In a memorable passage in his great 1969 novel Mr. Bridge, writer Evan S. Connell sketched a perfect comic picture of the indifference to art among some members of America’s privileged classes. The titular Mr. Bridge, a high-minded Kansas City lawyer, attends a ballet performance, and while he finds himself pleasantly diverted by the ballerinas, he is perplexed by their male partners.
“No doubt they were necessary for the show, and he could not think of any specific reason the young men should not be dancing,” Connell wrote, maintaining some sympathy with his hero while sending up his provincialism. “All the same he did not quite like it.”
Those of us with more expansive visions of the artistic possibilities of dance might exclaim: If only Mr. Bridge had seen Jacques d’Amboise perform! In his heyday, d’Amboise, who died on May 2 at the age of 86, was the most vigorous and convincing male dancer in the United States. Decades before Mikhail Baryshnikov ditched the Soviet Union for an eager fan base in the West, d’Amboise held audiences in the palm of his hand, thanks to the extraordinary things he could do with his feet.
Few dancers ever seemed as hale and hearty as d’Amboise. To be sure, dancers are on the clock from the first moment they enter a ballet studio — injury, atrophy, and time will inevitably claim their careers — but d’Amboise, similar to Tom Brady, enjoyed unlikely longevity. In 1949, when he became a member of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, Harry Truman was president. By the time he finally stepped away from the company in 1984, Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
Born in 1934 in Dedham, Massachusetts, to Andrew and Georgiana Ahearn, d’Amboise entered the world as plain old Joseph Ahearn. Yet his mother harbored grand notions about herself that were transferred to Joseph and his three siblings. “She always dreamed that she would be an actress, in drama, and that educated her: She’d dance, recite poetry, use beautiful words, speak French, and act and sing,” d’Amboise recalled in a 2011 Paris Review interview to promote his fine memoir, I Was a Dancer. “And her dream was that all her children would be brought up that way.”
Naturally, ballet lessons were de rigueur. After the family relocated to New York, first to Staten Island and then to Washington Heights, Joseph signed up at the School of American Ballet, the student wing of New York City Ballet. Then, in a bit of latent Francophilia, Georgiana decided to confer each member of her immediate family with new surnames: Andrew was now Andre, Georgiana herself was now Georgette, and young Joseph was now Jacques. As if this was not enough, Georgiana/Georgette also decreed that the clan would no longer go by her husband’s last name but her own maiden name, d’Amboise. “It’s aristocratic, it’s French, it has the ‘d’ apostrophe,” d’Amboise remembered his mother saying, as recounted in his memoir. “It sounds better for the ballet, and it’s a better name.”
His mother was not wrong: In the spirit of old-time movie stars whose given names are junked for those that better suited their personas, Georgiana surely recognized that rechristening her son would lend him an enviable exoticism. Yet, for his admirers, part of the fascination was that d’Amboise’s regal moniker didn’t quite match his personality: Perhaps owing to his background as a Staten Islander, there was something scrappy and streetwise about d’Amboise’s stage presence that made his elegant line and immaculate technique all the more surprising, an authentically American admixture of toughness and artistry.
Filmed records of d’Amboise’s key parts at the New York City Ballet preserve his brilliance: In a 1960 performance of Balanchine’s Apollo, d’Amboise exudes self-possession while contending with three muses. And in a 1964 performance of Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes, the dancer spills onto the stage for a solo with the spunk of a super patriot, spinning, hopping, and even saluting. Hollywood took an interest in d’Amboise — in Stanley Donen’s musical masterpiece Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), he is just about the only performer to dance with the abandon of a backwoodsman — but his calling remained the lively arts.
Before he left the New York City Ballet, d’Amboise founded the National Dance Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to spread dance education far and wide. Indeed, his greatest legacy may be the inspiration his dancing gave to others, including two of his four children, Christopher and Charlotte, who each took up dancing themselves. Only the stodgiest among us could watch d’Amboise do his thing and not wish to get up and follow in his virile, vital footsteps.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities
