I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  The Rising Stars troupe swelled in number. New Jerseyans Cole Mills, from Oceanside; Kiki Nyemchek, from Teaneck; and Vlad Kvartin, from Fair Lawn, whose immigrant status was an open question, all got put up in luxury rooms at the Wynn Las Vegas. They did charity events and met such humble folks as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

  The cherry on top of the sundae was when Steve hired the whole troupe for the 2006 grand opening of Wynn Macau, a new casino on the southern coast of China. The Rising Stars kids were the whole show. Wynn flew fifty teenage dancers from New York to Hong fucking Kong. These kids had never seen anything like it. The closest they might have gotten was an order of sesame chicken at their local Chinese takeout, and they would be disappointed to discover that the dish wasn’t normally offered in the actual nation of China.

  During this period, having Maks in my corner meant everything for me. No longer forced to put up with the misery of being a brokester working his butt off and being only poorly compensated, he could now afford to toss a few coins my way. Because I was still a broke-ass dancer scratching out an existence in the competition world, I appreciated the favor.

  More impressive than the money, though, was having doors open to him in the incredible, weird, over-the-top vanity fair of show business. Maks was twenty-six years old, a stud, and on the biggest TV show in the country. He ran through Hollywood like a kid through a candy store. Dancing with the Stars had suddenly blown up into such a huge phenomenon that when Maks showed up at a party he was bigger than half—90 percent!—of the celebs in attendance.

  Man, it was a crazy time. Overnight, my brother went from being a fucking nobody ballroom dancer in New Jersey to becoming the hot new face in entertainment. Everybody wanted a piece of him.

  Through all of this I experienced the first small beginnings of an upheaval in my relationship with my brother. It was nothing too pronounced, but I could feel a tremor as the earth shifted beneath our feet. Maks and I were now living a continent apart. He had always been my rock, and the thing about a rock is it isn’t supposed to change. I was so busy changing myself that I never stopped to imagine that my brother could become someone different than the person who had been at my side for so many years. At that point I was only faintly aware of what was starting to happen, but the real sea change would wash over our lives soon enough.

  First Season

  It took me a while to join the cast of Dancing with the Stars. I had a couple of appearances here and there, some more memorable than others, but I was in my own world and had my own thing going on. Though the show became a huge phenomenon, it wasn’t central to my life, since I was heavily involved in the world of ballroom dance competition, and that’s where my focus was. But it was a nice treat to get away and spend some time in the weird, wonderful realm of Hollywood. As it turned out, I didn’t sign on to the show as a professional dancer until 2011, for Season 13—at age twenty-five, the same age Maks was when he started.

  I have nothing but the deepest love for my older brother. He means more to me than I can express. When anyone refers to me as “Maks Chmerkovskiy’s kid brother,” wow, I feel a surge of happiness and respect. But again, that small inside voice kicks in. Hey! I want to call out, I’m not anyone’s kid brother. Well, I am, but that’s not all I am.

  I’m not some sidekick and I never set out to be Robin. I am Batman.

  And yet my first sound bite on my first season as a pro, the first time the audience encountered me as a member of the cast, set the snarky, stammering tone.

  “I’m Valentin Chmerkovskiy . . . no, wait . . . I’m Val—no, no . . . I’m Val Chmerkovskiy and it took my brother twelve seasons to try to win this thing and he still hasn’t done so, so I’m here to redeem the family name.” It was probably one of the most obnoxious things I’ve ever said, and I’ve said a lot of obnoxious things in my life. As a green-as-grass rookie, I was not aware that sarcasm didn’t play well on TV. The show wanted sound bites, punch lines, and catch phrases, so I went ahead and made my first impression on the show, coming off like a snotty little douchbag.

  Maks’s fans jumped all over my trash talk. What they were reacting to was banter, nothing more, just playful sarcasm. The simple fact that there was now a pair of brothers dancing as professionals seemed to challenge some people. A tiny fraction of the commentators were off-the-hook fanatical, and they were extremely active in the show’s forums and on other social media, posting comments daily. They were not always the nicest comments, either, and at times strayed into bullshit slander and totally whack opinion.

