant thigh-man in tights and Eve Harrington so-touched-by-your-generosity genuflections from the ballerinas, who would sniff from the presented rose as if its fragrance had been distilled from all the adoration of the cheering throng. Whereas the curtain applause for NYCB on the average night was more like a suitable tip left on the dining table while climbing into one’s coat—rather Waspy.
The English professor and literary critic Robert Garis, in his one-of-a-kind critical memoir, Following Balanchine (imagine Frederick Exley of A Fan’s Notes intoxicated by arabesques and never falling asleep on a stranger’s sofa), chronicled two decades of the intellectual devotion and personal engagement with what he calls the Balanchine Enterprise. Each Balanchine ballerina was a vessel of devotional investment. “I remember an enjoyable argument at the 57th Street automat (that splendid large space was one of the places we went to for coffee and postmortems) with Haggin and Marvin Mudrick, a friend of ours from the Hudson Review, after a performance: Haggin was supporting Verdy’s style strongly against that of [Allegra] Kent, Mudrick was supporting Kent against Verdy, whom he identified as a ‘soubrette.’ Verdy was my special interest, and I couldn’t accept Mudrick’s limiting category for her, but I really did love Kent, too.”
This would never happen today. It takes the spurious power