Who Was Maria Tallchief Read online

  For my nieces Erika and Katrina, dancers and actors both—C.G.

  To Whitney, Stephanie and Haley. May your light shine forever—VPT

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  Text copyright © 2002, 2013 by Catherine Gourley.

  Illustrations copyright © 2002 by Val Paul Taylor.

  Cover illustration copyright © 2002 by Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Published in 2002 as Who Is Maria Tallchief? and in 2013 as Who Was Maria Tallchief? by Penguin Workshop, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. PENGUIN and PENGUIN WORKSHOP are trademarks of Penguin Books Ltd. WHO HQ & Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2002003909

  ISBN 9780448426754 (paperback)

  ISBN 9780399540080 (ebook)

  Version_2

  Contents

  Who Was Maria Tallchief?

  The Osage Reservation

  The Rampage

  The Keeper of the Drum

  Pianos and Toe Shoes

  Madame Nijinska

  On the Road

  Mr. Balanchine’s Muse

  The Firebird’s Magic

  Princess of Two Worlds

  New Loves and Sad Farewells

  The Protest

  The Swans

  Who Was Maria Tallchief?

  Maria Tallchief was a ballerina, but she was not just another toe-dancer. She was America’s first prima ballerina. A prima ballerina is the star of the show, the very best dancer on the stage. Maria danced for kings and queens and presidents. She thrilled her audiences with amazing leaps and arabesques. Her performances as a swan queen, a sugar plum fairy, and a magical firebird stand out as some of the most beautiful chapters in American ballet history.

  She was a Native American, the daughter of a full-blooded Osage. Maria’s story begins on the Osage reservation in the rolling hills of northeastern Oklahoma. As a child, the beat of the tom-toms excited her. The rhythm of the drums filled the hollow of her bones. The songs of her people’s past woke within her a love of dance and the prima ballerina she would one day become.

  Chapter 1

  The Osage Reservation

  Maria opened her eyes. She had fallen asleep in the living room, and now her father was carrying her upstairs. She snuggled closer against his warm body and stared at his shiny black hair. His dark eyes smiled down at Maria.

  Maria’s first memory was that tender moment, waking to find herself safe in her father’s arms. She was three years old, and her father seemed like a giant to her. Alexander Joseph Tall Chief was six feet two inches. He had broad shoulders and a swaggering confidence that had won the heart of Ruth Porter, a farm girl from Kansas. He was Osage. She was Scottish and Irish. They were married soon after meeting in the small town of Fairfax, Oklahoma.

  Maria came into the world on a cold winter day, January 24, 1925. Her parents named her Betty Marie, after her two grandmothers, Elizabeth, “Eliza,” Tall Chief and Marie Porter. Maria had an older brother named Jerry. When Maria was almost two years old, her sister Marjorie was born. The Tall Chief family lived in a ten-room, red-brick house on a hill overlooking the Osage reservation.

  The Osage hills were a magical place for Maria. The prairie grasses bowed their heads and whispered in the wind. Wildflowers bloomed goldenrod yellow and daisy white. Butterflies and the songs of meadowlarks filled the air. In summer, Maria hunted through the high grasses for arrowheads. The sharp tips of stone were bits of Osage history. Whenever she found one, she said, shivers raced up her spine.

  The Osage had lived on the plains of North America for many hundreds of years. Before the white settlers came, the prairie was a sea of grasses so tall that an Osage hunter had to stand on the back of his pony to see what lay beyond. The brown clouds and thunder in the distance were herds of buffalo. The Osage called these bearded animals “brothers.”

  The white settlers, whom the Osage called “Heavy Eyebrows,” changed the land and the lives of the native people forever. Heavy Eyebrows plowed under the sweet-smelling grasses to farm the land. They slaughtered and skinned the buffalo, sending the woolly hides back East on the railroads that they had built across the plains. In some places along the iron rails, mounds of buffalo bones rose almost as high as the ancient prairie grasses.

  The government of the white settlers forced the Osage onto reservations, first in the country Heavy Eyebrows called Kansas, then to a new place called Oklahoma. The Osage were hunters and gatherers. Without the buffalo,they could not hunt. Heavy Eyebrows wanted the Osage to become farmers. Year after year they scratched a living from the baked-red soil, but the crops they grew were not enough. The Osage were a proud people. Now they were starving. They had no choice but to accept the handouts of food and supplies from the white government agents.

  Maria’s ancestors had a belief, however—an ancient prophecy. One day, great wealth would return to the Osage. At the start of the twentieth century, the prophecy came true. Beneath the whispering grasses, miles below the rolling hills of northeastern Oklahoma, was a lake of black gold—oil. The discovery of oil on the reservation made the Osage people the wealthiest Native American tribe in the country. Soon, hundreds of oil derricks were pumping the black gold to the surface. By the time Maria was born, these clanking and hissing metal skeletons had replaced the humped-back buffalo on the prairie of Oklahoma.

  Oil saved the Osage people from starvation. But oil also brought trouble, especially to the Tall Chief family.

