Beloved taskmaster: a new biography recalls the masterful choreography--and difficult personality--of Jerome Robbins.

Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance * Deborah Jowitt * Simon 7 Shcuster * $40

"It was my homosexuality I was afraid would be exposed, I thought. It was my once having been a communist that I was afraid would be exposed. None of these. I was & have been--& still have terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work, veneer of accomplishments would be taken away (by [the House Un-American Activities Committee], or by critics) that I panicked & crumbled & returned to that primitive state of terror--the face of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz."

This startlingly frank passage, found in a notebook written many years after the McCarthy-era events it alludes to, numbers among the key discoveries made by Deborah Jowitt in her thrilling and scrupulously thorough new biography Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance. The best dance critic in America--yes, better than that most dexterous of neoconservative phrase-turners Arlene Croce--Jowitt wrote vividly and insightfully about dance for decades at the Village Voice during the very period in which Robbins transformed himself from the most important choreographer and director on Broadway (Call Me Madam, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl, Gypsy) into a "serious" dance impresario, second only to his New York City Ballet master-colleague-rival George Ballanchine. Consequently, Jowitt is capable of honing in with equal fervor on Robbins's most famous popular work, West Side Story, and most admired serious one, Dancers at a Gathering.

Perhaps more important, Jowitt had access to Robbins's papers, which biographer Greg Lawrence did not for his deliciously gossipy Dance With Demons. Jowitt doesn't shy away from dish--Bertolucci protege and Andy Warhol impersonator Allen Midgette was one of the choreographer's lovers--or from detailing Robbins's exceedingly cruel habit of breaking dancers down both physically and psychologically, the better to build them up again as Iris ideal creations. (She recounts the legendary story of no one moving to help Robbins after he tripped and fell into the orchestra pit during a rehearsal.) But because of her knowledge of the dance world and Robbins's pivotal yet peculiar place in it, she's able to present him in all his glory and monstrousness with cool precision.

Jowitt's as amazed as anyone else at the ease with which Robbins straddled the worlds of high and low culture with Fancy Free, the breakthrough ballet that he transformed into the effer-vescent musical On the Town. Yet the esteem with which collaborators like Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green held him was not, to put it mildly, shared by the man himself. "'Live it up' seems to be my motto for a while," Robbins writes in a journal, "while the other Jerry stands aghast while being raped, destroyed, defiled, and maligned." Robbins appears to have despised himself--that "other Jerry," ever so briefly a communist--for naming names to HUAC. But his talent was too much in demand for even Zero Mostel, one of the people who nearly lost his career when Robbins gave up his name to HUAC, to refuse to work with him.

Show business isn't pretty, especially for a gay man of Robbins's generation--he went so far as to see an analyst who claimed she could "cure" him of his orientation. But Robbins's work remains, to the delight of generations to come. As for the "other Jerry," reading Jowitt's book gives one hope that those gay artists who follow him won't regard themselves as "raped, destroyed, defiled, and maligned."

Ehrenstein is the author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-1998.