The Sugarless Plum: A Memoir (7 page)

During my second year at SAB, I was becoming technically stronger and artistically more mature. In October, Suki cast me as the leading ballerina in the third movement of Balanchine's
Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet
, the ballet she'd be presenting in that year's workshop performance. The role was both romantic and grand, and I was naturally thrilled.

Balanchine had choreographed the role for Allegra Kent, one of his most divine, musical and mysterious ballerinas. She had retired the month before I arrived in New York in 1980, so I never actually saw her perform, but I'd watched her on videotape. I was thrilled to be dancing a role that had been created for her.

 

I also had a lead in the ballet Stanley staged that year, another piece by Bournonville, and again Deidre was in it with me. I was learning a lot of new ballets, and I found that memorizing the choreography wasn't hard. Dancers are able to perform an amazing variety of works and learn an unbelievable amount of
choreography because of what is called kinetic memory, or muscle memory, which is what makes it possible to execute complex movements without conscious thought.

Every dancer is born with this ability to one degree or another, but all dancers will benefit from the guidance of an experienced teacher. Some teachers are more adept than others at conveying choreography. There are different ways a teacher learns the steps and counts of a ballet. Is he teaching a role that has been choreographed specifically for him, or is it a role he has just watched other dancers perform? Sometimes the teacher learns a dance from a videotape (which can be accompanied by notes), and has had no firsthand experience of the exact counts and timing.

When she was teaching, Suki often danced the steps herself so we could see exactly how to do them, but Stanley taught differently. As I've said, he was not a man of many words, and those he spoke were often uttered so quietly that they could be hard to understand.

The Bournonville piece opened with three men dancing a fast, complicated sequence. When the boys rehearsed it, their unison was totally off. They clearly did not know the counts. Day after day I watched them making the same mistakes. Stanley would glance over at Deidre and me with a look that said,
What am I to do with them?
Looking back, I can't believe I had the nerve to do this, but one day I actually asked Stanley if I could take over the rehearsal.

“If you think you can help, please do,” he said, looking amused.

I then proceeded to tell the men what the counts were and
made them do the sequence over and over until they got it right. I could feel the “Boss” in me being reborn just as I could feel the stirrings of my future as a teacher.

When they finally got it, Stanley looked at me with a smile. “My,” he said, taking a puff of his cigar, “you are one tough cookie!”

From then on, to my delight, Tough Cookie became his nickname for me.

 

In mid-December I flew home for the school holidays. On my first day back I was anxious to get behind the wheel and use the driver's license I'd acquired the previous summer. My mom agreed to let me drive her and Romy to see the horses, which were now in a pasture not far from where we lived. We were just a few miles from our house when a woman coming out of an intersection ran a red light at full speed and plowed into the driver's side of our car. What happened in an instant seemed like slow motion. Our car spun around, and when it finally stopped, I looked up and saw my mother and my sister covered in blood. As it turned out, Romy had broken her collarbone and my mother had only superficial cuts. I thought I was fine except for a little pain in my leg; I just felt terribly guilty because I was the one driving. But when I put my hand down to feel my leg, there was what felt like a giant hole where the car door had punctured the outside of my left thigh.

By then someone had helped us out of the car and someone must have called 911, because an ambulance arrived and I was taken on a stretcher to the hospital. The doctors stitched me up
and said I was going to be fine; I was lucky because if the wound had been any deeper it would have cut into the muscle and I would never have walked again. All I could think about was that if Suki found out, she wouldn't let me dance the Brahms.

I recuperated at home for the two weeks of vacation and decided that I wouldn't tell anyone at SAB about the injury. I was able to walk without a limp or visible pain, and because I changed into my tights before getting to the studio, no one would see the fresh scar. But I also had gouges in my cheek and stitches next to my eye, so it would have been impossible for anyone not to notice. When Suki came up to me my first day back in class and asked me what had happened, I had to come clean. As it turned out, she didn't replace me, but she did tell me that I needed to take it easy and not push myself so that I could heal.

