November 2, 2019 • 26 mins
Reaching back to a 2014 episode on Maria Tallchief, a Native American dancer who 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 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Somebody recently shared a post on our
Facebook page as a suggestion for an episode of the show.
I went back to try to find that post so
I could thank that person by name. I could not
find it, but it was a post about Native American
women in the field of ballet. So with that suggestion
in mind, we are going back to our previous episode
(00:23):
on Maria tal Chief so good, she was amazing. This
originally came out almost exactly five years ago on November three.
We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
(00:47):
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 American topic 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, may
(01:09):
we uh. And there's a person that I have long admired.
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 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
(01:31):
the New York City Ballet, and she's often considered America's
first prima ballerina, she really set the bar for everyone
who came after her, and she said it extremely high.
She was really a role model for artists from all
backgrounds to strive for excellence and no matter you know what,
you're upbringing our cultural heritage. She was just an amazing
(01:52):
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 birth name was Elizabeth Marie tall Chief,
and that was originally two words. She was born to
Alexander Joseph tal Chief and Ruth tal Chief, whose uh
(02:14):
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 Marie Porter on her mother's side. Uh,
and Marie had been actually named after Marie Antoinette and
for geographical reference fair Fax. This is especially good for
(02:36):
people outside the U. S 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 O s Age Nation and he
was full blooded O Sage. Her mother, Ruth was Scott's Irish.
This family was well off thanks to Osage Lands being
really oil rich. Her father wisely invest it in real estate,
(03:01):
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 of it, like he
had the movie theater. Uh, 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.
(03:23):
And while according to Tall Chief, her father was never
physically violent with her mother, the pair would argue when
he drank. Sometimes they would argue about money because even
though he did very well, he sort of it went
out the door as fast as it came in UH,
and he would sometimes go on drinking bidges when these
big checks from the oil royalties came. And according to
(03:43):
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 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
(04:05):
at their vacation home in Colorado Springs, they took lessons
there as well. And in Maria's autobiography she recalls that
her first ballet class UH, 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.
And she says, what I remember most is that the
(04:26):
ballet teacher told me to stand straight and turn each
of my feet out to the side the first position.
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 Marie was also something that
(04:47):
she considered. Uh. And Maria first danced on point at
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
(05:08):
the body on tiptoe in this way. Uh. It's really
bad decision, and later teachers would be deeply dismayed by
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
(05:29):
was written in the nineties with Larry Caplan, she said,
the rhythm of those songs has stayed with me. Betty
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,
(05:51):
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.
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 Murray should be in. Two
(06:13):
grades ahead for reasons we just talked about, didn't really
sit well with the new school. She was placed in
stead in what was called Opportunity Class, which was similar
to 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
(06:36):
dancer teacher and choreographer Ernest Belcher, and this was really
a lucky happenstance. Belcher had actually been recommended to Ruth
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's ballet, tap acrobatics, Spanish dance,
(06:59):
and even had to learn to play castanets. Yeah. By
all accounts, Maria was extremely proficient in castanets. Belcher, 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
(07:21):
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 to
get them performing. Ruth booked the girls at Eastern Star
lodges and county fairs 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.
(07:47):
Both of the girls were really self conscious about the
whole thing, and when they finally outgrew their costumes, they
were really happy about it because they got to give
the whole thing up. Yeah, when she talks about it
in her autobiography, you could 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,
(08:08):
do you want to take a quick word from a sponsor,
let's do so. Going back to Maria Talchi, at the
age of twelve, tall Chief and her sister switched dance schools.
Her mother just sort of switched them over without really
(08:30):
consulting Ernest Belcher, and they became students of Brunoslava Nijinska,
who was a sister of fame dancer and teacher Vaslav Nijinsky.
And 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
(08:55):
describe Ninjinska as a kind but also intense. The Russian
woman was a graduate of the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg.
She 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,
(09:16):
just clear as bell. Right. But apparently it really was
pretty clear, uh, to the students what they were getting at.
And it was under Madame Nejinska that Tall Chief realized
how hard 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 lived the life of a dancer at all times,
(09:38):
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 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 you was fifteen in ninety she
(10:02):
made her debut. She danced at the Hollywood Bowl in
Chopin concerto along with none other than said Scheris. It
wasn't perfect. Tall Chief actually fell during the performance. Althore
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
(10:24):
like that, it's really unsettling and you feel very self
conscious and upset. But her teacher didn't seem really bothered
by it at all. Uh. And while she was studying
under Madame Djinska Benny, Maria was really exposed to a
great number of fantastic dancers who would visit the studio
to take classes when they were on tour, and it
brought them through town and she actually really caught the
(10:45):
eye of several as a very promising performer. Yugoslavian ballerina
Miya Slovenska had seen such potential in the young dancer
that she arranged for Sergey 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
(11:07):
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
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
(11:27):
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
made her father very happy and proud that she was
attached to this picture with a big name in it.
