Fonteyn said, “Oh, Bob, what a beautiful ballet! But no, I wasn’t very good in it. I used to stand in the wings before making that difficult first entrance to the piano cadenza, and I used to think ‘If I can just get through this cadenza, I’ll be all right.’ But you know what? I never could.”
For the rest of his life, Bob chuckled over such primary-source information. Likewise, he twinkled about once having had to inform Jerome Robbins of a decision Balanchine had made that overruled Robbins: Bob described himself as having been, on that occasion, “the messenger of the gods.”
He cherished the challenge of programming at City Ballet. When Balanchine’s life neared its end, Bob became an influential figure in the decision to name Peter Martins as Balanchine’s successor in running the company.
In 1987, Bob left Knopf to edit The New Yorker. It was at the point that its dance critic, Arlene Croce, who was then among Bob’s most valued friends, began to fulminate in print against what she saw as Martins’s inadequacies as Balanchine’s successor. A crisis ensued in 1988 after the publication of “Dimming the Lights,” her damning essay on the decline of the Balanchine repertory at City Ballet. At Martins’s behest, but without protest, Bob left the board.
As it happened, I arrived from London at that point as The New Yorker’s guest dance critic for six months. I soon learned how Bob loved to fill work with laughter. Once, when I was preparing an essay on the choreography of Paul Taylor, Bob entered my office in a sideways-hopping Taylor step.
At other times he would refer to the step that was the underpinning of Balanchine style, tendu: dancers, having to do it repeatedly every day, know that if they do it correctly, it unlocks whole realms of technique and style. Bob, loving work, loved the very idea of tendu.