I was a dancer, p.36
I Was a Dancer, page 36
Then, she said, “Oh! He’s with military intelligence.”
Next, “Oh, he’s with the State Department,” though what exactly he did there was never mentioned.
One day, all excited and bubbly, Lobelia called me in New York City, full of details about Brad Jr.’s romance. “It’s serious, Jacques. He’s engaged to Annette, and she’s a darling. At his high school, she was a cheerleader when he was on the football team. And she loves the outdoors, Jacques! They’re always off bushwhacking in the woods somewhere.” And then, not long after, in a letter, “At last, I’ve got the daughter I always wanted. Annette and Brad Jr. are married!”
Visiting LA for a television special when both Brads were away, I had the most sumptuous meal cooked for me by Annette and Lobelia, twitting and giggling around the kitchen like two beautiful birds. It was remarkable how similar Annette was to Lobelia—the dark hair, broad cheeks, enormous dark eyes, laughter, and vitality.
Annette and Brad Jr. eventually had three children, but, to my regret, I never had occasion to meet them, for, not long after the first was born, Brad Jr. was stationed overseas.
His assignment was Trieste, Italy, where his specialty—the languages and cultures of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovakia—would be invaluable. I remembered Trieste from our New York City Ballet tour there. The riots near the theater, and my guilt in deserting a company full of exhausted and injured dancers to go off to Hollywood.
“That’s a volatile area. What’s he going to do over there?” I asked, and Lobelia dropped hints, vague mentions of the lives and deaths of “Brad’s friends in Communist Yugoslavia.” I caught the gist that he was running agents. Brad Jr. was a spy!
Nothing would have torn Lobelia away from her husband, Bradford—except a grandchild. Every moment she could pry away, she visited Brad Jr., Annette, and their baby, Brad III. She was in heaven, and the cherub was not the only reason. In Italy, Lobelia could indulge: the opera at La Scala, the art in Florence, unbelievable Venice, Naples, and Rome, all while delving into Italian cuisine and cuddling her grandchild. She took up shuttling between her home with Bradford Sr. in South Pasadena and Brad Jr.’s family in Italy—which, with Annette’s pregnancies, kept growing.
Sometime around 1969, I received a letter from Lobelia that Bradford Sr. was ill. He had a previous heart condition and had developed cancer on top of that. “He’s fighting bravely, Jacques, and never complains. But it doesn’t look good.”
Shortly after I heard of Bradford’s illness, I was engaged to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show with the ballerina Marnee Morris as my partner. We opened the show and were followed by a rock singer—a seedy-looking, emaciated, and slump-shouldered woman with pockmarked, pale skin: Janis Joplin. Marnee and I had just finished our performance, and Janis was watching from the wings. “Hey, dancer,” she said, “I like you, and I like the way you move. The band and I plan to party tonight and I’d love for you to come with us. You too …” She gestured toward Marnee. Without waiting for an answer, she went onstage to perform. Marnee couldn’t believe it. “She’s coming on to you … and she’s so famous. Let’s watch her segment, and then go to the party.” Marnee was into that rock and hippie stuff. Not me. She headed for the party and on to a night of drugs with Janis and her band. I headed home to inquire, “Carrie, who’s Janis Joplin?”
That same night, Lobelia called me. There’s a three-hour time difference between New York and LA, and they had just finished watching The Ed Sullivan Show. Bradford was in bed. “Jacques, he forgot his pain and illness during your performance,” Lobelia said. “It’s the first time in all these months of suffering that I can remember him being happy. He kept saying, ‘How I love the ballet.’ ”
They had made plans for her life after his death, which was imminent—Lobelia would sell the house and go live with Brad Jr., Annette, and their children. Soon Lobelia’s letters were coming from Africa. Brad Jr.’s latest assignment was Gaborone, Botswana. It was an exotic place, very different from northern Italy. There, Lobelia planned to play with her now three grandchildren, especially the new baby, Geoff. She hoped to renew her life.
In the mid-1970s, Lobelia informed me, “Brad Jr.’s to be stationed in Washington, D.C. We’re coming home! We’re finally leaving Africa!” She sounded relieved. “It’s time to come back, it’s time for the children to learn about America and being American.”
