ERNIE BARNES, ARTIST AND FOOTBALL PLAYER
Published: April 30, 2009
Ernie Barnes, whose drawings and paintings of athletes, dancers and other figures in motion reflected his first career as a professional football player, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 70.
Ernie Barnes’s “Sugar Shack” (1971), a painting that was adapted for the cover of the Marvin Gaye album “I Want You.”
The cause was complications of a blood disorder, his personal assistant, Luz Rodriguez, said.
Mr. Barnes was an offensive lineman in the old American Football League, playing four seasons in the 1960s for the New York Titans, the San Diego Chargers and the Denver Broncos. He would often say later that even during his playing days, his heart was more in the painting and sketching he had been doing since he was a child.
But the athletic experience clearly influenced his painterly vision. His work, which mostly depicts black people — Mr. Barnes was black — is kinetic and often vividly bright, though even in his black-and-white pencil drawings the strain of competing bodies is evident in the curves, stretches and muscular exertions of the figures.
While his most famous painting, “Sugar Shack,” a jubilant dancing scene that appeared on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album “I Want You” and was shown during the closing credits of the television situation comedy “Good Times,” is not literally sports-related, it is nonetheless a characteristic work, with its vibrant tumble of bodies.
“One day on the playing field I looked up and the sun was breaking through the clouds, hitting the unmuddied areas on the uniforms, and I said, ‘That’s beautiful!’ ” he wrote on a Web site devoted to his work,
sundaysgladiators.com. “I knew then that it was all over being a player. I was more interested in art. So I traded my cleats for canvas, my bruises for brushes, and put all the violence and power I’d felt on the field into my paintings.”
Ernest Eugene Barnes Jr. was born on July 15, 1938 in Durham, N.C. His father was a tobacco company clerk, and his mother, the former Fanny Mae Geer, ran the household for a prominent lawyer in whose home library young Ernest discovered paintings by the old masters. Overweight and shy as a child, he was encouraged to build his body by a junior high school teacher who caught him drawing in a notebook as he hid from bullies. By the time he graduated from high school, he had received an athletic scholarship to North Carolina College of Durham, now North Carolina Central University.
Drafted out of college by the Washington Redskins of the
National Football League and traded to the Baltimore Colts, who cut him at the end of training camp, he was picked up by the Titans (they became the Jets in 1963) of the N.F.L.’s fledgling rival, the American Football League. In 1965, he played a final professional season in Canada. Afterward he approached Barron Hilton, then a part owner of the San Diego Chargers, with a proposal that he become the official artist of the A.F.L. Hilton introduced him to the owner of the Jets, Sonny Werblin, who staked him to a painting career, paying him a year’s salary to get him started.
Mr. Barnes, whose first two marriages ended in divorce, is survived by his wife, Bernie; a brother, James, of Durham; two sons, Michael, of Virginia Beach, Va., and Sean, of Washington; and three daughters: Deidre, of Durham, and Erin and Paige, both of Los Angeles.
********************************************************************************************
JACK KEMP, STAR ON FIELD AND IN POLITICS
By ADAM CLYMER
Published: May 2, 2009
Jack Kemp, the former football star turned congressman who with an evangelist’s fervor moved the
Republican Party to a commitment to tax cuts as the central focus of economic policy, died Saturday evening at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 73.
WJZ/Associated Press
Mr. Kemp in 1967 with Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. More Photos »
The cause was cancer, said his son Jimmy Kemp. Jack Kemp’s Washington consulting and lobbying firm, Kemp Partners, announced in January that he had cancer but did not disclose the type.
Mr. Kemp was secretary of housing and urban development under the first President George Bush and the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1996. But his greatest legacy may stem from his years as a congressman from Buffalo, especially 1978, when his argument for sharp tax cuts to promote economic growth became party policy, one that has endured to this day.
Mr. Kemp, having embraced a supply-side economic theory, told the House that year that the nation suffered under a “tax code that rewards consumption, leisure, debt and borrowing, and punishes savings, investment, work and production.”
