Suzanne Farrell: A ‘No-Precedent’ Ballet Comeback : Still Dancing After a Hip Replacement

Just beneath the pale softness of her Botticelli face some vague hint of trepidation shows as Suzanne Farrell floats into the lobby of the Chateau Marmont. Her uneasiness, masked perhaps by the calm and quietude that surrounds the hotel, is almost palpable. But nothing is different. Farrell has always made her aura palpable.

Even now, only a few months since appearing on stage at Lincoln Center for a momentous, teary return to the New York City Ballet, she betrays a certain fragility--not surprising after a 1 1/2-year absence due to degenerative arthritis of the right hip and eventual hip replacement surgery. In a time when the dancer toll has been heavy, Balanchine’s beloved ballerina managed a comeback of particularly heroic dimensions.

But at 42, and facing what she calls “a no-precedent situation,” Farrell doesn’t know whether the return is symbolic or real.

“I can’t know the answer to that yet,” she says, sitting regally upright on the edge of a low couch and looking more like a sedate visiting princess than a luxuriantly physical high-stepper.

“All I can say is that now I feel life is going on. Before (the surgery), it was going by. I’m thrilled to be able to walk and to move freely around in the world. Dancers are not very good about giving up their independence.”

The last time Farrell was scheduled to assert her sovereignty on the dance stage--before surgery--was October, 1986, when City Ballet came to Costa Mesa. But, by then she could no longer function, “not even to bend over and put on shoes.” She had constant pain, caused partially by the wearing away of cartilage. Her hip could not rotate in its socket without the material to cushion its motion. Finally there was no more motion.

Before things reached so desperate a state, however, she managed to ignore the pain.

“The only time it left,” says Farrell, “was when I danced. With all the adrenaline flowing in performance and all those endorphins kicking in I was actually pain-free. Dancing became manna from heaven. It was easy to believe that my condition would improve by itself or that I could work out the problem.”

When the company finished its ’86 spring season at Lincoln Center, Farrell thought she would rest and recuperate, thereby letting the painful hip heal. Instead “it got stiffer and stiffer.” With rehearsals for the fall tour under way she realized there was no recourse to the scalpel.

“The hardest thing was deciding to have the surgery,” she says, explaining that it would require her to stay strictly immobilized and in bed for two months. “Admitting that it was necessary took more from me than enduring pain.”

Thereafter nothing daunted her. She talks about following her doctors orders “to the letter”--doing the specific exercises in bed, not ever rolling over, and “taking heart” in the observable improvement from morning to evening.

She mentions that Sean Lavery, one of the most admired City Ballet principals, was recovering from surgery for a spinal cord tumor and came to lunch one day. By then she was partially ambulatory. “We laughed and laughed at the different strategies for carrying things while on crutches.”

But the true test was yet to come. Finally, with the long recovery period a thing of the past, Farrell returned to a packed house at the State Theatre. It was January, 1988. The adoring fans, who accepted her as Balanchine’s major muse for more than 20 years, made no sound as she first stepped on stage in the last section of “Vienna Waltzes.” And then, with a thunderous roar, applause broke around her.

More than a quarter of a century earlier, young Roberta Sue Ficker arrived in New York from Cincinnati--with chipmunk cheeks and the lean, frisky body of a colt. The 15-year-old had been discovered at a Catholic girls’ school by Balanchine emissary Diana Adams while talent-scouting and was offered a scholarship to the School of American Ballet.

By 1962, the revered paterfamilias took the fledgling into his company and started creating roles for her. Three years later she became a principal. The dancer known as Suzanne Farrell soon personified what came to be known as “the Balanchine ballerina”: She was exceptionally long of limb and slender, swift as a wild animal, pliant in the extreme and utterly musical.

She stood as an exemplar not just to audiences but also other dancers, notably Gelsey Kirkland, whose rounds of cosmetic surgery and excessive dieting were an attempt to replicate the look that Balanchine seemed to worship. But Farrell is one of a kind. Her swan neck, small head and alabaster skin--not to mention the miles of legs that put her at 5 feet 7--make her a distinct beauty.

Suddenly, in perfect health, she departed City Ballet in 1969, giving up a much-envied position to join Maurice Bejart’s Ballet of the 20th Century with her dancer-husband of several months, Paul Mejia. At the time she told a reporter that the cause of the decision was that Balanchine “did not give any roles to Paul because of resentment.

