November 3, 2014 • 28 mins
This Native American dancer was the first grand ballerina of the United States. Through her partnership with famed choreographer George Balanchine, she helped shape ballet in America and served as an inspiration for artists from all backgrounds.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's topic was actually
suggested by Tracy. She has been looking for more Native
(00:23):
American topics because she wanted to work on something uh
in that arena, and she came across this one. But
then she asked me if I would like to do
the research on it because it involves ballet, and my
answer was, of course, maye uh. And there's a person
that I have long and mireed. So the woman that
we're focusing on today is often referred to as a
trailblazer because she was a Native American who became the
(00:44):
prima ballerina for the New York City Ballet. But she
was a trailblazer period, even if you discount her Native
American heritage, not that you should, but because she was
the first prima ballerina ever at the New York City Ballet,
and she's often considered America's first prima allerina, she really
set the bar for everyone who came after her, and
she said it extremely high. She was really a role
(01:06):
model for artists from all backgrounds to strive for excellence
and no matter you know what your upbringing, her cultural heritage,
she was just an amazing beacon of artistry and brilliance
and creativity. And she is considered, as I said, to
be the first grand ballerina of the United States. So
we were talking today about Maria tal Chief. So her
(01:27):
birth name was Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief, and that was
originally two words. She was born to Alexander Joseph tal
Chief and Ruth taal Chief, whose uh maiden name was Porter,
on January and Fairfax, Oklahoma. She was named after her
two grandmothers, Eliza tal Chief on her father's side and
(01:50):
Marie Porter on her mother's side. Uh and Marie had
been actually named after Marie Antoinette and for geographical reference,
fair Fax. This especially for people outside the US, is
about sixty miles northwest of Tulsa, so it's really sort
of smack dab in the middle of the continental United States.
Her father was a member of the oh Sage nation
(02:12):
and he was full blooded oh Sage. Her mother, Ruth
was Scott's Irish. This family was well off thanks to
oh Sage lands being really oil rich. Her father wisely
invested in real estate, and when recalling her youth in
O Sage, Maria said that it felt like her father
owned the town. He did own some pretty prominent aspects
(02:33):
of it, like he had the movie theater, he owned
a lot of buildings around the town. He really, you know,
as we said, he invested in real estate and was
pretty smart about buying land. But he unfortunately also had
a drinking problem. And while according to tal Chief, her
father was never physically violent with her mother, the pair
would argue when he drank. Sometimes they would argue about
(02:54):
money because even though he did very well, he sort
of it went out the door as fast as it
came in. Uh. He would sometimes go on drinking bidgeons
when these big checks from the oil royalties came. And
according to Uh Maria, when she was very young and
he would fly into these rages, they were really incredibly scary.
He was a large man, and it was just frightening
(03:15):
to be around somebody that big and angry. Ruth wanted
Betty Marie, which is what the family called Maria, and
her sister Marjorie, to be educated in the arts. Visiting
teachers would give them lessons in music and dancing, and
when they were at their vacation home in Colorado Springs.
They took lessons there as well, and in Maria's autobiography
(03:35):
she recalls that her first ballet class, when she was
barely more than a toddler, was in a hotel in
Colorado spring She was about three years old. Sometimes you'll
see it told as four, but in her autobiography she
says three. She says, what I remember most is that
the ballet teacher told me to stand straight and turn
each of my feet out to the side the first position.
(03:56):
I couldn't believe it, but I did what I was told.
She studied music as well as dance, and she had
perfect pitch. Ruth's dream for both of the daughters was
that they would be musical dancing stars, but a career
as a pianist for Betty Murrie was also something that
she considered. Uh and Maria first danced on point at
(04:16):
the very tender age of five. And anyone listening to
this who has studied ballet is probably cringing because they
know this is far too early for a child to
wear point shoes. The bones of the feet are still
growing and they're not really strong enough for this, and
the musculature of the foot is not ready to support
the body on tiptoe in this way. Uh, it's really
bad decision and later teachers would be deeply dismayed by
(04:39):
this early foray into point shoes. As a child, Betty
Marie would accompany her grandmother Tall Chief to pow wows,
and she was really entranced by the dancing and the
songs that told the tribe's history. And her autobiography, which
was written in the nines with Larry Kaplan, she said,
the rhythm of those songs has stayed with me. Betty
(05:01):
Marie was also incredibly smart, even from a very early age,
and when she was enrolled in school at age five,
it was not long before the teachers decided they had
to move her two grades ahead just to keep her challenged,
which to me sounds crazy, like to move a five
year old into a class with seven year olds is
a really big gap at that age, but there it was.
(05:24):
When she was just eight years old, the family moved
to Los Angeles, California, Ruth still wanted the girls to
have every opportunity to be stars, and there was some
confusion about what grade Betty Murrie should be in two
grades ahead for reasons we just talked about didn't really
sit well with the new school. She was placed instead
in what was called Opportunity Class, which was similar to
(05:46):
a modern day gifted program. Yeah, and she still talked
in her autobiography about how she was still pretty bored.
They kind of couldn't keep her occupied enough. But she
also studied uh in Los Angeles under well known Hollywood
dancer teacher and choreographer Ernest Belcher, And this was really
a lucky happenstance. Belcher had actually been recommended to Ruth
(06:07):
Tall Chief by a druggist when she just kind of
inquired off handedly about dance teachers in Los Angeles. Belcher
taught Betty Murray and her sister a variety of different
dance styles over the years. There as ballet, tap, acrobatics,
Spanish dance, and they even had to learn to play castanets. Yeah.
By all accounts, Maria was extremely uh proficient in castanets. Belcher,
(06:32):
as I suggested earlier, was horrified that their dance teacher
in Oklahoma had put the girls on point at such
a young age, and he basically started out their ballet
training over entirely from scratch. He made it very clear
that they had been really lucky they had not been
injured by the carelessness of their previous teacher. As the
girls were studying under Belcher, their mother was really eager
(06:54):
to get them performing. Ruth booked the girls at Eastern
Star lodges and count affairs doing Native American dance. And
we have to kind of use air quotes there because
this was a really theatrical production rather than an authentic dance. Uh.
