Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Jackie also pressed Giles to try to find some romantic gossip about Astaire. Astaire’s first wife, Phyllis Potter, had died relatively young, and there was a long period when he was on his own before, late in life, he married a much younger woman, Robyn Smith. “Are you sure he didn’t have a mistress?” Jackie asked. “What about Cyd Charisse?” who was Astaire’s dancing partner. Giles found nothing, but she was amused by Jackie’s persistence. Jackie’s repeated questioning seemed blind to the endless newspaper speculation about her own romantic life.

  Giles and Jackie had active cooperation from Astaire’s daughter, Ava, and many of his friends, but Astaire’s widow, Robyn, threatened to sue both of them if they published their book. “Jackie dealt with it through Doubleday’s lawyers. She told me to have no qualms about it, other than to lay off Robyn. She said, ‘I don’t think we’re going to get this dame. She’s obviously got something in the closet. She’s determined not to have it come out.’ ” Jackie liked to talk tough, using that 1940s language in which women were “broads” and “dames,” to show she was going to support her author and resist Robyn Astaire. She also supported Giles by telephoning her at home on a Sunday when at last the book appeared and a hostile review came out in the New York Times. “Sarah, I just want you to know,” said Jackie, “whatever you’re feeling at the moment, that it is fantastic. Listen! It’s going to sell books.” Giles remembers feeling that Jackie could have waited until Monday morning when she got into the office, but “she was perfect. She was spot on when I was feeling all torn up.”

  However, when it came to the publication parties, Jackie refused. Tina Brown wanted to use the book’s publication as the excuse for major parties where Jackie would be the star attraction and help promote Vanity Fair. One party was held at the Royalton Hotel, the first of a new generation of boutique hotels, developed by the former owners of the nightclub Studio 54. Another was to be in Los Angeles. “Jackie wouldn’t come near either one,” Giles remembered. “She was not going to be used for a photo op. She was savvy.”

  Jackie also wanted to have it both ways. She wanted to resist Robyn Astaire’s suit against Doubleday for intruding on her privacy and tinkering with Astaire’s reputation, yet within a few years she herself would threaten to sue Vanity Fair to protect her own when one of the magazine’s reporters did a long feature on her. She might resent Vanity Fair for going after her, but she was not above urging Sarah Giles to discover new material about Fred Astaire’s love life. The difference, if there was one—and perhaps it’s slight, but it’s important nevertheless—is that what Jackie wanted primarily was an anatomy of Astaire’s style. He was the personification of male elegance. He had influenced not only popular dancers like Michael Jackson, but also Balanchine, Nureyev, and Baryshnikov. That part of Astaire’s life was public, open to inspection and analysis. Jackie regarded what she’d done in the White House as the only thing of hers that belonged to the public. Everything else was off-limits, and she wanted those limits respected. Whether this was genuine shyness and modesty on her part or simply the unilateral assertion of a powerful woman who had the resources to keep the world at bay is hard to say. She wanted to be a good editor who commissioned hardhitting biographies, but she also wanted to protect her own privacy.

  The most fascinating parts of Giles’s book, Fred Astaire: His Friends Talk, are those in which Astaire’s friends speculate on the elements of the dancer’s style that were clearly Jackie’s style, too. For example, Nancy Reagan thought Astaire’s shyness and his elegance were somehow mixed up together. One contributed to the other. Another friend of Astaire’s, Whitney Tower, said of Astaire’s longtime love of thoroughbred racing that he believed “Fred liked racing for the graceful movement of the horses.” The woman who rode horses for much of her life, and who preferred reading a book by herself to mixing in big parties, would have understood those two ingredients of Astaire’s self-presentation well.

