Carl Ostertag – II

After Carl Ostertag left Gump’s for his State Department contract, I lost touch with him. Our conversations had been principally at that wonderful old store, and it never occurred to me that I might become any closer .

It was approximately 1978 when we encountered each other, thanks to the Joffrey Ballet’s June season at the San Francisco Opera House. It also was the year the Joffrey included Agnes de Mille’s Conversation on the Dance in its San Francisco program. De Mille had sustained a massive stroke in 1975 which required her learning to write with her left hand; the stroke was the raison d’etre for Reprieve, her memoir of the ordeal and her tribute to her physician and the staff at the hospital. [I don’t have the copy handy so the details are hazardous, as also the exact date of that stellar Joffrey season.]

I got a call from my sister Edme, recently divorced from her husband. She was involved in some effective low-key public relations as with almost everything else she undertook. In this instance it was Friends of the Public Library and it seems the Friends wanted to utilize de Mille’s presence to provide a luncheon for her as well as to honor her grandfather Henry George, one of San Francisco Public Library’s founders.

Edme was assigned to arrange the luncheon, inviting the guests, and she enlisted me to provide names of dance-related individuals who should be invited, in addition to Library supporters. High on the list was Jocelyn Vollmar whose name was almost synonymous with San Francisco Ballet, with comparatively brief sojourns with New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Grand Ballet de Marquis de Cuevas and the Borovansky Ballet of Australia providing paid performing experience before returning to San Francisco. De Mille had accepted the invitation, but also had specified she was not going to make any comments.

The venue was the Veterans Building’s fourth floor, then occupied by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with a small oblong room on the Van Ness side of the building; it subsequently has become part of the Wilsey Center of the San Francisco Opera. There was a small café in the northeast corner of the fourth floor contracted to provide the luncheon. Edme arrived with perhaps a dozen green plastic squares of red blooming plants, variety unknown to me; she placed them down the center of the table as decor. The results were effective; their size permitted visibility; the cost was negligible. It was one of those apt surprises I sporadically experienced with my sister.

Robert Joffrey could not attend. As I remember, this was the time of year he held contract renewal interviews with the dancers. Gerald Arpino was to attend, but he specifically stated he would not introduce Agnes de Mille. I was deputized to make the introduction, and I guess, as consolation prize, was seated to her left. When de Mille arrived, her placement in the middle of the table facing the door required some maneuvering to seat her, thanks to the narrowness of the room.

My memory of the menu is zero as well as most of the guests present, but I do remember seeing Carl Ostertag almost directly across from de Mille and me, and if I didn’t know much about their history, I made the connection. We both smiled our recognition. I also have no memory of my conversing with de Mille beyond its being amiable.

When the time came for me to introduce de Mille, I prefaced my praise by relating the portion from In Promenade Home, the time she spent in a San Joaquin Valley town with rose bushes in the city’s square while her husband Walter Prude was stationed in a nearby air base. Via her publisher, I wrote de Mille to ask whether that town was Hanford, California, King’s County seat. Bless her, she responded, confirming the identification. At the time, I was just beginning to be enthralled by dance and knew about Oklahoma’s success because we received the Sunday New York Times in our country mail box every Thursday. I was devastated by the tardy knowledge that this fabulous woman had been so near by when I periodically visited my grandmother; I walked across that square to the City’s main post office to retrieve my grandmother’s mail. Stating what an inspiration she was and had continued to be, I ended my comments.

There was a stirring to my right; I turned and saw de Mille was getting up to
respond. Sitting down quickly, I was thrilled that de Mille went back on her invitational proviso. In that wonderful, slightly husky voice, she launched her comments with, “When ever I get up to speak, there is always the fear I might find myself accused of libel.” I noticed across the table several smiles and a grin or two.

I remember her speaking of her grandfather Henry George, “ By the time he was 24, he had been around the world four times. They did not loiter in those days.” In my memory’s ear I can still hear the tones clustered around the word “loiter.” Absolutely minted.