Both of the girls are really self conscious about the
whole thing, and when they finally outgrew their costumes, they
(07:16):
were really happy about it because they got to give
the whole thing up. Yeah, when she talks about it
in her autobiography, you can tell it. Just the whole
thing was horrible and uncomfortable and awkward. Uh. And before
we get to the next stage of her her education,
do you want to take a quick word from a sponsor.
Let's do. And now let's hop back into our story. So,
(07:39):
going back to Maria tal Chief, at the age of twelve,
Tall Chief and her sister switched dance schools. Her mother
just sort of switched them over without really consulting Ernest Belcher,
and they became students of Brunoslava Nijinska, who was a
sister of fame dancer and teacher of Voslav Nijinsky. And
(07:59):
when she first entered the studio and saw this round,
gray haired woman who was counting pupils, Maria actually thought
it was the school secretary, but it was in fact
her new um, very prestigious belly teacher. She would later
describe Ninjinska as a kind but also intense. The Russian
woman was a graduate of the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg.
(08:23):
I shouldn't speak a lot of English, and her husband
would translate awkwardly with directions that were aligned along the
lines of you are like spaghetti, you must pull pull,
just clears bell right. But apparently it really was pretty clear, uh,
to the students what they were getting at. And it
was under Madame Nijinska that taal Chief realized how hard
(08:45):
she was really going to have to work if she
wanted to pursue a career in dance. She was being
taught and to really just think about dance constantly and
live the life of a dancer at all times, not
just during class, but you know, when walking down the
street to carry herself, you know, in proper alignment when
she was waiting for a bus. Like basically, she was
being taught about the importance and the rigor of and
(09:08):
precision of the art. But none of this deterred her
in the least. It actually only served to make her
more and more certain that dance was her true path
in life. When she was fifteen in ninety she made
her debut. She danced at the Hollywood Bowl and Chopin
can share too, along with none other than said Scherise.
(09:29):
It wasn't perfect. Tall teeth actually fell during the performance,
although were teachers seemed unconcerned and reassured her that these
kinds of things happened to everyone. Yeah, Maria was horrified,
of course, anybody that's ever performed. When you have a
huge gaff like that, it's really unsettling and you feel
very self conscious and upset. But her daj didn't seem
really bothered by it at all. Uh. And while she
(09:50):
was studying under Madame Adjinska Benny, Maria was really exposed
to a great number of fantastic dancers who would visit
the studio to take classes when they were tour and
it brought them through town, and she actually really caught
the eye of several as a very promising performer. Yugoslavian
ballerina Miya Slovenska had seen such potential in the Young
(10:12):
Dancer that she arranged for Surgey Denham, who was the
director of the Ballet Rouse, to audition her when he
was in town. While he never actually spoke to Tall Chief,
he told her mother that she was a good dancer
and that he'd like to see her again when she
was done with high school. Uh. Betty Marie, which is
what she was still going by at the time, had
been planning to attend college, but her father actually kind
(10:35):
of put the brakes on that plan. He thought she
should be using all of that training that they had
been paying for all of these years to actually seek
out a job in dance. And so she auditioned for
and was cast in the film Presenting Lily Mars, which
I believe was an MGM picture as an extra. Uh
and Judy Garland started that picture, and so getting to
see Judy Garland work really delighted Tall Chief and it
(10:58):
made her father very happy in prey out that she
was attached to this picture with a big name in it.
But once the film wrapped, she had to find something
else to do, so she remembered her audition in which
Sergei Dunham had said that she was talented, so she
called him up to express her interest in working with
ballet Russ. UH. That probably did not play out initially
(11:21):
as she had hoped. The ballet Rous director Uh could
not quite conjure the memory of Talchi from her audition.
He's like, I don't actually remember you. However, her timing
was really impeccable because he was having some staff problems.
His troop was scheduled to begin a tour of Canada,
but many of the members of his company were kind
of caught in the politics UH following h it caught
(11:43):
in the politics of the war. So this is around
World War two, and they found themselves unable to get passports. Uh.
A lot of them were from Russia and they were
here in the US, and there were some paperwork issues
around the whole thing, and he was quite desperate, so
he let Talchi audition for him once again. She went
up to New York in audition, and this time she
(12:04):
was asked to join the tour as a member of
the Court of l A. She was really more than
happy to endure all the rigors of life on the road,
which she was doing basically alone, and as a seventeen
year old. She later encouraged her students to learn from
her experience and seek out opportunities. She extolled the virtues
of just being in the right place at the right
at the right time, and willing to work as hard
(12:26):
as you could when good fortune found you. And this
is also when she switched over from being Betty Marie
to taking the name Maria Tall Chief. And she had
actually been urged by a number of people you'll see
different names attached to sort of the person that's credited
with it to take a Russian stage name, and this
(12:46):
is quite popular among American dancers at the time. It
sort of was believed to give them a certain level
of cloud, but she refused. She really wanted to maintain
her O Sage heritage, and her last name, as Tracy
mentioned earlier, had been the words Tall and Chief separately,
but people con found it confusing, so she had actually
ditched the space between them. Back in school in California,
(13:08):
these kids had kind of teased her and made fun
of her, uh and acted about ditch all of this.