They set up house in Bethesda, Maryland, and flung themselves into the middle-class suburban lifestyle with gusto—parents’ associations, tennis, bridge clubs, reading circles, involvement with local charities and social organizations. The family adopted a pet dog—a golden retriever named Leo. The children made new friends, and everyone flourished. Articles were written in the local newspaper about them: “The Perfect Family—Mr. and Mrs. America and their kids.”
I was over forty by then, and my dancing career was slowing down. Having recuperated from a recent knee operation, I was back to performing, albeit with a doctor’s warning that if I continued, he would probably see me in another year for a second operation. I was thrilled just to be able to dance again.
New York City Ballet was headed to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and I was scheduled to dance in two marvelous roles: Meditation, and the last movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, roles choreographed for Suzanne Farrell and me by Balanchine. I was commuting between New York and Washington.
Lobelia wrote to tell me, “We’ve got our tickets for the ballet, Sunday, February 29 [1976]. The whole family’s coming, Jacques.” She was thrilled to see me and have her ballet fix. “Brad Jr. wants you to stay with us in Bethesda; it is only a few minutes’ drive across the Potomac to the Kennedy Center. You can save on hotels; it’ll be like old times, Jacques. And you can meet the grandchildren!”
I called Lobelia: “Carrie’s coming down too, and we’ll have our bags at the theater so we can go home with you right after the performance.”
Making schedules, giving orders, organizing things. I love it. I was excited—Carrie and I would be living with the Bishops again.
Two days before our date with the Bishops, my knee went out onstage, so I called Carrie, saying, “Don’t come down. Stay home, I’m coming back.” On Saturday morning, depressed, I limped my way back to New York. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, just focus on healing and returning to dance. Lobelia, Brad, and their family would come to the performance, find out I was injured, and would surely call Carrie or me in New York.
At the doctor’s office the next day, I was told, “No performing for a while.”
A dancer’s identity is wrapped up in his or her body. If you can’t dance, you lose identity. I wandered around New York, lost. Then I would exercise, take a ballet class, reinjure myself, doctors again—therapy, back in dance class—too soon—injured again—and so on. Getting older, but trying to hold on, and putting on a smiling face—eating, drinking, going to parties, and basically marking time, inwardly miserable. Somewhere, a little voice in the brain was saying, “Why didn’t Lobelia call to see how I am?”
“Carrie, have you heard from Lobelia?”
I would have thought she’d have been on the phone the morning after they attended the February 29 performance and heard of my injury.
One morning, up early, unable to sleep and wandering the city streets, I spied a headline in “Mystery Family Found, Bodies Burned.” It recounted how, on Tuesday, March 2, a ranger on fire watch in North Carolina spotted a tendril of smoke in the valley below, and conscientiously drove down to investigate. The ranger came across a fire in a pit. In the pit, flames crackled amid the swirling smoke of damp wood—the hissing of a demon orchestra feverishly tuning—masking the smoldering bodies of three children and two women. Discarded at the rim of the pit was a shovel, its sharp edges shining among the leaves.
They traced the shovel to a hardware store in Potomac, Maryland, and records revealed that a Brad Bishop Jr. had purchased it.
The authorities tried to reach Brad Jr. by phone. No answer. They called the State Department and were told to call back in the morning.
Further inquiries by the police to the State Department revealed that Brad Jr. had failed to report to work the previous week. “Oh, he left work last Monday, said he was feeling sick.” No one remembered seeing Annette or Lobelia that week, and the children had not been in school. At their home, the police found a vacant garage and no response to bells or knocks. They broke in and found an empty house, blood everywhere. The all-American Bishops—including Leo, the dog—were nowhere to be found.
Subsequent investigation confirmed that the bodies in the North Carolina fire pit were Annette, her three children, and Lobelia. Brad Jr. and Leo had disappeared. Brad Jr. was the prime suspect in the murders.
I followed every news development avidly. The authorities believed that the two women and the three children had been bludgeoned. Evidence showed that one of the women had locked herself in the bathroom and was trying to open the window when the door was smashed. All over the bathroom were bloody fingerprints. Lobelia’s.
Maybe Brad Jr. had been kidnapped, been killed, and his body left somewhere else. And what about the dog? What happened to Leo?