  Nureyev Asked to Write as Well as Dance

  Rudolf Nureyev was a soloist for Russia’s Kirov Ballet before he defected to the West in 1961. He helped create a legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn, from Britain’s Royal Ballet, and danced all over the world in the 1970s and even into the 1980s, when he reached his fifties. On one of the rare occasions that Jackie agreed to speak to the press, she had a conversation with John Lombardi for an article he was writing on Nureyev for the New York Times. Jackie told Lombardi, “I first saw him with Margot Fonteyn in early 1963 when he came with the Royal Ballet. The tension when they danced was extraordinary. You lost yourself in it. I remember there were forty curtain calls. People’s hands were black-and-blue pulp.” It’s a little odd that she should follow a tribute to a great ballet performance with that terrible image of bruised hands.

  She had flown both Nureyev and Fonteyn to the White House in a private plane and started a friendship with Nureyev that lasted for three decades. She was reputed to be one of the only women he stood up for when she visited his dressing room backstage. For her, Nureyev provided a living link back to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. “Seeing Rudolf and Margot Fonteyn dance together has made up for having missed Nijinsky and Chaliapin,” Jackie said. “It has been one of the strongest artistic experiences of my life.” So it’s not surprising that when she became an editor, she involved Nureyev in one of her book projects. Via her friend at the Gotham Book Mart, Andreas Brown, who had first led her to discover the fin-de-siècle illustrator Boris Zvorykin, she decided to bring out a new edition of Alexander Pushkin’s fairy tales, illustrated by Zvorykin. She asked Nureyev to write an introduction, in which he pointed out that Zvorykin and Diaghilev had come out of the same artistic movement, the Slavic Revival, in the 1890s.

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  The dance critic Francis Mason suspected that someone else wrote the introduction for the dancer’s signature. Whether Nureyev wrote it or not, he was certainly involved in planning the book with Jackie. Edward Kasinec at the New York Public Library remembered Jackie and Nureyev coming to look at a rare edition of Pushkin illustrated by Zvorykin in the library’s collection. It had been signed by the Russian empress to one of the readers of the New York Public Library, Isabel Hapgood. Jackie and Nureyev also socialized with one another in the 1970s and ’80s. Jackie visited Nureyev’s house on St. Bart’s in the Caribbean and warned her friends away from it, saying that it was filled with awful plastic furniture. Nureyev and his boyfriend also had a ranch house in Virginia near where Jackie hunted.

  More important, when Mikhail Gorbachev finally gave permission in the late 1980s for Nureyev to return to Russia to visit his ailing mother, Nureyev alerted Jackie. She asked Ted Kennedy to raise this as an issue with the Russian ambassador in order to guarantee that the Russians made good on their promise to let him return to the West. Nureyev’s relationship to mother figures had earlier attracted Jackie’s attention. “Every time I see Swan Lake performed by anyone else, I realize what an actor he is,” Jackie told Lombardi. “When he kisses his mother’s hand, you see, you begin to understand feudalism and, at the same time, the homage, the duty, the respect he has for the idea of a mother. It takes a great, great artist to distill that feeling.” One twentieth-century term, “mama’s boy,” was a derisive way of referring to male homosexuals or male effeminacy. Sensing that Nureyev’s homosexuality was an issue that needed to be addressed, she told Lombardi that Nureyev had helped challenge sexual stereotypes. After his athletic dancing brought people from all fifty states to see him, she noted that “people come from Utah now to see dance in New York—men who used to think it wasn’t manly.” Nureyev had cracked the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual.

  Jackie had many gay friends, and there was a higher proportion of them among the authors on her list at Doubleday than in the population at large. She also seems to have gone out of her way to teach herself about homosexuality. One of the few books left behind in her library in which she had turned down many pages for easy reference, and which she’d annotated in he
r own hand, was a history of homosexuality. Her commitment to Nureyev was not in spite of the dancer’s sexuality, nor because of it, but certainly it interested her. It was one more way ballet taught her to think about the body.

