‘DANCERS’: FINAL BOW FOR LEGENDARY COUPLE

Among the dancing legends hit by death this year--Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett--was the legendary couple known in Hollywood as simply Herb-and-Nora. They were director Herbert Ross and former prima ballerina Nora Kaye, widely considered to be the best ballerina America ever produced. In February, when Kaye died of cancer, Ross carried on by completing “Dancers,” a movie dedicated to her memory, starring their friend Mikhail Baryshnikov, and opening locally Friday.

“Dancers” is a reworking of “Giselle,” set in Italy, with a backstage love story and backstage sadness. After nearly 30 years of collaboration--including such films as “Funny Lady,” “The Last of Sheila,” “The Turning Point,” “Pennies From Heaven,” and such plays as “Chapter Two,” “The Apple Tree” and “Tovarich”--this was the last joint effort of Ross and Kaye.

Recently, at the house they designed and built in Brentwood, Ross talked about his wife, his loss and his movie. When he talks now, it’s with much halting, mid-sentence and much grief--but the conviction is clear. “Nora had a real belief about this movie, and that wasn’t always true of her,” Ross began. “She was very anxious that I didn’t cheapen my talents, and some of my movies she simply had no use for--’Footloose,’ for example. But on this picture, well . . . we ran every tape ever made of ‘Giselle.’ ”

“Giselle” was once one of Nora Kaye’s great roles; from 1940 until 1960--primarily with American Ballet Theater, where she was a charter member--Kaye’s range was such that she extended her art form. Perhaps the first “dance actress,” she defied imitation, offering up emotion and unparalleled technqiue in ballets such as Jerome Robbins’ “The Cage” (which he created for her), Agnes de Mille’s “Fall River Legend” and (especially) Antony Tudor’s “Pillar of Fire,” which made her an overnight star at 22. Her Hagar in “Pillar” is as revered and remembered as Laurette Taylor’s Amanda in “Glass Menagerie.” Kaye’s emotional projection and double air turns caused 23 curtain calls. But as Kaye said years later, “I didn’t know I was making history. I don’t know what history is.”

Kaye made more history by walking away from ballet--and allowing herself the luxury of a life. The young years at the barre, and two early marriages (one to Issac Stern), left her hungry for time offstage. Working with Ross, she gave new meaning to the title assistant to the director (or producer), and three of their movies were devoted to dance--”The Turning Point,” “Nijinsky,” and now “Dancers.”

In Rolling Stone magazine, Baryshnikov called “Dancers” a “very little story about love and how beauty affects people.” Ross says the film is about “the power of a woman’s love, reduced to its simplest terms--the ability to change the life of the man she loved. To make him understand the real meaning of existence.”

The movie was shot last fall in Italy in 34 days, while Ross was still in post-production on “The Secret of My Success.” (Because of Kaye’s cancer, the couple brought a doctor with them to Europe.) As shooting on “Dancers” progressed, Ross remembers: “It began to be clear what the thematic material was about--the death of ‘Giselle.’ Somehow this echoed our personal lives, in which death was unstated.”

What was stated, and well understood, was the couple’s near-symbiosis. In a sentence, Ross and Kaye together became what would have been unthinkable separately--a productive, supportive Hollywood resource that lasted . But how does such a team get started?

Ross remembers meeting Kaye in 1958 on a flight to--where else?--Casablanca. “Nora was afraid of flying and this was my first trip abroad really,” said the soft-spoken former chorus boy. “We talked the whole night on the plane and never left each other again.” Kaye was to dance at the festival in Spoleto and Ross was choreographing, but something happened in Europe. Nora Kaye entered her 40th year, the turning point for a dancer. “After the festival, she left American Ballet Theatre to be with me,” Ross said simply.

The two of them wanted to start a small ballet company and tour Europe but “to my amazement, I hated the life I thought I would love! I was homesick for America. I also didn’t think the work I was doing was commensurate with Nora’s gifts, so I wanted to disband the company. We closed at the opera house in Cologne, and that night she threw all her toe shoes out the window of my sports car. She never danced again.”

In “Passages,” Gail Sheehy wrote about this couple in a chapter called “Living Out the Fantasy.” Nora Kaye had been a girlhood idol of Sheehy’s; meeting her, Sheehy found “a thickset woman with ample contours in her face.” (The ballerina had allowed herself the luxury of food in later years.) But seeing Kaye with Ross formed another image for Sheehy: “The two of them together are like fragments of a picture being mended.”

The couple was included in “Passages” as an example of how to handle what Sheehy calls the “switch-40s,” a syndrome not unlike what psychiatrists call “mid-life crisis.” As Kaye told Sheehy: “Finally, I realized there had to be more than just going from role to role.” The incident in Cologne was also touched upon--Nora Kaye’s final performance--and the fun she had later driving through the Black Forest in Ross’ MGA, tossing out the shoes.

