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But I thought really, I think they sound silly.

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Yeah, it was about sex and marriage and who was doing what, all this sort of thing, or

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what they approved of or what they would do.

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It was a big talk, you know, a girl talk.

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And I thought that's a silly thing.

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But I don't think they meant it.

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I think it was like some of the people who were acting up in the 60s.

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Like the Fitzgerald in the 20s.

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They thought they had a role to play and they did it.

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Although I do think her affair with Noguchi was important.

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That was a serious one.

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Sorry with him later.

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He came here for a speech and we all went.

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And they went back.

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She invited, Joan Stone was there, Mary Gair and myself.

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And we were all at the arts club.

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We all belonged to it and Noguchi was a big deal.

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So Ruth was there.

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Tell me when you're laying down bars.

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No, we are rolling with speed.

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We are rolling with speed.

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Why don't we talk for a little minute about Noguchi.

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I was at the arts club with Ruth several years ago, three, four maybe, when Noguchi was going

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to make a talk there.

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I'd never heard him, I'd never seen him and I was enchanted beyond words.

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So I responded to the invitation at once.

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Mary Gair also, blood of the arts club, Joan Stone, friend of Ruth's also, all of us there.

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And when we got there, we all discovered that Ruth of course was there too.

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We were intrigued.

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So we all sat in the first row and Noguchi, a perfectly chanting Isamu.

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I have never known how to pronounce his first name before, but Ruth immediately said it

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as soon as he came into the room.

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He gave an enchanting talk of course and then Ruth invited the three of us over to her apartment

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after the talk which she gave because he and his secretary were coming over and would we like to come over

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for sandwiches and a drink and so would we.

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Oh, we've truly moved and it was a very exciting evening to meet an artist of that caliber so unexpectedly.

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Perfectly charming man.

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He's about Ruth's size.

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They look like a couple of little bookends together and they're perfectly adorable people together.

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At one point in the evening, I remember very well Joan Stone and I were standing together in Ruth's lovely apartment

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and Ruth and Noguchi went over.

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She wanted to show him something and she opened something.

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They had their backs to us and they both got the giggles.

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My dear, we were so curious.

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We were so curious.

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We were too polite to do anything about it at all so we stood as still as we could until he left the room

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and then we rushed over to see what anything was.

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We couldn't find a thing.

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To this day, I don't know what started the giggles, but we were like giggling ourselves like silly girls.

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But he is a perfectly enchanting man.

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Did they seem to be close friends?

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What could you observe from seeing them together?

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A perfect poise and utter charm.

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Yes, very simpatic, good friends certainly.

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As I say, they look like a pair because of the similarity in height and the grace of the two people.

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It was a fascinating experience.

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Of course, he's a fascinating experience.

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Great artist.

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Ruth said when she saw him, she's written, that he was the most beautiful man that she had ever seen.

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I would expect he could have been.

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I saw more character and style certainly than beauty at that point.

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But he's very attractive.

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His personality is completely charming.

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Do you think she made the right decision?

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Oh yes, oh yes, I think so.

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How do you know?

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You make a choice and you have to be right.

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You always have to believe you're right or you break your heart.

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It's true.

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In your own relationship with Ruth, how did she treat the rest of the dancers?

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Did the dancers in the company love her or hate her or what?

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Oh both.

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Dancers that worked for Ruth loved her or hated her.

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I would say that they were never indifferent.

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It was impossible not to be.

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She's too strong a personality.

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I think everybody admired her.

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That emotion was absolutely 100% with the company.

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I can't remember exactly any specifics about that, but it was more of a personal reaction to a stronger personality,

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to a more attractive woman in many cases.

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The men with the women director, this happens every once in a while,

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although the boys have to have more sense than that I would think in a dance company.

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But there certainly was some resentment.

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A good deal of it, as I suppose happens in every ballet company, is the paration never gives me a chance.

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I can't do this, I can't do that.

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Ruthin Bentley always did the leads in the ballet.

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I'm not sure why that's true, but why not for heaven's sake, it was her ballet.

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Besides, nobody matched her very well to work with.

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You have to be sensible about that too.

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I don't know what they would have expected.

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But there was a reaction from her style, and perhaps they were dancing the way they wanted to.

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But my dear, in Chicago it was the only job in town.

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If you wanted to do good work in the ballet, you had better be in this company.

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There was nothing else for a long, long time.

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She held ballet together in Chicago, and we knew that.

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We knew that very well.

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Were people afraid of her?

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Occasionally, I think.

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She could be very sharp, very sarcastic at times.

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She had the women's way of correcting where a man always sounds more impersonal.