Ronald Reagan adopted the issue as a central one in his 1980 presidential campaign, and in 1981 he won passage of a 23 percent cut over three years. The legislation was known as Kemp-Roth, named for Mr. Kemp and
William V. Roth Jr., the Delaware Republican and his Senate co-sponsor.
Mr. Kemp’s other great cause, in his 18 years in the House and for three decades thereafter, was to get his party to seek more support from blacks and other minorities.
“The party of Lincoln,” he wrote after the 2008 election, “needs to rethink and revisit its historic roots as a party of emancipation, liberation, civil rights and equality of opportunity for all.”
Mr. Kemp won his House seat in 1970 because of his celebrity as an all-star quarterback for the
Buffalo Bills, twice champions of the American Football League. He connected his concern for minorities with his respect for his black teammates, especially the linemen who had protected him from pass rushers.
Vin Weber, a former congressman from Minnesota and a close friend, said Mr. Kemp would often say, “I can’t help but care about the rights of the people I used to shower with.”
Mr. Kemp was an unlikely leader for a political cause based on a theory of economics. He had majored in physical education while playing football at Occidental College in Los Angeles. When he entered politics, many Washington veterans dismissed him as a “dumb jock,” and as a junior House member in 1977, he did not even serve on the tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means.
But though Mr. Kemp had not studied a lot at Occidental, he had been making up for it for years. On long team flights, his reading habits —
Ayn Rand and
William F. Buckley Jr., among others — stood out. The wide receiver Elbert Dubenion recalled this year, “He was reading these political books, and we were reading the Katzenjammer Kids.”
Mr. Kemp first heard about supply-side theory, as advanced by Arthur B. Laffer, a
University of Southern California economist, in 1976. Soon he immersed himself in the case for tax cuts, reading deeply from the works of the Laffer camp as well as its critics. When he debated the subject on the House floor, he cited studies on the money supply, the experience of Britain and Sweden, and the impact of past tax cuts in the United States.
He persuaded his House colleagues to bring the idea to a vote in 1977 and three times more, in 1978. Each time they sought to reduce taxes across the board, starting with the 70 percent marginal rate, which was then imposed on the highest incomes. They lost each time — once by only five votes — but they had an election issue.
Mr. Kemp had also convinced Bill Brock, chairman of the
Republican National Committee, that the issue was political gold. “He said, in effect, we need to restore the essence of our party, which is growth, which is jobs, which is creativity,” Mr. Brock said in an interview this year. “And the way to do that is to free people of the burden of excessive taxes.”
Mr. Brock said the issue was central to the Republicans’ gaining 15 seats in the House of Representatives and 3 in the Senate in the fall of 1978.
While some allies wanted him to seek the Republican nomination himself in 1980, Mr. Kemp supported Reagan. In 1979 he organized a seminar in Los Angeles to explain the intricacies of the policy to Reagan and his campaign advisers. Reagan, who thought his own taxes as a movie actor had been too high, seized on the idea as one that would appeal to blue-collar voters.
After his election, Reagan called for a three-year, 27 percent tax reduction, straight out of the Kemp-Roth bill, which had been introduced earlier. The three-year, 23 percent reduction that the president ultimately agreed to was supported by Mr. Kemp. Although its formal name was the Economic Recovery Tax Act, it became known as the Kemp-Roth tax cut.
“Jack Kemp is the indispensable political leader of the modern conservative economic revival,” Edwin J. Feulner, president of the
Heritage Foundation, a conservative research institution in Washington, said recently, adding, “Jack’s role in developing and exploring the potential of
supply-side economics in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for Reagan’s economic program.”
Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, said of Mr. Kemp: “I think there is no doubt that he had a greater impact on conservative and Republican economic philosophy than anybody else. More than Laffer, more than Reagan.” And the change he helped bring about was not just in the party’s attitude toward taxes, Mr. Ornstein said; Republicans, he said, were “no longer worshiping at the shrine of a balanced budget, for better and for worse.”
John French Kemp Jr. was born in Los Angeles on July 13, 1935. He had wanted to be a professional football player from the age of 6 but recognized that he did not have the bulk to be recruited by a major college team. Still, he wanted to join a football program that used a professional system, so he chose Occidental, where he started at quarterback.