Uh so she had actually ditched the space between them
back in school in California. Yeah. She had talked about
her school years, saying, some of the students made fun
of my last name, pretending they didn't understand if it
was tall or cheap. A few made war whoops whenever
(13:28):
they saw me and asked why I didn't wear feathers
or if my father took scalps. After a while, they
became accustomed to me. But experience was but the experience
was painful. Eventually I turned the spelling of my last
name into one word. Everything in school was in strict
alphabetical order, and I wanted to avoid confusion. She did
eventually take the first name Maria to sort of play
(13:49):
kate friends and professional advisers. It was kind of a
good compromise she was willing to live with because they
were still continuing to encourage her to shift tall Chief
into tall Chieva to sound more Russian. She'd been dancing
with ballet Rous for two years when in nineteen forty four,
Russian choreographer George Balantine joined the troop. While they were
working as the dance ensemble for the Broadway show Song
(14:12):
of Norway. And this meeting would prove to be pivotal bought,
both artistically and personally for tal Chief. Balancing is often
considered to be the creator of American style ballet, and
a lot of that was in collaboration with her. And
when she described her reaction when first working with Balanchine
(14:32):
in an interview that she did later in her life,
she said, this is how she described her inner monologue.
I am seeing music. This is it. I was a
musician myself, and I thought I am in my place.
Now I knew that that's the way I wanted to dance.
Another time, tal Chief said, of the legendary choreographer, I
never really understood until Balancing what ballet was all about.
(14:56):
And on August sixteenth of nineteen forty six, she and
Balanchine Mary. She was twenty one at the time when
he was forty two. And you might think that a
marriage between two famed artists would be all fire and passion,
but tall Chief never really described it that way in fact,
and Balancing proposed it seemed quite sudden to her, and
she told him she didn't even know she loved him,
and he said that was okay. But the next day
(15:18):
she accepted and when she spoke of their marriage outside
of dance, it sounded pleasant but really quite tame. There
has even been some speculation that it really was not
a particularly romantic um coupling. Their passion was really in
their work. Dancing with him really changed and refined Tall
Chief as a dancer. She became leaner and stronger and
(15:40):
really keenly aware of how every mechanism of her body
had to work to perform his intense choreography. So when
describing this period of artistic growth, she said, quote, what
did I learn? I learned to turn out, how to
point my toes properly where I belonged, where to place
my body, what muscles had to be developed? Everyone Otherwise
(16:03):
there was no way I was going to dance his ballets.
And soon after their marriage the duo actually left ballet roofs.
They waited for her contract to be up, and then
they traveled to France, where Tall Chief performed at the
Paris Opera Ballet in seven. That made her the first
American dancer to do so, although just as a side note,
her sister Marjorie did eventually become like a a regular
(16:28):
soloist with the Paris Opera ballet and was with them
for many years. Balanchine, for his part, really loved France,
and he actually might have wanted to stay there more
or less permanently under different conditions. But the Paris Opera
was really right with problems at the time. There was
a post war decline, and the opera's previous director had
(16:49):
actually been ousted for collaborating with the Nazis. The stage
conditions were poor. It became really apparent that Balancine and
his new bride were somehow expected to say to this
whole operation, and in fact they were actually pretty successful
in that regard. The critics had been pretty divided before
any of the performances happened. They seemed some of them
(17:12):
seemed really leery about this unknown American, But once she
debuted there, the universally praised Tall Chiefs dancing and her
work with balanching, and in many ways this really reinvigorated
interest in faith in the opera house and its work.
It wasn't long before the newlyweds returned to North America,
which will talk more about after another reward from a sponsor.
(17:33):
So in the late nineteen forties, after they had returned
to the US, Tall chief was named as the New
York City Ballet's first Prima Ballerina when the company was
founded by balanching and arts patron Lincoln Kearstein. During her
time collaborating with him, she danced many of her most
famous roles, including in the first year of the New
(17:54):
York City Ballet, the Firebird, which wowed audiences and earned
acclaim for both dancer choreographer. She also performed your Writticy
and Orpheus with Valentine's choreography, and that really cemented the
role of the New York City Ballet as part of
the New York cultural scene. Uh. Yeah, and I if
you ever want to see there's some great footage of
(18:16):
her performing Firebird. Uh. That will include a link to
you in the show notes. It's she was so amazing
because she just had such strength and such a great
she was tallish. Uh. Really just a beautiful, breathtaking dancer.
And it's no secret that Valancine had many muses who
he became both romantically and professionally linked to over his lifetime,
(18:38):
and Maria did not stay his love for terribly long.
They wound up separating in nineteen fifty one, and they
officially dissolved the marriage in nineteen fifty two, but they
kept collaborating creatively after that. But as Valancine moved from
Mused Muse, often developing both the dancer and his choreography
style in tandem, Maria took opportunity is elsewhere. She would
(19:01):
return to her home company and his u choreography over
and over, but she did dance other places as well. Yeah,
it was really a whirlwind time for tall Chief. Her
fame and her skill kept her in demand all over
the world. Uh In nineteen fifty two she did another
film role. She played the role of fame dancer Anna
Pavlova in the Esther Williams movie Million Dollar Mermaid. She
(19:23):
went back and starred in the as the Sugarplum Ferry
and Balanchine's original production of The Nutcracker. In nineteen four,
she performed at the American Ballet Theater. She partnered with
the most well known dancers of the time, including Andrea Iglevsky,
Eric brun and Rudolph Nareyev, and she was actually romantically
linked to several of the the dancers that she partnered with,
although only briefly in each case. Back home, June twenty nine,
(19:48):
n fifty three was declared Maria tal Chief Day by
the Oklahoma legislature, and the oath Age tribe bestowed the
title of princess upon her. Uh. Not long after she
and Balancheine had broken up, tall Chief married Elmore's a Netsudvov,
who was a pilot, but that union did not last
(20:08):
and they were actually divorced two years later in nineteen
fifty four, and the following year she met her third husband,
Henry D. Buzz Passion Junior. And Passion was from a
Chicago construction family and completely outside the art world. Uh.
And it's she's often quoted as saying this, and it's
such a sort of charming quote, which is why I
think it's so popular. But she describes him by saying
(20:30):
he was very happy, outgoing and knew nothing about ballet,
very refreshing. The two of them honeymooned all over Europe,
but it was basically a working vacation for tal Chief,
who was on tour at the time. Uh. In nine,
the couple welcomed a daughter, Aliz, and Maria took time
off from her dancing, but once her maternity leave ended,
(20:50):
she was really happy to return to the stage for
several more years. As the nineteen sixties went on, Balanchine
had really shifted his obsession as a choreare refer to
dancer Suzanne Farrell, who was twenty years younger than Tall Chief.
