More Than a Woman
by Joan Tewkesbury
Introduction by Peter Maguire
On Mother’s Day, I thought it appropriate to share an excerpt from my eighty-six-year-old mother’s autobiography, More Than A Woman: The Life and Times of Joan Tewkesbury. We have been quietly working on this project for the past couple of years. The more that I learn about her remarkable life, the more fortunate I feel to be her son. Joan is best known for writing Robert Altman’s 1976 film “Nashville,” and going on to write, direct, and produce films, television shows, plays, and ballets. Few know that her film career began in 1947 at the age of 10, when she played a ballerina in “The Unfinished Dance.” This big budget MGM musical was directed by the legendary Henry Koster and starred Margaret O’Brien, Cyd Charisse, and Danny Thomas. More than anything else, this experience made her want to stand behind the camera, not in front of it.
Not only did Joan Tewkesbury clear the path for generations of women in the entertainment industry, she did it with great humility and a sense of humor. Over the years, I have watched her quietly and generously guide and mentor generations of actors, filmmakers, artists, and dancers for little more than the satisfaction of watching them grow and realize their full potential. At 86 she is still teaching writing and going strong.
Many people think that I get my grit and determination from my father, but that is only partially true. I got an equal share of it from my mother who taught me that being tough and resilient was only part of the equation. Joan taught me more important lessons like treating people—irrespective of their race, class, or gender—the way that you would like to be treated, and never to snitch, whine, make excuses, or step on friends to get ahead. I am not a shrink, and don’t especially like shrinks, but it does not take Sigmund Freud to figure out why I have devoted much of my life to reclaiming lost honor, fighting for hopeless causes, winning pyrrhic victories, and helping those without the power or the proclivity to help themselves. I hope you enjoy this preview of More Than A Woman. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
More Than a Woman
Chapter 1: En Pointe
by Joan Tewkesbury
Dancing saved me because it gave me somewhere to go and something to do every day after school. I was an only child and things were rather complicated at home. I was born out of wedlock in Redlands, California, in 1936. Unless my parents were fighting, ours was a household of silence. There was always this strange undercurrent at home and I learned young that it was best to just shut up.
My mother, Frances Stevenson, and my father, Walter Tewkesbury, lived together for a time but never married. She was one of three girls whose mother wanted them to marry rich, older men. Frances was quite beautiful, but had other ideas and entered nursing school at 16. During the Great Depression, my mother moved from her family’s home in Illinois to California and met my father, who was two years younger and originally from Ontario, Canada. My dad was quiet and determined and repaired typewriters, radios, and office machines for the LA School system.
It was not until I was an adult that I realized how something like the Depression, where everything was taken away, resonated through everyone who lived through it. Because of the Depression, every mother’s dream at that time was for her daughter to be the next Shirley Temple. I started dancing lessons at age three where I learned how to smile, curtsy, and do all those girly tap dance things. Next came acrobatics, ballet, and personality classes. It was all about being perky and cute, and I hated every minute of it. I never liked performing, but on the surface, I was a very well-behaved child and I did as I was told. But beneath my pins curls and cheery exterior was a lot of judgement. Of course, I never said what I thought because I knew that it would get me into trouble.
A real rift opened up between my mother and me when she started to dress me like Shirley Temple, and I had to go to school with curls and short dresses. So, there I was, with my ass hanging out of a short little skirt, my hair in curls, with scabby knees from falling down on roller skates. I was embarrassed because that was not at all how I saw myself! All I ever tried to do was fit in so nobody would pay attention to me for being a freak or having this dancing school life.
My first dance teacher was Ruth Shooter who had danced in Ziegfeld Follies. Although my mom wanted to be a stage mother, when she got me to the dance studio she’d get shy and chicken out, and I didn’t blame her. The real stage mothers sat in the front row in folding chairs and were worse than football coaches. I remember one mother barking, “SING OUT, LOUISE!” at her daughter, and another sat just outside the studio door with a switch in her hands. She’d whack her daughter with it if she didn’t do well.
