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A sort of odd question really.

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If there would be one thing that you could change about Ruth Page, what might that be?

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If I could change one thing about Ruth Page, if I could give Ruth Page something, if I was some kind of fairy godfather, I think I'd bend down and touch her with my wand and give her the genius of creativity.

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Now whether she would be happier with that, it would be one of those odd fairy kisses.

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Perhaps her happiness was that she never, I don't think she ever had any worries about her work.

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I don't think that she had, I don't think she had many pretensions or illusions about her work either.

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I don't think she ever thought she was a figure of Balanchinian or Ashtonian proportions.

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But I think, I don't know whether it would make her happy, but I think that I would like to give her that.

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Just because in a way she deserved it so much more than artists who had it.

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And also she would have employed it with such a difference and such charm and such mischief that it might have been fascinating.

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Did you ever see her at a time when she was frustrated and happy, angry, suffering?

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I saw her when she was suffering very much once.

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When, a matter of fact, my first meeting with her, she sobbed all the way through it.

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She sobbed over a notice I had written. I forget the ballet it was actually.

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But she was sobbing in the background while Tom was threatening legal action, which in actual fact, of course, really,

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it's very difficult to in this country have legal recourse against a critic.

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Perhaps it's too difficult, I'm not sure.

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But there was poor Ruth sobbing in the background.

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It was heartrending because she was so obviously a nice and decent woman.

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And critics never like to be made aware of the pain they can cause.

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We like to do what we conceive of their job and walk away, leaving the victims to their own devices.

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I don't think it's a particularly cruel job.

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It's a job that does involve giving pain.

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And if you're sensitive, and most critics are surprisingly sensitive,

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it's part of our job which most of us really recoil from.

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And there was poor Ruth actually sobbing.

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And of course, one is always aware that no one wants to do a bad ballet and no one conceives one's opinion.

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So I did see her in pain, yes. It was not pleasant.

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How do you account for the fact that you later became good enough friends to have dinner together?

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Well, I think that one of the remarkable things about Ruth as an artist is that just as a person, she's incapable of malice.

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She's forgetful of malice.

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I mean, someone like Rudolf Nerev, charming man, who I admire and like very much,

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Rudolf remembers every bad notice that was ever written about him.

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I'm sure he could almost poke them verbatim.

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He wouldn't trouble to ask whether it was raining outside, people he despises, but he would remember those bad notices.

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And most people are like that.

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I mean, I know all the people who have written unkindly about me and they've been legion.

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I remember them.

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I don't think I hold any particular malice against them, but I remember them.

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I don't think that Ruth even remembered them.

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She, every relationship, she starts with trust and with a kind of clean sheet.

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It's not as though you're meeting her for the first time.

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It's much more complex than that.

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But you are being judged as if you're meeting her for the first time.

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She's not aware of past injuries, but she's aware of past pleasures.

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It's almost a unique quality, particularly from a person who puts themselves in the public eye so much.

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It's a wonderful quality.

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What qualities do you think enabled her personally to go on and keep doing and doing and doing what she did?

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Ruth was always an indomitable person.

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Nothing could stop her.

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She was determined against all, in the end, against all probability to create a ballet in the Midwest that she could personally be proud of.

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A ballet of the equivalents of Diaghilev, which after all was what she grew up with.

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She was very much a Midwestern person.

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She had her roots. She had her roots in Chicago. She kept her roots in Chicago.

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And as a result, she was determined to do something about ballet in that city.

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And nothing would stop her.

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It was just, she was like a heavyweight. She was like Rocky.

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She kept on coming back for more. She would be knocked down either by funding or by insulting notices.

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She had a certain amount of public support, remember, which helped her and kept her going and kept her warm.

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But she had a lack of public recognition apart from public support, official recognition.

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I mean, she was never a favorite with the National Endowment for the Arts.

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She was never a favorite with any funding.

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I don't think she ever knew the names of the people on the Ford Foundation.

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And of course, the Ford Foundation's were concerned.

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The fact that people perceived her, I think really wrongly perceived her, as having unlimited sums of money did not help her.

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Because people said, well, if she wants it, she's a rich lady, let her pay for it.

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Which was an attitude which no one is that rich.

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Subsequently, such a rich person as Mrs. Hartness, Rebecca Hartness, showed exactly the same.

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But Ruth believed in what she was doing. She believed in Chicago and the Midwest.

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And she believed that she had a ballet tradition to contribute.

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And that, I think, kept her going.

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Do you think it would have been different, or how might have been different, had she moved to New York?

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And if she thought about it and made plans to do it frequently and then never did?

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Ruth always was thinking of coming to New York.