Her style was much more um, sort of ethereal and lyrical,
whereas Tall Chiefs has been very fluid and very strong. Uh.
(21:13):
He was just kind of shifting gears in terms of
what he wanted to do. So he and talked you
kind of weren't having the same creative relationship that they
had had for a while. Paul Chief's final performance was
Romeo and Juliet, which she danced as part of the
Bell Telephone Hour on television. She was ready to retire
from performing after this, but not so much from the
(21:34):
whole world of dance. At Balanchine's urging, she actually took
on the job of heading up Germany's Hamburg Ballet, but
she did not stay there for very long. At this point,
her daughter a Lease was five, she was about to
start school, and her husband, Buzz was still working in
Chicago as a family business. He couldn't really just pick
up and relocate, so Maria decided that it was really
(21:56):
in the family's best interest for her to return to
the United States. She trans vision from dancing to teaching,
and she was a point of the artistic director for
the Lyric Opera Ballet of Chicago. She also founded the
Chicago City Ballet and she served as its artistic director
for seven years until it shut its doors. Was a
(22:16):
year of honors for her. She was honored by the
Kennedy Center for her contributions to the arts in the
United States, and she was inducted into the National Women's
Hall of Fame. Was a mixed bag. She received the
National Medal of Arts by the US government, which is
basically the highest honor that uh An artists can receive.
(22:36):
But it was also challenging for the fame dancer because
her husband, Buzz was charged with tax evasion and he
was eventually sentenced to two years in prison. But throughout
it all she remained steadfast. She stayed by his side.
Her husband Buzz died in two thousand four, and then
nine years after that, after suffering a broken hip and
(22:56):
some other issues, Maria died on April eleven, so just
last year, in Chicago, Illinois, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She
was and to close out Holly wanted to finish with
a few quotes from people in Maria's life. In the
words of one of her proteges, Kenneth of von Heideck,
who was the founder of the Chicago Festival Ballet, she
(23:19):
would teach classical ballet, not just technically, but she would
go beyond that and tell you how the laws of
physics help you achieve great elevation at great velocity. Her
daughter Alice was a poet and wrote, her dynamic presence
lit up the room. I will miss her passion, commitments
to her art, and devotion to her family. She raised
(23:39):
the bar high and strove for excellence and everything she did.
And choreographer Jacques Dumboise, who had been a junior dancer
at the age of fifteen with the New York City
Ballet when Tall Chief danced her famed firebird role, said
of the ballerina, when you thought of Russian ballet, it
was Lenova. With English ballet was Fontane for American that
(24:00):
way it was Tall Chief. She was grand in the
grandest way. I love it. I thought you might like
doing this one. I did, and I get so choked
up over the stuff people said about her, because yeah,
I was I was basically I've been you know, I
pretty much I'm trying to to at least get ideas
for episodes a couple of weeks ahead of when I
(24:20):
researched them. Uh, and I had been sort of poking
around looking for something that was related to a Native
American person or Native American history, and this was basically
something I stumbled across and immediately thought, Holly, well, and
there's an additional story that we could possibly explore at
some point in the future kind of related, well, very
much related to her. Uh. There were five kind of
(24:44):
prominent dancers that came out of Native America around the
same time. Her sister is included in that group, and
for some reason, they just really all sort of prospered
in the arts world. It did some really amazing and
incredible and noteworthy things. So she was probably the most
famous of them. But I if you have, you know,
a half hour or more to kill, google her and
(25:06):
look at videos of her online. She was so well
spoken and just the epitome of elegance and grace and wit. Uh.
You know, she spoke of George Balanchine throughout their life,
even after their failed marriage, with such fondness and she
clearly so respected him as an artist, and I just
I could watch footage of her all day long because
she was really amazing. But before I get more choked
(25:28):
up and start crying, um, I'll go to listener mail,
which is about Bella Lego. Se uh and this is
from our listener Molly, and she said, I loved your
podcast on Bella Lego. See. I had asked my dad
to retell me the story of when he met him.
My dad was a student at St. Louis University in
the early nineteen fifties and he worked in the theater department.
Bella played Boris played the Boris carlaf role in Arsenic
(25:51):
and Old Lace at a production there one year, and
my dad was running lights for the show. Dad said
the head of the theater department would invite out of
town guests to come and spend an hour or so
with the students, which Bella did. Dad couldn't remember anything
that he said, but he remembered him as quote an
extraordinarily decrepit old man. However, when the curtain came up,
Bella's character in the show enters through a window, and
(26:13):
Dad remembered this old man leaping through the window as
if he had shed forty years. He said when he
met him, he was a very nice old man, but
on stage he was very scary. I love that story
and it kind of holds uh parallels to the fory
Ackerman story that we told in the course of the
podcast about how you know he would be one way,
(26:33):
but then when he was on in public, he sort
of morphed into this much bigger, grander character, which I
just love. What a spectacular views. If you have any
memories of Bella Ago see or connections to Maria tal Chi,
which many of you might since she's a recent figure,
you can write to us and share those at History
Podcast at how stopworks dot com. You can also connect
(26:55):
with those at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History,
on Twitter at in history at missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, on pinterest dot com slash missed in
History I cannot wait to send a bunch of pictures
of Maria Talci uh. And you can also go to
our spreadshirt store at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot
com for all kinds of missed in History goodies like
shirts and mugs and bags. Uh. If you would like
(27:19):
to learn a little bit more about what we talked
about today, being ballet. You can go to our parents
site has to works. Type in the word ballet and
one of the articles that comes up is ten most
important ballet terms. It's kind of a nice grimmer on
some of the basics. Uh. You can do research there.