  Martha Graham Wrote for Jackie, Too

  Francis Mason served for decades on the board of Martha Graham’s dance company, and twice as its chairman. He had also served as cultural attaché at American embassies abroad and in the 1960s had promoted Balanchine’s and Graham’s companies in London. This enhanced the reputation and success of both companies in America. He was the longtime dance critic on New York’s WQXR-FM radio station as well. He died in September 2009, but some months before that he recalled how Jackie had helped Martha Graham’s company with her presence, not her cash: “She gave some money. Everybody knew her heart was in the right place. She didn’t have a big pocketbook, or didn’t display it conspicuously.” Still, that was enough, because Jackie’s renown helped the company. “She was influential: we could get in anywhere with Jackie.” More important, “Martha liked her.”

  Ron Protas was Martha Graham’s assistant before she died, a young man who helped her overcome alcoholism and depression late in her career. He also helped her regain enthusiasm for her company’s work. Graham made Protas her heir before she died. He interpreted her will to mean that he owned the copyright to all her dances, and even to her dance technique. After Graham’s death, in 1991, he sued her dance company to try to prevent it from performing her choreography. A lengthy and expensive legal battle ensued. Much of the battle took place when Mason headed the board of the company after Graham’s death. Mason said of Protas to the New York Times, “Martha gave him the world on a platter, made him anew, and he wrecked it.” For several years the legal difficulties even closed the company down and prevented it from performing. Eventually most of the choreographic rights were restored to Graham’s dance company and performances resumed. Protas faded from the scene.

  When Jackie was involved with Martha Graham’s company, however, Protas was front and center. Protas played a role in persuading Graham to record some of her memories for transcription with the idea of making them into an autobiography, and by his own recollection, he was important in telling Jackie about the recordings. “In 1986 after a gala performance I brought Jackie backstage,” he said. “I told her about the taping sessions and said to her, ‘If only I could persuade Martha really to do a book with them.’ Later that night Martha said to me, apropos of Jackie, ‘We could work together.’ And then she used the Quaker image ‘We walk the same way.’ ” Aaron Copland had composed the score to accompany one of Graham’s most famous ballets, Appalachian Spring, which had at its core a Shaker melody. The Shakers were a sect thought to have evolved from Quaker Protestantism. Graham’s reference to the Quakers was thus a significant tribute to Jackie. When the book was ultimately agreed to and a contract was signed, Protas recalled, Jackie went to visit Graham in the afternoons, sitting “at her feet like a kid, taking notes, helping her out. It was fascinating, because Martha really didn’t enjoy most women, but she liked Jackie. Martha was fearful about the book, afraid she would fail. It didn’t come easily. But toward the end, after she became ill, she pushed herself, saying, ‘Jackie believes in this. We mustn’t let her down.’ ” By 1991, when Graham’s book came out, Jackie had given up her earlier practice of speaking to the press about her books, but in lieu of words she did agree to show the reporter from Publishers Weekly, “with a kind of talismanic wonder, an ancient Han dynasty Chinese jade disk that Graham had given her.”

  The freelance writer Howard Kaplan, who had once worked for Doubleday and also written for Francis Mason’s Ballet Review, transcribed Graham’s tapes and pieced them together into a narrative while consulting with Graham and Jackie. Graham called the book Blood Memory to convey the generations of blood and family inheritance that direct a dancer’s instinctive steps, which sometimes come without preparation or instruction.

  The book’s most interesting revelation was the way its author, the self-assured dance legend, confessed that she still suffered from fear. She explained her decision to work on an autobiography this way: “Always I have resisted looking backward until now, when I began to sense that there was always for my life a line through it—necessity … Necessity to create? No. But in some way to transcend, to conquer fear, to find a way to go on.”

  Over and over Jackie testified to her interest in the creative process artists undergo to make their art. The passage in which Graham chose an Icelandic phrase, “doom eager,” to discuss that creative process would certainly have had Jackie’s attention: “You are doom eager for destiny no matter what it costs you. The ordeal of isolation, the ordeal of loneliness, the ordeal of doubt, the ordeal of vulnerability which it takes to compose in any medium, is hard to face. You know when this thing is coming on you. You know when you walk the streets by the hour. When the restlessness comes, when you are sick with an idea, with something that will not come out.” Graham added that “the artist is doom eager, but never chooses his fate. His is chosen, and anointed, and caught.”