I don’t remember much else, lost as I was in the success my comments had provided, a cog in an historical chain not too unlike my father’s family, though ours was not a twentieth of such significance.

The luncheon was over and I helped my sister pile the green plastic squares back into the box she had brought. Edme smiled at me and said, “I was hoping she would do that and your words made it possible.” We made out way down one of the deliberately-paced elevators in the Veterans Building and parted. She was headed to her car, I to the Opera House stage door, for I had been told I was welcome.

Carl Ostertag – I

Born in 1910 in Stuttgart, Carl Ostertag led quite a life, winding up in the San Francisco Bay Area where I met him in the art gallery maintained by Gump’s in its north side Post Street location; he curated its contents at two different periods.

The only Wikipedia entry for Carl occurs in connection with Vicki Baum and letters exchanged Otherwise he is simply a memory in the people who knew him; he is far too interesting not to withhold what I remember of him and because I like to hear other people’s life stories, I can amplify the entry with anecdotes. Carl’s life was one reflecting the agility and persistence of German Jews in the mid-twentieth century lucky enough to leave continental Europe prior to World War II.

Among his considerable qualities, Carl Ostertag also possessed a keen perception for personalities worth cultivating and cultivating them without being an example of toadyism. I was lucky enough to locate a paragraph on his career in Wikipedia because of his connection with Vicki Baum. There I learned he had studied at both the University of Vienna and the Sorbonne, studying “fine arts, art history, dance and music.”

Carl was perhaps five feet six inches, with pale eyes I remember as blue, a skin acquiring slight streaks of veins around his nostrils as he aged, an aquiline nose which also was short, and wavy hair receding as it greyed. He was one of the most meticulously dressed men I ever encountered with some regularity, but one preferring to exhibit a casual air, usually with a scarf at the neck. His speech carried touches of music along with the occasional divulgence that German was his mother tongue. He also possessed the capacity for story-telling both precise and with undertones of its emotional strength or absurdity.

His father was an industrialist, his mother an organist and he had one brother. The first story he mentioned about his pre-US life was advice from his father. “Go to Spain, you will not be bothered there.” In his slightly accented, modulated voice, Carl continued, “I was arrested in Barcelona, spent seventy two hours in jail, until my father was able to secure my release.”

If memory serves, Carl’s next move was to immigrate to England. Gravitating to the London dance world, he started studying with Marie Rambert. It would take some research to determine whether he actually danced in her company, but I do know he performed in ensembles at a time when any young man with some serious training was welcomed to appear with struggling companies.

Late in our friendship, Carl mentioned his father died in Switzerland, though his mother remained in Germany. “I tried to persuade her to come to England,” he said. “She was an organist and a good one and there always was work for one in England.” He paused, “She refused and died in Auschwitz.”

His brother he said lived in Canada, working for a non-profit humanitarian organization, and had one son. He also told me that Ostertag in German means “Easter Day.”

He one time waxed nostalgic over Stuttgart and its location which he said was surrounded by hills, providing a self-contained feeling. Another memory was of plum trees in late summer, early fall.

It was at Rambert’s Mercury Theatre that he met Agnes de Mille. As he remarked to me, “After meeting her, I knew she was something.” Their friendship became life-long; she called him “Carlein,” and he said he researched some of her books.

I never learned exactly how Carl immigrated to the United States, but suspect he applied for immigration as soon as he reached England. His first stop was doubtless New York City, where he was in the audience at the premiere of Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Given the friendship, I’m sure he also was present at the Oklahoma opening.

Carl’s wartime occupation, however, was in translating German in an appropriate OWI office in Washington. That office included Ruth Lert, who married Wolfgang Lert, also working at OWI. Lert became a man well known for his partnership in importing the best European skis, and still skiing at 90. Lert’s mother was Vicki Baum, so one can assume this is how Carl connected with the novelist. Wolfgang and Ruth Lert moved to San Francisco. I met Ruth Lert through Carl in San Francisco.