  A few of the online posters came off as rancid little trolls, more interested in tearing other contestants down than building their candidate up. It was a losing propostion, but there were times when I could not resist baiting them back. “Hey, yo,” I would post, attempting to give the crazies a reality check. “I’m standing right here with your main man, your hero, and we’re laughing at you together, at how truly insane extreme your comments are.”

  Unfair and silly as it was, the fan base broke down into rival camps, the true-blue Americans versus the foreign immigrants, and I’ll let you guess who led the list of the outsiders. The Russians were coming! The dark and deadly Chmerkovskiy clan! The show will turn into Dancing with the Czars!

  My celebrity partner that debut season, Elisabetta Canalis, had a career in Italy as an actress, spokeswoman, and model. Elisabetta was a beautiful person, stunningly pretty, who spoke English with a sweet and sultry Italian accent. She had long served as a muse for fashion designer Roberto Cavalli, but in 2011 she was most well known for going through a very public breakup with superstar actor George Clooney.

  Talk about being labeled: none of Elisabetta’s credits, nothing about her sophisticated, statuesque European aura mattered, because all people saw when they looked at her was Clooney’s ex.

  A season on Dancing with the Stars was actually an excellent way for celebrities to push the reset button. Athletes, actors, singers, and media personalities could come on the show and display sides of themselves that the public never saw.

  The producers participated in the same stereotyping as the rest of society, but the smartest celebrity contestants found a way around that, playing ball to some extent while at the same time not taking their public images too seriously. A sense of playfulness was required. Elisabetta found herself with an awesome opportunity to slip out from underneath her ex-girlfriend label and present herself as herself.

  Unfortunately for her, she drew me as a professional partner.

  I walked into the first meeting with my celebrity partner to find a drop-dead beautiful Italian woman. Elisabetta Canalis obviously didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, and I came to understand that she had never really watched the show before committing to appear. And I repeat: Elisabetta signed up for Dancing with the Stars without having ever watched the show.

  It was the blind leading the blind. I had zero experience as a Dancing with the Stars professional partner. My brother’s advice and opinions could guide me, but for better or worse I was determined to make my own choices. Even so, I always felt Maks’s presence, as if he was looking over my shoulder at everything I did. There were four people in the rehearsal room, two flesh-and-blood humans, me and Elisabetta, and two ghosts, Maks and George.

  Feeling the need to prove myself, I shifted immediately into alpha mode. I was coming in totally energized, not arrogant—I mean, I was grateful to be there—but maybe a little bit too cocky. I carried my experience in the competitive dance world as a badge of honor. I might not have spoken my attitude in words, but to the other professional dancers it must have come through loud and clear.

  “Look, you little fuckers haven’t been on a real dance floor in years. I’m an athlete! [insert chest thump] at the peak of my physique! [and another] I can dance ten dances in a row and not break a sweat. Y’all can probably not do two routines without wheezing and puking!”

  I was ready to teach whoever I got as a partner how to become a world champ
ion ballroom dancer, while in front of me stood a woman who had no idea what she was getting into. Elisabetta was certainly cool, smart, and pleasant enough, but as far as she was concerned, we could have been doing Nunchucks with the Stars.

  “I’m excited to learn how to dance,” she said, in a cool European tone that indicated Elisabetta never got excited about much of anything. People got excited about her, not the other way around.

  We were at completely different stages in our lives. She was shell-shocked after being dragged through the media muck for a few months, and I was this peppy little upstart puppy nipping at her heels. We started working together and, yes, she was without a doubt an awesome chick, but dancing was hard for her.

  In fact, dancing was really, really hard for Elisabetta Canalis.

  I’ll take the blame, all right? My style of teaching wasn’t making the process easier. I should have told myself that with only three weeks to teach her how to dance, I had to accept how vulnerable she seemed and acknowledge what she could and couldn’t do. I had no patience for insecurity and was so driven to succeed that I overplayed my role a bit. I still had the competition perspective in my blood. I thought I was back teaching at Rising Stars Dance Academy, where tough love was the order of the day and no coddling was allowed.

