The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  While her body must obviously be working hard to maintain its tilted verticality, her face and arms express relaxation. Her lifted brows and sultry eyelids mirror the cupid’s-bow of her mouth, just as the crisscrossed spangles on her black dress mirror the pattern of her fishnet tights. She is the picture of coherent, artificially manipulated composition, from coiffed head to elongated toe. And yet there is a further element in the photograph that contradicts all the signals about control, coherence, balance, precision. Swirling in the shadows that surround the ballerina, bouncing with distracting intensity off the metallic trim on her dress, playing around her bodice and fluttering on her inner arms, are wild, free, unconfined spots of brightness. This is, among other things, a photograph of dancing light.

  “They contain something of the secret and seldom realized intention of choreography,” Balanchine said of Lynes’s pictures. Just as a choreographer focuses on and responds to the human figure, so did George Platt Lynes: it was his central subject, whether in his portraits of Gertrude Stein, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and other Paris artists of the 1920s, or his male nudes of the 1930s, or the oddly romantic, narrative self-portraits he did in the 1940s. After his initial burst of fame and success in the 1930s, his reputation peaked quickly. It was Hollywood which, according to Cecil Beaton, “killed” Lynes as a photographer in the late 1940s; the man himself died of cancer, at the age of forty-eight, in 1955. But his importance never faded among those who had admired his work, and his prints still sell to collectors and fans.

  In March 1994 the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles organized a major retrospective of the work of George Platt Lynes, including the 1930s photo of the Balanchine ballerina. The ballerina herself was living, at the time, less than twenty miles from the Kopeikin Gallery, though she was unaware of the show that contained her portrait. Tamara Toumanova had been a permanent resident of Los Angeles since 1942, when she signed an RKO movie contract. Before that she danced in the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo in Paris, having been discovered by Balanchine at the age of eleven. In 1932 and 1933 she was one of his “baby ballerinas,” dancing the lead roles in ballets he choreographed for her (Cotillon, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Mozartiana, among others) before she was even a teenager. She stopped dancing for Balanchine sometime in the 1940s, but her connection to him lasted until his death; he would see her every time he brought his company to Los Angeles, often visiting her in her own home.

  “Balanchine was close not only to me but to my family,” Toumanova writes in her segment of I Remember Balanchine, and goes on to explain this by describing her emigré history—the aristocratic mother who had always loved ballet and who wanted more than anything else for her daughter to become a great ballerina; the engineer father, a colonel in the tsar’s army, who received fourteen battle wounds over the course of his military career; the family’s flight, following the Russian Revolution, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok to Shanghai, where the father worked briefly as an engineer; and finally the decision to give up everything else and move to Paris so that Tamara could begin studying ballet at the age of five. Few maternal gambles can have paid off so handsomely.

  Two months after the Kopeikin Gallery show, I pay a single visit to Toumanova at her Spanish-style bungalow on a quiet residential street in Beverly Hills. Filigree ironwork covers the front windows in Gothic arches; shiny, dark-green rubber plants grow near the house. In marked contrast to the well-kept property around it, a 1954 Buick Roadmaster sits on four flat tires in the drive-way, looking as if it hadn’t been moved in at least twenty years.

  As, in fact, it hasn’t. Tamara Toumanova and her mother bought this house in the early 1970s after both their husbands had died, and the car has been there, driverless, ever since. Before that the family lived in a large house in Bel Air. Tamara’s husband—a producer and screenwriter named Casey Robinson, whom she married in 1944—was the only non-Russian-speaker in the household, though according to his widow he “adored everything Russian.” The bulk of Toumanova’s career was handled by her mother, who did everything from sew costumes to advise on camera angles; but she allowed her daughter’s husband a subsidiary role in the movie world, where he was to “carry on the tradition that I did not become a poopsie-woopsie actress,” as Toumanova now puts it.

