Toad Times I

It was Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who memorably labeled the early 1950s—that period when the witch hunt for communists in America was most virulent—the "Time of the Toad." The historical ascription imparts a certain continuity to the gay life of Jerome Robbins, whose burgeoning dance career was indelibly altered by the toadiness of the times. For in mid-1953 Robbins chose to name names before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Apparently, success for Robbins, who died in 1998 at the age of eighty, was never quite the same.

So why did Robbins name names? In his painstaking study Greg Lawrence devotes considerable attention to the dancer's "demons," which very likely arose from Robbins's cowardly, self-serving conduct before HUAC. The ballet Poppa Piece, on which Robbins worked tirelessly before abandoning it near the end of his life, suggests that he had "developed the story line [using] his father and Jewish upbringing to explain, if not justify, his decision to act as a cooperative witness before HUAC . . . a fantastic rationalization which Robbins had come to believe and wanted others to believe" (501). Exorcising the demon of a father who had invariably equated dancing with sissies would thus allow Robbins finally to come quit of the intolerable shame he had experienced throughout his life from being Jewish, underclass, and gay all at once. Until then Robbins's lengthy artistic career, for better or worse, appears irresolvably to have been all about winning the approval of various fathers.

On the "better" side of that unresolved career is the sheer daring of the artistic vision that took shape when Robbins first set out to choreograph for both the ballet and the musical theater: the 1943 dance piece Fancy Free, for instance, was transformed a year later into the Broadway musical On the Town. In Robbins's "two-pronged revolution" of the stage, as he wrote in 1945, "the audience will come to expect as much of ballet as it does of a play, a novel, or a film. As the ballet and the theater draw closer to each other, an exciting prospect opens . . . to the benefit of all three" (83). Pursuing an artistic double life in subsequent productions (High Button Shoes, Look Ma, I'm Dancin', That's the Ticket) during the postwar years appears to have afforded Robbins a certain creative exhilaration uncircumscribed by the public demands of either high art or popular entertainment. One wonders if in the more private realm of his sexuality, closeted to the end of his life, Robbins's amatory pursuit of both men (actor Montgomery Clift) and women (ballerina Nora Kaye) was exhilarating in the same unresolved way.

It was Ed Sullivan who forced Robbins's hand. Sullivan's veiled threat to expose Robbins as a "homosexual" if he did not name names was a decisive factor in his decision to turn against some of his closest friends. From this compromising decision, the "worse" side of Robbins's "Jekyll-and-Hyde" life began to surface (49). More and more of the years following his appearance before HUAC were given over to a monomaniacal pursuit of revolutionary dance forms (Dances at a Gathering, The Cage, Brahms/Handel, and a hundred more), with only an occasional foray into musical theater (most notably West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof).

Through an avalanche of interviews and personal reminiscences about Robbins, Lawrence presents us with an artist capable of screaming rages, tyrannical temper tantrums, and abusive acts of cruelty. For example, Bruce Wells recounts the misadventure of leaving out a single hop while maneuvering around his partner in Dances at a Gathering: "[Robbins] came backstage and into my dressing room, in front of the other dancers, shaking just like he was in convulsions, and pointing at me and screaming, 'I'm going to take you out of all my ballets! How dare you leave out that hop! You're trying to sabotage me, my entire career'" (388...