Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance
by Deborah Jowitt
Book Summary Information
Author: Deborah JowittEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-08-03
ISBN: 0684869853
Number of pages: 640
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance
Book Review: Love Letter to Tanaquil Le Clercq
Summary: 5 Stars
All in all, I'm touched by Deborah Jowitt's well meaning and comprehensive biography of Jerry Robbins. She digs under the surface of his ballet and Broadway work and finds a whole lot more than I had ever imagined. Again and again she returns to the paradox of the name, how "Jerry Robbins" was a fake, all-American and showbizzy place name for the real, suffering, inward, outcast Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, and how Robbins could never be happy knowing this. He loathed himself from the inside out and the outside in: no wonder he treated others so terribly. Deborah Jowitt's years of research into the Robbins papers, those revealing scrapbooks and journals, have really paid off, for although I think in general Greg Lawrence's biography better in most ways, Jowitt's contains innumerable examples of revelation right from the horse's mouth, scraps of diaristic strip-tease that really pay off in almost every case. We can see how, in Gypsy, there had to be a strip-tease number in which three women explain, "You Gotta Have a Gimmick," because Robbins realized early on that was the path to artistic greatness--not the gimmick per se, but the emotional and psychological undressing.
Along the way Jowitt sketches in many portraits, some of them ravishingly done. Leonard Bernstein has never seemed so much himself before. John Kriza, the gadabout dancer from Ballet Theater days, seems as "Fancy Free" as the roles he created in Robbins' early work. Jowitt's greatest "creation" as it were is Tanaquil Le Clercq, the tragic, French-born ballerina who came down with polio while Balanchine's fourth wife. Le Clercq is the real heroine of the book: everything we think about, oh, say, Audrey Hepburn was really Tanaquil Le Clercq gone commercial: gorgeous, radiant, utterly chic, loveable, wildly talented in many different areas. I had just barely heard of her before and now I want me my Tanaquil Le Clercq! I'm going to have to go down to the Robbins Foundation and watch some primitive kinescopes of her. Jowitt actually saw her dance and has apparently never gotten over it. Her next book should be all about "Tanny"!
I did think that Jowitt is a bit sklmpy in her treatment of the HUAC thing. Growing up, I got the sense that Robbins' naming names made hum utterly despised. Even I, as a child of five, knew what he had done made him scum. And yet you never get a sense of what it was like for Robbins living, if not with guilt, then with the simple fact that thousands of people abhorred him. Likewise I think Jowitt isn't exactly the right person to write about Robbins' sex life, and when AIDS enters the picture, she seems bound and determined to avoid the glum subject once and for all. Finally, her lack of editorializing is all very well, but I for one do not believe that the later, experimental work is on a par with INTERPLAY, THE GUESTS, THE CAGE, AFTERNOON OF A FAUN or THE CONCERT. Why not? We don't get an explanation. It was the sixties, pretty much, and Robbins started taking the drugs and stopped wearing suits. But there must have been more to it. WATERMILL is no picnic.
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