In his later years, Jerome Robbins had the bearing and the manners of an autocrat. Perfect in posture, his angular face neatly trimmed with a closely cropped white beard, he looked the role of the grand master. At his death in 1998 at 79, he had all the awards that movies, theater and dance could offer, with an unequaled record of ballets and Broadway shows.
He was a guiding force behind two American musical theater classics, “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” and his enduring ballets extended from the exuberant “Fancy Free,” created when he was 26, to the lyric beauty of “Other Dances” in 1976.
“Perfectionist” was a word usually attached to his name, and he bore it proudly. Shrewd in attending to his fame, he was the first choreographer to call attention to his name by having it boxed in the program credits; and when he directed a retrospective of his theater work for the Tony-winning 1989 revue “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” he insisted on, and got, an unusually long rehearsal period, way beyond the budgets of most mortal musicals.
Yet he carried with him a shame that would not go away. In 1953, he named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, earning the enmity of many of his fellow artists who were blacklisted for their membership, however brief or desultory, in the Communist Party. Zero Mostel, one of the unfortunates, worked with Robbins later in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Fiddler.” But Mostel disliked Robbins intensely, and when Robbins would line up the “Fiddler” cast for instructions, as a martinet would line up his troops, Mostel, who was naughty anyway, would delight in raising his hand and asking, sweetly, “May I go pee-pee?”
A new picture-and-text book, “Jerome Robbins: That Broadway Man, That Ballet Man” (Booth-Clibborn Editions; $49.50), attempts to make some sense out of this contradictory man. It was written by Christine Conrad, a writer who once lived with Robbins and was a friend for 30 years. She has had access to the Robbins archives, and though he stipulated in his will that his journals should not be made public until 15 years after his death, she has received permission to reprint a few drawings and notes from them.
An unabashed admirer, she explains his testimony before HUAC by noting that Robbins, under pressure and already under threat of having his homosexuality made public, took the advice of his lawyer and decided to cooperate with the committee.
A week after his appearance, he premiered “Afternoon of a Faun,” one of his signature ballets, at New York City Ballet. Tanaquil Le Clercq, a favorite dancer, recalled that he made it quickly, with intense focus.
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There are other, happier chapters. People who knew him as a young dancer told Conrad that Robbins, born Jerome Rabinowitz in 1918 in New York City, was very loose, very funny, always playing jokes and “full of mischief.”
This hardly jibes with the image of the guarded, private Robbins, who sometimes frustrated dance press interviewers with stonewalling or hostile answers.
An explanation for this attitude may be in this somewhat garbled Robbins quote: “I found a rule for myself … which said that the higher the stakes are in a venture, the more money is involved, the more people are involved — there are corps of people you will never see who have something to do with what you’re doing. Beware of that.”
That was Robbins in his later years, when he demanded imperial power in his work. Looking back on an earlier time, however, he said about the creative process of “West Side Story”: “There was this wonderful mutual exchange going on … we gave to each other, took from each other, yielded to each other, surrendered, reworked, put back together again. … It was a very important and extraordinary time.”
This is the way I would like to remember him, not in frozen majesty, but in eager, welcoming work with his fellow artists.