  When she opens the door to me, I am first surprised by Toumanova’s height—shorter than I am, which puts her at just over five feet. She is, of course, considerably older than the slip of a girl in the George Platt Lynes photo. Her once-slender body is hidden by a long-sleeved, calf-length black dress, and her long hair, which she wore loose as late as the 1980s, is now swept back in a chignon. But the hair, though gray-flecked, is still dark, and the aristocratically molded face is still recognizably Toumanova’s, with those intense, dramatically widening eyes and that elegantly aquiline nose. Injured recently in an accident and temporarily walking with a cane, Toumanova no longer has a ballerina’s grace—except in her hands, which flash expressively from one gesture to another, now with raised annunciatory fingers, now pressed flat against her chest. Balanchine is still alive in those hands.

  She apologizes for closing the door rapidly behind me, which she does to keep in the three cats: Kiss-Kiss, Caruso, and a third she calls Pussycat (“I don’t even know what his name is,” she explains, as if the other two had introduced themselves to her). The foyer through which I enter and the front parlor into which she invites me both seem extremely Russian. Every flat surface, every square inch of wall space is covered with something dark and rich and old. A chandelier hangs in the hallway (“Usually when earthquake starts I hear the banging of the chandeliers,” Toumanova remarks calmly), and at least four glass candelabra rest on tables and shelves in the parlor; nonetheless, the overall light is uncharacteristically dim for midsummer, midday Los Angeles.

  As she excuses herself to get the coffee she has prepared for my visit, I peer through the gloom and discern a red-hued Turkish rug, a set of green-velvet-covered chairs and sofas, some intricate metalwork of undisclosed function, a half-size harp, an extensive collection of china and glass swans, a somewhat smaller collection of porcelain eggs, and an uncountable number of photographs, drawings, and paintings, almost all of them depicting Tamara Toumanova at some stage of her dance career.

  She emerges from the kitchen, not at all disconcerted to catch me snooping. “Did you see Karajan? And Chagall? And Balanchine in Paris? And Cocteau?” Each name is punctuated by a gesture toward the appropriate photograph. “Jean Cocteau was a very dear friend. This is Cocteau three weeks before he died. I have also the last letter he wrote; it was to me. And there, that one hanging in the middle there, is a drawing he did of me when I was in his Phèdre.” It is indeed: a lovely pastel, signed by Jean Cocteau. I am beginning to feel that I am in a museum—a museum which represents the work of a wide variety of prominent twentieth-century artists, but in which every artist has willfully and rather eccentrically chosen to focus on a single female figure.

  It is a museum, however, from which the chief curator is absent. “Mama died four years ago,” Toumanova tells me, in tones so freshly mournful that I feel compelled to express my condolences. “There has never been a personality like my mother,” she continues. “It’s not because she was my mother. It’s because she was my friend.”

  It was her mother who tended not only the garden outside the house but the artifacts within. Toumanova has tried to take over these roles, but there is a sad frustration inherent in being the sole curator of one’s own memories. “Some people say, ‘I have done this, I have done that,’ but they have no proof,” she points out to me. “I have so much proof it is almost difficult for me.” She sighs. “I am going through a difficult time right now. Everything I did, everything I created, everything I expressed is like a dream.”

  To cheer her up we turn to stories about her Hollywood career—from her role in Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance (“The second part is he and me, and he is at his best”), to the costume Mitchell Leisen
commissioned for her in Tonight We Sing (“Exactly like Pavlova”), to the humor and brilliance of Billy Wilder, who directed her in her last film, the 1970 Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

  I ask her what it was like to work with Alfred Hitchcock in Torn Curtain, a 1966 thriller in which Toumanova plays an imperious Czechoslovakian dancer who delivers Paul Newman up to the enemy. The look Hitchcock drew from her in the film—a harsh, arrogant stare, repeatedly focused on Newman during a series of stop-motion pirouettes—is the exact opposite of the dreamy, sultry look captured by George Lynes in his photograph. How, I wondered, had the director prepared her for this role?

