Dancer's History

DANCE TO THE PIPER (342 pp.]--Agnes de Mille--Little, Brown ($3).

One afternoon in a Los Angeles auditorium, a little girl gazed while Isadora Duncan, trailing a costume that resembled a set of colossal portieres, danced about the stage for the entire length of a Beethoven symphony. At curtain call La Duncan, scarcely winded, characteristically urged her exhausted audience to go right out and run barefoot through the hills. The little girl promptly took off her shoes and tried --to the exasperation of her mother, who spent several hours tweezing out the cactus spines.

That afternoon was in the pattern of the next two decades. For Agnes de Mille, against the forceful objection of her father, Playwright William de Mille, and of her uncle, Movie Producer Cecil B. de Mille, set her foot on the thorny way to become a famous dancer. In Dance to the Piper, her autobiography, she tells how she slowly made the grade. Dance to the Piper is considerably more than the success story of a poor little rich girl. It is a witty, civilized account of an age of revolution in the dance, by one of the spunkiest of the revolutionaries.

Lines of a Duck. "There was no place in the family point of view for failure," says Agnes, in describing her childhood. Her mother was the daughter of Henry George, the renowned Single-Taxer, her father had been a noted playwright since the age of 25, and Uncle Cecil was by his own admission the best director in Hollywood. So when Agnes begged leave to study for a career in dancing, the favor was granted--but only, said her mother, on condition that she become another Pavlova.

That, as it happened, was just what little "Ag" had in mind. Unfortunately, she was constructed more on the lines of a young duck than a young swallow, but hour after hour she exercised in her mother's bathroom, gripping the towel rack for her barre, to pull herself into the classic shape.

Agnes had her dancing debut in the late '20s, in the days when Martha Graham was pioneering modern dance. Agnes was soon a close admirer of that fiercely esthetic priestess, but she never became an acolyte. It has been the distinction of Dancer de Mille's career that although her talent is small, it is strong: she has danced at every step to tunes of her own choosing.

Her first concerts showed a mature wit, a flair for character dancing, and a feel for American material (forty-niners, chorines, Civil War vaudevillians). The critics clapped, but the going was hard. For the next half-dozen years, Agnes lived on a small allowance from her father, eked out with an occasional bond from her mother's badly depressed stack of securities. "Good heavens, baby," gasped Uncle Cecil in the innocence of his millions, "are you in this for your health?"

Out of the Cactus. In 1938, after six more lean years of recitals and study, mostly in England, Agnes returned to New York, and shortly joined the new Ballet Theatre, which was bent on proving that good ballet can have modern themes as well as the classic ones of the old Continental repertory. Turning more from dancing to choreography, Agnes composed Three Virgins and a Devil, which scored a quick comedy hit. Martha Graham herself called it "a little masterpiece." Next year, for the Ballet Russe, Agnes de Mille produced her bumptious Rodeo, and soon after contrived the dances for Oklahoma! in the same vein. After about 15 years of professional dancing, she was at last out of the cactus bed.

Since Oklahoma! she has designed the dances for a string of Broadway hits (including Carousel, Brigadoon, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and produced some fine ballets besides (Tally-Ho!, Fall River Legend). Success has neither quenched Choreographer de Mille's ambition nor made her dizzy. Rather, in her closing pages she does some "cold reckoning without the hysteria of failure to underscore my concern," and concludes: "The work wasn't good enough."

Martha Graham gave her an answer for that: "No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. And at times I think I could kick you until you can't stand."

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