I encountered Carl Ostertag in the Gump gallery, drawn by a Chicano artist’s exhibit whom I had met at Pomona College. Apparently my relative degree of curiosity intrigued him plus purchasing an etching on time. It wasn’t long after that he took a job in the cultural arm of the U.S. foreign service and was stationed in Bangkok, where he arranged exhibits of American artists, and, I would assume, managed their local itineraries and appearances. With the advent of Ronald Reagan, such cultural outreach withered appreciably.

He returned to San Francisco, and eventually to Gumps where he worked until Social Security kicked in. Apparently, however, he had acquired sculpture while in Southeast Asia. Either one or several pieces were sold to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA] enabling him to buy a Volkswagon.

Somewhere in between, before returning to Gumps, he hired himself as a cook to a wealthy San Francisco family to enable him to reach Europe. He recounted working in the kitchen in Switzerland when a dancer, also from San Francisco, entered, proceeding to tell him she was a ballerina. That same dancer also so identified herself on a long distance call to Germany when he was working as a night operator when it was still necessary to place overseas calls via human beings.

I did not encounter Carl for the second time until the Joffrey Ballet started performing at San Francisco Opera House, sponsored by San Francisco Symphony, with some management skills by Leon Kalimos. That is another somewhat extended story.

Valery Tereshchenko, 1901-1994

For one of those odd reasons some time last summer or fall, I went on Google to see if there was any entry on Valery Tereshchenko; I met him at Pomona College’s 1949 summer school between my sophomore and junior years; it was a necessary task because of my indifferent academic record, to enable me to start my junior year.

Not only did Valery’s name emerge on Wikipedia, but his life rated two pages, a record of publications and honors in his specialty, agricultural economics. Surprise, but actually, because of my memories of him, no surprise at all. If nothing else, the fact he survived the wholesale, pell mell chaotic refuge trail of white Russians from their homeland alone would be fascinating. I remember particularly that he, having been a cadet in the White Russian Army, was part of the corps shoved on to an island in the Greek Archipelago where typhus broke out and death was a frequent shadow at morning exercises, but where drill and classes continued daily. Anatol Shmelov of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute said the island could have been Lemnos; another possibility was the Gallipoli peninsula.

Valery initially had planned to be a pianist; when World War I erupted there was no question; despite conservatory training, he was destined to serve in the Czarist’s officer corps upon completing his studies; hence the reason he was part of that cluster of young Russians on the island. I don’t remember how he managed to leave the island, working his way up the Balkan peninsula countries until he reached Prague, where he graduated in economics from the Czech Technical University and Institute for Agricultural Cooperation where he taught.

Assuming he had a Jansen passport providing him entry to the United States, Valery went to work for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, I’m sure during the Roosevelt Administration. Actually, when you think about it, as a native of the North Caucasus, on the river Volga, the land on either side must have stretched far and wide with grain crops.

I remember Valery as a man of middle height, slender, very precise in manner in virtually everything and possessed of a gold set diamond ring which I vaguely remember as being on his right hand, little finger. He walked with his feet in a semi-first ballet position, his carriage revealing that his muscle formation might have supplied him with a ballet career had he not been focused on the piano.

His face, an oblong topped by closely cut black hair, possessed a slightly florid hue, the setting of his eyes and brows oblique causing him to say, smiling, “There are Tartars in my blood.” When I heard that, along with the carriage of his head, and the keenness of his regard when talking to you or discussing any subject, it seemed very obvious.

The record of his career testifies to his demeanor as a reconciler, explaining divergences, trying to bridge differences in culture and conditioning. His commentary invariably was thorough, delivered with a precision and courtliness I believed to be in the European diplomatic tradition. A young woman teacher, about to become a farmer’s wife in Dixon, California, said rather flatly but not unkindly, “You know that Valery is a pinko.”