  Chapter 2

  The Rampage

  Maria’s father was not wealthy, but he was well-to-do. “We didn’t live in a teepee,” Maria often told people who asked about her life on the reservation. “And we were never hungry.”

  Maria’s father owned a movie theater and a pool hall on the main street in town, but those businesses did not earn much money for the family. Instead, her father depended for money on the oil companies. They paid him for the right to drill oil on his land. Often, when a check for hundreds of dollars arrived, he pocketed the money and disappeared for days. Ruth Tall Chief did not know where her husband was, but she knew what he was doing: drinking. As much as a week might pass before he returned home.

  Maria remembered how frightened her mother became during those “binges.” When Maria’s father drank, he got mean. “The walls seemed to shake and the air seemed to fill with the thunder of his fury,” Maria remembered.

  Her mother tried to reason with him. “You are throwing away the money your family needs to live!” How was she to feed her daughters? she asked.

  The giant towered over his wife. His dark eyes were not kind now. They were angry. “I’m tired of hearing about money!” he shouted. He swung his arm, sweeping a stack of books from the table. They crashed to the floor.

  Maria grabbed Marjorie’s hand, and together the sisters ran down the hill to Grandma Tall Chief’s house. Maria cried for her to come quickly and save her mother!

  Her father’s “ra
mpage,” as Maria called it, ended without violence. She never once saw her father strike her mother. Still, a few months later when the next oil check arrived, her father disappeared again. Oil might have saved the Osage from starving, but it could not restore her father’s lost pride. Maria did not know what dark thoughts clouded her father’s mind during his binges. In time, however, she came to understand what her mother already knew. Her father was an alcoholic.

  One day Maria would write a book about her life. “I idolized him,” Maria wrote about her father. “But while we were growing up, he was often unbearable.”

  Chapter 3

  The Keeper of the Drum

  Maria learned about her Osage heritage from her grandmother. Eliza Tall Chief wore her black hair in a long braid, as was the custom for Osage women. She wrapped her shoulders in a colorfully striped tribal blanket. She told stories of the past. Many, many years ago, Maria’s great-grandfather, Chief Peter Bigheart, had traveled to Washington, D.C., to work with the white government leaders in planning the Osage reservation. Grandma Tall Chief also spoke of the powwow, a great festival that was very important to the Osage people.

  Each spring, Grandma Tall Chief said, the Osage held a powwow. The women wore their finest shirts and wide-beaded belts. They rubbed chalky gypsum over their doeskin leggings. Silver and turquoise bracelets ringed their arms. The dancing began in the afternoon and lasted for hours, Grandma Tall Chief said. Only the men danced. They fastened hawkbells around their legs below their knees. As the men raised one leg, then the other, the bells jingle-jangled. The men didn’t dress in feather bonnets. They didn’t spin or flail their arms. The Osage danced with dignity, Grandma Tall Chief said.

  One June afternoon, Daddy took Maria and Marjorie to a powwow. This was even more exciting for Maria than finding arrowheads in the grass. The Osage sat in semicircles. Their tribal blankets covered their shoulders. Just as Grandma Tall Chief had said, the women in their moccasins and silver jewelry did not dance. “Instead,” Maria remembered, “they formed a circle around the men and did a little side step, shifting their weight from one foot to the other in time with the drumbeat.”

  The keeper of the drum was a boy. The Osage always chose a boy for this honor, Grandma Tall Chief had explained. His beating on the kettledrum brought honor to his family.

  The men sang as they danced. The stories they sang told of times long ago and were as important as the dance itself. The story was the dance—mysterious and solemn. The men circled the large drum in the center of the dance ground. When the drumbeats stopped, each dancer froze, an uplifted foot in midair. Maria was entranced.

  Even as the sun slipped closer to the sandstone hills, the drumming and the dancing continued. In the shadows, the blackjack trees bending over the stream could have been the ghosts of Maria’s Osage ancestors.

  “The powwow was a journey to the past,” Maria said. She never forgot the rhythm of those ancient songs. One day, in her own way, she would become a sort of keeper of the drum. Through dance and story, Maria would bring honor to her family and to the Osage people.

  Chapter 4

  Pianos and Toe Shoes

  As a child, Maria thought of herself as a “typical Indian girl.” She was shy and polite and eager to please the adults in her life. Her brother Jerry, however, had a terrible temper like his father. Maria sometimes fought with Jerry. Mostly, she simply ran away from him.

  Maria’s mother explained to her daughters that Jerry’s problems began when he was just four years old. A horse kicked him in the head. Although Jerry seemed to recover, he could not learn the alphabet. He could not read, no matter how many times Ruth pointed and repeated the letters for him. One day, unable to control Jerry’s outbursts, Maria’s parents decided to send him away to a military school.