But once the film wrapped, she had to find something
(11:48):
else to do. So she remembered her audition in which
Sergey 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
as she had hoped. The ballet Us director Uh could
not quite conjure the memory of Talchi from her audition.
(12:09):
She'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
in the politics of the war. So this is around
World War two, and they found themselves unable to get passports. UH.
(12:32):
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 tal Chief audition for him once again. She
went out to New York in audition, and this time
she was asked to join the tour as a member
of the Court of Ballet. She was really more than
happy to endure all the rigors of life on the road,
(12:52):
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
as you could when good fortune found you. And this
is also when she switched over from being Betty Marie
(13:16):
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
is quite popular among American dancers at the time. It
sort of was believed to give them a certain level
of clout, but she refused. She really wanted to maintain
(13:36):
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, Yeah,
she had talked about our school years, saying, some of
the students made fun of my last name, pretending they
didn't understand if it was tall or chief. A few
(13:57):
made war whoops whenever 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
(14:19):
to sort of play 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 Chiva to sound more Russian.
She'd been dancing with ballet rous for two years when
in ninety four Russian choreographer George Balantine joined the troop
while they were working as the dance ensemble for the
(14:41):
Broadway show Song of Norway, and this meeting would prove
to be pivotal bought both artistically and personally for taal Chief.
Bouncing is often considered to be the creator of American
style by ballet, and a lot of that was in
collaboration with her. And when she described her reaction when
(15:01):
first working with Balanchine 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
(15:24):
ballet was all about. And on August sixteenth of nineteen
forty six, she and Balanchine married. 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 tal Chief never really
described it that way. In fact, and Balanching proposed it
seemed quite sudden to her, and she told him she
(15:44):
didn't even know she loved him, and he said that
was okay. But the next day 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 coupleing.
Their passion was really in their work. Dancing with him
really changed and refined tall Chief as a dancer. She
(16:08):
became leaner and stronger and 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?
(16:32):
Everyone Otherwise there was no way I was going to
dance his ballets. And soon after their marriage the duo
actually left ballet roufs. They waited for her contract to
be up, and then they traveled to France, where Tall
chief performed with the Paris Opera Ballet in seven. That
made her the first American dancer to do so, although
(16:52):
just as a side note, her sister Marjorie did eventually
become like a a regular soloist with the Paris Opera
l A and was with them for many years. Balancheen,
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 rife with
(17:13):
problems at the time. There was a post war decline,
and the opera's previous director had actually been ousted for
collaborating with the Nazis. The stage conditions are poor. It
became really apparent that Balanchein and his new bride were
somehow expected to save this whole operation, and in fact
they were actually pretty successful in that regard. The critics
(17:37):
had been pretty divided before any of the performances happened.
They seemed some of them seemed really leery about this
unknown American, but once she debuted there, the universally praised
Tall Chiefs dancing and her work with Balancheen and in
many ways this really reinvigorated interest in faith in the
opera house and its work. It wasn't long before the
(17:57):
newlyweds returned to North America, which talk more about after
another reef word from a sponsor. 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 Balanchine and arts patron
(18:21):
Lincoln Kirstine. During her time collaborating with him, she danced
many of her most famous roles, including in the first
year of the New York City Ballet, the Firebird, which
wowed audiences and earned acclaim for both dancer and choreographer.
She also performed Your Writticy and Orpheus with Valentine's choreography,
(18:43):
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 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 grace. She was tall Ish. Uh
(19:04):
really just a beautiful, breathtaking dancer. And it's no secret
that Balancine had many muses who he became both romantically
and professionally linked to over his lifetime, 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
(19:26):
after that. But as Balancine moved from mused muse, often
developing both the dancer and his choreography style in tandem,
Maria took opportunities elsewhere. She would return to her home
company and his 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
(19:48):
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 went back and starred
and as the sugar plum Ferry and Balanchine's original production
of The Nutcracker. In ninety four, she performed with the
American ballet theater. She partnered with the most well known
(20:10):
dancers at the time, including Andrea Iglevsky, Eric Brune, 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 nifty three was
declared Maria tal Chief Day by the Oklahoma legislature, and
(20:30):
the oth Age tribe bestowed the title of princess upon her. Uh.
