Oliver: a Smith of Smiths.

He was tall and graceful, willowy in the languid, patrician manner of old money, old power, and that easygoing confidence that derives from both. It was probably partly a pose, because although Oliver Smith looked like a captain of industry or a prince of state ordered up from a meticulous Central Casting, he was, in fact, merely theatrical. Very theatrical. Not an actor, but he could have been. Worse. A longtime scenic designer, a sometime Broadway producer, and a full-time ballet backstage eminence grise and front-office director of American Ballet Theatre. And hardly born to the purple, but in Waupun, Wisconsin, and hardly Ivy League educated but at Pennsylvania State University. And, contrary to quite common belief, he did not found ABT together with Lucia Chase, though both of them might well have done so. And now, like Lucia, he is dead. He was seventy-five years old, and this very month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Fancy Free, which was--despite his sets for Agnes de Mille's Rodeo two years earlier--his big breakthrough as a set designer. A cool half century or more of ballet.

I well recall when I first saw Smith. It was some time in July 1946. He was pointed out to me walking accompanied by Lucia Chase along Floral Street, the narrow, grimy side street that runs alongside the stately Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and indeed provides its stage door access. Ballet Theatre (as ABT was then known) was on its first-ever international trip, appearing for a lengthy, extended, and wildly successful season in London.

When I actually first met Smith, I am not quite so sure. I imagine it was in London or Paris, perhaps New York, whatever. I do remember when I really started to regard him as a friend. It was 1966-twenty years after the original sighting!--and I encountered him in the bar of the New York State Theater during an ABT summer season. Of a ballet that he had designed, I had written in the New York Times something to the effect that "Fall River Legend is politely called a good vehicle, but then so is a subway car," and Smith, while not fully agreeing, was so amused that he insisted on buying me a drink. You had to like him, if only for his lack of embarrassment and for the appreciation of a joke that was partly on him.

So we became friends, in the guarded way of artists and critics, lunching quite frequently, talking incessantly not only of the past, present, and future of Ballet Theatre. but also about theater design--design and practice. Smith was not just a designer; he was also an influential teacher of design, and I saw a lot of his students' work when we talked about the state of stage design. And, of course, there was Broadway. As the years wore on we talked with ever-increasing gloom about the plight of Broadway. It didn't do Broadway any good, and it probably ruined our appetite for lunch ... still we talked and talked.

The last time I saw him we didn't speak once again. This was at the final preview of the rock musical Tommy. Walking up the aisle, I caught just a glimpse of him. "How old he looks, how sick," I thought, and made a mental note to call him. We hadn't lunched for quite a time. I wondered what he thought about the new regime at ABT (he was always so wickedly, if tactfully, tactless), and I also wondered what he made of Tommy--a type of Broadway, and for that matter Broadway designing, so different from the Broadway that had nurtured him and that he. in turn, had nourished. But it was not to be. By the time I had remembered to call. it was too late. So our last meeting, like our first, was silent and--on his part, for I'm sure he didn't see me--anonymous. Full circles are tidy. And often sad.

When a person dies people always try to assess what he or she did, what difference was made, what was achieved and what wasn't. And it is never easy to see. We affect our various worlds in curious ways, sometimes by intention, sometimes by chance. The effect Smith had over the years was big but hard to assess, as he exerted his fine-tuned influence over the care and maintenance of ABT. That influence--rarely overt--a sibilant word or two in Chase's ear, a slightly mocking laugh at a rehearsal, a carefully selected cocktail party at his gracious home in Brooklyn Heights. Discretion was the better part of his power.

He helped to keep ABT going during very difficult years; he staunchly supported Antony Tudor and, to little avail, Eliot Feld, and perhaps to a lesser extent Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, while he was crucial to Chase's decision to blossom out into the evening-length Russian classics, and thus parallel, among emergent major classic companies, Britain's Royal Ballet rather than ABT's hometown rival, New York City Ballet. He was also forceful in moving ABT into the fringes of the modem dance repertoire--starting with revivals of Jose Limon's The Moor's Pavane and The Traitor in 1970. ABT would, I suspect, be an entirely different company today--if, indeed, it even existed--were it not for the life, times, and tastes of Smith.

But Smith as scenic designer--how will that rack up in history? Less significantly, I imagine. While he was cleverly eclectic, and a few, particularly among his ballet designs such as those for Fancy Free and Les Noces, were really brilliant, he was overshadowed both on Broadway (where his choices and skills as a producer were formidable but did not fall within the scope of dance) and in ballet by the generations succeeding. For a man always looking for the new, his designs were unexpectedly traditional, even old-fashioned.

However, when the story of American dance in the twentieth century is finally told, a good place should be reserved for Oliver Smith, a quiet visionary and one of its few true architects.