Ballerina danced with greats
Worked closely with Balanchine, Nureyev during her heyday
Maria Tallchief, who died Thursday at age 88, was the definitive American ballerina of the 1940s and 1950s. The exotically beautiful daughter of an Osage American Indian, she became an emblem for social mobility as well as for her dazzling artistry.
She was both wife and muse to the 20th century’s master choreographer George Balanchine, and the leading ballerina of New York City Ballet from its launch in 1948. She became a sought-after partner to both Rudolf Nureyev and Erik Bruhn, the world’s leading male ballet stars, as well as the lover of both of them.
Tall and long-legged, with the darkly aquiline looks of her father, Alexander Tall Chief, she set a superb standard for speed around the stage and intense expressiveness. “I wanted to be appreciated as a prima ballerina who happened to be an American Indian, never as someone who was an American Indian ballerina,” she told an interviewer.
Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief was born in Fairfax, Okla., on Jan. 24, 1925, one of three children of Alexander and Ruth Tall Chief. Her younger sister, Marjorie, would also become a ballerina. Home was the Osage reservation on which oil was plentiful, making her family wealthy.
Her father was the grandson of Chief Bigheart Tall Chief, who had led negotiations with the United States government on behalf of the Osage tribe over oil revenues. As a result, she wrote in her autobiography, her father never had to work a day in his life.
Her grandmother was “a typical Indian woman, (who) wore her hair in a single braid down her back and always had a tribal blanket draped over her shoulders.” Her mother was from a ScotsIrish immigrant family.
Betty Marie, as Tallchief was known, had a fine musical ear and took lessons in piano at 3 and dancing at 4. She and her sister often danced in Osage Indian ceremonies, but their mother instigated the family’s move to Los Angeles where a better education could be found.
While at Beverly Hills High School, Tallchief also trained in ballet for five years under the great chor-
“I wanted to be appreciated as a ballerina who happened to be American Indian.”
MARIA TALLCHIEF
eographer Bronislava Nijinska, sister of the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky; Cyd Charisse was a classmate and, at age 15, the two danced Nijinska ballets in the Hollywood Bowl.
Nijinska’s illustrious visiting colleagues enabled young Betty Marie to go to New York to join the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, then stranded by war in the United States. In 1942, age 17, she began her professional career, changing her name to Maria Tallchief (she resisted pressure to “Russianize” it to Tallchieva).
Two years later, choreographer Balanchine joined the troupe, and despite the age gap, Tallchief became his third wife in 1946, when she was 21 and he 42. She admitted that “we saved our emotions for the classroom,” and told an interviewer: “I was in the middle of magic, in the presence of genius. And thank God I knew it.”
Balanchine adored Tallchief ’s leggy, dark glamour as well as her outstanding musicality, and she became his muse when he founded Ballet Society, the forerunner of the future New York City Ballet. He taught her how to become “more Russian.” She shed weight and held herself more haughtily.
When New York City Ballet launched in 1948, Tallchief was already recognized as a magnetic talent.
Among the many ballets of Balanchine’s on which she stamped her charisma and technical brilliance were Orpheus, The Firebird, Scotch Symphony, Allegro Brilliante and his demanding versions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.
The pre-eminent contemporary critic Edwin Denby pinpointed Tallchief’s virtues as her intensity in grand style and “clear, surefooted dancing (which) travels through space easy and large.”
However, Balanchine’s marriages tended to last only until the next muse caught his eye. Tallchief was cast in ballets alongside young ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who would become his fourth wife in 1952.
Tallchief and Balanchine ended their marriage amicably without disturbing their artistic relationship. The choreographer continued to create masterly ballets for her, and she assumed a worldwide mantle as the epitome of American ballerinadom.
In 1952, Tallchief briefly married a pilot, Elmourza Natirboff, before taking Chicago construction magnate Henry (Buzz) Paschen for her third husband in 1956.
The marriage lasted 48 years, surviving Tallchief ’s heated love affairs with her celebrated partners, Bruhn and Nureyev.
She played Anna Pavlova in the 1952 Hollywood film Million Dollar Mermaid, with Esther Williams, and in 1955 was described as the world’s highest-earning ballerina.
In 1960, she joined New York’s other company, American Ballet Theatre, to dance a more dramatic repertoire than that favoured by Balanchine, and led ABT’s first tour to Soviet Russia in 1960, partnered by Bruhn.
It was then that the pair were first seen by the young Nureyev. And when he defected to the West, Nureyev chose Tallchief as his ballerina for his first U.S. television appearances.
On retiring from the stage in 1966, Tallchief settled with her husband in Chicago. She was director of ballet for the Lyric Opera of Chicago during the 1970s, and founder and co-director of Chicago City Ballet, which ran from 1980 to 1987.
In the late 1980s, Tallchief ’s husband was accused of fraud by his sister, a fellow shareholder in the Paschen firm, and lawsuits continued for the next 10 years. The luxury of Tallchief ’s lifestyle with Paschen was found to be partly dependent on false accounting, and in 1999 her septuagenarian husband was jailed for two years for tax evasion. He died in 2004.
Tallchief won many American honours: the Osage tribe named her Princess Wa-X the-Thonba (The Woman of Two Standards), and she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
She is survived by her daughter, the poet Elise Paschen, and sister, the former ballerina Marjorie Tallchief.