You can also visit us at our website, which is
missed in history dot com, for show notes and an
(27:39):
archive of all of our episodes. If you would like
to research almost anything else, you're my can conjure. As
we said, go to our parents site. How stoffworks dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
It has to works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's topic was actually
suggested by Tracy. She has been looking for more Native
(00:23):
American topics because she wanted to work on something uh
in that arena, and she came across this one. But
then she asked me if I would like to do
the research on it because it involves ballet, and my
answer was, of course, maye uh. And there's a person
that I have long and mireed. So the woman that
we're focusing on today is often referred to as a
trailblazer because she was a Native American who became the
(00:44):
prima ballerina for the New York City Ballet. But she
was a trailblazer period, even if you discount her Native
American heritage, not that you should, but because she was
the first prima ballerina ever at the New York City Ballet,
and she's often considered America's first prima allerina, she really
set the bar for everyone who came after her, and
she said it extremely high. She was really a role
(01:06):
model for artists from all backgrounds to strive for excellence
and no matter you know what your upbringing, her cultural heritage,
she was just an amazing beacon of artistry and brilliance
and creativity. And she is considered, as I said, to
be the first grand ballerina of the United States. So
we were talking today about Maria tal Chief. So her
(01:27):
birth name was Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief, and that was
originally two words. She was born to Alexander Joseph tal
Chief and Ruth taal Chief, whose uh maiden name was Porter,
on January and Fairfax, Oklahoma. She was named after her
two grandmothers, Eliza tal Chief on her father's side and
(01:50):
Marie Porter on her mother's side. Uh and Marie had
been actually named after Marie Antoinette and for geographical reference,
fair Fax. This especially for people outside the US, is
about sixty miles northwest of Tulsa, so it's really sort
of smack dab in the middle of the continental United States.
Her father was a member of the oh Sage nation
(02:12):
and he was full blooded oh Sage. Her mother, Ruth
was Scott's Irish. This family was well off thanks to
oh Sage lands being really oil rich. Her father wisely
invested in real estate, and when recalling her youth in
O Sage, Maria said that it felt like her father
owned the town. He did own some pretty prominent aspects
(02:33):
of it, like he had the movie theater, he owned
a lot of buildings around the town. He really, you know,
as we said, he invested in real estate and was
pretty smart about buying land. But he unfortunately also had
a drinking problem. And while according to tal Chief, her
father was never physically violent with her mother, the pair
would argue when he drank. Sometimes they would argue about
(02:54):
money because even though he did very well, he sort
of it went out the door as fast as it
came in. Uh. He would sometimes go on drinking bidgeons
when these big checks from the oil royalties came. And
according to Uh Maria, when she was very young and
he would fly into these rages, they were really incredibly scary.
He was a large man, and it was just frightening
(03:15):
to be around somebody that big and angry. Ruth wanted
Betty Marie, which is what the family called Maria, and
her sister Marjorie, to be educated in the arts. Visiting
teachers would give them lessons in music and dancing, and
when they were at their vacation home in Colorado Springs.
They took lessons there as well, and in Maria's autobiography
(03:35):
she recalls that her first ballet class, when she was
barely more than a toddler, was in a hotel in
Colorado spring She was about three years old. Sometimes you'll
see it told as four, but in her autobiography she
says three. She says, what I remember most is that
the ballet teacher told me to stand straight and turn
each of my feet out to the side the first position.
(03:56):
I couldn't believe it, but I did what I was told.
She studied music as well as dance, and she had
perfect pitch. Ruth's dream for both of the daughters was
that they would be musical dancing stars, but a career
as a pianist for Betty Murrie was also something that
she considered. Uh and Maria first danced on point at
(04:16):
the very tender age of five. And anyone listening to
this who has studied ballet is probably cringing because they
know this is far too early for a child to
wear point shoes. The bones of the feet are still
growing and they're not really strong enough for this, and
the musculature of the foot is not ready to support
the body on tiptoe in this way. Uh, it's really
bad decision and later teachers would be deeply dismayed by
(04:39):
this early foray into point shoes. As a child, Betty
Marie would accompany her grandmother Tall Chief to pow wows,
and she was really entranced by the dancing and the
songs that told the tribe's history. And her autobiography, which
was written in the nines with Larry Kaplan, she said,
the rhythm of those songs has stayed with me. Betty
(05:01):
Marie was also incredibly smart, even from a very early age,
and when she was enrolled in school at age five,
it was not long before the teachers decided they had
to move her two grades ahead just to keep her challenged,
which to me sounds crazy, like to move a five
year old into a class with seven year olds is
a really big gap at that age, but there it was.
(05:24):
When she was just eight years old, the family moved
to Los Angeles, California, Ruth still wanted the girls to
have every opportunity to be stars, and there was some
confusion about what grade Betty Murrie should be in two
grades ahead for reasons we just talked about didn't really
sit well with the new school. She was placed instead
in what was called Opportunity Class, which was similar to
(05:46):
a modern day gifted program. Yeah, and she still talked
in her autobiography about how she was still pretty bored.
They kind of couldn't keep her occupied enough. But she
also studied uh in Los Angeles under well known Hollywood
dancer teacher and choreographer Ernest Belcher, And this was really
a lucky happenstance. Belcher had actually been recommended to Ruth
(06:07):
Tall Chief by a druggist when she just kind of
inquired off handedly about dance teachers in Los Angeles. Belcher
taught Betty Murray and her sister a variety of different
dance styles over the years. There as ballet, tap, acrobatics,
Spanish dance, and they even had to learn to play castanets. Yeah.
By all accounts, Maria was extremely uh proficient in castanets. Belcher,
(06:32):
as I suggested earlier, was horrified that their dance teacher
in Oklahoma had put the girls on point at such
a young age, and he basically started out their ballet
training over entirely from scratch. He made it very clear
that they had been really lucky they had not been
injured by the carelessness of their previous teacher. As the
girls were studying under Belcher, their mother was really eager
(06:54):
to get them performing. Ruth booked the girls at Eastern
Star lodges and count affairs doing Native American dance. And
we have to kind of use air quotes there because
this was a really theatrical production rather than an authentic dance. Uh.
