I also thought immediately of Moira Shearer, whose saturated crimson tresses matched her red satin slippers in the film The Red Shoes. I love this movie, as I think so many dancers do. Coincidentally, this summer I stumbled across Moira Shearer’s 1987 biography of George Balanchine, Balletmaster. It is an odd piece of literature. She barely knew Balanchine, and she quotes frequently from Bernard Taper’s definitive biography from three years prior. She fully admits her outsider status, though, like when she recounts an awkward tête á tête with Lincoln Kirstein. He demanded of her: “How can you write? What do you know? You don’t know the repertory.”
The book is out of print and it’s easy to see why. Although there are several details that were new to me, it is often a regurgitation of other sources. She is at her best when she tells stories from her (clearly extensive) interviews with Balanchine’s exes Alexandra Danilova and Brigitta (Vera) Zorina, and longtime secretary Barbara Horgan. She is at her worst while hypocritically criticizing critics like Edwin Denby. She even rewrites a passage of his “excessively flowery” review of Apollo in