Carrie and I searched for an answer. Could this have been some monstrous revenge for Brad Jr.’s actions as a spy in Yugoslavia or Africa? Was Brad Jr. forced to watch the death of his family and then taken off to be killed and buried?
The police believed that the murders had taken place Monday, March 1, 1976. We would have been staying at their home. Had Carrie and I been with them, would we have added our blood to the house? Would we have been in the fire pit? Or would our presence somehow have deflected or deferred the killings?
Investigators reported that Brad Jr.’s credit card had been used at a North Carolina store on March 2. There was a story of a waitress at a diner describing a man “acting strange and nervous.” After an altercation with another patron in the diner, he had used Brad Bishop’s credit card to pay the bill, and fled. The waitress exclaimed, when shown a picture of Brad Jr., “That’s the man!”
I called André Eglevsky on Long Island. He had retired from performing and had started a ballet company there. For months, we were both terrified that Brad Jr. would show up on our doorstep—a fugitive, and mad. Months turned into years, and there were no new developments. The story faded from the papers but remained buzzing ominously in my brain engine.
Amazingly, no one ever came to talk to us. The police must have found the letters we had exchanged, our plans to stay with them that night. A friend of mine at the Washington Post informed me that for several years the paper had assigned some of their reporters to do nothing but try to track down Brad Bishop Jr., without success.
In the late 1970s, it was reported that a member of the State Department had gone to the restroom in a restaurant in Italy and, at the urinal, recognized a bearded Brad Bishop Jr. He stared and mumbled, “Brad? Is that you, Brad?” The man fled. “Brad, wait. Brad!”
Some twenty-three years after the murders, in the spring of 1999, Carrie viewed a news item on television. A couple who had worked with him spotted Brad Jr. at a train station in Switzerland. Their train had stopped next to another train, parked on a parallel track, and while gazing out of the window of her compartment, the woman saw, staring back at her through the other train’s window, Brad Bishop Jr. She called her husband over, “I think that’s Brad? Isn’t that Brad?” The two parties stood there, staring, their faces inches away from each other, separated only by the panes of the two train windows. As Brad Bishop’s train slowly pulled out of the station, he smirked and held both hands up—a “Don’t shoot” gesture—as if he was a bad boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar: a “You got me.”
Horror stories—the ones that raise the awful thought that no one is what they seem—forever cling to the dark shadows of the human mind. Dwelling on them, you begin to trust no one—those closest to you? yourself? Paranoia and madness threaten to crack through the earth and darken your soul. Order and civilization collapse, fly apart. In defense, a door in the brain snaps shut.
I had played and been friends with a boy who grew into manhood to slaughter his entire family.1
The Years Leading to Balanchine’s Death, Continued
By 1982, as I approached fifty, my life as a dancer was in a holding pattern, as a plane hovers over Kennedy International Airport, on its way down.
Balanchine’s health was steadily declining, and the word “succession” implied his death, something I didn’t have the ability to imagine. I’d try, asking myself, “Jacques, what’s going to happen with Balanchine gone?” and a black curtain would descend, impeding any thought in that direction. What did Balanchine expect of me? I decided to ask.
“Mr. B, what do you think I want to do?” He replied, “Make movies and Broadway shows. Direct, choreograph, teach. You are very good at directing, putting big things together.” I realized he was thinking of NDI and our yearly extravaganzas. I ventured, “Do you want me to be part of NYCB?” Blinking, he answered, “Yes, of course, always, but you have to support your family and you need money.” I announced, “George is in the Air Force, Chris’s career as a dancer is soaring, the twins are eighteen and launched on their careers,1 and Carrie is passionately pursuing her art as a photographer. Tell me what you need.”
Balanchine rambled, seemed to change the subject. “Lincoln is a homosexual, always for boys, and will destroy everything. He is in love with Joe Duell.2 Only I care about women, and woman is ballet. Like you have wonderful racehorses, you must treat them well and serve them. Taras, Jerry are not ballet … Jerry is Broadway.3 I am disappointed in Ronnie Bates. He cannot see [how to light ballets], and I can see.4 No one is around to tell, the clothes are junk [that is, when Balanchine is no longer around, there will be no one to direct the lighting designer and costume designer on how to dress and light the dancers].”