“Our whole problem was that Mr. Balanchine wanted to marry me.” Indeed, he had established a pattern of serial marriages to his various former muses--starting with Tamara Geva and ending with Tanaquil LeClercq.

Farrell’s hiatus from City Ballet lasted six years. “I realized that the Bejart aesthetic was the antithesis of everything I had become under Balanchine,” she says now. (In Brussels), “dancing was not the heart of the matter. Bejart’s ballets were about blending into the scene, becoming part of the theatrical fabric. Music and movement were not central.

“But Balanchine always told me that the most important thing is to live in the ‘now.’ So I was determined to get as much from my now in Belgium as possible. I have no regrets--except that I didn’t consider the possibility Mr. B. would die so soon.”

With an almost imperceptible hesitation, she lowers her eyes and tucks her feet neatly together. “He used to tell me that he’s Georgian and that Georgians live to 100. I believed him.”

It was in 1975 that the prodigal daughter came back to City Ballet, after sending Balanchine a note expressing her desire to do so. And with her return she “expected him to give me some ‘steppy’ ballets, since I was so thin and healthy. Instead he created ‘Tzigane.’ I guess he saw me as earthy and languid. It was a surprise. He told me I’d grown up.”

She acknowledges the maturation, change in outlook and development of worldliness, saying that Balanchine’s choreography for her reflected those qualities. But he went on to conceive many other ballets in various modes, among them the neo-Romantic work to Schumann’s “Davidsbundlertanze.”

But the bottom line “had less to do with what type of ballet he made for me than the fact that we wanted and needed to work together. When he realized that I hadn’t changed as a dancer, he accepted my marriage finally.”

(Mejia, on their return from Belgium, took over the directorship of ballet companies in Chicago and Guatemala and now serves the Ft. Worth Ballet. The couple have “a commuter marriage,” according to Farrell.)

Since Balanchine’s death five years ago, Farrell concurs with various City Ballet watchers that “things can’t be the same without him.”

“No one cleans your apartment like you do. No one took care of his ballets like Balanchine did. Only he understood how they worked.”

And on the basis of her closeness with him she intends to write an autobiography. “It’s important to set the record straight,” she says, but demurs when asked how. “If all those people who barely knew him are writing books, I really should do it. I’m sure it will be a revelation and objective--since I have no regrets, no bitterness.”

Where Suzanne Farrell stands right now as a dancer is not clear, however. Certainly, she cannot claim her former preeminence on the basis of “Vienna Waltzes,” a ballroom ballet that she danced in heeled shoes. She has given five performances of it so far and has danced nothing else.

Somewhat hesitantly, she mentions a ballet that former partner and current City Ballet co-director Peter Martins will do for her as an entry in the company’s American Music Festival in late April. She will dance the title role in “Sophisticated Lady” (Ellington) on the opening and closing nights of the festival.

There was talk of her doing “La Sonnambula,” the ballet about a sleepwalker who bourrees, apparition-like, before a bewildered poet. “But my doctor shook his head when I explained that it involves carrying the man about,” says Farrell. “I’m comfortable dancing on pointe-- that is not the problem. It’s the lifting that he thinks might be too risky.

“I want to dance but not at the expense of walking. Why jeopardize what I’ve worked so hard to regain?”

But the same zealous artist who dared all that her mentor asked, and more, the one who says she worked “to get it right rather than to get ahead” and who “always made it happen,” doesn’t stop now. Two decades of punishment--the grinding and pounding of joints that led to her affliction--leave no remorse, only the same positivism.

“When I first came back to the barre (post surgery), all my muscles were gone. Nothing worked. But each day there was a millimeter of improvement, without pain. And seeing that progress thrilled me.”

Suddenly, Farrell’s big, blue eyes well with tears as she casts an upward, sideways glance. “I don’t know where I can go from here,” she says, “but I’m doing what I can and using everything I have. At least I’ll know when I quit that I didn’t go just halfway. I love to dance so.

“The only thing to fear is not trying. I’m not afraid of failing. When I glance around in class, I can see how much better everyone else is, even with all my stamina and how young I feel. My legs don’t go as high. But I look better than yesterday. And, what’s most important, I’m living in the now.”