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This is true in business also a good deal of the time,

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although women are most certainly putting that aspect away to a great degree now.

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But she could be sarcastic and very cutting about things that she did.

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Not as much as most.

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But she mostly learned from Ruth by example, not by the verbal direction.

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So she wasn't protective, motherly?

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Oh, heavens no.

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I would never think of her like that.

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She was proud of her people, proud of the productions, and we knew that when they were good.

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When they weren't, you most certainly heard about it.

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But most of the things that she did in the long run when they were finally turned out,

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she had worked on them until she was fairly well satisfied.

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I don't see Ruth turning out a product that she did not wish to be known as her own.

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I don't see that happening.

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So when it went on, it was all right with her.

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Now at this point it was not the Page Stone Ballet.

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It was Ruth.

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It was Ruth at the opera.

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I don't remember when the Page Stone Ballet started.

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I believe when they started touring together.

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They did a good many tours together without the corps, without the ballet behind them.

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People don't do that any longer.

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It was a very, very interesting program.

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The two of them were interesting personalities.

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They did solos, they did duets, and the two of them could do a two-hour program.

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They traveled with Ruth Gordon, who was a fantastic pianist and very sympathetic to their work.

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And then they had so much gamut between the two of them.

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They had so much variety between tragedy, the Wagner thing, the Tristan,

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which was a beautiful, beautiful pas de deux, and comedy, Zephyr and Flora, and all kinds of things in between.

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They both did character work beautifully.

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And Bentley, of course, marvelous ballet technician.

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Ruth also had dances, which she did to poetry.

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She did everything.

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Did you ever notice what a beautiful voice she has?

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She has a marvelous speaking voice, perfectly beautiful, very melodic.

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I think she could have made a perfectly magnificent actress if she hadn't been so determined to be a dancer,

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which she was from childhood.

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And her voice hasn't changed as she's gotten older.

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Lots of people's do.

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It gets harsher, it gets scratchy.

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Hers is just as lovely as it was when she was a very young woman.

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But her speaking voice on the stage, she could...

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Oh, there's a cute story about it.

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In one of her books, she was telling Alexandra Danilova, she said,

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I can do pirouettes and recite poetry at the same time.

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Danilova said, what do you say, dear, when you do pirouettes?

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Which is a very good question.

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What kind of poetry did you hear?

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Did you hear the Carl Sandberg things?

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Is that what you remember?

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I didn't hear the Sandberg things.

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I remember the cautionary tales, where she was adorable.

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Tell me then.

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The cautionary tales are Hila Bellach.

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And I can't recite any of them, unfortunately.

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She still can from beginning to end.

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She knows them all.

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But she left a wonderful phrase with me from those, which the end of one is,

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I think you better stick to nurse for fear of finding something worse.

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Which is a good thing to remember in all kinds of funny circumstances.

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She did them in costume and they were demicaracter, you'd call it.

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What do you mean, demicaracter?

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Demicaracter.

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Whole full characters when you're doing Slavonic dances

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and stamping your feet a lot.

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And that's tossing your head and that sort of thing.

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Demicaracter is more gentle where you do a characterization,

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which is maybe occasionally amusing, which these things were.

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Did she share control of the company when you were in it?

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With Bentley?

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Oh yes, I should say so.

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They had a high regard for each other.

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Bentley respected her and truly loved her.

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She was marvelous with him because he was the first dancer in the opera

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when she first started working with him.

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But he didn't have real sophistication and background

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and he most certainly didn't have the ability to get a ballet on.

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I don't mean choreographically, I mean money-wise or anything else.

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So he enjoyed working with her very, very much.

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They were good for each other.

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People said Bentley could have gone to the Balanchine Company,

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become a big classical dancer and that sort of thing.

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He wouldn't have had as fulfilled a life artistically,

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I hate that word, fulfilled a life if he had done that, I don't believe,

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because Balanchine at that point was not doing very much for male dancers.

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He was very big with the ballerinas, and he was wonderful with them.

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But I don't think it would have been the right thing for him to do.

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He had a chance to stay with the Rambeur Ballet in England, but he chose this.

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I think it was just right.

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He did all of the classical ballets, straight classical,

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for instance the Little Ballet in Le Jouivre, which is so unusual.

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He did Juconda and of course he danced the lead male dancer in Juconda.

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Then he worked on Frankie and Johnny, for instance,

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with Ruth was a real collaboration because he was,

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he always called himself a hoover, he was not, I saw him tap dancing,

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he wasn't very good at that.

