CHAPTER 1

Introduction - Early Years
If you are a dancer reading this, or a dance student of any kind of dance and are hoping for a future in dancing, I think you may find this story of my life encouraging, and perhaps, maybe, even a bit inspiring. At least I meant and hope it to be so. A dancer’s life is not an easy one. It’s fortunate if there is someone to help and support, but if you have to go it alone, well, you just have to have a strong faith in yourself and the strength and ability to face whatever comes. Many miss the mark in spite of their efforts, but isn’t it best to have made those efforts no matter how many times we fall by the wayside? If we are able to say we actually ran the marathon rather than wondering what would have happened if we hadn’t, is a triumph not to be surpassed.

The early struggles and sacrifices endured by dancers, actors, composers and such, and their striving for success in their careers always interested me far more than their later lives, that is, after they had found success, and especially if they came from lowly beginnings, as I did. Even though, as a dancer I managed to become a soloist with the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center and a member of the leading ballet company in the USA (American Ballet Theater) as well as many other dance companies, I still feel I never really reached the top in my profession. But very few do, unless they happen to be a highly paid and publicized dancing star like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Baryshnikov or Nureyev. Oh, I’ve only mentioned men. There’s Makarova, Cyd Charisse, Dame Margot Fonteyn and the list goes on. But you see, it’s more difficult for men as they have so many more hurdles to overcome. In this society, men, as a rule, do not become ballet dancers and it’s amazing when some actually do. Still, it’s a lot easier than when I was growing up.

In case you are wondering about the title: “Dancing On A Greyhound Bus”, it comes from the many hours I’ve spent sitting on busses, as well as on trains and airplanes, visualizing and plotting dance steps in my head. In other words, choreographing. Entire ballets of mine have been created and notated that way.
Anyway, this is my story...

In Manhattan, on 34th Street, there was once a Greyhound Bus terminal. That’s where I first arrived in New York City – a sixteen-year old boy carrying all my belongings in a cardboard suitcase bought at Woolworth’s and with $20 in my pocket. I had come to New York to seek a career as a dancer, knowing no one there and with no connections. Would my dream eventually lay shattered at my feet? Or, could it be I was not meant to be a dancer after all?

As I stepped out onto 34th Street, looming above me to my right, was the Empire State Building - its top barely visible in the evening mist. To my left was Sloane House YMCA. Little did I know then that this bastion of tiny, cell like, door slamming rooms was to be home territory during many future New York City comings and goings.

I had come from Boston – well, from a town outside of Boston really - a town named Braintree, where I grew up in unrelenting poverty and abuse. It was also where I discovered music and dancing. Two Presidents were born and buried in Braintree; John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Their homes, very familiar to those of us growing up in Braintree, are still kept as shrines in nearby Quincy, which in the 17th century was all part of Braintree.

Photo above: John Adams’ Birthplace in Quincy, MA

My mother had already been abandoned with four children to raise by herself when she brought me into the world, illegitimate and unwanted. Imagine, a poor woman trying to cope with all this alone, and in the depths of the depression. By then, my three half brothers and sister were already teen-agers and about to leave. When they had gone there was only my mother and myself left. I grew up in surroundings of unrelieved poverty. The smell of it lingered with me all my life. “The dark brown taste of being poor” was the way famed actress Ruth Gordon characterized it. As a matter of fact, Ruth Gordon grew up nearby, long before I was born. Photo: My mother, Ethel Mae Grover

The first thing I remember was my Mother sitting me on a park bench and telling me to stay there while she went off to work as a seamstress. I did exactly as she had told me to do; sitting there quietly all day long, never moving, never wandering off until she came back to collect me. I was three or four years old. What was I thinking of to be so obedient? I had no toys. I didn’t know what ice cream or candy was. I just sat and looked at the railroad tracks and an occasional train passing by.

