For a time the book’s subject, Stephanie, was perhaps the most famous and easily recognizable ballerina in the world. Young readers wanted to be her. There were bags of fan mail and appearances on “Today,” “Midday Live With Bill Boggs” and a one-hour “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”
Christmas special.
For anyone who’s read the classic book, it’s easy to see why it was a best seller. Stephanie’s intensity — her beauty, her dark eyes and her seriousness — draws the reader in. The stark black and white lends some of the photos a Grimm’s fairy tale quality, with a haunted undertow that appeals to girls. And it offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the most prestigious ballet academy in the country, which has an almost mystical quality for aspiring ballerinas. (My own daughter is a student there.)
Wendy Whelan, today a principal with City Ballet, was 9 when she got her own copy that Christmas long ago. “As a girl from Kentucky,” Ms. Whelan said, “this book literally opened the door to my fascination with New York City, ballet and Balanchine.”
Rachel Moore, now the executive director of
American Ballet Theater and a former dancer, received her copy the following Christmas, and obsessed over every page. “Not only did the book introduce me to this glamorous world,” said Ms. Moore, who grew up in a small California town, “it actually showed me there was a path.”
Fans of the book might have assumed that Stephanie went on to an adult ballet career as well. But like countless other young dancers in professional children’s schools, Stephanie saw her career end in adolescence, a time of rebellion and discovery. Most move on to other interests. But for Stephanie leaving the school was filled with shame and secrecy. Finding her new place in the world — after the attention that came with the book — was a long and painful journey littered with troubled relationships and financial struggles, with moments of deep darkness and depression.
In an effort to find peace with her past, she is only now talking about why she stopped dancing and the difficult decades that followed. Finding her wasn’t easy. Google searches turned up nothing but female fans wondering whatever happened to that girl in “A Very Young Dancer.” Ms. Krementz did not respond to letters, e-mails or phone calls. But with the help of a relative, the girl in the book was finally located in northern Wyoming. She and several family members agreed to interviews on the condition that Stephanie be identified by her married name, DePierro, in an effort to protect the family’s privacy; her surname did not appear in the book.
Stephanie and her husband, John, live in a modest log house overlooking majestic Carter Mountain, with their dog and three horses. Bales of hay litter the yard, and a buffalo head, left over from a recent butchering, balances on some sawhorses.
At 46 Stephanie looks strikingly similar to the 10-year-old in Ms. Krementz’s images: the same chestnut-brown hair falling past her shoulders; the same dark, focused eyes and furrowed brow. She’s extremely polite, with a gentle disposition, but intense, thinking and waiting a beat every time she speaks. There are worry lines as she discusses how her dancing career came to an abrupt end.
“It’s kind of a sad story,” she says softly.
As fans of “A Very Young Dancer” know, Stephanie lived a life in Manhattan most children only dream about. She was raised with her sister and brother on the Upper East Side, attended the exclusive all-girls Convent of the Sacred Heart school in Manhattan and spent summers riding her pony on her grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming. Her mother, Linn, studied modern dance with Alwin Nikolais. Her father, Fritz, a German-born businessman, is a member of the Explorers Club who lectures on his travels to Nepal and Tibet.
When she was 5, Stephanie saw “The Nutcracker” at Lincoln Center and decided that she wanted to be onstage. She enrolled at the age of 7, and by the time she was 10 Stephanie was auditioning for the lead.
That same year she and her mother were approached by Ms. Krementz, who asked if she could use Stephanie as her subject. Ms. Krementz spent that year documenting Stephanie’s life onstage and off.
On the first page of the book Stephanie is shown pointing her left toe, right hand on the barre, bun firmly in place. “I don’t know if I want to be a dancer when I grow up — or if I want to do something with horses,” her opening quotation reads. “I really like horses.” On the next page she says, “I love ballet too.”
Later in the book she’s shown performing in “The Nutcracker”: sitting behind the stage curtain, lights out, waiting for her cue; running terrified from a giant mouse; then dancing blissfully with her prince.
“There are some parts in life where you say: ‘Step aside. This is my part,’ ” Stephanie says at her home. “I really feel that was my part. I haven’t had that feeling too much in my life, but with that, I did.”
The book did not tell the whole story. Classes at the school were sometimes laborious and unpleasant, with strict, demanding teachers. Her attendance, she says, wasn’t the best. She’d get headaches and miss class. Though she never argued or talked back, she says, she demonstrates how when she was really angry at a particular teacher, she would rise out of a plié, her hand extended outward, her middle finger up.
