Some of My Lives (30 page)

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Authors: Rosamond Bernier

BOOK: Some of My Lives
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I first met Mr. Balanchine on Broadway, when I was a chorus boy in a show he was involved with, called
Great Lady
. Then he picked me to understudy José Limón in another show he had choreographed,
Keep Off the Grass
. Then I met him on a boat coming back from Nantucket, and we had a long conversation about dance. Then I finally saw what is now the New York City Ballet. I immediately wrote him a letter and asked, “Can you use me, any way you want. Dancer, choreographer, anything.” And he wrote me and said come along.
One year later I was assistant artistic director to him. It was such a privilege, such a remarkable time that any moment with him, at work or socializing or at a rehearsal, was a gift.
We shared a dressing room for many years, it was nice having those relaxing moments with him. Once he told me how much he admired my ballet
Watermill
. He said, “We choreographers get our fingertips on that world everyone else is afraid of, where there are no words for things. I think that is what dancing is about. For ballets—there are no words. But we aren't afraid to go into that world.
“You take time away, there is no such thing as time in that ballet,
Watermill
.” He was fascinated by it.
I actually worked with him, choreographed certain things with him. He'd quite often call on me to ask me to help him do, for instance, a big hunk of
Nutcracker
or
Pulcinella
. Quite often they were things he wasn't too interested in doing. I didn't mind that. It was fun to ask him what he had in mind.
I remember in
Firebird
, particularly, getting all the instructions about how he wanted me to proceed. But most of all, it was fantastic to be in that milieu, where this enormous creativity was always pouring out of him. He was so prolific. He could do four ballets where any of the rest of us could do one.
It is different without him; it has to be. He is not there guiding his own ballets the way he sees them; he's not creating new works. I think that what he has left us, which is very much alive, is a certain kind of dedication to dance, and to those ballets which act as inspiration for us all.
M
y next life took me back to the United States and an unknown future. My friend of many years Michael Mahoney, who had been a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was the newly appointed head of the art department of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Before taking over, he was traveling in Italy with his friend Dr. Raymond Bahor. I joined them in Venice.
While I was lying in the sun (I know better now) on the Lido, Raymond asked me to explain Cubism. I talked away. Later we were in Paris. “Will you explain Surrealism?” Raymond asked, and I did my best. Michael said, “If you can talk like that off the top of your head, you should be lecturing.” I ignored this.
Some time later, I was back in New York, Michael telephoned. “We are all looking forward to your lectures.” “What? What lectures?” I asked in alarm. He claimed he had written to me all about this. To this day I don't believe him. “What about?” I asked. “The background of Twentieth Century Art,” came the answer. “How many?” “Fourteen” came the answer.
Well, I did it. With death in my heart I would take the train to Hartford every week, muttering my opening lines to myself—I had no text—and twice a week spoke to the students, all male at that point. I firmly decided never to do that again.
Somehow another old friend, Dominique de Menil, whom I knew in Paris, but was now living in Houston, Texas, tracked me down at my father's house in Philadelphia. “Come to Houston and speak to my students at Rice,” she said. I thought I had an out: “I can't. I have no slides.”
Dominique was very persuasive. I would live at their house, could use their library, her art department would make my slides.
Dominique and her husband, Jean, had come to Houston to escape the occupation. Dominique's father, Conrad Schlumberger, had invented a system needed for the exploration of oil fields. Jean was appointed head of the Schlumberger operations in North America. Later, Jean anglicized his name to John.
I finally agreed, curious about Texas, territory unfamiliar to me. Dominique asked for my telephone number. I gave it to her. “What is the area code?” she asked. I had no idea. That didn't exist when I left the United States.
So off to Texas. Dominique received me in the famous Philip Johnson house with—to Houston—the controversial flat roof. The walls and even inside the cupboards were painted in striking colors by the until-then dress designer Charlie James. There was a Cubist Braque near the entrance and a big Max Ernst sculpture in the garden. I was given the guesthouse a few steps away, with its treasure of a library.
I was geographically in Texas, but it was a French enclave. Only French was spoken in the house, and the gentle-voiced black domestics were from Louisiana, their French colored with a charming eighteenth-century vocabulary.
The other imported element was a jolly French Dominican monk, Père Duployé, who was there to teach French literature at Rice. He spoke no English, and the students knew no French, so I imagine I benefited more than anyone else. But I enjoyed him very much, and we had lively discussions walking along the Rice campus. “Do you think Apollinaire really understood Cubism?” he might ask me.
He had been lent a house. “Come to supper and I will make you a boeuf bourguignon that you will never forget,” he told me. He was right. It was delicious.
Jean and Dominique went off to distant parts. They were very active in ecumenical matters and civil rights. The next houseguest was Roberto Rossellini, who was involved with several Menil projects to do with cinema.
Roberto spoke no English and my Italian was shaky, so French was the lingua franca. We would meet at breakfast, and Roberto
would announce as an opener, “
Pascal n'avait pas raison
”—“Pascal wasn't right”—and he was off.
He told me that although he was divorced from Ingrid Bergman, she still relied on him and kept telephoning him with complaints. She was in a play in Washington and complained about the other actors; she complained about the director. “She was always like that,” he said resignedly. The next subject was the twins. He was very worried about them, he said. They had fallen into bad company in Rome. “I slapped them,” he said. “Both of them?” I asked. “Both of them,” and he demonstrated. So Ingrid shipped them to Hollywood to stay with Loretta Young. “Why Loretta Young?” I asked. “Ingrid said she would teach them good manners.”
Roberto was still worried about them. “Why don't you have them come here?” I asked. “You wouldn't want them.” “It's not my house, and I am sure Dominique would want you to have them.”
