“You don’t have to do a dance audition,” he informed the dozen or so chosen ones after he had made his selection. “It’s just for The Flower Festival at Genzano. You’ll be peasants, wandering around in the background.”
They were doing Flower Festival on their opening night, so I was able to see the company pull out the stops. Margrethe Schanne and Fredbjorn did La Sylphide, the ballet from the early 1800s that made Marie Taglioni famous. (She was the first to dance on pointe, you know, after her father whiplashed her to the peak of perfection.) Margrethe wore the white tutu, the flower wreath, the pearl bracelets and necklace, but she didn’t seem particularly fragile and fairylike to me. She wasn’t particularly pretty, so maybe that’s where the critics found a comparison to Taglioni.
Fredbjorn, on the other hand, in his brown plaid kilts, was pretty dashing. Leaping and jeté-ing here and there, leading his troupe of other kilt-clad boys in lots of aerial stuff. Those Danish boys could jump. They wore little black slippers with a white “V” over the toes, so with their tights it looked as though they were wearing particularly tiny slippers, and had particularly pointed feet. Seeing those darting feet shoot forward through the air, strong thighs and flapping kilts dashing after them, was pretty exciting. The audience thought so, too. Of course, a large part of the audience was only too thrilled to see those skirts fly up and reveal a well-packed pair of little black shorts.
Henning Kronstam was their great beautiful male, now that Erik Bruhn had left to seek international fame, and Henning was quite something. Taller than the other men, dark, with a sort of Robert Taylor face. Very handsome, but romantic and fragile, too. Not a Heathcliff but a Chopin.
He danced Night Shadow with Margrethe Schanne. Mona Vangsaa was in it, too. Very beautiful, too, an elegant brunette. In Night Shadow, a poet is in love with a married woman, who sleepwalks. At the end, her jealous husband stabs the young poet, and the sleepwalking wife, in her long white nightgown, comes upon the body. She walks off, carrying the body in her arms, Pietà-style. Henning Kronstam was much bigger than Margrethe Schanne, but she must have been very strong, because she did cradle him in both arms, walked off slowly into the wings, his beautiful head dangling. The audience was very struck with it. Me, too. It was touching in a way I hadn’t been touched before. Mother/mistress caring for her lover/child. It gave me chills.
In the last ballet, we finally got our chance to go on. I wore a short jacket, knee pants, and black felt hat with a wide brim. I took the hat off and waved it over my head a good bit as we huz-zahed the dancing.
Inge Sand danced Flower Festival with Fredbjorn Bjornsen. They were an adorable couple. She must have been somewhat older and was a dainty little blond Danish doll. He was her boyish and adoring suitor. They also did Coppélia together, I was told, and I could imagine her impersonating the doll and he as Frantz, the village boy who falls in love with her.
“Perky” was the key word for the Danish Ballet. And cute guys. The women were pretty, but except for Inge Sand, they had no real zip. Whereas the guys had all the zip you could ever ask for. This company had been founded by the famous Bournonville, who had been trained in Paris, around the turn of the nineteenth century.
I read later that he and one of his pals used to practice with one of them playing the violin and the other improvising madly around the room. Dancers who hoped to teach had to play the violin also, as they demonstrated the steps to their own playing. They often earned their livings teaching ballroom dancing to wealthy folks’ kids and probably the wealthy folks themselves. Even poor Taglioni ended up this way, after being heaped with jewels by the Czar and living on Lake Como in great style with her husband, the count. Probably a no-account count, as she eventually lost it all and wound up in London teaching people to waltz and do the schottische. The polka, too, I suppose.
Anyway. Bournonville favored male dancers, and his training primarily had to do with jumping, doing beats–all the bravura male stuff. Which is why that company has all those exciting guys leaping their way into your heart, while the pretty women sort of noodle their way around as second-class citizens.
So that was the Danish Ballet. Charming ballets we hadn’t seen before, pretty people, and those thrilling, jumping, handsome guys. It taught me a lot. I’d never before seen a company that wasn’t dominated by a ballerina and lots of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. They did do one three-act ballet, which had to do with a kingdom under the sea, but it went on interminably and I think was a revival of some famous thing that had been done in the late nineteenth century. It was very Victorian, and they didn’t do it again, once they realized the public was far more interested in those leaping boys. Essentially, this company was something else altogether.
We hadn’t seen the last of them, either. Fredbjorn Bjornsen was around town a lot for the next few years staging some of the Danish ballets. And Stanley Williams, with such an un-Danish name, finally came over and established himself as a teacher. He taught Edward Villella from the New York City Ballet. There was a lot of talk that he had fallen in love with Villella, but then, who wouldn’t have? Such a sexy guy. Such a sexy body.
As soon as the Danish Ballet season ended, the Met season began, and I was thrown into my new life. And my new loves. I was excited but I wasn’t a sap. Which was lucky for me.
The Met
It was wonderful working at the old Met. They tore it down, you know. It was the last desecration. They were planning to tear down Carnegie Hall when they came to their senses.