 

Between the stress of the injury and knowing that I had two important leading roles in the end-of-year workshop, the pressure was definitely getting to me. Although I never allowed it to show in my dancing, one of the ways that I dealt with my insecurities was by starting to eat more. It's not that I was sitting in my room and secretly stuffing myself, but because I was worried about spending money on food, I was eating things like pizza and macaroni salad. At the same time, I socialized more and went out with friends. Periodically we'd indulge ourselves by pigging-out on Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies and doughnuts. For the first time in my life, I was craving carbs—probably for their instant energy boost as well as their soothing proper
ties. Later, when I was diagnosed with diabetes, controlling my carb cravings when my blood sugar was out of control would become a serious issue—but all that was still in the future. My weight gain, however, was not.

One morning, I was in class with Madame Tumkovsky (Tumi, to us students) and had just finished a series of pirouettes in a diagonal line across the room when she called me over and, in the middle of class, told me that Stanley wanted me to lose five pounds. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It's not that either her message or her method of informing me was surprising; at the time, young dancers were often told to lose weight, and the message was rarely delivered in a warm or reassuring manner. But did she have to say it in front of the entire class?

I was immediately reminded of the first time I'd been humiliated by someone's criticism of my body. I was nine years old and in the fifth grade. The most popular boy in my class had blond hair and blue eyes and was so cool that he was going with a girl in the sixth grade, who happened to be one of Michele's best friends. I was delirious with joy when he wrote me a note in class that read, “You're a fox. You're cute.” I couldn't believe he actually liked me.

At the end of the year my class had a Hawaiian luau where the girls danced in bathing suit tops and grass skirts. I was excited to have this cool guy see me dance, sure that he'd be impressed. I shook my hips just for him, and when the performance was over I went over to where he stood. Instead of complimenting me, however, he looked horrified and stared right at my chest.

“You're flat!” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“You're flat,” he said again.

I made him repeat it a few more times while I tried to figure out what he meant. Did he mean I was skinny? Was he giving me a compliment? No, it couldn't have been a compliment, given the look of disgust on his face.

Once I got home, I pulled out the dictionary. Flat was defined as “level…without unevenness of surface as in tabletops….”

When I finally realized what he was talking about, I felt my face turning red. I was filled with shame. Until that moment it had never occurred to me to worry about whether someone would or wouldn't like me because of the way my body looked.

After that, there were no more notes from him. And, from then on, I wore loose sweatshirts over my clothes, even on the hottest days, which can be extremely hot in California.

Now, in Tumi's class, I once again felt deeply flawed and inadequate. Could I have been deluding myself into believing I was thin? Maybe I looked fat and just thought I was thin.

No dancer needs to be told how important it is to be thin. Balanchine, however, didn't expect his ballerinas to be emaciated. Although there was a body type he preferred, he was known to love dancers of all looks and sizes. He fell in love with a dancer's enthusiasm and passion, but, that being said, you did have to be as thin as your particular body could be. Personally, I had never had a problem staying thin, but now, for the first time, it wasn't so easy.

By the time that class ended, my head was spinning with contradictory thoughts. One moment I was planning how, from then
on, I'd avoid food at all costs. The next moment I was telling myself that I'd simply cut out sweets and eat more healthfully; I wasn't going to turn into a neurotic, anorexic dancer just because Stanley wanted me to be perfect for his ballet.

On the one hand, I wanted to keep my perspective about food, but, at the same time, I was horrified at the prospect of not being what “they” wanted me to be. I started to eat less and to analyze every morsel of food I put in my mouth. I had never had a soft drink before, let alone a diet one, but now I started drinking Diet Coke instead of orange juice. After a long day of dancing, however, I'd find myself so hungry that I'd inevitably lose control and overeat—or, at least, eat more than I had wanted or intended to. Each time that happened I was overcome with guilt and embarrassment, and terrified that my teachers would take away the roles I was dancing.

Naturally, I lost weight, and not surprisingly—given my personality and control issues—I went too far. By the end of that year, I was being told I needed to gain a few pounds.

 

Despite the fear that my accident and short-lived weight gain would keep me from dancing them, I did perform both the Brahms and Stanley's Bournonville in the end-of-year workshop. I knew that Balanchine would be attending one of the final rehearsals for his
Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet,
and the night before I was so excited I could hardly sleep.

By that time, Deidre and I had more or less gone our separate ways and found different groups of friends. My new roommate
and best friend, Stacey, was a beautiful blonde who had quit ballet when she was sixteen to be a cheerleader, worked hard to get back in dancing shape, and been accepted for SAB's winter program at the very late age of eighteen. Stacey had a collection of beautiful leotards and dance skirts, and that night, she told me to borrow whichever ones I wanted for the next day's rehearsal. Since I couldn't sleep, anyway, I stayed up late trying on one after another until I finally chose a matching reddish-coral set.