So the twins arrived, with a young Indian boy who was the son of Roberto's current wife. The twins spoke no French, only Italian, the Indian boy spoke English. There was no one common language. We would gather around the dining room table in the evening and play an animated game that they taught me called
Battaglia
.
Meanwhile, I was working feverishly to prepare a series of lectures. The slides were indeed made for me by the Rice art department under the direction of a bonny long-haired student, Susan Barnes. Since then, she has become the leading expert on Van Dyck and an ordained minister.
When the Menils were in residence, there would be a knock on my door promptly at six o'clock, and Jean—wearing his signature orange tie—would hand me a scotch and soda.
The dread day of the first lecture arrived, and I got through it. To my surprise—since he didn't understand a word of English—there was Roberto coming up to congratulate me. He said the equivalent of “You've got it. You haven't a worry in the world. When we get back to Paris, I will film all your lectures.” I was immensely moved to have such appreciation from a professional. Naturally, he never did film the lectures; he never had the money. But it was the intention that counted.
Roberto gave me the most romantic present I ever had. He drove
me to Rice. We got out and walked along endless corridors. We went into a room. He said, “Sit down, close your eyes, and put out your hand.” I felt something being put into my hand. “I have given you the moon,” said Roberto. It was in fact a fragment of the moon—Rice was one of the universities that were given samples of moon rock to analyze. I had to give the moon back, but I had had it for a moment.
I had only seen cowboys in the movies, so I rushed out in my best Cartier-Bresson manner with my camera, when Fat Stock week brought the cowboys and cowgirls riding into town. They had camped outside the town for the night, then rode into Houston in a brave procession.
I had never heard country-and-western music before, but I became addicted to the immortal Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn. The Menils did not have a television then, but I heard them on the radio and loved it.
I had wanted a proper cowboy hat and was advised to go to Stelzig's, which had the real thing. To my disappointment, they had already stocked up with their spring line of straw hats. I wanted the proper hard-hat item. I spied a cowboy high up on a ladder getting something, wearing a fine dark brown cowboy hat with the proper swagger. I called out to him, “Want to sell your hat?” “Sure,” he answered. “How much?” “Twenty bucks.” “Sold!” So I got the real thing. It had a reinforced crown for rodeo riding and it said “Rick” inside.
When I left Houston, I was wearing my new hat and holding a sheath of yellow roses—a symbol, I was told, that I was wanted back. I stepped into the Menils' private plane that was to take me back to New York. It had a Max Ernst on the wall. Where else?
I
t was a great way to get to know this country. Although born here, I had seldom lived in America for long. Now, through the lecture circuit, I got to know not only the major museums but also the rural ones tucked away in this vast continent.
I had no agent. Agents only wanted television stars, I learned. But one way or another, it got around that I was a possible number, and soon I was crisscrossing the country. You name it, I've been there.
I was amused to be greeted at the Yakima, Washington, airport with a large electric sign: “Welcome to Yakima, Rosamond Bernier.” It was a letdown on leaving to see that the electric sign was still there but just said “Welcome to Yakima” and any name of an arrival was added.
In Portland, Oregon, I was teamed on the local theater marquee with Comedy Hour and Mother's Day.
An agreeable woman named Wilma Lewis had a series in California, the A.M. Talks. I stayed at her house, and at six every morning I got into her station wagon, along with her sister Fran and the coffee machine, and we drove to Walnut Creek or Sacramento, or to one of several other places. The routine was that the assembled ladies got coffee and a chance to chat, and then they got me. The program was always the same, but in six different California suburbs.
At first I rather dreaded the Ladies' Luncheons that were invariably hosted by the head of the women's committee. It was part of the package. What on earth could I talk to them about that might interest them? Cubism was hardly an opener.
I hit on two surefire subjects: gardening and cooking, both of
which interested me. I would ask my neighbor on the right, after a suitable lead-in, “Do you have an acid or a lime soil?” And to my neighbor on the left, “Exactly at what temperature do you bake your ham?” I would return from these forays with illegible scribbled notes made on my knee during these meals.
During the first years of my lecturing, there were still dry states. John was appalled to think I couldn't get a drink after performing, so he gave me a little silver flask and filled it with whiskey so that I could retire to my hotel room after speaking and take a nip.
The change in this country was rapid. Now, in the smallest coffee shop, you get a choice of white, red, or rosé—the quality may not be high, but it is cheering to the traveler.
It was not always smooth going. I arrived in Chicago to speak at the Art Institute the next evening. I felt a bit odd, then a raging fever took over. Luckily for me, my husband was with me. He telephoned James Wood, the director of the museum (unfortunately, he died recently), who very kindly dug up a doctor, even though it was after hours. I was pumped that evening and the next morning with powerful potions.
It turned out that I had been bitten by a spider when I was lunching in Houston in the open air the day before. I had survived scorpions all those years in Mexico; I hadn't thought of urban Houston as dangerous territory.
I managed nevertheless to stagger onstage that night.
I was booked to speak at the University of Utah at Salt Lake City, a Mormon redoubt. They sent me a stern warning, the gist of it being that these artists I was going to speak about led highly irregular lives and they counted on my censoring my remarks. I wrote back equally sternly that these artists led magnificent lives and enriched ours and I was in no way going to misrepresent them.
I spoke in the gigantic gymnasium; several thousand attended. It apparently was a custom that if one of the pupils was moved with a message, he or she could stand up and deliver it.
When I finished, to my astonishment, a young girl came forward, grabbed the mike, and thanked God for bringing them Rosamond Bernier. That was the first and only time I have been linked to the Almighty.

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