  Not all of Graham’s memories were about the artist vying with dark destiny. There are one or two elements of camp humor. Graham recalled having to resist congressmen who wanted to censor her work because of its eroticism, but she conceded that her frankness sometimes got her into trouble. In Japan one of her dancers went off with several sailors and missed a performance. She told a friend while in a taxi afterward, “‘She never would have been a great dancer. She doesn’t move from her vagina.’ The taxi driver nearly swerved off the road. ‘You understand English?’ I asked. He turned and smiled. ‘Yes, ma’am. I was raised in Brooklyn.’ ”

  Graham said she had been “a devotee of sex, in the right sense of the word. Fulfillment as opposed to procreation, or I would have had children.” That statement would certainly have gotten her into trouble with the religious right. “In the early days when I still had an active life I wouldn’t be caught dead in bed without a light makeup. But I was never promiscuous … My philosophy of lovers and boyfriends? When I loved them I loved them. When I didn’t, I left. That simple.” Graham even described a moment during a dance with Erick Hawkins, whom she married briefly in the late 1940s, when she adored his male bottom. “Just before I tapped Erick with the flower in Every Soul Is a Circus, I thought, ‘Where did you come from? I could eat you up.’ ” Jackie put Graham’s comment under this picture in the book.

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  Jackie’s book with Martha Graham embraced sexuality as openly as Gelsey Kirkland’s, only Graham’s book was funnier. Jackie was willing to have a little fun with the pictures and the captions of Graham’s memoir. Of course, any publisher would have been happy to have Martha Graham’s recollections. That the great dancer felt she could write with Jackie what she could not and would not write with others is testimony to the way in which Jackie not only admired the creative process from a distance but dared to enter into it sympathetically, and collaboratively, with one of the century’s great talents. Jackie’s books were often braver, more unconventional, and more off-color than the way she presented herself to the public. When she was working with dancers, she was often at her best.

  Cut It

  Two dance books that appeared toward the end of her time in publishing, however, do not consistently match the high quality she reached with Graham or the high sales she achieved with Kirkland. After George Balanchine died, in 1983, Francis Mason had the idea of bringing out a new edition of the book he had done with Balanchine, first published by Doubleday back in the 1950s, a scene-by-scene retelling of the stories of the great ballets. This book had been a tremendous success and gone through many editions. Mason remembered, “I went to Jackie and said, ‘Look, can I do a book?’ She said, ‘Yes, but you’ve got to do it in a year. Catch everyone while the memory is green.’ ” That careless but evocative metaphor, that Mason should go speak with dozens of aging ballerinas while their memories were st
ill fresh and “green,” is vintage Jackie. What she might not have anticipated, though, was that Mason would take much longer than a year. Balanchine died in 1983, and Mason’s book wasn’t ready until the beginning of the next decade. Further, his manuscript was much too long. His contract called for 60,000 words and he produced 650,000. “Cut it,” she told him frankly. If he offended some of those he had interviewed, Jackie said, “Blame it on me. I’m the editor.” She offered him her office to do the work while she was away and gave him two months to do the job. Even after Mason’s cuts, the book came in as a door-stopping monument to a dance hero rather than a slim, readable book. When it came out in hardback, it was more than 600 pages long.

  Jackie might also have been tougher on another of her dance authors. Shortly after publishing the Balanchine book, Jackie approached another great of the dance world to ask for her autobiography. Judith Jamison had long been one of the principal dancers of the Alvin Ailey dance company, and after Ailey died, in 1989, she took over the leadership of the company. Ailey had won fame in the 1960s and ’70s not only for bringing black dancers to the stage but for choreography that described the experiences and was often based on the music of African Americans. Jamison’s book, Dancing Spirit, was to be published to coincide with the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Ailey company, so in publishing the book, Jackie was also promoting the company. It fit together several of Jackie’s passions: not only her love of dance, modern as well as classical, but also her commitment to honoring the work of African Americans in history.