Railroad tracks also ran behind where we lived. They led to and from Boston. and the kindly engineers, seeing our poverty, often threw some coal down from the train for us as it sped past.   Photos: At about age 3 or 4 years

One of my brothers very nearly killed me. I was standing behind him as he was chopping wood. While swinging his axe backwards he struck me in the forehead and with blood spurting everywhere I dropped to the floor as if dead. I always carried the scar.

This same brother also beat me. Coming home from school, sore from the beatings of the school bullies, I often had to endure him giving me more of the same. He also was a bully.

I thought my middle brother was a bit kinder. Perhaps he was trying to replace the father I never had. He took me to the circus in Boston once, an event that left me overwhelmed, and gave me an electric train and a bicycle, and even taught me how to ride it. I often helped him in the print shop where he worked and delivered his paper route. Yet many years later it was this same brother, the only one remaining after the others had died, who had by then become somewhat mentally unbalanced and threw me out of his house when I was most in need of help.
Along with recollections of my mother screaming out the window in hysterics, no doubt in extreme desperation over our poor circumstances, remain quite vivid.

This litany of abuse was the rule rather than the exception, but such happenings shape our destiny. I would often gaze up at the stars and pray that a space ship, like the one in “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” would land and take me away to my real home. It was not a happy childhood.

Over half a century later, when I had retired to Tucson, Arizona, I again visited Braintree and the site of the first house that I remember. It of course had long since been demolished. I particularly wanted to photograph the train tracks which were so much a part of those early years. They were still there but the woods on the other side of the tracks had become a housing development. On the spot where the house once stood, another house had been built and it’s owner was working in his garden. When he saw that I was about to take a picture he became extremely hostile and without giving me a chance to explain what I was about to do, he told me to back off or he would call the police. So much for the hospitality of the people of Braintree.

Beyond the issue of how cruel an environment I came from and the misery and real costs of poverty, there was one joy. I had my dog Billy, who grew up with me.

Photo: With Billy

This early love of animals showed itself when a very cruel boy next door climbed trees in search of bird nests. If he found one with baby chicks he would take out his jackknife and sever their heads off. He also kept a pen with live turtles that he captured from the nearby pond and took a fiendish delight in shooting up their rear ends with his BB gun. All this distressed me so that one day, while he was not around, I released all the turtles and guided them carefully as they walked, turtle pace, all the way down a hill, across a street and back into the pond. I don’t doubt he would have killed me too if he found out it was I who had performed this mission of mercy.

Returning to school after Thanksgiving Day, the teacher asked each of us to stand up and tell the class about our holiday dinners. This was a very insensitive thing for her to do. Each child described their dinner in detail – the turkey, the pumpkin and mince pies, the fruits and nuts, none of which I had ever tasted. When my turn came, even though I was an unflinching truth-teller, I could not bring myself to reveal that I had nothing like that. I simply repeated what I’d heard the others say and even at seven years of age I could sense the teacher suspected it was all a pack of lies.

Then my mother told me there was no Santa Claus. It was the first time I’d ever heard of him anyway. She was making sure I wouldn’t expect any presents that she couldn’t give me.

The First Dance Lesson
A man living in the single Braintree hotel was giving a dancing class. I don’t know who he was or how and why he rounded up about five of us ten year old boys. He was hoping to teach us tap dancing though none of us had any idea of what he was trying to do. It was possibly a basic class given to introduce local children to dancing. Or more likely this retired man wanted to teach some children the tap dancing he knew, merely for something to do. It left no impression on me, and certainly no inner call to dance.

School Days
Being poor and fatherless, wearing hand me downs, painfully shy and detesting the required school baseball and football games, I was naturally an outcast and regularly beaten up by gangs of bullies at the Monatiquot Grammar School, grades one through eight.. When it was one on one I could defend myself, but not against a swarm of roughnecks. I dreaded the two days each week that had required periods of outdoor sports. Winter was a relief as it was held in the indoor gymnasium with structured calisthenics. To me, that was more like dancing. And there was the radio. After school programs like Captain Midnight, The Lone Ranger, Little Orphan Annie. Superman. These fifteen-minute shows aimed at young boys sparked the imagination, filled in my loneliness.

