The Great Leap Forward

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After one season with Petit, Jeffrey said "goodbye to union wages" and set out to lay the groundwork for a company of his own. He taught by day, took classes by night and, beginning at sunrise, held rehearsals for his own ballets, which were performed at the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A. In 1952, he rented a loft in a Greenwich Village building that formerly housed the American Communist Party and, in the best spirit of free enterprise, opened Robert Jeffrey's American Ballet Center.

Coke on Wax. By 1956, Jeffrey had created enough of a repertory to launch seven of his dancers on a tour of one-night stands in 23 Southern towns. They traveled like gypsies in a borrowed station wagon and a rented trailer crammed with hand-me-down costumes from Balanchine and discarded scenery from the Metropolitan Opera. They danced in movie theaters, veterans' halls and gymnasiums; music was provided by a borrowed tape recorder or one of the dancers who dashed to a piano between his numbers. To ensure their footing, they often had to sprinkle a tacky coating of Coca-Cola on freshly waxed stages, many of which were so cramped that when it came time for a lift, the ballerinas would disappear into the flies.

The prospect of prosperity came in 1962, when Standard Oil Heiress Rebekah Harkness, a longtime ballet buff, invited the company to her 49-room ocean-front mansion in Watch Hill, R.I., to initiate a summer dance workshop. Lady Bountiful they called her, and so it seemed during the next two years when she helped finance the successful Jeffrey tours of the Near East and Russia. As time went on, however, Lady Bountiful began to seem more like Lady Macbeth to Jeffrey. She wanted more say in artistic matters and insisted on changing the company's name to her own. Jeffrey refused, and so they parted. Broke and unable to offer his danc ers any future, he lost all but two of his 26-member troupe, 14 of them to the newly formed Harkness Ballet.

Anguished Recesses. Jeffrey huddled with two friends who had helped him build the original troupe: Choreographer Gerald Arpino, 37, and Business Manager Alex Ewing, 37. Over the next year, in a kind of freewheeling fiscal pas de trois, they raised $165,000 and landed two Ford grants totaling $165,000. Ewing, a Yale graduate, arranged for a one-week tryout season at the City Center. Arpino created two new ballets. Jeffrey, meanwhile, hand-picked the best 20 dancers in his school, and rehearsed them until 10 every night for nearly seven months. When the revitalized Jeffrey Ballet finally made its City Center debut in March 1966, it scored such a resounding critical success that it was quickly installed as the theater's resident company.