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He was too tall and he was too balletic and too turned out,

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he could make all the right noises, but he was a jazz dancer, he loved it.

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And his sense of syncopation and that kind of thing was much better than hers.

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And the two of them and Frankie and Johnny had an absolutely perfect thing

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because a lot of those funny, crazy jazz things are bentleys,

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but they are dramatically placed and put in spot by Ruth.

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And of course her work in that ballet is the most jazzy,

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if you want to call it that, that she ever did.

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And jazz is a good word for Frankie and Johnny, it's her period anyway.

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What could you, for being in the company, tell,

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how would you characterize the relationship between Bentley and Ruth?

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It was for the most part extremely sympathetic.

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They understood what they were trying to do together.

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You could see that in Frankie and Johnny a good deal.

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You could also see it in Guns N' Castanets,

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which I think was also another good collaboration.

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I think that he occasionally resented her domination.

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I believe she was the stronger of the two artistically

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and saying what we were going to do, what they were going to do next.

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Then I think he always recognized that her suggestions were good and valid

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and went along with.

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Certainly it wasn't smooth all the way,

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but we never heard or saw any, there was never any public disagreement.

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If they ever had any disagreements, being people,

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both people of great dignity and good taste, they did it somewhere else.

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We never heard it.

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Were they friends?

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Yes, yes indeed.

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They were very companionable.

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I think when they went bucketing around the country together,

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they had a marvelous time.

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Ruth Gordon, Bentley and Ruth, you could see them touring New England.

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They both liked seeing things.

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Bentley was a very intellectual person, extremely.

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Very well read, interested in everything, very much like Ruth.

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What about Tom? Tom Fisher, you said he took a sort of fatherly interest,

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at least in you, did he take a fatherly interest in the rest of the company?

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Oh, he didn't take a fatherly interest.

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He oversaw the company because it was Ruth's.

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He didn't have a fatherly interest in any particular one of us,

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except when we were good or whatnot.

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It was later on that I realized he was a very good friend.

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At the time, as I say, I was too scared of him.

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I truly didn't have very much to do with him at all.

241
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He was very impressive.

242
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He was very knowledgeable.

243
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He was forever telling everybody what to do.

244
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He was the entrepreneur of our little world.

245
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Did you ever see him and Ruth quarrel about anything?

246
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No, never.

247
00:15:17.140 --> 00:15:20.900
No, I wouldn't have been together with him that much at that time.

248
00:15:21.720 --> 00:15:23.560
I have never saw them quarrel.

249
00:15:23.640 --> 00:15:27.160
I have only seen the greatest affection between the two of them.

250
00:15:27.580 --> 00:15:29.320
Did you go out on the road at all, Betsy?

251
00:15:29.380 --> 00:15:30.880
Did you ever tour? Did this company tour?

252
00:15:31.020 --> 00:15:31.720
Oh, yes.

253
00:15:33.400 --> 00:15:37.700
When the first big trips I ever took in my life was to Caracas, Venezuela,

254
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where we had an opera season.

255
00:15:40.440 --> 00:15:43.600
That was a fantastic experience.

256
00:15:44.020 --> 00:15:49.100
We went with a put-together opera company, and we went down on a cruise ship.

257
00:15:49.760 --> 00:15:53.060
I always remember looking up at the...

258
00:15:53.060 --> 00:15:57.500
We went to New York on a bus, which was the most unglamorous procedure,

259
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with the chorus of the opera, who ate oranges all the way to New York.

260
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I can remember the smell in the bus to this day.

261
00:16:04.960 --> 00:16:10.100
This group piling out of a bus at the pier

262
00:16:10.100 --> 00:16:13.960
and getting on the Santa Rosa to go on a spectacular...

263
00:16:14.580 --> 00:16:15.980
It was a regular cruise.

264
00:16:16.700 --> 00:16:21.060
All of those people looking over to see who their glamorous companions were going to be

265
00:16:21.060 --> 00:16:24.440
and seeing this bunch tumble off a bus and up the gangplank,

266
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it must have shocked them beyond words.

267
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We had a marvelous time, and the season was, I think, very successful for Ruth.

268
00:16:32.760 --> 00:16:34.360
It was very glamorous, certainly.

269
00:16:34.360 --> 00:16:37.980
We did more tours on a bus and truck.

270
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People travel that way now.

271
00:16:41.620 --> 00:16:46.100
The road company of Corus Line goes bus and truck, and we did, indeed, too.

272
00:16:46.320 --> 00:16:51.360
We traveled with Yukonda, Love Song, De Vertes Mo, and Bolero.

