The De Mille legacy.

Through one of those many tiny ironies by which Life lets us know it's still there, Agnes de Mille's usual seats for American Ballet Theatre performances at the Metropolitan Opera House were directly in front of my own. Therefore I had to sit through countless Lizzie Bordens administering countless whacks, see dozens of Cowgirls get their men, and watch inumerable Virgins foolishly lose it to Hell, all the time breathing down Agnes's bristling neck. In many ways I was not her greatest admirer--as she knew all too well--yet there we were, stuck with one another, an odd couple on the same side of the aisle but with rather different aesthetic viewpoints.

I last saw her at what was to be her final public appearance, a special gala performance given by ABT in her honor at the Met on June 7, 1993. The program was The Informer, Three Virgins and a Devil, and Rodeo, and Agnes gave one of her great speeches on the care and sustenance of the arts. And, naturally, she and her ballets received especially heartfelt ovations, of the kind ballet audiences the world over reserve for someone who has become, through a combination of genius, distinction, and age, peculiarly their own.

As usual, she was sitting right in front of me, and when I gave her a respectful kiss on the cheek (once when I kissed her she smilingly snarled, "Ah, sweet Judas!") I thought how frail she was. And I remembered something she had said to me a year or so before: "I do wish you had liked my ballets as much as you seem to like me." But I didn't just like Agnes. Prickly though she always was also the embodiment of the American spirit and Yankee know-how and in some strange way she was lovable. And in some strage way she was lovable. And in some strange way I loved her. I even liked her ballets more than she--to whom anything that was not a bouquet was, as Richard Buckle once noted of Frederick Ashton, a bomb--ever imagined or conceded. Or, in her oddly confident heart, cared.

Agnes de Mille was one of the architects of American ballet and one of our greatest native-born choreographers--one who set American cowboys dancing. A wonderfully witty individual, she was clever and tireless, ornery but never ordinary, I remember her slightly as a dancer. Comparatively late in the day--at a gala, accompanied by Lucia Chase, as I recall it--she was cavorting gamely in Three Virgins, and I also saw her very last appearance as the Cowgirl in Rodeo at Covent Garden in 1956. At the time I said that her performance was "gallant and, in terms of sheer physical stamina, would have been a credit to a woman many years her junior ... even if we were not able completely to suspend our belief that time has passed." She was, after all, fifty-one year old. Sprightly, but ...

In any case, she had by then probably already grown accustomed to my praising her with faint damns (she was, incidentally, very aware of the what and the who of everything written about her, but surprisingly seemed less sensitive to criticism than do many artists who are far less surface-prickly), because from the time I encountered her choregraphy--Tally-Ho and Three Virgins, when Ballet Theater first came to London in 1946--I had been rather less than underwhelmed by it, regarding it as well crafted but derivative (for example, from Eugene Loring in Rodeo--an influence disputed by the Mille--and from Anthony Tudor and Martha Graham in Fall River Legend). But as a writer, lecturer, and dance personality-in-general I thought her matchless.

Born in New York on September 18, 1905 (she would later engagingly shave off four years for the reference books), grandaughter of political economist Henry George (proponent of the Single tax), daughter of film producer William C. de Mille, and niece of the great director Cecil B. DeMille, she had a Hollywood childhool--later she recalled going to school with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., "a fat youngster in a sailor suit." Her interest in dance was sparked when as a child she saw Pavlova, Nijinsky, and, later, Isadora Ducan, "a fat, cross-eyed woman in dull costumes." After desultory studies at the University of California, the young Agnes started her dance training with Theodore Kosloff.

By 1928 she was dancing in the Grand Street Follies in New York. Soon she was studying with Martha Graham and giving recitals in Paris and London. In London during the thirties she became associated with Marie Rambert's Ballet Club abd its choreographers Ashton and, particularly, Tudor. She created a role in the first performance of Dark Elegies--and even, oddly enough and perhaps unconsciously, incorporated part of her dance into the Champion Roperhs entr' acte exit in Rodeo. And, talking of Rodeo, she would claim that she had already worked out those "horse-riding" movements and pantomine in London, prior to seeing Loring's Billy the Kid. But when I asked Peggy Van Praagh, one of the English dancers concerned, firmly said: "Not really--it was basically different."

London behind her, and the war in Europe about to start, de Mille was, on her return to New York in 1939, ready for her great adventure. She became part of the company Richard Pleasant was forming, what is today American Ballet Theatre. For that company in 1940 she created Black Ritual, her first major work, and one with an allblack cast. Her most important contibution in those early days, however, was in getting Tudor. Pleasant had invited Ashton to join the company, and when he received no reply (the letter went to the wrong address and was returned, unopened months later; otherwise Ashton might very wel have accepted), it was de Mille who assured him that it was Tudor he needed in the first place. The rest is Ballet Theatre's history.

As for de Mille, her final breakthrough came not with Ballet Theatre but with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In 1942 she created Rodeo for that company, set to music by Aaron Copland. The ballet celebrated cowboys and the open plains and made her the obvious choice the following year to do the choreography for the forthcoming Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, OklahomaB With its close integration of dance and action, and with its introduction of a dream ballet to project the story, it changed the course of the Broadway musical.

