The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  She and I were dressed almost exactly alike. White satin knee britches, long white satin coat trimmed with silver braid, a lace jabot, a very white wig. She was in a white carriage being drawn by a white horse. A real one.

  I was rehearsing in my head the little thing I had been given to do with two other boys in Faust. Could it be called a solo? If something that took two minutes and was danced with two other people could be called a solo, it was a solo.

  Suddenly, just before the music cue, the profile in the carriage turned, looked at me, and the voice said, “What number makeup are you wearing?” I said automatically, “Max Factor 22.” We went on. There was no time for a “Thank you.”

  When I came out of the elevator after the performance, she was standing in the back corridor. A tallish woman with short light-brown hair, in a sort of Audrey Hepburn style. Not a really beautiful face-Minda’s eyes were a little small–but she had a great nose. She still has it, as far as I know. Like a Greek coin in profile–very straight, starting almost between her eyes.

  As a group of us burst out of the elevator she said, “Which one of you gave me our makeup number?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Thanks. I thought it looked so much better than mine. Sorry to just yell out at you.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  We were all standing around, sort of impressed that one of the stars was chatting with us. They did, of course, but we were always aware of that star aura.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “Harry Potter,” I told her, reaching out for the hand she was holding out towards me.

  In Michigan women didn’t introduce themselves and shake hands. Men did. Women just smiled and hung on to their purses.

  I said, “These are my friends Alfred Houston and Tommy Corrigan and Robby Schmidt.” I always used full names, even then. I hate introducing people by first names, as though they’re disposable.

  “You’ve got a lot of ee’s there,” Minda said as she shook their hands.

  “That’s because we’re boy dancers,” I said. “Everybody is Robby and Tommy and Harry.”

  “Harry doesn’t fall into that category,” she said. “You’ve been saved. Though it doesn’t sound like you’ll want to keep it when you’re a big star. Harold Potter, more likely.”

  “Who knows if that will ever happen?” I said. We were beginning to clog up the narrow passageway to the stage door, and the other dancers were pushing past us as they went out, hating us for talking to a star.

  “Oh, I think so. I think so,” Minda said. “You’ve got the look.” Her attention wandered. She turned and took a very large red fox coat out of the hands of a tall man behind her. “This is my husband, Josh. Josh Meryl. I got my name legitimately. Everyone says I never got that name in Dayton. They’re right.”

  Mr. Josh shook hands all around, said they had to go, and they went out right ahead of us. There were no fans waiting for Minda Meryl. She wasn’t that kind of star yet. They were waiting for Lisa Della Casa, who had sung the Marschallin that night. So beautiful, really beautiful. She looked exactly the same offstage as onstage. We would much rather have chatted with her. For us, that was a real star. Of course, Minda Meryl is a real star now, and if she still chats with the ballet boys as she leaves the new opera house, I’m sure they are suitably thrilled.

  I had actually noticed Minda before in a rehearsal of Carmen. A dress rehearsal. She was stepping in for some imported soprano who was sick. I loved her more later but I liked her a lot at the rehearsal.

  The costumer had decided that Carmen would enter with her friends swathed in yards of black veiling. Carmen, that is. Not the friends. As they came swaggering in, Maestro Stiedry stopped the rehearsal and said, “Mees Meryl, you are not on the music!”

  In a perfectly ladylike voice she said loudly, “I’ve got so goddamn much veil, I can’t even see you!” The offending veil was removed and the rehearsal went on.

  In the dressing room for days afterwards you could hear someone or other saying, “I’ve got so goddamn much veil …”

  All of us got to know Minda better when we did La Périchole together later that season. She was doing it with Cyril Ritchard, the English music hall’s answer to Noël Coward. It was an Offenbach opéra bouffe from the Second Empire, something about some Spanish viceroy in Peru who falls in love with a beautiful street singer. The steet singer was Minda, La Périchole.

  Minda shared the role with Patrice Munsel. They were both a lot of fun. We danced in a kind of street circus that entered with La Périchole in the first act. Bulky Don was the weight lifter, and I was a hat seller. I wore a stack of six hats and did a little dance. I guess that was a real solo.