Now Ross elaborated: “She began merrily throwing the shoes out the window. In Spoleto we had done ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ and Sullivan was going to Moscow. I staged a dance for Nora, and she was invited to Moscow with Sullivan. She asked for new toe shoes and there was an objection. Because she must have needed 30 or 40 pairs, because she was very strong . . . but as we drove through the forest she forgot about everything. She began throwing out the shoes one by one. It was both an end and a beginning.”

The unanswered question: Why didn’t Nora Kaye become an actress? In the ‘40s she was offered “Johnny Belinda” but refused it. The major reason for not acting was probably “Nora’s voice. She had a very specific New York accent.” Also, and importantly, at 40 Kaye had achieved her professional goals, all of them.

Her marriage became her priority. What that meant, to Ross, is that every decision she made was essentially based on their being together. It meant she did not run a ballet company in Manhattan while he directed a movie in Nice. “I’d had my career, and there was no other possibility except the continuing of it,” as Kaye told Sheehy. And as Ross put it: “It was no sacrifice to her.”

Instead Kaye put her energy into Ross. Nobody in Hollywood doubts that the Ross output is due largely to Kaye’s input. In small and large ways. Example: Pre-Kaye, Ross would avoid waking up until afternoon, but the ballerina was an early riser, so he became one too. She was as tough on Ross, and his decisions, as she was on herself as a ballerina.

But did she play Pygmalion to his Galatea? The question is important because of the example they set, because people struggling in Hollywood often say, in effect, “If I had a Nora Kaye in my life, I could develop, succeed.”

“Pygmalion? I don’t know if that’s true,” Ross said, thinking about it. “Her belief in me compelled me to re-evaluate myself. That I know. But she was extremely critical. I mean she was not minus the support by any means, but she had this sort of divine gift for ruthless honesty. Most of us spend our lives deceiving ourselves, and Nora never did that.”

On a practical level, Kaye taught Ross “how a true performance was assembled, how detailed the work was. I began to understand that inspiration wasn’t enough; it had to be smoothed and polished and investigated and refined. She was methodical; she built in layers; she would create an inner monologue where she would speak to herself and you would watch details emerge.”

Kaye also had an unusual gift (especially for an artist) of drawing people to her. At her memorial service was such an impressive cross section of the community that if you looked quickly, you could believe in Hollywood as a film colony, an artists’ haven. To see Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine stand in line to be seated at the service wasn’t mere star-gazing. It was a glimpse of how one powerful artist can affect others.

“She was gregarious,” remembered Ross, “but she was also selective. There was a modesty that came out of discipline, and I think that applied to people, too. She loved artisans, people who could refinish furniture, anyone creative. Once, in Europe, she met Orson Welles at a cafe. She walked up to him, and did the bravest thing. She said, ‘You are the biggest disappointment of my life.’ Because she cared that much about talent.”

It seemed important to distill what Kaye knew and gave Ross, because it was an artist’s legacy. “Well, one thing,” he remembered, “Nora taught me that our gifts, yours or mine or anyone’s, are finite. What one must do is use them to their maximum. But recognize also that there is a limit to the gift. There are places, for example, that an actor can get to, and places in a role that he can’t get to. Knowing that frees you.”

Kaye obviously felt the freedom of an artist’s life, and sometimes she exhibited the carelessness allowed an artist. “She was often forgetful about saying thank you because she was so generous herself. People were gravitating to her, but she was so private. She had parts to her even I didn’t know.”

Nor did the public, certainly. Ballet aficionados like to believe Kaye was the role-model for Anne Bancroft’s Emma in “Turning Point,” but Ross disputes it, and so does the film’s writer, Arthur Laurents. Laurents, who decades ago was engaged to Kaye, explained that Shirley MacLaine’s character “was based on Leslie Browne’s mother, and the Bancroft character was a composite of women. . . . Nora was something else entirely. Nora was one of a handful of the great artists of the 20th Century.” Ross says the Bancroft character, the aging ballerina, was someone “totally addicted to death. Death is an addiction, you know. And people are amazingly immoderate. . . . Nora’s gift was for living.”

And not just living through her husband. He smiled in remembrance. “She had a very independent life. She would sometimes disappear all day. I was convinced she had another house or apartment. But she’d be visiting shops of people who interested her, roaming, learning. . . .”

Truly, then, there was life after being a prima ballerina? “There was this incredible capacity for having a good time, be it at the best suite at the George VI in Paris or the Hassler in Rome. The pleasure of living was very important to Nora. We never had a bad time.”