Across The Margin / ATM Publishing presents Chapter Three of Arthur Hoyle’s The Jealous Muse — Maria Tallchief & George Balanchine : A Pas De Deux…
Chapter Three — Maria Tallchief & George Balanchine : A Pas De Deux
Out on the dusty plains of Oklahoma, on an Osage Indian reservation, far from the glittering concert halls of Paris and St. Petersburg, was born Maria Tallchief, considered by many to have been the greatest American ballerina of the twentieth century. During the 1940s and ‘50s Maria Tallchief and the choreographer George Balanchine dazzled the dance world with their brilliant artistry. Together, they made classical ballet a major performing art in North America and established the New York City Ballet as an iconic institution, emblematic of excellence and innovation in dance. Their unlikely pairing brought together two vastly different cultural strains and traditions: the ancient mystical rituals of the American Indian, and the more recent aristocratic discipline of classical ballet as developed and refined in Russia at the Imperial Theatres. Their long relationship was marked by continuing tension between their allegiance to each other and their dedication to Terpsichore, the muse of dance. Like the dance itself, the pull between life and art is intertwined in their stories.
Dance is one of the oldest forms of human expression, comparable to body language, facial expression, and speech (including sounds) as a means of communication. Images of human figures in dance positions are found on the walls of caves inhabited by Cro-Magnon man, along with drawings of the animals they hunted and depended upon for survival. Early dance was likely a form of mimesis that magically enabled hunters to gain power over their prey. Native American people used dance to gain entrance into the world of the supernatural, seeking control over weather, food supplies, and enemies through ritual movements performed in elaborate costumes and masks made from animal parts and plant fibers.
We know that dance was performed in ancient Greek ceremonies, such as the rites of Dionysus, and in Roman entertainments that used pantomime. Dance entered Western Europe during the Renaissance, when it was adopted by the nobility as a means of displaying social status. It began in the late fifteenth century in Italy as social dances called “balletti” performed by members of the aristocracy. The marriage of Catherine de Medici to Henry II, king of France, brought dance to Paris. In 1570 their son Charles IX established the Académie de Poésie et de Musiqe, an institution created to promote the Platonic ideals of order and harmony in the universe as found in the rhythms and meters of Greek poetry and music. Dance was regarded as a pattern of movements that reflected cosmic laws operating throughout nature. By dancing, man was participating in this cosmic order, and elevating himself above his purely animal nature.
In seventeenth century France, dance became an elaborate ritual of the court known as “ballet de cour.” Dance was used by the monarchy as an instrument of political control through which courtiers showed their deference to and veneration of the king. Louis XIV established a system of court etiquette based on strict hierarchies conveyed through movement. There were codes for bowing, offering your hand, or carrying a fan, amongst other gestures.
In 1662 Louis XIV founded the Royal Academy of Dance to advance the art of dancing. His ballet master, Pierre Beauchamps, codified the five basic foot positions that remain the foundation for all ballet steps. Beauchamps designed “la belle danse,” an elaborate show of nobility performed exclusively by men wearing costumes and masks. Classical ballet, as we now think of it, evolved from “la belle danse” and “ballet de cour.” Seven years later Louis XIV established the Royal Academy of Music, which has come down to us as the Paris Opera, and in 1713 a formal school was started there to train professional dancers, including women.
Ballet spread to other European capitals, such as London and Copenhagen, as an indicator of cultural enlightenment. In St. Petersburg, Peter the Great imported ballet masters from France and Italy in an effort to westernize Russian culture. In 1766 Catherine the Great formed state theatres for music, drama, and dance in St. Petersburg that included a Franco-Italian opera and ballet. The dance theatre became known as the Maryinsky and later the Kirov Ballet. In 1783 the Bolshoi Stone Theatre was built in Moscow to house opera and ballet. Bolshoi dancers were serfs who had been trained by their overlords to perform in service to the state. The dancers’ subservience to a state mandated regimen persists today in the culture of the Bolshoi Ballet and in the attitude of Russian dancers towards their profession.