Both of the girls are really self conscious about the
whole thing, and when they finally outgrew their costumes, they
(07:16):
were really happy about it because they got to give
the whole thing up. Yeah, when she talks about it
in her autobiography, you can tell it. Just the whole
thing was horrible and uncomfortable and awkward. Uh. And before
we get to the next stage of her her education,
do you want to take a quick word from a sponsor.
Let's do. And now let's hop back into our story. So,
(07:39):
going back to Maria tal Chief, at the age of twelve,
Tall Chief and her sister switched dance schools. Her mother
just sort of switched them over without really consulting Ernest Belcher,
and they became students of Brunoslava Nijinska, who was a
sister of fame dancer and teacher of Voslav Nijinsky. And
(07:59):
when she first entered the studio and saw this round,
gray haired woman who was counting pupils, Maria actually thought
it was the school secretary, but it was in fact
her new um, very prestigious belly teacher. She would later
describe Ninjinska as a kind but also intense. The Russian
woman was a graduate of the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg.
(08:23):
I shouldn't speak a lot of English, and her husband
would translate awkwardly with directions that were aligned along the
lines of you are like spaghetti, you must pull pull,
just clears bell right. But apparently it really was pretty clear, uh,
to the students what they were getting at. And it
was under Madame Nijinska that taal Chief realized how hard
(08:45):
she was really going to have to work if she
wanted to pursue a career in dance. She was being
taught and to really just think about dance constantly and
live the life of a dancer at all times, not
just during class, but you know, when walking down the
street to carry herself, you know, in proper alignment when
she was waiting for a bus. Like basically, she was
being taught about the importance and the rigor of and
(09:08):
precision of the art. But none of this deterred her
in the least. It actually only served to make her
more and more certain that dance was her true path
in life. When she was fifteen in ninety she made
her debut. She danced at the Hollywood Bowl and Chopin
can share too, along with none other than said Scherise.
(09:29):
It wasn't perfect. Tall teeth actually fell during the performance,
although were teachers seemed unconcerned and reassured her that these
kinds of things happened to everyone. Yeah, Maria was horrified,
of course, anybody that's ever performed. When you have a
huge gaff like that, it's really unsettling and you feel
very self conscious and upset. But her daj didn't seem
really bothered by it at all. Uh. And while she
(09:50):
was studying under Madame Adjinska Benny, Maria was really exposed
to a great number of fantastic dancers who would visit
the studio to take classes when they were tour and
it brought them through town, and she actually really caught
the eye of several as a very promising performer. Yugoslavian
ballerina Miya Slovenska had seen such potential in the Young
(10:12):
Dancer that she arranged for Surgey Denham, who was the
director of the Ballet Rouse, to audition her when he
was in town. While he never actually spoke to Tall Chief,
he told her mother that she was a good dancer
and that he'd like to see her again when she
was done with high school. Uh. Betty Marie, which is
what she was still going by at the time, had
been planning to attend college, but her father actually kind
(10:35):
of put the brakes on that plan. He thought she
should be using all of that training that they had
been paying for all of these years to actually seek
out a job in dance. And so she auditioned for
and was cast in the film Presenting Lily Mars, which
I believe was an MGM picture as an extra. Uh
and Judy Garland started that picture, and so getting to
see Judy Garland work really delighted Tall Chief and it
(10:58):
made her father very happy in prey out that she
was attached to this picture with a big name in it.
But once the film wrapped, she had to find something
else to do, so she remembered her audition in which
Sergei Dunham had said that she was talented, so she
called him up to express her interest in working with
ballet Russ. UH. That probably did not play out initially
(11:21):
as she had hoped. The ballet Rous director Uh could
not quite conjure the memory of Talchi from her audition.
He's like, I don't actually remember you. However, her timing
was really impeccable because he was having some staff problems.
His troop was scheduled to begin a tour of Canada,
but many of the members of his company were kind
of caught in the politics UH following h it caught
(11:43):
in the politics of the war. So this is around
World War two, and they found themselves unable to get passports. Uh.
A lot of them were from Russia and they were
here in the US, and there were some paperwork issues
around the whole thing, and he was quite desperate, so
he let Talchi audition for him once again. She went
up to New York in audition, and this time she
(12:04):
was asked to join the tour as a member of
the Court of l A. She was really more than
happy to endure all the rigors of life on the road,
which she was doing basically alone, and as a seventeen
year old. She later encouraged her students to learn from
her experience and seek out opportunities. She extolled the virtues
of just being in the right place at the right
at the right time, and willing to work as hard
(12:26):
as you could when good fortune found you. And this
is also when she switched over from being Betty Marie
to taking the name Maria Tall Chief. And she had
actually been urged by a number of people you'll see
different names attached to sort of the person that's credited
with it to take a Russian stage name, and this
(12:46):
is quite popular among American dancers at the time. It
sort of was believed to give them a certain level
of cloud, but she refused. She really wanted to maintain
her O Sage heritage, and her last name, as Tracy
mentioned earlier, had been the words Tall and Chief separately,
but people con found it confusing, so she had actually
ditched the space between them. Back in school in California,
(13:08):
these kids had kind of teased her and made fun
of her, uh and acted about ditch all of this.
Uh so she had actually ditched the space between them
back in school in California. Yeah. She had talked about
her school years, saying, some of the students made fun
of my last name, pretending they didn't understand if it
was tall or cheap. A few made war whoops whenever
(13:28):
they saw me and asked why I didn't wear feathers
or if my father took scalps. After a while, they
became accustomed to me. But experience was but the experience
was painful. Eventually I turned the spelling of my last
name into one word. Everything in school was in strict
alphabetical order, and I wanted to avoid confusion. She did
eventually take the first name Maria to sort of play
(13:49):
kate friends and professional advisers. It was kind of a
good compromise she was willing to live with because they
were still continuing to encourage her to shift tall Chief
into tall Chieva to sound more Russian. She'd been dancing
with ballet Rous for two years when in nineteen forty four,
Russian choreographer George Balantine joined the troop. While they were
working as the dance ensemble for the Broadway show Song
(14:12):
of Norway. And this meeting would prove to be pivotal bought,
both artistically and personally for tal Chief. Balancing is often
considered to be the creator of American style ballet, and
a lot of that was in collaboration with her. And
when she described her reaction when first working with Balanchine
(14:32):
in an interview that she did later in her life,
she said, this is how she described her inner monologue.
