Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq

Tanaquil Le Lercq was a ballet dancer, the muse of both Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine (to whom she was married). Then at 27, she came down with polio. Although she regained the use of one arm, she never recovered her legs.

Nancy Buirski's documentary concerns itself with the second act of her long life -- she lived to be 71 --and the memory of her surviving friends, eked out with photographs and the few surviving kinescopes of her dancing. She seems to have been very good. Her struggles to learn to do everything again, from breathing to living on her own, is a story of inspiration that, happily, has vanished from the scene. Salk developed his vaccine, the last major outbreak of polio in this country was in 1955, when 2000 people came down with it.

My one cavil with this episode of American Masters is its use of the word "tragedy." What happened to her is sad, and her prominence at the time made it a national story, but what of the two thousand people who contracted polio the next year? This story of a member of the privileged class who lost some of her privileges leaves me a trifle cold.