Amanda Vaill opens her absorbing biography of the choreographer Jerome Robbins with an all too familiar psychological diagnosis: he was, she writes, ‘a man of contradictions’, in search of ‘a haven of love and acceptance’ he never quite found. ‘If in his professional, creative life “he was always right” … in private, he could be conflicted, vulnerable and torn by self-doubt.’
Some 500 pages later, as his ashes are cast into the sea off Long Island, the conflicts, vulnerabilities and self-doubt seem irrelevant, and Robbins looks like a simple case of someone always driven, driven, driven to work, fuelled by an almost demoniac capacity to drag everyone else into his vortex of creative activity.
In that process, he could be very cruel. Vaill is putting it politely when she remarks that ‘when trying to realise and protect his sometimes inchoate artistic vision, Jerry was fierce and heedless of the toll he exacted from others’. His dancers could be more pungent. ‘Just murder to work with’, said one; ‘he didn’t notice us as human beings,’ said another.
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