Agnes.

She was a handful -- complex and conflicted -- as anybody who knew Agnes de Mille will tell you. But there was a quality about her of both razored brilliance and creamy nougat confection that made her presence compelling, that tamed and subdued people, that commanded agreement, whether or not she was right. A new de Mille ballet or Broadway show was an occasion of intense interest, even after her reputation as a choreographer had begun its long descent.

We know about the success of de Mille's work on Oklahoma! and how she integrated serious dance and ballet dancers into American musical theater. And at least two of her many ballets, Rodeo and Fall River Legend, have withstood a short test of time, proving that the best of her work is very good indeed, and also reinforcing the idea that audiences still love a good yam. And as a woman of the theater (and film, and television, and letters), de Mille's ability to create rich characterization and to tell a good story were paramount gifts. (See "Eaten Alive," on pages 60-64, and "A Half Century with Agnes," pages 66-69.)

Her works reveal a great deal about the woman behind them. In Fall River, for example, de Mille vents her rage on a repressive Victorian society, very similar to the one in which she grew up: The sexually and emotionally frustrated Lizzie Borden is transformed by de Mille into a ballerina version of the notorious ax murderer. Rodeo is set in the vast American West of de Mille's youth and tells the story of a young woman, a cowgirl, who cross-dresses in an abortive attempt to win acceptance in a rough-and-tumble world dominated by men. (De Mille danced this role herself in the original 1942 production for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.) Only when the cowgirl agrees to wear a dress and, one assumes, settle down to the role of submissive wife, is the conflict resolved. Folk dances, American subjects, long dresses in high lifts, and a great many tender trusting girls looking for husbands are recognizable traits of her choreography. Although she contributed considerably to emerging forms of American dance, the work is often regarded in our liberated times as quaint, even dated.

She was a victim of her genetic heritage -- her body was not suitable for the ballet she loved and studied with such determination. Her earliest successes were a series of solo character sketches filled with humor and dramatic effects that she created in the 1920s and 30s. These became the groundwork for her later, more eleborate creations. After many years of struggle, she emerged as -- well, Agnes, who could be magnificent and wise and generous. And impossible. Being Agnes could never have been easy, especially for Agnes.

She loved flowers. In fact, a conversation I had with her about flowers in 1977, two years after a debilitating stroke, caused her to pay attention to me seriously for the first time. She smiled. And I still think she saw me as a bit of a dupe who was willing to supervise the spring planting of annuals at her family home at Merriewold in Sullivan County, New York. For me, it provided a long-awaited opportunity to interview her at length for a book I was writing on American choreographers. We used each other for the rest of her life, and we both knew it. A kind of grudging affection came only later.

I discovered that she had enormous courage, that her career had consumed her life, and that she was blind to certain realities -- by choice. For example, the house at Merriewold, about which she wrote an idealized account (Where the Wings Grow), was basically, by my time, a collapsing frame farmhouse, the gardens in high weeds without sufficient water to support new plantings, the wild deer chewing up the rest, the clay tennis courts a ruin, and everywhere inside die dank smell of standing water. It was Dickensian. But houses can also be metaphors for the lives of the people who inhabit them. One spring afternoon I looked down into the cellar for the first and only time and, in what appeared to be about six inches of water, saw something wiggle, just under the black and oily surface, swimming. This refuge to which Agnes returned all her life to heal herself and her memories, was held together, I came to believe, by her imagination alone. I do not know whether or not it collapsed at the exact moment of her death in die middle of die night on October 6, 1993, but this would not have surprised me, so powerful had been the sheer force of her determination to make things work her way.

Her lasting legacy, I believe, is the books, among the very best we have describing American dance and theater in this century. In her last book, a magnum opus on Martha Graham, whom she adored, Agnes settled some old scores, notably with Ted Shawn who had, fifty years earlier, told Agnes's mother that the ferociously determined little girl would never make it as a dancer and should give up her ballet classes and go to college instead. Agnes always had a brilliant mind -- and the memory to go with it, right up to the end -- and she trashed Shawn in print, years later, murderously. Not being able to forget proved to be both a curse and a part of her allure.

Invited nine years ago to speak about de Mille's prolific writings at an event in Cleveland honoring the great lady, who was watching us from her wheelchair backstage, I made the mistake, perhaps in the mode of Shawn so long ago, of suggesting that, even if she had never choreographed a single step, the scope and vigor of her writing would ensure her place in history. She was furious. That is not how she wished to be remembered, one of our great American originals.