Pamela Harlech: the Carabosse of British ballet - chairman of English National Ballet

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Christopher Bowen

The newspaper headline pasted like a talisman to Pamela Harlech's office door shouts its message as only a British tabloid can: "Is Power Broker Pamela Set to Return and Conquer?" Yet it seems that the subject of this proclamation is not English National Ballet's formidable chairman of the board, expatriate New Yorker Pamela, Lady Harlech. Beaming a smile across her baize-covered desk, Harlech dismisses the sign as a chummy office prank: "I can't remember who the article was about--somebody else, for a change. Carol, our executive director, put it there. Isn't it a hoot?"

But could a note of disappointment be detected in her voice? After all, in her four years with ENB, she has often seemed to be the company's most newsworthy figure, with the column inches to prove it. Yet, until recently, most of that coverage has fluctuated between the unflattering and the downright hostile. Accused of running Britain's second-largest ballet company to fuel her own ego, of bullying opponents such as Peter Schaufuss and Ivan Nagy into submission or resignation, and of foisting her own bad taste onto the repertoire, she is seen as the Carabosse of British ballet, leading a company cheerfully labeled in some quarters as Dance Theatre of Harlech.

Less-flattering nicknames of a more personal nature have also been applied, most of them inspired by her hair, a vast, aerodynamic helmet of black with silver wings, a monument to back-combing and lacquer. She says, "Like Lady Hairspray. Listen, I know them all, and it's so boring. My hair happens to be very thick and very difficult to do. I've been wearing it like this since I was twelve. It's nobody's business but my own, and it has nothing to do with whether I can run a ballet company or not. They don't talk about men like that.

"Of course, if I was blonde and pale, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But this is what they see walking through the door." Raising her hands to indicate the coiffure that offends so many, Harlech strikes a pose of operatic defiance, letting out a short cackle for effect. It is the one truly theatrical gesture in an otherwise friendly, businesslike meeting. But her irritation can also be detected in the tap-tap-tap of chunky jewelry on her desktop. This tattoo builds to an impressive crescendo when the subject of Schaufuss or Nagy is raised, though it should be noted that the decibel count on the Harlech tapometer is generally lower for Nagy.

Viewed from a distance, Schaufuss's transformation of dreary London Festival Ballet into English National Ballet, a glamorous and exciting company with sexy, crowd-pulling guest stars and the most comprehensive and challenging repertoire of any classical company in Britain, was one of the success stories of the 1980s. But Schaufuss's high-profile tenure was also an expensive one, and by the end of the decade a deficit of 500,000 pounds had been accumulated. Stories began to circulate of a company split into hostile factions, with artistic and administrative teams at loggerheads and a board fighting over who would be the next chairman.

At the end of 1989, Harlech was asked by the Arts Council of Great Britain, which subsidizes the company, to sort out the mess. This she did by getting the entire board to approve her appointment; that done, she then insisted that they all resign. It was a move worthy of one of the more farfetched episodes of Dynasty, with Harlech appropriately cast as Alexis Carrington Colby. The scandal reverberated around the British arts scene for months and did much to establish Harlech's formidable reputation, even more so when the first action of her new board was to sack Schaufuss.

Recalling her first few months at ENB, she insists that it was never her intention to get rid of Schaufuss. "I was put in place to sort out the board [members] who were fighting among themselves and behaving in a very unprofessional manner. I thought Peter was brilliant, but it soon became obvious that things would be difficult."

Just how difficult became clear at an early meeting between them. "He came along with one of his henchmen and threatened me for two hours about how we didn't need a board or a chairman, and how he was going to fire half the people in the building. He just went on and on. He thought he could walk over me. Boy, did he pick the wrong person. But then, he's very bad with women--really nasty with them--particularly those who are going to tell him what to do. Even the dancers, who thought I was the Wicked Witch of the West, had been complaining about him for years."

The shock waves surrounding Schaufuss's sacking would, in time, have died down were it not for the fact that his successor in the post of artistic director, Nagy, was also dismissed by Harlech and her board five months before his contract was due to expire. "I don't want to get into that much," says Harlech. "Ivan is a very nice man, but the job was simply too big for him. He didn't have a lot of ideas, and he didn't take trouble with the dancers." Falling morale and plummettistic artistic and technical standard were there for all to see, but Nagy retaliated by giving an interview in which he criticized Harlech for interfering in all of his artistic decisions, an accusation that, it seems, can still get Harlech riled. "That really bugged me! I had nothing to do with the repertoire. It's not my job. I don't know enough to be an artistic director; if I did, we wouldn't have been doing the rubbish we did."