From then on in, her career was split between the ballet stage and Broadway. For ballet, the highlight was probably Fall River Legend, a 1948 melodrama based on the Lizzie Borden murder trial, with music by morton Gould; it was created for Ballet Theatre's reigning dramatic diva, Nora Kaye, although, ironically, due to Kaye's illness, it was first danced by Alicia Alonso.

Yet, choregraphically speaking, it was probably on Broadway that de Mille left her real mark, in musicals such as One Touch of Venus (1943), Bloomer Girl (1944), Carousel (1945), Brigadoon (1947), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), Paint Your Wagon (1951), Juno (1959), and 110 in the Shade (1963). De Mille was in every way a trailblazer. She was the first woman to choregraph and direct a Broadway musical--Allegro in 1947--and it was she who made it possible for choregraphers to copyright their dances. Before de Mille, they had to rely on the kindness of friends and other strangers for royalty payments.

Of course, she never lost touch wth ballet, and for many years she was part of the team (sometimes official, more often unofficial) that offered artistic advice and counseling to ABT. Rodeo and Fall River Legend are in repertories around the world, and de Mille became adept at putting orginal Broadway material to classic ballet use: Her Scots ballet The Bitter Weird was based on dances from Brigadoom, and dances from Juno turned up in one of her last works for the balet stage, The Informer.

De Mille's interest in American folk dance, first evident in her early recitals led her to found two dance companies, following the example of the Russian Moiseyev troupe, that were specifically intended to preserve American dances: her Agnes de Mille Dance Theater (1953)-54); and her Heritage Dance Theater founded in 1973, which lasted, on and off, for about five years. The first company I somehow missed seeing, but the Heritage troupe was a major venture that deserved much better of the world and its funding than it actually received. It could, and should, have continued, and it would have been a permanent adornment to America, a valuable overseas ambassador. I also would have placed de Mille's creative abilities in a different, perhaps more favorable, context. Heritage Dance Theater was the great lost chance of her life. And, without making any song or dance about it, I think she knew it.

But, as time went on, de Mille was increasingly the spokesperson (no admirer of political correctness, de Mille herself would have said spokesman) for American dance, testifying before senate committees, stumping up and down the country, proselytizing for the American way of dance--from square dance to classical ballet, from jazz to rock. She was an indefatigable lecturer on dance, even after the severe stroke that nearly killed her and which she wrote about so movingly in her book Reprieve. Her lectures were terrific--funny, sassy, direct, informative, and wonderfully crowd-pleasing without a single moment of condescension. She was a born communicator. I remember especially the lectures she did for Robert Joffrey--Bob being no communications slouch himself--and these programs on the very life of dance had a charm and wit to them like nothing else before or after. She was one of the finest and most eloquent writers on dance the world has known. Her first two books of memoirs, Dance to the Piper and And Promenade Home are dance classics, and many of her other works, including her last book, a biography of Martha Graham published only last year, will be long remembered.

The one thing I thinl Agnes really disliked was being praised more for what she did in what sghe regarded as her spare time--her writing and her lecturing, and all that fervent activism--than for what she regarded as her true metier--dancing and choreography. I suspect that she thought (although she never put this it me in as many words) that she was being fobbed off with some kind of consolation prize. Perhaps she was. But perhaps the future will look more kindly upon her than have some of her contemporary critics, including myself. Whatever we have said of her, she has always revealed a gift--as sustained, ongoing gift--to be popular, at least with the two major works, Rodeo and Fall River Legend, that seem the likeliest bets for that select set, the classical ballet repertoire.

It is worth noting that Rodeo has, from the beginning and consistently thenceforward, proved more popular than Loring's Billy the Kid. similarly, Fall River Legend has always outrun Tudor's Pillar of Fire. Even this season Britain's Birmingham Royal Ballet has elected to mount the de Mille in preference to the work of their neglected native son. So which do you believe--box-office figures or critics? And which will history believe?

What de Mille had--perhaps she inherited it from that famous uncle of hers--was a flair for show business, an instinct for theatricality, a gift for the honestly cheap, Loring's Billy is a mythical character in a mythical land, not the gal next door getting her feller; and, while Tudor's Hagar may be psychologically correct, and before love's redemption, pathologically twisted, she'll never have the same tabloid appeal as Lizzie the ax murderer.

Could anyhthing else survive? I really doubt it. But two permanent ballets are a ticket to ride in dance's posterity stakes, and the rest of her work-what she did for the musical theater of her day campaigns, her alarms, her excursions, and, of course and never forget these, her books, will be around to remind us of Agnes de Mille, dancer, scholar, author, wit. What was the name she invented for a frolicsome woman in tally-Ho, or the Frail Quarry? Ah yes, A L-No-Better-Than-She-Should-Be. Of course, the ever-irreverent, sometimes irascible, and sometimes quite shrewdly inconoclastic de Mille was never No-Worse-Than-She-Should-Be, either. She was Agnes--take her, or leave her. And American dance and its audiences took her and loved her. As they should.