It was also at Occidental that he met Joanne Main, who became his wife of 50 years. She survives him, as do two sons, who also played professional football, Jeff Kemp of Redmond, Wash., and Jimmy Kemp of Washington; two daughters, Jennifer Kemp Andrews of Middleburg, Va., and Judith Kemp of Potomac, Md.; and 17 grandchildren.
The
Detroit Lions drafted Mr. Kemp in 1957 (as the 203rd pick), but he did not make the team. He played briefly with the
Pittsburgh Steelers and was cut by the
New York Giants and the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. Finally, with the founding of the American Football League in 1960, he was chosen by the Los Angeles
Chargers.
He went on to star as quarterback for the Chargers and was named to the all-A.F.L. team. In 1962, Mr. Kemp injured his passing hand, and the Chargers put him on waivers to open up his roster spot — temporarily, they hoped. But the Buffalo Bills claimed him for $100.
After his hand healed, his first game in Buffalo was against that year’s league champions, the Dallas
Texans. Mr. Kemp completed 21 of 35 passes for 230 yards and two touchdowns as the Bills upset the Texans, 23-14.
“The fans stormed the field after the game and carried Kemp off on their shoulders,” Larry Felser, a sportswriter at the time for The Buffalo Courier-Express, recalled earlier this year. “It was a scene from a bad movie, but it happened.”
Mr. Kemp led the Bills to league championships over the Chargers in 1964 and 1965, when he was chosen as the league’s most valuable player.
Billy Shaw, a Bills teammate and a member of the Hall of Fame, said in a recent interview: “Jack Kemp is probably the most intelligent football player I ever played with. Jack had what I consider better than average ability or skills as a player, but because of his ability to use his head and to make good decisions on the field, his results were probably better than the talent that he had.”
Mr. Kemp was a founder and president of the A.F.L. Players Association. In January 1965, he supported a boycott of an all-star game in New Orleans by the league’s black players after they had been barred from nightclubs and cabs in the city. Mr. Kemp helped get the game moved to Houston, where the black players participated.
His last season as a professional player, in 1969, was a losing one in Buffalo, but he was named an all-star for the seventh time. It was also the league’s last season before merging with the
National Football League. Among A.F.L. quarterbacks, Mr. Kemp ranked first in number of passes (3,055), completions (1,428) and passing yardage (21,130).
His transition to politics was smooth. As a popular football player he had campaigned in New York for
Nelson A. Rockefeller and in California for Ronald Reagan in their gubernatorial races and for
Richard M. Nixon and Barry Goldwater in their presidential bids. And he was a name in Buffalo. With a House seat open in the 1970 election, local Republicans persuaded Mr. Kemp to campaign for it. He won with just 51.6 percent of the vote, but in seven of his next eight races he cruised to victory with at least 70 percent of the vote.
After helping the Reagan campaign in 1980, Mr. Kemp was elected chairman of the House Republican Conference, the third-ranking leadership post. In that role he sometimes clashed with Reagan, who was quicker to compromise on taxes than Mr. Kemp. “Jack Kemp now knows I’m teed off with him,” Reagan wrote in his diary in 1982.
But the president hailed Mr. Kemp on his retirement from the House in 1988, writing in a letter, “We showed this town that — if you want to make the government move — let a guy from Hollywood and a football quarterback call the plays.”
Mr. Kemp had hoped to succeed Reagan, running earlier that year for the Republican nomination and offering himself as the conservatives’ alternative to Vice President George Bush and Senator
Bob Dole of Kansas, the minority leader. But
Pat Robertson, the television evangelist, took so much of the party’s conservative base, finishing second to Mr. Dole in Iowa, that Mr. Kemp’s hopes deflated.
Mr. Kemp dropped out of the race in March 1988 and endorsed Mr. Bush, clearly hoping for the vice-presidential nomination. That went instead to Senator
Dan Quayle of Indiana. But after his victory in the fall elections, Mr. Bush did choose Mr. Kemp to take over the
Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1989.
