Among Marvelous Ants and Bees PRIVATE DOMAIN

By Martha Duffy

Paul Taylor burst upon the dance world in 1957, but not quite in the way he had hoped. At 27 he was a member of Martha Graham's troupe and already experimenting on his own. Specifically he was trying to strip away the "dancerly" elements in the modern style, to get down to the basics. He and his hardworking group of three performed the results at the YM-YWHA in Manhattan, and a few weeks later Louis Horst in the influential Dance Observer weighed in with the definitive review: four inches of blank space followed by the author's initials.

Thirty years later the master choreographer still glowers in behalf of the novice he once was: "The review wasn't even very long," he fumes. But the showman in Taylor is able to put it in perspective. "There is," he remembers, "what no amount of paid advertising could have brought -- immediate notoriety." The two coexisting reactions -- of the egocentric artist and the canny producer -- reveal a true man of the theater, and in Private Domain Taylor has written one of the best and most candid theater books to appear in a long time.

There have been several dance autobiographies recently, many of them extolling or punishing George Balanchine along the way, but none is as intelligent or funny or shrewd as this one. Taylor's insights on fellow artists -- Graham, Balanchine, Robert Rauschenberg -- are unusually trenchant and fresh. The book is blessedly free of the cleaned-up quality that such memoirs often have, which inevitably makes the childhood chapters the only interesting, trustworthy ones. Talk about warts and all! For readers who want to hear about pressures and strains on the professional dancer -- the drugs, the drink, the penury -- they are all here, far more eloquently stated than in the lurid confessions of Gelsey Kirkland's Dancing on My Grave.

Today Taylor is probably America's greatest living choreographer. He has received most of the major awards, including a MacArthur "genius grant." He has a town house in Greenwich Village. But before the adulation and creature comforts came decades of very hard scrambling. He was born near Pittsburgh in the depths of the Depression, and his parents separated when he was a small boy. Mama was too busy managing hotel dining rooms to spend much time with her son. Still, he recalls, "I don't remember ever being lonely -- I had health, privacy, and a mother I was wild about." Early on he recognized the "beautiful curse" of solitude, "the one without which I doubt all other patterns would have grown."

Taylor discovered his vocation while at Syracuse on a swimming scholarship. It came as an inexplicable flash, "telling me that I'm to become a dancer -- not any old dancer, but one of the best." The flash was tardy; college is dangerously late to start serious dance training. But Taylor worked on technique, pushing his "instrument" -- as modern dancers like to call their bodies -- ruthlessly, and he was soon studying with the likes of Graham and Jose Limon. Graham became a powerful influence. Much to Taylor's approval, she called her instrument the "bodaah," and he was transfixed by her witchy pronouncements and "oracular eyes."

From Balanchine to Merce Cunningham, choreographers invited Taylor to join their groups. For six years he danced mostly with Graham but in 1961 went on his own for good. A foe of ballet's artifice, he was inspired by the city's population: "They are standing, squatting, sitting everywhere like marvelous ants or bees, and their moves and stillnesses are ABCs that if given a proper format could define dance in a new way." Now his privations really began, and he records them with deep feeling and baleful gusto. Home was usually a wretched flat, cold water or no water. One chapter starts off with "snow sifting gently through the roof." In extremis he ate dog food.

Most of all he toured. If every choreographer's dream is a company of his own, the frustration of touring is the exhausting price to be paid. Heaven knows the beautiful curse of solitude is lifted. There are six seats on the train for seven weary bodaahs. Curtains, stagehands, producers are all nonfunctioning. Taylor is terrified that he won't have enough money to pay for tickets home. He constantly feels insufficient as a leader and fearful that his dancers are bumptious slobs. He even cuts one of his men's hair at an airport. The dancers give as good as they get. At one acrimonious dinner in Spoleto, Italy, they accuse him of cheating at cards. He is appalled. Yet they are loyal; no Taylor dancer ever departs to join a rival company, and one gain comes out of all the strife: "onstage togetherness -- a tribal unity that all audiences notice right off."

Taylor says he has never hired a dancer who did not appeal to "something warm" inside him. But there are frosty spots: Bettie de Jong ("picture a lovely reed dancing") is closest to him, but at times his feelings for her "are like a furry noose which slowly tightens around my neck." He admires the young Twyla Tharp's "magnificent" ambition, but simmers when she disparages his work to London critics. With what must be unprecedented honesty he says he gave Dan Wagoner little solos in Aureole to keep him interested without handing him a fat part. Wagoner, Tharp, Senta Driver and Laura Dean all left Taylor to start successful troupes of their own. He is rueful: "They look to me for direction -- want tugs from their puppeteer boss -- and then snip the strings . . . competing with the great guy who first hired them. The nerve of it!"

Over the years the repertory builds, becoming more varied and more lyrical; State Department tours replace the bus-and-truck forays. At home Taylor's life becomes intertwined with that of a deaf-mute, George Wilson, whom he befriended in the '50s and who stays on, living nearby and helping out. About a few matters Taylor can be irritatingly coy, and one of them is sex. As a youth he could not decide whether he favored males or females ("Let's just say that I preferred to be on top"), so he sought out Graham for counsel. She told him to stop worrying about it. A few years later, after glimpsing a beautiful young man while on tour in Sri Lanka, he turned to homosexuality. But he continued to have affairs with women, always griping about the shortcomings of either arrangement. Nonetheless, through the tantrums a saving wit always comes to the rescue. After one dark rumination he cries, "What's a gender to do?"

Private Domain ends in 1974, the year Taylor stopped dancing. Though the last pages are upbeat -- starting work on the exultant Esplanade -- they are preceded by a remorseless account of physical and emotional breakdown. The trouble began when Taylor started gulping Dexamyl, a combination of amphetamine and tranquilizer, not knowing that it was addictive (Dexamyl has since been taken off the market). In 1968 he disappeared from a tour and spent a nightmare week in Liverpool, drunk, debauched, close to death, a Walpurgisnacht pitilessly described. A few years later his ankle, often injured, was ruined. He had ulcers. Finally he collapsed onstage in Brooklyn and came down with hepatitis. His performing career was over.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company, 18 strong these days, is now presenting a repertory in New York City that demonstrates the vast resources of this protean figure. Soon two young dancers, David Parsons and Douglas Wright, will snip their puppet strings and try to become the Paul Taylors of the '90s. They had better read this book, not only for a preview of the pitfalls ahead, but also for an insight into the nonartistic qualities that just might come in handy: guts, humor and, above all, stamina.