Loving anchor for grande dame

Dancer, carpenter, architect, stage designer, husband, family man. Newell Taylor Reynolds was, most of all, perhaps, something there isn’t a word for. “Helpmate” is too condescending, “amanuensis” too literary and pretentious, “devotee” too cultish, “caregiver” too medical, “enabler” too tinged with overtones of excess and abuse.

Reynolds died Wednesday at age 91, much loved in the Los Angeles dance community and beyond for being the rock, the anchor, in the life and career of preeminent Southland choreographer, teacher and company director Bella Lewitzky. He supported her in many ways, created spaces for her onstage and off, buttressed her importance as an artist with his own quiet authority, made her freedom possible by devoting his life to it.

When you spoke with him, his intelligence, perception and warmth were unmistakable, but he never broadcast those virtues, remaining instead a kind of silent partner or loving subordinate to his dynamic and multitalented wife.

They met in the 1930s, performing for Los Angeles modern dance pioneer Lester Horton; after that, his role was never in doubt, although its forms of expression changed decade by decade. Indeed, he became whatever Lewitzky needed up through her death in 2004, and it’s impossible to guess what would have happened to them if they hadn’t found each other.

If we celebrate Reynolds’ life as an act of devotion, we should also celebrate the other lives that haven’t ended yet but that have made a major difference to dance in a country where artistic support must be personal long before it has any chance of being institutional or governmental. Talent isn’t enough -- the struggle for recognition and a place at the table is too exhausting.

Recently, one of the Southland’s most active and acclaimed choreographers lost the person who had functioned as a copycat Newell Taylor Reynolds both personally and professionally. That loss was due not to death, which might have made it easier, but to unexpected, unexplained abandonment, which has left in its wake emotional wreckage and financial ruin. After a quarter of a century, the relationship and the career were inextricable, and no board of directors or company supporters have yet made enough difference to secure the choreographer’s future.

Some long-lived dance artists go through a whole roster of people devoted to their welfare -- modernist icon Martha Graham, for example. Early on, she had Louis Horst: mentor, composer, lover. At the very end of her life, believe it or not, she had Madonna, a former student who reportedly paid for the medical care Graham needed in her final days but who insisted on anonymity, possibly because her generosity clashed with her image as pop music’s material girl.

In between, Graham had Ron Protas, a young photographer who did what Graham’s dancers and board didn’t or couldn’t do: rescue her from the deepest depression of her life and inspire her new beginning as a choreographer and company leader.

Protas became her companion, professional assistant and heir, in the process alienating so many self-styled keepers of the Graham flame that demonizing him has become their cottage industry since her death. Was he the right man for the job? Who knows? He was there with what she needed, and let’s thank him for that.

Maybe Protas’ big mistake was not adopting the silent, half-invisible but unchallengeably supportive presence that Reynolds made look so easy and natural in service to Lewitzky.

In any case, Reynolds’ death reminds us of all the loving personal fealty that sustains dance by giving talent its wings. There ought to be a word for that or even a holiday. In the meantime, anyone blessed with such a powerful, unsung whatever should light a candle, send flowers and think seriously about a second honeymoon.

lewis.segal@latimes.com