His biggest task was cleaning up the corruption and favoritism that had marked the housing department during the Reagan administration. Again he was a bundle of energy. He met black leaders, visited homeless shelters and presided over the destruction of failed housing projects like Cabrini-Green in Chicago. He also offered proposals like tax preferences for inner-city “enterprise zones” and urged that public housing tenants be enabled to buy their homes. Most of these ideas went nowhere. One successful measure was the Affordable Housing Act, a block grant program that has spent about $1.5 billion a year since 1992.
Mr. Kemp’s final turn on the national stage came as Mr. Dole’s vice-presidential candidate in 1996. It was a surprising choice. The two men differed on economic policy: Mr. Dole advocated balanced budgets; Mr. Kemp wanted tax cuts and did not worry about deficits. They also disliked each other. In one exchange, in 1985, Mr. Dole said, “Kemp wants a business deduction for hair spray.” Mr. Kemp retorted: “In a recent fire, Bob Dole’s library burned down. Both books were lost. And he hadn’t even finished coloring one of them.”
But the choice of Mr. Kemp balanced the ticket. It pleased conservatives, who were skeptical about Mr. Dole, and it added Mr. Kemp’s East Coast and California ties to Mr. Dole’s Midwestern support. Plus, Mr. Kemp was 12 years younger than Mr. Dole, who was 73.
In the fall campaign, Mr. Kemp made a point of going to minority neighborhoods that rarely saw Republicans. But those efforts appeared to make little difference as President
Bill Clinton won re-election comfortably. The Dole-Kemp ticket won 12 percent of the black vote, compared with 10 percent for the Bush-Quayle ticket in 1992.
After 1996, Mr. Kemp became involved with charitable and political associations and headed Kemp Partners, a lobbying and consulting firm in Washington. But he never ran for office again, ending a political career that in many ways reflected an answer he had given in 1970, when asked how his football experience qualified him for Congress.
“Pro football,” he replied, “gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics: I’d already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded and hung in effigy.”
*******************************************************************************************
GREG PAGE, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION
Published: April 28, 2009
Greg Page, a prizefighter who was hailed as the next
Muhammad Ali as a teenager and briefly held a world heavyweight title in the mid-1980s, only to sustain a brain injury in his last fight in a seedy Kentucky nightclub in 2001, died on Monday at his Louisville home. He was 50.
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Greg Page, left, in 1980. His professional record was 58-17-1.
In an interview with The Associated Press, his wife, Patricia, attributed his death to the lingering effects of that final fight. It left him paralyzed on his left side, with garbled speech.
Page came from a boxing family and began practicing the sport at age 5. When he was 17, he was being called the next Ali, after sparring three rounds with Ali.
“That boy hit me so hard it jarred my kinfolks in Africa,” The Louisville Courier Journal later quoted Ali as saying.
Page boasted to the paper at the time, “He wasn’t hurtin’ me or nothin’.”
Page was the World Boxing Association heavyweight champion for five months in 1984 and 1985 but fell short of the golden future experts had predicted. He constantly battled extra pounds; was ensnarled in disputes between promoters; was startlingly injury prone; fought questionable opponents; threw away money on a large entourage; and experienced a sequence of other problems not unfamiliar to the fight game.
He twice disappeared from the sport for years. Even his championship victory at age 26 over Gerrie Coetzee at the Sun City Resort, then in what was considered Bophuthatswana, now part of South Africa, was marred by a timekeeper’s error: the knockout occurred 48 seconds after the round should have ended. Coetzee’s protest went nowhere.
Page’s record as a professional was 58-17-1, with 48 knockouts.
Bert Sugar, the boxing historian, said in a 2005 interview with The Louisville Courier-Journal that Page “never fully, I think, achieved his potential.”
In a 1982 New York Times interview when he was 23 and still unbeaten, Page said: “Everything I do is controversial. O.K., so what? They say I can’t punch. O.K. They say I’m not serious. O.K.” He ran down a list of allegations, including that he was too fat, too old and too young, then concluded: “I’m a myth, a fluke, a poor exhibition of a fighter. I love it.”