I am seeing music. This is it. I was a
musician myself, and I thought I am in my place.
Now I knew that that's the way I wanted to dance.
Another time, tal Chief said, of the legendary choreographer, I
never really understood until Balancing what ballet was all about.
(14:56):
And on August sixteenth of nineteen forty six, she and
Balanchine Mary. She was twenty one at the time when
he was forty two. And you might think that a
marriage between two famed artists would be all fire and passion,
but tall Chief never really described it that way in fact,
and Balancing proposed it seemed quite sudden to her, and
she told him she didn't even know she loved him,
and he said that was okay. But the next day
(15:18):
she accepted and when she spoke of their marriage outside
of dance, it sounded pleasant but really quite tame. There
has even been some speculation that it really was not
a particularly romantic um coupling. Their passion was really in
their work. Dancing with him really changed and refined Tall
Chief as a dancer. She became leaner and stronger and
(15:40):
really keenly aware of how every mechanism of her body
had to work to perform his intense choreography. So when
describing this period of artistic growth, she said, quote, what
did I learn? I learned to turn out, how to
point my toes properly where I belonged, where to place
my body, what muscles had to be developed? Everyone Otherwise
(16:03):
there was no way I was going to dance his ballets.
And soon after their marriage the duo actually left ballet roofs.
They waited for her contract to be up, and then
they traveled to France, where Tall Chief performed at the
Paris Opera Ballet in seven. That made her the first
American dancer to do so, although just as a side note,
her sister Marjorie did eventually become like a a regular
(16:28):
soloist with the Paris Opera ballet and was with them
for many years. Balanchine, for his part, really loved France,
and he actually might have wanted to stay there more
or less permanently under different conditions. But the Paris Opera
was really right with problems at the time. There was
a post war decline, and the opera's previous director had
(16:49):
actually been ousted for collaborating with the Nazis. The stage
conditions were poor. It became really apparent that Balancine and
his new bride were somehow expected to say to this
whole operation, and in fact they were actually pretty successful
in that regard. The critics had been pretty divided before
any of the performances happened. They seemed some of them
(17:12):
seemed really leery about this unknown American, But once she
debuted there, the universally praised Tall Chiefs dancing and her
work with balanching, and in many ways this really reinvigorated
interest in faith in the opera house and its work.
It wasn't long before the newlyweds returned to North America,
which will talk more about after another reward from a sponsor.
(17:33):
So in the late nineteen forties, after they had returned
to the US, Tall chief was named as the New
York City Ballet's first Prima Ballerina when the company was
founded by balanching and arts patron Lincoln Kearstein. During her
time collaborating with him, she danced many of her most
famous roles, including in the first year of the New
(17:54):
York City Ballet, the Firebird, which wowed audiences and earned
acclaim for both dancer choreographer. She also performed your Writticy
and Orpheus with Valentine's choreography, and that really cemented the
role of the New York City Ballet as part of
the New York cultural scene. Uh. Yeah, and I if
you ever want to see there's some great footage of
(18:16):
her performing Firebird. Uh. That will include a link to
you in the show notes. It's she was so amazing
because she just had such strength and such a great
she was tallish. Uh. Really just a beautiful, breathtaking dancer.
And it's no secret that Valancine had many muses who
he became both romantically and professionally linked to over his lifetime,
(18:38):
and Maria did not stay his love for terribly long.
They wound up separating in nineteen fifty one, and they
officially dissolved the marriage in nineteen fifty two, but they
kept collaborating creatively after that. But as Valancine moved from
Mused Muse, often developing both the dancer and his choreography
style in tandem, Maria took opportunity is elsewhere. She would
(19:01):
return to her home company and his u choreography over
and over, but she did dance other places as well. Yeah,
it was really a whirlwind time for tall Chief. Her
fame and her skill kept her in demand all over
the world. Uh In nineteen fifty two she did another
film role. She played the role of fame dancer Anna
Pavlova in the Esther Williams movie Million Dollar Mermaid. She
(19:23):
went back and starred in the as the Sugarplum Ferry
and Balanchine's original production of The Nutcracker. In nineteen four,
she performed at the American Ballet Theater. She partnered with
the most well known dancers of the time, including Andrea Iglevsky,
Eric brun and Rudolph Nareyev, and she was actually romantically
linked to several of the the dancers that she partnered with,
although only briefly in each case. Back home, June twenty nine,
(19:48):
n fifty three was declared Maria tal Chief Day by
the Oklahoma legislature, and the oath Age tribe bestowed the
title of princess upon her. Uh. Not long after she
and Balancheine had broken up, tall Chief married Elmore's a Netsudvov,
who was a pilot, but that union did not last
(20:08):
and they were actually divorced two years later in nineteen
fifty four, and the following year she met her third husband,
Henry D. Buzz Passion Junior. And Passion was from a
Chicago construction family and completely outside the art world. Uh.
And it's she's often quoted as saying this, and it's
such a sort of charming quote, which is why I
think it's so popular. But she describes him by saying
(20:30):
he was very happy, outgoing and knew nothing about ballet,
very refreshing. The two of them honeymooned all over Europe,
but it was basically a working vacation for tal Chief,
who was on tour at the time. Uh. In nine,
the couple welcomed a daughter, Aliz, and Maria took time
off from her dancing, but once her maternity leave ended,
(20:50):
she was really happy to return to the stage for
several more years. As the nineteen sixties went on, Balanchine
had really shifted his obsession as a choreare refer to
dancer Suzanne Farrell, who was twenty years younger than Tall Chief.
