red BMW.
“You must be Rose,” she said as I opened the passenger side door.
Dressed impeccably in a camel-colored wool suit, pearl earrings, and an elegant necklace, the former ballerina looked as regal behind the wheel as she had on the stage.
En route to her house, I asked her if it had been hard to leave the stage after a lifetime in dance—“like you might lose your mind as Nijinsky did?”
“Hardly. You’ve got the wrong ballerina, Rose,” she said, bursting into laughter. “I’m not like that. Let me make you a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you all about it.” I followed Cynthia from the garage into her kitchen, where we were met by her bouncy chocolate Lab, Fred, who stuck his nose in my bag, grabbed the bagel I had been saving, and ran out of the room. Cynthia took off after the dog. In the meantime, I noticed a wall of framed pictures. Among them was a breathtaking black-and-white photo of Cynthia as the Dying Swan. Another showed her performing a pas de deux with Rudolf Nureyev, another with Bruce Marks. Above them were eight framed Dance Magazine covers side by side, each with Cynthia on the cover—the first when she was only seven years old.
“I call that my wall of shame,” she said, walking toward me with what remained of my bagel. “Sorry about that, can I make you something to eat?”
“No, no, I’m fine.” Cynthia fixed me a double espresso and spooned instant coffee into a mug for herself. Then we sat down in her family room to talk.
“How did your dance life begin?”
“I grew up in Los Angeles and was sort of a sickly kid. Every year I had a cold that lasted from Christmas to Easter. So when the doctor suggested that I get out for some exercise, my mother enrolled me in a ballet class. And from the minute I pointed my toe, it was clear that I had an affinity for it.”
“I read that the famous ballerina Carmelita Maracci was one of your first teachers.”
“Yes, I studied with her from the time I was nine until I was fourteen and a half. She was a formidable creature, only about 5'1", but used to scare me to death. She was very intelligent and well educated and always spoke of art and music and its relationship to dance. Her classes were choreographed, so that the exercises didn’t feel like exercises. She told us stories and had us imagining all sorts of things. For example, she would liken the rond de jambe to an oar in the water.
“I also took classes from two other Los Angeles ballet teachers, Michel Pinaeff and Robaire Rouselott, who is really responsible for giving me my technique. He was a little Swiss man whose classes were very dry and very technical. You had to be very serious to survive his class because it was full of theory and not much fun.”
“And you were one of the serious ones.”
“Yes, I suppose I was. I didn’t fit in that well at school and only had a couple of friends outside of dance. Dance became my whole world. The dance studio became my second home. My social life revolved around ballet.”
“When did you start thinking about becoming a professional dancer?”
“I caught the bug when I was around fourteen, after I received a Ford Foundation scholarship to study at the San Francisco Ballet School. I loved being around a major dance company and watching its director, Lew Christiansen, work with the dancers. That’s when I began dreaming of becoming a famous ballerina. I wanted to dance in all the great ballets, like Beauty and the Beast, Swan Lake and Giselle. I became a principal with the company and remained there for four and a half years.”
“Why did you leave San Francisco Ballet?”
“Back then if you really wanted to make it big, you made your way to New York City and into one of the premier ballet companies. I had met George Balanchine when I was only thirteen. He said to me, ‘Come see me if you want to dance in my company.’ My parents thought I was too young and wouldn’t let me go. So my plan was to go to New York when I got older and dance in New York City Ballet.”
“So how did you end up in American Ballet Theatre?”
“I happened to attend ABT’s 25th Anniversary celebration at Lincoln Center and couldn’t believe what a fabulous company it was. I loved their repertory, their sense of theater and drama. I loved the dancers. So I never went to see Balanchine.”
“How did you know that you were making the right decision?”
“I didn’t at first. When I auditioned for ABT, they said they’d have to put me back in the corps de ballet and that there were only a few spots available for principals. If I wanted to get in as a principal, I would have to wait. In the meantime, I auditioned for the Harkness Ballet and they wanted me. I didn’t know what to do, so I phoned my mother for advice. She said, ‘You’ve always dreamed about being in a company like ABT. Don’t take the first thing that comes along; hold out for that company.’ I’m so glad she advised me to do that because a couple of weeks later ABT called and said they’d take me. I ended up dancing with the company for twenty-six years, from 1965 to 1991, with the exception of the ten months I took for my breakdown.”
“What breakdown?”
“In 1965, I became a member of ABT’s corps de ballet. Nine months later I was a soloist, and nine months after that, a principal. They inundated me with roles—dancing, dancing, dancing, and working with various choreographers and a multitude of partners. I became completely overwhelmed and overworked. It was exciting, but I had no time for a personal life at all. Here I was, a promising principal dancer with a lot of fans, but I was growing more miserable every day. I started hating everything about dance. I didn’t believe in myself as an artist because I didn’t really know who I was as a person. I became rebellious. I didn’t want people telling me what to do. I didn’t want to be judged by critics, by audiences, by the director, my teachers, my coaches, my peers. It came to a point where every time I stepped on the stage, I felt like I was going to my own execution. So in 1975, at the age of twenty-nine, I quit. I walked away from it all. I moved back to Los Angeles and got fat. I vowed that if I were ever going to dance again, I would need to discover who I was as a person and integrate that into my dancing.”
“So what happened?”
“Lucia Chase, the director of American Ballet Theatre, called me every month and said, ‘Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t abandon your great talent. You haven’t yet fulfilled your potential. You’ll be so sorry you’re doing this.’ And so, after nine months, I agreed to come back, but only under certain conditions. I told Lucia that I didn’t want to perform eight times a week and be dog-tired all the time. And I didn’t want to constantly be changing partners. I wanted each performance to be special. I wanted to do it right.”
“Your leaving must have been such a shock to the company, as well as to your fans. Did people understand your motivation for leaving?”
“Everybody thought that I left because I was having a tantrum about the Russians. There was an influx of Russian defectors coming into the company around that time. The press loved to focus on Alexander Godunov, Natalia Makarova, Baryshnikov, and Nureyev. This gave everyone the impression that the Russians were better than everyone else. I believed that we were just as good as the Russians, but we didn’t have the built-in publicity that they were getting. I became very outspoken—a champion for the American dancer—so people thought I left in protest. But the truth is that I left for personal reasons.”
“Lucky for all of us that you came back. Audiences have always adored you.”
“The