  Minda kidded around with us in the wings while we were waiting to go on. One night as we were leaving the theater at the same time, she said, “Are you going somewhere to eat?” Josh wasn’t waiting for her. “Mind if I go with you?” she said.

  We were thrilled, of course, and so we all traipsed across Seventh Avenue, Minda in her red fox. Together we had trays and shiny tables at Bickford’s. She wanted to know all about us, where we were from, where we had studied, what we planned to do. She acted more like an older sister. Not motherly. She’s actually one of the rare stars who wasn’t all that thrilled with herself. Maybe fighting her way out of Dayton and through the drafty halls of opera houses in Leipzig and Darmstadt did it. Later, she was to be a real friend. I was appreciative at the time, but we never saw each other after I stopped dancing.

  Minda had a way with words. When I was discussing the boys in the dressing room, she said, “It’s called promiscuous. It’s called sleeping around. It’s called being boy crazy. It’s called high school.”

  I told her about Henry Right, the young man in the opera management who was so in love with one of our budding choreographers in the corps de ballet. Mr. Right was trying to help launch the boy’s career, and was rewarded with an occasional bit of nooky. Minda said, “The fucking he’s getting isn’t worth the fucking he’s taking.”

  When I wondered whether one of the ballet critics was hallucinating when he eulogized a really bad male dancer in his column, she said, “He writes his column with his cock.”

  “More like his ass,” I replied.

  “You’re getting to be quite a witty lad,” she said admiringly.

  I loved Minda. I’ve never been so outspoken since.

  On dieting, Minda recommended, “When you feel like eating, fuck instead. If that’s possible, of course.” The Minda Meryl lifestyle should have been made into a book.

  One of my favorite remarks was about a new contralto who was making a big hit at the Met. “They’re just trying to slow her down enough so she can be a nymphomaniac,” she said.

  After a while, she and Josh used to invite me to go places with them. I became a kind of surrogate kid brother. I never discussed my private life with them. I was happy to go to parties and the movies with Josh and Minda.

  One night, we were at a party that turned out to be more of an affair than they had thought it was going to be. Everyone was rather stuffy and all dressed up, so Minda drank more champagne than she should have. When a very Fairfield, Connecticut, kind of couple introduced themselves, Minda said, “This is my husband, Lester, and my lover, Mitch,” giving us make-believe names. The woman looked at me in a patronizing way and said, “Did you say ‘bitch’?” Minda said, looking her very squarely in the eye, “Not to him, I didn’t.”

  They had a comfortable apartment in the West Seventies, and some Sundays when I didn’t have a modern-dance rehearsal, I would go there for brunch. We would read the Sunday Times together.

  In Michigan, we didn’t have anything like the Sunday Times. It overwhelmed me a bit. I often thought that if you had absolutely nothing to do and all the money in the world, you still couldn’t do everything that was in the Sunday Times. The plays, the concerts, the art exhibits, the movies. So much to do. Selecting what you wanted to do was wh
at made you into a New Yorker. New Yorkers decide “I only do this,” narrowing their lives down to John Cage concerts, movies from Yugoslavia, and George Bernard Shaw plays. Then you knew who you were and so did everybody else.

  The Sex Squad

  There were ten of us in the Sex Squad. Ten boys. There were ten girls, too, but they didn’t really count in our minds.

  Being in the Sex Squad didn’t mean you were among the ten best dancers, it meant you were among the ten most fuckable dancers. Let me make it clear that when I say “fuckable,” I mean desirable. There were some of us that didn’t fancy some guy jumping our bones but much preferred jumping his.

  Let’s see. Who exactly was in the Sex Squad?

  Illy Ilquist: Tall, blond, a handsome face and a sumptuous body and not a bad dancer at all.

  Rex Ames: Shorter than Illy. Strongly resembling Tyrone Power, he probably had the strongest technique in the company.

  Robby Schmidt: Our enfant terrible. Very sexy, short, a good jump, but not as much technique as he thought he had. And a complete slut.

  Tony Compostella: Later Antonio Compostella. Dark, not particularly handsome. Not a bad technique, but a long body and shortish legs. In training to be a slut.