A suit Page filed against Kentucky boxing authorities, maintaining that there had been inadequate medical provisions at his last fight, helped reform boxing. In 2007, his wife agreed to a settlement with the Kentucky Boxing and Wrestling Authority in which the agency admitted no wrongdoing but paid her $1.2 million. It also agreed to name the regulations it enacted in 2006 the “Greg Page Safety Initiative,” among them a provision that a licensed ringside physician conduct a thorough physical examination of all fighters after bouts.
Gregory Edward Page was born in Louisville on Oct. 25, 1958. His father and two uncles had been boxers, and the uncles had sparred with Ali. In an interview with The Hartford Courant, his wife said that his father took the young Greg to the gym and said: “Son, you have two choices. Either you box or you box.” So he boxed, even though he preferred basketball.
At 17, he reached the National Golden Gloves semifinals in the heavyweight division, and the next year was runner-up. In both 1977 and 1978, he won the Amateur Athletic Union heavyweight championship. He finished his amateur career with 94 wins and 11 losses.
He knocked out his first professional opponent, then ran his record to 11-0. In 1981, he won the United States Boxing Association heavyweight title with a technical knockout of Stan Ward.
In March 1984, Page lost a bout with Tim Witherspoon for the World Boxing Council heavyweight title, weighing what The New York Times called “a blubbery 239 ½” pounds.
The common wisdom was that Page should have won.
“If he had heart, he would have taken me out,” Witherspoon said.
In August 1984, Page lost his United States Boxing Association title to David Bey by a unanimous decision. He won his world title three months later, then lost it to Tony Tubbs in April 1985. Meanwhile, he was supporting a payroll of 20 to 25 people. His accountant told The Courier-Journal he needed just four or five.
He fought just six times from 1986 to 1988, and not at all from 1993 to 1996. After defeating a string of opponents, he fought Robert Davis, an undefeated fighter, in June 2000 in New York City. He lost by a technical knockout in the eighth round. By that time he was also working in a factory as a painter.
Then came the bout against Dale Crowe on March 9, 2001, in a nightclub in Erlanger, Ky., so dingy that decaying dead rats littered a corner of Page’s dressing room. The fight was touted as a duel for the championship of Kentucky.
Information about survivors other than his wife was not available.
******************************************************************************************
FRANKIE MANNING, THE AMBASSADOR AND MASTER OF LINDY HOP
By TERRY MONAGHAN
Published: April 28, 2009
Frankie Manning, a master of swing-era dance who went from the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to Broadway and Hollywood, and then after a long break enjoyed a globe-trotting second career as an inspirational teacher and choreographer of the Lindy hop, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 94 and lived in Corona, Queens.
Steele, Auckland
Frankie Manning on tour with Lucille Middleton in 1938.
Bill Cunningham
Mr. Manning in 1989.
His death was announced by his companion, Judy Pritchett.
Excelling in what quickly became first America’s and then the world’s most popular participatory form of jazz dancing in the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Manning led the way in giving the Lindy hop professional expression. The dance, which enables both partners to improvise rhythmically at the same time, has had enduring appeal as both a social and a performance dance, sweeping aside hierarchical, class, ethnic and gender conventions.
When questioned about the apparently irresistible allure of the Lindy, Mr. Manning invariably described it as “a series of three-minute romances.”
Dapper and charming to the end, he always conveyed the muscular and pile-driving yet rhythmically rich style of his heyday, when he propelled partners through the air at lightning speeds to the swinging sounds of Chick Webb,
Duke Ellington and Count Basie at the Savoy, Harlem’s premier ballroom. From there he ascended the entertainment ladder, appearing in Cotton Club productions, Mike Todd’s 1939 musical “The Hot Mikado” and movies like “Radio City Revels” (1938) and
“Hellzapoppin’ ” (1941).
Born on May 26, 1914, Mr. Manning left Jacksonville, Fla., with his mother three years later as part of the great northward migration of Southern blacks. They settled in Harlem.
