“Ummm,” he said, “maybe I should.”
Then, before I walked away, Mother said, “I’m so glad she’s taking a cab so you can stay a little longer and talk.”
Chapter 5
On the crowded shuttle back to New York, I thought how parental-child roles are reversed when nature runs its inevitable course. The parents become the children and vice versa. They bring us up lovingly, tolerating our moods and mischief. The circle meets itself when we find ourselves becoming their protectors. I loved them more than I could ever express and was realizing more and more how their values had molded me.
I thought of what an integral part they had played in the development of my professional attitudes as a child. I had just accepted that they were always there, supporting me with their love and care. It was not something I appreciated really. It just was. But looking back, I realize that they were the ones who had steered me, not only into my acting career as such, but toward the patterns that that career had assumed—that is, live performing. I had always sensed that this was what they had wanted for themselves. So, in effect, I was doing it for them as well as for myself.
I was born with extremely weak ankles which didn’t properly support my weight. So at the age of three my parents searched out and found a ballet school with a fine reputation in Richmond, Virginia. They hoped that ballet would act as therapy for strengthening my ankles. Not only did the therapy work but right from the start I adored the physical expression of dance. It became indispensable to me.
The school was named for its principal teacher, Julia Mildred Harper. I remember Mother being impressed with how Harper taught her students to express themselves with their hands. Mother’s hands had always been one of the most expressive outlets for her, and she identified with that outlet for me. Through one’s hands came feelings, Mother would say. You can express joy, sorrow, terror, and fun through your hands. I listened to her and even today I can discern another person’s character as much through their hands as any other way.
I was not very assertive in school or in dancing class. But Mother continually encouraged me to step up more—to go to the front of the line, to express a new idea for a game or a step. But if I didn’t feel I was ready, I didn’t want to say or do anything. It frustrated Mother a great deal. I don’t think it bothered Daddy very much. Maybe Mother saw herself in me and didn’t want me to make her mistake of being too cautious.
I went to dancing school every day. Even though I needed the expression of dance I hung at the back of the classroom because I had a medium-sized birthmark behind my left armpit. I felt it was so ugly, I didn’t want anybody else to see it. That birthmark haunted me for years. Today, I have to think twice to remember which arm it graces.
My first performance was singing and tap-dancing to “An Apple for the Teacher.” I wore a green cardboard four-leaf clover on my head and I dropped the apple. It was my first laugh. I dropped the apple on purpose every time after that.
As I progressed in school, I regarded my studies as simply what was required; the dancing my parents had begun for me was my life.
I found schoolwork boring. I found the books I chose to read an adventure. I loved books about scientists and explorers and philosophers. School, somehow, managed to make these same human beings seem dull. And I loved my telescope. I would gaze from my bedroom window for hours or lie on the steamy summer grass well into the night wondering what could be going on with the stars that twinkled a message I was sure I would decode someday.
Many mornings I would wake up convinced that I had had a particularly advanced and sophisticated dream relating to medicine or to some other civilization that had existed on earth, but I could never remember the dream well enough to write it down.
So dancing and music were my outlets. In the ballet, whenever I heard Russian music, it would bring me to tears because somehow I felt I understood Russian music in my heart. It reminded me pf a familiar feeling I couldn’t quite remember. But I never mentioned my feelings to anyone because I didn’t understand them.
When I was twelve we moved to Arlington, Virginia, and Mom and Dad enrolled me in one of the best ballet schools in the country, The Washington School of the Ballet in Washington, D.C., right across the Potomac River from where we lived. Lisa Gardiner and Mary Day were my teachers.
Every day after school I took the bus to Georgetown, transferred to a streetcar, and danced for five or six hours, returning to Arlington on the bus at night, doing my homework by the light above my seat as I was jostled home in the dark. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but the habit of this extremely demanding schedule was building a work pattern I hold to to this day. Then it was because I wanted to do it. Now I don’t think I could do and be what I am without it.
As I progressed in my dancing, I became very good at character work. Again, it was the Russian influence. My torso assumed the proper posture during a Russian mazurka as though I had been born to do it. I might have had red hair and freckles and looked like the map of Ireland, but I felt Russian. Whenever I saw the Russian alphabet, I felt I knew how to read it, but I just couldn’t remember how. When my Russian Jewish girlfriends took me home with them after dancing class, I knew the food I was eating, even when it was for the first time.
I was confused by how much I responded to anything Russian. I knew I knew nothing about it—yet I knew so much.
I sat starry-eyed when Lisa Gardiner related her days with the Ballet Russe, dancing with Anna Pavlova. Russians were so wildly passionate, allowing their emotions free rein, claiming that control stifled life.
I wanted to be wildly passionate, but as a middle-class WASP American, my upbringing dictated otherwise. Nevertheless, I identified with the Russian soul. I couldn’t understand why. I asked my mother and she said it was because I was talented. It was one of those marvelous nonanswers that parents can give and it served very well to make me wonder what talent really was.