Following Russia’s defeat of France in the War of 1812, Russian ballet began to draw from its own cultural heritage for its themes and subject matter. Ballets that remain popular today, such as The Firebird and Swan Lake, are built on Russian themes and music. The Firebird, based on a Russian folk tale, was first presented in 1822. Swan Lake was first performed in 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre to music by Tchaikovsky. This was followed by productions of The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892), both to music by Tchaikovsky, at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. The ballets choreographed by the French ballet master Marius Petipa during this period became the basis for classical dance in the twentieth century.
Russian ballet was brought to the West through the efforts of the famed impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev settled in Paris and in 1909 founded Ballets Russes, a company whose members included Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, and Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava Nijinska. Ballets Russes’ productions of The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, both to music by Igor Stravinsky, astonished Parisian audiences and marked the beginning of the modern era in ballet.
One of the young dancers at the Imperial Theatres was a striking young man named Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze. He was admitted to the Imperial Ballet School in 1913, a year before the outbreak of war and the temporary disbandment of Ballets Russes. He was nine years old. Homesick, and reluctant at first to become a dancer, his attitude changed during a performance of The Sleeping Beauty on the stage of the Maryinsky Theatre when as a member of the corps de ballet he first experienced the thrill of dancing for an audience.
The school closed for a year following the Bolshevik Revolution and during this interval Balanchivadze lived with his aunt in St. Petersburg and survived doing odd jobs, including playing piano in silent movie theaters. He resumed his training in 1918, graduated in 1921, and entered the Conservatory of Music in St. Petersburg, where he studied for three years while performing as a dancer for the Maryinsky. His schooling had grounded him in both music and dance.
Balanchivadze began choreographing in 1920, when he was sixteen. In 1923 he formed his own company, composed of dancers from the Imperial School, and presented a program in St. Petersburg that earned the disapproval of the theatre’s artistic director, who forbade the dancers to perform Balanchivadze’s choreography. Feeling stifled creatively, Balanchivadze and his business partner Vladimir Dimitriev took a small company of dancers on a tour of Western Europe that included stops in Berlin, London, and Paris. The dancers included Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Geva (Balanchivadze’s wife), Nicholas Efimov, and Balanchivadze. In Paris, they auditioned for Ballets Russes, and Diaghilev invited them to join his company. A year later, in 1925, Balanchivadze displaced Bronislava Nijinska as choreographer for Ballets Russes. Diaghilev changed his name to George Balanchine. A knee injury in 1926 curtailed his dancing career, limiting him to character roles. Balanchine remained with Ballets Russes as choreographer until its demise after the death of Diaghilev in 1929.
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As Balanchine was beginning his career as a choreographer, on January 24, 1925 Maria Tallchief (Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief) was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, culturally about as far away from Paris and the world of Ballets Russes as one could get. Yet she was destined to become Balanchine’s wife and prima ballerina, and to be the dancer who brought critical acclaim to Balanchine’s New York City Ballet at its inception. How did their lives come together?
Marie’s father, Alexander Tall Chief, was a full blood Osage Indian independently wealthy on royalties from oil deposits found on Osage land. His grandfather Peter Big Heart had played a significant role in securing mineral rights for the tribe during its negotiations with the federal government for land in Oklahoma. Alexander was a widower with three children from his first marriage when he met Ruth Porter, who had come to Fairfax to visit her sister, then employed as cook and housekeeper for Alexander’s mother. Alexander and Ruth had two other children together, Gerald, who was permanently maimed by a horse kick to his head, and Marjorie (born October 19, 1926), who also became a ballerina.
Ruth had aspirations for her daughters to become performing artists. Marie received her first ballet lesson at age three while the family was vacationing in Colorado Springs, and she also studied the piano from an early age. When Marie was five, she began taking ballet lessons in Fairfax from a Mrs. Sabin, who prematurely put her on pointe, nearly ruining her feet. Ruth arranged for Marie and Marjorie to perform at county fairs and rodeos in Oklahoma, giving them their first public exposure.