Balanchine continued, “I say, ‘The best silk, the best costumes always.’ But I need help. I cannot do it all. I never knew you were ready now, yes, good. It has to be, in the future, someone who loves women—not a homosexual—the only two people are you and Peter.”
Balanchine rarely demanded, but if, when he was in the hospital with no hope of recovering, he had tried to persuade me to direct the company, I would have insisted, “Jerry is the one. Or, if Lincoln balks at Jerry … a troika—Tanny, Karin von Aroldingen, and Rosemary Dunleavy.”5 I wanted to be remembered: “There for Balanchine, gone when he’s gone.”
Jerry was tormented, like Lincoln. Each had qualities of brilliance, bordering on genius, and each was gifted with wit—marbled with meanness. On their shadow sides, they sometimes behaved like monsters, determined to camouflage any sign of a gentler, sunlit side. But it cropped up. Lincoln once came into my dressing room and proudly showed me a picture of himself marching amid hundreds of African Americans in Selma, Alabama, the only white protester in the picture, carrying a little black boy on his shoulder, like St. Christopher carrying Jesus. And Jerry, underwriting the medical costs for injured dancers, on the condition that the dancers never tell anyone.
Jerry in his choreography, and in his life, was a seeker. He hoped and dreamed of a better world, without prejudice, with races and cultures in harmony, somehow finding that place despite society’s rules, nationalism, fear, hate of other cultures, and divisions of religions or class. His work in the theater and dance are full of these themes. At NYCB, The Guest, Age of Anxiety, and Dances at a Gathering come to mind. And on Broadway, West Side Story was at the apex.
Despite Lincoln’s personal animosity toward Jerry, there was no doubt that, next to Balanchine, Jerry was the preeminent choreographer and man of the theater in America. It surprised me that Lincoln allowed his distaste for Jerry to jeopardize in any way the future of the company.
Balanchine never said no to Jerry Robbins, but he never said yes to anybody. Like Louis Quatorze declaring, “I am the state,” Balanchine continually declared, “After me, I don’t care. It will be different. Something else. Right now, with these people, and this music—that’s all I care.” When Peter Martins went to Balanchine’s hospital bed to receive his imprimatur and be officially installed as his successor, Peter told me Balanchine answered, “You’ll have to fight Jerry for it.” It was something that Alexander the Great said on his deathbed: “Let the strongest win.”
You could always tell where you stood with Lincoln by studying Nancy Lassalle’s behavior.6 A patron and groupie who dedicated her life to the company and, especially, the school, from its earliest days, she reflected what Lincoln projected. At this time, she was telegraphing Lincoln’s disfavor toward me, turning down the corners of her mouth and averting her eyes when she saw me.
He would wander around, come up to dancers, stare at them, saying nothing or, all of a sudden, yelling, “Get out!”
As Balanchine faded, Lincoln’s behavior rippled into a Jackson Pollock. One noon, dripping sweat after ballet class, I was gossiping with Carol Sumner7 in the hall. Lincoln appeared. Spotting us, he pressed himself against the wall and, like a crab, sidled past as if afraid our bodies might touch. I ventured a nervous, “Hi, Lincoln. You got a moment?” He squeaked out a high-pitched “Yeeeessss!,” then, accelerating his crabwalk, slipped through the hall door, and out of sight. “Oh, well. Lincoln’s not lucid,” I said to an open-mouthed Carol.
Lincoln Kirstein accosting Suzanne Farrell (image credit 17.1)
That same night, in the dressing room I shared with the elegant Icelandic star Helgi Tomasson, I sat alone, putting on my makeup. The first ballet, Swan Lake, had just ended, and I was still haunted by Tchaikovsky’s angst-ridden chords. In the adjacent dressing room, Peter Martins was frantically changing out of his Prince costume to prepare for the next ballet, when Lincoln burst into his dressing room. You could hear everything through the doors. “Peter, you’re THE ONE,” he bellowed. “You have to watch everything George does! There’s no time to waste! Watch all the ballets, over and over. Sit in the balcony, sit on the sides! Watch from the orchestra! Sit in the front row. Analyze it all! Everything onstage! The patterns. The entrances. The exits. Find out how George does it!”
