I MARRIED A GENIUS: Review

• Published in: The New York times 1986
• Main Authors: 1930's, ELIZABETH KENDALL, Elizabeth Kendall, a dance critic, is finishing a book on Hollywood romantic comedy in the
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Balanchine, George (1904-1983); BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION; DANCING; Kendall, Elizabeth; Zorina, Vera
• ISSN: 0362-4331

[Vera Zorina] was the woman who in the years just before World War II personified the glamour of the Russian Ballet - that exotic aura of demure, yet invincible womanly charm - for American theater and moviegoers. Ironically, Vera Zorina wasn't really Russian: she was a dark-blond German-Norwegian with wide eyes, a gently cleft chin and a lean, yet voluptuous body -born Eva Brigitta Hartwig in Berlin in 1917. The Russian name came from her stint as a dancer in the mid-1930's in Col. W. de Basil's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The renown came from her migration from the ballet stage to the musical comedy stage - in the 1937 London production of Rodgers and Hart's ''On Your Toes''; thence to the movies as a protegee of Samuel Goldwyn, who featured her in his 1938 ''Goldwyn Follies''; then on to Broadway to play the sweetly comic angel in the Rodgers and Hart 1938 Broadway hit, ''I Married an Angel.'' SOME of the problem may be that she does not have the gift for imaginative re-creation of scenes, not even ordinary scenes that are not as charged as a marriage. She tells us, for instance, that when [George Balanchine] taught ballet class, it was ''very special.'' ''He simply asked,'' she says, ''for unusual things, saw unusual faults, and demanded more.'' She doesn't seem to realize that a host of ballet fans, scholars and interested readers would love to know what things he asked for, what faults he saw, what he demanded. Neither does she call up for its narrative color the impoverished, gallant, gypsy world of ballet she grew up in. (One has only to pick up a fine memoir, Sono Osato's ''Distant Dance,'' which covers some of the same ground, to realize what kind of an objective, observing eye is missing here.) However she may experience them, even her most complicated feelings about herself - her longing to dance in the midst of a movie career for instance - come out in oblique fashion.