I remember interviewing Edith Le Clercq in her Upper West Side apartment in late 1981. I remember a portrait on display of Edith as a young woman, sixty years earlier. I remember a couple of framed dance photos of her celebrated ex-ballerina daughter; one was, I believe, the cover of a French dance magazine. Her daughter’s tragic fate had certainly humbled Edith; there was no trace of the hauteur that had alienated many, including her own daughter, during the years when Edith was George Balanchine’s mother-in-law.
Mother and daughter had been estranged many times over the years, but Muriel Stuart, who had brought Tanaquil to the School of American Ballet, told me that she thought they were now closer than ever. In any case, Edith told me that she had just been on the phone with Tanaquil, who, as I well knew, did not want anyone poking around in her past at that moment.
“Don’t tell him everything,” Tanaquil had told her mother. But Edith was someone who did want her place, and more than that, her daughter’s place in history to be documented. And one did feel that mother and daughter were equally strong willed.
Edith was modest, however, when it came to establishing her daughter in the balletic firmament. She told me she thought there were two ballets in which no one had ever equaled her daughter: I am almost certain that she said Balanchine’s La Valse and Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun. And that, of course, made perfect sense. Each had been created for Tanaquil, had become classics in the repertory. Edith’s daughter had collaborated with a great choreographer to create a mutual self-portrait that had endured to became a canonical part of ballet tradition and lineage.
Consciously or not, dancers when they create something new are aware of the same possibility, and embrace it wholeheartedly. Second-best to creating the role is inheriting it under the watchful eye of a living choreographer. Somehow the entire trajectory seemed vivid to me when I went to NYCB earlier this week.