In 1933 Ruth brought the family to Los Angeles to gain access to the world of show business. She enrolled both sisters in Ernest Belcher’s School of Dancing. Belcher was an Englishman who had come to America just before the outbreak of World War I accompanying a touring troupe of dancers as a solo dancer performing between acts. The son of a butcher, he had studied ballet in London and built a career dancing with female partners in English music halls. In Los Angeles, Belcher found success as a teacher and choreographer working in the fledgling motion picture industry. He directed dance sequences and coached actors in movement in over two hundred films, and worked with such luminaries as Mack Sennett, D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. De Mille, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, and Gloria Swanson. Belcher immediately recognized that the technique Marie had learned from Mrs. Sabin was faulty, and he started her over with fundamentals of the five basic positions and the steps that proceeded from them. Marie credited Belcher with giving her the foundation on which her career as a dancer was built.
Belcher introduced Marie to Bronislava Nijinska, then living in Los Angeles and running her own dancing school. Nijinska would become instrumental in Tallchief’s rapid rise through the ranks of ballerinas. In 1937 Marie began taking lessons from Nijinska and through her made a direct link to Ballets Russes. In the summer of 1940, when she was fifteen, Marie performed as principal soloist in a production of Nijinska’s choreography for Chopin Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl. Marie also took lessons from Mia Slavenska, a former ballerina with Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the successor to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Slavenska introduced Marie to Denham when he was in Los Angeles scouting for talent at Nijinska’s school, and Denham showed interest in Marie’s dancing.
Encouraged by his attention, Marie accompanied Nijinska to New York after graduation from Beverly Hills High School in the summer of 1942. Once in New York, she enrolled in the School of American Ballet, where Balanchine was teaching, and met him briefly during a dinner at the Russian Tea Room. Marie secured an audition for Denham, but was told there was no room in the company, which was about to embark on a tour of Canada. But then, through a series of fortuitous events, Tallchief obtained a position in the company. When one of the dancers in the corps de ballet lacked papers to enter Canada, Marie was hired to replace her, and at the end of the tour Denham invited her to join Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as an apprentice dancer, replacing a dancer who had become pregnant. Her career as a professional dancer was launched.
Nijinska was then choreographing for Ballet Russe and made Marie the understudy to Alexandra Danilova, the company’s prima ballerina, arousing the envy of other corps dancers with more seniority. Danilova mentored Marie and became a role model for her. In October 1942 Marie was given a walk-on role in Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo. It was de Mille who suggested that she change her name to Maria and spell Tall Chief as one word, which to American ears would sound Russian. In May 1943, in Philadelphia, Tallchief was asked to dance a soliste role in Chopin Concerto when Nathalie Krassovska injured her foot. Tallchief danced the role for the remainder of the tour and established herself as a soloist. In less than a year she had achieved a position of prominence in the company that most dancers waited five years to reach. Tallchief later acknowledged the important role that Nijinska had played in her rapid rise. In her autobiography she wrote: “It was from Madame Nijinska that I first understood that the dancer’s soul is in the middle of the body and that proper breathing is essential.” (Tallchief, p. 16)
In 1944 George Balanchine joined Ballet Russe as choreographer. Since the demise of the original Ballets Russes he had led a peripatetic life, moving from one ballet company to another and often working as a freelance choreographer. While still associated with Ballets Russes, Balanchine had fallen in love with Danilova, moved in with her, and dissolved his marriage to Tamara Geva.
Balanchine had formed another company, Les Ballets, and while performing in London he was approached by a wealthy young American, Lincoln Kirstein, who had come to Europe in search of a choreographer with whom he could launch an American ballet company and school. He hired Balanchine and his partner Dimitriev and brought them to America. On December 22, 1933 they opened the School of American Ballet in a studio on Madison Avenue once used by Isadora Duncan. They began with twenty-two students. The enterprise was being subsidized by Edward Warburg, a wealthy friend of Kirstein. On June 8, 1934 the School of American Ballet performed its first work, Serenade, with choreography by Balanchine, on the lawn of Warburg’s father’s estate in White Plains, New York. Classical American ballet was born.
Kirstein, in his history of the New York City Ballet, described Balanchine’s fitness to bring classical ballet to America: “Before he left Russia, Balanchine knew that the twentieth century needed its own tempi, which were jazzy and syncopated, and that asymmetrical rhythm was deep in the motor dynamism of advanced industrial societies.” (Kirstein p. 130)
Balanchine took no salary while teaching at the School of American Ballet and supported himself as a choreographer for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. He created dances for Ziegfield Follies, collaborated with Rodgers and Hart, and was hired by Samuel Goldwyn to choreograph the film Goldwyn’s Follies. During this production, Balanchine fell in love with Vera Zorina, a dancer from Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo chosen by Goldwyn as the ballerina for his film. Long separated from Danilova, Balanchine married Zorina on Staten Island Christmas Eve 1938.