  “He adored me,” Toumanova says of Hitchcock, “because I was a part of the life he admired. I had the letters of Jean Cocteau, Miró, Chagall, Darius Milhaud. And he said to me, ‘Madam, do you know what you have? You are a very rich young lady.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Maître, I know what I have.’” Toumanova also recalls that when she was on the set, surrounded by the crew and the other players, Hitchcock would have his secretary bring out a silver tray bearing a single glass of champagne: “Only one glass. That means nobody else but me. That is how he thanked me.”

  When I bring up the photography of George Platt Lynes, Tamara Toumanova first assumes that I’m referring to another portrait he did of her, a 1941 photograph taken while she was in Salvador Dali’s Labyrinth. She owns that photo (“The original,” she says, as if a photograph could have only one) and has seen it reproduced many times. But then I produce the earlier picture that had hung in the Kopeikin show, and she is both startled and moved, for she has not seen this picture in decades.

  After studying the photo for a moment, she identifies it as being from Cotillon, the first ballet Balanchine made for her, in 1932. What is odd, she comments, is that in the photo she is wearing not her own costume (that of a young girl at her first ball), but the costume of another role, “the woman in black.” Balanchine, apparently, was not present during the photography session; it was Lynes who got her to pose in this theatrical, purely invented position. Toumanova nonetheless agrees with Balanchine’s assessment of Lynes’s choreographic evocation. “It’s so outstanding,” she says, looking at the picture. “I don’t say this because it is me, but because it is a beautiful picture. The hand, resting … the quality of the look. They don’t take photographs like that anymore.”

  Later she elaborates on this theme. “It is an epoch that is going away. I look at it and it is like another world.” She looks at me hard, as if to instill in me the importance of what she is about to say. “In life, you never realize how everything changes. It changes suddenly.”

  I look down at the photograph in my hand, at the dreamy look, the softly resting hand, the delicately balanced pose, and I realize that the woman in the photograph is silently telling me just the opposite. I will be this way forever, she is saying.

  A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

  was not, as a child, taken to the opera. This was only partly a matter of money. It is true that we did not have enough to buy good seats, but there is always the balcony, or even standing room, for those who are passionate about the art form. My husband, for instance, comes from a working-class Italian-American family—a background much poorer, economically, than mine—and he was introduced to opera as a child. Toward the end of her life my mother-in-law, even when she was subsisting entirely on social security, would give opera tickets as gifts to relatives. (Ambiguously malicious gifts, sometimes, but that’s another issue.) And several friends of mine from equally impecunious backgrounds recall that, as teenagers, they would sneak into performances during intermission, so that by the time they were in their twenties they knew the second halves of a number of operas. And then there were always records.

  But we didn’t even have opera recordings, which suggests to me that my lack of early exposure to the form was more, or other, than an issue of just money. I remember being told that my father couldn’t stand the sound of the human voice accompanying classical music; he felt it marred the instrumental experience. (In this respect, at least, he is the opposite of Mark Morris.) And my father is the more overtly musical of my parents: he is—or was—a competent amateur on the recorder. After the divorce, when he was living alone in New York, he used to spend many of his Saturdays driving upstate to a monastery in order to play recorder duets with one of the monks; afterward he would share the brothers’ wordless midday repast (it was an order that had taken a vow of silence, which no doubt added to my father’s pleasure) and then drive back home to his solitary apartment.

  My sister inherited this musical talent. She also developed, as a child, a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and had collected nearly a full set of those old, rather lavishly boxed D’Oyly Carte LPs by the time she was thirteen. Among the several instruments she played was the cello, and she would use it to do a hilarious imitation of The Lady Jane in Patience—hilarious partly because my sister, though very thin, nonetheless managed to convey something of the role’s plump bathos. Perhaps as a result of her interest, or perhaps as a cause of it, we were taken to see live touring productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. But not to the opera per se.

