Who Was Maria Tallchief Read online

  George Balanchine’s new company was small and didn’t have much money. Even so, George vowed to make the New York City Ballet the best dance company in America. For the next three years, both he and Maria worked very hard. She danced in her husband’s ballets. She danced also in ballets staged by other dance companies. The dance critics were paying more attention to Mr. Balanchine’s ballerina.

  “Maria Tallchief can make everything she does on stage look glittery,” a dance critic wrote. “Some dancers are pearls,” wrote another critic. “Maria Tallchief is a diamond.”

  Maria longed to be perfect if not for her own sake, then for George’s. And yet, not every performance went well. Maria never forgot the first time she danced as the white swan maiden, Odette, in Swan Lake. It was the winter of 1949. Maria had difficulty concentrating. Another dancer, playing Benno, knelt before her. She balanced one foot on his thigh, raising her leg behind her and extending her hand to her partner, “Prince Siegfried.” Suddenly her leg trembled. She fell forward. The next moment, the swan queen, her prince and Benno were sprawled ungracefully on the floor.

  Maria was mortified. There was nothing she could do except stand up and continue dancing.

  After the performance, Maria felt miserable. George was kind. He did not scold her. Still, Maria believed she had let him down. She had danced badly.

  Late that night, a friend telephoned her. “I just want you to know, Maria, maybe you’re not too happy tonight about your performance,” she said. “But it was nerves.”

  Maria’s mood brightened a little. Her friend had reminded her of an important truth in ballet: No one—not even the great Balanchine’s wife—could be perfect every time.

  Chapter 8

  The Firebird’s Magic

  The applause for Maria Tallchief grew louder with each new ballet George created for her. In 1949, just months before her twenty-fifth birthday, George challenged Maria once again. He created a new ballet just for her, The Firebird. In this performance, Maria would play a mythical creature from Russian folklore.

  The story begins in an enchanted garden where Prince Ivan discovers a rare and beautiful firebird. Ivan chases and then captures the creature. The frightened firebird pleads for her freedom. Finally, Ivan agrees. The grateful firebird gives the prince one of her blazing feathers, and she promises that if Ivan is ever in trouble, he may use the feather to call for her help. Too soon, Ivan does indeed find himself in need of the firebird’s magic. The princess he loves has fallen under the spell of an evil magician. Ivan calls upon the firebird to help save his love. As in all fairy tales, good triumphs over evil. Ivan and the princess marry, and the firebird flies away, a free creature once again.

  The role of the firebird terrified Maria. George had choreographed truly amazing leaps as the bird tries to avoid capture. George wanted to show off Maria’s technical abilities. Yet, even he was nervous. So many things had already gone wrong. During one rehearsal, Maria leaped into her partner’s arms with such force that she nearly knocked him to the floor.

  As opening night approached, Maria became ill. She was cold and tired. Each time she swallowed, her throat felt as if it were on fire. This was more than nerves! George took her to the doctor. The doctor announced that Maria’s tonsils were infected. She must have an operation to remove them. “But I cannot have an operation,” Maria argued. “I must dance!”

  The doctor insisted.

  After the surgery, he ordered Maria to stay in bed and sleep. For two days, Maria tried to rest. Always, her mind drifted back to that mythical Firebird. Finally, she threw off the covers, dressed in her leotards, and returned to the rehearsals.

  On the day of the opening night’s performance, Maria’s costume finally arrived. The headdress was a crown of feathers. Maria had not yet danced in the crown. How might it affect her balance, her jetés? There was no time to rehearse. Someone hurriedly pinned the feathered crown onto Maria’s head.

  Waiting in the wings, Maria felt her heart flutter. She had never been so nervous before a performance. The orchestra began to play.

  As the curtain rose, Maria took a deep breath. The ballerina who stepped on stage was no longer Maria Tallchief. She was a mythical, magical bird with feathers ablaze.

  Ordinarily, George would have worn his blue suit or his fancy white dinner jacket to the opening night’s performance. He did not expect curtain calls tonight, so he had arrived at the theater wearing rather ordinary clothes. As he watched Maria’s performance and heard the gasps of amazement from the audience, George realized that he had been wrong. Maria’s frightened bird now fluttered, now flashed, now seemingly flew through the air into her partner’s arms.

  When the curtain fell at the end of the performance, something truly magical happened. The people in the audience rose to their feet and roared with excitement as if they weren’t at a ballet at all but at a football game! They chanted over and over, “Tallchief! Tallchief! Tallchief!”

  Backstage, Maria was confused. She had not practiced a curtain call, but clearly the audience was demanding that she return to the stage. They were on their feet, shouting and applauding. “As long as I live,” Maria would one day write, “I’ll never forget the roar.”

  That night, Maria’s dream came true. She had become America’s prima ballerina.

  Chapter 9

  Princess of Two Worlds

  Maria loved dancing. The applause and cheers of the audiences thrilled her. Even so, she wanted something more. She wanted to have a child. George loved children, but he did not want to have any of his own. Children would complicate their busy lives, he said.

  Maria also missed her sister. Marjorie had married a dancer. Both she and her husband had joined a ballet company in Europe. Maria hardly ever saw her sister.

