The Jewel on Your Chest
Ballerina Maria Tallchief 1925-2013: An Appreciation
Ballet is the most ephemeral of the arts, disappearing as it happens, but the prima ballerinas who embody its genius linger indelibly as if they were immune to time. Safe to say there was never a ballerina to leave a mark like Maria Tallchief who died at 88 last April of complications from a broken hip. Hers was an almost mythic American life, as grand and ardent as it was improbable. She leapt out of the prairie, a Native American girl from a small town, a princess of the Osage tribe whose Indian name Wa-Xthe-thonpa can be translated as “Woman of Two Worlds.” She became the first American ballet superstar, the blazing “archetype of her generation” as the critic Arlene Croce put it.
The musically-gifted daughter of a Scotch Irish mother and a full-blooded Osage Indian father, she was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief in 1925 in Fairfax Oklahoma in the waning years of the so-called “Reign of Terror” when dozens of Osage were murdered for the oil royalties that had made the tribe the richest in America. She had high cheek bones, a strong jaw, a mask-like face; she also had brains, a compulsion to excel and perfect pitch. For a while she thought she would become a concert pianist. The family moved to Beverly Hills when Tallchief was eight. She and her sister Marjorie, who also became a ballet star, studied with Bronislava Nijinska, the sister of Nijinsky. Tallchief’s professional career began after high school in 1942 when she landed a $40-a-week job in New York with the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo; she toured venues around the country, and apprenticed under the great ballerina Alexandra Danilova.
That year, in the Russian Tea Room, she was introduced to George Balanchine. Four years later in 1946 they married. She was 21, he was 42. On Tallchief Balanchine drew up the dances that defined the novel style of New York City Ballet. She was his muse, the intimate co-creator of his swan queen Odette, his Sugar Plum fairy, his Firebird, “the most spectacular role” he made for her, according to Croce, and the first great success of City Ballet. After its premiere deranged balletomanes stood in the balcony of the City Center theater shouting “Tall Chief! Tall Chief! Tall Chief!”
“Maria epitomized Balanchine’s style,” said Nancy Reynolds, the research director of the Balanchine Foundation. “Un-emotive, speedy, extremely precise, extremely musical. She was electric on stage.” A clip of her in Firebird shown at a memorial service in New York offered a thrilling glimpse of how she could move in her prime: her cantilevered balance, her erotic athleticism and joy, the eerie liquid grace of her arms undulating with a life of their own.
Her love affair with Balanchine’s choreography outlasted their marriage which was annulled after six years when he didn’t want children. Tallchief performed around the world and in 1960 was the first American to dance at the Bolshoi. During their dalliance in France in 1961, she taught Rudolf Nureyev the Twist, the dance craze of the day. Five years later, not long after starring in the ballet Cinderella in Hamburg, Tallchief retired. She was 40 and disdainful of dancers who hung on past their prime. She had remarried once, and then again, more happily, and had had a daughter, Elise Paschen. She started the ballet school of the Chicago Lyric Opera and founded the now defunct Chicago City Ballet. She stayed in shape. She coached young ballerinas. Dance as if you had a jewel on your chest, she told them. During a deep arabesque, when you are peering into the darkness, imagine you are standing at a balustrade gazing at a lake. And when you tilt your head, it should be as if you were lifting a cheek to the light.
That ballerinas are immune to time is their last illusion. Stravinsky once asked during a rehearsal of Orpheus, “Maria how long will it take you to die?” It was hard to relish the light after the death of her husband Henry Paschen a decade ago, and her final years before the broken hip were darkened by dementia. Last June her ashes were returned to the earth beside her father and her mother and her Tallchief ancestors; the Catholic cemetery was just down the road from the house where she took her first steps. A golden eagle traced circles in the sky above the lavender and the larkspur and the boundless rolling hills of bluestem grass dancing in the wind.