  So it was not until I was well into my twenties, maybe even in my early thirties, that I first attended an opera at the venerable San Francisco Opera House. (Before that, there had been one evening at the Paris Opera when I was a Eurailing student of twenty—but I was so high up, and so ignorant of what I was seeing, that I remember more about the Chagall ceiling than I do about the opera being performed.) Now I try to go at least once or twice a year. Sometimes the operas are good and sometimes they are terrible, but I find that I like the experience of being at the opera.

  I have particularly fond memories of an evening a few years ago when my husband and I went to hear Tosca. The source of my affection was not the opera; in fact, after a subsequent exposure to Madame Butterfly I have decided to swear off Puccini altogether. No, the warm feelings I associate with that occasion have to do with the opera house itself, and in particular with the people who have for many years carried on its underlying functions. My night at the opera, that night, was spent mainly outside the glamorous multi-tiered auditorium, in the belly of the building.

  My own belly was the initial problem: from the moment I sat down, I began to experience a severe case of stomach cramps. At the first intermission I leapt out of my seat before the applause had decently ended so as to be among the first in the ladies’ room downstairs. Then, to kill the rest of the interval and exercise my complaining stomach muscles (why had I insisted on having that West Indian curry for dinner at six o’clock?), I strolled around the basement bar, attempting to look as if I had a purpose. In my peregrinations I noticed a little room marked First Aid just to the left of the bar area, where people appeared to be getting medical attention, or at any rate attention. I longed to be there—to go in and lie down for a while. But I couldn’t bring myself to overcome the shame of walking into the First Aid room amid all those well-dressed witnesses, particularly since I wasn’t visibly having a heart attack or anything.

  So I went back to my seat. But as the lights began to dim I said to my husband, “I think I’ll go lie down in the First Aid room for the second act. My stomach is killing me.” I had realized, you see, that during the performance all those people would be gone from the bar, and therefore no one would observe my shameful defection. I scurried up the aisle toward the exit doors just as Scarpia sounded his first notes.

  The bar was, as I had hoped, deserted, and the door marked First Aid remained invitingly open. I peeked my head inside and was greeted by a chipper, owlish man in, I would guess, early middle age. He had round spectacles and a receding hairline, and seemed to be about my height—though it may only have been his extremely unthreatening air that made him seem comfortingly short.

  “I have stomach cramps,” I announced. “Do you think I could lie down here for the second act?”

  “Of course!” He gestured toward two old-fashioned
slatted bedsteads (they reminded me of my visits to British infirmaries) that had been screened from my view when I stood in the doorway. “We have Herbert Hoover-vintage beds. Grey institutional blankets from 1932” (which, as the program had reminded me, was the year the San Francisco Opera House opened; Tosca was the first performance). “Everything for your finest comfort. What have you been eating?”

  “Caribbean food,” I answered, glad that he didn’t immediately attribute my stomachache to either menstrual cramps or emotional instability.

  He set a little footstool next to the nearer bed, the one most shielded by the screen. “Just take off your shoes and climb up,” he said. “Do you want to get under the covers? Or would you like me to cover you with a blanket from the other bed?”

  “A blanket from the other bed,” I agreed happily. Lying down in my dress wasn’t so bad. In fact, lying down and being covered by a blanket was wonderful. My stomach instantly ceased to bother me.

  After enjoying my supine position for a moment or two, I turned my head to look at my protector. Seated at a little desk directly in line with the door but also within my view, he was writing in what looked like a large guest register.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Wendy,” I said conversationally.

  “No, I mean your last name,” with a smile.

  “Oh—Lesser.” He appeared to be writing it down; perhaps he was noting my symptoms in some kind of catalog.

  “Do you get many people down here in the course of a performance?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, quite a few. Opera lovers are very passionate people, and unexpected things are always happening to passionate people. Opera lovers like to overdo everything—food, love, emotion…”