Time-wise it wasn’t so ancient. The building wasn’t a hundred years old, I suppose, when I was there. The stage looked like it had a million nails punched into it and pulled out again. We used to laugh at Alexandra Danilova, who was still dancing, and the way she had of tiptoeing out on stage studying the floor in front of her as she came out. We always said she was looking for a good place to dance. At the Metropolitan Opera it wasn’t such a bad idea. That stage floor was rugged.
Anyway, to bring you up to speed: I had auditioned for the Met. I had been accepted by the Met. Now I was a dancer at the Met. Living alone on Sixteenth Street, seventeen years old.
I hardly ever wore real clothes. I struggled out of my cold-water flat in a pair of corduroy pants and a gray sweater every morning. Got on the subway at the Eighteenth Street entrance.
We called it the Seventh Avenue Subway. The names IRT and the IND never really sank in. We were never going to Queens anyway. Alfred, one of my new friends at the opera, was asked if he had ever been to Canarsie on the Fourteenth Street shuttle. He said, “No, but I hear it is very beautiful.” He told me he had one cardinal rule: “Never go anywhere you can’t get home by subway.” He made that rule after waking up in a taxi in the Bronx wearing pink panties and a cross. And he was Jewish.
The subway stations were Twenty-third Street, Twenty-eighth Street, Thirty-fourth Street, and Forty-second Street. The Forty-second Street station had an exit right at the stage door of the Met. Fortieth and Seventh. Right by the fruit stand. You bought an apple and rushed in the door right there. A jolly-looking man sat by the stage door. I never learned his name, he never learned mine. He knew I was one of the dancers. I’m sure that anyone with an air of self-confidence could have raced through the stage door at any time.
Straight back was the elevator. Room for four, six maybe at a squeak. The elevator was old and shaky, with a lightbulb right in the middle of it. The ballet school and rehearsal room were on the sixth floor.
The stars had their dressing rooms directly off the stage. The dancers’ dressing rooms were on the third floor, on the other side of the stage, but we didn’t go there unless we were performing.
Usually we walked up to the sixth floor because the elevator was so slow. The halls were stacked with wicker trunks with costumes from ancient productions: Lakmé, The Girl of the Golden West, Thaïs, The Flying Dutchman. The names of the operas were stenciled on the sides of the baskets none too neatly, operas that hadn’t been performed in years.
God, it was exciting. Me, dancing right where Pavlova had. Nijinsky, too. He did Tyl Eulenspiegel at the Met when he was on the American tour. Diaghilev, the company impresario and Nijin-sky’s lover, was afraid to go on the tour because a fortune-teller had told him he would die on the water. So he never crossed the ocean and sent Nijinsky with the dreaded Romola when the company went on a second tour to South America. She was Hungarian and a terrible dancer. He was Russian. When they married in Rio, they couldn’t speak a word to each other. And this was where Nijinsky had rehearsed Tyl Eulenspiegel. A ballet no one ever does now. It just lives on in those grainy, browny pictures they loved to take in those days.
I know my ballets. Belle-Mère had Beaumont’s Book of Ballets and I read about every one of them. I’m a good student. Maybe too good. I can’t help learning from my mistakes.
On our first day, Zachary Solov gave us a little pep talk. He didn’t introduce the dancers to each other. Obviously a lot of them were in the company already and knew each other well. There were only about half a dozen of us, the new dancers, in a company of maybe thirty-two altogether. Eighteen girls and fourteen boys. (We were “girls” and “boys.” No one talked about “women” and “men.”)
In his pep talk, Zachary Solov told us that the Met had agreed to an evening of ballets as part of the repertoire. Perhaps we would do Les Sylphides, and certainly a new ballet of his own devising but, for the time being we would rehearse the ballet from Faust. I gathered that Mr. Solov had choreographed this as a guest artist the previous season and that most of the dancers already knew it.
As soon as we started rehearsals, I got the picture pretty clearly. The opera company was divided into real dancers and not real dancers. Some of the not real dancers were very nice-looking, but when you got close you realized they weren’t very young anymore.
Among the real dancers was a redhead named Maggie. A real Maggie: all common sense and grit. Maggie could really dance, and she was strong. I knew I was going to like her.
And there was Joy. Joy was brunet and kind of lavish-looking. At first glance I thought she might be a not real dancer, but she surprised me. She could really whack out those pirouettes and beats.
There was Anne Thatcher, also very good technically. Like me, infatuated with dancing itself.
One fantastic-looking Russian girl had incredible legs and an incredible head. What is it with those Russians? That long neck, the kind of square head with a long-nosed profile finished off with a strong, wide jaw, and those tippy-tilty eyes. Not to mention those slippery, curvy legs. Not straight but really curvy, with super-curvy feet. One look at those legs and feet and you knew straight off where Swan Lake came from. Her name was Asia. Pronounced like a Southerner saying “I see you”—“Ah see ya.” Quite exotic. I was going to have to keep my eye on her to see if she could really dance.
There were also Nancy and Luellen and several other little baubles in blond and brunet. Very pretty; pretty bodies. I came to think Zachary Solov was a genius for using those people so they actually looked like they could dance.
