ALEXANDER, SHANA - NUTCRACKER by nutcracker.txt

Author:nutcracker.txt [nutcracker.txt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Other similarly awkward encounters ensued. The last this couple heard from

Frances was a telephone call at 1:30 A.M. “She kept apologizing for awakening us and said she knew it was inappropriate, but she insisted that somebody on the Board was following her.”

Frances not only spoke of her fear of being followed, she said her telephone was tapped and her building under surveillance. She described a close brush with death at lunch. Five minutes after she and her guest that day left the restaurant, the woman’s husband-a noted gun collector-had turned up looking for her.

Not all Mrs. Schreuder’s social encounters with Board members were sinister. She could be a very animated and amusing conversationalist, and she sometimes projected an intense, exotic sexuality. New York is full of fashionable women, another lawyer says. “After a while, they all look the same. Frances was a true original. I found her fascinating.”

A Ballet Guild party was held at the Carlyle Hotel. Frances and her escort grew raucous enough to drown out the entertainment. When a patroness tried discreetly to hush them, Frances huffed loudly that she was a close personal friend of Lincoln Kirstein. The next day the woman checked.

Kirstein said he had never heard of her. In truth the entire inner circle knew about Frances by now, and it was becoming apparent that her dinner party money was just the tip of a green iceberg.

The financial details of each new ballet mounted by NYCB are complex, arcane, and jealously guarded; it would scarcely do for some givers to know what other givers are, and are not, giving. But some financial facts are available regarding Frances’s first really big benefaction, which was not to a new ballet but a new book. This was a mammoth catalogue raisong entitled Choreography by George Balanchine, to be published by a not-for-profit foundation. Mrs. Schreuder was first approached about it during the spring or summer of 1979. In time she received a lofty letter from Winthrop

Knowlton-then president of the NYCB Board, as well as president and CEO of

Harper & Row-inviting her to contribute to the $75,000 estimated cost. ” Providing the basic information in concentrated form, the book will illuminate Balanchine’s growth and adumbrate his career and influence by outlining in factual form the essential details of place, occasion, and personnel which, while emanating principally from America for the past forty years, remain directly connected with the beginnings and first triumphs in St. Petersburg, Paris and London,” Knowlton wrote. His letter continued in like vein for three single-spaced pages, eventually coming out with it: what K6chel did for Mozart, what Gesellschaft did for Bach,

Frances Schreuder was hereby invited to help make possible for the man whom her new friends placed alongside Picasso and Stravinsky as one of the three surpassingly artistic geniuses of the twentieth century.

Did Frances come through? Does a duck take to water? When finally published, in 1983, the huge book weighed nine pounds, sold for $75 a copy, and had cost $420,000 to produce. $105,000

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