Kirstein and Balanchine had by now formed American Ballet with dancers from the school and in 1935 the company was invited to join the Metropolitan Opera, performing the dance sequences in its productions. Never a comfortable marriage—only twice was Balanchine allowed to stage his own ballets—the relationship ended after the second season. Over the next several years, Balanchine continued to work for other ballet companies and for the musical theater to support himself. He once choreographed a troupe of elephants for Ringling Brothers, to music by Stravinsky.
Balanchine and Tallchief worked together for the first time in 1944 on a production of Song of Norway performed at the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera to music by Edvard Grieg. The dancers came from Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with choreography by Balanchine, who was then working for the company. Tallchief danced in the corps de ballet and was understudy to Danilova. Although Tallchief was offered Danilova’s role when the production moved to Broadway, she turned it down because she wanted to study under Balanchine. Many years later, after her retirement from dancing, Tallchief explained the pull of Balanchine. “I remember my first meeting with him. I was nineteen, and he had come to Ballet Russe to stage Song of Norway. I was absolutely astonished at his musicality . . . He expressed poetry and emotion and drama through the way he used the music. You saw the music as he used it. I realized that this was what I wanted to learn, how I wanted to dance. I had to start all over again.” (Mason, p. 236, 238)
Balanchine was known for the rigor of his classes and rehearsals. He conducted class every day for an hour, starting at eleven am. The dancers usually arrived a half hour earlier to warm up. When Balanchine entered the studio, the dancers took up positions at the barre, where they performed a standard set of exercises, beginning with pliés, bending exercises designed to loosen the dancers’ muscles. These were followed by battements, which involved beating movements of the legs and feet. After the barre work, which lasted about ten minutes, dancers moved to the center of the room, where Balanchine put them through a progression of steps that varied from day to day. When the class ended, dancers rested, then rehearsed the ballets in the company’s repertoire. A dance journalist who embedded himself with the New York City Ballet for a year wrote that “taking a Balanchine class is like doing sixty minutes of wind sprints.” (Mazo, p. 27) The speed that Balanchine demanded from his dancers, and that was a distinguishing characteristic of his choreographic style, put great stress on his dancers’ bodies. Some dancers did not like Balanchine’s methods and studied with other teachers. But Tallchief, with her stamina and dedication, thrived under his regimen.
Tallchief was rewarded with solo roles and Balanchine drew close to her, seeing in her a dancer around whom he could construct his ballets. In 1944 she danced a solo variation in Balanchine’s choreography for Danses Concertantes, to music by Stravinsky, Balanchine’s favorite composer, with whom he worked on many ballets. Two years later, in a sign of her growing stature within Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Tallchief danced the role of the Gypsy-Fairy in Le Baiser de la Fée (The Kiss of the Fairy), sharing the spotlight with Danilova and Frederic Franklin, the company’s star dancers.
Nineteen forty-six was a momentous year for the development of classical ballet in America. In January, Balanchine and Vera Zorina divorced. It had been an unhappy marriage for Balanchine, strained by frequent and lengthy separations as Zorina pursued an acting career in Hollywood. During the summer, Balanchine surprised Tallchief by proposing marriage to her. She appears to have had no inkling of his romantic interest in her. She wrote to her mother for advice, and Ruth opposed the marriage, on the grounds that Balanchine was twice her age and twice divorced. But Tallchief, although she didn’t love Balanchine, accepted his proposal. They were married at a Manhattan County Court House on August 16, 1946. “I was overjoyed, married to this man who was a prince of dance, and, I truly believed, a prince among men,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Women fueled his creativity, fed his inspiration. All his previous wives had been dancers because his life was his work. It was simple, for him and for me . . . He was a poet and I was his muse.” (Tallchief, pp.57-58) Tallchief made it clear that theirs was a professional union, not a personal one. “Passion and romance didn’t play a big role in our life. We saved our emotion for the classroom.” (Tallchief, p. 89) The couple slept in separate beds and were not sexually active, perhaps because Balanchine feared making her pregnant. Balanchine seems to have related to Tallchief as a cavalier to his consort on stage. “George was a warm, affectionate, loving husband. Our relationship fulfilled me, and I was content to let work dictate my life.” (Tallchief, p. 89)
Shortly after the marriage, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein formed a new dance company called Ballet Society, and Balanchine resigned from Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Ballet Society began as a subscription organization with eight hundred members. The company had about fifty dancers, among them the teenager Tanaquil Le Clercq, who would become a rival to Tallchief for Balanchine’s attention.