The boys fell into the same two categories. Clifford and the other Harry were nice-looking: dark brunet, light blond. But I don’t think they ever went to class–didn’t want anyone to see what they couldn’t do. There was Don, the bodybuilder. He told me once, “When I see myself in the mirror I start to get a hard-on.” That says everything, doesn’t it? Steve was his counterpart. Imagine Jack LaLanne doing double tours en l’air. Pretty trippy.
There was a cocky kid named Tony, who wasn’t a bad dancer. He was Italian and wanted to be a choreographer. I guess he thought that once he wasn’t a dancer anymore, people would stop conjecturing that maybe he was queer.
There was Alfred, my new friend, who resembled Jean Cocteau and had the most splendid feet I have ever seen on a human being. He was a particular favorite of Miss Craske’s. Perhaps his 1920s looks brought it all back to her.
There was Siegfried Ilquist, the Norwegian god. Illy wasn’t the greatest dancer on earth, but he had a superb dancer’s body. The first time I saw him in the dressing room stripping his dance belt off that fantastic body, I felt something zing through me. Can a person be in lust? I don’t think I was in love with him, but he was the first man I ever pursued. I slept with him many times and I never didn’t feel like it. That has to say something for the power of beauty and lust.
And then there was Rex Ames. The bad boy of ballet. Rex could really dance. He was certainly our best male dancer. Black leather, Elvis Presley pompadour and all. Sex on a stick, that was Rex. He was very hot. Everybody wanted to sleep with him and everybody did. He ignored me, thank God.
And why not? I was just this green kid from Chicago. Some technique. A hard worker. A ballet teacher’s delight. I was called “the White Virgin” around the dressing room very shortly. Later, Rex Ames said to me in a fit of bad temper, “You always reminded me of Grace Kelly. And that is not a compliment.”
In the Dressing Room
I was riding around with Tennessee Williams in Key West and he didn’t want to fuck me. I said, ‘Tennessee, pull over.’ ” Someone named Robby was staring into the mirror putting gummy mascara on his upper lashes as he talked. Siegfried Ilquist was sitting next to Robby, studying his own face in the mirror. I had just come in. Siegfried looked at me in the mirror and said, “You’re over there,” gesturing with the back of his head at the long table on the other side of the room. My new pal Alfred was already there, looking at a jar of greasepaint with an unhappy look on his face. I had to admire Siegfried’s take on makeup. He just had on light pancake and a line over and under his eyes. No Sophia Loren doe-eyes look for him. He stood up. He was just wearing a dance belt. Some ass.
I went over and sat down next to Alfred. “You don’t have to put that stuff on,” I said. “Where’d you get it? That drugstore in Times Square?” I picked it up. “Leichner’s. It’s too messy. I’ll let you borrow my Max Factor No. 22, and you can get some tomorrow. It’s a lot easier. That Leichner stuff gets all over everything. If you have to lift somebody, it’s everywhere except on your face.” I had learned about Max Factor in summer stock.
Robby said, “I make up for the first two rows. Fuck the rest of them.”
A voice from somewhere said, “Well, you’ve certainly tried.”
Robby swept out haughtily. Over his shoulder he said, “I never sleep down.”
As he left, someone else said, “What a little cunt.”
Siegfried said, “Oh, his heart is in the right place.”
The voice in the back of the dressing room–it was probably smart-aleck Tony Compostella–said, “Yeah, but his cock isn’t.”
Everyone laughed.
We were doing Faust, and Mattiwilda Dobbs was singing. I could hear her on the intercom. Really nice voice. I was beginning to learn something about singing, too. We were in rehearsal for La Gioconda–
the Dance of the Hours. A real ballet. Zinka Milanov was singing the lead, with Leonard Warren. They called her the Queen of the Met. She was everything you think is ridiculous in an opera singer–big, old, and she never moved. But when she was having a good night, her voice was more beautiful than anyone else’s. That’s what we’d been doing today. Tonight was Faust, which was easy. More like folk-dancing. We wore knee britches, leaving the boys like Robby no chance to show off their ass.
Faust had already started downstairs. We weren’t on until the second scene, so we had a longer break after our last class. Siegfried came over to our table and stood behind us. “What are you guys doing when we’re done here?” he said. “Want to go to Tad’s Steak House for something to eat?” He was already in his knee britches. We didn’t have to experience those powerful thighs in the dressing-table mirror. Alfred and I looked at each other. “Why not?” I said. Alfred and I would have probably gone to the Bickford’s cafeteria right behind the theater anyway. Alfred lived with his parents on the Lower East Side in a housing project, but they were used to his being out wandering around in Manhattan for half the night. Alfred had just graduated from the High School of the Performing Arts and he’d been out on the streets of the city for years. Elegant and slightly dazed, but knowledgeable. I think everyone thought he was a foreigner.
After the performance, neither of us said anything about Siegfried’s invitation. Obviously, he was interested in one of us. Maybe both of us. Robby walked behind us towards the dressing-room door. In a very good imitation of Bette Davis, he said, “Tad’s Steak House–what a dump,” and vanished out the door.
The Sex Squad Page 6