One day in 1929, on his way to Sunday school, he experienced a cultural epiphany on Seventh Avenue, outside the Alhambra Ballroom, when he discovered that he could take part in a youth dance there instead. Dancing soon became his passion, and though his mother initially dismissed his dancing as “too stiff,” he practiced incessantly and kept getting better.
In the early 1930s the entrepreneur Herbert White invited Mr. Manning to join his elite troupe, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, at the Savoy Ballroom. Granted free admission to the Savoy, where he moved to the incessant rhythms of the major 1930s big bands, white as well as black, he rapidly progressed as a dancer. But Mr. Manning, who was working as a furrier, did not consider himself a professional; as he explained in his autobiography,
“Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop” (
Temple University Press, 2007), written with Cynthia R. Millman, “We didn’t get paid, but the people watching might throw some money on the floor near the dancers, and we would divide it up.”
Mr. White paired Mr. Manning with Naomi Waller, and his distinctive style took shape. By the time the two of them signed a contract to dance at the Cotton Club, in 1936, shortly after that fabled room had moved from Harlem to Midtown, Mr. Manning was indisputably a professional.
Their success there led to a 1937 tour of France, Ireland and Britain, which included a royal command performance at the London Palladium. Mr. Manning was soon dancing in the Hollywood movie “Radio City Revels” and on tour across New Zealand and Australia.
Back home again he danced in “The Hot Mikado” at the New York World’s Fair and appeared in Hollywood’s version of the comedy team Olsen and Johnson’s Broadway show “Hellzapoppin’,” in a sequence widely regarded as the best example of the Lindy hop on film. Mr. Manning’s ebullient, athletic style was captured at its peak in a sensational acrobatic duet with his new partner, Ann Johnson.
Mr. Manning had choreographed a series of routines for four couples to Count Basie’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” but different music was used in the film because the studio did not want to pay for the use of Basie’s song.
After serving with the Army in New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan during World War II, Mr. Manning led a four-person dance troupe called the Congaroos, which toured England and South America and appeared in the movie “Killer Diller” in 1948. But work began drying up in the 1950s, and Mr. Manning finally abandoned professional dancing for a Post Office job in 1955.
After 32 years of service, Mr. Manning embarked on a hyperactive retirement, returning his full attention to the Lindy, which had begun experiencing a revival. He taught at the Sandra Cameron Dance Center in Manhattan. Many bookings in the United States and abroad followed, and he began teaching, and eventually performing, with his son, Charles Young, known as Chazz, who had followed in his professional footsteps.
In 1989 Mr. Manning and another veteran of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, Norma Miller, choreographed a Lindy routine for
Alvin Ailey’s “Opus McShann.” That same year Mr. Manning shared the
Tony Award for choreography with Cholly Atkins, Henry LeTang and Fayard Nicholas for their contributions to the Broadway revue “Black and Blue.”
In 1992 he trained
Denzel Washington for a Lindy scene in
Spike Lee’s film “Malcolm X,” in which Mr. Manning also appeared. “We were just trying to keep up with him,” Mr. Washington recalled.
Mr. Manning’s marriage to Gloria Holloway ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Pritchett, his companion, and Mr. Young, his son, who lives in Las Vegas, he is survived by another son, Frank Manning Jr. of Leonia, N.J.; a daughter, Marion Price of Atlanta; a half-brother, Vincent Manning of Tobyhanna, Pa.; seven grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
In 1994, Mr. Manning celebrated his 80th birthday in New York at a four-day event billed as Can’t Top the Lindy Hop, attended by Lindy enthusiasts from around the world, at which he established a new tradition by dancing with 80 successive partners. In honor of his 85th birthday in 1999, he danced with 85 partners at the Roseland Ballroom, where his name was emblazoned on the marquee — and where back in the 1930s he had once been turned away.
In recent years two hip replacements had slowed Mr. Manning down, but he was still planning to celebrate his 95th birthday in grand style at
a five-day Birthday Festival in New York reaffirming his leading role in ensuring the recognition of the Lindy hop, including the premiere of a documentary, “Frankie Manning: Never Stop Swinging,” on Channel 13 in New York. Organizers say that event — set for May 21-25, with some 2,000 expected to attend — will go on as scheduled, as a memorial.
