People everywhere use the arts to escape from the oppressive realities of their lives, but for director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, escapism became a lifelong obsession fueling his greatest artistic achievements.
Born in 1918 as Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, he removed any suggestion of Russian-Jewish identity from his name to launch a career performing and then creating all-American dances for ballet companies and Broadway. A bisexual whose most intense and long-lasting relationships were with men, he choreographed gorgeous male-female love duets and staged enduring musical theater paeans to heterosexual romance. And when his political opinions and affiliations brought him under potentially ruinous government scrutiny, he betrayed friends and colleagues.
The story of this brilliant, conflicted escape artist is newly told by Amanda Vaill in “Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins.” An experienced biographer, Vaill had access to Robbins’ extensive private archives, so the book almost becomes the as-told-to project that she envisioned before Robbins’ death in 1998. His voice is everywhere.
Other Robbins books give you the facts about the innumerable theater and ballet projects that make him a central figure in the history of 20th century theatrical dance. But Vaill has a gift for story telling, for context, that transforms the production credits and backstage anecdotes into tightly focused dramatic episodes in the life of a man always fiercely self-protective.
For example: In late 1953 or early ’54, Robbins choreographed the battle between the toy soldiers and mice for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet “Nutcracker.” Greg Lawrence doesn’t say anything about the matter in his 2001 book “Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins.” Deborah Jowitt mentions it in her 2004 book “Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance,” but simply notes that “Robbins has never been given program credit for his contribution.” Only Vaill tells us how much Robbins wanted that credit and how it was ultimately denied him by someone he loved.
“Once again,” Vaill writes, “it was a case of ‘who stands where, and with whom,’ as Tanny had put it to Jerry back in 1951. Once again, the answer was ‘George was here first’; credit would be given to Jerry ‘over my dead body.”‘ Robbins reportedly was “devastated.”
Vaill provides detailed accounts of the creation of Robbins’ Broadway shows, the most celebrated being “West Side Story” (1957) and “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964). All his ballets, including the masterworks “Fancy Free” (1944) and “Dances at a Gathering” (1969), also are documented meticulously. In the process, we gain new insights not only about Robbins but also about cultural icons, such as director George Abbott, composer
Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Mikhail Fokine, singer Ethel Merman and, of course, Balanchine – father figure and the King Kong of classicism, an inescapably intimidating presence in Robbins’ life.
Vaill writes that when Robbins and Twyla Tharp were collaborating on a ballet titled “Brahms/Handel” in 1984, Tharp had a dream in which the two of them saw what Tharp described as a huge snake “‘in a filthy sewage-ridden murk partially covered by some of the oldest floorboards in theatrical history.’ When she told Jerry about the dream, over dinner, she asked him if he knew what the monster signified.
“‘Sure,’ said Jerry. ‘George.”‘ Beyond recording professional triumphs – and a few catastrophes, such as Robbins being fired from the film of “West Side Story” in midproduction – Vaill also has love stories to tell, some tantalizing (the two-year affair with actor Montgomery Clift), others heartbreaking, such as the 15-year relationship between Robbins and photographer Jesse Gerstein.
Ultimately, Robbins attained a hard-won self-acceptance. He reconnected with his Russian-Jewish heritage in “Fiddler on the Roof” and the ballet “Dybbuk,” and he also lived openly as a homosexual – although, like Alvin Ailey and a number of other master choreographers, he never overtly expressed that part of his nature in his dances. He even tried to confront his guilt over his 1953 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and the seven people he named who supposedly recruited him for the Communist Party. But he never escaped the taint of that act and, for all her sympathy, Vaill leaves him stranded and exposed in his fear.
It’s easy to make Robbins the prototype of the eternally tormented artist, but there were too many triumphs and lovers for that.
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Somewhere
The Life of Jerome Robbins
By Amanda Vaill
Broadway Books, 688 pages, $40