My second school was British dancer and choreographer Ernest Belcher’s Westmore Dance Studio on Western Avenue. It was probably the most important dance school on the west coast in 1946. In addition to teaching Shirley Temple and staging the ballet in her film “The Little Princess,” Belcher taught Fred Astaire, Maria Tallchief, Cyd Charisse, and many of the early Hollywood stars.
When I was 10, Belcher encouraged me to audition for an MGM film called “The Unfinished Dance” that was casting thirty-six young ballerinas. I’ll never forget that audition. There were thousands of little girls, all in pink toe shoes. Russian dancer and choreographer David Lachine was screaming at all of us. Back then, dancers were treated savagely, the lowest of the low. The idea of the performer as rich celebrity is relatively new.
Henry Koster, the film’s director, came into the room, and someone told me and two other little girls to stand next to the star, nine-year-old Margaret O’Brien. Koster took one look at me and said, “You really don’t want to be here, do you?” When I replied, “I really don’t, but don’t tell my mother,” he laughed and I got the job.
“The Unfinished Dance” was a remake of a French film called “Ballerina” and Margaret O’Brien played an aspiring ballerina named Meg Merlin. Even though she was only nine, she was already a huge star who had appeared in a dozen films. “Poor, fat Margaret” as we called her behind her back, couldn’t dance, and neither could Karin Booth, the female leading actor. Really, Margaret was very sweet and we were nice to her because we felt sorry for her. She had never studied dance and when they put her in pointe shoes she sprained her ankle.
Each morning my mother and I would take a series of streetcars from our house in Alhambra to the MGM lot in Culver City. At that time, the big studios and the unions were at war and we had to cross picket lines to get into the studio. There were often brawls, and one day they even lit a sheriff’s car on fire. I remember scary looking men screaming, “Scab!” at my mother and me when we walked through the main gate. They were mean, and we were dumb chorus kids who didn’t know anything about anything, and were just trying to go to work.
Before we would rehearse in the afternoon, all of the kids went to the studio school where there were teachers for different grades. Margaret went to the fancy school on the MGM lot with Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Powell, and all the other child stars. It was a separate little school house and it was very pretty. We didn’t get to go there. Our school was much more pedestrian.
In those days, the film industry was a lot like the military. All the time schedules were in military time because most of the men involved in the business were veterans and treated filmmaking like an army march. We started shooting at the crack of dawn “to get the light” even though we were working on an MGM sound stage! There were not a lot of laughs on the set of “The Unfinished Dance.”
Below is a short clip from “The Unfinished Dance.” At 0:53, Joan is in the front row, second girl from the right, with dark curls and light blue leotard.
Many of the child actors in the film were their family’s breadwinners. The mothers tried to keep their girls as young-looking as possible, for as long as possible, because they paid the bills. There was one girl in “The Unfinished Dance” who was 14 but looked like she was 8. Her mom did not allow her to drink milk or eat anything that would make her grow. She lived on chicken broth, and boy was she mean!
Because I was an only child, I was an accomplished eavesdropper, and liked to hear the things that I was not supposed to hear. The stage mothers were ruthless gossips and from them, I learned that one of the mothers was fucking the assistant director so her daughter would get a bigger part in the movie. I learned that the reason the mean girl was so mean was because her mom would not let her eat real food—everybody’s lives were on full display.
Decades before #metoo, reality in Hollywood was stark! It was fight or flight. People used to ask my mother why she was training me to be a dancer, because it was one step removed from being a prostitute. I remember my mother telling me about her cousin who danced in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1920s, and they were embarrassed when she came to visit! I got real savvy, real quick, but for the young women who had no tools, there was no escape, and it was heartbreaking. I learned about all of it from the gossiping mothers.