Following a six month stay in Europe where Balanchine was serving as guest choreographer for the Paris Opera, the couple returned to New York and took up residence at a hotel on West 57th Street. Tallchief left Ballet Russe to join Ballet Society. Some of Tallchief’s associates at Ballet Russe advised her to remain with the company, where her star was rising. In Balanchine’s company, there were no stars. The dance itself, not the personality of the dancer, was Balanchine’s focus. As choreographer, he was the star. His critics faulted him for creating works that sacrificed spirit and feeling for the sake of pure form. Balanchine made no apologies for his aesthetic, nor would he compromise it. “Nothing is left either to the principals or corps de ballet to do for themselves,” Balanchine stated during an interview early in his career. “I show them every tiny movement and the least mimetic action; and I count their every step.” (Dance Journal, 1931. Quoted in Olga Maynard). Balanchine’s insistence on absolute control alienated some dancers. But others discovered that his demands enabled them to achieve levels of performance they had thought unattainable. Playbills for Balanchine’s ballets listed the dancers alphabetically; no one received top billing, except Balanchine. But audiences knew who the stars were, and paid to see them. Tallchief became a powerful draw.
In April 1948, Ballet Society offered its first production, Orpheus, to the general public. The company rented space at the New York City Center of Music and Drama, home of the New York City Opera. Tallchief danced the role of Eurydice; Nicholas Magallanes was Orpheus. The performance was witnessed by Morton Baum, a key director of the City Center who controlled its finances. Though not a balletomane, Baum knew greatness when he saw it, and following the performance of Orpheus he asked Lincoln Kirstein to bring Ballet Society to City Center and operate under the name New York City Ballet. Thus was born America’s greatest ballet company. Tallchief became America’s first prima ballerina, though her name continued to be listed alphabetically on company programs.
In the fall Jerome Robbins, who had danced for Ballet Theatre and achieved fame choreographing Broadway musicals, joined New York City Ballet as a dancer and choreographer. Balanchine appointed him associate artistic director. At the outset, New York City Ballet was tied to the New York City Opera, and its performances were limited to Mondays and Tuesdays, the weakest nights for theater in New York. The company gave only thirty performances each season. This schedule did not give Tallchief enough work, and in 1949 she toured as a guest artist with Ballet Theatre (forerunner of American Ballet Theatre), a company founded in 1939 by the American dancer Lucia Chase.
On November 27, 1949 the New York City Ballet presented The Firebird, a work made famous in 1910 for being the first of Stravinsky’s ballet scores. Balanchine created a new choreography, performed with costumes and sets designed by Marc Chagall. Tallchief danced the part of the Firebird in a role that brought great acclaim to her and to the company. The fluidity and grace of Tallchief’s movements as she floats across the stage, seemingly on air, her arms fluttering like wings, are breathtaking. The audience and the critics rhapsodized over the performance. Tallchief, interviewed for a documentary film about Balanchine after his death, recalled the moment: “The curtain came down and suddenly the City Center sounded like a stadium at a football game after somebody’s made a touchdown.” (Dancing for Mr. B) Balanchine regarded The Firebird as the New York City Ballet’s first great success.