Not long after she and Balanchine had broken up, tall
Chief married Elmore's a Natsudbov, who was a pilot, but
that union did not last 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, Jr.
(20:54):
And Passion was from a Chicago construction family and completely
outside the art world. 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 and by saying 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
(21:16):
working vacation for Tall Chief, who was on tour at
the time. Uh. In ninety nine, the couple welcomed a daughter,
Aliz and Maria took time off from her dancing, but
once her maternity leave ended, 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 choreographer to dancer Suzanne Farrell, who was twenty
(21:39):
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. 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.
Tau Chiefs final performance was Romeo and Juliet, which she
(22:03):
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 whole world of dance. At
Balanchine's urging, she actually took on the job of heading
up Germany's homboard Ballet, but she did not stay there
for very long. At this point, her daughter Else was five,
(22:23):
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 in the family's best interest for
her to return to the United States. She transitioned from
dancing to teaching, and she was a point of the
artistic director for the Lyric Opera Ballet of Chicago. She
(22:44):
also founded the Chicago City Ballet and she served as
its artistic director for seven years until it shut its doors.
Was a 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. A mixed bag. She received
(23:06):
the National Medal of Arts by the US government, which
is basically the highest honor that uh an artist can receive.
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
(23:30):
nine years after that, after suffering a broken hip and
some other issues, Maria died on April eleventh, 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 von Heideke, who
(23:53):
was the founder of the Chicago Festival Ballet, she would
teach classical ballet, not just technically, but she would go
beyond it and tell you how the laws of physics
help you achieve great elevation and great velocity. Her daughter
Alice was a poet and wrote her dynamic presence lit
up the room. I will miss her passion, commitments to
(24:13):
her art, and devotion to her family. She raised 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. It was Fontane for American ballet.
(24:37):
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 researched them, uh, and
(24:59):
I had been and sort of poking around looking for
something that was related to a Native American person or
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 prominent dancers
(25:22):
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 is probably the most famous of them. But
I just if you have, you know, a half hour
or more to kill, google her and look at videos
(25:44):
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 Balanchie throughout their life, even after
their failed marriage, with such fondness, and she clearly so
respected him as an artist. I just I can watch
footage of her all day long because she was really amazing.
(26:09):
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
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History podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you
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History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
(26:31):
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your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. Somebody recently shared a post on our
Facebook page as a suggestion for an episode of the show.
I went back to try to find that post so
I could thank that person by name. I could not
find it, but it was a post about Native American
women in the field of ballet. So with that suggestion
in mind, we are going back to our previous episode
(00:23):
on Maria tal Chief so good, she was amazing. This
originally came out almost exactly five years ago on November three.
We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
(00:47):
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 American topic 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, may
(01:09):
we uh. And there's a person that I have long admired.
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 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
(01:31):
the New York City Ballet, and she's often considered America's
first prima ballerina, she really set the bar for everyone
who came after her, and she said it extremely high.
She was really a role model for artists from all
backgrounds to strive for excellence and no matter you know what,
you're upbringing our cultural heritage. She was just an amazing
(01:52):
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 birth name was Elizabeth Marie tall Chief,
and that was originally two words. She was born to
Alexander Joseph tal Chief and Ruth tal Chief, whose uh
(02:14):
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 Marie Porter on her mother's side. Uh,
and Marie had been actually named after Marie Antoinette and
for geographical reference fair Fax. This is especially good for
(02:36):
people outside the U. S 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 O s Age Nation and he
was full blooded O Sage. Her mother, Ruth was Scott's Irish.
This family was well off thanks to Osage Lands being
really oil rich. Her father wisely invest it in real estate,
(03:01):
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 of it, like he
had the movie theater. Uh, 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.
(03:23):
And while according to Tall Chief, her father was never
physically violent with her mother, the pair would argue when
he drank. Sometimes they would argue about money because even
though he did very well, he sort of it went
out the door as fast as it came in UH,
and he would sometimes go on drinking bidges when these
big checks from the oil royalties came. And according to
(03:43):
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 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
(04:05):
at their vacation home in Colorado Springs, they took lessons
there as well. And in Maria's autobiography she recalls that
her first ballet class UH, 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.
And she says, what I remember most is that the
(04:26):
ballet teacher told me to stand straight and turn each
of my feet out to the side the first position.
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 Marie was also something that
(04:47):
she considered. Uh. And Maria first danced on point at
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
(05:08):
the body on tiptoe in this way. Uh. It's really
bad decision, and later teachers would be deeply dismayed by
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
(05:29):
was written in the nineties with Larry Caplan, she said,
the rhythm of those songs has stayed with me. Betty
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,
(05:51):
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.
