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Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins

Amanda Vaill

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Oct 14, 2018
Category: Biography

This is the best book I’ve read about the theater since Moss Hart’s Act One.

It’s the best book about the process of making art since Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.

And it’s the best book about the connection — always necessary, but often ignored — between the personal issues of a creator and the work that he/she produces.

No wonder I got up at 4 AM, day after day, to chip away at Amanda Vaill’s mammoth (531 pages) biography of Jerome Robbins, the dancer, choreographer and director who blasted convention to create a wholly new kind of dance musical. (Vaill can be counted on to break new ground; Everybody Was So Young tells the story of the Murphys, who were previously just footnotes for Fitzgerald and Hemingway.)

It’s a good time to celebrate Jerome Robbins. October 11, 2018 marked the 100th year since his birth. And he’s still more than relevant — Spielberg is remaking “West Side Story.”

No story is more satisfying than “how I made it,” particularly when it’s set in the sepia-tone nostalgia of the Depression (and when the striver in question is a show-biz-bound child of Jewish immigrants from Russia). The Jerome Robbins version is different from most; he sets out to dance, is instantly launched, is always employed, never really fails. To dancing, he adds choreography and directing. By page 93, he has met Leonard Bernstein — Vaill calls them “opposite sides of the same coin” — and they’ve begun to collaborate on “Fancy Free.” In the spring of 1944, their ballet was featured at the Metropolitan Opera House. They received 22 curtain calls; when the cheering finally ended, Agnes de Mille found Robbins “leaning against a wall, sweating and bug-eyed with incomprehension, his breath coming in gasps punctuated by an affectless giggle.” [To buy “Somewhere” from Amazon.com, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

De Mille told Robbins he was “safe and need never be frightened again.” So did the review in The New York Times: “ten degrees north of terrific.” Though he was just 25, Robbins knew better. His conclusion: “Now I had enough money to start analysis.”

Good idea: His appetites were huge and, at least on the surface, contradictory. He was gay, but he slept with women. His style of dance was decisively American — clean, muscular, turbo-charged — but because he felt like a “little kike,” he gravitated to meetings of the Communist Party.

The sexual story is the more intriguing, because when I think of bi-sexuality, I tend to think of women — when a man says he’s bi, I think, “No, you’re basically gay.” That reduction doesn’t apply to Robbins. He was gay. He also loved women. But it didn’t matter who he loved; he never fully committed. Montgomery Clift, realizing he was going off to fame in Hollywood, told Robbins it was time to end their two-year affair. “I could make you love me,” Robbins said — and there, right there, was the pattern of all his relationships: romances that seemed consuming but weren’t, romances compromised by an endless series of affairs-on-the-side.

That personal issue didn’t need immediate resolution because Robbins always had work. And very great work, at that: just as he turned 30, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein launched the New York City Ballet, and Robbins had a new showcase. But as sure as opposing institutions come to resemble one another, a Communist-crazed America began to act very much like the Soviet Union — and in 1950, Ed Sullivan, the popular columnist and TV host, was marching in lockstep with Senator Joseph McCarthy. He put it bluntly to Robbins: Give me the names of guests at a pro-Red party that Lena Horne hosted at your apartment, or I’ll write a column that tells all the world you’re a Commie and a homosexual.

That’s the kind of moment when you question everything, and Robbins did. “Where does the talent come from,” he asked himself, “when I have felt such a hoax.” He resisted mightily for three fraught years before testifying as a “friendly witness” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. There, he said, he had indeed been a Party member. And he named names. A month later, Robbins directed Ethel Merman and Mary Martin — “a feat roughly equivalent to snagging Mick Jagger and John Lennon to headline the same concert,” Vaill writes — in a television special sponsored by Ford. He had saved his career and avoided one flavor of shame. But the damage to his reputation was considerable, and his betrayal of friends would haunt him to the end of his life.

Work saved him; there he found problems he could solve better than anyone. The chapter on “West Side Story” reads like a thriller. There was the thrill of working with Bernstein, the struggle to get a good script from Arthur Laurents, the challenge of raising the money and casting the show. And then, the agony of rehearsal: “Jerry’s idea was to make the cast seethe with hatred for one another — or for him.” The effort was supremely worth it. Between acts at a Washington preview, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, in tears, told Robbins, “The history of America has now changed.”

If this were just a series of challenges and triumphs — “The King and I,” “Call Me Madam,” “Peter Pan,” “The Pajama Game,” “Bells Are Ringing,” “Funny Girl” (the show that made Barbra Streisand a star) — this would be a book only for fans of ballet and musical theater. What makes it engrossing for a general reader is that Robbins pulled his work out of his life, and Vaill has the good sense to lean on his journals to explore those life issues. “I never wanted to be a Jew,” Robbins had said. “I wanted to be safe, protected, assimilated.” But when he started to work on “Fiddler on the Roof,” for example, that distance evaporated. He was dealing now with his father — intimately. And with his family’s long-shattered home in Russia — passionately.

The production was awash in turmoil; the word out-of-town was that Robbins had a disaster on his hands. A few weeks before the show reached New York, cast member Austin Pendleton asked Robbins, “Jerry what are you going to do?” The reply was immediate: “Ten things a day.” (This is why you read with pen in hand; here is advice you can use.) And he did. After the triumphant New York opening — “one of the most moving final curtains of the American musical theatre,” Frank Rich later wrote — Robbins’s father came backstage. “He threw his arms around me,” Robbins recalled, “and wept and wept and said how did I know all that.”

And then, the ’60s, a decade of turmoil. Robbins took up with a woman who had dated his analyst — and then, fearing the intimacy, added a male lover. He was in his 50s now, and savvy enough to see the pattern: “The tug of war, pulling on nerves. ‘Pain’ is the name of the game — get it and give it.” But his male lover left him. And that, for Robbins, was a different magnitude of hurt: “I never mind being queer when I am in love — it is when I am alone that I feel the loneliness and the shame.”

He took LSD, which only intensified his misery. Robbins saw his life “as a glass table….about to break into a million shards.” He thought of suicide; he hurt his Achilles heel; he saw that had always traveled with “a friend” and that his friend was “your lover, Death.”

Terrible stuff. And thrilling. Because this, friends, is what we go through as we age — usually without being able to name it or say it. Jew, queer, Commie, fraud: Robbins could name them all, and confront them all in his work. And that, in the end, is the wellspring of his greatness. It wasn’t for the mastery of technique and his uncanny ability to solve problems that he’s a giant in the history of ballet and Broadway. It’s because he had, over and over, the courage to look inside for answers to the larger questions of drama.


Most biographies tail off as their subject grows old. Not this. Robbins aged; he lost his vitality, but never his creativity. Work was not quite his salvation, but it was the road he took to look for the home we all seek. On May 20, 1998, he had the great good fortune of watching his dances performed at the New York City Ballet’s spring gala; a month later, he was dead. A magnificent end to an epic life. And to a book destined to be called “classic.”