Balanchine in a Hollywood Crime Story

Balanchine in a Hollywood Crime Story

In Susan Elia MacNeal’s new crime novel, “The Hollywood Spy” (1), George Balanchine is described choreographing a duet to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue”. The location is Hollywood in July 1943.

Yes, “The Hollywood Spy” is fiction. Although Balanchine knew Gershwin and choreographed to his music over several decades, he avoided the “Rhapsody in Blue”. But MacNeal has modelled her novel’s Balanchine duet, enjoyably enough, on a solo that Balanchine had made the year before, for his then wife Vera Zorina (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14). The Paramount Pictures movie “Star Spangled Rhythm” (1942) was one of a Hollywood wave of World War II morale-booster musical compilations; all its musical numbers were by Harold Arlen. The popular singer Johnny Johnston introduced Arlen’s song “That Old Black Magic”; Balanchine choreographed a number in which Johnston, playing a soldier, dreams that Zorina steps out of the framed photograph of her he keeps by his bed (signed “Best wishes. Sincerely, Vera Zorina”); she then dances rapturously on snowy slopes before returning to his bedside and vanishing from his grasp.

So in The Hollywood Spy”, MacNeal’s Balanchine follows suit, saying:

“I want this piece to be something the men all recognise: a soldier is staring at a photograph of his favorite pinup girl, dreaming of her. As he falls asleep, they dance… But even though they’re together, she’s always just slightly out of touch.”

To his male dancer, the Canadian Luke Bolton, Balanchine goes on:

“Then you - when the dance is finished, you step out of the dream and back into reality. You look at the picture. Sad she’s gone, but you are hopeful you will find her again someday. You see? For these minutes, we can make people believe, make them love. Give them hope. Art is like a hospital for the soul.”

July 1943 happens to coincide with a window in Balanchine’s known itinerary. He might just have worked on this other wartime Hollywood morale-lifter, which MacNeal names “Star-Spangled Canteen”, for the fictitious Gold Brothers Studios. MacNeal has done a fair bit of other homework. We’re told that Lincoln Kirstein, having seen Sarah Sanderson dance during the War with the Vic-Wells Ballet when he was working in London for General George S. Patton, has pulled strings for her to dance for Balanchine in this new film. Let’s overlook the inconvenient fact that Kirstein’s duties with the U.S. army didn’t take him to London until 1944: his name only occurs once in these pages. Sarah, by contrast, is best friend to our detective protagonist, Maggie Hope. It’s such fun to find that she’s dancing for Balanchine that we don’t mind pretending that Kirstein reached London a year or two earlier than he did.

And when Balanchine turns up in the novel, he’s recognisably the Mr B. of whom we’ve heard so much. He sniffs. He’s courteous. He has the music played in the studio before he begins to create. He has an uncanny sense of camera angles. Sarah politely tells him “I’m sorry Vera Zorina couldn’t do the role. I saw the pictures of ‘On Your Toes’. She’s beautiful.”

Since Balanchine was married to Zorina at the time, Sarah is well advised to say that. Around the year 1943, Balanchine’s problems with Zorina drove him into a misery he probably never equalled until Suzanne Farrell eluded him by marrying Paul Mejia. But Balanchine, consummate professional, would have let few of his dance colleagues observe that. In “The Hollywood Spy”, Balanchine simply concentrates on Sarah , changing the subject from Zorina to her. (“You just need to be more natural with your arms. Still too English.”) Later, he introduces her to Igor and Vera Stravinsky.

MacNeal’s one big mistake is to have this Balanchine, hoping to use Sarah further, ask her at the end to move to New York, “to dance with American Ballet Caravan.” Sorry, Sarah, but no. According to James Steichen’s 2019 Balanchine and Kirstein’s American Enterprise (Oxford University Press), American Ballet Caravan did not dance after 1940; by which time it had become much more Kirstein’s project than Balanchine’s. According to Martha Ullman West in her Todd Bolender, Janet Reed, and the Making of American Ballet (University Florida Press, 2021), the name American Ballet Caravan was sometimes used in 1941 to advertise the company also known as the American Ballet in its tour of South America. Either way, no institution used the American Ballet Caravan title after 1941.

Balanchine is one of the novel’s good guys; he’s not remotely a suspect in its murder story. More even than most crime novels, “The Hollywood Spy” is about good and evil : it’s an exemplary piece of woke/politically correct fiction, in which the baddies are racists, fascists, misogynists (wife-beaters included), and homophobes. The innocent and persecuted characters, one of whom is the central murder victim, include Roosevelt voters, anti-fascists, lesbians, and people of colour. Believably, there are members of the police on both sides. MacNeal did not invent the extent to which the Los Angeles of 1943 was infiltrated by Nazi sympathisers; “The Hollywood Spy” draws strength from drawing our attention to this.

It’s also, alas, very name-droppy. On page 11: “The last thing I remember at the party was Bogie playing bongos - Garbo had taken off her clothes and gone swimming.”) Robert Benchley, Walt Disney, Lena Horne, Howard Hughes, Hattie MacDaniell, Alla Nazimova, and Igor Stravinsky are all characters who put in brief speaking appearances. This is harmless, though I can’t help wishing Hattie McDaniel’s few lines did not include this: “Is Igor going to play? I have to have a front-row seat, you know.”

