It was her father, Vadim Boretszky-Kasadevich, who called a temporary halt to the child prodigy business, by insisting that dance be suspended for a year until she could do some school work.
Discovered at Preobrajenska’s school by George Balanchine, he placed her with the de Basil company, and for a half-dozen years she remained there, save for a brief interlude with Balanchine’s short-lived Les Ballets 1933.
It was that same year that I brought the de Basil company to America the first time, where she joined the trinity of “baby ballerinas”—Baronova and Riabouchinska, of course, being the other two. It is a matter of history how Toumanova became the American rotogravure editors’ delight; how America became Toumanova-conscious.
Strong, remarkably strong though her technique was even in those days, her performances were frequently uneven. Toumanova was a temperamental dancer then, as now, and to those who know only her svelte, slender, mature beauty of today, there may be some wonder that in those days she had to fight a recurring tendency towards embonpoint, and excessive embonpoint. But there were always startling brilliancies. In Jeux d’Enfants and Cotillon, I remember the dazzling fouetées. It is one of Toumanova’s boasts that she was the first dancer to do thirty-two double fouetées and sixteen triples in actual performance. I am not an authority on these technical matters and can, therefore, merely record the statement.
Her unsuccessful Broadway appearance (a musical called Stars in Your Eyes) was followed by a reunion with the de Basil Company in Australia and a short season with him at the Hollywood Theatre, in New York; and there was a later sojourn with the Massine Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Then Hollywood beckoned. There was one film in which she played an acting part, Days of Glory. The picture was certainly not much to talk about, but she married the producer-writer, Casey Robinson.
Since then, she has turned up as guest-artist with one organization after another: the Paris Opera Ballet, the Marquis de Cuevas company, Anton Dolin’s Festival Ballet in London, the San Francisco Civic Ballet; a nomadic balletic existence, interrupted by another Hollywood film appearance, this time in the role of Pavlova in Tonight We Sing, based on my earlier book, Impresario.
As a person there is something about her that is at once naive and ingenuous and, at the same time, deep and grave and tragic. She cries still when she is happy, and is also able to cry when she is sad. She adores to be praised; but, unlike some other dancers I know, she is also anxious for criticism. She solicits it. And when she feels the criticism is sound, she does her best to correct—at least for the moment—the faults that have prompted it. Her devotion to her mother—“Mamochka”—herself an attractive, voluble, and highly emotional woman, is touching and sometimes a shade pathetic. Toumanova’s whole life, career, and story have been, for the most part, the thrice-familiar tale of the White Russian émigré. Like all émigré stories, hers is extremely sentimental. Sentiment and sentimentality play a big part in Tamara’s life.
She is, I feel, unbreakable, unquenchable. She is, in her maturity, even more beautiful than she was as a “baby ballerina.” She is, I suppose, precisely the popular conception of what a glamorous ballerina is, or at least should be. Her personality is that of a complete theatrical extrovert. The last row of the gallery is her theatre target. Hers is not a subtle personality. It is a sort of motion picture idea of a ballerina assoluta, a sort of reincarnation of the fascinating creatures from whose carriages adoring balletomanes unhitched the horses and hauled them to Maxim’s for supper, dining the course of which the creatures were toasted in vintage champagne drunk from slippers. It doesn’t really matter that her conception is a bit dated. With Toumanova it is effective.
Tamara’s conception of the ballerina in these terms is deliberate. She admits her desire is to smash the audience as hard as she can. With her a straight line is veritably the shortest distance between two points, and no ballerina makes the distance between herself and her audience so brief. This conception has been known to lead to overacting and to the ignoring of the colleagues with whom she is dancing at the time.
There is with her, as ever, great charm, an eager enthusiasm, and I am happy to say, a fine sense of loyalty. This is a quality I particularly appreciate. It has been shown to me on more than one occasion. When I brought the Paris Opera Ballet for the New York City Festival, Tamara was not nor had she been at that time a member of the Paris Opera Company. She barely knew Lifar, yet it was she who became his champion in New York. It was a calculated risk to her career which she took, because she respected Lifar as an artist, did not believe the stories about him, and was interested in fair play.