  For another year, Maria and George lived and worked together. Maria wasn’t unhappy, but she wasn’t complete, either. Finally, in 1951, Maria and George ended their five-year marriage. But they did not end their artistic relationship. Maria was still George’s muse. He continued to create ballets for her. And she continued to dance for him.

  A year later, Maria fell in love again. At least, she thought it was love. Elmourza Natirboff was an airplane pilot. He knew nothing about ballet.

  Maria didn’t care. Elmourza was handsome and fun to be with. They went to horse races and parties. After a whirlwind romance, they married. Then, just as quickly, the marriage began to unravel.

  Elmourza did not understand the long hours his wife’s career demanded. He didn’t understand why she was so exhausted after a performance. He also had a temper. One night, angry at her about something she didn’t quite understand, Elmourza kicked a wastebasket across the room. Suddenly, Maria remembered her father’s angry outbursts during his drinking binges. Maria did not want to live the life her mother had in Fairfax. Maria left Elmourza, ending their short but troubled marriage.

  In June of 1953, Maria returned to the Osage reservation in Oklahoma. Her people had called her home to honor her. On Main Street, people lined the sidewalks. They waved American flags. Signs in storefronts read, Welcome home, Maria! Their kindness overwhelmed her.

  She entered her father’s movie theater where she and Marjorie had danced in their first recitals. Maria’s parents were there. So was Grandma Tall Chief. Her hair, graying now, still hung in a braid down her back. A tribal blanket still hugged her shoulders.

  Today, however, Maria would not dance. Today, she was the guest of honor. The Tribal Council welcomed her into the Osage tribe, giving her the name that Grandma Tall Chief had chosen for her: Princess Wa-Xthe-Thonba. It meant “Princess of Two Worlds.” The chief placed a feathered bonnet on Maria’s head. She was more accustomed to diamond tiaras, and the heavy headdress felt awkward.

  Afterward, Maria returned to the red brick house on the hill overlooking the reservation. That afternoon in the Osage hills, America’s prima ballerina feasted on the traditional Osage foods
she had loved as a child: fried squaw bread and dried corn boiled with beef. If only for one day, Maria was once again that shy Indian girl who hunted for arrowheads in the long, whispering grasses.

  Chapter 10

  New Loves and Sad Farewells

  In 1953, Maria was the most famous ballerina in the world. She met the president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower. Her photograph appeared in newspapers and on the cover of magazines as America’s “Woman of the Year.” She even danced on television many times.

  A young man who became her partner admitted he was afraid of dancing with the great Maria Tallchief. “I don’t bite, you know,” Maria told him.

  “Miss Tallchief,” he answered, “I’m not afraid of you biting me. I am afraid I’ll knock you off pointe.”

  Maria laughed. “You’re not strong enough to knock me off pointe!”

  One man, however, did sweep Maria off her feet. His name was Henry Paschen. Everyone called him Buzz. He was not a dancer. He had never even been to a ballet. Once he saw Maria perform in Firebird, however, he could not take his eyes from her. Maria felt the same attraction. “His sky blue eyes made my heart stop whenever I looked into them,” she said. They married in June of 1956.

  A few years later, another love came into Maria’s life . . . her daughter Elise was born.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of seeing that beautiful child when they brought her to me for the first time,” Maria wrote in her autobiography. “She had black hair, long and silky, and I thought ‘She’s truly an American-Indian baby.’ When I held her in my arms and her eyes looked into mine, I thought ‘This is heaven.’”

  Days later at home with her new baby, Maria slipped into her toe shoes and laced them. Her father was visiting. He said, “You have a husband and a baby now. You ought to be content.”

  “I am content, Daddy,” she answered.

  “Then it’s time to put those shoes away for good.”

  Stop dancing? “Never!” she told her father. “I have to dance.”

  Joseph Tall Chief knew his daughter was every bit as stubborn as he was. He said nothing more about it.

  Maria had everything she had wanted: an exciting career and a beautiful family. Her sister, Marjorie’s life seemed enchanted, too. She and her husband had joined the Paris Opera Ballet, and they had twin children. And yet, sadness and loss comes into every life. A few months after Elise was born, Maria’s father became dangerously ill. The doctors in Fairfax did not know how to make him well again. Maria turned to the one person who had always been there to help her and who was still a very dear friend, George Balanchine. “I’m so afraid,” she told him.

  George was always the calm spot in the center of a storm. He told Maria to bring her father to Chicago and let the doctors there examine him. Maria made all the arrangements. Within days, her father and mother had arrived.

  Maria tried to mask her shock at seeing him. Her father had always seemed a giant to her. Now, his body sagged from sickness. His eyes were cloudy. His skin was yellowish. The doctors in Chicago offered little hope. Joseph Tall Chief died in October 1959. As he had wished, his family buried him in the cemetery in Fairfax among the other Tall Chief graves. Maria’s grief ran very deep. Had it only been ten months ago that she had argued with her father about putting away her toe shoes forever? He had been healthy and happy then. Now he was gone.