  Tommy Corrigan: Red-haired, cute, again a long torso and shortish legs, but on him it looked good. He would have liked to be a slut but was too Catholic.

  Clifford Fearing: Our Heathcliff. Very dark and handsome. Not much of a dancer and never pretended to be. From somewhere in the Caribbean. Famous for his self-introduction, “Suck or fuck?” Hung out at the YMCA a lot.

  Todd Weinstein: An excellent dancer. Blondish with slightly protruding eyes. A Margaret Craske favorite, although he danced in the Antony Tudor manner.

  Bobby Ferrett: I think he was from the Philippines actually, despite the last name. He really couldn’t dance at all, but he was handsome and had a nice body and his family was very rich. The Met knew a good thing when they saw it.

  Robert Rhodes: I never knew him very well. He wasn’t bad-looking and could actually dance with a lot of style and presence. He was a Craske favorite, also, and left the company mid-season because he had supposedly sat on some broken glass while taking a bath. Who knows? Of course, everyone in the dressing room thought he had definitely sat on something in the bathtub that had put him out of commission.

  And then there was me: God knows how I would be described by one of the other dancers. Probably like this: Kind of blond. Kind of a hick. Beginning to develop some real technique. Seems very innocent, but there has to be more to it than that. And they would have been right.

  My great friend Alfred was not in the Sex Squad, and I’m sure to his great relief. He was really too noble-looking for the sexy contortions Zachary Solov had contrived for us to dance. And he would have hated being painted orange and then having to wash it off in the company of others. That was not Alfred at all.

  Just because we were in the Sex Squad didn’t develop any particular esprit de corps. It just reassured us all that in the evanescent world of ballet, we were among the season’s most admired butterflies. Probably something like the Ziegfeld Follies used to be. Beautiful and very admired. But loved? That was another story altogether.

  Alfred Thought He Was Jean Cocteau

  One of my best friends at the opera was Alfred. He looked like a French refugee. The truth was much plainer. His parents, Sally and Ed, lived way downtown on the Lower East Side in a housing project. He lived with them when I first met him. They regarded their son with awe. It was as though a peacock had deposited its egg in the nest of two sparrows. “What have we wrought?” could be seen in their eyes as tall, elegant, very European Alfred passed before their wondering eyes.

  Alfred was a particular favorite of Miss Craske at the opera school. Partly, I think, because of his elongated and articulate body. He looked like the illustrations in a “How To” ballet book with his high-arched feet, his slender thighs, his strong-beaked face with the swept-back hair. His body looked like it was capable of any ballet position. Which it was. However, energy and attack and expressing his emotions through his body were not his. Alfred once said to me, “With those legs they shouldn’t try to make you dance. They should just let you walk around.” Which was actually more true of himself.

  Another reason for Miss Craske’s attachment to Alfred is that he was something of the beau idéal of a ballerina’s partner from the 1920s. In photographs of Pavlova being partnered, her male companions had the same long, slender limbs and blade-like profile as Alfred. I think he brought back the dear, dead days when Miss Craske was frolicking in the back row of the Pavlova company, as it hauled itself from Canberra to Perth, Vancouver to Quebec, Buenos Aires to Bogotá. Miss Craske, it was rumored, had also danced travesty roles–male partnering roles in which she dressed as a boy. Evidendy, this was very common in the early part of the century. Once I did find a picture of someone named Craske in a kind of romantic-chevalier outfit. Large plumed hat, knee britches, with long hair. It could have been her. Miss Craske, gray hair in a bun and tan slacks, lived wreathed in the mysteries of her past. She never reminisced.

  What she did do was involve favorite students in the mysteries of her love for an Indian guru called Baba. There seemed to be an ashram somewhere in Miss Craske’s past. Her pet students seemed to favor Baba themselves. Those of us who were not pets of Miss Craske believed that they were sucking up to her, feigning interest in her living Indian deity, when actually their primary interests were getting her attention and getting laid. Wasn’t everyone’s?

