Every Step You Take (19 page)

At night I moved with my new family from center stage at Lincoln Center to center stage at the Manhattan clubs that were all the rage in the mideighties—Nell's on Fourteenth Street, the Pyramid Club on Avenue A, the Boy Bar, Palladium, the World, Wah Wah Hut, and, of course, the Odeon and Indochine, both run by Keith McNally, and the Canal Bar, run by Keith's brother, Brian McNally. I remember at one point we were all given little keys that read
NELL'S
to attach to our key chains, which allowed us to cut all the lines and get into the clubs for free. We felt like hotshots—we were becoming
somebodies
.

Everyone in our little group—especially Heather, it seemed to me—was suddenly gathering more and more attention from the world at large. One night the screen actress Jodie Foster was sitting at a nearby table at the Canal Bar, and she stared and stared and stared at Heather. Another night at Il Cantinore in the Village we met the writer Tama Janowitz and the exotic Paige Powell, close friend and assistant to the famous pop art icon Andy Warhol, both of whom later introduced us to Warhol himself. I'll never forget the first time I was invited to join Andy for dinner at the Algonquin Hotel. When I asked if I could bring some friends, he said, “Yeah, great. That's great.” I took ten friends in the end, unabashed little upstart that I was, including Heather, with whom Andy instantly became obsessed. He then began attending every ballet, always sitting in the same spot up front (Balanchine's former seats, in the first ring, which we had provided), his white head luminescent in the dark theater as he stared intently at the stage throughout the performances. After the performances we would head downtown to meet Warhol and various members of his eclectic entourage—painter Francesco Clemente and his wife, Alba; the jeweler John Reinhold; singer Debbie Harry; artists Alex Katz, Stephen Sprouse, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—wherever they had gathered. Often it was at a huge group table at Indochine, and when we arrived, Andy—who could be the most peculiar mix of quiet, fascinating, nasty, and flirtatious all at once—would murmur, “So great you came. You guys were great tonight.” We would drink and eat and dance and carry on all night—I never knew who paid.

One day Andy called and said he wanted to take photographs and paint portraits of Heather, Ulrik, and me as Christmas presents for us, so we headed over to The Factory for our photo session. Afterward we went to Mr. Chow's, another regular haunt where Andy liked to hold court in a favorite corner. Keith and Jean-Michel would set up a boom box nearby and disappear in a cloud of marijuana smoke. Everyone I met seemed to be both talented and strange, and life itself was so fast and wild and exciting—surely we were all hot on the trail of at least fifteen minutes of fame.

On several occasions in those years Peter, Heather, Ulrik, and I were invited to dinner at Lincoln Kirstein's house, as ballet
objets
to spice up parties when Kirstein was entertaining potential donors to the NYCB. Among the regular guests was a wealthy woman named Frances Schreuder, who had been hugely generous to the ballet community, but who ran into a sticky patch when it was alleged that she had urged her son to kill her father (her son's grandfather) so that she could inherit his money. All of this seemed scandalous in an entertaining, wacky art-world way; and then there was the titillating mystery of Lincoln Kirstein's wife—a woman named Fidelma who seemed never to be a part of our gatherings. After the dinners we would turn to one another as we hit the streets to head off to whatever after-parties there were on that night and ask, “Where in the world was Fidelma?”

