HoF Number One: Maggie

Okay, as promised or threatened, here is the first of my Hall of Fame posts. There are people I've known whom the world needs to know about, too, or not to forget. The first of these is my ballet teacher from Reno, Margaret Banks, which would no doubt horrify her. Well, that's too damn bad. If there is any sort of afterlife, and they read blogs there, Maggie will just have to deal with the embarrassment. So here goes.

Being a dancer is a lot like being an alcoholic. Sometimes it's exactly like being an alcoholic, to the extent of, well, drinking way too much and waking up face down in apartments you don't recognize, and having to apologize to strangers a lot. But aside from a general fondness for controlled substances, what I mean here is that dancers (and other artists, I’d guess) have to go to class every day or they begin to lose both their edge and their motivation, just as alcoholics attend daily meetings to stay focused and stay sober. There’s more than a surface similarity here, to my mind. I think that in a weird way, we artists are addicted to failure. We’re terribly afraid of failure– along with success, mediocrity, and the big laughing face of God pointing his finger down at us someday and booming out "You thought you could do what? You?!" which pretty much sums up all the other neuroses. In other words, we may be lusting after the muse, but we’re also doing everything we can to keep her away. Sound familiar, anyone? Anyway, going to classes, just like going to meetings for an addict, reaffirms our purpose, supports our choice to actually pursue the unreliable bitch, and reestablishes our place in the artists’ community– all very valuable actions, as any addict worth his salt will tell you. (Just for the record, if anyone knows of a daily meeting for writers, I’d like to sign up. Not only does it really suck to struggle through this alone, trying to get better without any handy teacher around to give corrections, but it’s also hard to remember how important it is without that external calling of a barre and a dozen or so peers in sweaty, torn clothes every afternoon. I want a Writers’ Barre, and I don’t mean the kind that writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were so fond of. Although sometimes that’s nice, too.)

But back to the dancing. Let me tell you about teachers. Ballet teachers are all the same: picture a tiny, elderly creature in a knit sweater and with a slightly mysterious, often impenetrable accent. Her hair is pulled back and probably died some color that would scandalize Mother Nature, and she constantly sports an appraising, not-sour but carefully not-encouraging expression on her face, complete with pursed lips and one slightly raised eyebrow. Her arms are folded, unless they’re extended to their utmost, reaching out like hawk’s wings to demonstrate how the human body can reach and expand, filling the room and touching the opposite walls with its fingertips in spite of the fact that it only stands 4'11" and has shoulders so narrow that you could encircle them with one palm.

This is a ballet teacher. And my ballet teacher, back in Reno, was a little like this, sort of, but she was also a true original, and the kind of character that only Reno seems to breed.

Maggie Banks was petite, and she could somehow, while lecturing you about things like extension and reaching out past your fingertips, breathe in and fill a whole stage that normally required an entire opera company to not seem rattlingly empty. But she was also jolly, and funny, and told great stories about her days in Hollywood and New York and hobnobbing with Gene Kelly and Shirley MacLaine and any other even vaguely musical star you can think of from the 50s and 60s– and just for the record, when I later met several of those people, they were always thrilled to hear about her, and said things like, "Oh my god– Maggie! She was the best, she taught me everything!" which is a pretty damn good recommendation coming from Donald O’Conner. Oh– and also for the record, Maggie was from Canada, so she was blessedly free of the gutteral consonants and twisted, Cyrillic vowels that make so many teachers unintelligible.

Maggie Banks left home at 16 to go to New York and dance solos with American Ballet Theater. I don’t know the year she did this– the late 30s? Early 40s?– but she was known for her extension and her musicality. She could nuance the choreography and turn the simplest step into something groundbreaking. I know this from the reviews and pictures that were framed and hung around her studio, which I read and re-read a million times while waiting for class to start. More about that later.

The other pictures that were hung up were from Hollywood– backstage shots from rehearsals of Can-Can and West Side Story, and 8x10 glossies of legends like Fred Astaire and Ann-Margaret. Now, I had grown up knowing without question that West Side Story was the greatest musical ever made, with the greatest score, and also that Fred Astaire was simply super-human, so brushing past all these pictures, not to mention learning from someone who’d also given Rita Moreno corrections, and hearing stories about how bad Natalie Wood sounded when she sang her songs on set– well, I was touching greatness.

And in spite of all the cynicism I’ve developed since those days, and the disappointments which have led me to reluctantly admit how small and ordinary the world of men is, and how lacking in magic, generally, I’m convinced that, in Maggie’s studio, I was touching greatness. Maggie’s Hollywood was of another era, one in which there truly was a community of stars who hung out at each other’s houses, who worked together at the studios and worked constantly, finishing one musical and starting another like clockwork, but with a glamourous opening every few months to spice things up. This was a world in which Maggie and Debbie Reynolds could wash dishes together at someone’s party because they were tired of hobnobbing and ended up in the kitchen together. It was a place where Maggie could go outside during a break from rehearsal and chat with Bette Davis, who was bitching about Joan Crawford ("We’re all just sitting around waiting for J.C. And I don’t mean Jesus Christ.") It was an era when Maggie could meet Juliet Prowse in her first role and form a lifelong friendship. That one included helping to keep Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley apart at inopportune moments, and breaking the news to Juliet’s husband years later that if he called Juliet’s hotel room in London at 2 in the morning and a man answered, it probably wasn’t because they were holding a late rehearsal.