  I went into the rehearsal period full steam, and my attitude caught Elisabetta off guard. So about a week and a half in we had a little moment, she and I, caught on camera and pretty much summing up the state of our relationship.

  We were rehearsing the quickstep, a fast dance that was really difficult to learn and even harder to get right. I mean, it’s called the quickstep, right, so I think the difficulty should be pretty self-explanatory right from the start. Elisabetta might have noticed that my fashion sense was way off. I dressed like the sixty-year-old ballroom dance teacher I had worked with two years before in London—shout out to Alan Fletcher! Elisabetta’s fashion guru, Roberto Cavalli would have shuddered and hid his eyes.

  “Quick, quick, slow!” I called out. We were already halfway through the rehearsal process, dancing wasn’t getting any easier for her, and my tone wasn’t getting any brighter. I wasn’t gloomy and I never belittled anybody, but at that point in time, I didn’t place as much value on uplifting rhetoric, because I was so accustomed to using challenging rhetoric. I thought that if I pushed my students, they would know that I cared, because I was challenging them to surpass their expectations. The people in the world that I came from, the world of dancesport, knew never to take it personally.

  But George Clooney had never talked to Elisabetta like I was talking to her. Nobody in their right mind would have dared to talk to this woman that way. She was a big star in Italy, where people walked on eggshells around her, the way they behave toward A-list celebrities in the States.

  “Quick, quick, slow! Quick, quick, slow!”

  “Hey, hey,” she muttered, rolling her big, beautiful runway-model eyes at me. She didn’t understand what I was doing, and didn’t feel it either. At that point, she didn’t even want to feel it. Instead of trying to make her understand, I should have focused on an easier dance step that would maybe help her enjoy dance in general. At least that would have represented progress, after which she might gradually come to understand what we were trying to do.

  I spun around, demonstrating. “Quick, quick, slow. Quick, quick, slow.”

  “I still don’t understand,” she wailed.

  “Quick, quick, slow. Quick, quick, slow. Quick—”

  “Show me again,” she ordered, cutting me off. “Show it to me again.”

  Those were her words, but what I heard in my head was something different:

  Dance, monkey, dance!

  I had an image of me as a Blackpool champion, standing there in front of a woman who’s, what? George Clooney’s ex? Someone who’d had a bit part in Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo?

  I turned to her and said, “You know I’m not your bitch, right?”

  Whoa, whoa, double whoa.

  She rolled her eyes and said, “What?” She was appalled. “What did you say?”

  “I’m out here trying to make you look good,” I said, trying to justify myself. “I’m here for you.”

  “Not for me!” she responded, then started gathering up her things, all the while muttering curses in street-slang Italian.

  The camera caught it all, and even though the producers wound up editing out my “not your bitch” line, viewers got the idea. Obviously, we made up after that day and let bygones be bygones. But the damage had been done. Our rehearsal package aired in week two and not too coincidentally we got eliminated from the show that week, also.

  Like I said, I’ll take the blame. I wasn’t good at communicating within what was a new environment for me. I had a lot of learning to do.

  But actually, that early elimination might have been the best thing that ever happened to me on Dancing with the Stars. It not only ended the agony, but it meant producers could assign me to perform as a solo dancer on featured pro numbers. I was able to demonstrate what I was actually good at, which at that point was dancing. What I wasn’t good at (not yet) was guiding a celebrity partner.

  I busted my ass showing what I could do. I was already looking ahead to the next season, and knew I had to find a way to stand out. On the basis of my miserable showing with Elisabetta, I wasn’t sure that I would be asked back. So I pulled out all the stops as a dancer.

  Some of the pros allowed their feelings to get hurt when they were eliminated. Their egos kicked in and they would turn their backs on the remaining episodes of the show. They didn’t want to perform in the precommercial “bumper,” they didn’t want to do the thirty-second filler, and they didn’t want to do a performance for a visiting guest artist.