On the surface, our lives may have seemed to be hip and glittering and glamorous, but during these same years a tinge of darkness—of recklessness and mishap and even of death—was also seeping in at the edges, staining the studied beauty of our ballet endeavors and the roaring gaiety of our nightlife. Balanchine's illness, followed by his death in 1983, had been the first dark shadow cast over our beautiful playground. As the seasons unfolded, the tragedies multiplied. In September 1985, just months after I had been promoted to principal, the whole company was badly shaken when our beloved John Bass—a talented corps dancer and a man of high spirits and incredible wit—got mysteriously ill. John had come to a dinner at the Gruens' one night with his right eye stuck shut—he didn't know why this was happening, but he said he was going to the doctor the next day. The next thing we knew John had been diagnosed with a rare cancer, and quarantined in the hospital—and then he died. It was awful. No one understood exactly what had happened, but the doctors and newspapers all said that he had died of lymphatic cancer. We would learn soon enough that he had died of something else, a dreadful new disease everyone was calling “the gay disease”: it was AIDS, and John was only twenty-nine when he died. All of us who knew John were deeply saddened and confused by his death, and as the deadly statistics about AIDS began to unfold, and rumors began to spread about the many ways it could be contracted, the situation became terrifying. A killer had been unleashed in our midst—a silent, unpredictable killer.

Not five months after John's death, in February 1986, another tragedy rocked the company. Joseph Duell, a beautiful dancer and promising young choreographer with the company, leaped from his fifth-floor apartment and died. Joseph had been promoted to principal less than two years earlier, and he was emerging as a major talent. Just the day before his death I had watched him give a disturbing, strangely distant performance of the first movement of
Symphony in C
. Everyone knew that Joseph was deeply committed to his art, but that he had struggled in the past with depression and other demons. But his death was unthinkable. Like John, Joseph was only twenty-nine. How could someone so young and strong and full of light be conquered by darkness? As one of our fellow dancers, Toni Bentley, wrote at the time in a piece about Joseph for the
New York Times
: “The source of a dancer's power is the energy that distinguishes life from death. For suicide to enter such a world as ours totally dislocates us, our values and our visions.”

The unforgiving nature of a performance schedule can be a godsend in times of extreme stress and sorrow—whatever else happens, life and art must continue to play out from moment to moment for a dancer onstage. The company had danced the day Balanchine died and we had danced the day John Bass died and we danced the day Joseph Duell died. On all of these occasions we danced for and in honor of our absent brethren, carrying our confusion and sadness with us through our airy leaps and turns, letting whatever feelings were trapped inside us give color to our expression in that moment—this was the only way we knew how to process life. This was what I had been trained to do for years. You don't talk about it, you don't analyze it, you don't dissect it—you go to class or you go to rehearsal or you go to the theater and you just dance.

When my twenty-first birthday rolled around that April, Ulrik threw a huge party for me at Brian McNally's trendy Canal Bar. It was a strange and surreal experience for me to be the “guest of honor” at a gathering that was packed with famous New York artists and dancers and “celebrities” of all types. In addition to the ballet crowd and Andy Warhol and his superhip entourage, a smattering of high-profile people like Ray Charles, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Fran Lebowitz all came to celebrate with me. Ulrik documented the event with a photo album that had captions under the pictures, and I will never forget the shot of me standing on a table, screaming something at the top of my lungs. Beneath it he posted the caption: “At age 21 Jock finally
DOES
have a voice!”

It was true. Maybe my promotion to principal dancer and my arrival at the milestone of legal adulthood had given me more confidence and a clearer sense of who I was. But for whatever reason, for the first time I was beginning to think—and sometimes even to speak—for myself. Although I'm sure dancing so many new roles onstage had boosted my confidence in general, in retrospect it seems obvious that an important factor behind my growing sense of self, in addition to the passage of time, was my increasingly intense relationship with Heather, on- and offstage. As Heather and I became more established as partners onstage, and more attuned to the specific nuances of each other's style, I could allow myself to explore and experiment more. It was always an exciting and often a quite daring experience to perform with Heather, because she could be counted on to challenge me while we were out there. She might take off for a turn when I was still ten feet away, or add extra pirouettes as if to say, “Ha, take that!” I learned to counter with challenges of my own. In the
Nutcracker
, in the grand pas de deux in the second act, I remember trying to do every turn or arabesque with one hand instead of two. It was exhilarating to dance such beautiful and complicated ballets with this sleek, spiky, edgy ballerina whom Balanchine had called his “wild orchid.” For all the boldness and complexity of her movements, Heather never made a sound with her pointe shoes, and audiences were transformed by the purity with which her dancing married the music. I could understand why someone like Andy Warhol had become fascinated with her; many people were. Heather's bright blue eyes alone, with their long, lush eyelashes, were mesmerizing. When Andy did our portraits, he did several of Heather's eyes alone.

