By Sheer Force of Genius

With a range that extended from brash Broadway musicals such as “On the Town” and “Gypsy” to inimitably sensitive and sensual ballets such as “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Dances at a Gathering,” choreographer Jerome Robbins had a career unmatched in its creative variety.

Who else could evoke antique Thai dance drama for a Broadway audience by suavely combining a number of Asian and Euro-American dance techniques (“The Small House of Uncle Thomas” sequence in “The King and I”), or develop a complex, large-scale classical vehicle for New York City Ballet from the movement motifs found in a vintage, ballroom-style Fred Astaire/Rita Hayworth film duet (“I’m Old Fashioned”)?

In perhaps Robbins’ best-known creation, he also brilliantly fused jazz ballet, the plot of “Romeo and Juliet” and the gestural style of teenage New York gangs in the groundbreaking “West Side Story” dance musical on stage and screen.

This ability to assimilate influences from everywhere and to annihilate traditional distinctions between high and low culture made Robbins a quintessentially American artist. Moreover, his story at first glance seems the inspiring archetypal tale of the son of immigrants who achieved fame, fortune and a place in history through talent and hard work.

But that story also had its dark side, and Robbins insisted on telling it himself through a 1991 theater project (“The Poppa Piece”) intended to serve as an uncompromising self-portrait. Eventually, after heroic and agonizing attempts to confront his past, he abandoned it, unfinished. He died in 1998 and instructed his estate that his private journals remain unpublished for 15 years.

Whatever those sealed volumes may eventually reveal, two recent books (one by someone who knew him intimately, another by someone who never met him) offer a comprehensive study of this conflicted, driven man and his star-spangled career as choreographer and director.

Issues of ethnicity, sexuality and power politics converge in both these accounts, bedeviling Robbins throughout his life and fueling the confrontational style of his working methods and the characteristic intensity of the work itself.

Author and screenwriter Christine Conrad’s “Jerome Robbins: That Broadway Man, That Ballet Man” (Booth-Clibborn Editions) represents a monument to a 30-year relationship with Robbins that began as romance and ended as loving friendship.

A Robbins scrapbook, filled with production photos, personal mementos and interviews culled from a number of sources, it anchors its breezy, compassionate biographical overview with insights in Robbins’ own words about how some of the masterpieces of 20th century dance and musical theater came into being and what they meant to him personally.

“I think my dad’s greatest pleasure was ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ” Robbins recalls in a 1995 videotaped conversation that Conrad excerpts. “[After the performance] he came through the stage door and he saw me and just burst into tears.

“I was so touched by it. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do that show, because of the background that I have.” That background, of course, involved being born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in 1918 to a family of Russian Jews who ran a delicatessen on Manhattan’s East 97th Street.

From the first, Robbins rebelled against the constraints that he felt his ethnicity imposed, changing his name to achieve a more mainstream American identity, though he later came to terms with being Jewish and always fought the anti-Semitism he found in the arts world. Indeed, as he later told the FBI, he joined the Communist Party in 1943 because he initially believed that it opposed the kind of prejudice he had experienced.

Ten years later, Robbins was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Communist affiliations, betraying friends and colleagues in a political witch hunt that proved a “scalding experience” for him, in Conrad’s words.

“He never spoke publicly about his testimony after appearing before the committee,” she writes, noting that the abortive “Poppa Piece” he worked on 38 years later fell apart because Robbins could not adequately depict or resolve his anguish over caving in to pressure to name other Communists and sympathizers in the theater and dance worlds.

Conrad sees Robbins’ decision as a result of the threat of “exposure relating to his sexual life,” an opinion strengthened in “Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins” (Putnam), an exhaustively researched portrait by Greg Lawrence, co-author of Gelsey Kirkland’s autobiography, “Dancing on My Grave,” and two other books with her.

To Lawrence, Robbins’ inability to accept his homosexuality and his fear of being publicly outed drove him to extremes: turbulent gay romances (including one with the young Montgomery Clift) followed by attempts to will himself straight--and also the agreement to give the House committee the names of colleagues he knew to be Communists. (It should be noted that other gay artists, such as composer Aaron Copland, declined to give the committee any names.)

Jerome Chodorov, one of the writers of the musical “Wonderful Town,” was among those Robbins named. “I never was bitter about Jerry,” Chodorov told Lawrence, “because I figured in those days a homosexual was very vulnerable ....I don’t think he did it out of viciousness. He did it out of fear.”

In Lawrence’s book, Robbins isn’t the only major figure to ricochet between male and female lovers. Composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, for example, is quoted as telling author Gore Vidal that he slept with the entire original cast of his and Robbins’ hit ballet “Fancy Free,” which would be three women and four men, if you count the non-dancing bartender.

But Robbins wasn’t just another happy hypocrite in the arts world, brandishing a trophy wife while hiding his boy toys. Instead, he seemed to forever internalize the homophobia and perhaps also the anti-Semitism and Red-baiting around him. So if he never actually suffered any loss of work after the House testimony became public, the experience haunted him and he judged himself more severely, in more ways, than any of his attackers.

Lawrence quotes dancer-choreographer Ruthanna Boris’ story of seeing Robbins grimly stare at a mirror before dancing a Balanchine ballet early in his career. “His costume was mauve tights, a white flowering poet’s shirt with a black vest over it, and a velvet tam ... tilted to one side. Very, very demode and Parisian poet. He stood there and he looked and he said, ‘Well, now I look exactly like my father thought I would when I told him I wanted to be a dancer.”’

Lawrence begins his book with a statement by Mel Tomlinson, a former soloist with New York City Ballet: “If I go to hell, I will not be afraid of the devil. Because I have worked with Jerome Robbins.”

Seconded and documented over and over, that view of the man gives “Dance With Demons” a very different tone than “That Broadway Man, That Ballet Man.” But the books are complementary (if not necessarily complimentary), and from them a composite portrait emerges.

If anyone ever became a genius by sheer force of will, that genius was Robbins. Parental disapproval over his career choice, guilt over his sexuality and every other blow to his self-esteem were buried and vanquished, for a time, in an uncompromising work ethic that mandated not mere success or even excellence, but unquestionable greatness.

His association with George Balanchine at New York City Ballet may have softened that stance somewhat, giving him the supportive father figure he always needed, but to the end he remained harsh and demanding to himself and to everyone working for him--especially when he felt greatness to be out of reach.

Both Conrad and Lawrence quote the 1989 New York Times interview in which Robbins declared, “I am a perfectionist. I wear that badge proudly. I think that’s what art is about--trying to make it as good as you possibly can.” The wonder is how often he exceeded everyone’s expectations but his own, redefining his greatness, and genius, once again.

In our hearts, we might wish that he had been more at peace with himself, but who would ever wish away any of the unforgettable and often visionary moments of dance and musical theater that these books celebrate?

“The possibilities of the human body are endless,” Robbins told World Theatre magazine in 1959. “Why not use them all? Why limit ourselves to a set [dance] language which in spite of its good qualities is no longer fit to express the feelings of today?”