The names keep piling up. Our heroine Maggie Hope’s ex-fiancé, John, remarks of the restaurant Musso & Frank’s (p.82):

“I like it here… The Stanley Rose Book Shop’s next door. A lot of other writers buy books there and come here to drink - Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, John O’Hara, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker. Even Raymond Chandler sometimes.”

Sarah has begun an affair with the “Rhapsody in Blue” clarinettist. When she, Maggie, and John seek him out in one club (pp.255-256):

“They caught sight of Henri in a discussion with a distinguished grey-haired man wearing round black-framed glasses. ‘Maggie! John!’ the clarinettist called, waving them over. As the older man smiled and moved on, Henri whispered ‘Bertolt Brecht’. Maggie raised her brows as her eyes followed the German who’d written ‘The Threepenny Opera’.

“‘Who else do you know here?’ John asked the clarinet player, eyebrows high.

“Henri looked around the room discreetly. ‘That’s Otto Klemperer,’ he told them, indicating with his chin. ‘Nabokov, Richard Rodgers. Let’s see, Arthur Rubinstein, Christopher Isherwood, and Dylan Thomas.’

“‘Richard Rodgers!’ Maggie tried to contain her excitement. ‘We were just listening to “Oklahoma!”in the car! Do you think Mr. Disney will come?’ she asked, hopeful.”

Since John has been referring to Disney as “Walt” since page 72, Maggie’s hopes are not unreasonable. Though “Walt” is absent at that club, he turns up to shake her hand a few pages later. Other people named in this cityscape are Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Dorothy Dandridge, Marlene Dietrich, Duke Ellington, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Hedda Hopper, Billie Holiday, Howard Hughes, Otto Klemperer, the Marx Brothers, Nabokov (which Nabokov we do not learn), Mickey Rooney. As John leads Maggie to the scene of the crime (a hotel room):

“They went back to the path, walking deeper into the hotel’s lush grounds. There was the sound of piano scales, and a crooning male voice came from one cottage. ‘Frank Sinatra,’ John said by way of explanation. ‘Beyond his place is Charles Laughton’s. And beyond his Dorothy Parker’s.’”

By the way, the murder victim was John’s fiancée; but it’s sweet of him to carry on with this Who’s Who of Hollywood even as we are approaching her abode. But then John, still a young man in 1943, has been accumulating quite a c.v.. He has graduated from Oxbridge; has worked as private secretary to Winston Churchill; has been briefly engaged to Maggie; has joined the R.A.F.; has been shot down over Nazi Germany; has crossed the Atlantic to Washington D.C., where he’s become a friends of the Roosevelts; has written of his war experiences for The Atlantic, Collier’s, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Town and Country; and more recently has moved to L.A. to work with Disney on his new propaganda film (also, we later discover, to work with others on a secret-service project). Oh, and in L.A. he made time to become engaged to Gloria, the murder victim.

If all that makes him sounds too composite to be convincing, you’re beginning to spot one of the novel’s larger problems. Another is its protagonist, Maggie, who’s mainly an innocent feeling her way through the unknown with more luck than perception. Now and then, however, MacLean makes her thoroughly assertive, telling men how to arrange themselves around her. Although there were and are women this multifaceted, this one, Maggie, doesn’t add up believably: we don’t feel enough of the process that makes her act this way. At the end, when she tells people at the Secret Service how they’re going to do her bidding, it’s too obviously feminist narrative effect. It’s easier to applaud her new display of authority than to feel she’s three-dimensional.

The year is 1943, but the novel’s characters make an impeccably twentyfirst-century gallery. Henri the clarinettist is black. Sarah the dancer and Maggie, our detective heroine, have suffered their share of Me Too sexual harassment. The murdered Gloria, despite her engagement to John, is found to have been lesbian (which is why we meet Alla Nazimova). The crooks are Nazi sympathisers who beat up blacks and Mexicans and try to bomb the theatre where Disney’s premiere is happening. (John has put Maggie at her ease about Disney by assuring her he does not think Disney an anti-Semite; he tells her of Jews who like Disney and like working for him.) Because my politics and MacLeod’s largely coincide, I find her on the side of the angels. But she’s keener to name celebrities than angels here. Indeed, The Hollywood Spy suggests she thinks they’re one and the same.

In its way, Balanchine’s treatment of “That Old Black Magic” has as big an array of clichés as MacNeal’s novel; and his are a lot less politically correct. What’s more, as we see it on Star-Spangled Rhythm, it’s hard to tell what Balanchine was hearing in the music; I’m inclined to guess that Hollywood editors blurred the musical points he was trying to make. Even so, Balanchine takes his clichés - the photograph that comes to life, the nymph who summons the dreamer into her world, the Romantic fairy who is expansively and ecstatically at liberty amid trees, snow, and moonlight, the muse who inspires bit eludes - and transcends them with fresh dramatic force. If there is one step to single out (12-21), it’s the rapturous grand battement where the raised leg takes time to descend while the torso and arm arch back and down as if having released a mighty essence. This became a classic Balanchine device: it may be one he first used in the 1920s. But this 1942 film is the earliest filmed instance I know of a Balanchine dancer delivering it. We absolutely see how, for Balanchine, Woman has a power that no man can equal. Throwing her leg high into the air and then lingering over bringing it back to the floor, she becomes both exciting and disturbing. She acquires more absorbing complexity than anyone in MacNeal’s novel.

Tuesday 3 August