Whenever Balanchine was rehearsing at SAB, everyone who was around came to watch. That day Peter Martins stood at the side barre while Jerome Robbins stood in the doorway; company members and SAB students lined the classroom walls. I was nervous but mostly excited; since we already had rehearsed so much, I was ready and surprisingly calm.

Stacey was a demi soloist in the same piece, and her part opened the ballet. She started with a series of big jumps and immediately fell flat on her face. We all looked at Balanchine. How was he going to react? As soon as he knew she wasn't hurt, he broke into a smile, and everyone in the room seemed to let their breath out at once. Stacey's fall had broken the tension and reminded everyone that Balanchine liked it when dancers fell because it meant they were going for it with all their energy.

In my pas de deux there was a sequence in which my partner walks toward me. It's a romantic moment, and my partner, James Sewell, wasn't doing it the way that Mr. B wanted him to.

“Be like man,” Balanchine said, pounding his chest.

Jimmy tried, but he simply could not get the walk the way
Mr. B wanted it. Balanchine was known for being a great actor and a fine dancer who could demonstrate things precisely. Now he got up and walked toward me with his chest held high, taking firm steps and looking strong and powerful.

For a brief moment I was dancing with Mr. B.

 

I loved every moment of performing the Brahms, and the performances went well, even though I danced with injuries. One was the leg I'd hurt in the car accident and the other was a foot injury. Pain or no pain, nothing was going to stop me. The buzz was that Balanchine liked me, and I was fantasizing more than ever about a future with the New York City Ballet.

 

Shortly after the workshop performances, I graduated from PCS with a straight A average. I was sixteen years old. It felt great to know that I wouldn't have to worry about schoolwork anymore and could focus just on dance.

In July I went home for the summer, where my mom had all my favorite foods waiting: nectarines and plums and cashew nuts and bagels with lox and cream cheese. It was great to see Gent again. He still recognized my voice and gave me the neigh that I had so missed hearing. Romy, Michele, Mom, and I went for a great ride with all of our dogs through a beautiful forest opening onto a waterfall and a wide-open space where the horses could run and run. Even though I'd been gone for months, it didn't seem to matter; Gent and I were as connected as ever.

That summer I went folk dancing with my mom, camping with
my dad and Lynn, and ate as healthfully as I could. What I didn't tell anyone was how constantly I thought about the New York City Ballet and being thin enough for Balanchine.

In September, I returned to SAB.

I was seventeen, thin and ready to go.

The week I got back to New York I was once again called to Madame Gleboff's office along with my friend Stacey and one other student. Once more I received her news with mixed emotions, but this time my ambivalence had nothing to do with how I felt about pursuing a career with City Ballet. What Madame Gleboff told us was that Balanchine wanted us next for the company. But she quickly followed up that exciting news by cautioning us that Balanchine was ill. He was in the hospital, and there wouldn't be any new members taken that year, so if we had offers from other company directors who'd seen us in the workshop we should consider them. And, in any case, if Balanchine didn't recover, whoever took over might not choose us.

The three of us left her office in silence. Balanchine wanted us! But he was ill. He might not recover? I could not contemplate that possibility. Mr. B had been sick and in the hospital before and he'd always pulled through. I had to believe he'd pull through this time, as well.

 

Although no one wanted to imagine a City Ballet without Mr. B, we had often speculated among ourselves about who might take over on that faraway day when he was no longer around. People often suggested that it might be Peter Martins. I knew he'd cast me as a demi soloist and had chosen me to understudy the lead in his workshop performance of
The Magic Flute my
first year at SAB, so I was hoping he still liked me and would pick me for the company. But I wasn't even going to think about that because Balanchine would be fine. He had to be fine.

