Maria Tallchief, who died last Thursday, at the age of eighty-eight, was the first grand ballerina produced by this country. The daughter of an oil-rich Osage Indian (she had the cheekbones to prove it) and a Scotch-Irish woman, she more or less epitomized what her contemporaries regarded as our national history, and her artistic virtues—grandeur, command—were exactly those that Americans of that period, the height of the Cold War, wanted to believe were specifically American traits.
Tallchief’s first important teacher was Bronislava Nijinska, Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister, who, in her studio in Los Angeles (Tallchief’s home town for most of her youth), specialized in virtuoso footwork, upper-body styling, and “presence.” Tallchief learned them all. In 1942, at the age of seventeen, she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the most celebrated ballet company—actually, in those days, practically the only important ballet company—in America. Two years later, George Balanchine joined the Ballet Russe as its resident choreographer, and she met her fate. Balanchine was to be the creator of the American style of ballet dancing, and she was the first woman on whom he practiced at length. He also decided that they should get married. He was twenty-one years older than she. She told him that she wasn’t sure she loved him. He said that was O.K., and so she went ahead. Unsurprisingly, it was not a marriage of passion (in her 1997 autobiography, written with Larry Kaplan, she strongly suggests that it was sexless), or the passion was for ballet. They worked fourteen hours a day, she reported, and their main joy in life was to find, when they were finished in the studio, that Sammy’s Delicatessen was still open.
The marriage lasted five years, during which time the two of them molded Tallchief into the great thing that she became. Many of the roles that Balanchine created for her, or that she is remembered for—the Coquette in “La Sonnambula,” the Fairy in “Le Baiser de la Fée,” Sanguinic in “The Four Temperaments,” the virtuoso ballerina of the first movement of “Symphony in C,” the Firebird in the ballet of that name, the Sugar Plum Fairy of “The Nutcracker”—have a note of dominance, related, I think, to the Imperial Russian Ballet tradition and bred into her not just by Balanchine but by Nijinska, too, and perhaps also by the example of the great Ballet Russe ballerina Alexandra Danilova, all three of them graduates of the Imperial Ballet school. These roles do not lack poetry, but Tallchief, it seemed, did not need a man in order to be poetic. There is a YouTube clip of her rehearsing the lullaby section of “Firebird.” Back and forth she glides, a magical creature, the light beaming off her beautiful, high-held bosom. “She danced it like a flame,” the critic Lillian Moore wrote.
Her mastery and glamour were absolutely crucial in the establishment of New York City Ballet. In 1948, when Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein founded the company, very few people in New York were interested in having a ballet company. They had never had one before. Why did they need one now? Balanchine convinced them, but many people say that it was actually Tallchief, as the Firebird, in the year after the company’s founding, who brought them to their knees.
Balanchine, as is well known, went from ballet girl to ballet girl throughout his career. Sometimes he would marry the young woman, if it was convenient—if not, not—but in any case, he developed her to what seemed her highest potential and, in the process, used her qualities for himself, as a doorway into a new period in his art, a new story. The example that is always written about today is Suzanne Farrell, but great as she was—for many, the greatest of all his dancers, in sixty years—this is partly because so many of the writers in question witnessed her career, and not the others’. A few years after Balachine and Tallchief were married, he turned his attention to another young woman, a close friend of Tallchief’s, Tanaquil LeClercq, who embodied a different idea of dancing: light, fleet, chic. Tallchief soon saw what was happening, and she ran off with a Circassian aviator, Elmourza Natirboff. That ended swiftly, and in her youth she never landed anything much better. She fell in love with the great Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, but he, a convinced homosexual, didn’t want her. Then she fell in love with Rudolf Nureyev. Reportedly, she is one of maybe four or five women who ever got him into bed, but soon, symmetrically, he fell for Bruhn and dumped her.
In the sixties, ignored by Balanchine, she performed with some other companies, and did well in them. (It is said that when she danced for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in the late fifties, she was the highest-paid ballet dancer in the world.) After these excursions, she always returned to New York City Ballet. By the mid-sixties, however, it became clear that all of Balanchine’s older ballerinas—indeed, many of his younger ones, too—had been sidelined in his mind by Suzanne Farrell. In 1965, Tallchief quit the company at the age of forty. When she was older, she had some hard words to say about this; in fact, forty is a normal time for a ballet dancer to retire. But it is difficult to cease being the favorite, and that happened to Tallchief, at least in regard to Balanchine, long before she hit forty. After she left N.Y.C.B., Tallchief tried to beef up ballet in Chicago (now her home), a city notoriously indifferent to that art. She created the ballet school of the Chicago Lyric Opera; then she founded Chicago City Ballet, with the financial help of Henry Paschen—the C.E.O. of a very successful contracting firm—whom she had married in 1956. But the company was riven by feuds. She eventually resigned.
Tallchief was a person whom ballet fans and critics looked up to. That was not just because of her primacy as a Balanchine ballerina. She was smart, sophisticated, witty. She was a good raconteur. At a panel on Nijinska in, I think, 1986, she said that Nijinska never bothered to learn much English. Most of the corrections that the students got were from her husband and translator, Nicholas Singaevsky. Singaevsky would come over to Tallchief and whisper, “Madame think you look like spaghetti.”
People also loved Tallchief for speaking her mind. After Balanchine’s death, she soon realized that his successor, Peter Martins, was not going to use her, or most of the great man’s dancers, to coach his ballets and, thus, ensure his legacy. Martins, it seemed, didn’t want these veterans around; they might challenge his authority. Many of them remained diplomatically silent about this. Not Tallchief. With proud wrath, she denounced the laxity of the productions of Balanchine’s ballets that N.Y.C.B. gave in the nineties. And when she was given the authority to coach Balanchine’s ballets—not for New York City Ballet, but for the preservation department of George Balanchine Foundation, among other organizations—she was the opposite of lax. In 1995, I watched her coach a teen-age dancer, Jennie Somogyi, in Balanchine’s 1955 “Pas de Dix.” I wrote down what she said as fast as I could:
Fingers out—all the way out! That’s it. Now back here—yum-tada-tum—head! Here, here, head! Yes. Now hand across the face. Remember, like a veil. Don’t throw it away, Jenny. Find your elbow, find your head. Chest up. Waist in. Where’s your fanny? Tucked in. Good. Don’t hurry. Yes. Yum-tada-tum. Pas de bourrée. You’re saying to the audience, ‘Look at my beautiful feet.’ Now arms. You’re saying, ‘Look at my beautiful gestures.’ And now—‘Look at what I’m going to do next!’
Balanchine went beyond that presentational image, but he couldn’t have done so unless he had loved it once, in her. She gave him, and us, very much. R.I P.
Photograph of Maria Tallchief in May, 1954: AP.
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