Driven by the dance
Rupert Christiansen SOMEWHERE: THE LIFE OF JEROME ROBBINS by Amanda Vail!
Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 675, ISBN 9780297847977 Amanda Vaill opens her absorbing biography of the choreographer Jerome Robbins with an all too familiar psychological diagnosis: he was, she writes, 'a man of contradictions', in search of 'a haven of love and acceptance' he never quite found. 'If in his professional, creative life "he was always right" ... in private, he could be conflicted, vulnerable and torn by self-doubt.'
Some 500 pages later, as his ashes are cast into the sea off Long Island, the conflicts, vulnerabilities and self-doubt seem irrelevant, and Robbins looks like a simple case of someone always driven, driven, driven to work, fuelled by an almost demoniac capacity to drag everyone else into his vortex of creative activity.
In that process, he could be very cruel. Vaill is putting it politely when she remarks that 'when trying to realise and protect his sometimes inchoate artistic vision, Jerry was fierce and heedless of the toll he exacted from others'. His dancers could be more pungent. 'Just murder to work with', said one; 'he didn't notice us as human beings,' said another.
But his ruthlessness wasn't sadistic and it doesn't seem to have been focused on his ego or glory; it was all about getting the job done, as well as possible. When that mission was accomplished, he could be generous and thoughtful, and although his bed-hopping was prodigious — one guesses Vaill hasn't tracked the half of it — he also remained loyal to many that he loved or befriended.
Where will the history of dance rank him? Vaill never quite addresses this tricky question, and it leaves a hole in her otherwise meticulous assessment of the material. Most authorities would agree that he had the energy and the fertility of the firstrate, but not the vision or originality. In his classical work, mostly made for New York City Ballet, he stands in the shadow of its founding father George Balanchine, of whose genius he remained in uneasy awe. Balanchine's art had been forged in the furnaces of the Maryinsky in St Petersburg and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: a Jewish boy from New Jersey, born Jerome Rabinowitz, whose father worked in the garment business, could hardly compete with that impeccable pedigree.
Robbins made some perfect small works out of his thinner cultural inheritance (Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert are both indisputable classics, and their accent is distinctly American), but his more ambitious pieces, such as Dances at a Gathering and Watemill, have not stood the test of time. They lack the inexorable musical and architectural logic, the fine spiritual geometry, which underpins Balanchine's oeuvre, and elements which at first seemed strikingly theatrical have now come to seem blandly cute or even kitsch. Robbins' ballets can still please audiences, but they don't challenge dancers or extend the possibilities of the art.
Perhaps his more lastingly important and influential work was his contribution to several major Broadway musicals, West Side Story, Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof being among the most notable and innovative. He was a born showman, not a romantic artist. Dance was always his passion, but he wasn't classically trained: his first lessons were taken in the earthy modernism of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, and his first pieces were skits devised for a bohemian summer camp. He may have completed his apprenticeship under Fokine, who rehearsed him in Nijinsky's role of Petrushka, but it was in his ability to tune into `the way we dance today and how we are', first evinced in Fancy Free, a romping tale of three American sailors on furlough in Manhattan which he and Leonard Bernstein developed into On the Town, that he found his true voice.
At the same time, 1943-4, he briefly joined the Communist party. Except to suggest that this was something that people like him did at the time, Vaill can't find any urgent motivation for this — his upbringing was stable, he never experienced deprivation and he wasn't deeply interested in politics. He soon drifted away, but in 1953 the House Un-American Activities Committee ensnared him as a friendly witness. Threatened by the odious Ed Sullivan (host of a highbrow television chat show) with exposure of his affairs with Montgomery Clift and other celebrities, he kowtowed to McCarthyism and blabbed out some names. It was the worst mistake of his life: the liberal establishment never forgot his cowardice, and he never forgave himself.
Guilt pervaded his love life too. He seems to have been genuinely bisexual, with a strange instinct for triangulating any relationship across the gender divide, and nobody lasted long as a sexual partner. If there was one person on whom his affections steadily focused, it was probably Balanchine's fourth wife, the exquisite ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq, whose career was tragically cut short by polio in 1956. They appear not to have been lovers, but they were certainly soulmates. 'I love you so for just that quality which really is very honest and always makes me blink at its directness and acuteness,' he told her awkwardly. Her photo sat by his bedside to the very end.
After Fiddler on the Roof in 1964, Robbins drifted away from Broadway and upped his aesthetic game. Olivier tried in vain to get him to direct The Bacchae and Don Quixote at the National Theatre, but he needed to size himself up as Balanchine's successor at New York City Ballet, and through the early 1970s he created a series of works that represented the summit of his choreographic ambitions. They didn't wash: the young Turk Robert Wilson was one of several who attacked him for his superficiality. 'Jerry Robbins has killed the New York City Ballet,' he complained. 'It's all like Broadway — the dancers are all coming out of their skin.'
After Balanchine's death, it was Peter Martins who assumed direction of the company, and in 1987 Robbins ricocheted back to showbiz with a glitzy cavalcade of a retrospective called Jerome Robbins' Broadway which canonised the work he had done on musicals from On the Town to Fiddler on the Roof. But there were new kids on the block, and in the light of Michael Bennett's brilliantly hard-edged A Chorus Line Robbins' cheerful, athletic folksiness had come to seem somewhat passé — fodder for the bridge-and-tunnel crowds rather than the cutting edge.
The onset of Parkinson's and prostate cancer, as well as the encircling ravages of Aids, did little to dent his energy. In his last years, he made a suite of dances from West Side Story for New York City Ballet, a satisfying marriage of the two sides of his creative personality, and three months before his death in 1998, at the age of 80, he was still rehearsing a revival of his version of Stravinsky's Les Noces. It's not a conception that quite works — and it certainly isn't in the class of Nijinska's original. The Russian peasants, as Vaill observes, 'seem like the Jets and Sharks', and Robbins can't resist softening the ritual ferocity and impersonality with a suggestion of romantic love. But it was on precisely that combination of hard shell and soft centre that he had made his reputation — and his life too.
Previous page