  Now that Jerry had left home, Ruth Tall Chief turned all her attention to her two daughters. One day, she promised herself, she would take her girls away from the reservation and the small town of Fairfax with its clanking oil derricks and dusty roads. She would take them away from their father’s frightening binges fueled by oil money. Her girls would perform on stage and become famous. Traditional Indian dancing was not what Ruth Tall Chief had in mind, either. Her girls would dance ballet. During the summer when Maria was three years old, her mother took her for her first lesson. When Marjorie was three, she too began her lessons.

  Maria’s best friend was her sister. She and Marjorie dressed alike. They did everything together, including learning how to dance. In Fairfax, their teacher was a woman who knew very little about ballet. Mrs. Sabin didn’t teach the Tall Chief girls the basic positions and movements. She forced five-year-old Maria to go up on her toes before her feet were strong enough to hold her. Mrs. Sabin did not know that dancing en pointe too early could damage forever a little girl’s feet.

  Ruth bought satin toe shoes in sizes too large for her girls. That way, they didn’t outgrow their dancing slippers so quickly. She stuffed the toes of the slippers with cotton. Pain needled Maria’s feet whenever she stood en pointe. She never told her mother about the pain.

  Ruth sewed the costumes for her daughters’ dance routines. For one patriotic dance routine, Ruth made Maria a cape and sewed an American flag on the inside lining. On stage as the record “Stars and Stripes Forever” played, Maria twirled and twirled—sometimes on her toes and sometimes not—until she was dizzy.

  A dancer must know music, and so Ruth also hired a piano teacher. While other children played outside after school, Maria now practiced both her piano lessons and her dance steps. Ruth watched her daughters closely. She saw that Marjorie could extend her leg almost to her head. That was much higher than Maria could. On the other hand, Maria could close her eyes and listen to a melody, then immediately identify the notes. “That’s a C, that’s a G,” she’d tell the piano teacher. Then she played the same melody without making a mistake.

  “Your daughter has perfect pitch,” the piano teacher told Maria’s mother. It was a remarkable musical talent.

  Ruth began to imagine different futures for her daughters. One day Marjorie would become a ballerina. Maria would become a concert pianist. For now, however, the two sisters continued to dance together. Sometimes they performed on stage in their father’s movie theater. More often, they performed at county fairs, Boy Scout jamborees, and rodeos.

  The rodeo especially frightened Maria. The long-horned bulls in their pens snorted and pawed the dirt. The muscles along their flanks quivered nervously. Behind the grandstand, Maria heard the cowboys talking. Riding a rodeo bull, they said, was like riding a ton of swirling fury. The worst thing was getting stepped on. If a bull got the chance, said the cowboys, it would run you over for sure!

  Like the bulls in their pens, Maria waited nervously for her turn to go into the arena to entertain the audience. She preferred dancing in Daddy’s theater. At least in the movie house, a snorting swirl of fury could not run her over!

  Often while traveling to and from the county fairs and rodeos, Ruth complained to her husband. If they stayed on the reservation, she said, her girls would never achieve greatness. And she was certain that greatness was in them. They would dance at county fairs and rodeos in homemade costumes all their lives. In California, they would have a better life. At last, Joseph Tall Chief agreed.

  In 1933, when Maria was eight years old, the Tall Chief family packed up their belongings and moved to Los Angeles. If Maria felt sad leaving the Osage hills and her Grandma Tall Chief behind, once again she did not complain.

  Chapter 5

  Madame Nijinska

  California was full of colors that Maria had never seen in Oklahoma—groves of bright oranges, apricots, and peaches. The Pacific Ocean shimmered a silvery blue in the sunshine. Even her father seemed happier. He could golf every day!

  Maria and Marjorie began their ballet lessons right away. Ernest Belcher welcomed the two girls into his class. He was shocked to learn that both
Maria and Marjorie had been dancing on their toes for years. It was a miracle, he told Ruth, that both girls had not injured themselves. “Forget everything Mrs. Sabin showed you,” he told his new pupils. “You must start all over and learn the basic steps.”

  Ballet school was hard work, but Maria was happy in Mr. Belcher’s class. She was not so happy in Beverly Vista School, however. She could read far better than the other students in the third grade, so she was often bored with the lessons.

  When she came into the classroom, the students covered their mouths with their hands and made war whoops. Where were her feathers? they teased. Did she live in a teepee? Was her last name Tall or was it Chief? How many scalps had her father taken?

  It didn’t help much either when Ruth decided her girls would begin performing again at county fairs. She thought their Osage heritage would make them a more interesting act. She sewed new costumes—buckskins with fringe, headbands with feathers, and hawkbells down the outside of each leg. Maria disliked the costume, but she disliked the dance routine even more. Osage women did not dance. Only men wore the traditional hawkbells. Grandma Tall Chief knew that. Why didn’t her mother understand? Maria was proud of her Osage heritage, but this dance seemed all wrong.

  Ruth was determined. As long as the costumes fit, her daughters would dance to the tom-toms. As always, Maria did as she was told. The one thing Maria could change, however, was her name. She began to write Tallchief as one word, not two. Maybe that would stop some of the teasing.