The magical thing about Maggie, the real source of her enduring greatness, was not just the people she’d known or the bits of history she’d been involved with. I’ve been involved with some history since then, too– I saw apartheid up close and personal, and 9/11, too– and I know that doesn’t make anyone great. But Maggie was down to earth, she was reliable. She was the ultimate professional, who did what she’d said she would, and how she’d promised, and didn’t promise things she couldn’t deliver. She knew herself, knew what she wanted, knew what she could offer and what would and wouldn’t work. I think in Hollywood in any era, those must be exceedingly rare gifts. For a young dancer learning his craft, they were certainly every bit as valuable as learning how to do a plié.

I discovered Maggie when I was 17. My father tracked down her studio for me– I can’t remember where he’d heard about it, and if I had nothing else to thank him for through the years, Maggie would be one great legacy. At that point, Maggie Bank’s Ballet Studio was in a tiny storefront (aren’t they always?) south of downtown Reno. It was dim and cramped, and I didn’t quite understand what to do. You had to enter through the back, if you were dancing, because the studio space itself stretched wall to wall and you weren’t supposed to walk in street shoes over the dance floor. But you would naturally come in the front if you’d never been there. And then the dressing rooms were inadequate (as always) and I think the men’s dressing room doubled as a storage closet. That’s usually the case. If you’re a man in the ballet world, you can count on a certain number of mops in your future.

I took a couple classes. But I actually got serious about Maggie a year or so later, when the studio had moved and I had also gotten really serious about dancing. No more trying this or trying that– I’d found jazz and tap teachers, realized my former ballet muse was a bust. So off I went, again, and this time the studio had moved to the home I remember best, in a business park out by the train tracks in Sparks.

This space was much, much bigger. There was a lobby, and proper dressing rooms (although I seem to remember that the mop still lived in the men’s bathroom). The dance space was huge, or seemed so. And it was packed. Every professional dancer in Reno (with two major production shows and half a dozen cabaret revues going, there were several hundred of those, then) acknowledged Maggie as the teacher of choice. She taught advanced/professional ballet at 4:30 every afternoon (perfectly timed so that working dancers could go straight to their shows when it ended at 6:00, with time for a stop in the cafeteria or at MacDonald’s on the way. There’s that Canadian practicality) and beginning or intermediate class from 6:00 to 7:30. I toiled away in those six o’clock classes and dreamed of the day I’d be allowed into 4:30. I, with a varied host of other beginners, haunted the corridor outside the studio before our class started, and peered in at the pros as they went across the floor, working on jetés or turns or whatever suited Maggie’s fancy that day.

They clapped for each other, sometimes. Or laughed when they fell over. Maggie joined in, or said, "What was that?" Or sometimes stopped the music and said, "Kids, you’ve got to pay attention. It’s–" and she’d go through the motions, stressing what had gone wrong. And then, "Thank you, everybody," and the day was over.

It was much the same for us at six, except we were far more anxious, far less able to laugh and let mistakes roll off. We were avid and serious, as the pros were, too, and we knew Maggie our time spent with Maggie would open all doors and see us on our way into our dance careers. I remember watching at that doorway, wide-eyed at Michael’s perfectly pointed feet, at Leslie’s emotional impact even just doing turns across the floor, at Eva’s extension. Later, I discovered the first male teacher I truly wanted to emulate in Philip Riccobuono, and a couple years after that, when I got hired by the best choreographer I ever worked for, and one of the best in the world, the audition took place in that studio.

Maggie died a couple years ago. She had something that she thought was a persistent flu, and our mutual best friend Angelo urged her to go to the doctor. When she finally did, they found a tumor and wanted to operate immediately. And in surgery, her small intestine was perforated, she developed an infection, and after waking briefly to learn what had happened to her and attest that she didn’t want to be kept alive on machines, she died. It was the end of an era, and another break from that earlier era in show business when professionalism mattered, and when performers were craftspeople first, divas second or third (or not at all).

I’d like to stick an inspiring close on this– that’s what’s expected, after all. She taught us, and set us free, and the world’s a better place and all. And that’s true, but the other truth is that the world is poorer without Maggie, and those of us who were her products are getting older and have moved on in our own lives. We’re not a community, and most of us are not even dancing anymore. Maggie has a legacy, as we all do, and hers is particularly proud, being of hard work and immeasurable talent and love and dedication. And fun, and joy in what you’re doing. That’s all true, it’s irrefutable. But as I get older, I think more and more that I’d trade a few good legacies for the people who left them. I’d rather go to Maggie’s class again, and hear a few more stories.