Books in Brief: Dancing on My Grave

Dancing on My Grave: An Autobiography, by Gelsey Kirkland, with Greg Lawrence (Doubleday, 286 pp., $17.95)

Gelsey Kirkland was perhaps the greatest dramatic classical ballerina America has produced until she nearly killed herself with cocaine in the early 1980s. This chronicle of her meteoric rise with the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, her ghastly fall, and her professed recovery at age 33 is the raw material of self-psychoanalysis, largely devoid of true insight. Though Miss Kirkland’s detailed descriptions of her life and career suggest she sabotaged them for deep-seated personal reasons, such as her unresolved ambivalence toward her perfectionist alcoholic father, she instead pins her tragic demise on nearly every major figure in American ballet. Surely many of Miss Kirkland’s damning anecdotes about such luminaries as George Balanchine, Fernando Bujones, Peter Martins, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Patrick Bissell, the last four of whom were her lovers, are more than a little unfair. Ironically, then, Miss Kirkland’s editor, the determinedly private Jacqueline Onassis, has presided over an embarrassingly intimate piece of self-indulgent mud-slinging. On the other hand, Miss Kirkland is probably correct to point out that Balanchine’s acclaimed neoclassical style is injurious to dancers, that Baryshnikov was a sadistic womanizer, and that American ballet, in general, overemphasizes technique to the near-exclusion of choreographic interpretation. These perceptions give Dancing on My Grave some higher value, but balletomanes will also be fascinated by its rare, vile views from backstage.

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Jacqueline Coleman

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Dancing on My Grave: An Autobiography, by Gelsey Kirkland, with Greg Lawrence (Doubleday, 286 pp., $17.95)

Gelsey Kirkland was perhaps the greatest dramatic classical ballerina America has produced until she nearly killed herself with cocaine in the early 1980s. This chronicle of her meteoric rise with the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, her ghastly fall, and her professed recovery at age 33 is the raw material of self-psychoanalysis, largely devoid of true insight. Though Miss Kirkland’s detailed descriptions of her life and career suggest she sabotaged them for deep-seated personal reasons, such as her unresolved ambivalence toward her perfectionist alcoholic father, she instead pins her tragic demise on nearly every major figure in American ballet. Surely many of Miss Kirkland’s damning anecdotes about such luminaries as George Balanchine, Fernando Bujones, Peter Martins, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Patrick Bissell, the last four of whom were her lovers, are more than a little unfair. Ironically, then, Miss Kirkland’s editor, the determinedly private Jacqueline Onassis, has presided over an embarrassingly intimate piece of self-indulgent mud-slinging. On the other hand, Miss Kirkland is probably correct to point out that Balanchine’s acclaimed neoclassical style is injurious to dancers, that Baryshnikov was a sadistic womanizer, and that American ballet, in general, overemphasizes technique to the near-exclusion of choreographic interpretation. These perceptions give Dancing on My Grave some higher value, but balletomanes will also be fascinated by its rare, vile views from backstage.