Antony Tudor: A Feared and Complicated Genius

At a Kennedy Center tribute in 1986, host Walter Cronkite introduced honoree Antony Tudor as “a butcher’s clerk from Britain who left the old world of European dance to create a new world of American ballet.”

Tudor, who wintered in Laguna Beach the last 14 years of his life, is considered one of the few undisputed geniuses of 20th Century dance, creating at least four enduring masterpieces, including “Jardin aux Lilas” and “Pillar of Fire.”

In contrast to the stock characters and fairy-tale creatures of traditional ballets, Tudor created a new style of ballet in which he portrayed the emotional lives of ordinary people. His ballets, for which he tapped his own experiences, observations and insight into human nature, shocked audiences with their raw, psychological depth.

But unlike his contemporary rival, choreographer George Balanchine, who had numerous books written about his life and work, the man described by those who knew him as egocentric, mean-spirited, feared and fearsome escaped a biographer’s examination.

Until now.

“Shadowplay: The Life of Antony Tudor” (Viking; $24.95), by veteran dance and music writer Donna Perlmutter, tracks Tudor’s development as an artist, from his upbringing in the working-class district in London’s East End (where he was born William Cook in 1908) to his role in the advent of American Ballet Theatre.

Early in his career, Tudor earned a reputation as one of the most difficult and manipulative choreographers toward his dancers.

“He was so witty and so malicious that people stood in fear of him,” said Perlmutter, who lives in Westwood. “Dancers were frightened to death because most often he said deeply personal things to people. Even Rudolf Nureyev told me that Tudor could look at you and with X-ray eyes see right through to the core of you.”

Tudor, who taught in the dance division at the Juilliard School of Music and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet after leaving the American Ballet Theater in 1950, began his Orange County association in 1973 when he was invited to teach during the winter quarter at UC Irvine.

Tudor and his longtime partner, dancer Hugh Laing, returned every winter after that, staying at the beachfront Vacation Village in Laguna. Even after Tudor suffered a heart attack in 1979 and could no longer teach at UCI, the two men continued making their annual pilgrimages to Laguna.

Tudor and Laing were together for 54 years, with the exception of a period when Laing married the famous ballerina Diana Adams. And even then, said Perlmutter, “some people said it was not a marriage for two, but a marriage for three because Hugh and Tudor never really stopped their lifelong partnership.”

Perlmutter, who devotes more than a chapter to Tudor and Laing’s days in Laguna, said the two men had some of their happiest times there.

“Tudor loved the fact that people didn’t know who he was,” she said. “In the dance world he was a Titan. He was, as Clive Barnes put it, ‘the revolutionary of modern ballet.’ But they would go for these walks on the beach and the people they met had no idea. He wasn’t the kind of person who walked around with a puffed chest. He took a secret delight in knowing that people didn’t know he he was.”

It’s in Laguna that Perlmutter, who writes for Dance Magazine, Opera News and The Times, met Tudor for the first time in 1986 for a newspaper interview.

“Before I ever met him I stood in awe of him because his ballets were like no one else’s and they had that power to move me the way few other dances that I see ever have,” recalled Perlmutter.

But despite his reputation for being difficult, Tudor was at ease during the long, free-flowing interview in the restaurant at the Hotel Laguna.

“During that interview he was so enthusiastic and having such a good time that he brought up the subject of doing a book,” said Perlmutter, who was not sure just how serious Tudor’s offhand remark, “Next time, a book,” was.

Tudor had, she said, turned down countless book offers over the years.

“There were all kinds of people who came close and he would nix the idea,” she said. “He was a very secretive, complex man who, you must understand, came from a time when to be homosexual (in England) was to risk arrest. That’s only one reason. There were many things that he was uncomfortable about and, as a matter of fact, he did not fit comfortably into his life or his career.”

In most cases, Perlmutter said, “creating choreography was painful for him. Occasionally, there was an ease for doing what he did, but in the book I likened him to Beethoven, whose scores were punctured with his pen from fits of anger, as opposed to Mozart, who wrote in this beautifully fluid script. Giving birth to a ballet was agony for (Tudor). But the agony was worth it because he usually produced a masterpiece.”

It wasn’t until a year after their interview that Perlmutter had the free time to even contemplate writing a book.

When she met with him again in Laguna, Tudor surprised her by saying that a book was out of the question. But he softened considerably by the end of their meeting, which ended with Perlmutter saying she would send Tudor a proposal outlining the scope of the book she planned to do.

Six weeks later, however, the 79-year-old “revolutionary of modern ballet” was dead of heart failure.

Perlmutter is not sure whether Tudor ultimately would have cooperated with her on the biography.

“Knowing now what I know about how complicated, how perverse and how self-defeating he could be, and the general dissatisfaction he felt with himself, I’m not 100% sure he would have cooperated,” she said. “And especially because his partner, Hugh Laing, lived in mortal terror of anyone finding out about him, and he had a way of controlling Tudor.

“A friend who knew them both very well, put it this way: She said Hugh’s attitude was, ‘If you ever find out that I’m a lowly Caribbean, uneducated and gay, I’ll kill you.’ That really summed up his personality. He was really like a fiery dragon.”

Perlmutter was able to talk to Laing only several times on the phone; one year and three weeks after Tudor’s death, Laing too was dead.

But she had the cooperation of the executor of Tudor’s estate and in charting Tudor’s public and private life she interviewed 143 of Tudor’s friends, relatives and former colleagues both here and in England.

As Perlmutter discovered, “Tudor locked horns with every ballet star of our times. Those dancers who danced in his ballets really had encounters of a very personal kind with him because you couldn’t dance in his ballets without having that kind of encounter.

“That was what he demanded because that was what his ballets were about: personal encounters.”