Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins

The first biography of the celebrated choreographer/director of Broadway, ballet, and Hollywood-a man of towering achievement and extraordinary personal demons.For decades he was one of the most commanding creative forces in America. His work on such shows as On the Town, The King and I, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy, and Jerome Robbins's Broadway earned him five Tony Awards and two Academy Awards. His brilliance with American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet established him as one of America's great ballet masters. But when Jerome Robbins, n? Rabinowitz, died at the age of seventy-nine in 1998, he was a haunted man. All of his life, he had struggled with demons: his bisexuality, his Judaism, his often bitter relationship with his parents, his betrayals of others during the McCarthy hearings, and his perfectionism that bordered on the sadistic. He was loved and hated in equal parts; and only now, in this groundbreaking biography by insider Greg Lawrence, based upon two years of research and dozens of interviews with Robbins's family, friends, and colleagues, can the full measure of both the artist and the man be taken. It is a fascinating portrait of light and dark-like its subject, a work rich in complexity.