  I had a different attitude. “Yo, I just left my whole world to be on this show! Give me as much camera time as possible!”

  Unlucky Season 13 of Dancing with the Stars featured celebrity contestants such as Ricki Lake, Rob Kardashian, and J. R. Martinez, who won with an overwhelming number of viewer votes. Chaz Bono’s appearance triggered protests from conservatives because he was transgender. NBA forward Metta World Peace partnered with my brother’s future wife, Peta Murgatroyd, who was taking her first turn as a pro dancer, but Metta and Peta were the first couple to be eliminated.

  Season 13 also featured a week-six exchange between my brother and the judges for which I might have been at least partly to blame. He and I stood together watching the couple going on before him, and it bothered us both when their routine received extravagant praise from the judges, totally overblown for what Maks and I considered was at best a mediocre performance. So he vented to me a little about the cluelessness of the judges.

  Bitching about the adjudicators was a time-honored ballroom tradition, so I joined in on the trash talk. Instead of calming him down, I acted as a catalyst for his outrage, getting him even more hyped up than he was to begin with. He went out and did his number with his partner, Hope Solo, the famously fiery goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s soccer team. It was “Broadway Week” on Dancing with the Stars, so they performed a rumba to “Seasons of Love” from the Broadway show Rent.

  When judge Len Goodman came down hard on Solo (“This was your worst dance of the season, in my opinion”), Maks reacted. Waving his arms over his head, he encouraged the crowd to boo Goodman’s comment—which they did, enthusiastically.

  Goodman: Don’t start all that, Maks, because half the fault is yours.

  Maks: As long as the audience likes our journey, we’re good.

  Goodman: Let me tell you, Maks, the audience likes the effect. They judge on efficacity. I’ve been in this business for over fifty years—

  Maks (under his breath): Maybe it’s time to get out.

  Judge Carrie Ann Inaba spanked Maks for his dis of Goodman (“Have some respect!”), so there was plenty of leftover tension when host Brooke Burke did the post-routine interview. She asked my brother how he felt about
the scoring. He voiced his disappointment, then added a comment heard around the Dancing with the Stars world.

  “With all due respect, this is my show,” Maks said.

  All microphones should come with a warning label, “Use of this device by Maksim Chmerkovskiy could result in injury or death.” He was notorious for his “that wasn’t disgusting” style of off-the-cuff comments. I knew exactly what he was trying to say—that the dancers were responsible for the show right alongside the hosts, judges, and producers. It was indeed “Maks’s show” as much as anyone else’s.

  But that’s not what America heard. Viewers misconstrued the comment as typical “Maks the Knife” arrogance. The discussion boards and commentary threads lit up. No one wanted to cut this well-meaning, English-as-a-second-language dancer a break. Maybe he couldn’t express himself perfectly, but his heart was always in the right place. In protecting Hope he was only expressing his loyalty to a teammate.

  It wasn’t much, but within the closed system of Dancing with the Stars, the whole business qualified as a major dustup. I felt bad, because I had fired my brother up, and he said things he probably wouldn’t have said otherwise. We were like kids on a playground. You act a little differently—and talk a little trashier—when you have your boy backing you up.

  DURING MY DEBUT SEASON I EXPERIENCED THE BACKSTAGE chatter at Dancing with the Stars for the first time. I knew a lot of the professional dancers, so I wasn’t a total outsider. Not much that was being said surprised me, since the talk was the familiar routine about aches and pains, the opinions of judges, and who was an item and who wasn’t. I thought I was back in the sweaty changing rooms of the competition circuit, or in the cafeteria at high school. The environment may be different but people were the same all over.

  I did get introduced to something that was new to me, though, an ongoing discussion among the Dancing with the Stars pros—not a debate, really, more like a sore topic that everyone kept revisiting. The question centered on who had it easier, the female professionals who were teaching male celebrities, or the male dancers, like me, who taught female partners?