*********************************************************************************************
EKATERINA MAXIMOVA, SOVIET-ERA BALLET BOLSHOI STAR
Published: April 29, 2009
Ekaterina Maximova, whose lyrical lines, technical precision and luminous stage presence made her a star of the Bolshoi Theater and a darling of dance critics and balletomanes across the world, died Tuesday in Moscow. She was 70.
The Bolshoi Theater Archive, via Associated Press
Ekaterina Maximova as Giselle in a Bolshoi production.
The Bolshoi, which announced her death on
its Web site, said she died suddenly and unexpectedly. She had remained active as a ballet coach, and news reports from Moscow said she had apparently been in robust health.
Petite, dark-haired, fetching and charismatic, Ms. Maximova was an
Audrey Hepburn-like figure in the Soviet-era ballet world, a dancer whose natural grace and unassuming radiance made her thrilling flights across the stage seem effortless. She was versatile, equally adept in classical ballets — “Giselle” was a signature role, which she first danced in 1960, coached by the celebrated Galina Ulanova — and modern Soviet works.
In 1959, as a 20-year-old newcomer to the Bolshoi, she was given the lead role of Katerina in the company premiere of the Yuri Grigorovich ballet “The Stone Flower,” which she also performed during the Bolshoi’s first trip to the United States later that year.
Based on Russian folk tales, and with music by Prokofiev, “The Stone Flower” is the story of a stone mason, Danila, who is being seduced away from Katerina, his village sweetheart, by a magical temptress. At her first performance at the
Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Ms. Maximova elicited the kind of giddy critical rapture that would follow in her wake throughout her career.
“Lovely little Maximova, to be sure, is enough to melt the heart of any witch, however cruel,” the dance critic of The New York Times, John Martin, wrote. “She has an exquisite dancer’s body, capable of virtually any movement required of it and of making it seem to flow spontaneously out of simple emotional conviction. Beautiful to look at, with a radiant smile and childish guilelessness, she is the ideal of all the young sweethearts of the storybooks.”
Ekaterina Sergeevna Maximova was born in Moscow; according to most sources, including The International Encyclopedia of Dance, the date was Feb. 1, 1939. She began dancing as a young girl and at 10 entered the Bolshoi school, where she trained with Elisaveta Gerdt. Still a student, she danced Masha in “The Nutcracker,” a part she would perform many times, and after graduating in 1958 immediately joined the
Bolshoi Ballet.
In “The Stone Flower,” Danila was danced by Vladimir Vasiliev, whom Ms. Maximova had known since she was a girl and whom she married. They became a powerful pair — their partnership far outlasting that of
Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn — dancing together in “The Nutcracker,” “Giselle” and “Don Quixote,” as well as in Mr. Grigorovich’s “Spartacus,” with music by Aram Khachaturian.
Later, when Mr. Vasiliev began to turn more toward choreography and his relations with the Bolshoi soured somewhat, he and his wife performed opposite each other in ballets like “Icarus” and “Anyuta,” based on a Chekhov short story, that Mr. Vasiliev created for the two of them. Eventually they formed their own company for international touring, returning to Moscow in 1995 when Mr. Vasiliev replaced Mr. Grigorovich as director of the Bolshoi, a post he held until 2000; he survives his wife.
In announcing Ms. Maximova’s death, the Bolshoi described her incomparable career.
“The glory of Russian ballet,” its statement t called her, “the ornament and pride of any foreign company with which she appeared, the dancer of Grigorovich, Béjart, Petit, Lacotte, a television star, charm personified, the eternal feminine component of the immortal Maximova-Vasiliev duet.”
It was last year that the Bolshoi presented a week of events to observe its 50-year affiliation with Ms. Maximova and Mr. Vasiliev. During the celebration, Mr. Vasiliev commented on the nature of their long partnership. The Web site of The Telegraph, in London, reported his simple formula for success: “The man must not get in the way of the woman,” he said. “She is the most important person on the stage.”
(A previous version of this article included a mistranslation of Ms. Maximova’s age from the Bolshoi Theater.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 