A Shot at Carnegie Fame (excerpt)

Finally, the day of the dance recital arrived. We clambered into my father's (who went by the name Capote) Audi and took the #Holland Tunnel into #Manhattan. We were wedged into the tiny sedan, surrounded by shopping bags bursting with costumes, suitcases packed with shoes, duffel bags overflowing with props and accessories and makeup. The recital was an all-day affair. We headed out early for the hall, so early that my mother, who had us up at dawn rolling our hair, combing it into ringlets, painting our faces and packing up all our stuff, barely had time to engineer the high-rise bee-hive that was her trademark for special occasions. On the ride into Manhattan, all my father could talk about was how our lives were about to be turned on end. “You’ll see,” he kept repeating. “Starting tomorrow, everything changes.”

Once we arrived at #Carnegie Hall, Capote disappeared to assume his dual roles as the evening’s host and stage manager. He issued precise instructions to the photographers he’d hired to record the event – particularly my sister Alexia’s and my contributions to it – advised stagehands on the stage layout and lighting, assigned the performers’ families and friends their seats, and generally made a meal of every assignment he gave himself. My anxious mother was left to her own devices at the back of the hall, standing sentry over all our bags.

To my young eyes, the scene around us resembled bedlam more and more with every new wave of arriving audience members. Maybe it was the size of the venue or the enormity of the occasion; maybe it had something to do with Capote’s infinite capacity for mismanagement. 

Compared to anything we had seen before, the arena was certainly immense. At one point, Alexia and I killed time by playing hide and go seek, which served as our self-guided tour of the labyrinth that is Carnegie Hall. From the outside, as we’d approached it, it had seemed like any other large building jostling for elbow room on the streets of Manhattan, but inside it was a mystical, magnificent cavern, a semi-lit cocoon of a stage on which momentous occurrences took place. A million miniature light bulbs, producing an atmospheric glow that seemed to emanate from a great distance away, bathed center stage, backstage and the auditorium proper in the dissimulated luminescence of the densest part of a forest. Noise did not travel through the hall; instead, vibrations stayed rooted to their point of origin to create sounds so pure that talking above a whisper seemed sacrilegious. The décor could scarcely be described as understated, yet it did not shout for attention: the blood-red cushioned seats and dark wine-colored carpet; the orchestra pit painted black; oak stage floors and thick velvet curtains; the center-stage backdrop depicting a #European garden with cypress trees and fountains.

The entire hall gave off a smell of well-seasoned wood, affluence and the wealth of the memories our father had spoken so often about – a rich history of standing ovations, encores, rapture and tears. All this was accented by delicate stenciling on the balconies, and crowned by a massive crystal chandelier that oversaw everything. A sense of wonderment rooted me to the spot; but only until it was replaced by an even stronger yen to explore all the hall’s nooks and crannies.  

While the adults busied themselves with the minutiae of seating arrangements and stagecraft, my sister and I jumped in and out of the black orchestra pit; wrapped ourselves in the heavy, dusty velvet stage curtains; swung from ropes that looked like Rapunzel’s braids; closed our eyes and counted to 20 against the scenic backdrop on the center stage; yelled our names from one wing of the stage to the other. Some official or other might try to stop us – “Little girl, don’t do that here”; “Where are your parents?” – but they never tried to catch us, so we simply adjourned to the backstage area, or to the makeup booths, the orchestra pit, between rows of plush seats under the overhang of the balcony, and resumed our playing. With every new arrival of a fledgling ballerina, the ranks of our game of hide-and-go-seek swelled, until it boasted a cast of 75 screaming kids and more, tearing around the stage and bumping into each other along the tight aisles.     

Mothers trawling for places at the back of the theater to store costumes and accessories became hysterical when they spotted their own daughters speeding by, carefully-coiffed ringlets unraveling, make-up running, pink leotards stained from knees to neck.

 “Wait till your father sees you,” my mother admonished, almost dropping the bags of our costumes at the disheveled sight of us, which would be captured for posterity in the poster-sized prints Capote later had made of us in our dancing prime. But for two hours nothing could come between us and our frenzied dashing about. Then, gradually, the smell of perspiration commingling with the scent of the violet toilet water my mother had dabbed on us early that morning made me think better of it, even as a triple whammy of excitement, anticipation and pandemonium began to infect mothers backstage and the audience in the well of the auditorium.

