Agnes de Mille Dies; Her Dances Remade Broadway : Theater: Innovative choreographer enlivened ‘Oklahoma!’ ‘Brigadoon’ and other musicals.

Agnes de Mille, the feisty doyenne of American dance who with the landmark “Oklahoma!” was the first to integrate dance and story, forever changing the direction of the Broadway musical, died Thursday. She was 88.

Miss de Mille, who had suffered effects of a massive stroke in 1975 and a heart attack a year later, died in her Manhattan home, said Dr. Fred Plum of New York Hospital.

She came under the spell of dance as a girl after seeing the legendary prima ballerina Anna Pavlova perform. She said she wanted to be a choreographer before she knew the word. But her phenomenal Broadway successes, among them the Tony-award-winning “Brigadoon” and “Kwamina,” which led to the Kennedy Center Career Achievement Award in 1980 and the White House National Medal of Arts in 1986, came to her serendipitously in the 1940s after what she described as “15 years of unbroken failure.”

Born into a family destined to make history in Hollywood, she struggled with little help from her famous filmmaker uncle Cecil B. and director-writer father, William, to put her own luster on the de Mille family name.

In 1941, at age 36, she had gloomily assessed her life:

“Youth gone. No husband. No child. No achievement in working. . . . Time was passing. . . . Prospects ceased to be bright.”

But virtually overnight, her prospects became fiery bright. On Oct. 16, 1942, she premiered her innovative ballet “Rodeo,” dancing the role of the cowgirl heroine. In one of her many ingenious innovations, she taught her cowboy dancers to use tennis strokes to simulate riding imaginary horses on stage.

Critics called the production, scored by Aaron Copland, the first great American ballet.

The performance at the Metropolitan Opera House prompted 22 curtain calls.

And two members of the rapturous audience wired her that night: “We think your work is enchanting. Come talk to us on Monday.”

They were Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, the Broadway composer and lyricist, and they hired her to choreograph their historic musical, “Oklahoma!”

The show, first titled “Away We Go,” was panned by the critics at its New Haven, Conn., opening on June 14, 1943, and was far from sold out when it opened on Broadway. Miss de Mille said later she couldn’t even give away first-row balcony tickets.

But the first show was so beloved by the audience that the house sold out nightly thereafter, and Miss de Mille became firmly established as the Broadway choreographer for decades.

She was paid $1,500 plus $50 a week during the run and was refused a $25 raise by the show’s producer. She had to wait until her next hit, “A Touch of Class” starring Mary Martin, to achieve financial security.

Miss de Mille’s personal life turned around just as quickly. She married theatrical agent Walter F. Prude, whom she had met through her friend and colleague Martha Graham.

“He was a real charmer and witty, and we had a grand time for 47 years,” she told an interviewer in 1992 after his death.

Prude went off to fight in World War II and his new wife returned to Broadway.

When her two hits were joined by a third, “Bloomer Girl” in 1944, she became the first woman to equal the triumphs of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter with three hit musicals playing on Broadway simultaneously.

After “Carousel” opened in 1945, she felt secure enough to furnish the couple’s Greenwich Village apartment and buy a mink coat.

In 1946, Miss de Mille gave birth to her only child, Jonathan, who became a college professor.

She choreographed “Allegro” in 1947 and that same year tried her hand at directing as well as designing the dances for the immortal “Brigadoon,” earning a Tony award for the choreography.

She created a memorable ballet about ax murderer Lizzie Borden, “Fall River Legend,” in 1948, tried her hand at staging an opera, with little success, and returned to Broadway with “Gentleman Prefer Blondes,” a 1949 hit.

To come were “Out of This World” in 1950; her personal favorite, “Paint Your Wagon,” in 1951; “The Girl in Pink Tights” in 1954; “Goldilocks” in 1958; “Juno” in 1959; “Kwamina,” which won her a second Tony in 1962, and “110 in the Shade” in 1963.

And she discovered that she liked to write books--about herself.

Agnes George de Mille was born in Harlem, the first child of playwright-cum-screenwriter and director William Churchill de Mille and Anna Angela George. Her paternal grandfather was playwright Henry C. de Mille, her maternal grandfather was the political economist Henry George, and her father’s younger brother, Cecil B. DeMille (some of the family used an uppercase D), was the hugely successful filmmaker.

Although she grew up in what she termed “a family of compulsive achievers,” she candidly described herself as “a spoiled, egocentric, wealthy girl.”

Her father moved to Hollywood to join brother Cecil in 1915 when Agnes was 9 and her younger sister, Margaret, was 6.

She saw the legendary Pavlova that same year, but it took four years for her to persuade her father to let her take ballet lessons. Her uncle arranged for her to audition for the dancer Theodore Kosloff.

“He said my knees were weak, my spine curved, that I was heavy for my age and had ‘no juice’ meaning not limber,” she said years later. “But he took me on.”

Although, at 13, she was beginning her training very late for a ballerina, her parents limited her practice to 45 minutes a day. Dancing was not regarded as a proper career.

