The Fiery Grande Dame of Musical Theater Kicks Up Her Heels. And Forgets Her Age.
(This interview was conducted in October 1982. Agnes de Mille passed away in 1993 at the age of 88.)
By Gregory N. Joseph
“REVOLUTION” is an overused word, but choreographer Agnes de Mille did precisely that to the American musical theater when she incorporated ballet as an integral part of the storyline in “Oklahoma!” four decades ago.
Before the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein classic made its bow on Broadway in 1943, dance had always been decorative, something to serve as a backdrop for the main action, or at the very most, to provide an animated interlude between scenes.
Now the Terpsichore began to rate equal billing with the actors, sets, costumes and other prime elements of the musical production.
“Really, I was just trying to do good dancing, not really revolutionize anything,” de Mille recalled.
“I had done quite a bit of work in American folk dancing and I thought I was pretty good at it, so I decided to use that style in the play. But this business about it and my choreography being ‘Americanized’ and all that is ridiculous.
“They like to say that anything that’s rough or uncouth is ‘lusty and American,’ and it’s just not so. My choreography simply captures a feeling, an atmosphere, that’s all.”
De Mille had traveled to the West Coast from New York to participate in the first of the 1982 “Balboa Lectures: Arts & Letters” series at the San Diego Museum of Art.
She and her husband, Walter F. Prude, a concert agent, reside in a cavernous, book-lined apartment in Greenwich Village. Both are in ill health — she suffered a stroke in 1975 and has no feeling on her right side, and he had a spinal operation last December.
But, with a friend in tow to help her along, de Mille made the trip anyhow, ever the fiery grande dame of the American musical theater with an opinion to offer on everything from the relative artistry of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly to government funding of the arts.
She also is not averse to discussing her famous family — her father, William, a playwright; her uncle, Cecil B. de Mille, the celebrated (or demeaned, according to your tastes) film producer and director; and her maternal grandfather, political economist Henry George, noted for his study, “Progress and Poverty,” and his espousal of a single-tax theory (whereby all tax revenue would derive from a levy on the value of land and other natural resources).
“Cecil could be enormously charming,” she said of her uncle, the director of “The Ten Commandments” and other movie spectacles, who died in 1959.
“He did fine pictures at the beginning, then found that the combination of sex and religion could be lethally popular. He was a highly reactionary man. But my father, on the other hand, was a real democrat, a real thinker.”
Of Astaire and Kelly, she said: “Astaire’s an artist, Kelly’s a tap dancer — when he (Kelly) gets outside of that, he makes a fool of himself.”
She dismissed Kelly’s performance in “An American in Paris” out of hand, even though the movie won the 1951 Oscar as Best Picture and is generally thought to contain Kelly’s finest dancing on film. “What is it? Just a bunch of colors splashed on the screen and him moving around in front of it.”
Shifting her frail, 5-foot-3 frame and raising her cane off the floor for emphasis, de Mille related how, after a series of setbacks, her career took a turn for the better in 1942 when she staged her first full-length ballet, a western-like number titled “Rodeo,” for the Ballet Russe del Monte Carlo.
Although struggling to make ends meet at the time, she managed to scrape together enough money to buy tickets to the opening night for Rodgers and Hammerstein. She knew the great writing tandem was considering doing a musical based on “Green Grow the Lilacs,” and would need a choreographer.
She wanted the job. She got it.
“The opening night of ‘Rodeo’ was an absolute triumph,” she remembered. “There were 22 curtain calls.”
De Mille, who choreographed 14 Broadway shows — including “Brigadoon,” “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” and “Paint Your Wagon” — believes her forceful, romantic style of dance, rich in showmanship and verve, became popular with audiences largely because of the nationalistic fervor of the times.
“I came along at a very good time,” she said. “‘Oklahoma!’ opened at the height of World War II, when people in the country were searching for their roots, for reaffirmation of themselves as Americans.
“And I also came along during a period of great composers. I worked with great ones — Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Frederick Loewe, Richard Rodgers.
“There’s nobody like that now. (Director) Hal Prince’s show, ‘Evita,’ is, in many ways, brilliant, but the dancing is on a postage stamp. There is no real dance to it. And look at what won the best-musical Tony Award this year, ‘Nine’ — there’s no dancing in it, just a girl wiggling her hips.”
De Mille refuses to tell anyone her age. “They’ve guessed everything from 65 to 89, and I’ve forgotten myself. “That’s the God’s honest truth!”
Then she paused.
“I’ve become so impoverished physically,” she said quietly, looking down. “I used to have such great pride in my feet, my legs. They were the most beautiful in the business. No more, no more.”