  To his great credit Alfred never displayed the faintest interest in Baba or any other Oriental mysteries. Even though among the leading Craske favorites, he sailed serenely along pursuing his own internal destiny and ignoring all else. Miss Craske respected that, I’m sure. I once asked him about Baba. He said, “Mama and Papa may be gaga for Baba, but I’m not.”

  Alfred’s internal destiny was to live as though it were the 1920s and he was in France. His head of a hawk did resemble Jean Cocteau’s, and he did nothing to discourage this comparison. When not studying dance, he drew, in the style of the Russian expatriate artist Pavel Tchelitchev. Tchelitchev had a studio on East Fifty-fifth Street, and Alfred sometimes hung around in that neighborhood, hoping to run into him by chance. Perhaps attract his attention. He was not physically unlike Tchelitchev either. Tchelitchev might think of him as a son, but that was unlikely. Tchelitchev’s longtime lover was Charles-Henri Ford–perky, adorable, and full of cheek, absolutely the other end of the spectrum from Alfred. True, Tchelitchev had discovered Nicholas Magellanes lounging about on the sidewalks of New York and had sent him over to Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine at the School of American Ballet. He was now one of the premier danseurs of the New York City Ballet.

  But more, Tchelitchev had come from the 1920s art world of between-the-wars in Paris. I knew nothing of this scene, but I learned all about it from Alfred: Picasso, Derain, Tchelitchev, and other artists designing sets for the Diaghilev ballet company. Les Six, the French musical avant-garde, created scores to be danced to. Alice Nikitina, the fragile young ballerina, was the mistress of Lord Beaverbrook. This was glamour, certainly as Alfred saw it.

  During our first year at the Met, Alfred moved to a little top-floor cold-water flat on Bank Street in the West Village. It could well have been in Montmartre: the walls an ancient gray plaster that must have been painted white before the First World War. A narrow iron cot. Paintings leaning their faces towards the walls. Small plaster works on the fireplace mantel. No curtains. A fire escape outside the windows. I don’t think I was ever there in the evening. I remember no lamps, only limp New York light filtering in from the courtyard behind the building. There was absolutely no color. Even Alfred’s eyes were the color of dust. In this little enfilade of small rooms it was forever 1928. Alfred even dressed it, in his black pants and long-sleeved white dress shirt with the sleeves turned up a few times. Not too long ago, I saw an early photo of V
ladimir Nabokov rowing on a lake somewhere in Germany in the 1920s that looked exactly like Alfred in the 1950s.

  Alfred drew elongated male nudes as though they were floating overhead or drifting off towards the horizon, stunted children dressed in gigantic leaves, figures already much explored by Pavel Tchelitchev. His paintings, however, were much more his own, and often showed a figure closely resembling himself. Sometimes he was a man waiting on a lonely train-station terrace in a country that was clearly not the United States. Or a figure with his face plunged into a vase of brilliantly red flowers. Loneliness, torment, beauty of a magical sort were Alfred’s stock in trade. I was entranced.

  I was equally entranced with his stories, recounted in his cracked, old-man’s voice in a drifting, matter-of-fact manner. He told me this: one afternoon, as he lay resting in the gloaming on his narrow cot with no lights on, he heard a noise. He looked up. A man was on the fire escape trying to jimmy the window open. Someone else would have leaped up shouting or run to the door to escape before the man could enter.

  Alfred rose and silently glided across the room and pressed his pale face with the large, staring gray eyes to the window, just above the burglar’s lowered head. The burglar glanced up, saw the spectral face, and leaped back, shouting. With a clang, his tool fell the five stories into the courtyard. Clinging to the flimsy fire escape railing for a moment, he gathered himself and fled up the fire escape to the roof. Then Alfred drifted back to his cot and resumed his nap.

  This is his story, anyway. I loved it particularly because it was unplanned. This is how Alfred responded to an emergency–as he thought Gertrude Stein would have liked him to.

  He also had a favorite story about his father. He was seated in a park near their housing development one afternoon when he saw a woman approaching he was sure he knew. As she came closer, he became ever surer that she was among his acquaintances. But who? Finally, when she arrived directly in front of him, stopped, and said hello, he knew who it was: his daughter.