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She was always thinking of basing her company in New York and then going back to Chicago and things like that.

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It would have had some advantages for her inasmuch as she certainly might have been taken more seriously in Chicago.

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Because Chicago always took New York more seriously than it took Chicago seriously.

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So that could have been a help.

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But I think she was sensible enough to realize that she was fundamentally a small fish and a better stay in that particular pool.

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Rather than risk it in New York.

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What could have been a possibility was if she had formed a liaison with Serge Denim of the Ballet of the West of Monte Carlo

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and somehow taken over the Ballet of the West of Monte Carlo,

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that might have given her a more secure touring base and a sort of New York cachet, which could have helped her.

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But for her to come into New York where already there was Balanchine and Kirstein and Lucia Chase already there implanted

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and in later years Robert Joffrey as well, to come into that particular thing I think would have been probably asking for money.

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That's a nice Freudian slip.

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I think it certainly needed money. But it would have been asking for trouble.

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There are, as you know, a rather long list of firsts to Ruth's credit.

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The first person to commission a score from Aaron Copeland, some of the other composers and artists that she worked with.

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The first person to present Rudolf Nerev after his defection.

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Do you think she has some kind of special quality and eye for talent perhaps?

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I think that Ruth always did have a very special eye for talent.

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It's not a coincidence that she produced so many people for the first time.

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I mean, even something people always forget is that she was one of the very first dancers in Apollo.

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Apollo was originally done not by Diaghilev but by Adolf Baum.

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It was the Elizabeth Frye Coolidge thing in Washington DC.

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Ruth actually danced in the very first performance, not a Balanchine's Apollo, but in Adolf Baum's Apollo which came before Balanchine's.

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But that's only just one of the incredible number of firsts. Yes, she did.

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She was the first to present Nerev in New York.

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She was the first, and in Chicago for that matter,

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she was the first to encourage a great number of creative artists, composers, Aaron Copeland, one example.

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And she had this connoisseur's eye for quality and for, I mean, she understood very well, for example, the importance of Villain-Petit.

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Particularly in her field of ballet, her dramatic field of ballet, she understood very well and she worked with Petit.

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She always had this feel for dancers, musicians, designers, choreographers who had something very special about them,

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which is why I think she would have proved such a remarkable artistic director.

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She had all of those qualities of connoisseurship, taste and imagination.

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If she'd run a restaurant, she would have been a terrific maitre d'é.

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A sense of adventure. Do you think she has a sense of adventure as well?

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She certainly had a sense of adventure. Anyone would have to have a sense of adventure to start a ballet company in Chicago.

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I mean, you know, the stockyards were not exactly favorable to Sheiniya Turnes.

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And she had not only a sense of adventure, but the imagination to make that adventure into a genuine trip.

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She wasn't an armchair traveler in any sense. She loved movement and she loved doing things.

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She loved doing different things. Perhaps that sense of adventure was not always helpful.

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I mean, inasmuch as she was always working at a ballet company for Chicago,

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always working at what would indeed have been a third, fourth in American dance, apart from ballet theater and New York City ballet,

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or if you count San Francisco, perhaps a fourth course. But that was her initially.

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But I think it was perhaps her sense of adventure that led her not to pursue one thing with quite the single-mindedness

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that Lucia Chase and Lincoln Kirstein pursued them with.

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She would do something for a few seasons and then she'd go away and then she'd start again.

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If you look at the record of her achievements, there's a certain stopping and starting about them.

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And that was the people who are adventurous very often do not have the kind of hard grind consistency that sometimes is needed.

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So I think that they maybe have worked both ways.

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In the end, how do you personally, when you think about Ruth, I mean, what are the...

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I think of hugging her. I think of the pleasure she's given me, the person.

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I think of the guts with which she has pursued her ideals.

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I think of the way in which the whole dance world, from Fontaine to the smallest person in the court of ballet

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who's come in contact with her, has fallen in love with her.

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And I think of the joy and the brilliance some of her operetta ballets have given to audiences all over the world.

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I think of the pleasure that things like Mary Widow and Flay the Mouse,

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the way she has extended the operetta into, I think what she used to call an operetta dance song or something like that.

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But it's something that she has extended in terms of the way of massing, who I've both started the concept of the ballet bouffe.

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She gave us the operetta dance to a very large extent.

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And I think that that is her real tribute.

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That's lovely. My last question, unless the other of you have one after this, which is the last question I always ask,

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is there anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to talk about?

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No, I don't think so. You've researched the whole thing awfully well.

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And you've asked us the right questions, I think.

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Good. Laurie? Ben? Thank you.

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Okay.

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Thank you.