Betsy Ross Davis No. 05 [June 13, 1985]

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But I thought really, I think they sound silly.

Yeah, it was about sex and marriage and who was doing what, all this sort of thing, or what they approved of or what they would do.

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

And I thought that's a silly thing.

But I don't think they meant it.

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

Like the Fitzgerald in the 20s.

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

Although I do think her affair with Noguchi was important.

That was a serious one.

Sorry with him later.

He came here for a speech and we all went.

And they went back.

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

And we were all at the arts club.

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

So Ruth was there.

Tell me when you're laying down bars.

No, we are rolling with speed.

We are rolling with speed.

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

I was at the arts club with Ruth several years ago, three, four maybe, when Noguchi was going to make a talk there.

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

So I responded to the invitation at once.

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

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

We were intrigued.

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

I have never known how to pronounce his first name before, but Ruth immediately said it as soon as he came into the room.

He gave an enchanting talk of course and then Ruth invited the three of us over to her apartment after the talk which she gave because he and his secretary were coming over and would we like to come over for sandwiches and a drink and so would we.

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

Perfectly charming man.

He's about Ruth's size.

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

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

She wanted to show him something and she opened something.

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

My dear, we were so curious.

We were so curious.

We were too polite to do anything about it at all so we stood as still as we could until he left the room and then we rushed over to see what anything was.

We couldn't find a thing.

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

But he is a perfectly enchanting man.

Did they seem to be close friends? What could you observe from seeing them together? A perfect poise and utter charm.

Yes, very simpatic, good friends certainly.

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

It was a fascinating experience.

Of course, he's a fascinating experience.

Great artist.

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

I would expect he could have been.

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

But he's very attractive.

His personality is completely charming.

Do you think she made the right decision? Oh yes, oh yes, I think so.

How do you know? You make a choice and you have to be right.

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

It's true.

In your own relationship with Ruth, how did she treat the rest of the dancers? Did the dancers in the company love her or hate her or what? Oh both.

Dancers that worked for Ruth loved her or hated her.

I would say that they were never indifferent.

It was impossible not to be.

She's too strong a personality.

I think everybody admired her.

That emotion was absolutely 100 % with the company.

I can't remember exactly any specifics about that, but it was more of a personal reaction to a stronger personality, to a more attractive woman in many cases.

The men with the women director, this happens every once in a while, although the boys have to have more sense than that I would think in a dance company.

But there certainly was some resentment.

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

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

Ruthin Bentley always did the leads in the ballet.

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

Besides, nobody matched her very well to work with.

You have to be sensible about that too.

I don't know what they would have expected.

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

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

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

There was nothing else for a long, long time.

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

We knew that very well.

Were people afraid of her? Occasionally, I think.

She could be very sharp, very sarcastic at times.

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

This is true in business also a good deal of the time, although women are most certainly putting that aspect away to a great degree now.

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

Not as much as most.

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

So she wasn't protective, motherly? Oh, heavens no.

I would never think of her like that.

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

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

But most of the things that she did in the long run when they were finally turned out, she had worked on them until she was fairly well satisfied.

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

I don't see that happening.

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

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

It was Ruth.

It was Ruth at the opera.

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

I believe when they started touring together.

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

People don't do that any longer.

It was a very, very interesting program.

The two of them were interesting personalities.

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

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

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

They had so much variety between tragedy, the Wagner thing, the Tristan, which was a beautiful, beautiful pas de deux, and comedy, Zephyr and Flora, and all kinds of things in between.

They both did character work beautifully.

And Bentley, of course, marvelous ballet technician.

Ruth also had dances, which she did to poetry.

She did everything.

Did you ever notice what a beautiful voice she has? She has a marvelous speaking voice, perfectly beautiful, very melodic.

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

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

Lots of people's do.

It gets harsher, it gets scratchy.

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

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

Oh, there's a cute story about it.

In one of her books, she was telling Alexandra Danilova, she said, I can do pirouettes and recite poetry at the same time.

Danilova said, what do you say, dear, when you do pirouettes? Which is a very good question.

What kind of poetry did you hear? Did you hear the Carl Sandberg things? Is that what you remember? I didn't hear the Sandberg things.

I remember the cautionary tales, where she was adorable.

Tell me then.

The cautionary tales are Hila Bellach.

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

She still can from beginning to end.

She knows them all.

But she left a wonderful phrase with me from those, which the end of one is, I think you better stick to nurse for fear of finding something worse.

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

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

What do you mean, demicaracter? Demicaracter.

Whole full characters when you're doing Slavonic dances and stamping your feet a lot.

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

Demicaracter is more gentle where you do a characterization, which is maybe occasionally amusing, which these things were.

Did she share control of the company when you were in it? With Bentley? Oh yes, I should say so.

They had a high regard for each other.

Bentley respected her and truly loved her.

She was marvelous with him because he was the first dancer in the opera when she first started working with him.

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

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

So he enjoyed working with her very, very much.

They were good for each other.

People said Bentley could have gone to the Balanchine Company, become a big classical dancer and that sort of thing.

He wouldn't have had as fulfilled a life artistically, I hate that word, fulfilled a life if he had done that, I don't believe, because Balanchine at that point was not doing very much for male dancers.