Since I was trained in the art of dance, I grew up knowing something about how that process develops. For me, talent never had anything to do with the intellectual processes. It sprang almost entirely from feeling, expressed through the support system of discipline. My interpretation had to be on the mark and identifiable to another human being. If no one understood what I was trying to convey with my movement, then my feeling wasn’t communicating.
The combination of Lisa Gardiner and Mary Day was a dynamic source of disciplined inspiration for me. Miss Gardiner (it was as though “Miss” were her first name) was a soft-spoken, intellectually continental woman of high sophistication. It was rumored around the dancing school that she had been married once for one night. No one was able to uncover who her husband had been. It was out of the question to ask Miss Gardiner directly. No one ever knew how old she was either. That was definitely unapproachable territory also. But she was deeply kind and wise. She had impeccably erect posture as she sat proudly in her high-backed chair smoking her cigarette from a long silver holder. Her fingernails were polished with a shimmering pink color and sloped as they extended from her fingers. She let the smoke from her cigarette filter through her nose until it curled in the air above her.
Sometimes after class we sat and chatted. She talked about touring and the adventures of the old days in Russia. She talked of the importance of human experience in relation to movement. “So-and-so is not yet a consummate dancer because she hasn’t lived enough. She needs to suffer in order to attain wisdom. Such wisdom will then be evident in her movement.” I listened with rapt attention. She made inspirational sense to me. I heard her with different ears than I heard anyone else. I didn’t want to disappoint her. I felt she understood me and was specifically involved with my progress. I was “special” to her. She didn’t exactly disapprove of my boyfriends or my other interests in life, but made it clear that I had better fish to fry, namely dancing. When one of my boyfriends came to collect me for a date, she was polite and gracious, but upon saying good-bye would take a long drag on her f
iltered cigarette and more slowly than usual let the smoke spiral out of her nose as though counteracting a bad smell. With subtle disdain, she would wave me into the night as though secretly understanding that I would wise up when I was finished with my adolescent years. It was at those times that I was maddened with curiosity about the real story of her one-night marriage.
Mary Day was her opposite. Miss Day (Miss was her first name too) was a direct, down-to-earth, instructional pile driver of a teacher. She had black flashing eyes which she orchestrated to flash on cue under carefully arched eyebrows. She was about five feet six with size four feet which moved like greased lightning when she demonstrated a “combination” which she wished us to execute. Her voice rang with command, and when she didn’t like what she saw, she made no attempt to be sensitive in expressing her judgment. She walked with a proud stride, her feet turning out ducklike in opposite directions, her arms churning defiantly at her sides. Her movements were assertive and rapid, giving the impression that she wished to waste no time in her ambition to structure the best ballet school east of the Mississippi and south of New York.
When she was displeased at a student’s progress, she never hesitated to denounce them as “ridiculous” and told me once that I would never be able to dance the role of Cinderella because I was too “big” and she just couldn’t have Cinderella “clod-hopping” across the stage when the prince was supposed to feel sorry for her. When I told Mother what Miss Day had said, Mother called her up and said, “Fine, Shirley would rather be an actress anyway.” That was news to me, but I had to stay away from class for a few weeks until Miss Day apologized for her breach of sensitivity and said I would be really wonderful in the role of the Fairy Godmother because she needed to have size and command. Mother relented and I returned to class. Mother might have been reticent where she herself was concerned, but nobody was going to push her daughter around in an impolite manner. Mother wanted me to be a success and neither Miss Day nor anybody else was going to intimidate me if she had anything to say about it.
Miss Day, on the other hand, admired Mother’s spunk and gained new respect for me, too, as a result, so much so that later on when the school was in financial disorganization, she called Mother to solicit Dad’s help in “straightening out the mess.” Dad complied and the three of them have been friends ever since.
With Miss Day I always knew where I stood. If I could extract a pleased nod or a compliment from her, I knew I was progressing. The summer I returned from an intensive ballet course in New York City, she took one look at my legs and said, “Well, finally you are beginning to develop dancer’s muscles. Things are looking good for you.” That compliment satisfied me for six months.
So Miss Gardiner and Miss Day were my childhood professional mentors. They were the ones I longed to please and they were my yardstick for accomplishment. I spent more time with them at the school than I did with anyone else. And along with Mother, it was they who planted the seeds of acting in my mind. Miss Gardiner’s way of nourishing those seeds was to say, “You are a fine actress when you move. I always know what you’re attempting to convey.” Miss Day would say, “You know, Shirley, your face moves too much for classical ballet. Why don’t you think about going into acting?”
Either way, I got the message. But first I felt I needed to become accomplished at the expression of dance.
I remember the choreography contest. We were allowed complete freedom to choreograph what we wanted. I wasn’t interested in “steps” or matching movements. I wanted to express what I was feeling. As I was discussing it with Mother, she revealingly said, “Why don’t you choreograph movement that expresses a person willing to die for her art?” At first, that sounded melodramatic to me, but her feeling was so intense, I realized it was “acceptable” because that was just where she lived.