Miss de Mille attended the Hollywood School for Girls and then graduated cum laude with a degree in English from UCLA in 1927. The next day, her parents told her they were divorcing.

After what she described in an autobiography as an “anguished” trip to Europe, her mother settled with her and her sister in New York. Her father remarried--a script writer named Clara Beranger.

Miss de Mille continued to dance and, with the encouragement of actor Douglass Montgomery, presented her first dance concert in Santa Fe, N.M. She was hailed as “the successor to Isadora Duncan” and earned $364.

She gave her first concert in New York in December, 1928. New York Times critic John Martin called her “undoubtedly one of the brightest stars now rising above our native horizon” and compared her comedic dancing to the sad but funny antics of Charlie Chaplin. Her father telegraphed from Hollywood: “Welcome, my daughter, into the profession.”

But fame eluded her. She danced in theatrical stock companies, variety shows, private parties and what she later termed “third-rate night clubs.” In 1929, she fulfilled her first choreographic assignment, arranging the dances for a revival of “The Black Crook” in Hoboken, N.J.

When she presented a dance concert in Hollywood, her uncle gave a party for her afterward, and the Los Angeles Times bannered “De Mille Girl Makes Good.”

But for a decade, she was to dance on concert stages in the United States and Europe largely unheralded, studying classical ballet during her years in London.

In England, she later wrote, “you could be a failure without being miserable. In Hollywood you had to have success. You had to have fashionable clothes. You had to have a car, or you were just scum. But in London they didn’t care; duchesses went around in old clothes.”

She spent most of the 1930s in England, lured back to Hollywood once by her uncle. He offered her a contract for $250 a week and transcontinental (but not transoceanic) fare to choreograph the dances for his spectacular film, “Cleopatra.” She complied reluctantly with his edict that she dance on the back of a bull but was fired because he said the dance “has no excitement.”

“He had offered me practical help and thrown me away as trash,” she later said of the experience.

In 1939, Miss de Mille accepted a job as choreographer to what became the American Ballet Theater, and undertook the innovative and daring assignment to choreograph “Black Ritual” for a company of 16 black dancers. Two more important ballets, “Three Virgins and a Devil” and “Tally-Ho,” preceded her professional apex, “Rodeo.”

“Oklahoma!” and the long-awaited success followed.

“When I was beginning my career, I had no endowment and was very poor,” she mused in 1972. “I felt sorry for myself, naturally, and as it turns out, quite foolishly, for in many ways the hardships were beneficial.

“I played the piano for rehearsal, I arranged and copied music, I designed costumes, shopped for material, cut and stitched, packed, pressed and hung. I learned lighting, lit and ran performances, I rehearsed groups and myself, I took charge of printing, wrote copy and advertisements, organized photographic sessions, signed leases, devised and signed contracts, made up the payroll and kept the books.

“I also devised all my dances and performed them,” she continued. “The first time I walked into a theater as a director-choreographer, I was the master of the situation. . . . “

In an interview with the Arts and Entertainment cable network in 1988, she likened her visions for the dancers in “Rodeo” and “Oklahoma!” to “a baseball pitcher using his whole body. . . . Rather than just arms and legs, I thought they should use the thrust of their abdominal muscles . . . their entire muscle structure” for movement.

As her string of successful shows stretched from the 1940s into the 1950s and 1960s, Miss de Mille turned to writing. Eventually, she penned 13 books about her life and dance.

In 1973, the dancer and choreographer realized a dream when she organized the Heritage Dance Theater, pairing her own lectures with illustration by the dancers.

She was in the New York State Theater of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, ready for the curtain, on May 15, 1975, when her life took another major turn.

“Suddenly,” she later wrote, “I discovered that half my body was dead.”

She had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage that paralyzed her right side and nearly ended her life. A blood clot in her leg had to be removed in surgery.

Hospitalized for three months, she gamely taught herself to walk again, practicing at a barre installed in her home. Still fighting her way back from the stroke, she had a heart attack in 1976.

Her response was to produce a lecture and dance concert using dancers from the Robert Joffrey Ballet, and to write more books.

“When she can’t dance, she choreographs. When she doesn’t choreograph, she writes. When she isn’t writing, she is talking, talking, talking,” The Times’ music and dance critic Martin Bernheimer wrote in 1980, describing the show she had brought to Los Angeles’ Greek Theater a couple of years earlier.

“De Mille, after all, is no ordinary mortal,” Bernheimer noted. “She is a crusty, naughty, urgent, opinionated, informed, iconoclastic, indomitable, level-headed, no-nonsense, passionate dynamo.”

The lecture-dance concert was recorded for posterity in a 90-minute television film broadcast by PBS early in 1980.

It was also PBS with its hour-long 1987 special “Agnes, the Indomitable de Mille” that preserved her self-chosen epitaph:

“I would like one word on my tombstone,” she said on the show. “ Dancer .”