I don’t remember how, or even if I responded, because little of my small arsenal of explanations would have made any difference. What quieted me was knowing that Valery and I met on enthusiasm for the “ballett,” that second “t” usually spoken by classical dance lovers from eastern Europe. I must have asked him whether, on his business visits to Russia, had he gone to the Bolshoi. Out came his smile, a slight movement backward of the head, a flash of his eyes, along with the information that he attended at every opportunity. I suspect the opportunities were part of his perks as a visitor, together with the fact he was a native.

I particularly remember his recounting sitting in a box near the stage right exit, and, when Marina Semyonova was dancing Swan Lake, heaving a bouquet on to the stage while she was bowing during Act II. Such actions, of course, were defondu, he knew it, but the theatre personnel did not retaliate. “As she left the stage, she looked up at me,” Valery recounted with satisfaction, having exhibited all the hallmarks of a school boy immersed in a prank.

Valery’s love of “ballett” was very special to me, at a time when ballet company careers were tenuous and the two US professional enterprises were centered in New York City; Ballet Theater and Ballet Society, which would become New York City Ballet. There also was Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, trouping around the country by train or bus, gradually being filled with American-trained dancers, with most of the principals, Russian or Europeans guesting.

Valery was the second person to feed my love of ballet, reinforcing its value for me.

I had come to my love of ballet too late to qualify for a career, my training limited to a dancer trained by Ernest Belcher in Los Angeles, a lovely woman whose health had been saved from the ravages of polio by those classes starting in the five positions. Of all the cache of names I find in my memory bank hers eludes me, a nasty lapse failing to honor someone who gave me the seeds of a life-long passion.

Valery Tereshchenko was the first adult after this teacher to feed this deep planted knowledge. At Pomona there was a modern dancer teaching in the women’s P.E. Department by the name of Karen Burt, teaching with the aid of a drum and jersey skirts of various hues. One of her comments referred to studying with Martha Graham. “She made lifting a leg a divine act.” Fine and good, but it was not ballet. Valery refreshed me.

A couple of times our little group persuaded Valery to play the piano for us. He clearly had not pursued his first love, but when he sat down on the bench, raised his hands to the keyboard, he looked like the protégé of Sergei Rachmaninoff whom I had heard at a 1940 Sunday matinee concert in Visalia, California. The brilliance was there in spots, the feeling constant.

I would have to rummage around basement papers to remind myself how I kept in touch with Valery. We did meet once again, in New York City in 1952 and talked about “ballett”, though we never attended a performance together. His hair had become visibly streaked with grey, but the carriage remained. He spoke in generalities of his work and it seemed obvious he traveled frequently.

Out of that last encounter I remember his speaking of a young woman in the office he occupied at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. “She was a typist and I noticed she wore a blouse with a round collar. Every day she wore that blouse, freshly pressed, to work. I never saw her wear any other.”

It made me realize Valery Tereshchenko’s powers of observation and the inferences he was able to reach. I am sorry now I made no further effort to keep in touch. Just two years shy of seventy, I am grateful Valery Tereshchenko emerged from my memory bank – a memorable personality indeed.

Rossini and Lew’s Ballets

KDFC, the classical music station in the San Francisco and Northern California area, frequently airs Giaocchino Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie. It’s a wonderful title to an opera I’ve never seen, but it more or less coins musical equivalents of the words “sprightly,” “cheeky”, “playful.”

Hearing it reminds me of a world premiere in what is now Herbst Auditorium in the Veterans Building at the corner of McAllister and Van Ness Avenue with San Francisco Opera House anchoring the southern end at Grove and McAllister. In between lies the courtyard of green and a recent fountain installed to honor the war dead of World War II. About five years ago a tiny woman close to ninety informed me earth from all the battles of World War I involving US soldiers had been brought there. “I can’t say I appreciate it when expensive dinners and dances are placed there,” she said. While I agree with her in theory, I continue to be amazed that the City and its movers and shakers of the time constructed these buildings and opened them in the midst of the Great Depression. When the Veterans Building was finally retrofitted, the auditorium’s dressing rooms were placed off stage, replacing those minuscule changing rooms in the building’s depths reached through narrow, circular iron stairs. It even acquired a green room at the back of the building where Nina Menendes hosted a reception following a flamenco performance in 2019.