Her style was much more um, sort of ethereal and lyrical,
whereas Tall Chiefs has been very fluid and very strong. Uh.
(21:13):
He was just kind of shifting gears in terms of
what he wanted to do. So he and talked you
kind of weren't having the same creative relationship that they
had had for a while. Paul Chief's final performance was
Romeo and Juliet, which she danced as part of the
Bell Telephone Hour on television. She was ready to retire
from performing after this, but not so much from the
(21:34):
whole world of dance. At Balanchine's urging, she actually took
on the job of heading up Germany's Hamburg Ballet, but
she did not stay there for very long. At this point,
her daughter a Lease was five, she was about to
start school, and her husband, Buzz was still working in
Chicago as a family business. He couldn't really just pick
up and relocate, so Maria decided that it was really
(21:56):
in the family's best interest for her to return to
the United States. She trans vision from dancing to teaching,
and she was a point of the artistic director for
the Lyric Opera Ballet of Chicago. She also founded the
Chicago City Ballet and she served as its artistic director
for seven years until it shut its doors. Was a
(22:16):
year of honors for her. She was honored by the
Kennedy Center for her contributions to the arts in the
United States, and she was inducted into the National Women's
Hall of Fame. Was a mixed bag. She received the
National Medal of Arts by the US government, which is
basically the highest honor that uh An artists can receive.
(22:36):
But it was also challenging for the fame dancer because
her husband, Buzz was charged with tax evasion and he
was eventually sentenced to two years in prison. But throughout
it all she remained steadfast. She stayed by his side.
Her husband Buzz died in two thousand four, and then
nine years after that, after suffering a broken hip and
(22:56):
some other issues, Maria died on April eleven, so just
last year, in Chicago, Illinois, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She
was and to close out Holly wanted to finish with
a few quotes from people in Maria's life. In the
words of one of her proteges, Kenneth of von Heideck,
who was the founder of the Chicago Festival Ballet, she
(23:19):
would teach classical ballet, not just technically, but she would
go beyond that and tell you how the laws of
physics help you achieve great elevation at great velocity. Her
daughter Alice was a poet and wrote, her dynamic presence
lit up the room. I will miss her passion, commitments
to her art, and devotion to her family. She raised
(23:39):
the bar high and strove for excellence and everything she did.
And choreographer Jacques Dumboise, who had been a junior dancer
at the age of fifteen with the New York City
Ballet when Tall Chief danced her famed firebird role, said
of the ballerina, when you thought of Russian ballet, it
was Lenova. With English ballet was Fontane for American that
(24:00):
way it was Tall Chief. She was grand in the
grandest way. I love it. I thought you might like
doing this one. I did, and I get so choked
up over the stuff people said about her, because yeah,
I was I was basically I've been you know, I
pretty much I'm trying to to at least get ideas
for episodes a couple of weeks ahead of when I
(24:20):
researched them. Uh, and I had been sort of poking
around looking for something that was related to a Native
American person or Native American history, and this was basically
something I stumbled across and immediately thought, Holly, well, and
there's an additional story that we could possibly explore at
some point in the future kind of related, well, very
much related to her. Uh. There were five kind of
(24:44):
prominent dancers that came out of Native America around the
same time. Her sister is included in that group, and
for some reason, they just really all sort of prospered
in the arts world. It did some really amazing and
incredible and noteworthy things. So she was probably the most
famous of them. But I if you have, you know,
a half hour or more to kill, google her and
(25:06):
look at videos of her online. She was so well
spoken and just the epitome of elegance and grace and wit. Uh.
You know, she spoke of George Balanchine throughout their life,
even after their failed marriage, with such fondness and she
clearly so respected him as an artist, and I just
I could watch footage of her all day long because
she was really amazing. But before I get more choked
(25:28):
up and start crying, um, I'll go to listener mail,
which is about Bella Lego. Se uh and this is
from our listener Molly, and she said, I loved your
podcast on Bella Lego. See. I had asked my dad
to retell me the story of when he met him.
My dad was a student at St. Louis University in
the early nineteen fifties and he worked in the theater department.
Bella played Boris played the Boris carlaf role in Arsenic
(25:51):
and Old Lace at a production there one year, and
my dad was running lights for the show. Dad said
the head of the theater department would invite out of
town guests to come and spend an hour or so
with the students, which Bella did. Dad couldn't remember anything
that he said, but he remembered him as quote an
extraordinarily decrepit old man. However, when the curtain came up,
Bella's character in the show enters through a window, and
(26:13):
Dad remembered this old man leaping through the window as
if he had shed forty years. He said when he
met him, he was a very nice old man, but
on stage he was very scary. I love that story
and it kind of holds uh parallels to the fory
Ackerman story that we told in the course of the
podcast about how you know he would be one way,
(26:33):
but then when he was on in public, he sort
of morphed into this much bigger, grander character, which I
just love. What a spectacular views. If you have any
memories of Bella Ago see or connections to Maria tal Chi,
which many of you might since she's a recent figure,
you can write to us and share those at History
Podcast at how stopworks dot com. You can also connect
(26:55):
with those at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History,
on Twitter at in history at missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, on pinterest dot com slash missed in
History I cannot wait to send a bunch of pictures
of Maria Talci uh. And you can also go to
our spreadshirt store at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot
com for all kinds of missed in History goodies like
shirts and mugs and bags. Uh. If you would like
(27:19):
to learn a little bit more about what we talked
about today, being ballet. You can go to our parents
site has to works. Type in the word ballet and
one of the articles that comes up is ten most
important ballet terms. It's kind of a nice grimmer on
some of the basics. Uh. You can do research there.
You can also visit us at our website, which is
missed in history dot com, for show notes and an
(27:39):
archive of all of our episodes. If you would like
to research almost anything else, you're my can conjure. As
we said, go to our parents site. How stoffworks dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
It has to works dot com.
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