(2 of 3)
From Balanchine to Merce Cunningham, choreographers invited Taylor to join their groups. For six years he danced mostly with Graham but in 1961 went on his own for good. A foe of ballet's artifice, he was inspired by the city's population: "They are standing, squatting, sitting everywhere like marvelous ants or bees, and their moves and stillnesses are ABCs that if given a proper format could define dance in a new way." Now his privations really began, and he records them with deep feeling and baleful gusto. Home was usually a wretched flat, cold water or no water. One chapter starts off with "snow sifting gently through the roof." In extremis he ate dog food.
Most of all he toured. If every choreographer's dream is a company of his own, the frustration of touring is the exhausting price to be paid. Heaven knows the beautiful curse of solitude is lifted. There are six seats on the train for seven weary bodaahs. Curtains, stagehands, producers are all nonfunctioning. Taylor is terrified that he won't have enough money to pay for tickets home. He constantly feels insufficient as a leader and fearful that his dancers are bumptious slobs. He even cuts one of his men's hair at an airport. The dancers give as good as they get. At one acrimonious dinner in Spoleto, Italy, they accuse him of cheating at cards. He is appalled. Yet they are loyal; no Taylor dancer ever departs to join a rival company, and one gain comes out of all the strife: "onstage togetherness -- a tribal unity that all audiences notice right off."
Taylor says he has never hired a dancer who did not appeal to "something warm" inside him. But there are frosty spots: Bettie de Jong ("picture a lovely reed dancing") is closest to him, but at times his feelings for her "are like a furry noose which slowly tightens around my neck." He admires the young Twyla Tharp's "magnificent" ambition, but simmers when she disparages his work to London critics. With what must be unprecedented honesty he says he gave Dan Wagoner little solos in Aureole to keep him interested without handing him a fat part. Wagoner, Tharp, Senta Driver and Laura Dean all left Taylor to start successful troupes of their own. He is rueful: "They look to me for direction -- want tugs from their puppeteer boss -- and then snip the strings . . . competing with the great guy who first hired them. The nerve of it!"
Over the years the repertory builds, becoming more varied and more lyrical; State Department tours replace the bus-and-truck forays. At home Taylor's life becomes intertwined with that of a deaf-mute, George Wilson, whom he befriended in the '50s and who stays on, living nearby and helping out. About a few matters Taylor can be irritatingly coy, and one of them is sex. As a youth he could not decide whether he favored males or females ("Let's just say that I preferred to be on top"), so he sought out Graham for counsel. She told him to stop worrying about it. A few years later, after glimpsing a beautiful young man while on tour in Sri Lanka, he turned to homosexuality. But he continued to have affairs with women, always griping about the shortcomings of either arrangement. Nonetheless, through the tantrums a saving wit always comes to the rescue. After one dark rumination he cries, "What's a gender to do?"