Ms. Roche, my dance teacher, and Capote were nowhere in evidence, so the running order of the recital and the matching of costumes to dance pieces became a frantic guessing game for the mothers. When the music struck up, a tidal wave of ballerinas broke onto center stage under lights flashing a disorienting palette of greens, blues, pinks, and reds. The taped music blared; parents in the audience struggled to be heard above the din, screaming the names of their daughters in the hope that they would turn their way for photographs. Some performers who had missed their cues rushed onto the stage after the piece had started, often with their mothers in tow armed with some forgotten accessory or other. At one point, the stage was so packed full of mothers and dancers and errant items of costume that the crush made the actual business of performing a dance almost impossible. It seemed to me that there were many dancers onstage I had never seen in class before, and all of us vying for a spot front of stage so that our pictures could be dutifully snapped for the family albums.

That night we danced in uneven and scattered formations, swaying back and forth as if a gale were blowing across the stage, gathering us up and depositing us like piles of leaves. Some dancers stood petrified by stage fright; others had to keep their eyes locked on the feet of their neighbors in order to stay up with the steps. At one moment, my father muscled his way to the wings, gestured wildly at me to separate myself from the knot of disorganized dancers, and called out: “Barbara, get away from them, or I’m going to kill you!” (Threatening to kill people – me, in particular – seemed to be becoming his solution to every problem.) At first, thanks to the glare of the footlights, I couldn’t see him. When I acted as if I had not heard him, he made his way to the backstage during my costume change, grabbed one of my ears, and ran over his solution to the problem in hand a second time.

What he wanted most of all was to get photographs of me on my own, center stage at Carnegie Hall. The big soloist. Unfortunately for him, standing out from the crowd was not in my nature. I didn’t care for stardom or special attention; I just wanted to be one of the gang, have a good time with all the other crazy, two-left-footed, would-be but never-were-going-to-be prima ballerinas. It was five-year-old Alexia who proved, that day, to be a natural for the limelight. She was the main attraction. She only had to point a foot, raise an arm, or tilt her head to bring inspiration raining down from the rafters onto her narrow shoulders. The dance steps came effortlessly to her. She commanded the stage so completely the other students kept their distance, as if driven away from her personal space by magnetic repulsion. Somehow she was able to organize her dance group into perfect formation; it followed her lead without hesitation or misstep, in striking contrast to the anarchy breaking out all around.

For five hours we danced; then – abruptly it seemed to us, though it must have felt like an eternity in the coming to the audience – it was all over. Suddenly Ms. Roche, who, throughout the recital, had been conspicuous by her absence, was on stage being draped with bouquets of red roses. My father joined her and took his own bow, which, somewhat to my surprise, earned him cheers and thunderous applause. A truce of sorts was forged between them in the bliss of shared acclamation.   

Taking the Holland Tunnel home that night, my mother and sister slept in the car. Capote, all his earlier misgivings about my performance forgotten, could not stop rattling on about how magnificent the recital had been. I was too exhausted either to sleep or to pay heed to my father’s rose-tinted redaction of the evening’s events; instead, I peered out of the window at the Manhattan skyline. I’d been to the city before, on field trips to the #Museum of History; plus, every year my mother, sister and I, together with our neighbor and her two kids, went to see the #Rockettes at the #Radio City Christmas Show. Those visits had taken place during daylight, when Manhattan was a cauldron of clattering subway cars, honking horns, blaring sirens, congested sidewalks, putrefying garbage, the rich aromas of vending-cart meals and pastries baking in restaurant kitchens. But at night – and from a distance – the city’s rococo light show made its inanimate inhabitants come alive. The night exposes Manhattan’s might and its frailty, presents it in unvarnished form for inspection. The midnight sun of neon and fluorescence bleaches out the shadows and the grays, throwing the city’s skeletal form into razor-sharp relief. It’s at night that its saw tooth outline stands proudest against the sky, blocking out the horizon; its spaghetti tangle of roads seem most like a racetrack without beginning or end; its light-festooned bridges seem like a warm greeting and a fine send-off to the perpetual ebb and flow of humanity that is its heartbeat. It felt terribly grown-up to be driving around the city at night. It was a feature of that particular day, together with treating Carnegie Hall as my own private playground, that has never dimmed in my memory.

With the coming of the following day, I expected things to be forever different, as Capote had assured us they would be. But I didn’t know what, precisely, my new life would be like. How dancing at Carnegie Hall would change my breakfasts, my mornings, my days at school. I anxiously waited to see what would happen. That first day post-C.H. was a Sunday, strangely like most other Sundays. No one called; no one treated me, or the day, as special. I was disappointed; I was puzzled. But I was also relieved. Alexia and I spent the day playing up in the attic – same old same old wasn’t such a terrible thing after all.

For the following year’s dance recital, Capote rented #Lincoln Center, no less! A repeat ride through Lincoln Tunnel, a return engagement of hide-and-go-seek for Alexia and me before the performance.