The most important thing that I learned on “The Unfinished Dance” was how fake it was. The film was made at the height of MGM’s musical glory. Karin Booth, the woman who played the new ballerina, couldn’t dance at all, so they made a machine so she could fake it. A big circular piece of metal sat on the floor with a rod coming out of it. A belt was attached to the rod and they would strap Karin to it, and put her costume over the apparatus. She only had to do two things: open her arms, look back and close her arms. The stage hands would pull her across the floor as the machine did her turns. It was ridiculous! I thought, This is all fake! Why is everybody trying so hard in class if they have a machine that does the work for you?
Even at 10, the only job that interested me on the set was director, because he got to ride on the crane. Above all, I was interested in what the camera was doing. That was fascinating to me. The people behind the scenes were having so much more fun than we were. They weren’t standing around bored, they did not have to get up on their toes, flit across the floor, and get yelled at for being out of the light, or off the mark. The men who operated the cameras, adjusted the lights, and recorded the sound were always busy, and if they felt like smoking a cigarette, they smoked one. Compared to them, we were just paper dolls, or worse.
When I received my first check for “The Unfinished Dance,” my mother took me to the bank and opened a savings account for me in my name. This supremely pissed off my father, but it changed my life forever because it taught me that I could earn money, always get a job, and never needed to rely on anyone but myself. One day when I was 11, my dad dropped me off at dance school and said, “I won’t be coming home.” More than sadness, I felt relief. I recall saying to him, “I am surprised that you did not leave sooner. I’m glad that you get to have a life now.”
My dad didn’t want to pay child support, so he decided that he wanted full custody of me. Because it was a custody battle, we went to court at LA City Hall. I sat in a separate room, and when the judge came in, he said, “You have to decide who you want to live with. Your mother or your father?” “Neither one,” I replied and he said, “That won’t do.” Then we all sat in a court room and I was cross examined by their lawyers and asked tricky and leading questions. At the end of the day, my mother was awarded custody, but she was mad at me because I said that they fought. From that point forward, I was sort of on my own. From a very young age, my mother made two things perfectly clear: you had to be financially independent and you needed to own property.
After “The Unfinished Dance” I took the red and yellow street cars to Eugene Loring’s American School of Dance in Hollywood. Loring had been a member of American Ballet, George Balanchine’s first company, and choreographed and danced the role of “Billy the Kid.” After he appeared in “National Velvet” with Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney, he stayed in Los Angeles and was under contract with MGM.
The American School broadened my horizons and opened up a whole other dimension of dance that had nothing to do with the prim and proper world of ballet. Some of my classmates were gay men who were studying dance under the GI Bill, and my best friend was the daughter of blacklisted communists. More than anything else, I learned that there was much more to dance than the fifth position and line. I discovered another world where a kind of magic that transports the audience out of the theatre could happen. That magic is what I’ve remained interested in ever since.
Eugene Loring believed that dance, like painting, sculpture, or music, was a language and that there was no true movement without emotion behind it. I had wonderful teachers there like French ballerina and actress Leslie Carlon, Indonesian dance teacher Marie Ja, and modern dancer Mary Sale who taught me how to soar and gave me a sense of what it was like to take flight. Jack Cole and Gwen Verdon came to teach and were incredible. Gwen was in her 20s and gorgeous, just an incredible dancer and he was a really muscular guy, like a martial artist. I had never seen movement like theirs. It was all about knee slides and drums! This was dance and I finally understood what dance could be. Those classes were filled to the brim, and not with kids, but with very serious men and women.
I became aware of race at Loring’s school because a lot of black GIs came to study dance there. Jack Cole, the father of theatrical jazz dancing, taught, so there were always black dancers around. But dance was a meritocracy, it was never about race, it was whether or not you could turn out well enough, spin, or fall on your knees. Marie Bryant was another teacher who had a big impact on me. Originally from Mississippi, she was a heavenly black lady who had sung and danced with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Lionel Hampton at the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theatre. I was about 13 when I started to take her class, and supposedly she was teaching us jazz dancing. Many years later, I realized that what she taught us was the art of striptease, and she taught every girl in that class how to fuck.