But not long after this triumph, Tallchief’s personal relationship with Balanchine began to fray. Balanchine had brought his newest protegé, the young Tanaquil Le Clercq, to live with them. Unbeknownst to Tallchief, a romantic relationship had begun between her husband and Le Clercq. Tallchief was also feeling stressed by her sense of responsibility to Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. “In my position as the company’s leading ballerina, and as Balanchine’s wife, much was depending on me . . . That my private life and my job were one and the same made me feel that I was always on, always working. It added to the strain.” (Tallchief, p. 140)
During the New York City Ballet’s tour of England in the summer of 1950, Tallchief told Balanchine she wanted to separate from him. He made no resistance, but asked that the separation not be announced until they had returned to New York from the tour. He assured her that their working relationship would not be affected. In fact, a great weight was lifted from Tallchief’s shoulders. “Now I was responsible only for myself, and what I did on stage would reflect on me alone. That the burden of being Balanchine’s chosen ballerina had fallen on Tanny’s shoulders came as a kind of deliverance.” (Tallchief, p. 149)
Balanchine was following a pattern of serial pairing with his leading ballerinas, always in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal rather than a deeply engaged human relationship. Alexandra Danilova, who lived with Balanchine during his years with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and remained his friend for life, observed that “Balanchine’s attitude toward the women he fell in love with was that of a painter toward his model . . . He actually never found, I believe, his one hundred percent beloved. Maybe that is why he was so creative. His life was creating, having satisfaction in searching.” (Mason, p. 3, p. 6) Joseph Mazo, the journalist who embedded with the New York City Ballet in the early 1970s, came to the same conclusion about the suitor Balanchine. “His real darlings are the muses, and he is one of the most virile lovers they have had all century . . . There are no children by his wives, but his offspring by Terpsichore have peopled the dance floors of the world.” (Mazo, p. 100)
In 1952, Tallchief and Balanchine annulled their marriage, on grounds that Balanchine did not wish to have children. On October 4, 1952, Tallchief married Elmourza Natirboff, a professional pilot who had been courting her since her separation from Balanchine. On December 31, 1952, Balanchine married Tanaquil Le Clercq. She was twenty-three, he was forty-eight.
Tallchief’s performance in The Firebird had brought notice from the dance world. Critics lavished praise on her, and Dance Magazine gave her one of its annual Awards. André Eglevsky, a highly regarded premier danseur, joined New York City Ballet in 1951, and his partnering with Tallchief elevated her stature. When the Washington Press Club named Tallchief Woman of the Year in 1951, her fame spread to the general public. Capitalizing on this, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast her for the role of Anna Pavlova in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), a musical directed by Mervyn LeRoy starring Esther Williams. She also performed the pas de deux from Sylvia with Eglevsky on national television. In 1953 the Washington Press Club honored her again as a Woman of Achievement, and the Oklahoma State Legislature declared June 29, 1953 Maria Tallchief Day. Her Osage nation performed a special ceremony in tribute to her. Her performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Balanchine’s staging of The Nutcracker in 1954 drew appreciative crowds and made the ballet a fixture of the company’s repertory, giving it financial stability. Watching Tallchief dance had become an imperative for followers of the performing arts.
In the summer of 1954 Tallchief was invited to join Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for its American tour at a salary of $2,000 per week, an unheard of sum for a prima ballerina. The tour made stops in 103 cities, spreading classical ballet into America’s hinterlands. Tallchief was featured on the October 11, 1954 cover of Newsweek Magazine, confirming her status as a national icon. The magazine called her “the finest American-born classic ballerina the twentieth century has produced.” Tallchief’s success strained her marriage to Natirboff, whose resentment of her long workdays and frequent absences led to arguments. After the Ballet Russe tour, she went to Mexico and divorced him.
In April 1955 Tallchief rejoined the New York City Ballet, touring with it in Europe and the US. While in Chicago, she met Henry Paschen Jr., a member of a prominent and wealthy Chicago family that had constructed many of the city’s landmarks. Paschen came to New York to court her, and on June 3, 1956 Tallchief married him in Chicago. Paschen joined her on New York City Ballet’s summer tour of Europe. When she became pregnant, she ceased performing and went to Paris to stay with her sister Marjorie and Marjorie’s husband, who were then dancing for the Paris Opera Ballet. Despite her precaution, Tallchief miscarried her child. The experience scarred her. She wrote in her autobiography, “As despondent as I was about the miscarriage, that I had failed to live up to my responsibility to George and the company made me feel even worse.” (Tallchief, p. 225) During the same tour, tragedy struck the New York City ballet when Tanaquil Le Clercq contracted polio in Copenhagen. Balanchine took leave from the company for a year to care for her. She never recovered the use of her legs.