Those intense eyes of Heather's, and the way they could lock in on you—it comes back to me every time I recall the dark February day in 1987 when another sudden tragedy rocked our world. It was a cold and rainy afternoon—in the windowless New York State Theater you could never see or smell the rain, but sometimes you could hear the rumblings of thunder exploding outside—and Heather and I were about to dance in a matinee performance of Peter Martins's
L'Histoire du Soldat
. I was just about to make my entrance when a stage manager came up to me. “I hear your friend died today,” he said. I looked at him, confused. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I have to go onstage.” “Your friend, the guy with the white wig,” he answered.

That was how I learned that Andy Warhol had died. It was so confusing, but I had to make my entrance. I didn't have time to react, so I just walked onstage and began the pas de deux. I knew Heather could feel something was wrong. She kept sending me fierce looks with those piercing blue eyes of hers, seeking mine at every opportunity. We finished dancing, and the moment we were offstage I told her the news. I remember feeling shocked, and also scared and angry. When someone backstage reported that Andy had died in the hospital after a gallbladder operation, I refused to believe it at first. How was this possible? Something awful was happening in the world. I was twenty-one years old and my friends were dying.

Andy's death that February was one of many profound moments that Heather and I would share, in life and on and off the stage, during the fifteen years we danced together. The combination of these intense experiences and the sheer volume of time we logged together seemed to bring us closer and closer with each passing month—in retrospect, it seems probable that I was relating to her more and more as a kind of surrogate mother. We went everywhere together and did everything together. I admired and trusted her, and asked for her advice about everything. In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that it was both Peter's and Heather's mentorship and support in those tender years of my late teens and early twenties that gave me the courage to try to formulate an identity of my own. I started looking around and thinking for myself, and after a while I began to consider new options in my private life as well as onstage.

Ulrik had noticed my newfound confidence enough to acknowledge it in his photo caption that read, “Jock finally
DOES
have a voice,” but I think I shocked both of us when I proved my new independence by starting an affair with another man. I'd like to blame my actions on the Pyramid Bar and the disco night that they used to host there every week—but I think it had a lot more to do with youth and lust and good old-fashioned paybacks. Ulrik's dalliances were really wearing on me. The first night that I noticed John Beal at the Pyramid's Sunday disco event it was because he was noticing me, staring holes into me from somewhere to my right as I ordered drinks at the bar. When I turned to look I was astounded—I didn't think it was possible for anyone to be as good-looking as Ulrik. We said hello, and exchanged names. When he intercepted me on the way to the men's room a little later, I explained that I had a boyfriend—a boyfriend who was, in fact, right across the room from us.

When I went back to the Pyramid Bar the following Sunday, John was there again. This time when we talked, briefly, we also exchanged numbers. I was slightly horrified by this brazen act, but when he called and invited me to lunch a few days later, I accepted. We ate at the Tomato Café in Chelsea—I will never forget it—and I was so aware that I was doing something bad that I couldn't touch my food. John positioned his knees outside mine under the table, and kept pushing my knees together with his, until I had to ask him to stop. I was upset by this rendezvous, but when I went to the Pyramid Bar on the following Sunday, I was armed and in a premeditated mood for crime, whether or not I knew it at the time. I was on a cassette-making jag in those days, and I often made tapes of different songs built around some special theme. Before leaving for the Pyramid that night, I loaded a copy of my most recent cassette of assorted love songs—“Don't Make Me Over,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Tainted Love,” and other classics—into my pocket. It just seemed like a good idea to me as I left the house, and I couldn't say exactly why.