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 Murray should be in. Two
(06:13):
grades ahead for reasons we just talked about, didn't really
sit well with the new school. She was placed in
stead in what was called Opportunity Class, which was similar
to 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
(06:36):
dancer teacher and choreographer Ernest Belcher, and this was really
a lucky happenstance. Belcher had actually been recommended to Ruth
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's ballet, tap acrobatics, Spanish dance,
(06:59):
and even had to learn to play castanets. Yeah. By
all accounts, Maria was extremely proficient in castanets. Belcher, 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
(07:21):
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 to
get them performing. Ruth booked the girls at Eastern Star
lodges and county fairs 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.
(07:47):
Both of the girls were really self conscious about the
whole thing, and when they finally outgrew their costumes, they
were really happy about it because they got to give
the whole thing up. Yeah, when she talks about it
in her autobiography, you could 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,
(08:08):
do you want to take a quick word from a sponsor,
let's do so. Going back to Maria Talchi, at the
age of twelve, tall Chief and her sister switched dance schools.
Her mother just sort of switched them over without really
(08:30):
consulting Ernest Belcher, and they became students of Brunoslava Nijinska,
who was a sister of fame dancer and teacher Vaslav Nijinsky.
And 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
(08:55):
describe Ninjinska as a kind but also intense. The Russian
woman was a graduate of the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg.
She 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,
(09:16):
just clear as bell. Right. But apparently it really was
pretty clear, uh, to the students what they were getting at.
And it was under Madame Nejinska that Tall Chief realized
how hard 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 lived the life of a dancer at all times,
(09:38):
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 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 you was fifteen in ninety she
(10:02):
made her debut. She danced at the Hollywood Bowl in
Chopin concerto along with none other than said Scheris. It
wasn't perfect. Tall Chief actually fell during the performance. Althore
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
(10:24):
like that, it's really unsettling and you feel very self
conscious and upset. But her teacher didn't seem really bothered
by it at all. Uh. And while she was studying
under Madame Djinska Benny, Maria was really exposed to a
great number of fantastic dancers who would visit the studio
to take classes when they were on tour, and it
brought them through town and she actually really caught the
(10:45):
eye of several as a very promising performer. Yugoslavian ballerina
Miya Slovenska had seen such potential in the young dancer
that she arranged for Sergey 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
(11:07):
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
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
(11:27):
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
made her father very happy and proud that she was
attached to this picture with a big name in it.
But once the film wrapped, she had to find something
(11:48):
else to do. So she remembered her audition in which
Sergey 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
as she had hoped. The ballet Us director Uh could
not quite conjure the memory of Talchi from her audition.
(12:09):
She'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
in the politics of the war. So this is around
World War two, and they found themselves unable to get passports. UH.
(12:32):
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 tal Chief audition for him once again. She
went out to New York in audition, and this time
she was asked to join the tour as a member
of the Court of Ballet. She was really more than
happy to endure all the rigors of life on the road,
(12:52):
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
as you could when good fortune found you. And this
is also when she switched over from being Betty Marie
(13:16):
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
is quite popular among American dancers at the time. It
sort of was believed to give them a certain level
of clout, but she refused. She really wanted to maintain
(13:36):
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, Yeah,
she had talked about our school years, saying, some of
the students made fun of my last name, pretending they
didn't understand if it was tall or chief. A few
(13:57):
made war whoops whenever 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
(14:19):
to sort of play 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 Chiva to sound more Russian.
She'd been dancing with ballet rous for two years when
in ninety four Russian choreographer George Balantine joined the troop
while they were working as the dance ensemble for the
(14:41):
Broadway show Song of Norway, and this meeting would prove
to be pivotal bought both artistically and personally for taal Chief.
Bouncing is often considered to be the creator of American
style by ballet, and a lot of that was in
collaboration with her. And when she described her reaction when
(15:01):
first working with Balanchine 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
(15:24):
ballet was all about. And on August sixteenth of nineteen
forty six, she and Balanchine married. 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 tal Chief never really
described it that way. In fact, and Balanching proposed it
seemed quite sudden to her, and she told him she
(15:44):
didn't even know she loved him, and he said that
was okay. But the next day 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 coupleing.
Their passion was really in their work. Dancing with him
really changed and refined tall Chief as a dancer. She
(16:08):
became leaner and stronger and 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?