273
00:16:52.900 --> 00:16:57.140
All over... six weeks at a time, I think, we went out.

274
00:16:57.600 --> 00:16:59.420
We went all through Texas for months.

275
00:16:59.620 --> 00:17:02.540
We played Amarillo, Canyon, all those gay places.

276
00:17:02.540 --> 00:17:04.960
It was quite an experience.

277
00:17:05.340 --> 00:17:07.880
What was that like, on the road, with the bus and truck?

278
00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:08.540
Great fun.

279
00:17:09.960 --> 00:17:14.840
We would pick up, get into the big thing, all of the corda ballet in one.

280
00:17:15.160 --> 00:17:18.420
Bentley occasionally rode with the corps

281
00:17:18.960 --> 00:17:24.000
because he liked to chatter with the corps, loved to talk to us.

282
00:17:24.620 --> 00:17:29.440
And Ruth occasionally, but more often, would be in the car with Ruth Gordon,

283
00:17:30.300 --> 00:17:31.320
who was the musician.

284
00:17:31.320 --> 00:17:33.980
And a driver, I can't remember.

285
00:17:35.040 --> 00:17:37.180
We had two ballet boys with us.

286
00:17:37.340 --> 00:17:40.880
We had the head electrician of the opera.

287
00:17:40.920 --> 00:17:44.560
The head electrician is a suit job, it's not a blue collar.

288
00:17:45.300 --> 00:17:48.460
Marty Fosnack traveled with us, and Manny Brenner and his wife,

289
00:17:48.600 --> 00:17:50.600
Winnie Brenner, who was in the corda ballet.

290
00:17:51.100 --> 00:17:53.700
And the two of them were absolutely marvelous companions,

291
00:17:53.820 --> 00:17:55.800
and that was off on the first tour.

292
00:17:56.300 --> 00:17:59.320
We traveled all the way down through Illinois,

293
00:18:00.440 --> 00:18:06.800
around to Texas, these places in Texas, across the Gulf to New Orleans,

294
00:18:07.040 --> 00:18:09.680
and then back up Florida, and then back up.

295
00:18:09.680 --> 00:18:13.460
It was a long tour, my first time away from home.

296
00:18:14.460 --> 00:18:15.060
Did you share a room?

297
00:18:15.060 --> 00:18:16.960
It rained all the way through Texas.

298
00:18:17.760 --> 00:18:21.560
Yes, Mary Gere was my roommate, and we have been close friends all of our lives.

299
00:18:22.280 --> 00:18:24.700
Borrowed each other bobby pins, talked all night.

300
00:18:25.680 --> 00:18:27.440
Got scolded quite often.

301
00:18:27.440 --> 00:18:27.800
And then one night, when we were on the bus,

302
00:18:27.800 --> 00:18:29.380
and Bentley sent us to the bus one night.

303
00:18:29.900 --> 00:18:33.360
Oh, another girl, Paula Swanson and myself,

304
00:18:33.520 --> 00:18:36.380
got sent to the bus one night without night lunch,

305
00:18:37.420 --> 00:18:40.500
because Bentley could be very severe, very severe,

306
00:18:41.820 --> 00:18:44.040
because we giggled during Bolero.

307
00:18:44.720 --> 00:18:49.780
Well, I'll tell you, Bentley was doing the sexy mail, you know,

308
00:18:49.780 --> 00:18:53.700
and he started snorting away, which we thought was hysterically funny.

309
00:18:53.700 --> 00:18:57.220
And we were behind the scenes going, titter, titter, titter, titter.

310
00:18:57.220 --> 00:19:00.700
Oh, Chris, he could hear us. It was terribly bad discipline.

311
00:19:01.440 --> 00:19:03.780
I mean, it was really bad. You can't do that sort of thing.

312
00:19:04.720 --> 00:19:06.180
So off we went to the bus.

313
00:19:06.220 --> 00:19:08.500
Oh, he yelled and screamed and stamped his feet something fierce.

314
00:19:08.580 --> 00:19:10.760
I think it was mostly because we laughed at him.

315
00:19:12.460 --> 00:19:13.860
Well, he was carrying on, you know.

316
00:19:16.260 --> 00:19:17.040
No, what about...

317
00:19:17.040 --> 00:19:17.820
It's still funny.

318
00:19:18.100 --> 00:19:19.000
It is still funny.

319
00:19:19.940 --> 00:19:20.600
No, what about...

320
00:19:20.600 --> 00:19:21.780
Oh, change of set?

321
00:19:22.160 --> 00:19:22.480
Okay.

322
00:19:23.700 --> 00:19:23.920
We'll be right back.