The many Braintree homes we lived in were invariably near railroad tracks. I spent a lot of time on those tracks, walking the rails to and from school, balancing on them, playing or dreaming of the day when I could get on one of the trains and go to someplace, anyplace away from Braintree and the life I was living.   Photo: Monatiquot School

During one summer there came a ray of happiness. Two weeks spent with my mother by the ocean at Brant Rock in a house trailer my brother had built. If it were not for a constant toothache I would have enjoyed it more, but even so it was like paradise playing among the rocks and watching the tides of the New England coast. I was just about to turn thirteen when I had the experience of puppy love for the girl in the next trailer, holding hands and going for walks along the beach together. After the two weeks ended we parted with undying love and I sent her silly, boyish love letters, actually post cards with all my grandiose plans about someday becoming a movie director or a Walt Disney animator. She never answered. It was soon forgotten.

When I became fifteen my Mother finally told me the truth about my origin; that the husband that abandoned her was not my real father after all and I had a different father than my brothers and sister. I was an accident and unwanted. Could this be the reason I felt so different from my family? Why my Mother had once abandoned me in the park? Who was he? Where did he come from? How did they meet?  All I managed to learn was that he was Canadian, possibly French Canadian. In later years all these questions arose but the secrets had died with her. Although I kept the name, there is no Holden blood in me at all. Photo: Braintree Movie Theater These painful memories of an unhappy childhood are best forgotten, but I found a well-worn path of escape and it led to a sanctuary; the local movie theater. The Braintree Theater could hardly be called a grand movie palace but to me it was a portal to another world. Beginning as a twelve year old I went as often as I could get the 11 cent  admission and sat alone among adults as the stories of adventure, mystery and excitement unfolded before my eyes.

The Braintree Theater had no stage, only curtains that opened and closed for each of the double features. The Dead End Kids, popular movie stars of the period, once stopped off in Braintree on a personal appearance tour of some kind. With no backstage area available, they played baseball with us local kids in the parking lot until time to come out and stand in front of the curtains. I’ve long forgotten what they said or did but every kid in town must have been there and the manager had to sit us two in each seat.

Truly, movies shaped my life. There was a saying at the time that movies should be more like real life. I thought life should be more like the movies. They taught me history, ethics, how to deal with adversity and propelled me through those difficult years.

Photo: About 12 years old

High School - With Music
About this time an encounter with scarlet fever left me nearly deaf. While in classes I would strain to hear the teacher who would often send me to the Principals’ office to get a scolding. They thought I was either stupid or just being troublesome. The awful truth was that I was just too shy to tell him, or anyone, that I simply could not hear what they were saying.

I entered High School with remedial English. Apparently I had failed in this subject though I instinctively spoke grammatically correct English picked up from all the reading I had done. Still, the rules of grammar, such as correctly diagramming sentences, continually eluded me and that was the cause of the failure. The teacher wanted to see my Mother about it, but my Mother never appeared. I had to deal with it alone.

Be that as it may, during my Freshman year the English teacher praised me for a piece I wrote about the Moldau River in Czechoslovakia. What on earth would I know of Czechoslovakia? I just felt inspired to write it after hearing the music by Smetana on the radio. There was not much classical music on the radio in those days except the New York Philharmonic on Sunday afternoon and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday that I listened to devotedly, despite my mother’s hatred of it. She went out of the house when it was on.

Since there was no one to guide me in what High School subjects to elect, I simply copied what the girl sitting next to me had written on her questionnaire They were all subjects for a commercial course when I would have been more suited to a liberal curriculum.

The house where I lived alone with my mother was an attached wing to the main house. It had two tiny bedrooms upstairs and a tiny living room and a kitchen with a slanted floor. There was an old, cast-iron stove used for heating as well as cooking. By that time my mother was working long hours at a nearby potato chip factory, leaving me home alone to do the house work.

Photo: The tiny [attached] house where I lived alone with my mother

This was the house I remember most of all. It was the house where I learned music, where I discovered dance and from where I left Braintree for good.

