Island Profile: Barbara Horgan | Life’s dance leads to career at Balanchine’s side

Barbara Horgan began life in New York City, where she grew up and went to school. Unlike most other Shelter Island transplants, she was “dropped off” here at the age of 5, an early attendee at Camp Quinipet. “My father was in the automobile business, and so they could deposit me here and then come out on weekends and stay at one of the big hotels.” But as her father’s business prospered, the family began to rent houses in Westchester and her Shelter Island connection ended, only to be renewed many decades later.

She graduated from high school (Nightingale Bamford) in 1950. “I was such a lousy student I chose not to go to college and started to educate myself in acting.  I was stagestruck and dying to perform. I had a few gigs.” Then by chance she met a number of people studying dance, including the ballerina Allegra Kent, who had joined the New York City Ballet Company in 1953 at the age of 15 and was promoted to principal in 1957. Many roles in George Balanchine’s ballets were created for her.

Because of these connections, Barbara began to frequent the ballet and “just thought it was fabulous. I had a part-time job at a record store then, to keep body and soul together, and on Saturday afternoons dancers would come in. When I told them I knew Kent, they invited me to a party.

“So I got into this dance crowd and I was enjoying every minute of it. One afternoon, I ran into some [of them] in front of the stage entrance of the City Center.” The group decided to have lunch together but the young women, all working for the New York City Ballet, needed their pay checks first. “They said, ‘So come upstairs.’ So up I went and stood in the hallway and was introduced to the general manager, who said, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, “I’m an unemployed actress. Do you ever use actresses?’ and she said, ‘No, but I could sure use a secretary,  my regular secretary is in the hospital.’ And I said okay, I can type. I walked in the next day and I never left. I was 20.”

For the first 10 years, she was part of a tiny staff. “There were just three of us, but it was a terrific education, it was a real repertory theatre.  We toured a great deal, Europe and Asia for six months, four months, huge tours, very educational.”

Then in 1963, George Balanchine, who was the artistic director, asked her to be his personal assistant, the position she held until he died in 1983.

“He was a remarkable man and I was very fortunate in many ways, because [working with him] was very easy. People ask me, ‘but what did you talk about’ and I don’t remember, I just know that we did and that we laughed a lot. We just worked very well together.

“He really brought a different kind of teaching to America and then, of course, to the world — more technical, stronger, faster. He had come from Russia, left during the revolution in 1924 with a group of dancers because they had no work and were starving. I wish he had lived to see the end of communism, to see the Berlin Wall fall.”

As events unfolded, she was made executor of his estate. From the estate, she developed, with others, the George Balanchine Trust, an instrument in which the 14 heirs named in his will could enter their rights and have them managed. He had given these heirs his intellectual property, 453 works in all, including 75 to 80 active ballets, musicals, books and movies.

This was and is a complicated matter, since in many instances there were both American and foreign rights, performing rights and media rights. The trust manages them all, with the heirs maintaining complete authority, able to say yes or no to any request.

As one of his heirs, Barbara received a small condo in Southampton. “It was fully mortgaged, I may add, and very modest. I would go there weekends and loved it. It was just a half-mile from the beach, a perfect location. I always had an affinity for Eastern Long Island,” going back to childhood and school friends who had invited her for frequent weekends on the South Fork.

Then, in 1988, Edie Landeck, long her personal physician and friend, called to tell her about a house on Ram Island up for sale. It was an estate sale, Edie said, and they often were good deals. Barbara had visited Edie often and knew she loved the Island and she really wanted a bigger place. “Don’t look at the house, just look at the view,” Edie told her, adding that renovation was always an option. It was a small lot, less than an acre, but looking right over Gardiner’s Bay. She came, looked, renovated, and the rest, as they say, is history.

What a very long arc — from 1936 to 1989 until today — and how lucky for all of us. Now, through financial arrangements between Barbara and the Shelter Island Educational Foundation, our eighth graders get to go into the city to see the “Nutcracker”!