Meanwhile, classes and rehearsals continued as usual. For the workshop that year, Suki was staging two Balanchine ballets,
Valse-Fantiasie
and
Western Symphony
. I was chosen, along with two of my closest friends, Catherine and Kelly, to share the lead in
Valse Fantaisie
, each one dancing the part in one of the three times it would be performed. In addition, I was picked to dance the lead in one of the four movements of
Western Symphony
. My role was particularly meaningful to me because Balanchine had originally created it for his fourth wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq. It was sexy and flirtatious, requiring lots of energy, not to mention prancing on pointe, high kicks and lots of turning. In photographs, Tanny had always looked glamorous and sensual, qualities I had never attributed to myself. So when Suki invited a group of us to her home one evening to watch a video of the original cast, I was afraid that I'd be intimidated or discouraged by watching her. Instead, the opposite happened: Tanaquil's un
inhibited, energetic and humorous performance made me realize that I could bring my own kind of energy and abilities to the role.

Now in my third year at SAB, I was working hard, loving the roles I was dancing and assuming, as we all were, that Balanchine would be at our final rehearsal for the workshop and at the performances as usual. At the same time, I was also enjoying more of a social life and forming close bonds with some of the other dancers. Although, on one level, we were competing with one another, on another level we inspired and supported one another. We knew that each one of us was unique, and we were hopeful that we would all be accepted into the company. We were extremely disciplined and danced all day under enormous pressure, but we were also very young, away from home, and, like any group of college-age students, we liked to let loose a bit in the evenings. We'd go out to dinner at one of the many local restaurants and occasionally we partied on weekends with guys from the men's advanced class and even a few from the company who occasionally showed up. My roommate, Stacey, made a mean daiquiri, so we would sometimes gather at our apartment to get drunk. And, of course, we also gossiped about who was dating whom in the company. Our “fun,” however, always came second to the serious business of dancing.

 

Despite the outward appearance of normalcy, after several months of Balanchine's absence, it became clear that there was a real possibility he might never come back.

My friend and fellow student Peter Boal and I often talked
about visiting him. We felt a need to tell this man who had changed our lives just how much he had influenced us, how much he meant to us, and how much we missed him. At the same time, we worried that we might be intruding. After all, we were only students; we weren't even company members, and we really had no idea if he'd even know who we were. Finally, however, we decided we just had to go.

When we got to the hospital, we sat in the waiting room too nervous even to go up to the desk and ask if we could go in to see him. We were about to leave before we even entered the room when we heard a voice calling, “Come, come in.” It was Karin von Aroldingen, a principal dancer with the company and Balanchine's closest companion at the time, and one of those who had been by his side throughout his illness. Karin told us that Balanchine was having a good day and that we should go in to see him.

Although he was very thin and pale, he seemed happy to see us and asked us to pull a couple of chairs up to his bedside, indicating that he had something to tell us.

Balanchine was passionate about many things, including art, dance, food and music, and we were sure that when he spoke his words would be both passionate and profound. Instead, he asked us if we were in school, and then talked for ten minutes about the importance of staying in school and getting a good academic education.

Normally, Balanchine did not condone anything that took his dancers' attention away from the theater; it didn't matter what
it was: getting married, having a baby or going to college. His attitude generally was that if we wanted to go to school we could do it when we finished dancing.

Needless to say, Peter and I left the hospital confused. Why had Mr. B told us to stay in school? Was he thinking clearly, and if so, was he trying to tell us something about the future of the company without him?

 

Balanchine died April 30,1983, the day of our first workshop performances. Lincoln Kirstein and Peter Martins announced his passing to the audience before the curtain went up, and we danced with more heart and soul than ever. It was the death of a genius and of an era.

His funeral, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign, a beautiful Russian Orthodox church on the east side of Manhattan, was attended by hundreds of people, many of whom comprised a history of dance in our century. As each of us entered the church, we were given a lighted candle, which we held, standing as is customary in Russian Orthodox churches, for what seemed like hours.

Standing at the very back of the church, I was spotted by Joseph Duell, the NYCB soloist who had choreographed a new work for the SAB workshop that I was in the first year I was there. Joe took my hand and led me closer to the front of the church. Karin Von Aroldingen, who was standing close by, nodded in my direction, as if to let me know that I was welcome and she was happy to see me there. I was touched that she and Joe seemed to think that I belonged.

When the service was over, we formed a long, long line and silently walked past the open casket to pay our last respects. Although I knew my grief couldn't compare to that of those who knew him so much better and who had worked with him every day, I, too, felt an inexpressible sorrow. I had been touched by Balanchine's greatness and the promise of a life working with him. Now I would never dance one of his new creations. I would not have the opportunity to be nurtured by his genius.