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

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

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

I think it was just right.

He did all of the classical ballets, straight classical, for instance the Little Ballet in Le Jouivre, which is so unusual.

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

Then he worked on Frankie and Johnny, for instance, with Ruth was a real collaboration because he was, he always called himself a hoover, he was not, I saw him tap dancing, he wasn't very good at that.

He was too tall and he was too balletic and too turned out, he could make all the right noises, but he was a jazz dancer, he loved it.

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

And the two of them and Frankie and Johnny had an absolutely perfect thing because a lot of those funny, crazy jazz things are bentleys, but they are dramatically placed and put in spot by Ruth.

And of course her work in that ballet is the most jazzy, if you want to call it that, that she ever did.

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

What could you, for being in the company, tell, how would you characterize the relationship between Bentley and Ruth? It was for the most part extremely sympathetic.

They understood what they were trying to do together.

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

You could also see it in Guns N' Castanets, which I think was also another good collaboration.

I think that he occasionally resented her domination.

I believe she was the stronger of the two artistically and saying what we were going to do, what they were going to do next.

Then I think he always recognized that her suggestions were good and valid and went along with.

Certainly it wasn't smooth all the way, but we never heard or saw any, there was never any public disagreement.

If they ever had any disagreements, being people, both people of great dignity and good taste, they did it somewhere else.

We never heard it.

Were they friends? Yes, yes indeed.

They were very companionable.

I think when they went bucketing around the country together, they had a marvelous time.

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

They both liked seeing things.

Bentley was a very intellectual person, extremely.

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

What about Tom? Tom Fisher, you said he took a sort of fatherly interest, at least in you, did he take a fatherly interest in the rest of the company? Oh, he didn't take a fatherly interest.

He oversaw the company because it was Ruth's.

He didn't have a fatherly interest in any particular one of us, except when we were good or whatnot.

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

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

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

He was very impressive.

He was very knowledgeable.

He was forever telling everybody what to do.

He was the entrepreneur of our little world.

Did you ever see him and Ruth quarrel about anything? No, never.

No, I wouldn't have been together with him that much at that time.

I have never saw them quarrel.

I have only seen the greatest affection between the two of them.

Did you go out on the road at all, Betsy? Did you ever tour? Did this company tour? Oh, yes.

When the first big trips I ever took in my life was to Caracas, Venezuela, where we had an opera season.

That was a fantastic experience.

We went with a put -together opera company, and we went down on a cruise ship.

I always remember looking up at the...

We went to New York on a bus, which was the most unglamorous procedure, with the chorus of the opera, who ate oranges all the way to New York.

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

This group piling out of a bus at the pier and getting on the Santa Rosa to go on a spectacular...

It was a regular cruise.

All of those people looking over to see who their glamorous companions were going to be and seeing this bunch tumble off a bus and up the gangplank, it must have shocked them beyond words.

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

It was very glamorous, certainly.

We did more tours on a bus and truck.

People travel that way now.

The road company of Corus Line goes bus and truck, and we did, indeed, too.

We traveled with Yukonda, Love Song, De Vertes Mo, and Bolero.

All over...

six weeks at a time, I think, we went out.

We went all through Texas for months.

We played Amarillo, Canyon, all those gay places.

It was quite an experience.

What was that like, on the road, with the bus and truck? Great fun.

We would pick up, get into the big thing, all of the corda ballet in one.

Bentley occasionally rode with the corps because he liked to chatter with the corps, loved to talk to us.

And Ruth occasionally, but more often, would be in the car with Ruth Gordon, who was the musician.

And a driver, I can't remember.

We had two ballet boys with us.

We had the head electrician of the opera.

The head electrician is a suit job, it's not a blue collar.

Marty Fosnack traveled with us, and Manny Brenner and his wife, Winnie Brenner, who was in the corda ballet.

And the two of them were absolutely marvelous companions, and that was off on the first tour.

We traveled all the way down through Illinois, around to Texas, these places in Texas, across the Gulf to New Orleans, and then back up Florida, and then back up.

It was a long tour, my first time away from home.

Did you share a room? It rained all the way through Texas.

Yes, Mary Gere was my roommate, and we have been close friends all of our lives.

Borrowed each other bobby pins, talked all night.

Got scolded quite often.

And then one night, when we were on the bus, and Bentley sent us to the bus one night.

Oh, another girl, Paula Swanson and myself, got sent to the bus one night without night lunch, because Bentley could be very severe, very severe, because we giggled during Bolero.

Well, I'll tell you, Bentley was doing the sexy mail, you know, and he started snorting away, which we thought was hysterically funny.

And we were behind the scenes going, titter, titter, titter, titter.

Oh, Chris, he could hear us.

It was terribly bad discipline.

I mean, it was really bad.

You can't do that sort of thing.

So off we went to the bus.

Oh, he yelled and screamed and stamped his feet something fierce.

I think it was mostly because we laughed at him.

Well, he was carrying on, you know.

No, what about...

It's still funny.

It is still funny.

No, what about...

Oh, change of set? Okay.

We'll be right back.

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