  The death of her father was not Maria’s only loss. When Grandma Tall Chief also died, Maria returned again to the small graveyard in Fairfax. An old Osage woman standing near Grandma’s grave was chanting. The sound was haunting, familiar and yet mysterious, too. It was the voice of Maria’s people from long, long ago. Perhaps as Maria walked away from the cemetery, she took some comfort in knowing that her father and her Grandma were together again.

  For many months, Maria mourned. Even though her grief exhausted her, she still laced up her toe shoes and danced. And in her dancing, she slowly began to heal.

  Chapter 11

  The Protest

  Maria found joy in the music and movement of her body. She wanted to share that joy with others, especially children. When a television star named Dave Garroway invited Maria to perform a dance recital for an audience of American-Indian children, Maria quickly said yes. Here was an opportunity for Princess Wa-Xthe-Thonba to bring together the two worlds in which she lived—the world of ballet and the world of Native Americans. Because the program would be on TV, many thousands of people across the country would see the performance.

  The 1960s was a time of unrest. Across the country, people were joining hands to protest unfair treatment of people of color. African Americans marched side by side with white protesters to demand equal rights for all Americans.

  Native Americans, too, were protesting. Many believed that images of American Indians on television and in movies were prejudiced. Those images portrayed their people as uncivilized and savage.

  On the afternoon of Maria’s television show, the school buses that were to bring the children to the auditorium did not arrive. Maria stood on stage in costume, but the seats were empty.

  “Where is everybody?” Dave Garroway asked. He was angry but also worried. He had a television program to broadcast, and he had no audience.

  “Wait a while,” someone suggested. “They’ll come.”

  An hour later, the auditorium was still dark and silent. The children never came.

  Maria danced that afternoon for the television cameras only. Perhaps for the first time ever, she danced without joy in her heart. “I was disappointed by the experience, and sorry that the children didn’t return for the telecast,” Maria said.

  Later, she learned what had happened. Some Native Americans in the Chicago area refused to bring the children to the auditorium. They thought the television people were trying to steal away their native culture, trying to make their children more American and less Native American.

  Maria was deeply hurt. She believed it was possible to live in two worlds. She had done it. Her sister Marjorie had done it. But most of all, Maria believed this: “The beauty of ballet should not be denied to anyone.”

  Chapter 12

  The Swans

  When Maria was forty-one years old, she realized her time in the spotlight was ending. She was watching a young dancer in rehearsal lift her leg higher and higher. The dancer’s balance was off, and Maria corrected her. The girl was so eager to please, so hungry to learn. Maria thought with surprise, Why, that was me a lifetime ago!

  Practically all her life, Maria had been dancing. If she stopped, what would she do? A whole new generation of young girls were just now tying on their toe shoes for the first time. Perhaps she could teach them what Madame Nijinska and George Balanchine had taught her—passion and discipline.

  Still, the thought of being “retired” frightened her. Backstage, whenever she had felt nervous, Maria had lifted her chin and stepped forward to show the world what she could do. Was it time now to show the world again what she could do as a teacher?

  The decision tormented Maria. “Should I . . . or shouldn’t I?” she asked herself over and over again. When Elise was younger, Maria took her on tour with her. In the hotel rooms late at night, Elise set out plates of food for her mother. Sometimes, if she wasn’t too tired after a performance, Maria draped a silk scarf over the lamp to create a soft glow, and she read to Elise. Once, Elise had written a poem that began:

  Because she is my mother, every night she turns into Cinderella.

  After the final performance of a tour in Venezuela in 1966, Maria returned to her hotel room alone. Buzz and Elise were not waiting in the wings. They were home in Chicago. Maria longed to be with them. That night, she made up her mind. It was time she stopped turning into Cinderella.

  A few days later, Maria returned to her family in Chicago and left the stage for good. She began to build a new life for herself. She made a studio on the top flo
or of her house and gave herself lessons each day. She began to work with performers at the Chicago Lyric Opera and later, helped to begin the Chicago City Ballet. All along, she never lost touch with her closest friend, George Balanchine.

  In 1983, Maria received a frightening telephone call. George was in the hospital. Maria flew to New York City. As she hurried down the hall toward George’s hospital room, Maria felt as if her life was about to change again. George had created a golden age of ballet in America, and she had been part of it. “I couldn’t imagine the world without him,” she confessed.

  Maria entered the room and drew a chair close to his bedside. George was too weak to sit up, but he smiled when he saw Maria. A short while later, the nurse asked her to leave. Maria knew she would never see George again.

  Soon after George died, Maria wrote, “The ballet world in which I grew up is gone.”

  In the years that followed, Maria found joy in new experiences: her daughter’s success as a writer, walks along Lake Michigan in Chicago or along the beach in Florida. Although she no longer performed publicly after 1966, she never put away her toe shoes. Each day, she gave herself a class at the barre. Sometimes she taught.

  When Maria was seventy-one years old, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., named her “one of the outstanding artists of the twentieth century.” Many in the world of ballet believed Maria Tallchief had achieved her goal of becoming a perfect prima ballerina. Maria knew she had not. But this no longer troubled her. Perfection, she now believed, was impossible except in nature.