Balanchine returned to the New York City Ballet for the 1957-1958 season, and choreographed Gounod, his final ballet for Tallchief. The leading roles were danced by Tallchief and Jacques d’Amboise. The ballet derived from Charles Gounod’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major. Gounod was a nineteenth century French composer, best known for his opera Faust. Balanchine’s description of this ballet opens a window into his choreographic technique, and his philosophy of the relationship between dance and music.
I do not mean the dancers to imitate or mirror the music in any literal way. Rather, to the time that music keeps, dancers develop other themes. They are complementary, if you like, and with appropriate music for dance, like the symphonies of Bizet and Gounod, there is a kind of balance I aim for between what is heard from the orchestra and what is seen on the stage. (Balanchine, p. 191)
This ability to create interplay between music and dance, counterpoint between two art forms, was Balanchine’s genius, grounded in his dual training as dancer and musician.
In the summer, New York City Ballet embarked on an Asian tour, but Tallchief had become pregnant in April and withdrew from dancing. She moved to Illinois, and she and Paschen set up housekeeping in Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago on the fashionable north shore. Their daughter Elise Maria Paschen was born January 4, 1959. The Paschens hired a nanny named Soeur Ruth (Sister Ruth) to care for Elise. In the fall, Tallchief’s father Alexander died in Oklahoma.
The international star Erik Bruhn joined the New York City Ballet in 1959, another sign of the company’s prestige. Bruhn had trained at the Royal Danish Ballet School and became a soloist with the company in 1949, though his contract allowed him to perform with other companies. But tension built between Bruhn and Balanchine, perhaps because Bruhn’s star status did not accord well with Balanchine’s insistence on the dance itself as star. Bruhn left at the end of the season to join American Ballet Theatre, and Tallchief, who had flourished as his partner, went with him. American Ballet Theatre was preparing to leave on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, and Tallchief was conflicted about leaving her one year old daughter. Elise remained in America with Soeur Ruth. In Moscow, at the Bolshoi Theatre, Tallchief danced the Black Swan pas de deux in front of Khruschev and other Russian dignitaries and met the Premier after the performance. She and Bruhn repeated the performance in London at the invitation of Margot Fonteyn.
On her return to America, she continued traveling with American Ballet Theatre, and separated from Paschen, whose attention during her long absences had strayed to other women. She took up residence in New York with Elise and Soeur Ruth. In April, she danced Miss Julie with American Ballet Theatre as Balanchine watched with the audience.
In the summer of 1961, Tallchief returned to Europe to dance with Bruhn at the Royal Danish Ballet. She brought Elise and Soeur Ruth with her, and while she was there she met Rudolf Nureyev, who had recently defected from the Soviet Union and was dancing with The Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. Tallchief befriended Nureyev, and she, Bruhn, and Nureyev socialized together, an arrangement that led to a complicated romantic triangle. In 1962, Tallchief danced with Nureyev on the Bell Telephone Hour when Bruhn was injured.
In 1963 she and Balanchine were again working together after she and Bruhn rejoined the New York City Ballet. She bought a brownstone apartment on New York’s upper west side and settled in there with Elise and Soeur Ruth. But her star was fading. Balanchine no longer choreographed for her, and she was given fewer and fewer roles. Bruhn resigned from the company when Balanchine asked him to perform without rehearsing. Balanchine’s attentions were now focused on Suzanne Farrell, a brilliant young dancer seventeen years old with whom Balanchine became obsessed. But Tallchief remained America’s prima ballerina in the eyes of the general public, continuing to dance on the Bell Telephone Hour, often paired with Bruhn and Eglevsky, on programs hosted by movie stars such as Shirley Jones. In 1965, partnered with Jacques d’Amboise, she performed at the White House for President Lyndon Johnson.
Tallchief resigned from the New York City Ballet in October 1965. Balanchine invited her to stay on to teach the company class, and in 1966 he asked her to join him as a coach for the Hamburg Ballet. When the Hamburg Ballet performed that summer in Paris, Tallchief danced Cinderella, one of her final performances.