“I wasn’t the poster child of the most dedicated student in school,” she admits. “But when it came to performing I was 100 percent dedicated.”
The summer before she turned 13 she was staying in a cabin on the family ranch when her mother came in with bad news: The academy wanted Stephanie to consider withdrawing. Though she hadn’t enjoyed classes all that much, the news, she says, was devastating: “I cried my eyes out.”
She wasn’t just a young dancer whose career was ending abruptly but the focus of a beloved, high-profile book. Her failure would be agonizingly public. And so she decided, with her mother’s backing, simply to tell people that she had quit.
“So many people would say, ‘Why’d you stop dancing?’ Just everybody,” Stephanie recalls. She told them that she wanted to go to college, and that a commitment at the school would rule that out. That was her story, and she stuck to it for three decades.
At a cafe on the Upper East Side last spring, Linn remembered being surprised when the school’s associate director at the time told her she should consider withdrawing Stephanie. But as a dancer herself, Linn knew how difficult class could be. “Any mother who is a parent there knows that those Russian teachers were very strong,” Linn said. “You take what they say, and you don’t go against them.”
According to Amy Bordy, the school’s director of public relations, the two Russian women who ran the school and knew the details of Stephanie’s tenure are no longer living: Nathalie Gleboff, the associate director, died in 2007; Natalie Molostwoff, the executive director, in 1994. However, Stephanie’s attendance record shows excessive unexcused absences. Ms. Bordy also added that she had to repeat two consecutive class levels. She stressed that a student’s performance onstage has no relation to a student’s progress in class at the school, and that dancing with City Ballet is a perk.
Stephanie’s father, Fritz, divorced from Linn when the girls were very young, said he doesn’t remember Stephanie’s being so upset about leaving the school. He said he was relieved when his daughters did not become professional dancers. “When it comes to spending a lifetime in the ballet, it’s like being a priest or a nun,” he said. “You have to give yourself totally to the profession.”
Still, for all these years, he thought Stephanie had quit on her own.
Stephanie did enroll in college, at Wesleyan, where she studied religion. In the summer she continued to go to Wyoming, where she worked several seasons as one of few female horse wranglers. After graduating she landed a job as a mounted Urban Park Ranger in New York. While on duty in the Bronx, she collapsed in a park bathroom and experienced a seizure. She remembers saying to herself: “Life’s not really working out too smoothly. I need to step outside of this picture.”
She considered traveling to Tibet, where she could join a monastery. But her mother knew of one closer to home, in Connecticut. For the next 10 years Stephanie lived on and off at that monastery, milking cows, learning Latin, driving a tractor, praying, meditating.
“It was healing. I don’t know if it did the trick, but it was helpful,” she says. In the late ’90s she moved to Cambridge, Mass., where she held several different jobs over the following decade, including working with the homeless.
She shakes her head. “I didn’t know what I was doing, really. I was still kind of lost.”
By then most people had forgotten about “A Very Young Dancer.” But every now and then someone would find out she had been Marie and would ask why she stopped dancing. The question was as painful as it had been 20 years earlier. At one low point she took a stack of the books to the Salvation Army and shoved them down the donation chute. Stephanie acknowledges that she might have had troubles in life regardless of her association with ballet and the book, but says her experience as a child no doubt contributed to her depression later in life.
Four years ago, while Stephanie was living in Cambridge, Linn asked her to oversee a house she was building in Wyoming. Stephanie moved back to the site of those happy childhood summers. Two years later she met her future husband. They got to know each other through a Bible study group and now belong to an evangelical church that meets on Sunday in a red-roofed dining hall that, when not being used for worship, features live cowboy music and a $12 chuck wagon dinner buffet. "Stephanie went through a couple of hard years and realized what’s important to her and what makes her happy," her brother, Christopher, said by phone from his home in Australia.
Her husband, John, is from the Bronx, and moved to Wyoming 25 years ago for the adventure and wide-open spaces. He has worked as a cook, a builder and a taxidermist, and is currently a plumber. Stephanie works in a flower shop. Until he met her, he had no idea what “A Very Young Dancer” even was.
On a snowy day Stephanie flips through the book, telling John about the real people behind the pictures: the woman in wardrobe who pressed too hard with the bobby pins; Balanchine, who never talked down to the kids.
She looks at a picture of herself joyously dancing across a big, dark stage. “It was quite an experience,” she says. “It is hard to top it.” She gazes out the window at snowcapped Carter Mountain. “Out here kind of tops it, in a way.”
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