Many years later, when I was turning sixty, I spent a day visiting Braintree and this house. I was surprised to discover it still standing, in fact, renovated and being used as a training school for office temp secretaries. So it happened that on a sunny, summer morning I stood in the old cemetery and peered over the wall into what was once our kitchen. A man was sitting at a desk in the very spot where the old cast-iron stove had stood. I wanted to tell him that I once sat with my feet in its oven while listening to opera broadcasts, that the re-built floor that I had so often washed on my hands and knees was once slanted. That I practiced my first ballet exercises holding onto a kitchen sink that had long gone.

What distressed me most during my first year of High School were not the subjects I had chosen but the gym period. The reason was that each student had to supply his or her own gym outfit, which for boys meant a pair of gym shorts, a jock strap, t-shirt and sneakers. This was no problem for the other boys but for me it was a major disaster because I had no idea where the money was to come from for such a luxury.

I remained an outcast. My only friend was another outcast. He was a Jehovah’s Witness and was shunned due to his not saluting the flag, a requirement of his faith that believes allegiance should only be given to God. We would stick together during gym periods and warn each other against approaching onslaughts of the high school bullies.

Then I began listening to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts more avidly. Not only listening but following along with the vocal scores that I got from the public library. My knowledge of classical music grew by leaps and bounds. In musical appreciation class I was the only one who could identify selections the teacher played on the phonograph, an accomplishment that certainly didn’t endear me to any of my classmates!

Being nearly deaf, the only thing left for me to do was to leave school. I thought I could continue my education at home alone with home study courses and not have to face the ordeals of school everyday. The little wing of the house then became my own private school and I seldom went out. I ordered a book of high school subjects by mail and created a daily schedule for my self-taught classes that I rigidly followed just as if in public school. What discipline!

Somehow I acquired a broken down, out of tune upright piano and began to learn how to play it.

Photo left: An image I drew at the time
Photo right: Quincy Conservatory was in this building

Every Saturday I pedaled my bicycle into Quincy where there was an actual Conservatory Of Music. The piano teacher came there every Saturday to give lessons. He himself was a student at the New England Conservatory in Boston. My weekly lesson was fifty cents, a sum I earned by delivering papers, picking blueberries or weeding gardens. I soon became rather good at the piano and as the Conservatory’s star pupil I was saved for the last in their annual recital playing the first movement of Grieg’s piano concerto followed by Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” - very poorly I’m sure. It’s hard to believe but no one from my family came to listen or give me support in any way. Seeing this, my teacher was saddened. One gentleman and his wife in the audience must have felt sorry for this lonely, neglected boy and took me afterwards for an ice cream soda, a treat I remember to this day.

Photo: The Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy, MA

Quincy had other attractions, like four movie theaters and a public library with private booths where you could listen to their collection of music records.

Books That Can Change Lives
Then something happened that caused a complete about face – a total shift in my consciousness. It was a book on a shelf of the Quincy Public Library that mysteriously caught my eye. A book that was to set my course in a similar but different path than music and would turn out to be my life’s endeavor. It was the biography of the Russian ballet dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, written by his wife, Romola. I couldn’t put it down and read it three times in a row. It was like a revelation when it dawned on me that perhaps I could be a dancer too, like Nijinsky. At least it was a wondrous dream that could possibly lift me out of my wretched and unhappy surroundings and perhaps find a place for me in this newly discovered world of dance. Never having thought about dancing before I had no idea what to expect but was fascinated from the first page. There were so many parallels between Nijinsky’s life and my own. He came from a poor and dysfunctional family. So did I. He was painfully shy. So was I. I decided then and there that I would be a dancer just like him, ignoring the all-important fact that he became insane by the time he reached thirty!

Photo: Nijinsky as Petrushka - the puppet with a soul

But Nijinsky was a Russian and a graduate of the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg. I was an American boy with absolutely no one to help and no one I could talk to about my newly found ambition. I had found refuge from my unhappiness in dreams of becoming a dancer but I would first have to contrive a world of my own and fit into it. So I soon forgot all about the piano and my dream of becoming a concert pianist to pursue dancing – a beauty I must know. Though I had never had a ballet lesson or even seen a ballet, I became entirely intoxicated by this fantasy.