Following her retirement from performing, Tallchief reconciled with Paschen and moved back to Chicago with their daughter. For a time she focused her energies on mothering Elise and became involved with her schooling. Then in 1974 she began teaching ballet for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and directing the dance sequences for its operas. In 1979, facing a large operating deficit, the Lyric Opera discontinued its ballet school. Tallchief, with financial backing from her husband, formed the Chicago City Ballet, a school and company. Her sister Marjorie, now a widow and also retired from performing, joined the company as a teacher. The company gave performances in Chicago and in other mid-western cities. In 1982 Tallchief brought in Paul Mejia to be the choreographer for Chicago City Ballet.
Mejia had danced with the New York City Ballet. In February 1969 he had married Balanchine’s muse Suzanne Farrell. Farrell had declined a proposal from Balanchine made shortly after he had divorced Tanaquil Le Clercq. Angered by what he regarded as a betrayal, Balanchine dismissed Mejia from the New York City Ballet, and Farrell left with her husband to dance with the Ballet of the Twentieth Century in Brussels. After Mejia joined the Chicago City Ballet Farrell performed with the company as a guest artist, lending it her prestige.
On April 30, 1983, George Balanchine, whose health had been in decline since a 1978 heart attack, died after a lengthy hospital stay in New York. Tallchief came to his bedside. Moira Shearer, a British dancer who wrote a memoir about her professional relationship with Balanchine, reported that “Maria was more outwardly upset than anyone . . .” (Shearer, p. 171) Tallchief, in her autobiography, lamented not only Balanchine’s passing, but the fading of his legacy.
The Chicago City Ballet struggled financially and had trouble securing sponsors. The Balanchine style of ballet that Tallchief presented was not popular with Chicago audiences, who preferred the story ballets staged by touring companies like Ballet Russe and American Ballet Theatre. In 1987 Mejia left the company, and the directors hired Daniel Duell, another former dancer with the New York City Ballet, to replace him. He was given the title Co-Artistic Director, which drew the ire of Tallchief, who was in Europe when the appointment was made. She returned to find her role in the company diminished, and resigned. Paschen, who had been subsidizing the company by providing them with free space in a building he controlled, withdrew his support and presented the remaining directors with a bill for $369,000 for back rent. The Chicago City Ballet folded, amidst considerable acrimony in the city’s arts community, some of whom believed that Tallchief’s high handedness had driven away potential donors.
Soon Tallchief’s circumstances worsened. In March 1992 Paschen’s sister and nephew filed a civil racketeering lawsuit against him, charging him with siphoning more than $5M from the family business to pay for lavish renovations to four homes that he and Tallchief owned: one in Chicago, another in New York, a third on Martha’s Vineyard, and a fourth in Florida. Three of the homes, decorated by one of Chicago’s premiere interior designers, had been featured during the 1980s in elaborate full color spreads in Architectural Digest. Paschen had been dismissed from the company a year before the lawsuit was filed. The litigation was settled when Paschen agreed to reimburse the company $1M and to sever all ties to Paschen Contractors. The story of his fall scandalized Chicago.
Then, in December 1998, the US Attorney in Chicago indicted Paschen on charges that he had evaded taxes by using Paschen Contractors to pay for nearly $2M of renovation work at his four homes. Although the Paschens had filed a joint return, Tallchief was not charged. In January 1999 Paschen pled guilty to tax evasion, and in April he was sentenced to prison for two years. Paschen and Tallchief suffered terrible financial losses during this ordeal, having to sell most of their assets to meet their obligations to Paschen Contractors and the Internal Revenue Service, and to pay their legal fees. The stress of the prosecution and incarceration damaged Paschen’s health, and sent Tallchief into psychiatric care. Paschen died from pancreatic cancer on June 2, 2004 at his home in Highland Park.
Tallchief remained in Chicago. In December 2012 she broke her hip, and on April 11, 2013 she died of complications from the injury. She was remembered in obituaries appearing across North America and England as the greatest American ballerina of the twentieth century, and as the instrument of Balanchine’s choreographic style.
View Maria Tallchief performing The Firebird Suite here.
Further Reading
Balanchine, George. New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968.
Mason, Francis. I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Tallchief, Maria with Larry Kaplan. Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.