I chose some Russian symphonic music. I designed my body movements to express the anguish of the Russian soul in its suffering. I dragged myself across the floor as though being held down by an invisible force and finally convulsed into an outburst of triumph in the last movement.
When I performed my choreography, Mary Day had me do it twice. The second time, I spontaneously altered the final position. She gave me second prize because she felt I had been more involved with performing than with choreographing. I felt spontaneity was essential to choreography.
Thus began my personal conflict with the classical forms of dancing and consequently the dilemma Of whether I wanted to be a dancer or a star. When I graduated from high school I went straight to New York and into the chorus of a Broadway show. I was finally a professional dancer.
Dancers, or gypsies, as we refer to each other, are soldiers with talent, artists who are not allowed freedom, exponents of the living body who are in constant pain.
No one who hasn’t done it can possibly understand what the inherent contradictions mean. It is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, even after you give it up. It is with you every moment of your day and night. It is an art that expresses itself in how you walk, now you eat, how you make love, and how you do nothing. It is the art of the body, and as long as a dancer possesses a body, he or she feels the call of expression in dancer’s terms. Dancers are always aware of how they look physically. Such is the name of the game. I, as a dancer, may move awkwardly, but I am always aware of it. I may profess to be relaxing, but my body speaks to me when the time is up. I may revel in what strength I have, but I always know I could use more. And I always know when I look beautiful, when the line of a crossed leg is exquisitely angled, when my posture denotes certitude, and when a proud bearing commands respect. I, as a dancer, also know that when depression sets in, I cave in in the middle, become slovenly in my movements, and find it very difficult to look in the mirror.
I, as a dancer, may run with graceful strides to catch a cab, but I am intrinsically involved with every crevice of the street because I don’t want to become injured. I may adore a certain dress, but I will never wear it if it doesn’t enhance the body line. I choose clothes not for style or color or fashion, but for line … a dancer’s obsession.
When you have observed the progress of your body year after year in the dancing-class mirror, you are aware of each centimeter and bulge. You are aware of how beads of sweat look when they fall glistening from the end of a strand of your hair because you have worked hard.
You know that each slice of chocolate cake you indulge in the night before will have to be lifted in an arabesque the following day.
You learn how to apply your dancer’s knowledge to small everyday tasks, how to warm a pot of milk and set a table at the same time. How to talk on the phone and stretch your hamstrings on a tabletop in order to save time. You can deftly change your entire wardrobe in an airplane seat without being noticed because your body is your domain of manipulation and you know you can do anything with it.
Your relationship to pain becomes complex. There is good pain and bad pain. Good pain becomes a sensation you miss. Bad pain becomes a sensation of danger. With age you learn to pace yourself. You learn that breathing is as important to the movement as the physical technique itself. You learn to never breathe in. You understand that nature involuntarily takes care of that, as it does when you sleep. You learn to only breathe out. By doing that, you release the toxins in the body. Whenever you engage in a high kick, you breathe out toward, the kick. With that, you know you can go on kicking indefinitely.
And the personality of a gypsy is volatile. With a solo artist, eruptions of temperament are expected; with gypsies they are misunderstood.
Gypsies and soloists have put in the same amount of time in class, have slogged through their own self-doubt, and have endeavored to touch the soul of their being in similarly confrontational terms. To dance at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty. You are completely exposed when you dance. Your physical health is exposed. Your self-image is exposed. Your psychological health is exposed, and your senses of humor and
balance are exposed, to say nothing of how you relate to time, space, and the observer. It is impossible to dance out of the side of your mouth. You tell the truth when you dance. If you lie, you hurt yourself. If you “mark” it and don’t go full out, if you don’t commit your body totally, you hurt yourself. And if you don’t show up for work, it is relatively impossible to live with the guilt. That is why dancers give the impression of being masochistic. Masochism is not a dancer’s gimmick. Dancers fear being hurt. They do, however, enjoy the challenge of overcoming. That is, after all, what the art of dancing is all about. Overcoming the limitations of the body.
Dancers know that the mind, body, and spirit are inextricably intertwined.
You know it the first time you face an audience. There is “the big black giant” (as Oscar Hammerstein put it) out there and your task is to make them feel something through your body. You know you have to mean it. You know you have to have faith in your balance, your flexibility, and your strength. You know also that they will readily identify with your physical feats because they all have bodies too. You know that if you trip and fall, you humiliate them because that is what they are afraid of in themselves. You know that the easier you make it seem, the more hope you give them for themselves. You know they are rooting for you, otherwise their attendance would be called into question. You represent what they would like to be able to do themselves, because each and every one of them have their own problems with their bodies.
And so you continue day after day to keep yourself in shape, driving each muscle one last mile in order to become a role model for what can be done with the body.
And I have done this for nearly fifty years.
I don’t know why I loved dancing so much from the very beginning. As I said, I believe it had something to do with having danced in a prior incarnation. It came “naturally” to me, as they say.
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