There was a text book on ballet by Kay Ambrose, the only one available at that time. It was not really a proper textbook but an introduction to ballet technique written for ballet fans but it had charming illustrations that I would spend hours trying to duplicate with my own body.

I began to comb my hair in the Nijinsky 1910 fashion. I faked the turned out walk of a dancer and imagined I was Nijinsky himself. Day by day the picture crystallized into an idealistic metamorphosis. I found a Russian grammar at the library and began to learn the Russian language. Soon I was able to read, haltingly, Tolstoy’s “War And Peace” in Russian, with the aid of a Russian-English dictionary. In later years, Russian was to become my second language.
I didn’t feel I was ready to start my ballet lessons right away. For one thing, I needed to get my teeth fixed. Growing up as I had without milk or proper nourishment, my teeth were fragile. I had already lost several and the rest were in bad shape. I also had a small case of teen-age pimples.

There was no chance of family help, in fact there wouldn’t be even the slightest encouragement. If my love of classical music was scorned by them, how would they accept me as a dancer, let alone a ballet dancer. In New England at that time, and possibly still, boys simply do not dance. Even interest in classical music was considered odd for a boy. It all had to be kept secret.
Finishing High School was not as important as extending my life away from Braintree. I had outgrown it and also Quincy. Now my destination would have to become the not too distant city of Boston.

During one of my lonely train trips into Boston I found a teacher, a kindly Russian gentleman - Senia Russakoff. He and his wife, Regina, were Russian Jews from Petrograd. In America they had danced in a vaudeville circuit. They actually lived in their studio on Boylston Street in downtown Boston, sleeping on cots but they were ashamed to reveal this, telling anyone who asked that they lived on ‘the hill’, meaning the nearby, very exclusive Beacon Hill. In the distant past Russakoff had been the teacher of none other than Ray Bolger, then already long famous for his role as the scarecrow in “The Wizard Of Oz”.

I pretended the Russakoffs were my Russian parents and their shabby studio was really the Imperial School Of Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Photos: A drawing I made and a picture of Senia Russakoff My first lesson was private, or ‘prriwat’ as Senia Russakoff would say in his heavy Russian accent. In fact he only gave private lessons as they did not have enough students for regular classes. As I already knew the basic positions from the Kay Ambrose book which I could show in an approximation, I began to realize this was no proper ballet lesson. I was not at all surprised when the lesson ended with perhaps the most spectacular and well-known step in all of Russian character dancing. “Prisyadki” is a movement from Russian folk dance where you squat down and alternately kick the legs out. I must have shown a natural talent for this particular step as Russakoff had me doing hundreds of them. The following day I could barely walk! Image: Animated dancer demonstrating prisyadki kicks

Boston’s Metropolitan Theater
I could only afford one lesson a week, but I went into the studio every morning as if it were my real home, staying there all day either practicing or helping Senia write his dictionary of ballet terms on his typewriter. This was really his idea, to keep me occupied and out of their way. Both Senia and his wife Regina suspected, and once even asked me if I came from a broken home. Why else would I want to spend so much time with them, as if they were my family? Little did they know!

Photo: Main Lobby, Metropolitan Theatre [now Wang Center], Boston, MA

To pay for these lessons I got a job as an usher at the Metropolitan Theater which at that time was Boston’s premiere movie palace It was built in 1925 and then hailed as a magnificent movie ‘cathedral’ fashioned after the Paris Opera. Glittering chandeliers, imposing columns and doorways of imported marble formed an elegant setting for thousands of patrons who came to be entertained by movies, big bands and vaudeville. By my time there it had turned to only showing first run movies, but had lost little of its splendor. It was really quite a glamorous job for a young teen-ager. I felt I worked in a palace.

             Copyright © 2006-2008 Richard Holden

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