(16:32):
Everyone Otherwise there was no way I was going to
dance his ballets. And soon after their marriage the duo
actually left ballet roufs. They waited for her contract to
be up, and then they traveled to France, where Tall
chief performed with the Paris Opera Ballet in seven. That
made her the first American dancer to do so, although
(16:52):
just as a side note, her sister Marjorie did eventually
become like a a regular soloist with the Paris Opera
l A and was with them for many years. Balancheen,
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 rife with
(17:13):
problems at the time. There was a post war decline,
and the opera's previous director had actually been ousted for
collaborating with the Nazis. The stage conditions are poor. It
became really apparent that Balanchein and his new bride were
somehow expected to save this whole operation, and in fact
they were actually pretty successful in that regard. The critics
(17:37):
had been pretty divided before any of the performances happened.
They seemed some of them seemed really leery about this
unknown American, but once she debuted there, the universally praised
Tall Chiefs dancing and her work with Balancheen and in
many ways this really reinvigorated interest in faith in the
opera house and its work. It wasn't long before the
(17:57):
newlyweds returned to North America, which talk more about after
another reef word from a sponsor. 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 Balanchine and arts patron
(18:21):
Lincoln Kirstine. During her time collaborating with him, she danced
many of her most famous roles, including in the first
year of the New York City Ballet, the Firebird, which
wowed audiences and earned acclaim for both dancer and choreographer.
She also performed Your Writticy and Orpheus with Valentine's choreography,
(18:43):
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 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 grace. She was tall Ish. Uh
(19:04):
really just a beautiful, breathtaking dancer. And it's no secret
that Balancine had many muses who he became both romantically
and professionally linked to over his lifetime, 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
(19:26):
after that. But as Balancine moved from mused muse, often
developing both the dancer and his choreography style in tandem,
Maria took opportunities elsewhere. She would return to her home
company and his 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
(19:48):
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 went back and starred
and as the sugar plum Ferry and Balanchine's original production
of The Nutcracker. In ninety four, she performed with the
American ballet theater. She partnered with the most well known
(20:10):
dancers at the time, including Andrea Iglevsky, Eric Brune, 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 nifty three was
declared Maria tal Chief Day by the Oklahoma legislature, and
(20:30):
the oth Age tribe bestowed the title of princess upon her. Uh.
Not long after she and Balanchine had broken up, tall
Chief married Elmore's a Natsudbov, who was a pilot, but
that union did not last 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, Jr.
(20:54):
And Passion was from a Chicago construction family and completely
outside the art world. 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 and by saying 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
(21:16):
working vacation for Tall Chief, who was on tour at
the time. Uh. In ninety nine, the couple welcomed a daughter,
Aliz and Maria took time off from her dancing, but
once her maternity leave ended, 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 choreographer to dancer Suzanne Farrell, who was twenty
(21:39):
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. 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.
Tau Chiefs final performance was Romeo and Juliet, which she
(22:03):
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 whole world of dance. At
Balanchine's urging, she actually took on the job of heading
up Germany's homboard Ballet, but she did not stay there
for very long. At this point, her daughter Else was five,
(22:23):
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 in the family's best interest for
her to return to the United States. She transitioned from
dancing to teaching, and she was a point of the
artistic director for the Lyric Opera Ballet of Chicago. She
(22:44):
also founded the Chicago City Ballet and she served as
its artistic director for seven years until it shut its doors.
Was a 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. A mixed bag. She received
(23:06):
the National Medal of Arts by the US government, which
is basically the highest honor that uh an artist can receive.
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
(23:30):
nine years after that, after suffering a broken hip and
some other issues, Maria died on April eleventh, 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 von Heideke, who
(23:53):
was the founder of the Chicago Festival Ballet, she would
teach classical ballet, not just technically, but she would go
beyond it and tell you how the laws of physics
help you achieve great elevation and great velocity. Her daughter
Alice was a poet and wrote her dynamic presence lit
up the room. I will miss her passion, commitments to
(24:13):
her art, and devotion to her family. She raised 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. It was Fontane for American ballet.
(24:37):
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 researched them, uh, and
(24:59):
I had been and sort of poking around looking for
something that was related to a Native American person or
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 prominent dancers
(25:22):
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 is probably the most famous of them. But
I just if you have, you know, a half hour
or more to kill, google her and look at videos
(25:44):
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 Balanchie throughout their life, even after
their failed marriage, with such fondness, and she clearly so
respected him as an artist. I just I can watch
footage of her all day long because she was really amazing.
(26:09):
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
be out of date now, you can email us at
History podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in
History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
(26:31):
Google podcast the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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