Always a dancer… - ballerina Allegra Kent - Interview

Interview, March, 1997 by Robert Gottlieb

RG: She was your partner?

AK: In a sense. But there weren't any boys available for dates, anyway. I was always running out the school door to get to a ballet class; I never stayed in school for the boys.

RG: So when Bert Stern came along, that was it. He decided it was you, and -

AK: He did decide. After eight months, he decided that he would like to marry me. And I married him.

RG: As Jane Eyre says, "Reader, I married him."

AK: [chuckles] It's going to be a musical now.

RG: Yes. Maybe your life will be, too.

AK: It already has been. [laughs] "Da, da, da!"

RG: How do you read this part of your life?

AK: My early marriage? I was too young.

RG: Everyone was too young to get married when they got married.

AK: Even now, I see coming attractions of movies, and I say to myself, "I'm too young, I'm too impressionable, I can't see this movie!"

RG: And Balanchine was famous for not wanting his ballerinas to marry, have children, et cetera.

AK: My mother didn't care.

RG: But Balanchine cared.

AK: Yes, he cared.

RG: So when you were doing this thing of getting married when you were too young and having children - well, I know you wanted the children - to what extent were you consciously and perversely gratified that you were acting against Balanchine's wishes?

AK: Oh, there was that ingredient. I definitely knew. [laughs] I knew what he would say. But getting married wasn't so deliberately against him, it was just . . . at that time I didn't know what else to do. I'd been living with my sister, then my mother arrived; I didn't know who in the family I should be living with. And I didn't want to live alone. So it was a kind of changing of apartments, or changing of roommates, more or less. But I didn't know anything, really, about who this roommate was going to be. He was going to be a husband/roommate. Then the children - of course, I knew how important my children were.

RG: You wanted them.

AK: I wanted them.

RG: You wanted them, but also - I'm sorry - but I can't help Inferring this from your book that there was some part of you that needed to defy or disobey.

AK: Well, it was the way I was - because I was always trying to be a good girl, but a good girl who was really a bad girl. And that's the way I danced, too. Because no one really taught me the rules when I started with those ex-GIs. I didn't know there were certain things you did or didn't do in classical ballet.

RG: This matter of the good girl who's also a bad girl goes back to Balanchine's vision of you that we were talking about.

AK: That's right, yes.

RG: So do you think that even then you understood on some level that while you were doing what you really needed to do, which was to have children, you were also showing him that you - not he - were In control of your life?

AK: Yes. I was.

RG: In a way it sounds to me - I don't want to make a vulgar equation here - but you're halfway between Gelsey Kirkland, who did nothing but resist, defy -

AK: And yet who didn't break so many dance rules.

RG: Yes, but we're not talking about dance rules.