Somewhere The Life of Jerome Robbins

Prologue In the end, he came home. Four days earlier, on July 25, 1998, he had suffered a catastrophic stroke and was rushed to New YorkPresbyterian Hospital, where a CAT scan revealed that the entire right hemisphere of his brain had been flooded with massive amounts of blood. His doctors had wanted to put him in intensive care, but it was clear they could do nothing more for him there. So the terms of his living will had been invoked and he had been brought back to the house he had lived in for thirty years and to the circle of family, friends, and lovers who had gathered to say good-bye. Now he lay in his third-floor bedroom, the once quicksilver body still, the sharp eyes unseeing, the voicewhich could warm you or raise blisters on your skinsilent. His breathing was ragged: sometimes he seemed not to be breathing at all, and then suddenly he would take deep, gasping breaths, as if he were desperately trying to fill his lungs with oxygen. "Is he afraid?" his sister had asked when she arrived at the house from her home in Vermont; when she was reassured that no, he wasn't, she said, "I am." Downstairs, in the office that was the center of a milliondollarperyear theatrical business, the telephones rang with concerned calls from associates, colleagues, friends, but upstairs it was quiet except for the rounded cadences of Bach's French Suites on the bedroom CD player. He always liked to have music playing, particularly if it was something he was working on, and in recent weeks, although he'd been far too frail and forgetful to work, he had been listening to this Bach recordingas if he drew comfort or certainty from Bach's clear phrasing or from the confident structure that always brought him back to where he had started. On his bedside table a photograph of a beautiful woman, a dancer stricken with polio at the height of her fame, smiled at him from the antique frame in which he had placed it; on the desk beyond the foot of the bed another photograph, of the young man he had loved and nursed through his final illness, gazed across the room at him. On chairs ranged around the bed sat his sister, two former lovers, his assistants, an old friend and confidant, and the friend's young wife, a physician; it was she who made sure that someone was always holding his hand. The minutes ticked by. Then suddenly his dog, an affable creamcolored mixed breed who had adopted him some years before on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, jumped on the bed and started to lick his cheek. And just as suddenly he opened his eyes and rose up in bed, seeming to take in the faces grouped around him, looking at each one in turn. "You're fine," said his friend's wife, squeezing his hand. "You're fine." There was a silence. He subsided on his pillow, his eyes turned to the ceiling. The dog barked twice. "All right," his friend's wife said now, soothingly. "You're free." The dog let out a long, keening cry. It was over. The next day theNew York Timeslike other newspapers on two continentswould carry his obituary on the front page: "Jerome Robbins, 79, Is Dead: Giant of Ballet and Broadway." The lights on Broadway's theaters would be dimmed for a moment and the flags at Lincoln Center lowered to half-mast, as the world remembered a man who had put an indelible stamp on American theater and dance with ballets likeFancy FreeandThe CageandAfternoon of a Faun and Dances at a Gatheringand musicals likeOn the TownandPeter PanandWest Side StoryandFiddler on the Roof; a "theatrVaill, Amanda is the author of 'Somewhere The Life of Jerome Robbins' with ISBN 9780767904209 and ISBN 0767904206.