The “world premiere” I referred to was Con Amore, a Lew Christensen romp, created in 1954, to Rossini’s overtures, starting with The Thieving Magpie as the setting for the camp of the Amazons, invaded by the Thief, Sally Bailey danced the Queen of the Amazons, Nancy Johnson the errant wife, Leon Kalimos the husband and Carlos Carvajal the sailor who arrives at the wife’s door. I’m sure Fiona Fuerstner was one of the Amazons. Leon Danielian was the thief; his role subsequently was danced by the likes of Michael Smuin and John McFall; at New York City Ballet Jacques d’Amboise became the thief where Violette Verdy took on the Amazon assignment and Tanaquil leClerq that wife. When Marc Platt saw San Francisco Ballet’s revival under Helgi Tomasson’s direction, he exclaimed, “How brilliant, such wit.”

As I was drifting off to sleep my mind ticked off the Lew Christensen ballets I particularly enjoyed and want to see again. Chronologically, of course, the
first is Filling Station, Lew’s debut as a choreographer. Such rich, raffish roles for any of the dancers with a comic bent. Then there is Jinx, created while Lew waited to be called up for service in Germany in World War II, using the music to Frank Bridge by Benjamin Britten, almost Brechtian in its plot.

Con Amore comes next, although Carlos Carvajal mentioned Le Gourmand, a work I never saw but had the dancers as various viands who end up destroying the title character. From the 60’s summer series came Shadows, with Jocelyn Vollmar and Robert Gladstein in the principal roles, another of Lew’s psychological comments worthy of revival.

I don’t have either book on the company handy but somewhere in between, came Divertissement d’Auber pas de trois for a man and two women, where one woman, I think Fiona Fuerstner, was required to dance a dizzy array of turns and for the man, Michael Smuin as I remember, a series of jumps with his legs jack-knifed under him. Anatol Joukowsky mentioned to me that he had coached one of the men to take a quick breath as he jumped, saying it sharpened the step. Subsequently when watching it did make a difference. Virginia Johnson completed the trio.

Norwegian Moods was created for one of the summer seasons the company danced at the Geary Theatre, a ballet which Richard LeBlond remarked broke Lew’s several year creative block. I often think that the presence of Keith Martin and Susan Magno, Royal and Joffrey Ballet dancers respectively, had something to do with the waters flowing once more.

When Attila Fizcere joined San Francisco Ballet, Lew cast him in the title role of Don Juan where Lew’s vaudeville experience launched a chase through a convent, a marvel of timing. Anita Paciotti danced the role of a seduced peasant who spat out her anger. Tina Santos said she spat when auditioning and Lew liked the reaction so much he incorporated it.

Scarlotti Portfolio more or less marked Lew’s return to Italian-laced social comment with a hoop dance danced by David McNaughton at the first ever USA IBC Competition in Jackson, Mississippi, 1979, resulting in a medal for Lew.

There were others, but I dwell on the warmth and wit of those I listed first. To be fair, among other ballets Lew created, Leslie Young, who assumed responsibility for staging his choreography following the death of Virginia Johnson, mounted Beauty and the Beast for Pittsburg Ballet Theatre at the invitation of Terrence Orr, former American Ballet Theatre principal who danced Divertissement d’Auber during his years with San Francisco Ballet.

When the company was performing at the Alcazar, Lew cast Sally Bailey, Roderick Drew and Michael Smuin in Original Sin, Lew’s telling of the Bible’s Creation and Fall. He also mounted a Herb Caen libretto titled Life: A Do It Yourself Disaster , a biting sketches on mishaps youth through retirement.

In my fantasies, I envision a full program of works over several seasons so I can revel once more in the Christensen wit and perspective. Such riches.

Krasnow, Donna H, and Lewis, Daniel E., Daniel Lewis, A Life in Choreography and the Art of Dance

This detailed book, heavily factual, generously illustrated, probably is unaffected as its subject; Daniel Lewis’ fifty-seven year career in 20th and 21st century modern dance is staggering in its accomplishments and generosity towards fellow dancers. It also in particularly intriguing to me; I remember the Limon-Humphrey performances in what is now San Francisco’s Herbst Auditorium; also I remember Donna Krasnow from the San Francisco phase of her career, as well as one of his teachers at the New World School of the Arts, Tina Santos, one-time scintillating San Francisco Ballet soloist.

Before discussing the body of the text with its thirty plus tributes from fellow dancers, teachers and students, two misstatements need correction. The first concerns Capezio on page 12 where the Nicholas Terlizzi name is mis-spelled; the Capezio history is available on Ballet-maker’s website. The second regards the 1963 Limon tour of Asia. It was not the first State Department-sponsored tour of the Far East, though it may well have been the first “modern” ensemble to execute that marathon maneuver. The inaugural tour was accomplished by San Francisco Ballet in 1957, inaugurating the dance troupe touring practice, providing a fiscal lifeline to ensembles as well as an adroit diplomatic maneuver for these United States.

The Lewis family background reflects the period of U.S. immigration in late 19th and early 20th century in its energy, urban challenges and practical improvisation. The physical challenge of the Lewis boys came as a start with the happy solution for Danny of dance activity, leading through grade school into the High School for the Performing Arts. A poignant segment is written regarding Danny’s vile exposure to written English, leaving him at written disadvantage, making one understand why Donna Krasnow has accomplished this 229 page paperback record of a dancer/teacher/choreographer living through a pivotal transition in U.S. dance life.

Anyone remembering the performing arts world prior to the enabling legislation of the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities, and the residency programs of the first years of the NEA can comprehend the small tours frequenting the book’s middle pages. One also can understand the formation and, in some instances, expansion of college programs and the creation of programs in colleges and of high schools for the arts. Danny Lewis was immersed in this welcome evolution of the performing arts.

A full chapter is devoted to Lewis’ salute to Jose Limon, choreographic commentary and deep affection for this seminal figure in modern dance.

Lewis’ relationship to Limon’s wife Pauline Lawrence and Martha Hill, responsible for the formation of Juilliard’s dance department, is reflected faithfully, along with his regard for Anna Sokolow and Doris Humphrey; their works formed part of the ten-year existence of his company which benefitted from the NEA Dance Program’s residency program. It is clear in the meticulous accounting of performances that Lewis also enjoyed an association with Charles Weidman, and Lewis also staged his works with his company. Lewis was singularly lucky to have known this seminal figure in American modern dance. Unfortunately for the reviewer, the company’s residencies or performances never reached Northern California, so the record of works, appearances and details remain mute, known only to the printed page.

The Daniel Lewis twenty-six year career in Miami, Florida commenced in 1987, building a versatile dance program affiliated with Miami-Dade College, becoming known as the New World School of the Arts [NWSA]. Lewis made certain the curriculum included African and Asian traditions in the schedule. He immersed himself also in the administration structures and programs which supported dance in Florida, and beyond.

Throughout the texts comments are recorded by Lewis’ friends, Krasnow made certain were included. I counted thirty-two recipients with one or two quoted twice. A chronology of Lewis’ company affiliations, tours, residencies and master classes covers four plus pages. It is a pity that David Wood, Lewis’ favorite teacher at New York City’s School of the Performing Arts, died before Krasnow started this record. Wood, with his wife Marnie, created the Dance Department in the Theatre Department at the University of California, Berkeley, Wood’s alma mater. From the Fresno, California native, whose sister has contributed to dance life vitality in the California state capitol, it would have been succinct and as energetic as the reviewer remembered him from skits at summer camp.

Clearly, reading this record of a talented, energetic charmer, Donna Krasnow has done Daniel Lewis and herself a comprehensive tribute.

Krasnow, Donna H, and Lewis, Daniel E., Daniel Lewis, A Life in Choreography and the Art of Dance
Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, Publishers, 2020. 229 pages, illus., pbk.
ISBN:9-781476681914